A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth 9780567145604, 9780567659545, 9780567551092

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A Celebration of Living Theology

A Celebration of Living Theology A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth Edited by Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2015 © Justin A. Mihoc, Leonard Aldea, and contributors, 2014 Justin A. Mihoc, Leonard Aldea, and contributors, have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5671-4560-4 PB: 978-0-5676-6511-9 ePDF: 978-0-5675-5109-2 ePub: 978-0-5674-3382-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Celebration of Living Theology/Justin Mihoc and Leonard Aldea p.cm Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-5671-4560-4 (hardcover)

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents List of Contributors The Editors Preface Introduction Lewis Ayres Part 1

vii x xi 1

Patristics

1

Reading the Fathers Today John Behr

2

Authority and Doctrinal Normation in Patristic Discourse: The Nicene Creed at the First Council of Ephesus Thomas Graumann

7

20

Part 2 Byzantine Theology

3

The Impact of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite on Byzantine Theologians of the Eighth Century: The Concept of ‘Image’ Mary B. Cunningham

41

4

Why should we read Middle Byzantine Fathers? Jane Baun

59

5

‘Myriad of Names to Represent Her Nobleness’: The Church and the Virgin Mary in the Psalms and Hymns of Byzantium Krastu Banev

75

Part 3 East and West in Dialogue

6

Christianity and Platonism in East and West John Milbank

107

7

Boethius the Theologian Augustine Casiday

161

Part 4

8

Modern Theology

Towards a Fair History of Christian Orthodoxy Antoine Arjakovsky

177

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Contents

Vladimir Lossky’s Reception of Georges Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic Theology Paul L. Gavrilyuk

Part 5

191

The Future of Patristics

10 Patristics after Neo-Patristic Cyril Hovorun

205

11 ‘Following the Holy Fathers’: Is there a Future for Patristic Studies? Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan of Diokleia

214

A Bibliography of Prof Andrew Louth Bibliography Index of References

225 240 257

List of Contributors Antoine Arjakovsky Dr Antoine Arjakovsky teaches at the Ukrainian Catholic University, where he is the founder director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Lviv; he is also research director at the Collège des Bernardins, France. Among his most notable publications are The Way. Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940 (University of Notre Dame, 2013) and Qu’Est-Ce Que L’Orthodoxie? (Gallimard, 2013). Lewis Ayres Prof Lewis Ayres is professor of catholic and historical theology at Durham University. Between 2009 and 2012 he served as the inaugural holder of the Bede Chair of Catholic Theology at Durham. He has taught in the United Kingdom, in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin and in the United States at Duke University and Emory University. His publications include Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2004/06), and Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Krastu Banev Dr Krastu Banev is lecturer in Greek patristics in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, United Kingdom. His research interests include classical rhetorical theory, the Byzantine homiletic tradition, patristic anthropology and modern Orthodox theology. Jane Baun The Rev Dr Jane Baun is university research lecturer in eastern church history at Oxford University, Faculty of Theology and Religion her publications include Tales from Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and numerous articles exploring the interface between official and unofficial belief in medieval Orthodox religious culture.

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John Behr Father John Behr is the dean of St Vladimir’s Seminary and professor of patristics; he also teaches at Fordham University, where he is the distinguished lecturer in patristics. Among his recent publications are The Case Against Diodore and Theodore: Texts and their Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2011), Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Becoming Human: Meditations of Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013). Augustine Casiday At present, Dr Augustine Casiday is lecturer in Greek at Cardiff University. His publications include Reconstructing the Theology of Evagrius Ponticus Beyond Heresy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), The Trinity and Incarnate Word (The Priory Institute, 2008), and Tradition and Theology in St John Cassian (Oxford University Press, 2006). Mary B. Cunningham Dr Mary B. Cunningham is lecturer in historical theology, University of Nottingham. Her most recent publications include ‘The Place of the Jesus Prayer in the Philokalia’, in Bingaman, Brock and Nassif, Bradley eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 195–202; ‘Mary the Theotokos’ (‘Birth-giver of God’), in Casiday, Augustine, ed., The Orthodox Christian World (Routledge, 2012), pp. 189–200; Brubaker, L. and Cunningham, M. B., eds., The cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: texts and images (Ashgate, 2011). Together with Elizabeth Theokritoff, Dr Cunningham is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Paul L. Gavrilyuk Dr Paul L. Gavrilyuk holds the Aquinas chair in theology and philosophy, Theology Department, University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota. His publications include The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Histoire du catéchuménat dans l’église ancienne [A History of the Catechumenate in the Early Church] (Paris: Le Cerf, 2007), Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance

List of Contributors

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, co-edited with Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Thomas Graumann Dr Thomas Graumann is reader in ancient Christian history and patristic studies, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. His publications include Christus interpres. Die Einheit von Auslegung und Verkündigung in der Lukaserklärung des Ambrosius von Mailand (Patristische Texte und Studien, 41), Berlin/New York (de Gruyter), 1994; Die Kirche der Väter. Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (431) (Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie, 118), Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck), 2002. Cyril Hovorun Dr Cyril Hovorun is currently a research fellow at Yale University, Divinity School. In 2008, he published Will, Action and Freedom. Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century (Brill). John Milbank John Milbank is professor in religion, politics and ethics, University of Nottingham. Among his most recent publications are Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Wiley-Blackwell, In Press) and ‘Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition’, The Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1(1), 2012, pp. 203–34. Kallistos Ware From 1966 to 2001, Kallistos Ware was Spalding lecturer of eastern orthodox studies at Oxford University. In 2007, he became the metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Great Britain. His publications include Orthodox Theology in the Twenty-First Century (World Council of Churches, 2012), The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 2nd edn, 1993), and The Orthodox Way (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982). He is also among the editors of Faber and Faber’s English translation of The Philokalia.

The Editors Justin A. Mihoc is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. He has published articles on patristic and biblical studies and is editor of the Reviews of Biblical and Early Christian Studies (www.rbecs.org). Leonard Aldea is a PhD candidate at Durham University, Department of Theology and Religion. His research interests are modern orthodox theology, theology of the avantgarde, theology and the arts. His published articles include ‘The Implicit Apophaticism of Dada Zurich: A Spiritual Quest by Means of Nihilist Procedures’, Modern Theology 29.1 (January 2013); and ‘The Desert Fathers and the Male Gaze’, Studia Patristica 52 (2012), co-authored with Andrew Brower-Latz.

Preface ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’ Matt. 13:52 This Festschrift, as well as the conference it has grown from,1 is as much labours of scholarly work as it is the result of a collective feeling of affection and gratitude towards their subject. Fr Andrew was initially not in favour of having a conference dedicated to him; what eventually warmed him to the idea was the entirely different view that it would help consolidate further the link between the study of Orthodox Theology and the Department of Theology at Durham University. Our first thanks should therefore go to Fr Andrew himself, for having understood the need for this conference, and for all the support he gave us during the long process of organizing it. Our gratitude further extends to all the keynote speakers who accepted our invitation; their presence turned this academic event into a real celebration of Fr Andrew’s life and theological work. For many years, the name and career of Prof Andrew Louth were associated with the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, which honoured him as professor emeritus on his retirement. The conference was organized under the aegis of the Department as a token of gratitude on behalf of its staff and students. From the very beginning, the aim of the conference was to bring to the foreground not only Fr Andrew’s outstanding work in the field of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, but also his perhaps less well-known contribution to other theological areas, such as Modern Theology and Orthodox Studies. Our intention was to go beyond the typically limited character of academic conferences, in order to showcase and honour Fr Andrew’s ability to bridge various subjects and to advance academic research through an interdisciplinary outlook and methodology, which only a theologian of his stature and experience can offer. We hope something of that feeling of celebration and multidisciplinarity has been 1

The conference, A Celebration of Living Theology: Engaging with the Work of Prof Andrew Louth, took place in Durham, 9–12 July 2012.

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transferred to the present volume. To the extent to which it has been possible, we have tried to preserve the overall thematic structure and diversity of subjects of the conference. The editors are also very grateful to a large number of people and institutions who offered their moral, logistic and financial support; neither the conference nor this volume would have been possible without their dedication. Thanks to their involvement, the conference grew into a major academic event, drawing together participants from over ten different countries. With the risk of forgetting some of our supporters, we must nevertheless express our special gratitude to Durham University, the Department of Theology and Religion, and its Head at the time, Dr Robert Song, Ustinov College, St Chad’s College, the Graduate School, the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, Durham Cathedral and Alexander Egorov for his financial support. We would also like to thank Aidan Wightman for his assistance in proofreading and editing the final draft of this volume. A special thank you is also due to our colleague Andrew Brower-Latz for his key contribution as member of the conference organizing committee. It is our hope that this volume highlights the originality and diversity of Fr Andrew Louth’s thought, and will inspire further engagement with his opus. The Editors

Introduction Lewis Ayres

As a scholar Andrew Louth both stands in a venerable tradition and is a herald of something new. From one point of view he continues a long tradition of British Patristic scholarship. The past century saw such scholars as Ernest Evans, W. H. C. Frend, R. P. C. Hanson, J. N. D. Kelly, Geoffrey Lampe, Maurice Wiles and Edward Yarnold – to name but a few. Many aspects of this tradition have continued in such personae as Bishop Kallistos, Fr Richard Price, Frances Young and Lord Williams of Oystermouth. Andrew’s Patristic work certainly fits well within this lineage. It does so both because, like so many of those in my first list, he began his scholarly life as an Anglican, and because, like so many in both lists, he is a theological polymath writing on a wide range of topics outside the traditional concerns of a scholar of early Christian studies. Yet, between my two lists there is something of a shift. Anglican Patristic scholars are the clear majority at the heart of that first list – many of them serving their church in parish life as well as academics. This tradition has not yet disappeared, but it is far less vital and central to the Church of England than it once was. Indeed, the study of Patristics in Britain is now far more evenly divided between different Christian traditions, and this is noticeable in my second list. And yet this difference may not be the most important. While many of those named in my first list saw their engagements with early Christian writers as being of importance for the Christian community today, almost all were suspicious of the modes of theological reasoning employed by the figures they studied. There was, for many, a great gulf fixed between methods appropriate in modernity and those of the early centuries. Andrew’s early book Discerning the Mystery is justly famous because with directness and panache it reveals the problems with such an assumption and offers a foundation that is both theological and philosophical for engaging the Tradition anew. While, in philosophical terms, Andrew’s work drew heavily on Gadamer’s Truth and Method, theologically, Andrew’s work sits sympathetically

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A Celebration of Living Theology

alongside the French Catholic ressourcement tradition and the tradition of the ‘Neo-Patristic’ synthesis among Orthodox theologians – as well as alongside the work of others in my second list. Discerning the Mystery suggested to many readers ways in which their engagements with early Christian texts was a delving into ever-vital sources for Christians in any age. The difference in cultural milieu between early Christianity and late modernity does not demand of us a constant rewriting and ‘translation’ of early Christian idiom and conceptuality, so much as it shapes a conversation in which we seek to attend to those who are always the senior partners in our Christian conversation, aware of our own milieu, but aware also of its provisionality. The same text, of course, suggested also that if we are to sustain the faith of those who shaped early Christian belief, then we will need to find ways to sustain the methods of reading Scripture that were at the heart of their own practice. In these ways, Discerning the Mystery was one of the heralds of a significant shift in approaches to early Christianity. All the standard scholarly tasks of Patristic study continue; yet alongside the growth in social-historical approaches that have become so well known and so fruitful, an ever-growing number of scholars have explored ways in which the study of early Christianity may enable us to hear the writers of the first centuries as living voices. Such a movement has many representatives in the North American context; in the UK Andrew’s was an early and powerful voice. Andrew’s work since Discerning the Mystery has done much to further this agenda in ever-new ways – with new paths taken since his reception into the Orthodox Church. But by ‘work’ I mean not only his writing, but also his mentoring of students, his work as a member of the Orthodox community in the UK and around the world, his work more latterly as a priest in the Orthodox community. This volume follows on from a conference that was brought together both to celebrate Andrew’s contribution to the study of theology, Patristics and Orthodoxy, and to provide a stimulus to take that work forward. Because of Andrew’s presence – and that of a venerable tradition of other Patristic scholars – Durham has long been a vital centre for research in this area and particularly a centre for junior Orthodox scholars seeking a home for their doctoral studies. The essays you will find here thus exemplify the many dimensions of Andrew’s work. Some essays are directly exercises in studying early Christian texts. Others focus on the development of early Christian thought in the Byzantine world (and some on the early Medieval Latin context). A significant proportion of the essays works with themes from early Christian writers but is engaged in

Introduction

3

debates with and between modern thinkers in an attempt to sketch new ways of living and thinking the Tradition. In this collection the boundaries between our modern professional theological disciplines are constantly questioned, our habits of dividing up the Christian past undermined and deep resources for taking further Andrew’s own theological and scholarly agenda offered. May it bear much fruit!

Part One

Patristics

1

Reading the Fathers Today John Behr

The call to ‘Return to the Fathers’ produced tremendous fruits over the course of the past century. I would like to take up that call here, but now in the context of the twenty-first century, to ask how, now, do we read the Fathers, for it seems that today this is one of the most important and difficult questions. In one sense, it has never been easier: we have great critical editions, translations and an abundance of secondary studies and instruments. But in another sense, it has never been more difficult or contested: how should one read their texts and why? I would like to begin with what has become a standard presentation, used in many classrooms, on the discipline of reading historical, especially, Patristic texts, and how that has changed over the past century, and that is Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn.1 After reviewing changes in patterns of historiography over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she turns her attention to what these changes mean for the study of pre-modern texts. She notes how ‘late ancient Christian (“post-New Testament”) studies . . . have idiosyncrasies foreign to other premodern disciplines: it developed under the aegis of a confessional theology and leaped somewhat precipitously from this orientation to that of social history and social theory in the 1970s and 1980s’.2 In her own graduate education, she recalls: ‘Patristics . . . was a theologically oriented discipline that centered largely on the Church Fathers’ Trinitarian and Christological expositions against “heretics”. To bring ancient philosophy into relation with theology was as broad a disciplinary reach as I could then imagine would be professionally viable’.

1

2

E. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Clark, History, p. 158.

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But she then notes, ‘the social revolutions of the late 1960s merged in the 1970s with social science approaches that were implicitly (and sometimes overtly) aimed at undercutting the dominance of theology in the study of early Christianity—and in the years thereafter, cultural approaches were added in. Social formations, women, the poor, “heretics,” and sexuality now were deemed suitable topics for investigation’.3 This was not so much an extension of the field of theology, to see how it could change the world, but, in her words, an escape: ‘the race for social science provided an escape from a narrow philological and confessionally oriented theological orientation’. Yet, she notes that these changes remained intriguingly oblivious to the ‘literary/theoretical currents’ at work refashioning departments of literature. Looking back several decades later, it has become clear to her that a basic point was neglected in this hasty refocusing on issues deriving from social studies: ‘Overlooked in the rush for realignment was a point not then so obvious: that we do not possess the types of documents on which social historians of modernity work, but highly literary/philosophical texts that lend themselves well to theoretical analysis.’4 The opening of new horizons – ‘our attention to grids and groups, networks, liminality, and “thick description,” ’ – nevertheless produced new insights and understanding, and so, she adds, ‘I would not wish to return patristics to its traditional disposition.’ But, she continues: ‘Nonetheless, these social-scientific appropriations obscured the fact that scholars of late ancient Christianity deal not with native informants, nor with masses of data amenable to statistical analysis, but with texts—and texts of a highly literary, rhetorical, and ideological nature.’5 She thus proposes a return to dealing with the matter in hand – texts; and texts which possess a ‘highly literary, rhetorical, and ideological nature’. But, significantly, not texts that evidence a theological concern. As it is with texts that students of the Fathers deal, these texts ‘should be read’ she comments, ‘first and foremost as literary productions before they are read as sources of social data’. Only by ‘joining theoretical to social-scientific and theological-philological analyses’ will we be able to ‘enrich the field’.6 As such, ‘late 3 4 5 6

Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid.

Reading the Fathers Today

9

ancient Christian studies’ must, she argues, ‘re-envision’ itself as ‘a form of the new intellectual history, grounded in issues of material production and ideology, that has risen to prominence in the late twentieth-century’.7 Not discounting the insights given by all the other historical disciplines – archaeology, numismatics and so on – what should be of most concern for us, Clark asserts, are ‘issues of recent theory that pertain to texts’. And here, she would urge us to cede no ground whatsoever to contemporary theorists – she mentions Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard – who ‘have lately appropriated for their own purposes the rich texts of late Christian antiquity’.8 As intellectual historians, scholars of late ancient Christianity enjoy an advantage, because it is their very profession to ‘work with literary texts of a highly rhetorical and ideological nature’.9 Now, this call to an ‘intellectual history’ attuned to the textual nature of its material is indeed salutary. We can never forget that the material which we study, when reading the Fathers, is literary – of different genres, rhetorically structured in diverse ways, serving a multitude of purposes. If ‘Patristics’ had been mining these texts for particular topics – Trinity, Christology and so on, something to which I will return – we do indeed need to be reminded that we need to learn to read the texts themselves first, paying attention to their concerns, how they work and the rhetoric they employ. But what of Theology? Clark assures us, in her words, that ‘Theology has not been abandoned, but finds a welcome place in this reconfiguration of late ancient Christian studies’, and she cites Virginia Burrus as a confirmation of this point, in her reading of ‘early Christian theological texts through the illuminating lens of critical theory’.10 However, in Clark’s recounting of the development of the discipline, ‘theology’ only appears together with philology, as when she notes how the social sciences challenged the ‘narrowly philological and confessional oriented theological orientation’ and when she urges us to filter everything through critical theory – ‘joining theoretical to social scientific and theologicalphilological analyses’ – to enrich the discipline.11 ‘Theology’, for Clark, is a matter of Trinitarian and Christological expositions, directed against the ‘heretics’ and works together with philology and on a philological level. Such theology can still

7 8 9 10 11

Ibid., italics original. Clark, History, p. 161. Ibid., pp. 161–2. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., pp. 158–9.

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find a place, but it must be subsumed under the critical theory that gives a new intellectual history its legitimacy. But is this any more theology? And in what sense would it be theological? It is striking that in a discussion of Clark’s book in the journal Church History, Virginia Burrus raises a telling question about understanding the discipline as ‘intellectual history’. Burrus asks, with this new title, ‘what pernicious binaries might be inadvertently reinstated. Ideas versus practices? Elite versus popular culture? Surely we do not want to go there again. I don’t think Clark does’. ‘Yet’, she continues, ‘by the same token, I am concerned with what might not be excluded by “intellectual history”—namely a fairly traditional version of Patristics focused primarily (if not exclusively) on the close study of the writings of the so-called Fathers, even if it is a version now newly and critically tuned to issues of power.’12 Traditional Patristics, the close study of Patristic texts, is problematic for Burrus, even if critically attuned, for, as she puts it a few lines later, ‘I worry about the potential loss of a certain kind of political traction.’ So, is there indeed room for theology when reading the Fathers in terms of a newly minted, critically attuned ‘intellectual history’? What kind of theology would it be? And what would make it ‘theological’? Is there indeed such a thing as ‘Patristic theology’?

Fragmentation The problem is in fact even more complex, for the kind of confessional, philological theology against which Clark and Burrus are reacting – Patristics as a history of dogmatics – is itself, I would argue, deeply problematic. Certainly, there can be no going back to what had become ‘traditional’ Patristic study by the mid- to late twentieth century – scholarship exemplified in the standard textbooks of the era, for instance J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines. But neither can such works be taken as definitive of what constitutes a theological reading. In fact, looking back now at such works, it seems that even within the ‘theological reading’ they practised, a more fundamental breakdown had already occurred. Kelly’s work, for instance, is divided up into chapters dealing with distinct topics, suggesting thereby that they are discrete topics: distinct chapters 12

V. Burrus, ‘Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory: A (Somewhat) Confessional Reading’, Church History, 74:4 (2005), p. 814.

Reading the Fathers Today

11

on ‘Trinity’, ‘Christology’, ‘Soteriology’, ‘Exegesis’ – categories derived from the systematization of theology over recent centuries. Certainly, one cannot treat everything at once. But dividing up the work in this manner presupposes that the theology of those being presented is amenable to being dissected in this way. If we should then want to know what any particular figure, say Irenaeus or Athanasius, thought, we would need to synthesize select paragraphs in diverse chapters. But can this even be done once their work and thought have been dissected into later categories? The same point can, largely, be made for many of the monographs on particular figures, for all too often they proceed by what have come to be standard theological loci, without considering the coherence of all this, as theology. A rather glaring example of this problem in a monograph devoted to a particular locus – that of the Trinity – is evidenced by Richard Hanson, who, after concluding his mammoth landmark tome, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, notes, in an article summarizing his work, that through all the various debates ‘the shape of Trinitarian doctrine finally achieved in the fourth century, then, was necessary, indeed we may say permanent. It was a solution, the solution, to the intellectual problem which had for so long vexed the church’.13 The problem to be solved is an intellectual one, that of establishing the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet, this is, for Hanson at least, a task separable from the exegetical practices of those whom he studied. For, as he puts it in the conclusion to his tome, ‘the expounders of the text of the Bible are incompetent and illprepared to expound it. This applies as much to the wooden and unimaginative approach of the Arians as it does to the fixed determination of their opponents to read their doctrine into the Bible by hook or crook’.14 He clearly has no time for the exegetical practices of the theologians of this period by which they reached their conclusions: reading the Scriptures – the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets – as speaking of Christ. He then continues with this rather perplexing statement: It was much more the presuppositions with which they approach the Biblical text that clouded their perceptions, the tendency to treat the Bible in an “atomic” way as if each verse or set of verses was capable of giving direct information about 13

14

R. P. C. Hanson, ‘The Achievement of Orthodoxy in the Fourth Century AD’, in R. Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 142–56 (156). R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 848.

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A Celebration of Living Theology Christian doctrine apart from its context, the “oracular” concept of the nature of the Bible, the incapacity with a few exceptions to take serious account of the background and circumstances of the writers. The very reverence with which they honoured the Bible as a sacred book stood in the way of their understanding it. In this matter they were of course only reproducing the presuppositions of all Christians before them, of the writers of the New Testament itself, of the tradition of Jewish rabbinic piety and scholarship.15

Their exegetical practice is simply wrong, even if it is a practice going back to the apostles themselves and their proclamation of the gospel, a manner of exegesis moreover shared with the rabbis, and which was, in fact, the common approach to sacred texts in antiquity.16 And, more perplexingly, this was also the exegetical practice within which the doctrine of the Trinity was elaborated and has its meaning. For Hanson, the doctrine of the Trinity was an ‘intellectual problem’ that was resolved in the fourth century, and which can now simply be called upon as a given of Christian theology. Dividing up the controversies of the early centuries by following the chapters in modern dogmatic textbooks, with the fourth century having established Trinitarian theology, it remained for the following centuries to do the same for the Incarnation – another given of Christian theology. Hanson never, as far as I am aware, addressed the question of what happens when one takes these supposed core theological elements out of the context in which they were composed and the practice of reading Scripture within which they had meaning, and places them in another context, in this case, that of systematic theology and a historical reading of Scripture. Although Hanson’s words are rather stark, the attitude they present is rather typical and examples could easily be multiplied. The problem, I would suggest, is in fact even more serious, inasmuch as the fragmentation of Patristic studies reflects a breakdown in the discipline of theology more generally. Looking back at the last century, it is hard not to be struck by the impression that, despite all the great fruits produced by several centuries of intense and diligent scholarly, historical and critical work – on Scripture, the Fathers, liturgy, art, asceticism, systematic theology and so on – the discipline of theology itself has fragmented into various sub-disciplines, fields working with such different presuppositions and methodologies that they no longer relate to each other and hardly even

15 16

Hanson, Search, pp. 848–9, italics mine. Cf. J. L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 14–19.

Reading the Fathers Today

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comprehend each other.17 This fragmentation is especially true, and most grievous, in the case of the rupture between the study of Scripture, on the one hand, and systematic or dogmatic theology, on the other, with ‘Patristics’ included in the latter, at least when it was practised, until the mid- to late twentieth century, as the history of dogmatic theology. Understanding the unity of the (singular) discipline of theology as theology, is, it seems to me, our greatest challenge today. If there is to be Christian theology today, there needs to be a re-integration of the diverse fields, as theology, and to do this, we need to understand the nature of this particular and peculiar discipline. Although, as any dictionary will note, the word is formed from the words theos and logos, it cannot simply mean speaking about God, in an manner analogous to the way in which, for instance, those who study ‘geology’ speak about the world and those who study ‘biology’ speak about the phenomenon of life and living creatures, if for no other reason than that God is not subject to our scrutiny, to be merely spoken about, described in abstract, uninvolved terms.18 Nor, less presumptuously, can theology simply be a philological reading of texts in which the word ‘God’ appears. If such philological reading is to be subsumed under an intellectual history attuned to critical theory, are its presuppositions such as to allow theology to be theology? Or will it be so tamed and domesticated as to no longer be theology, no longer have its own traction, rather than our own preferred ‘political traction’?

Integration For theology does have its own discourse, its own language. But, as Rowan Williams notes, ‘Theology . . . is perennially tempted to be seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how it learns its own language.’19 And here, naturally, the Fathers, especially those of the early centuries, the beginning of the discourse, are in fact of primary help, as those who first began to speak this language. Increasingly, over the last decade or so, attention has shifted to this task: not that of expounding the mind of the Fathers or their consensus, nor even 17

18

19

Cf. E. Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). Cf. J. Behr, ‘What are we doing speaking about God: The Discipline of Theology’, in A. Papanikolaou and E. Prodromou (eds.), Thinking Through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2008), pp. 67–87. R. Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 131.

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using categories derived from systematizing a presupposed consensus – the Trinity, Christology, Pneumatology, exegesis and so on – in separation, but rather hearing how particular Fathers wrote theology, in a variety of contexts and genres – apologetic, anti-heretical, homiletic, poetic – employing a variety of exegetical practices to proclaim Christ in accordance with the Scriptures, making claims about creation, human beings and the work of God, and making claims upon their hearers. Such an approach does not merely expound the Scriptures or expound upon the being of God and does not seek to find a consensus or the lowest common denominator, but rather, to borrow an image from Irenaeus, attempts to be attuned to the symphony that is being played through these distinct figures: a symphony that is both synchronically and diachronically diverse, enabling us to see the Catholic dimension of early Christianity not as an increasingly intolerant monolithic institution (which is still supposed even by those who reject its historic reality) on the one hand, but as the body which in fact embraces diversity; and, on the other hand, to see the heretics (again, in the earliest centuries – before imperial Christianity) not as those rejected by a supposedly intolerant episcopacy, but as those who, through their own intolerance, separated themselves from the Catholic body to form communities who agreed with themselves (such as Marcion) or distanced themselves from the broader body, thinking that they alone know better (such as Valentinus).20 And, in reverse, it is noteworthy that when Irenaeus intervened in affairs in Rome at the end of the second century, it was not to demand that the Valentinians be excommunicated and their books burnt, in the name of an increasingly intolerant patriarchal orthodoxy intent on preserving its purity for its own purposes, as is often supposed. Rather, it was to urge that the great church should acknowledge the degree to which the Valentinians had already separated themselves from this community, and to promote toleration of diversity among those who remained together: for as Irenaeus reminded Victor, in the controversy over Quartodeciman practice, ‘our divergence in the fast confirms our agreement in the faith’.21 This fact is important, for it means that the establishment of an ‘orthodox’ theological discourse by the end of the second century was not the result of power games (though it would increasingly have political dimensions in later

20

21

For a full exposition of this, see my Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Irenaeus of Lyons, Ep. to Victor, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.24.12–17.

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centuries), but has a properly theological grounding. This symphony of theology comprised different voices throughout time, each lending itself to the melody being played, with different timbres and tonalities, inflections and themes, and each in turn being shaped by the symphony. Speaking theologically, moreover, this diachronically and synchronically polyphonous symphony is not, therefore, constructed by any individual voice or all the voices together, but is governed by its own rhythm and rules, so that, to use Irenaeus’ words, it is God who ‘harmonizes the human race to the symphony of salvation’ (Against Heresies 4.14.2). Reading the Fathers ‘symphonically’ in this way, then, attunes us to the melody that is theology. But rehearsing the symphony, as it has been played to this date, is not yet, however, theology; that would only begin when, having read attentively through the score of earlier movements, we take our own part in the ongoing symphony. It is noteworthy that those who have taken this further step in the twentieth century – such as von Balthasar or more recently Zizioulas – have been accused of transgressing disciplinary boundaries. Balthasar was criticized for being too influenced by contemporary questions, resulting in a certain ‘eclecticism’ and ‘ahistoricism’ in his ‘audaciously creative’ utilization of Patristic texts.22 Zizioulas, likewise, has been criticized for being unduly influenced by modern, existential, philosophy, and of giving an inadequate reading of the Fathers, though in his case, it would seem to result from a perceived need to stay within the realm of ‘patristic theology’, claiming that his understanding of the ‘person’ is already developed in the work of the Fathers, and so laying claim to legitimacy and authority in this way, rather than clarifying the nature of the discourse of theology within which he would work as a systematic theologian. Alan Brown’s rather impassioned defence of Zizioulas, from his supposed critics in the so-called ‘Anglo-Orthodox school of patristic theology’, arguing that the critique that Zizioulas’ work fails ‘the unspoken presupposition that Orthodox theological speech should be submitted to the bar of the patristics monograph’, is rather misplaced.23 There is indeed no reason simply to repeat what certain Fathers have said, but if one is not going to rehearse, with care and accuracy, particular movements of this symphony, then one must provide an account of what it is one is in fact doing. 22

23

Cf. B. Daley, ‘Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers’, in E. T. Oakes and D. Moss (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 202. A. Brown, ‘On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology’, in D. Knight (ed.), The Theology of John Zizioulas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 35–78 (67), italics original.

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In this continuing engagement between the task of reading the Fathers, and reading the Fathers today, with concern for contemporary questions and philosophical movements, one particularly fruitful area for engagement seems to be the strain of phenomenology that has undergone a ‘theological turn’ in recent decades, especially that of Michel Henry, with his phenomenology of life, and Jean-Luc Marion, with his analysis of saturated phenomena. Indeed, Marion’s analysis of saturated phenomena provides, as recently suggested by Tamsin Jones, an intriguing model for Patristic texts and their reading – received as a pure given, but opening out onto an endless interpretation, as we encounter the phenomenon of God’s revelation which exceeds any reduction.24 The correlation between that which appears and the appearance, between the ‘intuition’ and one’s ‘concept’ of it, need not only be determined as adequation, in which lies ‘truth’, or inadequation, as in the understanding of the phenomenon from Kant to Husserl, but, Marion argues, it can also be encountered as the ‘excess’ of ‘saturation’. And this recognition opens a way to avoid the ‘idolatrous’ impulse of philosophy to determine and reduce concepts to static formulations, ones that, moreover, take their measure from the capacity of the thinking subject. The ‘nonmetaphysical method of philosophy—phenomenology, but a phenomenology thoroughly secured’, as elaborated by Marion,25 does not impose ‘conditions for the possibility of phenomenality, the horizon, the constituting function of the I’, whether through Kant’s categories or Husserl’s intentionality,26 nor does it begin with the subject (even Heidegger’s authentic Dasein), nor does it privilege Being, but rather, it begins with the givenness of what shows itself, and in the case of the saturated phenomenon: it alone truly appears as itself, of itself, and starting from itself, since it alone appears without the limits of a horizon and without reduction to an I. We will therefore call this appearance that is purely of itself and starting from itself, this phenomenon that does not subject its possibility to any preliminary determination, a revelation. And—we insist on this—here it is purely and simply a matter of the phenomenon taken in its fullest meaning.27

24

25

26 27

T. Jones, A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 158. J.-L. Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (trans. J. L. Kosky; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. x. Marion, Being Given, p. 4. J.-L. Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon,’ in D. Janicaud, J.-F. Coutrine and J.-L. Chrétien (eds.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 176–216 (212–13).

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Marion’s saturated phenomena – the Event, the Idol, the Flesh, the Icon – culminates in the figure of Christ, whose manifestation ‘counts as paradigm of the phenomenon of revelation according to the paradox’s four modes of saturation’,28 as Event (saturating according to quantity, unable to be accounted), as Idol (saturating according to quality, being unbearable by the look), as Flesh (saturating according to relation, being absolute) and as Icon (saturating to modality, being unable to be looked at), ‘precisely because as icon He [Christ] regards me in such a way that he constitutes me as his witness rather than as some transcendental I constituting Him to its own liking’.29 The subject, the constituting I, has been displaced, however self-aware it has become through critical theory (to gain a ‘political traction’ of one’s own liking), to be replaced by one who is given, gifted, called (beyond being?) by Revelation itself. Christ, once again (and rather than ‘Christology’), is again the subject of revelation, of theology, and theology itself is revelatory (rather than ‘revelation’ being one of the many topics studied by theology) and so, perhaps, Patristic texts should be read as themselves saturated phenomena in a theological reading. There are, needless to say, many unanswered questions: two issues in particular dominate current discussion about Marion’s saturated phenomena and the completion of these phenomena in the phenomenon of Revelation. First, who or what is the subject to whom the phenomenon appears, if not to an I, and how does this subject, however understood, receive this revelation without re-inscribing the phenomenon in a horizon necessarily subjective? And, second, what is the place of hermeneutics in this analysis of saturated phenomenon, or as Jones puts it: ‘What is the actual relation between allowing the given to appear as such without any interpretation by the subject, on the one hand, and the subject’s actual experience of this appearance itself, on the other? Or in other words, how can we talk of the appearance itself while totally bracketing out the subject?’30 Perhaps more careful attention to the symphony of the Fathers (their synchronic and diachronic polyphony), approached now with a keener sense of the saturated character of revelation, may provide some answers. Tamsin Jones, for instance, has brilliantly analysed how Marion appeals to the Fathers univocally, as offering ‘a homogenous unit of authoritative source material for Marion to mine—a continuous tradition of an orthodoxy in which Marion would also like to be placed’.31 In particular, Marion conflates the apophasis of Gregory of Nyssa 28 29 30 31

Marion, Being Given, p. 236. Ibid., p. 240. Jones, Genealogy, p. 117. Ibid., p. 15.

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with Dionysius or rather surreptitiously introduces ideas particular to Gregory under the name of Dionysius, where in fact closer attention to the particularity of Gregory’s apophasis would have allowed for a clearer exposition of the endless character of entering into the saturated nature of revelation. Likewise, Jones points out how Marion’s translation of Dionysius’ use of the term αἰτία – ‘cause’ – as Requisit (the requested or the required one) is, in fact, a great example of creative interpretation, not needing authorization by claiming, as Marion does, that this is what the term originally meant for Dionysius.32 With regard to the question of the place of the subject addressed by Revelation and the role of hermeneutics, the very development of the discourse of Christian theology has much to offer, inasmuch as answering the call of ‘the God who reveals himself through the cross’33 requires the death of the one who hears: I no longer live, but Christ lives in me (Gal. 2.20) – a death which is alone an entry into life (as Henry’s phenomenology of life) and the completion of God’s creation of the human being through the creature’s own fiat, answering a call that is only heard exegetically (through the opening of the Scriptures), not by another technique or method of reading or exegesis, but by focusing on Christ as the subject, the self-interpreting Word exegeting the Father (cf. Jn 1.18), providing the categories and horizons of his own intuition – revelation-rather than being reduced to those of a thinking subject, and heard liturgically, though the breaking of bread, in which his companions, those who share in the broken bread, become his body – so that he disappears from sight. Although Marion reflects on this, beautifully but briefly, in his essay, ‘They Recognized Him And He Became Invisible To Them’,34 I am not sure that he (or Henry) has fully appreciated two points. First, the extent to which, and the implications of the fact, that the Christ he speaks of, the Christ of the canonical Gospels, is always already revealed within this hermeneutical structure. Certainly, it is Christ himself who grounds or constitutes this revelation, on his own terms; the Gospel is that of God, not of man (to borrow from Paul (Gal. 1.12), the one whom Luke interpreted). But Christ is not simply there before the disciples’ eyes waiting to be recognized by the intuitions he supplies; it is, rather, specifically in the Gospel of Luke that he appears on the road to Emmaus. And likewise now to those who stand in the same tradition of opening the scriptures and breaking bread. 32 33 34

Ibid., pp. 157–8. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 3.3.30 (GNO 2.118.20–21). Jean-Luc Marion, ‘They Recognized Him and He Became Invisible to Them’, Modern Theology, 18:2 (2002), pp. 145–52.

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Second, that the excess of this saturated revelation can only be received through the death of the subject, sharing in his passion, to become his body, so that he disappears from sight (rather than remaining to be adored in the Eucharistic gifts, the high-point of saturated phenomenon for Marion), for it is alone the death of the subject which breaks down all their attempts to constitute their world, and instead allows them to become clay in the hands of God, to become (finally) flesh, created by God (rather than themselves). Yet, despite such questions, such theologically attuned phenomenology does, it seems to me, open a space for a theological reading of Patristic texts – texts that are devoured today in the battle of critical readings – and also an approach for explaining what makes such reading theological and revelatory (phenomenologically), and, indeed, what is theological about Theology.

2

Authority and Doctrinal Normation in Patristic Discourse: The Nicene Creed at the First Council of Ephesus Thomas Graumann

In Andrew Louth’s wide-ranging Patristic scholarship, a question of fundamental theological significance may be detected as being repeatedly examined: What constitutes and legitimates theological discourse beyond the restating of what has already been said before, and what frames, underpins and limits such expansive systematic reflection? The possibility of advancing theological thinking, even in a traditional mode, is demonstrated in exemplary fashion in the recovery of the distinct theological ‘originality’ of John of Damascus. The famous quotation from the prooemium of his so-called Fountain Head of Knowledge – ‘I shall say nothing of my own, but collect together into one the fruits of the labours of the most eminent teachers and make a compendium’ – may seem to mark him out as the proponent of a purely restrictive notion of tradition par excellence. However, it is taken in Andrew’s seminal study as a key stimulus for a discussion of John’s approach and thought much more sensitive to the subtle and complex nuancing and appropriation of this tradition, helping to reveal the dynamics of ‘ Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology’ which the book’s subtitle announces.1 Moving beyond the stereotypes of past scholarship on John, it rediscovers the creative operations of the theological mind and the way it seeks to support itself on the central pillars and unshaken foundations of theological enquiry. Tradition as a starting point and guiding principle of theological reflection is also a central concern in Andrew’s

1

John Damascene, Dialogues, proem. 60–62, quoted in: A. Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 15 and p. VIII.

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introductory portrait of the other great figure of early Byzantine theology – Maximus the Confessor. Maximus’ way of thinking alerts us to the relationship between faithfulness to tradition and the potential of original theological thinking within certain legitimate boundaries, and to the main elements involved in this difficult balancing act. Maximus ‘displays . . . [a] theological mind, drawing on Scripture and all that is meant in Orthodox Christianity by Tradition – the Fathers, the councils, spiritual experience. . . ’.2 Tradition, in this equation, with all the complexity of the aspects and ingredients that make up the notion, appears, to me, to be the major challenge for any discussion of theological norms and the processes and principles by which to authenticate doctrinal reflection and discourse. Arguably, this problem is one of the main driving forces behind the transformation of the Patristic heritage into the scholastic modes of theology in the Medieval West, and signals one of the major faultlines in the disputes of the Reformation Era and the early modern ‘Confessional’ age.3 The following brief investigation has no aspirations to contribute to a systematic exploration of the norms, authorities, limits and presuppositions of contemporary theological enquiry, let alone a distinct Orthodox perspective on the matter. Rather, in the historical mode, it aims to illustrate just one small but significant component of the problem. The historical test-case in focus here is the ‘canonization’ of the Nicene Creed at the First Council of Ephesus, which now merits closer inspection. The relevant conciliar decision comes to pass within an extended process of nascent theological reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, prompted by the Trinitarian and Christological disputes. The triangulation of scripture, Fathers and councils in this process, suggested by Andrew’s reading of Maximus as decisive – accounting for spiritual experience proves rather more difficult in historical examination – is gradually worked out over the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries as the principal method to legitimize doctrinal discussion and authorize its results as orthodox. Creeds for the most part stand in for the cypher ‘councils’ in this process but creeds can also be used, and claimed, as a summary of the tradition of the Fathers, and, in individual instances, creeds through citation and allusion arguably also 2 3

A. Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), p. VII. See, for instance, the studies collected in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (2 vols; Leiden: Brill, 1997); and A. Merkt, Das patristische Prinzip. Eine Studie zur theologischen Bedeutung der Kirchenväter (Leiden: Brill, 2001).

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provide specific reference to the scriptures. The strategies and presuppositions of doctrinal normation in the demarcation of orthodoxy are, however, not always self-consciously deliberated.4 It is the Council of Ephesus in 431 that takes precedence in this respect, for, in addition to the condemnation of Nestorius, it issued the first formal decision (horos) of its kind. For the first time, a council explicitly took up a position vis-à-vis the question of doctrinal norms, and decreed a certain standard for deliberation and decision-making that went beyond the constant and almost stereotypical assertions made on many earlier occasions about the need to conform to scripture.5 This decision is eminently pertinent, in principle, to the problem of authoritative teaching, its grounding and limitations, and proved to be, historically, of far-reaching consequence for subsequent doctrinal deliberations and debates generally, and conciliar definition in particular. We refer, of course, to the canonization of the Nicene Creed as the sole and sufficient norm of Orthodoxy set out in what later canonical collections list as the so-called ‘Canon 7’ of Ephesus.6 That this ‘canonization’ should have happened in circumstances where the council’s own legitimacy was hotly contested from the outset emphasizes the need for a closer historical examination into the likely motivations and purposes behind this ruling. The decision to canonize the Nicene Creed in this way was taken in a meeting of a group of bishops who associated themselves with Cyril of Alexandria, held on 22 July, four weeks after the initial condemnation of Nestorius and amid the turmoil that followed it.7 However, the Nicene Creed had already played a significant role in the dealings of the council, notably in the condemnation of

4

5

6

7

For a sketch of the development, see T. Graumann, ‘The Conduct of Theology and the “Fathers” of the Church’, in P. Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2009), pp. 539–55. See T. Graumann, ‘The Bible in Doctrinal Development and Christian Councils’, in J. N. Carleton Paget and J. Scharper (eds.), The New Cambridge History of the Bible (Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to 600; Cambridge: University Press, 2013), pp. 798–821. For the canonical collection, see K. H. Ohme, ‘Kirchenrecht’, RAC 21 (2004), pp. 1099–139; esp. 1024f. on the inclusion of Ephesine ‘canons’. On the history of the council in general, see J. A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria. The Christological Controversy: its History, Theology and Texts (Vigiliae Christianae Supplementum, 23; Leiden: Brill, 1994); C. Fraisse-Coué, ‘Le débat théologique au temps de Théodose II.: Nestorius’, in Histoire du Christianisme: des origines à nos jours (vol. 2: Naissance d’une chrétienté (250–430); Paris: Desclée, 1995), pp. 499–550; L. Perrone, ‘Da Nicea (325) a Calcedonia (451)’, in G. Alberigo (ed.), Storia dei concili ecumenici (2nd edn; Brescia: Queriniana, 1993), pp. 11–118 (77–83); B. J. Kidd, A History of the Church to AD 461 (vol. 3; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), pp. 218–53; C. J. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des conciles d’après les documents originaux (vol. II.1; Paris: Letouzey, 1908), pp. 287–377; S. Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially pp. 146–80, may only be used with caution.

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Nestorius, as has been observed many times in scholarship.8 Here, once the initial turmoil caused by the challenges to Cyril’s initiative to gather a meeting on 22 June (not reported in the acts of the meeting) had settled, and the substantive agenda was entered into, Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem asked for the recitation of the Creed in a rather matter-of-fact way, without providing any justification and without elaborating on the purpose of this motion.9 Its function nonetheless soon became clear in that, subsequently, the orthodoxy first of Cyril’s Letter to Nestorius and then of Nestorius’ response was examined against the standard of the Creed.10 The seeming inevitability, then, of starting any theological enquiry on the basis of the Nicene Creed, and of ultimately returning to it, after a four-week interval, when summing up conciliar business by a solemn affirmation of the Creed, may in fact cloud rather than illuminate the precise historical contexts of the council’s contentious and contested activities. For it is these activities which account for this remarkable self-positioning, and which allow a rather more distinct evaluation of what the canonization of the Nicene Creed both tried to achieve, and to what it in fact amounted. Indeed, the council was contentious from the start, and it remained hotly contested for the entirety of the period of the bishops’ activities in Ephesus (and at the court) during the summer of 431, and for some time after that. We need to examine more closely the history of that period to appreciate fully that the famous Canon 7, which declared the sufficiency of the Nicene formulation of orthodoxy, was much more than a simple reaffirmation of the obvious, and yet also, perhaps, initially much less than an absolute prescription of the limitations of doctrinal definition and expression for all future discussion. At the same time, the circumstances provide us with a pertinent insight into the 8

9

10

A. DeHalleux, ‘La première session du concile d’ Éphèse (22 Juin 431)’, EThL 69 (1993) pp. 48–87, considers its function in the first meeting held against Nestorius as equivalent to a definition of the legal basis from which the examination proceeds (pp. 73–4); H. J. Sieben, Die Konzilsidee der Alten Kirche (KonGe.U; Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1979), speaks of its doctrinal ‘Monopolstellung’ in all conciliar considerations (pp. 232–42, passim); and A. Grillmeier, Christ in the Christian Tradition (vol. 1; trans. J. Bowden; 2nd edn; London: Continuum, 1975), in assessing the doctrinal achievement of the council, can simply state: ‘For the Fathers of 431 Nicaea provided the real authoritative christological formula. The dogmatic idea that the Fathers found in it was this [i.e. that one and the same is Son of the Father and Son of the Virgin Mary; and she may therefore be called Theotokos]. . . . This was the dogma of Ephesus, which was thus that of Nicaea’ (p. 486). Collectio Vaticana, 43; E. Schwartz (ed.), Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum (Berlin and Leipzig, 1927–84; hereafter ACO), 1.1.2, p. 12. Collectio Vaticana, 44–8; ACO 1.1.2, pp. 13–36. For analysis of the session, see De Halleux (as n. 8); T. Graumann, Die Kirche der Väter. Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (431) (Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 118; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 357–93; T. Graumann, ‘ “Reading” the First Council of Ephesus (431)’, in R. Price and M. Whitby (eds.), Chalcedon in Context: Church Councils 400-700 (TTH Contexts, 1; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 27–44.

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principles operative in the council’s doctrinal deliberations, and the way in which doctrinal normation and authorization were being carefully negotiated – if not always fully and consciously reflected – in the process. The task set before the council, then, adumbrated initially in the imperial letters of convocation, and subsequently spelled out more clearly in the imperial instructions read out to the council by the infelicitous imperial envoy Candidianus at the beginning of the session of 22 June, was principally to discuss and examine the issues threatening rupture in the church and damaging the stability and welfare of the empire.11 The imperial sacra is concerned chiefly with the fair and amicable conduct of this undertaking, without so much as hinting at a desired outcome beyond regaining peace and unity. This lack of specific guidance and – it is argued – the purposeful restraint avoids not only taking sides, but even leaves it to the council to determine in what way the problem might be solved. Only one thing is expressed rather more specifically: the request that there be consideration of ‘the truth’ or ‘true doctrine’ or ‘dogma’; this, in fact, is pointed out as the sole purpose of the council, setting aside engagement with all other grievances and challenges.12 The rather generic and, in a sense, self-evident expectation is voiced that the council’s conclusions ought to be in accord with ‘orthodox religion’.13 Nothing else could reasonably be expected. There is no attempt to be any more specific on what might constitute orthodoxy or on what basis it might be deliberated or in what form it might be expounded. What is all the more interesting then is that a number of actors on the Ephesine stage, and on all sides of the doctrinal divide, invariably understood this imperial instruction to refer to the Nicene Creed – even if tacitly. Thus, in his protests written against the Cyrillian part-council, immediately after it had declared his deposition, Nestorius summed up his understanding of what the emperor had charged the bishops to do.14 He emphasized as the central imperial demand the need of a ‘joint meeting of all’, at which the bishops ‘by a joint decree confirm the Creed of the holy fathers convened at Nicaea’.15 In stark contrast to his own compliance, so he complains, the Egyptians chose to disobey imperial orders ‘for in the letter sent out by your piety you said that a single concordant faith should be issued by all, corresponding to the writings of the

11

12 13 14 15

Collectio Vaticana 25, ACO 1.1.1, pp. 114–16 for the full Greek text; cf. Collectio Vaticana 35, ACO 1.1.2, p. 8, for the place in the proceedings of 22 June where the letter was read. Collectio Vaticana 31, ACO 1.1.1, pp. 120–1. Ibid., p. 121, 7f. Collectio Vaticana 146, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 13–15. Collectio Vaticana 146.1, ACO 1.1.5, p. 13, 31f.: . . . οὕτως ϰοινὸν ἁπάντων ποιῆσαι συνέδϱιον ϰαὶ ϰοινῆι ψήϕωι ϰυϱῶσαι τῶν ἁγίων πατέϱων τὴν πίστιν τῶν ἐν Νιϰαίαι συναθϱοισθέντων.

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evangelists and the apostles and the doctrines of the holy fathers’.16 Theodosius had not been so specific. The council of the oriental bishops also makes a similar point after their belated arrival in Ephesus.17 Having heard the imperial sacra read to them, Bishop John of Antioch summarizes it to the assembly, and makes an important addition. According to his understanding of what he just heard, the sacra demanded an ‘exact examination and confirmation of the pious faith of the holy and blessed fathers who assembled at Nicaea in Bithynia’.18 Nicaea was not mentioned in the sacra but, it appears, was readily understood to be meant by its references to orthodoxy and holy doctrine. That the Creed of Nicaea described the standard of orthodoxy and that any doctrinal decision could only consist in its confirmation therefore seems the unquestioned assumption of all; hence, it was read into the emperor’s rather more general statement. The emperor’s representative, the Count Candidianus, also takes this understanding for granted when reporting back to the court: not only the churchmen, and certainly not only the eastern bishops, drew this conclusion. In Candidianus’ report about his efforts to prevent the meeting on 22 June from going ahead, the comes is also rather more specific on the question of orthodoxy than the emperor’s instructions had been.19 He expresses his firm conviction that the emperor’s desire was the ‘confirmation of the faith’.20 This might entail, as one option, that the council could find that ‘they all equally professed correctly according to the religion of the holy fathers’.21 Once again, the presupposed notion of orthodoxy behind this phrase is one that describes it as that of ‘the fathers’, and even though Nicaea is not specifically mentioned, the fact that in the other statements just examined the ideas of the Fathers and the Nicene Council virtually fuse into one, suggests that Candidianus too may have understood the Nicene Creed as the archetypal expression of the religion of the Fathers. What ‘confirming Nicaea’ meant in reality, and what kind

16

17 18 19 20

21

Collectio Vaticana 146.3, ACO 1.1.5, p. 14, 13–15: μίαν γὰϱ παϱὰ πάντων σύμϕωνον ἐϰτεθῆναι πίστιν ἐν τοῖς ὑπὸ τῆς ὑμετέϱας εὐσεβείας ἀποσταλεῖσι διηγοϱεύσατε γϱάμμασι πϱόσϕοϱον τοῖς τε εὐαγγελιϰοῖς ϰαὶ ἀποστολιϰοῖς γϱάμμασι ϰαὶ τοῖς τῶν ἁγίων πατέϱων δόγμασιν. Translations provided in this essay use drafts for an English edition of the Acts of Ephesus by R. Price and T. Graumann, Translated Texts for Historians, Liverpool (forthcoming). Collectio Vaticana 151, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 119–24. Collectio Vaticana 151.10, ACO 1.1.5, p. 121, 14f. Collectio Casinensis 84, ACO 1.1.4, pp. 31–2. Ibid., p. 32, 8f.: ‘uelle namque eum [sc. imperatorem] dixi [sc. at the meeting of the bishops on 22 June] fidem nostram . . . roborari.’ Collectio Casinensis 84, ACO 1.1.4, p. 32, 25f.: ‘cunctis uobis presentibus iudicaretur quis praue et praeter regulas ecclesiasticas credere uideretur an certe recte omnes pariter confiteri, sicut sanctum patrum religio habet.’ The other option presented here is to identify those who had believed contrary to the rules of the church.

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of theological exposition could be considered its most adequate expression, was of course the centrally contested issue between the conflicting parties. These immediate responses to the sacra, all written within a week of the fateful events of the meeting of 22 June in which it was read to the bishops joining Cyril (or its respective reading to the bishops in alliance with John of Antioch at their meeting on 26 June) thus allow us to surmise that references to ‘orthodoxy’ were on all sides immediately equated with (an as-yet contested understanding of) the Nicene Creed. This sentiment may have been in line with Emperor Theodosius’ unspoken presumptions. More importantly, the evidence suggests that it expresses the prevailing ecclesiastical mentality at the time, cutting across the ‘party-lines’ in the Christological dispute, and also characteristic of the religious presuppositions operative in imperial administration. In fact, this emphasis cannot come as a surprise. After confessing allegiance to ‘Nicaea’ had already become the minimum requirement for the rapprochement of a number of religious ‘parties’ in the 360s, the Constantinopolitan Council of 381 had after all – in the words of the historian Socrates – ‘strengthened’ the Nicene Creed,22 thus making it the official declaration of orthodoxy in the Theodosian Church and Empire. Thus we find in the later decades of the fourth and into the fifth century, repeated allusion to credal formulae considered to be Nicene, even if they did not always conform exactly to the wording originally set out in the council of 325 (nor to the Creed of 381).23 Against this background, the correct understanding of the Nicene Creed had already played a major role in the epistolary confrontation between Cyril and Nestorius before the council24 – and it is for this reason that the test applied to 22

23

24

See Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 5.8.1 (279,15 Hansen): ϰϱατύναι τὴν ἐν Νιϰαίᾳ πίστιν. Cf., for example, the creed that may be reconstructed from the Catechetical Homilies of Theodore of Mopsuestia. See P. Bruns, Theodor von Mopsuestia: Katechetische Homilien (2 vols; Fontes Christiani, 17, 1–2; Freiburg: Herder, 1994), esp. pp. 24–35, and A. Mingana (ed.), Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Nicene Creed (Woodbrooke Studies, 5; Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1932). On the question of a possible flexibility of wording in creeds considered to be ‘Nicene’, see V. H. Drecoll, ‘Wie nizänisch ist das Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum’, ZKG 107 (1996), pp. 1–18; and, with different emphasis, L. Abramowski, ‘Was hat das Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum (C) mit dem Konzil von Konstantinopel zu tun?’, Theologie und Philosophie 67 (1992), pp. 481–513. The entire discussion on this particular creed (for which see also generally, J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (3rd edn; London: Longman, 1972) illustrates the wider problem in hand. The point to make, here, is the understanding implied in all these cases that ‘the’ Nicene Creed, however varied versions and readings might have been used in practice, should constitute the foundational expression of (post-) Theodosian orthodoxy. On the formation of Nicene Orthodoxy over the course of the fourth century, see also L. Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy. An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See: Cyril, Ep. 4 (Collectio Vaticana 4, ACO 1.1.1, pp. 25–8), Nestorius, Ep. ad Cyrillum (Collectio Vaticana 5, ACO 1.1.1, pp. 29–32), Cyril, Ep. 17 (Collectio Vaticana 6, ACO 1.1.1, pp. 33–42). These are the Second Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, the Second Letter of Nestorius to Cyril, and the Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, respectively.

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their letters during the meeting represents an effective and plausible procedure. Nestorius, furthermore, had discussed the Creed in his sermons even before that25 and Cyril had criticized his interpretation of it in the Contra Nestorium as early as 430.26 Importantly, this interpretation of the council’s remit – as being charged to confirm the faith of the Fathers and specifically the Nicene Creed – was specifically held up in protest against the meeting of 22 June led by Cyril, which had allegedly violated both ecclesiastical custom and imperial instructions rather than enacting this expectation. Unsurprisingly, Nestorius contrasts the expected confirmation of the faith of the Fathers in unison and accord, with the partiality and procedural flaws of that meeting.27 Bishop John, in the meeting of the Syrians on 26 June, speaks of the confirmation of Nicaea as of one of those elements in the imperial instruction that Cyril chose to ignore and hold in contempt, and asks his part-council to determine the appropriate sanction.28 In response, the Oriental council collectively lists this and other trespasses by Cyril and Memnon as intended to prevent examination of the ‘heretical’ doctrines contained in the Twelve Chapters.29 These they consider to corrupt the faith of the Fathers, so the avoidance of engaging with them already amounts to a failure to confirm to that faith. In complete accord with this sentiment, John suggests stipulating the following terms for the reconciliation of all the bishops involved in Cyril’s ploy: (1) the anathematization of the Chapters, and (2) the profession, rather, of the Nicene Creed, ‘introducing nothing different from it or alien to piety’.30 This contrast between the Chapters and the Nicene Creed, and the implied suggestion that the Chapters introduce ‘something different’ from it will mark the stance of the bishops in alliance with John of Antioch throughout the following weeks and months, and can be heard as a general base in all their pronouncements. Their letter, for example, to the clergy of Constantinople repeats the demand for condemnation of the Chapters and to ‘sincerely accept’ the Nicene Creed – the notion of sincerity introduces a small but important qualification behind which the difficulty of the Creed’s authentic interpretation already raised its head.31 Confirmation of the faith of the Fathers, thus, might not necessarily consist in

25 26 27 28 29

30

31

For instance, in the sermon ‘Über das Nicaenum’ (Loofs, Nestoriana, pp. 294–7). Cyril of Alexandria, Against Nestorius 1.6–8 (ACO 1.1.6, pp. 26–31). Collectio Vaticana 146, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 13–15. Collectio Vaticana 151.1–10, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 119–21. Collectio Vaticana 151.11, ACO 1.1.5, p. 121, 28f.: ‘ὥστε τὴν αἱρετικὴν κακοδοξίαν μὴ ζητηθῆναι, ἣν ἐν τοῖς κεφαλαίοις εὕρομεν.’ Collectio Vaticana 151.12, ACO 1.1.5, p. 122, 5. The same is repeated in reverse order in the decree issued by the oriental part-council (Collectio Vaticana 151.15, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 122–3). Collectio Vaticana 155, ACO 1.1.5, p. 127.

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the simple restatement of the Nicene Creed alone. In their letter to the senate, they talk of their opponents’ necessary ‘recovery’ of the Nicene Creed,32 and the letter to the urban laity demands their ‘return’ to it.33 In all these statements, it is the implied juxtaposition with the damnable Chapters that has, in the view of the Orientals, turned the Cyrillians away from the Nicene Creed, and which requires them to recover it. However, they do not offer any firm statement about how this alleged move away from Nicaea and towards the heresy of the Chapters found expression in the meeting of 22 June. It is, rather, the fact that the positions outlined in the Chapters had remained unchallenged that alone sufficed to make this claim. For Orientals such as Theodoret, the Chapters consisted of heretical violations of, and additions to, the faith of the Nicene Creed, and this is what they had come to Ephesus determined to expose and condemn.34 Both sides, then, in reality took the Nicene Creed to be the unquestioned and unquestionable expression of orthodoxy and the starting point and yardstick in any doctrinal discourse. But that conviction served as justification for diametrically opposed strategies and objectives. The Creed gained a specific critical potential for Cyril and his allies in that it was brought to bear against Nestorius in the session of 22 June once its Cyrilline use and interpretation – as set out in his Second Letter to Nestorius – had been accepted.35 In contrast, the easterners mustered the Creed against the alleged heretical innovations and additions found in the Twelve Chapters and a meeting, which had failed to expose them. In this way both sides talked past each other and disputed both the Creed’s proper application, and its consequences for the current debate, while sharing in unspoken agreement the assumption of its authoritative status. The importance of adhering to the Nicene Creed as the description of one’s own position and in identifying the critical failure of one’s opponents gained an increasingly acute political edge with the repeated imperial interventions over the following weeks. By sending additional missives and further high-ranking officials to Ephesus, the emperor tried to rescue a council that – if viewed from 32 33 34

35

Collectio Vaticana 156, ACO 1.1.5, p. 128, 17. Collectio Vaticana 157.3, ACO 1.1.5, p. 129, 21–2. Cf. the criticism and attack on the chapters composed in the run up to the council by Theodoret of Cyrus, Impugnatio xii anathematismorum Cyrilli (CPG 6214), to be reconstructed, in part, from ACO 1.1.6, pp. 108–44; and (the lost treatise of) Andreas of Samosata, Impugnatio XII Anathematismorum Cyrilli (CPG 6373); for fragments, see ACO 6.3.1, pp. 111–13; and generally P. Évieux, ‘André de Samosate. Un adversaire de Cyrille d’Alexandrie durant la crise nestorienne’, REByz 32 (1974), pp. 253–300. This is the main trajectory and procedural logic of this part of the session, Collectio Vaticana 44–47; ACO 1.1.2. pp. 13–35; cf. the interpretation in Graumann, Die Kirche der Väter, pp. 372–85.

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an imperial stance – had descended into turmoil and was threatening to become a dismal failure. Theodosius angrily demanded, on 29 June, to receive the minutes of the meeting of 22 June. In the response written by the council on 1 July, the council insists that it had, in fact, conducted the examination of doctrine required by the earlier sacrae in that they had measured Nestorius against the Nicene Creed.36 Over the following weeks, this defence becomes ever more forcefully repeated in response to the increasingly raised tone of criticism by the easterners, who continued to allege the council’s failure in conducting a proper examination, and in their violation of the traditional faith. When the Cyrilline council reported to Theodosius about their later meetings of 16–17 July, it made the same point once more, expressing first of all and emphatically their complete confidence in having fulfilled the task set before them: ‘We have clarified for your piety the apostolic faith expounded by the 318 assembled at Nicaea and deposed Nestorius whose beliefs were contrary to it.’37 This report, drafted by Juvenal of Jerusalem, projects a sense of closure. The council reports its entire business over the past weeks, starting from the deposition of Nestorius, now almost a month ago, right down to its present reinstatement of Cyril and Memnon – quite unnecessary, they affirm, since their calumnious so-called deposition by the easterners had always been null and void – and the necessary deposition of John and his followers.38 The report summarizes all activities and decisions with apparent satisfaction and a noticeable sense of finished business. Over and above what had already been negotiated, nothing, it seems, remained to be done. Another report to the Pope, probably written concurrently with it,39 equally reads like a closing statement and entails in equal measure information and justification of the council’s activities. This self-satisfaction contrasts markedly with the sentiments expressed by the easterners at the same time. Recent developments must have marked the nadir of their struggles. On learning of the Cyrillian report to Theodosius, they immediately, and in great haste and alarm, sent a counter-report after the Count Irenaeus, who had already departed from Ephesus with a bundle of their

36 37

38 39

Collectio Vaticana 84.1, ACO I.1.3, pp. 10, 29–11, 5. Collectio Vaticana 92.1, ACO 1.1.3, pp. 28, 26–9, 2: ‘τήν τε ἀποστολικὴν πίστιν, ἣν καὶ οἱ ἐπὶ τῆς Νικαίας τριακόσιοι δέκα καὶ ὀκτὼ συναχθέντες ἐξέθεντο, φανερὰν κατεστήσαμεν τῆι ὑμῶν εὐσεβείαι καὶ τὸν ἐναντία ταύτηι φρονήσαντα Νεστόριον καθείλομεν.’ Collectio Vaticana 92.2–4, ACO 1.1.3, p. 29f. Collectio Vaticana 82, ACO 1.1.3, pp. 5–9. In the Latin collection, this letter (Collectio Veronensis 22) immediately follows the one to the Emperor (Collectio Veronensis 21); in intent and scope, it appears very much to be the sibling of the one to the emperor.

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messages to the emperor.40 Hoping for their messengers to catch up with Irenaeus in time, they charge him to deliver the document to the emperor together with those handed to him earlier. In this hasty report, their exasperation and despair shines through their repeated ridiculing and disparaging of the activities of the Cyrillians. Nothing seemed able to prevent or stop the Cyrilline juggernaut, and their own efforts appeared to remain completely without resonance. It is in this document, marking their lowest ebb, that the Orientals’ self-confessed positioning as defenders of the Nicene Creed gains added poignancy. They put the Creed at the beginning of the letter,41 presenting it thereby not just as a preface to all they have to say, but making it, in effect, their charter. Correspondingly, the letter concludes by imploring the emperor to order the signing of this Creed by all bishops, in place of any misguided attempts at doctrinal formulation in Ephesus, and so effectively to cancel out all such recent attempts. For the first time in the surviving documents, they not only repeat the formulaic warning not to add to the Creed, but also provide an explanation or illustration of the specific critical assertions that must not be allowed to be added to it: ‘In addition to this, we beseech your piety to order everyone to sign the Creed of Nicaea, which we have placed at the beginning of this our letter, and to add nothing alien to it, neither asserting that our Lord Jesus Christ was a mere man (for he is perfect God and perfect man), nor making Christ’s Godhead passible; for both are equally reckless.’42 The rejection of these two statements is entirely in keeping with ‘Antiochene’ theology; yet it responds at least in part also to the constant accusations levelled against Nestorius – namely, that he taught Christ to be ‘a mere man’. The pairing ‘perfect God’ and ‘perfect man’ is of course their preferred concept, found later in the Formula of Reunion, and consistently thereafter.43 It is in this highly-conflicted context that we must place the gathering of the Cyrilline supporters on 22 July, just a few days after the sending of these 40 41

42

43

Collectio Vaticana 159, ACO I.1.5, p. 131. Collectio Vaticana 163, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 133–5; that this letter was prefaced by the Nicene Creed is stated near the end of the letter (see following note) and is repeated in the rubric of the Greek version, p. 133, 34f., which, however, does not preserve the text of it. Collectio Vaticana 163.3, ACO 1.1.5, pp. 134, 38–p. 135, 4: ‘πρὸς δὲ τούτοις ἀντιβολοῦμεν ὑμῶν τὴν εὐσέβειαν κελεῦσαι πάντας τῆι κατὰ Νικαίαν ὑπογράψαι πίστει, ἣν τούτων ἡμῶν προετάξαμεν τῶν γραμμάτων καὶ μηδὲν αὐτῆι ξένον ἐπεισαγαγεῖν, μήτε ψιλὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν λέγοντας‘ » θεὸς γάρ ἐστι τέλειος καὶ ἄνθρωπος τέλειος᾽ « μήτε παθητὴν εἰσάγειν τὴν θεότητα τοῦ Χριστοῦ τολμηρὸν γὰρ ἐπίσης ἑκάτερον.’ On ‘Antiochene’ theology at Ephesus and the formula, see, for instance (and despite a somewhat narrow perspective), P. B. Clayton, ‘The Christology of Theodoret of Cyrus. Antiochene Christology from the Council of Ephesus (431) to the Council of Chalcedon (451)’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 153–64; cf. also G. Gould, ‘Cyril and the Formula of Reunion’, DR 105 (1987), pp. 235–52.

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reports by both sides. This session decreed the momentous Canon 7.44 The minutes of the meeting are a problematic blend of material from the session of 22 June, four weeks earlier, and the disciplinary case of one Charisius, a former Quartodeciman schismatic, which provides the opportunity to present for condemnation a declaration of faith, known to be authored by Theodore of Mopsuestia but remaining anonymous in the minutes.45 The minutes, whatever we think of the way they represent actual events, now provide a much clearer rationale for what the earlier meeting against Nestorius had done (which had not demonstrated much conceptual or procedural clarity or reflection). This time, the Nicene Creed is read out with the explicit acknowledgment of its doctrinal sufficiency.46 Yet the dangers of misinterpretation and adherence in words only are also pointed out, and quotations from the Fathers are adduced as authoritative guides and as assurances of an orthodox reading.47 This model of legitimate dogmatic reflection as resting firmly on the basis of the Creed, and guided authoritatively by the Fathers, has informed doctrinal discourse in the ancient church and beyond. When, later, the case of the Quartodecimans shows how a problematic ekthesis came to be used in their reconciliation with the church, the condemnation of such practice results in the decree (horos) known as Canon 7.48 No examination of the theology of the ekthesis is recorded, yet its apparent difference from the Nicene Creed is alleged in the canon by the sheer juxtaposition between the two49 and subsequently reinforced by the repeated

44

45

46 47 48

49

The session of 22 July receives comparatively little attention in scholarly accounts of the council; a terse paragraph in McGuckin, St. Cyril, p. 100, and a few lines in Fraisse-Coué, ‘Le débat’, p. 536, both simply ‘list’ the session and its decision. As is the case in general church histories, the classical account by Hefele/Leclerq, Histoire, p. 330f., is a straightforward paraphrase of the acts. J. R. Wright, ‘The seventh canon of Ephesus’, in E. M. Leonard and K. Merriman (eds.), From Logos to Christos: Essays on Christology in Honour of Joanne McWilliam (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), pp. 83–9 offers no historical insights, presenting, rather, sweeping theological judgements on the import of canonical decisions. The brief account in Wessel, Cyril, 178f. is erroneous on fact and confused in its interpretation. Collectio Atheniensis 73–79, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 84–117. For discussion of the ‘minutes’ of this meeting and the extent to which they were editorially reworked already at the time, see T. Graumann, ‘Protokollierung, Aktenerstellung und Dokumentation am Beispiel des Konzils von Ephesus (431)’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 42 (2010), pp. 7–34 (esp. 26–32); L. Abramowski, ‘Die Sitzung des Konzils von Ephesus am 22. Juli 431: ‘Über die Befestigung des Symbols von Nizäa und über den vom Presbyter Charisius übergebenen Libellus’, ZKG 115 (2004), pp. 382–90; Graumann, Kirche der Väter, pp. 400–9, and the observations by E. Schwartz, praefatio ACO 1.1.4, p. XVIIIf. Collectio Atheniensis 74.2–4, ACO 1.1.7, p. 89. Collectio Atheniensis 75.1–22, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 89–95. Collectio Atheniensis 75–76, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 95–106; the horos at 77, ACO 1.1.7, p. 105, 20–106, 8. For the text, see below n. 52. Charisius’ plea ends with a broadly Nicene version of the Creed (Collectio Atheniensis 76.3, ACO 1.1.7, p. 97, 16–23), after which follows immediately the ‘falsified creed’ (Collectio Atheniensis 76.4–11, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 97–100), and ‘Canon 7’ then follows at Collectio Atheniensis 77, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 105–6.

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condemnation of Nestorian thought and – likely as an editorial addition50 – the introduction of appended extracts documenting his errors.51 The horos reads: When, therefore, this had been read, the holy council laid down that no one is allowed to produce or write or compose another creed beside the one laid down with the aid of the Holy Spirit by the holy fathers assembled at Nicaea; and that as regards those who dare to compose another creed, or produce or present it to those wishing to turn to the knowledge of the truth whether from paganism or Judaism or any form of heresy, they, if they are bishops or clerics, are to be expelled, the bishops from episcopacy and the clerics from the clergy, while if they are laymen they are to be anathematized. In the same way, if any are found, whether bishops or clerics or laymen, either holding or teaching the things contained in the exposition of the incarnation of the only-begotten Son of God presented by the presbyter Charisius, or the abominable and perverted doctrines of Nestorius, which are also appended, they are to be subjected to the verdict of this holy and ecumenical council, with the result, clearly, that a bishop is to be stripped of episcopacy and deposed, a cleric is likewise to be expelled from the clergy, while if he is a layman, he too is to be anathematized as has been stated above.52

What is prohibited in this way by the horos, is in a narrow and specific sense the usage of another declaration, such as the incriminated ekthesis, for the conversion of pagans, Jews and heretics or schismatics. The horos declares the condemnation of a distinct practice, it does not prescribe, however, the closure of all further dogmatic discussion or declaration; nor does it stipulate adherence to the precise wording of the Creed of 325.53 Rather, the very start of the minutes 50 51 52

53

See Schwartz, praefatio, ACO 1.1.4, XVIIII. Collectio Atheniensis 78.1–25, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 106–11. Collectio Atheniensis 77, ACO 1.1.7, pp. 106, 20–106, 8: ‘Τούτων τοίνυν ἀναγνωσθέντων, ὥρισεν ἡ ἁγία σύνοδος ἑτέραν πίστιν μηδενὶ ἐξεῖναι προφέρειν ἢ γοῦν συγγράφειν ἢ συντιθέναι παρὰ τὴν ὁρισθεῖσαν παρὰ τῶν ἁγίων πατέρων τῶν ἐν τῆι Νικαέων συναχθέντων σὺν ἁγίωι πνεύματι· τοὺς δὲ τολμῶντας ἢ συντιθέναι πίστιν ἑτέραν ἢ γοῦν προκομίζειν ἢ προφέρειν τοῖς ἐθέλουσιν ἐπιστρέφειν εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν τῆς ἀληθείας ἢ ἐξ Ἑλληνισμοῦ ἢ ἐξ Ἰουδαισμοῦ ἢ γοῦν ἐξ αἱρέσεως οἱασδηποτοῦν, τούτους, εἰ μὲν εἶεν ἐπίσκοποι ἢ κληρικοί, ἀλλοτρίους εἶναι τοὺς ἐπισκόπους τῆς ἐπισκοπῆς καὶ τοὺς κληρικοὺς τοῦ κλήρου·εἰ δὲ λαικοὶ εἶεν, ἀναθεματίζεσθαι. κατὰ τὸν ἴσον δὲ τρόπον, εἰ φωραθεῖέν τινες εἴτε ἐπίσκοποι εἴτε κληρικοὶ εἴτε λαικοὶ ἢ φρονοῦντες ἢ διδάσκοντες τὰ ἐν τῆι προκομισθείσηι ἐκθέσει παρὰ Χαρισίου τοῦ πρεσβυτέρου περὶ τῆς ἐνανθρωπήσεως τοῦ μονογενοῦς υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ ἢ γοῦν τὰ μιαρὰ καὶ διεστραμμένα Νεστορίου δόγματα, ἃ καὶ ὑποτέτακται, ὑποκείσθωσαν τῆι ἀποφάσει τῆς ἁγίας ταύτης καὶ οἰκουμενικῆς συνόδου, ὥστε δηλονότι τὸν μὲν ἐπίσκοπον ἀλλοτριοῦσθαι τῆς ἐπισκοπῆς καὶ εἶναι καθηιρημένον, τὸν δὲ κληρικὸν ὁμοίως ἐκπίπτειν τοῦ κλήρου· εἰ δὲ λαικός τις εἴη, καὶ οὗτος ἀναθεματιζέσθω καθὰ προείρηται.’ Pace Kidd, History, p. 247, who erroneously maintains the prescription of ‘any other form of words’ to be the only plausible reading. In contrast, L. Perrone, ‘Da Nicea’, p. 81, notes, rightly, that the decision at the time ‘non implicava necessariamente una fedeltà letterale’. See also the discussion of ‘Nicene’ Creeds above.

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from which the horos is taken acknowledges the continual difficulty and necessity of the Creed’s interpretation and recognizes the need for authenticating this process.54 While it makes no mention of the earlier approbation of Cyril’s letter, this very process could be seen to illustrate the way in which the Creed’s effective canonization left open – even more, demanded – its continuous re-thinking and interpretative appropriation after the model of the Fathers. Indeed, it was this practice that alone was able to guard it against abuse and error. Once separated from this context, the Canon could be read in a much more restrictive vein as potentially precluding any additional statements from the delineation of orthodoxy – as is already the case in the second council of Ephesus.55 The story of the Nicene Creed in the disputes over authentic theology, its content and conduct, does not finish here even for the Ephesine council itself. Surprisingly, the decision taken by the Cyrillians is not referred to in the ongoing dispute. The strategy of the easterners, in turn, adumbrated in their report rushed to Irenaeus, seems to have struck a cord with the court. Irenaeus reports back to them somewhat hastily – and ultimately prematurely – that this position won the day,56 and a sacra sent by Theodosius through the Count John in August accordingly confirms the deposition of Nestorius, Cyril and Memnon, while underlining his own unwavering attachment to the orthodoxy, ‘which we received from our fathers and forebears and which the most holy council in the time of Constantine of divine memory concordantly confirmed’.57 Count John orally instructed both sides that the emperor thus expected an exposition of their respective positions, which probably meant not simply a response ‘on the question of the holy Virgin Theotokos’ (as the Orientals put it58), but a position-paper on the dispute in general. Both sides replied to the sacra. The Cyrillians (now in effect led by Juvenal of Jerusalem), after much complaint about the unjust ‘deposition’ of Cyril and Memnon and about the outrages of the Orientals, simply restated their affirmation that the faith had been clarified 54

55

56

57 58

Collectio Atheniensis 74.4, ACO 1.1.7, p. 89, 15–20. For this reason, Patristic excerpts are then adduced 75, 1–22. For the usage of this ‘canon’ to effect the deposition of Flavian of Constantinople by Dioscuros of Alexandria at the council of 449, see CChalc., act. I 943(a)-1067; ACO 2.1.1. pp. 189–95; The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (trans. R. Price and M. Gaddis; Translated Texts for Historians, 45; 3 vols; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 340–63. It is noteworthy and puzzling that the results of this meeting find no echo in any of the following exchanges and are also not reported, it seems, to the emperor. This observation adds to the unease with the reliability of the acts of that meeting. Collectio Vaticana 164, ACO I.1.5, pp. 135–6; according to the Latin Collectio Casinensis, this was written before the mission of Count John. Collectio Vaticana 93.3, ACO 1.1.3, p. 31, 24–7. Collectio Atheniensis 48.5, ACO 1.1.7, p. 70, 10.

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in their meeting against Nestorius and that the Nicene Creed had been given pride of place in the context. Nothing else, we may infer, was required.59 It may seem surprising that no mention is made of the meeting and ruling about the sufficiency of the Nicene Creed on 22 July, or of the arguments produced in the context, which ostensibly would have made a much stronger case. In contrast, the Orientals delivered an extensive discussion of their relationship to the Nicene Creed, and its relevance to the matters in hand, before eventually providing a short formulary of their Christological thinking. This would become the foundation of the Formula of Reunion agreed two years later. This response is the most explicit and important statement of self-confessed Nicene Christological orthodoxy emanating from Ephesus during the summer of 431, and deserves to be quoted at length. What is more important than everything – they write to the emperor – is your authority’s command in the letter itself for the removal of the causes of offence insinuated into the orthodox faith by some and for the use, as rule and norm, of the creed formerly issued by the fathers at Nicaea, which, containing nothing defective or superfluous, presents salvation in summary, comprehending in a few words everything that the divine scriptures have handed down to us about piety, and banishing the beliefs of those who want to innovate for us and have wandered off into error.60

As a necessary consequence, they repeat their zealous desire for ‘throwing out’ Cyril’s Chapters, and report how they had urged the opposing party to join them in signing the Creed. Yet having failed to persuade them, they moved on their own to ‘acknowledge this orthodox Creed as immaculate, to subscribe to it and reject in written confession that bizarre issuing of the Chapters’.61 In what follows, they expound the sufficiency of the Nicene Creed, which they underscore repeatedly. The Creed hands down a ‘precise definition of the economy’ in that it teaches firmly and unwaveringly the true Godhead of the Only-begotten from which may be also deduced (in accord with the scriptures) ‘that our Lord Jesus 59 60

61

Collectio Vaticana 94, ACO 1.1.3, pp. 32–3. Collectio Atheniensis 48.2, ACO 1.1.7, p. 69, 18–23: ‘ἐϰεˆι νο δὲ πάντων μεˆι ζον τὸ πϱοστάξαι ὑμωˆ ν τὸ ϰϱάτος ἐν αὐτοˆι ς τοˆι ς γϱάμμασιν ἀνελεˆι ν μὲν τὰ σϰάνδαλα τὰ τ ηˆ ι ὀϱθηˆι πίστει παϱά τινων ἐπισυϱέντα, ϰανόνι δὲ ϰαὶ γνώμονι χϱήσασθαι τηˆι ἐν Νιϰαίαι ὑπὸ τωˆ ν πατέϱων ἐϰτεθείσηι πάλαι ποτὲ πίστει, ἥτις, οὔτε ἐλλιπές τι οὔτε πεϱιττὸν ἔχουσα, σύντομον τὴν σωτηϱίαν χαϱίζεται, ῾ϱ ήμασιν ὀλίγοις τὸ παˆ ν διαλαβουˆ σα τωˆ ν ὅσα αἱ θεˆι αι γϱαϕαὶ ἡμˆι ν πεϱὶ εὐσεβείας παϱαδεδώϰασιν, ϰαὶ ἐξοιϰίσασα τὰ τω ˆν ϰαινουϱγεˆι ν ἡμˆι ν βουλομένων ϰαὶ πεπλανημένων ϕϱονήματα.’ Collectio Atheniensis 48.4, ACO 1.1.7, p. 69, 40–2: ‘ἀϰέϱαιον τὴν ὀϱθὴν ἐϰείνην ϰαθομολογῆσαι πίστιν [sc. that of Nicaea] ϰαὶ ταύτηι ϰαθυπογϱάψαι ϰαὶ ἐϰβαλεῖν ἐγγϱάϕωι ὁμολογίαι τὴν πεϱιττὴν ἐϰείνην ϰαϰοδοξίας γέμουσαν τῶν ϰεϕαλαίων ἔϰθεσιν.’

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Christ is not a mere man but truly Son of God’.62 This, of course, is hardly an exhaustive answer to the questions disputed between the parties. Still, they go on: ‘We therefore, following them, neither add nor subtract anything from the Creed and the exposition of this confession, since the exposition of the fathers suffices for everything.’63 On this firm ground, and only after the repeated insistence of not in any way adding or subtracting from the Creed, they address the emperor’s demand for a profession of faith ‘on the subject of the holy Virgin Theotokos’.64 And so, after prayer for divine assistance and emphatically asserting not to be speaking by human standards, they profess, obligingly, what scripture has taught them.65 The following formula is in this way heavily guarded, and the effort of theological clarification and profession is only ventured into in the context of prayer. There could hardly be a more intensive and full evocation of all safeguards against error. This is not the voice of the confident intellectual or the inquisitive theologian – both stereotypical attitudes of the heretic – but of the humble, prayerful hearers of Holy Scripture, readers and followers of the Fathers and guardians of the Nicene Creed. The formula thus prefaced is in essence the same that will be agreed two years on in the Reunion, professing Mary Theotokos, asserting the double consubstantiality of the Incarnate Son with respect to his Godhead and Manhood, the unmixed union of two natures and, emphatically, confession of one Christ, one Son, One Lord. It is essential to underline that the formula is framed not only by the prefatory remarks about the status of the declaration in relation to the Nicene Creed as the sufficient expression of orthodoxy, but is also followed by a concluding paragraph that insists once more on the firm tradition of this profession, which they make ‘having been taught these things by the theologians, evangelists, apostles, prophets and those who in their time were teachers of the pious faith’.66 Its resultant demand is for the emperor to impress upon the bishops the rejection of Cyril’s theology ‘and to subscribe only to the confession of the holy fathers convened at Nicaea’.67 In other words, the profession offered by way of 62 63

64 65 66

67

Ibid., p. 70, 4f. Ibid., p. 70, 6–8: ‘ὅθεν ϰαὶ ἡμεῖς ἐϰείνοις ἀϰολουθοῦντες τῆι μὲν πίστει ϰαὶ τῆι ἐϰθέσει τῆς ὁμολογίας οὔτε πϱοστίθεμέν τι οὔτε ἀϕαιϱοῦμεν, ἀϱϰούσης πϱὸς ἅπαντα τῆς τῶν πατέϱων ἐϰθέσεως.’ Collectio Atheniensis 48.5, ACO 1.1.7, p. 70, 10. Ibid., p. 70, 12f. Collectio Atheniensis 48.7, ACO 1.1.7, p. 70, 22–4: ‘ταῦτα διδαχθέντες παϱὰ τῶν θεολόγων ἀνδϱῶν, εὐαγγελιστῶν ϰαὶ ἀποστόλων ϰαὶ πϱοϕητῶν ϰαὶ τῶν ϰατὰ ϰαιϱὸν γενομένων τῆς εὐσεβοῦς πίστεως διδασϰάλων.’ Ibid., p. 70, 29f.: ‘μόνηι δὲ τῆι ὑπὸ τῶν ἁγίων πατέρων τῶν ἐν Νικαίαι συναθροισθέντων ὁμολογίαι καθυπογράψαι.’

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explanation about their position in the present theological controversy does not result in the demand for the stipulation of this formula (or any other new propositional text on the matter), but rather in demanding nothing beyond the Nicene Creed. This criterion also explains the rejection of Cyril, whose principal fault, according to their analysis, lies precisely in the effort (from their perspective both flawed and ineffective) of seeking conciliar authorization for certain additional statements. The following weeks were characterized by turmoil and strife, as a result of the parties’ mutual accusations and condemnations, both in Ephesus and in Constantinople at the imperial court. Yet, amid the complaints about harassment, and in the lobbying and desperate calls for support, matters of doctrinal import receive little mention. Nothing in the surviving documents of the time goes beyond the (by now already rather formulaic) vilifications of Nestorius on the one side, and the equally repetitive condemnations of Cyril’s Twelve Chapters and their alleged Apollinarianism on the other. Sophisticated reflection on the authority of the Nicene Creed and on the methodologies, hermeneutics and procedures by which to employ it in aid of an ever more improbable solution to the crisis may not be expected and are indeed not in evidence.68 Despite this general caution, the continuing silence over Canon 7 remains noteworthy and puzzling. What, then, might the historical enquiry into the contexts and modes of claiming the Nicene Creed in the Ephesine council contribute to the question of how to conduct and authorize theological discussion and relate it to normative expressions of faith? We can hardly be content to note that, as ever, things are more complex, and murky, than is apparent by paying attention solely to the abstracted decisions gathered in collections of the decrees of Ecumenical Councils or canonical collections. Yet the second council of Ephesus, and that of Chalcedon shortly thereafter, did just that – reading the canon (or horos) as a general prescription limiting theological enquiry and definition.69 Guarding against such abstraction, it is important to realize, first, that the majoritarian Cyrillian council was neither distinctive nor exclusive in laying claim to Nicene Orthodoxy. Against the swirl of accusations and protests by the Orientals, their promulgation of Canon 7 can be seen as a defensive (and retrospective) justification of their activities on 22 June; and as a defence, 68

69

For the period of tense negotiations, competition and vying for political influence between the parties, during the late summer and autumn of 431, see McGuckin, St. Cyril, pp. 101–7; FraisseCoué, ‘Le débat’, pp. 537–40. See above, n. 55.

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37

also, against the accusations of having departed from the Nicene Creed by the affirmation of Cyril’s orthodoxy (and, indeed, a specific text) on the occasion. Yet, the move may equally be considered in a more expansive, even aggressive, way: as precluding any conceivable declaration of Christological orthodoxy by the Orientals set up against, mainly, Cyril’s Twelve Chapters, and as preventing any other envisaged attempt to enshrine Antiochene principles in an authoritative statement of whatever kind.70 The concomitant refutation of the anonymous Ekthesis (known to be authored by Theodore of Mopsuestia) put a stop to any attempts in this direction – if indeed the Orientals had shown any appetite for such an endeavour. In fact, they did not – rather, they were the first to insist on the exclusive signing of the Nicene Creed, in a clearly restrictive measure against the Cyrilline doctrinal propositions and the ‘heretical’ move away from the Creed that they detected in the anathemas. Signing the Nicene Creed was sufficient ground for them to re-establish communion because they perceived in it an implied rejection of the entire work of the session of 22 June and whatever it entailed for the laying down of doctrinal definition. If the Cyrilline message of 22 July was that the sufficiency of the Nicene Creed allowed no other declaration of faith, it required, nevertheless, interpretative guarding by the Fathers. The easterners, in contrast, demonstrated in their response to the emperor’s wishes for clarification, that a new declaration achieving this might just about be possible, if only its status in relation to the Nicene Creed was sufficiently clarified as one completely subservient to it, and as offering nothing that might be construed as an addition or modification. This strategy the council of Chalcedon would later also adopt. Placing it in the turmoil of a split council, it is suggested, expresses best the sense in which the necessary attachment and orientation towards the Nicene Creed were conceived of in Ephesus, rather than focusing on one party’s exclusive – and deceptively calm – declaration. The lasting tension and dynamic interaction between the needs for restriction and expansion in doctrinal discussion (and behind the canonization of the creed), are reflected, argued and fought over even more determinedly and forcefully than in the initial disputes over the Nicene Creed in the fourth century. In the canonization of the Nicene Creed, the principal discussion about the norms and limits of theological definition reaches a decisive step. The process effects an unshakable foundation and fixed point

70

At the same time, the horos pre-empted any demands by the emperor to this effect. It is this sentiment and conclusion that explains the resistance by most bishops in the second session of the Council of Chalcedon to the idea of drafting a new confession of faith.

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of reference for subsequent discussion. Yet it is anything but rigid or ossified. Rather like in the dynamics of ‘tradition and originality’ – to conclude with Andrew’s words – the apparently restrictive canonization of the Nicene Creed comes with the simultaneous realization of its need for interpretation and is, thus, immediately opened up again for further reflection and even for the possibility of distilling the results of such reflection into doctrinal statements in the future. The Orientals already do this in Ephesus during the summer of 431; Cyril in effect endorses the practice and concurs with it when agreeing to the Formula of Reunion two years later, and the Council of Chalcedon makes it the lynchpin of its complex layering of authoritative texts meant to support, hedge and guard what they are willing to say in their own voice. The historical investigation, it is hoped, shows the intrinsic dynamic and dialectic, the continuing conversation between different voices, in the very making of a canon that only seemingly disallows it.

Part Two

Byzantine Theology

3

The Impact of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite on Byzantine Theologians of the Eighth Century: The Concept of ‘Image’ Mary B. Cunningham

This paper will engage with Father Andrew Louth’s work on theologians of the late antique and early Byzantine period, studying the influence of ps(pseudo)Dionysius the Areopagite on eighth-century liturgical writers, including John Damascene, Germanos I of Constantinople and Andrew of Crete. Louth’s important monographs on ps-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor and John Damascene provide the foundations for this attempt,1 but his various articles on the reception of the Dionysian corpus in Byzantium are also valuable.2 Whereas ps-Dionysius’ influence on Maximus, Germanos and John is treated in the latter studies, there remains room for investigation of one other important eighthcentury figure – namely, Andrew of Crete.3 I shall therefore take up this challenge in the second half of this paper, attempting not only to engage with some unique characteristics in the thought of this important, if enigmatic, liturgical writer, but also to demonstrate his undoubted debt to ps-Dionysius the Areopagite. I hope to prove that eighth-century theologians such as Andrew of Crete were engaging with ps-Dionysian thought in creative, if sometimes surprising, ways. 1

2

3

A. Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989); idem, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996); idem, St John Damascene. Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See A. Louth, ‘St Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor: A Question of Influence’, in E. A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica 27 (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), pp. 166–74; idem, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, in Y. de Andia (ed.), Dionysius l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident (Actes du Colloque International, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité, 151; Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), pp. 329–39. For orientation on Andrew of Crete, see the still useful article by S. Vailhé, ‘Saint André de Crète’, Échos d’Orient 5 (1901–02), pp. 378–87; M.-F. Auzépy, ‘La carrière d’André de Crète’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 88 (1995), pp. 1–12; A. Kazhdan, with L. F. Sherry and C. Angelidi, A History of Byzantine Literature (650-850) (Athens: Institute for Byzantine Research, 1999), pp. 37–54.

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But let us begin with ps-Dionysius himself, a figure who continues to attract considerable attention in modern scholarship.4 The pseudonymity of this latefifth- or early-sixth-century writer is now well known; perhaps when we persist in labelling him with the prefix ‘pseudo’, we risk perpetuating a pejorative view that emerged after his unmasking during the later Middle Ages.5 In any case, Dionysius is now known to be a writer, probably monastic, who flourished in the late Roman, and Christian, territory of Syria.6 His corpus, which is deeply influenced by late antique Neoplatonism – and especially by the thought of the fifth-century philosopher Proclus – began to circulate in Byzantium in the second half of the sixth century.7 As Hans Urs von Balthasar, followed by the current editor of the Dionysian corpus, Beate Regina Suchla, have argued, the sixth-century theologian, John of Scythopolis, was responsible not only for publishing the Dionysian works, but also for providing most of the surviving scholia.8 It is after this period, first in the thought of the great seventh-century theologian and philosopher, Maximus the Confessor, and subsequently in that of middle Byzantine thinkers – including those who lived during the iconoclast period – that the Dionysian corpus was fully assimilated into the Eastern Christian theological tradition. The importance of Dionysian thought, in Byzantine and modern Orthodox theology as well as in the Western mystical tradition, is by now well known.9 4

5

6 7

8

9

In addition to the works already cited, see R. A. Arthur, Pseudo-Dionysius as Polemicist. The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); S. Coakley and C. M. Stang (eds.), Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009); A. Golitzin, ‘Dionysius Areopagite: A Christian Mysticism?’, Pro Ecclesia 12.2 (2003), pp. 161–212; A. Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite (Wilton: Morehouse-Barlow, 1989); C. Schäfer, The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Leiden: Brill, 2006). C. M. Stang, Apophasis and pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No longer I” (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); idem, ‘Dionysius, Paul, and the Significance of the Pseudonym’, in Coakley and Stang (eds.), Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, pp. 11–25. Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, p. 2. A full list of ps-Dionysius the Areopagite’s works appears in M. Geerard (ed.), Clavis Patrum Graecorum (vol. 3; Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), nos. 6600–35, pp. 269–77 [Hereafter CPG]. Editions are available in PG 3, cols. 120–1120; R. Roques, G. Heil and M. De Gandillac (eds. and trans.), Dionysius l’Aréopagite. La hiérarchie céleste (Sources Chrétiennes 58; Paris: Cerf, 1958). An English version of the main writings may be found in P. Rorem (ed.), Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works (trans. C. Luibheid; London: SPCK, 1987). H. U. von Balthasar, ‘Das Scholienwerk des Johannes von Sythopolis’, Scholastik 15 (1940), pp. 16–38; B. R. Suchla, Die sogennanten Maximus-Scholien des Corpus Dionysiacum Areopagiticum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980), pp. 31–66. Both works are cited in A. Louth, ‘St Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor: a question of influence’, p. 166. See also P. Rorem, and J. C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). For studies, see V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (trans. The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius; London: James Clarke, 1957; repr. Crestwood: SVS Press, 1976); B. McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroads, 1994); D. Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) for studies of the reception of Dionysian thought in Eastern and Western mysticism.

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43

Whereas works such as On the Divine Names and On the Mystical Theology arguably exerted more influence on the West, the Byzantine world absorbed and engaged with all four of Dionysius’ surviving treatises, as well as with the letters that are appended to the corpus. Dionysius describes, with the help of language and ideas drawn from the pagan neoplatonic tradition, the ways in which God manifests himself in creation – not only causing it to come into being, but also continuously revealing himself there. Like the pagan philosopher Proclus, Dionysius thinks in terms of triads.10 Such a structure is expressive not only of God’s own being, but also of his manner of interaction with creation. Dionysius is fully Christian, and probably Chalcedonian, in his understanding of God’s threefold nature, as Trinity, which nevertheless exists as ‘a “monad” or “henad”, because of its supernatural simplicity and indivisible unity’.11 However, movement is also fully a part of God’s existence: it reveals itself in a threefold way, as in Proclus’ system, in rest, procession and return. As Louth demonstrates in his monograph on Dionysius, this concept of procession or emanation deals effectively with two problems: first, it reveals the way that everything, both divine and created, is interrelated in some way; and second, it explains why we, as created beings, feel perpetually disoriented or ‘out of touch with the roots of our being’.12 Let us turn now to the reception of the Dionysian corpus in the eighth century, beginning with a brief survey of the work that has been done on its fate in Byzantium after the end of the sixth century. In addition to his books on Maximus the Confessor and John Damascene, Father Andrew Louth has published several useful articles that focus more exclusively on Dionysius’ influence not only on these important figures, but also on other middle and late Byzantine theologians.13 I will pass quickly over Maximus since he does not, strictly speaking, belong within the remit of this paper; nevertheless, that he was an important interpreter of the Dionysian corpus for subsequent tradition is undeniable. Whereas Louth has helped to dispel the misconception that Maximus represents Dionysius’ chief scholiast, he does not deny the significance of his debt to the Areopagite.14 In the context of a discussion of Maximus’ acceptance of the Dionysian vision of the cosmos – as a radiant hierarchical

10

11

12 13 14

A. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 163; Stang, ‘Dionysius, Paul and the Significance of the Pseudonym’, p. 11. De divinis nominibus I.4, CPG 6602, PG 3, col. 589D; trans. Luibheid with Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, p. 51. Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, p. 12. See above, notes 1 and 2. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor’, esp. pp. 166–7.

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order that spreads down through creation and draws it back up into union with God – Louth writes as follows: Maximus is heir to all this: but, more than that, in his own theological reflection he works out in greater – and more practical – detail what in Dionysius is often not much more than splendid and inspiring rhetoric. How the cosmos has been fractured, and how it is healed – how this is achieved in the liturgy – what contribution the Christian ascetic struggle has to make: all this can be found, drawn together into an inspiring vision, in the work of the Confessor. It seems to me that Dionysius provides the cosmic framework for Maximus’ vision.15

The christocentric nature of Maximus’ cosmology reflects a similar emphasis in the Dionysian writings.16 Dionysius’ understanding of the ‘mystical’ ascent to God does not represent a purely intellectual, or spiritual, exercise. In all of his writings, Dionysius stresses the ecclesial framework of mystical encounter: it is the incarnate Christ, as revealed in scripture and manifested in the sacraments, who lies at the heart of Christian experience. Thus, the dichotomy that John Meyendorff perceives between ‘the individualistic mysticism of Dionysius and the christocentrism of Maximus . . . dissolves in this new perspective’.17 Both thinkers are, in fact, grounded in a holistic, and above all christocentric, view of God and his creation. This vision is set out in Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia, which represents a highly Platonic interpretation of the Church (in both physical and metaphysical terms) as the microcosm of a universe in which a constant movement of procession and return to God, the Creator of it all, is enacted.18 It is to the eighth century, however, that I would like to shift my focus for the remainder of this paper, in order to explore the influence of Dionysius the Areopagite on three important iconophile theologians: John Damascene, Germanos of Constantinople, and above all, Andrew of Crete. Here again, we can build on foundations that are laid by Louth, not only in his important monograph on John Damascene,19 but also in his study on Dionysius’ place in the iconoclast controversy.20 In order to set the scene for this discussion, it is worth

15 16 17 18 19 20

Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 31–2. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor’, esp. pp. 168–71. Ibid., pp. 169–72. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, CPG 7704, PG 91, cols. 657–717. Louth, St John Damascene. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’. See also idem, Greek East and Latin West. The Church A.D. 681-1071 (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2007), pp. 41–66.

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reviewing briefly both the theological climate of the early eighth century and recent scholarship on the subject.21 This is a period which, although intensely studied, remains frustratingly opaque in both historical and theological terms. The problem lies primarily in the one-sided nature of the sources, since most iconoclast texts do not survive, and literary and material evidence for this period is, in any case, scant.22 The traditional view that, following a growing devotion to holy icons as intermediaries between holy figures including Christ, the Mother of God, and saints and their ability to work miracles by channelling divine power, a series of emperors, beginning with Leo III, legislated against the fashioning of icons on the grounds that they were idolatrous, has recently been questioned by some scholars.23 Such revisionists question especially the date (either 726 or 730) at which iconoclast policies were first implemented and how intense these actually were in the first half of the eighth century. However, leaving aside the political dimension of iconoclasm, it remains apparent that a theological discussion concerning not only pictorial representations, but – in a wider sense – the extent to which divine truth can be revealed in material creation had been initiated.24 Dionysius the Areopagite’s writings were relevant to this discussion and it is somewhat surprising to note, as Louth does in his article on this subject, that iconophile and iconoclast writers did not always reveal an awareness of his thought.25 The reasons for such neglect may be simple: it is possible that whereas the Dionysian corpus was circulating in the sophisticated environment of Christian Palestine, it was not widely known in eighth-century 21

22

23

24

25

The most recent and comprehensive study is L. Brubaker and J. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, C. 680-850. A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also A. A. M. Bryer and J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham, 1977); S. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Leo III with Particular Attention to the Oriental Sources (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium Subsidia 41; Paris and Louvain: Peeters, 1973). For a study of the theological aspects of the controversy, see K. Parry, Depicting the Word. Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1996). For a survey of the various media, both literary and material, see L. Brubaker, and J. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca. 680–850): The Sources. An Annotated Survey (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 7; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). See especially L. Brubaker, ‘Icons Before Iconoclasm?’, in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo 45 (2000), pp. 1215–54; Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, esp. pp. 79–135; P. Speck, Kaiser Leon III., die Geschichtsweke des Nikephoros und des Theophanes und der Liber Pontificalis (Poikila Byzantina 19–20; Bonn: R. Habelt, 2002–03). For useful discussions of this process, see C. Barber, Figure and Likeness. On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); G. Dagron, ‘L’ombre d’un doute: l’hagiographie en question, Vie-XIe siècle’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 (1992), pp. 59–68. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, p. 330.

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Constantinople.26 John Damascene and Andrew of Crete, both of whom were born in Damascus and spent time either in Jerusalem or at the Monastery of St Sabas, were inspired by Dionysius’ apophatic theology and by his elucidation of the ways that God chooses to reveal himself in creation. Germanos I, patriarch of Constantinople between 815 and 830, and one of the first opponents of Leo III’s iconoclast policy, meanwhile made no mention of the Dionysian corpus in his writings.27 Louth has also shown that there was scant reference to Dionysius at the councils of Hiereia (754) and Nicaea (787), and that Theodore of Stoudios and the patriarch Nicephorus, who both undertook extensive refutation of the iconoclasts in the first half of the ninth century, referred primarily to one (unfortunately spurious) passage in Dionysius’ On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy: ‘ . . . the truth in the likeness, the archetype in the image, each in the other, apart from the difference of substance’.28 Theodore cites a few other passages from the Dionysian corpus but, in short, it appears that both theologians worked primarily from florilegia and that they did not study Dionysius’ work in its entirety.29 So far, I have alluded only to Dionysius the Areopagite’s potential appeal to the iconophile theology of images. The Dionysian concept of divine reality revealing itself gradually through successive levels of the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies appear at first glance as a gift to the iconophile cause. However, a case can also be made regarding the interest of Dionysian thought to the iconoclasts. Although it is impossible to recover more than fragmentary evidence of their ideas, enough texts – along with polemic addressed against them – survive for us to be able to reconstruct some elements of their arguments. Charles Barber’s recent outline of the iconoclast case suggests, quite refreshingly in view of the barrage of polemic that we encounter in post-ninth-century Byzantine tradition, that this did have positive, as well as destructive, goals.30 The iconoclasts appear above all to have upheld God’s transcendence, which they believed to be threatened by his representation by physical means in the material world. Beyond this, however, they were seeking to construct an alternative model of Christian symbolism or representation. The contention that the only true 26

27

28 29 30

For a discussion of the different levels of learning that prevailed in each area during this period, see C. Mango, ‘Greek Culture in Palestine after the Arab Conquest’, in G. Cavallo, G. de Gregorio and M. Maniaci (eds.), Scritture, libri e testi nelle aree provinciali di bisanzio (vol. 1; Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1991), pp. 149–60. Germanos of Constantinople’s authentic writings are listed in CPG 8001–23, vol. 3, pp. 503–9. On his unawareness of the Dionysian corpus, see Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, p. 330. (ps-)Dionysius the Areopagite, De ecclesiastica hierarchia IV.3.1, CPG 6601, PG 3, col. 473C. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, pp. 332–5. Barber, Figure and Likeness, Chapter 4, ‘Figure and Sign’, pp. 83–105.

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symbol of Christ, who is both God and man, is the Eucharist could, of course, be refuted on the grounds that this mystery is not a mere symbol but is in fact the body and blood of the Lord himself.31 In addition to this dubious argument, however, the iconoclasts chose a few other objects that could signify the presence of God in his creation, including the cross and the church building. Paramount in this debate was the meaning of words such as εἰκών (‘image’), σύμβολον (‘symbol’), τύπος (‘type’ or ‘sign’) and others, since these represent different ways that unseen, or divine, reality may be glimpsed in the material world.32 Above all, however, the iconoclasts appear (whether they had miaphysite leanings or not) to have been anxious to preserve a clear divide between the transcendent God and his creation. Christ, whom they feared to portray in images because of his divine nature, was present to humanity in the sacraments that he instituted but sanctioned few other physical reminders of his presence in the material world. The appeal of Dionysius the Areopagite’s theology, and especially of his apophatic teaching, to iconoclasts is thus highly likely. And, in fact, as Louth has noted, it appears that the bishops who attended the iconoclast council of Hiereia in 754 quoted a work by Dionysius in their preface – a liberty which John the Deacon, at the iconophile council of Nicaea, deplored since he believed that they had misunderstood the general tenor of his teaching.33 A picture is emerging of, if not debate, at least serious questioning in eighthcentury Byzantium of the relationship between God and humanity, as mediated above all by Christ but also through physical and human reminders of his incarnate being – whether these were saints, relics, miraculous icons that were not made by human hands, symbolic objects such as the cross or painted images. Even if we do not entirely accept revisionist theories about the beginnings of the iconoclast controversy, it is possible to agree with scholars including MarieFrance Auzépy,34 Leslie Brubaker,35 Gilbert Dagron36 and John Haldon37 that a 31

32 33

34

35

36 37

See S. Gero, ‘The Eucharistic Doctrine of the Byzantine Iconoclasts and Its Sources’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 68 (1975), pp. 4–22. The idea was first expressed in Constantine V’s Peuseis (‘Enquiries’) and then in the Horos of the iconoclast council of Hiereia in 754. See PG 100, cols. 332, 336 and 337; J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (Florence and Venice: Antonio Zatta, 1759–98), vol. 13, cols. 261E-264C; D. J. Sahas, Icon and Logos. Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 92–4. See Barber, Figure and Likeness, esp. pp. 96–104. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, p. 331; Sahas, Icon and Logos, p. 54. See various articles in M.-F. Auzépy, L’histoire des iconoclasts (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2007). Brubaker, ‘Icons before iconoclasm?’ in (with J. Haldon), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, esp. pp. 32–68. Dagron, ‘L’ombre d’un doute’. See above, note 35.

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re-evaluation was taking place, on all sides, concerning the ways in which God manifests himself within creation. The place of the Dionysian writings within this debate is central, so it remains puzzling that the dissemination of this corpus during the eighth and ninth centuries was patchy. Nevertheless, for those theologians who did encounter Dionysius’ treatises and letters, their impact was significant. One eighth-century theologian who certainly did assimilate the Dionysian corpus was John Damascene. Writing from a monastery in Palestine – most probably St Sabas – in the first half of the eighth century, John produced a number of important theological works, including treatises that describe and defend orthodox doctrine, homilies, hymns and the three orations in defence of images.38 John reveals his awareness of Dionysius’ vision of the celestial hierarchy in his treatise on the Orthodox faith, referring to him, for example, in the chapter that deals with angels and acknowledging his ordering of the heavenly beings into three orders of three, or nine, ranks.39 The orthodox doctrine concerning God and creation that John Damascene expresses here and elsewhere in his writings is of course also inspired by the wider biblical and Patristic tradition. As Louth makes clear throughout his monograph on the Damascene, his purpose was to gather together the Byzantine theological tradition; he ‘would have been horrified to have been thought original’.40 What the Dionysian corpus added to this mix was an affirmation both of the incomprehensible transcendence of God and of the ordered way in which he reveals himself through ‘the glittering ranks of the celestial hierarchies’ and in the grace of the liturgical and sacramental life that can be celebrated here on earth.41 In addition to the revelation that is granted through scripture and the liturgy, however, glimpses of divine reality may be accessed through material objects. John Damascene devotes space in his first and third orations On the Divine Images to exploring various aspects of such intermediaries, including their nature, purpose and origins. The third of these works, in which the subject is given its most systematic treatment, provides a fascinating analysis of the ways in which various types of images, ranging from Christ himself (as the image 38

39

40 41

For a full list of the works of John of Damascus, see CPG 8040–70, vol. 3, pp. 511–22. Critical editions of most of these texts may now be found in B. Kotter (ed.), Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos (5 vols, Patristische Texte und Studien, vols. 7, 12, 17, 22, 29; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1969–88). John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa II.3 (17), in St John of Damascus, Writings (trans. F. H. Chase, The Fathers of the Church; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), p. 208. See also Louth, St John Damascene, p. 123. Louth, St John Damascene, p. 15. Ibid., p. 153.

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of the Father) through God’s foreknowledge of things that have yet to happen, and the types and material objects that prefigure, or represent, divine truth, to written or painted memorials of holy people, represent their prototypes.42 John recognizes here – and is playing with – the paradoxical fact that images in some way make hidden things perceptible (and in that sense convey something of the nature of those things), but at the same time remain ontologically distinct from their prototypes. He acknowledges his debt to Dionysius the Areopagite frequently in this process, not only referring to his work (especially On the Divine Names, in this context) but also including Dionysian passages in the florilegia that are attached to each treatise.43 Images, for both John and Dionysius, ‘establish relationships between realities: within the Trinity, between God and the providential ordering of the universe, between God and the inner reality of the human soul, between visible and invisible, between the past and the future, and the present and the past. The image, in its different forms, is always mediating, always holding together in harmony’.44 Material icons, at the bottom end of this series of reflections from divine to created reality, are nevertheless essential to the whole structure. They reflect God’s presence, initiated at creation but fulfilled in his Incarnation, throughout the physical world. It is surprising, in view of the Areopagite’s influence on John Damascene, that Germanos I, who was patriarch of Constantinople between 715 and 730 and also an active opponent of iconoclasm, reveals no awareness of Dionysius’ writings. This may simply reflect the latter’s lack of access to this corpus – a state of affairs which is also manifested at the council of Nicaea in 787 and in the writings of some other theologians of this period.45 However, it is worth thinking briefly about why, in any case, Dionysius’ thought might not have been congenial to Germanos of Constantinople. If we look, for example, at the latter’s commentary on the Divine Liturgy, called in the manuscripts an Ecclesiastical History, we find a determined emphasis – in spite of the focus in earlier Byzantine tradition on a more anagogical, or Alexandrian, form of liturgical interpretation – on 42

43

44 45

John of Damascus, Oratio de imaginibus III, in Three Treatises on the Divine Images (trans. A. Louth; Crestwood: SVS Press, 2003), pp. 81–158. See, for example, John of Damascus, Oratio de imaginibus I. 28–32, trans. Louth, Three Treatises, pp. 40–1. Note, however, that the manuscript tradition of these florilegia is complex and that it probably incorporates later interpolation. See P. Speck, ‘Eine Interpolation en den Bilderreden des Johannes von Damaskos,’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 82 (1989), pp. 114–15; J. Chrysostomides, in J. A. Munitiz et al. (eds.), The Letter of the Three Patriarchs to Emperor Theophilos and Related Texts (Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1997), pp. xxviii–xxxii; A. Alexakis, Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and Its Archetype (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 35; Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996); Louth, St John Damascene, pp. 212–13, note 45. Louth, St John Damascene, p. 216. Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, pp. 330–2.

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the historical symbolism both of the church building and the liturgy that is celebrated there.46 Although Germanos alludes to such mystical elements as the Cherubic Hymn, in which the choir (representing the congregation) joins with the angels in praising ‘the life-giving Trinity’, he presents an Antiochene, or historical, interpretation of the preparation and placement on the altar of the holy elements at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Faithful. This is, in fact, a fusion of the Alexandrian and Antiochene traditions, as regards the Divine Liturgy; the mystical aspect may be inspired by a Constantinopolitan tradition that reflects the legacies of writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, but Germanos is concerned above all to remind his readers of the historical events that are commemorated in the second half of the Eucharistic rite. Such an attitude is, in fact, consistent with other aspects of Germanos of Constantinople’s thought. One of the problems, of course, in dealing with this important thinker of the early eighth century is that so many of his writings are uncertain in their attribution and await full-scale analysis.47 Germanos wrote treatises, sermons, hymns and some important letters.48 It is possible in this brief discussion only to indicate some of the defining features of the authentic works and to suggest why – even if he had known of the Dionysian corpus – this iconophile patriarch might not have made full use of it. The surviving letters that Germanos sent to iconoclast bishops during the opening stages of the controversy reveal quite a pragmatic, and also historical, approach to the meaning and function of holy images.49 Germanos acknowledges the manmade nature of icons and argues that proskynesis, or ‘veneration’, is offered not to the material objects but to the subjects whom they depict. He touches on the Christological issue, emphasizing the reality of the Incarnation, which allows us to depict the divine and human Christ in an icon, but focuses more on examples 46

47

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Germanos, Historia mystica ecclesiae catholicae, CPG 8023, PG 98, cols. 384–453; St Germanus of Constantinople on the Divine Liturgy (trans. P. Meyendorff; Crestwood: SVS Press, 1984). For an excellent commentary on this text, see R. Bornert, Les commentaries byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Archives de l’Orient Chrétien, vol. 9; Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 1966), pp. 125–80. Studies to date include J. List, Studien zur Homiletik Germanos I von Konstantinopel und seiner Zeit (Texte und Untersuchungen zur byzantinisch-neugriechischen Literatur, vol. 29; Athens: Byzantinisch-neugriechischen Jahrbücher, 1939); L. Lamza, Patriarch Germanos I von Konstantinopel (715-730): Versuch einter Endgültigen Chronologischen Fixierung des Lebens und Wirkens des Patriarchen: mit dem Greichisch-Deuscen Text der Vita Germani am Schluss der Arbeit (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1975); G. E. Roth, Paradox beyond Nature. An Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Dialogue on the Marian Homilies of Germanos I, Patriarch of Constantinople (715-730) (Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2012). Germanos I of Constantinople’s works are listed in CPG 8001–28, vol. 3, pp. 503–10. CPG 8001–4; for discussion, see Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, pp. 89–105.

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of legitimate images in biblical and ecclesial tradition. It is, of course, important to take into account the purpose and context of such letters, which was to reprimand errant bishops and to avert full-scale controversy.50 Nevertheless, what we might describe as a more practical and grounded approach to theology is also evident in Germanos of Constantinople’s festal sermons. This preacher is interested in the human beings who surround Christ and the Mother of God, including the grandparents or parents, SS Joachim and Anna, and other related personages such as Zacharias, the priest of the Jewish temple.51 His tendency to dramatize – in a literal or ethical way – their encounters achieves its finest expression in the long homily on the Annunciation, which is composed almost entirely in dialogue form.52 There is no space to explore these works further in the context of this paper, but it is worth repeating on the basis of the evidence cited so far that even if Germanos had been acquainted with Dionysius the Areopagite’s works, he might not have felt at home – from the point of view of biblical or apocryphal exegesis – in the latter’s more mystical and allegorical frame of reference. Let us turn now to a third eighth-century liturgical writer – namely, Andrew of Crete. Unlike Germanos, Andrew had access to the Dionysian corpus and expressed his appreciation for it, both openly and tacitly. It is possible to argue that Dionysius’ ideas helped to shape this theologian’s understanding both of the interaction, by means of all kinds of images, between the divine and created spheres, and of the role of liturgical celebration in this process. It may be helpful to begin this discussion with a brief summary of Andrew of Crete’s life and works. According to his biographer, Niketas, whom scholars date variously between the later eighth and tenth centuries, the future archbishop was born in Damascus, probably around 660.53 He was educated in Jerusalem, where he joined the clergy of the church of the Anastasis, was tonsured as a monk and served as a notary to the patriarch, before moving to Constantinople sometime after 685. Andrew achieved high offices in the imperial city before being elevated to the archiepiscopal see of Crete around 711. He probably died in 740, on the 50 51

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Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, pp. 94–105. See, for example, Germanos’s two homilies, In presentationem s. deiparae, CPG 8007–8008; PG 98, cols. 292–320; M. B. Cunningham (trans.), Wider Than Heaven. Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2008), pp. 145–72. Germanos, In annuntiationem, CPG 8009, PG 98, cols. 320–40; D. Fecioru, ‘Un nou gen de predică în omiletica ortodoxă’, Biserica Ortodoxă Română 64 (1946), pp. 65–91, 180–92, 386–96; Cunningham (trans.), Wider Than Heaven, pp. 221–46. Niketas Magistros, Vita Andreae Cretensis (BHG 113), A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus (ed.), Analecta Hierosolumitikes Stachyologias (vol. 5; St Petersburg, 1898; repr. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1963), pp. 169–79.

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island of Mitylene, or Lesbos, on the way home from a visit to Constantinople. The reasons for this journey are not entirely clear. Andrew produced a large number of sermons and hymns in the course of his long career;54 it is perhaps the largely liturgical nature of his oeuvre that has caused it to be somewhat overlooked by scholars.55 Fortunately, such neglect has begun to be reversed in recent years. In 1995, Marie-France Auzépy devoted a short study to re-examining the content and dating of Andrew’s liturgical and hagiographical writings.56 Some of the more striking conclusions that she reaches include the suggestion that Andrew was a strong defender of holy icons (in spite of the fact that there is scant evidence of this in his homilies and hymns) and that he spent the last ten years of his life in Constantinople before being exiled by Leo III for his iconophile views – this would explain Andrew’s presence on Mitylene at the time of his death.57 Alexander Kazhdan also devotes considerable space to Andrew in his useful survey of middle Byzantine literature.58 This scholar calls attention to the ‘timeless’ quality of Andrew’s liturgical writing, suggesting that this preacher is less interested in the historical nature of biblical or apocryphal events than in their theological, or eternal, meaning. In an interesting comparative study of the sermons on the Annunciation written by Germanos of Constantinople and by Andrew of Crete, Kazhdan shows that whereas the former focuses on the dramatic nature of the encounters between the Virgin Mary, the archangel Gabriel and Joseph, Andrew of Crete visualizes a motionless, if emotionally charged, event. He is interested in the meeting of the divine and created worlds at this pivotal moment, and in the meaning of the Annunciation within the whole context of God’s dispensation for humanity. Kazhdan also raises the possibility that Andrew of Crete might have been an iconoclast sympathizer. He bases this hypothesis both on the preacher’s silence concerning the dispute over icons and on his exploration of different meanings for the word εἰκών (‘image’); the latter may reflect his search for various modes of human apprehension of divine reality in addition to that of the man-made image or icon.59

54 55

56 57 58 59

See CPG 8170–8219, vol. 3, pp. 541–51. The most useful survey of Andrew of Crete’s life and works remains S. Vailhé, ‘Saint André de Crète’, pp. 378–87. See also M. B. Cunningham, ‘Andrew of Crete: A High-Style Preacher of the Eighth Century’, in eadem and P. Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 267–93. Auzépy, ‘La carrière d’André de Crète’, pp. 1–12. Ibid., p. 5. Kazhdan, et al., A History of Byzantine Literature (650-850), pp. 37–54. Ibid., pp. 39–40.

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Before exploring this question in more detail, it is worth examining exactly how indebted Andrew of Crete is to the thought of Dionysius the Areopagite. To begin with his explicit allusions to the Areopagite’s thought, we need only to turn to Andrew’s second sermon on the Dormition of the Virgin Mary in which he invokes the witness of ‘a man learned in sacred doctrine, who, they say, investigated holy things with wisdom and erudition, and to whom hints of the mysterious representations of super-celestial minds were revealed, in a way worthy of the angels’.60 Andrew goes on in the same passage to describe how this figure was present at the deathbed of the Mother of God and recounted his experience in his treatise On the Divine Names.61 In commenting on this narrative, Andrew emphasizes the mystical nature of the event, quoting the Areopagite’s statement that such matters cannot be communicated or understood by ordinary Christians. At the same time, incidentally, he reveals his topographical knowledge of Jerusalem, describing the route that the funeral cortège took from Zion to Gethsemane and the elaborate tomb that had been prepared there for the Virgin’s body.62 Throughout this commentary, Andrew displays reverence towards the witness of Dionysius the Areopagite. Beyond the respect that he would naturally feel for an apostle, convert of St Paul, and first bishop of Athens (as he thought Dionysius to be), however, it is clear that the eighth-century preacher admires Dionysius’ mystical vision, which sees beyond the unfolding of historical events to their eternal meaning. Other instances of Dionysius the Areopagite’s influence on Andrew of Crete are implicit, rather than openly acknowledged in the three sermons that make up the trilogy for the feast of the Dormition. Let us look, for example, at a passage in the first homily where Andrew attempts to describe the mystical ascent to divine understanding. After referring to the Virgin Mary’s miraculous conception, birth and infancy, he exclaims: ‘Only to those who have been taught to discern divine realities, who had been purified by nearness to the divine, only to them did the Most Holy One make known an offprint (ἀπομÓργματα), as it were, of this mystery, lifting the intellectual curtain in

60

61 62

Andrew of Crete, In dormitionem II.9, CPG 8182, PG 97, 1060–61; B. E. Daley (trans.), On the Dormition of Mary. Early Patristic Homilies (Crestwood: SVS Press, 1998), p. 127. Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus, CPG 6602, PG 3, col. 681D. Andrew of Crete, In dormitionem II.11, CPG 8182, PG 97, cols. 1064–5; Daley (trans.), On the Dormition of Mary, pp. 129–30. It should be noted that the homilies are misnumbered in PG, following a mistake by their editor, François Combefis. The homily that is published second in PG is actually the first in the series.

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a silence and an unknowing far above speech, to reveal some portion of the hidden, secret glory within.’63 Continuing in this vein a few lines later, Andrew expresses his wish that the Christians who are present at this feast may be illumined and may perceive the mystery clearly for themselves. The preacher characteristically chooses recondite vocabulary to express his sense that the faithful are being ‘initiated’ into mysteries beyond human understanding.64 He draws here and elsewhere on the terminology of pagan mystery religions, but also on the language and ideas of Dionysius the Areopagite who, like Andrew, saw liturgical celebration as an essential aspect of Christians’ path towards an apprehension of divine reality. It is also interesting to note that, here and elsewhere in Andrew’s homiletic works, he suggests that the sermon (or ‘logos’) represents a key aspect of the liturgical – or mystical – experience. This, I would like to suggest, is not simply a rhetorical trope, but reflects the theological role of the sermon in the mediation of biblical revelation to Byzantine audiences. A few other examples may be adduced in order to prove not only that Andrew of Crete admired the Areopagite’s thought, but also that the latter influenced his understanding of the method and goals of Christian life. First, let us consider what many regard as Andrew’s greatest work – the long, penitential hymn known as the Great Kanon. It is surprising that despite the familiarity of the Great Kanon to most Orthodox Christians, since it is sung daily, in sections, during Compline in the first week of Lent and in its entirety in Matins on the Thursday of the fifth week, scholars have not yet provided a critical edition or full-scale study of the work.65 This situation is again beginning to be addressed: for example, in a recent and thought-provoking article, Derek Krueger explores the development

63

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Andrew of Crete, In dormitionem I.2, CPG 8181, PG 97, col. 1076B: ‘ . . . μόνοις γνωρίσας τοῦ μυστηρίου τούτου τὰ ἀπομόργματα, τοῖς τὰ θεῖα θείως συγκρίνειν δεδιδαγμένοις, οἶς ὡς μάλα κεκαθαρμένοις τῇ πρὸς τὸ θεῖον ἐγγύτητι, δι᾿ ἀφθεγξίας καὶ ἀγνωσίας ὑπεραφθέγκτως, ἡ ὑπεράγιος τὸ νοερὸν ἀνακαλύψασα δέρος, μέρος τι παρέδειξε τῆς ἔνδον κρυφιομύστου λαμπρότητος.’ (‘Only to those who have been taught to discern divine realities, who had been purified by nearness to the divine, only to them did the Most Holy One make known an offprint, as it were, of this mystery, lifting the intellectual curtain in a silence and an unknowing far above speech, to reveal some portion of the hidden, secret glory within’); Daley (trans.), On the Dormition of Mary, pp. 105–6. See also Andrew of Crete, In dormitionem I.8, CPG 8181, PG 97, 1088B; Daley (trans.), On the Dormition of Mary, pp. 113–14. There is to date no critical edition of Andrew of Crete’s Great Kanon. I have chosen to use the version of the text that appears in PG 97, cols. 1329–85. The text may also be found in the Triodion Katanyktikon (Athens: Phos, 1983), pp. 295–313. An abbreviated version appears in W. von Christ, and M. Paranikas (eds.), Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum (Leipzig: Georg Olms Hildesheim, 1871), pp. 147–61.

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of what he calls ‘the liturgical self ’ in Andrew’s work.66 This ‘self ’ is a collective figure who identifies with both Old and New Testament sinners in order to plumb fully the depths of self-reproach and penitence. Whereas Krueger reveals convincingly the extent to which the narrator, speaking for his congregation, compels this collective ‘self ’ to realize its fallen condition, he does not perhaps emphasize enough the way in which the recognition of sin and true penitence leads the Christian into a closer relationship with God. This vision is expressed at various points in the Great Kanon, as we see in the following passage: ‘Awake, O my soul, be as courageous as the great one of the patriarchs, that you may attain action with knowledge, that you may gain a mind to see God, and reach to the impenetrable darkness in contemplation, and become a great merchant.’67 The reference to apophatic theology, most probably with a recollection of Dionysius the Areopagite’s On the Divine Names, is striking here, as Andrew describes the possible outcome of dedicated prayer following true repentance. Second, Andrew joins a long tradition of liturgical writing on the theme of Christ’s Transfiguration with his sermon on that subject; he develops a scene of human encounter with divinity that is described in the Gospels but calls for further interpretation in the context of the feast. This preacher focuses first on the mystery of the Incarnation: Christ, he reminds us, appeared in glory to three of his disciples but remained fully human.68 Calling on the congregation to enter fully into this encounter and, metaphorically, to climb Mt Tabor with the disciples, Andrew stresses throughout the sermon the spiritual transformation that will take place in each of us. This is a mystery that is beyond human understanding: it is ‘inexpressible’ (ἀνέκϕραστον), ‘ineffable’ (ἄρρητον), ‘incomprehensible’ (ἀνέϕικτον) and so on. It is nothing less than the deification of human nature, the ‘ecstasy and ascent of those who [are made] according to nature into things that are above nature’.69 Such language has a Dionysian flavour, although it could 66

67

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D. Krueger, ‘The Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete, the penitential Bible, and the liturgical formation of the self in the Byzantine Dark Age’, in B. Bitton-Ashkelony and L. Perrone (eds.), Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 15; Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) (forthcoming). Andrew of Crete, The Great Kanon, Ode 4, PG 97, cols. 1348D–1349A; trans. (with adjustments) Sister Katherine and Sister Thekla, St Andrew of Crete, The Great Canon, and The Life of St Mary of Egypt (Newport Pagnell: The Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Assumption, 1974), p. 42. Andrew of Crete, In transfigurationem, PG 97, CPG 8176, col. 932C: ‘ . . . καὶ Χριστὸς αὐτὸς, ἡ καθαρὰ τελετὴ, ὁ ὑπερούσιος τοῦ Γεννήτορος Λόγος, ὁ δι᾿ ἡμᾶς κατελθὼν ἄνωθεν, καὶ τὴν ἡμετέραν σάρκα πτωχεύσας διὰ φιλανθρωπίαν, βούλοιτ᾿ ἂν ἡμᾶς ταύτην σὺν αὐτῷ ποεῖσθαι τὴν ἄνοδον.’ Andrew of Crete, In transfigurationem, CPG 8176, PG 97, col. 933A–B: ‘Τοῦτο τοίνυν ἑορτάζομεν σήμερον, τὴν τῆς φύσεως θέωσιν, τὴν εἰς τὸ κρεῖττον ἀλλοίωσιν, τὴν ἐπὶ τὰ ὑπὲρ φύσιν τῶν κατὰ φύσιν ἔκστασιν καὶ ἀνάβασιν’.

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also, of course, have been drawn from the Byzantine monastic tradition. What is significant about this sermon, for our purposes, is not only this interest in the human encounter with divine reality, but also Andrew of Crete’s emphasis, as elsewhere in his festal sermons, on the potential involvement of every faithful Christian in deification. He implies, here as elsewhere, that participation in the liturgical celebration of the feast, combined with rational understanding of its meaning, is transformative in its deepest theological sense. Let us now return to Kazhdan’s provocative suggestion (which notably contradicts the views of Marie-France Auzépy) that Andrew of Crete may have had iconoclast leanings.70 The evidence for this hypothesis lies in the scarcity of references to icons in Andrew’s writings – at least to the material, or manmade, icons that were being threatened by imperial policies of the eighth and ninth centuries. It is true that Andrew of Crete wrote very little on this subject: a fragmentary text in defence of icons survives, but its authenticity has been questioned by some scholars.71 Apart from this, there is a passage in a homily on the Circumcision of the Lord and St Basil (intended for 1 January) in which Andrew speaks of Christ’s representation in ‘signs’ (τύποι) and ‘images’ (εἰκÓνεϚ) and the veneration that these deserve.72 The correct iconophile vocabulary is used here, along with a reference to Basil of Caesarea’s famous statement that honour to an image is passed to its prototype,73 but the destruction that Andrew deplores is due to Muslim invaders of Crete, not the iconoclasts.74 Apart from these two instances, we find no mention of the iconoclast debate in Andrew’s writings. His hagiographer, Niketas, makes no mention of the controversy and the same reticence is adopted in St Andrew’s entry in the tenth-century Synaxarion of Constantinople.75 It is striking, however, as Kazhdan notes, that this eighth-century preacher and hymnographer evinces a consistent interest in the various meanings of the word ‘image’ (εἰκών), along with those of related words that indicate the reflection, or mirroring, of one thing in another.76 This is the shifting interface 70

71

72 73 74

75

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Kazhdan, et al., A History of Byzantine Literature (650–850), p. 40; Auzépy, ‘La carrière d’André de Crète, pp. 11–12. Andrew of Crete, De sanctorum imaginum veneratione (BHG 1125; CPG 8193), PG 97, cols. 1301–4. For doubts about the authenticity of this work, see N. B. Tomadakis, Ἡ βυζαντινὴ Ὑμνογραφία καὶ Ποίησις (Athens, 1965), vol. 2, p. 192. Andrew of Crete, In circumcisionem Domini et in s. Basilium, CPG 8175, PG 97, col. 929D. Andrew of Crete, In circumcisionem Domini et in s. Basilium, CPG 8175, PG 97, col. 932A. Of course, this circumstance does not change the fact that Andrew seems genuinely to be deploring the destruction of holy icons in this passage, so it is perhaps irrelevant in the context of this discussion. H. Delehaye (ed.), Synaxarium Constantinopolitanum (Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum Novembris. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902), col. 730. Kazhdan, et al., A History of Byzantine Literature (650-850), pp. 39–40.

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between what is imperceptible or ineffable and that which can be seen, heard, touched or understood. Andrew frequently alludes to the way in which divine truth may be apprehended, even if only dimly, by means of types, imprints or images that take the form of mental images or words. It is also worth noting that he sees this process as happening not only in the context of penitential prayer, ascetic exercise or rational enquiry, but above all through participation in the liturgical celebration of the Church. Deification, he implies, occurs in the lives of the Christian faithful when they join in the timeless but also commemorative celebration of the liturgy. Christ and the angelic host, as well as the Mother of God, also participate in these rites, granting illumination to those who enter fully into their cosmic meaning, assisted by the archbishop and preacher, who describes himself as ‘the host’ at the banquet.77 Without taking a firm position either on the side of Andrew of Crete’s iconophile or on that of iconoclast tendencies, since the evidence for either is simply lacking in contemporary sources, I would like to suggest that the early eighth century may have been a period of genuine exploration with regard to the issue of icons and their veneration rather than one of firm allegiance to one side or the other of the growing controversy. It is certainly true that figures such as John Damascene and Germanos adopted a clear position early and that they employed arguments that had been developed a century or so earlier in the context of Christian and Jewish dialogue. However, it is quite likely that in the years immediately following Leo III’s endorsement of iconoclasm, that is, after 726 or at the latest, 730, bishops such as Andrew of Crete did not feel impelled to publicize their views on the issue. Andrew was nevertheless interested in the various ways that God manifests himself in creation; he saw this process as ongoing and accessible to those Christians – both lay and monastic – who purify themselves to the extent that they are open to the contemplation of divine mysteries that are made present in private and liturgical worship. In conclusion, I have attempted in this paper both to pay homage to the essential contribution that Father Andrew Louth has made to the field of Early Christian and Byzantine Theology and to offer some further ideas that are based on his work. I have suggested that the early eighth-century archbishop, Andrew of Crete, whose liturgical writings reveal so much mystical vocabulary and reflection – even if they are mostly intended for the festal celebrations of the Church – reflect the influence of the late-fifth- or early-sixth-century theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite. The reverence with which Andrew regarded this 77

See, for example, Andrew of Crete, In nativitem I and II, CPG 8170-71, PG 97, cols. 813D and 821A.

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shadowy figure (of course believing him in reality to be a contemporary and disciple of St Paul) is evident not only in his explicit citations of the Father, but also in his adoption of apophatic ideas and understanding of the cosmic nature of liturgical celebration. Andrew’s views on the veneration of icons are, as we have seen, more difficult to decipher, but his understanding of reality of Christ’s incarnation, to the extent that he truly understood and participated in human nature, is never in doubt. For all the ‘timeless’ or ‘motionless’ quality of Andrew’s liturgical writing, there is a sense that the mystery of human and divine encounter is played out in the created, physical universe. God may be glimpsed by means of ‘signs’ and ‘images’, but he remains transcendent and unknowable. This apophatic understanding appears to be the most important legacy of Dionysius the Areopagite for St Andrew of Crete.

4

Why should we read Middle Byzantine Fathers? Jane Baun

We all know why we should read the Church Fathers – and, by and large, we do read them. But for most of us, the age of the ‘Fathers’ ends, for all practical purposes, with Maximus the Confessor (⫹662), or perhaps John Damascene (⫹749). How often do we read, for spiritual or scholarly edification, any Byzantine spiritual or ecclesiastical authors in the period after the Damascene and before Gregory Palamas (⫹1359)? Two beacons do shine out from within that sixcentury gap, those of Photios (⫹post 893) and of Symeon the New Theologian (⫹1022), but the host of other authors of the period possessed of more modest lights – preachers and exegetes, canonists and scholars, spiritual Fathers and ascetic masters, hymnographers, hagiographers and poets – are rarely read or considered, save by highly specialized scholars. Does this matter? Perhaps not greatly. But I hope to show that if we simply pass over six centuries of Orthodox theological and spiritual endeavour, we do lose something, something of the fullness of Orthodox tradition. This is a tradition – and a mystery – to which we all, as disciples of Fr Andrew Louth, are committed to inhabiting and transmitting. Along the way, I would like to consider some aspects of the contribution that Fr Andrew has made, and is making, to our understanding of the tradition that we both revere and seek to understand more fully. Fr Andrew’s contributions to theology are the particular concern of this volume. But his contribution to church history, and in particular to the history of the Byzantine church, is also worthy of note. As well as examining the place of Middle Byzantine Fathers in modern research, this paper also hopes to highlight some aspects of Fr Andrew’s work that may be less visible to theologians, but for which teachers of church history and of the Byzantine Empire will forever bless his name.

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One premise of this paper is that Middle Byzantine Fathers have been the victims of their own success. Middle Byzantine Fathers are defined, for the purposes of this paper, as Byzantine Christian authors writing in Greek, after John Damascene and before Gregory Palamas, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, with the greatest concentration of surviving works primarily from the middle of that period, from the tenth to the twelfth century. These are figures such as George of Nikomedeia, John Geometres, Symeon Metaphrastes, John Mauropous, Michael Psellos (in his persona as theology tutor – to John Italos and Theophylakt, the future Bishop of Ohrid, among others), Theophylakt of Ohrid, Paul of Evergetis, John Xiphilinos the patriarch and John Xiphilinos the younger, Euthymios Zigabenos, John Agapetos, Eustathios of Thessaloniki1 and Theophanes Kerameus.2 They are not exactly household names (save perhaps Theophylakt, in the Slavic-speaking world, and Symeon, among scholars of hagiography), and – with the notable exception of Michael Psellos, one of the great self-promoters of all time – that is how most of these preachers, pastors, poets and scholars may have wanted it. For, like icons of the Mother of God, Middle Byzantine Fathers tend to point away from themselves. Much as Mary always points to her son, so Medieval Byzantine preachers and exegetes are always pointing us back to the Patristic Fathers. And that is indeed what we tend to do: ignore the medieval authors and read the classics. Our present conference in honour of Fr Andrew is a case in point. Its twelve plenary papers are almost evenly split between the Patristic and the modern periods: five papers concentrate on the fourth to eighth centuries; six, from the twentieth century to the present day and the future. Only one plenary paper – this one – ventures into this thousand-year gap from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. The shorter papers tell a similar story: of forty short papers, just over half – twenty-two – focus on the fourth to eighth centuries, while a quarter – eleven – treat the twentieth century to the future. Seven papers do swim in the thousand-year gap we have identified, a mere 17.5 per cent of the total. Of these, three and a half are early modern, two are late Byzantine (later thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and one examines Western medieval authors of the ninth century and the turn of the twelfth. Part of a final paper treats a Middle Byzantine author, the early twelfth-century 1

2

Eustathios is relatively well known among Byzantinists for his historical and philological writings, but his sermons, deemed ‘more conventional than his best works’, are less studied; quotation from A. Kazhdan, Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (3 vols; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 754. Hans-Georg Beck set the basic framework for discussion of these figures and their work in his Kirche und theologische Literatur im Byzantinischen Reich (IV.4–6; Munich: C. H. Beck, 1959), pp. 520–711.

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heresiologist and exegete Euthymios Zigabenos. It counts as one half for our purposes because it examines the role played by Zigabenos’ Panoplia Dogmatica in an early modern controversy over the Eucharist. We may rejoice that a Middle Byzantine Father was being read and taken seriously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but then, we must also ask – what about our own century? Are we reading our medieval forefathers? If this collection in honour of Andrew Louth may be taken as a snapshot of the present state of the field of Orthodox theology and church history, it seems that we are not. Papers read at meetings of the International Conference on Patristic Studies offer another sampling of where scholarly energies are being concentrated. Of the more than 600 papers from the gatherings in 2003 and 2007 that have been published in Studia Patristica,3 only four papers examine Greek authors between John Damascene and Gregory Palamas, and these concern the Patriarch Photius (as contrasted with Augustine), Paul of Evergetis, John Geometres and Michael Psellos.4 Soundings may also be taken from another highly visible publication, the recent volume on Eastern Christianity in The Cambridge History of Christianity.5 Although its chronological remit begins in the eleventh century, of the thirteen bishops, homilists, hagiographers, poets and exegetes noted above, only four appear in the volume, and then only in passing. George of Nikomedeia is noted for the influence of his homilies on artistic representations of liturgical feasts and commemorations, and Symeon for his saints’ Lives, while Eustathios of Thessaloniki (once) and Michael Psellos (four times) are pressed into service as witnesses to lay piety.6 To be fair, this particular volume was not conceived as a thorough survey of the Byzantine Orthodox Church, and ‘Eastern Christianity’ in its Greek-speaking and Byzantine expressions occupies only one of its

3 4

5

6

Studia Patristica (vols. 39–49; Leuven: Peeters, 2006–10). A. M. Ritter, ‘Augustine and Patriarch Photius on Religion and Politics’, Studia Patristica 40 (2006), pp. 221–38; E. Skaka, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of Paul of Evergetis’ Synagoge: Some preliminary remarks’, Studia Patristica 40 (2006), pp. 281–8; M. de Groote, ‘Joannes Geometres Kyriotes and His Metaphrasis Odarum’, Studia Patristica 42 (2006), pp. 297–304; Ketevan Bezarashvili, ‘Michael Psellos: the Interpreter of the Style of Gregory the Theologian and the new Aspects of the Concepts of Rhetorical Theories’, Studia Patristica 48 (2010), pp. 233–40. Niki Tsironis’ study of ‘Desire, Longing and Fear in the Narrative of Middle-Byzantine Homiletics’, Studia Patristica 44 (2010), pp. 515–20, examines three eighth-century homilists, John of Damascus, Andrew of Crete, and John of Euboia. M. Angold (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity (vol. 5: Eastern Christianity; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In two articles in Angold (ed.), Eastern Christianity: for George and Symeon, see N. Ševčenko, ‘Art and Liturgy in the later Byzantine Empire’, pp. 127–53 (139, 141); for Eustathios and Psellos, see S. Gerstel and A.-M. Talbot, ‘The culture of lay piety in medieval Byzantium 1054-1453’, pp. 79–100 (83, 87, 91–3).

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four parts, so one could hardly expect minor figures to appear.7 The book as a whole displays a particular – and overdue – concern for global and more modern manifestations of ‘Eastern’ forms of Christianity, taking the story far beyond Constantinople, and into the present day. As such, it provides a useful corrective and supplement to past ways of telling the Eastern Church story, but its choice of topics – Patriarchal, Russian, ‘Oriental’, modern – also illustrates starkly how far the marginalization of the ‘middle’ story of the development of Eastern Orthodox life and thought with which we are concerned here has advanced. Fr Andrew, in his 1983 essay Discerning the Mystery, talks about ‘listening across a historical gulf that is not empty’.8 But given the thousand-year gap between the ninth and the nineteenth centuries typical of modern study of the Eastern church, scholars do seem to behave as if that gap were empty, empty of the things we tend to think render an author worthy of study – chief among them, I suspect, ‘originality’. The Byzantines themselves would argue, of course, that originality is highly overrated: what matters is tradition, and one’s place in the interpretation, representation and transmission of the treasury of tradition. In this spirit, this paper will argue the importance, and benefits, of paying attention to these ‘middle’ authors, who fall in between the Patristic period and our own time, but played a crucial role in the transmission of Orthodox tradition, and will offer one small example of the kind of corrective that reading the medieval fathers can provide. One suspects that writers such as Theophylakt of Ohrid or Euthymios Zigabenos would be most pleased if modern readers were to prize them above all for their role in transmitting of tradition, rather than for their own original contributions. One can imagine them saying, with John the Baptist – they – the holy Fathers – must increase; I must decrease. Nadejda Miladinova has showed us how Zigabenos was valued in early modern debates chiefly due to his transmission of Gregory of Nyssa and John Damascene – and Euthymios himself would no doubt have thought that was right and proper: the Fathers must increase, I must decrease.9 It is the stance of humility of a servant who puts service above his own glory. And at the risk of embarrassing our honorand, 7

8

9

The volume treats ‘Eastern Christianity’ after 1000 under four headings: The Ecumenical Patriarchate; The Russian Church; Eastern Christianities; The Modern World. A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), p. 107. [Ed. Note: Reference to Nadejda Miladinova’s unpublished paper ‘Eucharistic debates in 17th and 18th centuries: the interpretation of texts of Panoplia Dogmatica of Zygabenos as a refutation of the heresy of Berengar’, presented at the conference, but not included in this volume.]

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I would suggest that we can find this stance of humility in Fr Andrew’s own career, in his painstaking, self-effacing service to the field of church history. This conference has rightly celebrated Fr Andrew’s monographs on the nature of theology, the Christian mystical tradition and John Damascene. I would like to focus, however, on some of the less visible opera minora, those numerous small works which are far from being minor in their cumulative impact on the continued survival of the fields of Patristics and church history. One example is his volume on Maximus the Confessor in the Routledge Early Church Fathers series, which offers a clear way into this most daunting and rewarding of Patristic theologians, and encouragement for the faint-hearted.10 Historians should be grateful to Fr Andrew for ensuring that Medieval Byzantium did not fall out of the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press series on The Church in History. Fr John Meyendorff ’s vision of a new history of the church in six volumes, which would treat both East and West on equal terms, was in danger of foundering when Fr John suddenly passed away in 1992. Fr Andrew took on writing the early medieval volume (seventh–eleventh centuries),11 and also the commissioning and shepherding of later volumes – time-consuming, unglamorous, at times ungrateful work – but of immense service to church history, and to nurturing a more balanced historical discourse. There is also a body of more hidden work, even more thankless, but important in keeping the flame of Eastern Christianity alight for students and scholars. There is Fr Andrew’s work with the mammoth third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, which helped to ensure that Patristics was not squeezed out by more modern concerns, and that the post-patristic Christian East was represented. Another project helping to keep Greek East and Latin West together has been his involvement with the massive Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.12 Fr Andrew edited the first Genesis volume (chapters 1–11) for this series, and his introduction to that volume stands by itself as a concise, elegant overview of key themes in Patristic theology.13 The whole ACCS project, in self-description ‘a postcritical revival of the early commentary tradition known as the glossa ordinaria, a text artfully elaborated with ancient and authoritative reflections and insights’,14 constitutes a marvellous vindication of Fr Andrew’s 1983 Discerning the Mystery, with its 10 11 12 13

14

A. Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996). A. Louth, Greek East and Latin West: the Church, AD 681–1071. 28 vols; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998–2010. A. Louth and M. Conti (eds.), Genesis 1-11 (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament, vol. 1; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001). http://www.ivpress.com/accs/about.php, accessed 4 February 2013.

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manifesto for the restoration of exegesis, and particularly the allegorical habit, to its rightful place at the heart of how we do theology.15 Its editor, Thomas Oden, a champion of the ‘palaeo-orthodox’ movement in post-modern Protestant theology, initiated the series to satisfy ‘a deep hunger for classical Christian exegesis’, which he found among Christians of all denominations, and ‘a growing demoralization in relation to the useful exegetical outcomes of postEnlightenment historicist and naturalistic-reductionist criticism’.16 Fr Andrew anticipated this dissatisfaction in 1983, when he opened Discerning the Mystery with a critique of prevailing academic trends in the humanities.17 The ACCS may ultimately prove more fruitful than countless learned monographs or erudite articles in making the church Fathers better known, and, what is more, read, among students and believers. The project is rehabilitating the reputation of the Fathers – rebranded as ‘the ancient ecumenical teachers’ – presenting them as having a vital contribution to make to the deeper understanding of Scripture. In so doing, it is helping to secure the future of Patristic study. The involvement in such projects entails a certain amount of divine disregard for worldly glory and professional self-sacrifice, as they do not rate highly in research assessment exercises – more hidden work for which we thank Fr Andrew and all those who have worked on the volumes. Teachers and students of church history owe a further debt of gratitude to Fr Andrew for his work in ensuring that certain key texts have not only remained in print, but also – continue to be intelligible to modern students – so that there is more to their lives than Wikipedia and Google. He has engaged in that most Middle Byzantine of activities, metacharacterismos – literally, ‘transliteration’, or ‘refashioning’ – refashioning the classic editions of church history to enhance their accessibility for the new generations of students who come with little, if any, prior knowledge of Christianity or the Bible.18 There are the renewed Penguin paperback editions of Staniforth’s 1968 Apostolic Fathers and Williamson’s 1967 translation of Eusebius’ Church History, each provided with new introduction, notes, updated bibliography, map, ‘Who’s Who’ and appendices.19 There is

15 16 17 18

19

Louth, Discerning, ch. 5. T. Oden, ‘General Introduction’, in Louth, Genesis, p. xvii. Louth, Discerning, chs. 1–2. For the broader cultural sense of metacharaterismos, see J. Baun, Tales from Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 263–4. A. Louth (ed.), Early Christian writings: the Apostolic Fathers (trans. M. Staniforth; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, rev. edn, 1987); Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine (ed. A. Louth; trans. G. A. Williamson; London: Penguin, 1968, rev. edn, 1989).

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also the new, complete, translation, with study aids, of John Damascene’s On the Divine Images and the 2010 re-issue of Joan Hussey’s 1986 The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, with introduction and updated bibliography.20 Fr Andrew’s foreword to the reissue of The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire offers an astute and telling observation on the scholarly work of Joan Hussey. Commenting on her immense labour and service in the translation of George Ostrogorsky’s Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates, and in editing the magisterial volume IV, The Byzantine Empire, of the Cambridge Medieval History (1966–67), he observed: ‘The work of translating and editing is immensely timeconsuming, and promotes the reputation of others; it is perhaps a sign of the self-effacement required for such work that when Hussey listed these works as essential in the bibliographical note to the first edition of this volume, she neglected to mention that she had translated the one and edited the other.’21 Humility. Self-effacement. The field must increase, I must decrease. That is what too much reading of the fathers can do to you. The result, though, is not all bad, especially when it results in the kind of selfless labour with which we have been gifted in this corpus of hidden work. And so, back to our Middle Byzantine Fathers, those exegetical and homiletical ‘Lost Boys’, who were so successful at pointing us back to the Fathers that we have almost forgotten they themselves existed. With the exception of perhaps Photios and Symeon the New Theologian, most Middle Byzantine figures languish in the Patrologia Graeca or in manuscript, largely unread by historians, theologians and the faithful. When figures such as Theophylakt of Ohrid do appear in standard treatments or encyclopaedia articles, it is usually to assert that they are just transmitting catenae of the church Fathers; nothing of particular interest or originality there.22 Yet, there is much of interest in these texts, and material for many a dissertation or monograph. One Middle Byzantine homilist, George, metropolitan bishop of Nikomedeia in the later ninth century (ca. 860), has found strong advocates – but it has been mainly art historians and literary scholars in the United States and Greece, rather than church historians or theologians, who have given George such

20

21 22

John of Damascus, Three treatises on the divine images (ed. A. Louth); J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, reissue with new material (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hussey, Orthodox Church, p. xxi. For example, G. Podskalsky, ‘Théophylacte d’Achrida’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité 15 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), cols. 542–6 (545): ‘Ses commentaires scripturaires sont entièrement empruntés aux chaînes et aux compilations, non aux textes originaux.’

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prominence, beginning in 1977 with a now-classic article by Henry Maguire, ‘ The Depiction of Sorrow in Middle Byzantine Art’.23 Maguire, Robin Cormack, Maria Vassilaki, Niki Tsironis, Brigitte Pitarakis and Nancy Ševčenko have all highlighted the influence of George’s Passion homilies on the development of Byzantine conventions regarding the artistic representations of the feast of the Christian year, and on scenes such as the Crucifixion and Deposition of Christ.24 Niki Tsironis, in addition, has worked to restore George to his proper place in the study of Byzantine homiletics.25 Church historians have begun to follow suit: for example, Stephen Shoemaker has examined George’s role in the transmission of earlier traditions on the life of the Virgin Mary and in the development of Marian doctrine and devotion in the Byzantine church.26 George’s main works are now much more visible to scholars of Byzantium, but there is still fruitful work to be done on the potential of his corpus for church history. At the top of the Middle-Byzantine wish list of texts for serious attention must be John Geometres’ tenth-century Life of the Virgin, an erudite, difficult and dense, but profoundly beautiful, series of meditations on the events of Mary’s life.27 It perhaps needs a team of scholars rather than one person, but it is well worth doing. Though written in poetic language, it constitutes a veritable ‘doctrinal essay on the mission of the Virgin’, and the history of Marian doctrine and devotion is incomplete without it, yet it is little read or studied by scholars 23

24

25

26

27

H. Maguire, ‘The Depiction of Sorrow in Middle Byzantine Art’, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 31 (1977), pp. 125–74; see also H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 91–108. Homilies in PG 100: 1336–1529; see Beck, Kirche, pp. 542–3; also A. Cutler and A. Kazhdan in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 838, with additional references; R. Cormack, ‘The Arts during the age of Iconoclasm’, in A. Bryer and J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977), pp. 35–44; M. Vassilaki and N. Tsironis, ‘Representations of the Virgin and their association with the Passion of Christ’, in M. Vassilaki (ed.), Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Milan: Skira Editore, 2000), pp. 453–63; N. Ševčenko, ‘Art and Liturgy in the later Byzantine Empire’, in Angold (ed.), Eastern Christianity, p. 139. N. Tsironis, ‘George of Nicomedia: Convention and Originality in the Homily on Good Friday’, Studia Patristica 30 (Leuven: Peeters, 1996), pp. 573–7; idem, ‘Historicity and Poetry in Ninth-Century Homiletics: the homilies of Patriarch Photios and George of Nicomedia’, in M. B. Cunningham and P. Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 295–316. S. J. Shoemaker, ‘A Mother’s Passion: Mary at the Crucifixion and Resurrection in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and its Influence on George of Nikomedeia’s Passion Homilies’, in L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (eds.), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 53–67; Baun, Tales, 282, 289 sets George’s Passion homilies in their larger historical and devotional matrix. John’s profile has risen in recent times through the work of Marc de Groote in editing and analysing his poetry, in particular, the Metaphrasis Odarum; see ‘Joannes Geometres’, Metaphrasis of the Odes: Critical Edition’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 44 (2004), pp. 375–410; also his 2006 article in Studia Patristica 42, noted above.

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today.28 It is ironic that the text’s greatest champions in print so far have been a trio of post-war Roman Catholic scholars, Frs Martin Jugie, J. Galot and Antoine Wenger, writing between 1944 and 1966.29 Antoine Wenger, who had begun work on a critical edition of the text, but published only part, thought it the masterpiece of Byzantine work on Mary.30 Part of the trio’s interest in John’s Life was, of course, the light it cast on the third and fourth Marian dogmas of the Roman Catholic church, those regarding Mary’s Immaculate Conception (defined dogmatically in 1854 by Pius IX) and her bodily Assumption (1950, by Pius XII), and also upon a potential fifth, yet to be formally adopted, that of Mary’s co-redemptive qualities. But it is clear from the great esteem in which all three scholars held the Life of the Virgin that their appreciation of its merits went far beyond its usefulness as a quarry for venerable Eastern Orthodox proof-texts in support of modern Roman dogma. A complete critical edition, and further study, are great desiderata. John Geometres’ Life of the Virgin provides us with an overview of Medieval Byzantine Mariology, and two later Middle Byzantine authors, John Xiphilinos the Younger and Theophanes Kerameus, writing respectively in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, offer a similarly sweeping look at the church year, with complete series of homilies for the Sunday Gospels and feasts.31 In addition to the intrinsic interest of the texts, surely a comparison of these two sets of homilies would have much to say about changing approaches and concerns in the transmission of tradition. Or maybe not – but that result would be worth reporting as well, if we are to understand more fully how the tradition has developed. Both homilists, however, await their champions. Why have works such as these been neglected? Lack of modern translations is one major problem in their reception by a wider public. Scholars, put off

28

29

30 31

See Beck, Kirche, pp. 553–4; Baun, Tales, pp. 282–5, considers the Life of the Virgin as a witness to elite attitudes towards Marian theology; quotation in J. Galot, ‘La Plus ancienne affirmation de la corédemption mariale’, Recherches de Science Religieuse 45 (1957), pp. 187–208 (191). M. Jugie, La Mort et l’Assomption de la Sainte Vierge (Studi e testi 114; Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944); M. Jurgie, L’Immaculée Conception dans l’Écriture Sainte et dans la tradition orientale (Rome: Academia Mariana, 1952); A. Wenger, L’Assomption de la Très Sainte Vierge dans la tradition byzantine du VIe au Xe siècle (Paris: [n. pub.], 1955); A. Wenger, ‘Foi et piété mariales à Byzance’, in H. du Manoir (ed.), Maria: études sur la Sainte Vierge (vol. 5; Paris: Beauchesne, 1958), pp. 956–62; A. Wenger, ‘L’Intercession de Marie en Orient du VIe au Xe siècle’, Études mariales 23 (1966), pp. 51–75; the complete edition that Wenger announced in his 1966 article has never appeared. Wenger, L’Assomption, p. 201. For Xiphilinos, brief treatments and further references in Beck, Kirche, pp. 556–7, 629–30; A. Ehrhard, Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen and homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1936–39), v. I 3, 383–403, 525–59, including homily list; also D. Stiernon, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité 8 (1974), cols. 792–4; more recent bibliography in A. Kazhdan, Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 2211; Kerameus homilies in PG 132: 125–1078.

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by a perceived lack of originality in Middle Byzantine Fathers, are not likely to help much in this. The gap is being filled instead by translation campaigns such those sponsored in the United States by traditionalist Orthodox groups – the Chrysostom Press in Missouri has taken on Theophylakt, and the Centre for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies in California has translated the Evergetinos florilegium.32 These translations have been made without waiting for modern critical editions, and must be used with care, but they have a major role in increasing awareness of the texts, and in providing indications of fruitful areas for scholarly research. Where determined clergy, laypeople and monastics, supported by mostly anonymous benefactors, have led the way, one hopes scholars, students – and additional benefactors – will follow. Why does this relative neglect matter? Why should these figures be of interest to anyone outside pious Orthodox traditionalists and the handful of ecclesiastical historians perverse enough to specialize in the Middle Byzantine period? Discerning the Mystery gave us the answer quite a while ago. Many have mentioned our debt to this ‘essay on the nature of theology’, and expressed how our own work continues, three decades after its publication, to find dialogue with it both useful and fruitful. My experience was like that which Paul Gavrilyuk spoke of when he first encountered Fr Andrew’s Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: here was what I had been trying to say all along, but could not quite articulate, and it was also pointing me way beyond my limited understanding and challenging me to go deeper into the inquiry.33 Its chapter on allegory should be required reading for everyone studying pre-modern texts, and its counsel for patient listening to traditional forms and methods provides a muchneeded corrective to modern ways of reading. I had always thought that people like George of Nikomedeia, John Geometres, Theophylakt, John Xiphilinos and Theophanes Kerameus were worthy objects of study – worthy, with all the dutifulness that word implies – sometimes a bit dull and conventional, and the Greek can be impenetrable. But I have not always been patient enough to read someone like Theophylakt slowly enough to enter his allegorical world on its own terms, to immerse myself in the living stream of tradition and risk being transformed by it. The relentless pressure of academic production targets does not afford much time for such slow reading – but we do violence to the tradition if we deny it the patient application it demands. 32

33

Descriptions of these projects online, at http://www.chrysostompress.org/ for Theophylakt; http:// www.ctosonline.org/patristic/EvCT.html for the Evergetinos. P. Gavrilyuk, ‘Vladimir Lossky’s Reception of Georges Florovsky’s Neopatristic Theology’, in the present volume, pp. 191–202.

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In Discerning the Mystery, Fr Andrew speaks of the contribution of Christian theology as a way of pursuing knowledge ‘by keeping open access to the tradition which is the vantage-point from which we can behold the mystery of God, which has been revealed in Christ’.34 When we ignore or dismiss bits of this tradition – in this case, when 1,000 years fall out of the bottom of it, leaving only the Patristic and the modern at either end, when we lose the middle of the tradition with which we claim to be in active dialogue – we risk distortion, since we have no corrective against which to check our preoccupations and passions. And when we teach only the extraordinary authors – the Symeons and the Palamases – it leaves little room for that army of figures who kept the Orthodox show on the road in between the peaks. Yet, how they did that is an integral part of the story of the historical road of Orthodoxy. Mindful listening to the whole tradition helps assess and correct omissions or distortions in our teaching and preaching. We tend, given the pressures of time and resources, to try to get to the gist of things. Similarly, worship, for much of modern Christianity, has to be reduced down to what can be grasped quickly, obviously, in simple language, preferably in 55 minutes. No time for patient immersion in the contours of a mystery, of the type necessary for true spiritual growth, here. But there are signs of hope. The internet is one of the factors that has speeded up modern life immeasurably, and created the expectation of instant gratification via anything that can be found on the end of a search string. Yet, it is also creating new possibilities for going deeper, and new treasuries of texts: for example, the entire exegetical corpus of Theophylakt of Ohrid is now available online, in Russian translation, fully searchable.35 This is freely available, presumably backed by generous benefactors. Theophylakt has always been hugely important for the Slavic Orthodox world, medieval and modern; he is of much more than purely antiquarian or medieval interest. The English-speaking world is catching up – the Chrysostom Press in Missouri has set itself the project of an English translation of Theophylakt’s entire corpus of scriptural commentaries, with volumes available both in print and electronically, albeit by purchase only.36 One example of the kind of thing we risk losing, which jumps out at us when we sit down to the patient work of slow reading of preachers such as Theophylakt and Xiphilinos, is the eschatological aspect to their thought. Apart from a bulge 34 35 36

Louth, Discerning, p. 146. Online at: http://feofilakt.ru/. The English Theophylakt project awaits a generous benefactor who could enable all the volumes to be available freely as a public service.

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of interest around the turn of the last millennium, modern scholars, preachers and exegetes, in my experience, have very little time for eschatology. Few preach on the Last Things unless the lectionary forces them to, and even then, there are ways to wriggle out of it, usually pleading supposed irrelevance to the everyday lives of their flock. With a few exceptions, historians of Byzantium have not given apocalyptic expectation a very high profile either.37 But eschatology, whether personal or corporate, is central to Christian hope and doctrine.38 We dare not lose it, in church life or in church history, much as we may try to avoid it. Immersion in tradition here provides a useful corrective. When we read Middle Byzantine preachers, we cannot avoid the Last Things. Of course, Patristic preachers are a great reservoir of thought on the Last Things as well. But their expectation is often more immediate, and therefore can seem more remote from our own situation. Gregory the Great, to take one example, was sure that the signs of the end times were all around him – and, living in post-reconquest Italy, having to deal every day with fallout from Lombard invaders, who could blame him? – although he disapproved of speculation as to the exact timing of the end.39 Middle Byzantine preachers, often writing from more settled contexts, had to find ways to make the Last Things vivid in their own times, revealing in the process much of value for both historian and pastor – for the historian, a fuller understanding of the motivations and preoccupations of Medieval Byzantine religious culture; for the pastor, insights into the psychology of eschatology as motivation for their flock. Of course, bishops in the medieval Balkans, such as Theophylakt, writing in late eleventh-century Bulgaria, and Eustathios, writing from later twelfth-century Thessaloniki, could also find what seemed to be alarming signs of the times in plundering raids carried out by various barbarian groups in Thrace.40 Theophylakt might wax apocalyptic in a sympathetic letter to his fellow bishop in Vidin, a fortress city on the Danube in northeastern Bulgaria that had been laid waste by Cumans and Pechenegs, likening its sufferings to 37

38

39

40

Notable among them, P. Magdalino, ‘The Year 1000 in Byzantium’, in P. Magdalino (ed.), Byzantium in the Year 1000 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 233–70. For eschatology as an essential, distinguishing characteristic of Christianity, and its particular texture in Orthodox theology, see H. Alfeyev, ‘Eschatology’, in M. B. Cunningham and E. Theokritoff (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 107–20. For the higher pitch of Gregory’s allegorical interpretation, see J. Baun, ‘Gregory’s Eschatology’, forthcoming in B. Neil and Matthew dal Santo (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 157–76. Eustathios’ best-known work, On the Capture of Thessalonike, which provides an eye-witness account of the city’s sack by the Normans in 1185, presents the event in apocalyptic terms; Greek text in PG 136: 9–140; The Capture of Thessaloniki (trans. J. R. Melville-Jones; Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1988).

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the beginning of the end times – but neither Balkan bishop was in the business of predicting an imminent Last Day.41 Like Gregory before them, they aimed to draw every lesson possible for their flocks from the Last Things, and especially to channel eschatological urgency and anxiety into moral urgency. The multiple levels possible in allegorical interpretation are put to good use here. Theophylakt, discussing the signs of the end in Matthew 24, considers them on three levels.42 Many of the verses have an historical interpretation, referring to the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 and the sufferings of the people after the Romans put down the Jewish rebellion. Commenting on Matthew 24:19, ‘Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give such in those days!’, Theophylakt quotes Josephus: ‘Christ is also implying the eating of children, for Josephus speaks of a woman who, on account of the starvation during the siege, cooked her child and ate it’.43 Commenting on verse 20, But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day, he explains,44 He addresses these words to the Jew in the person of the apostles; for the apostles would have already departed from Jerusalem by the time that flight would be necessary. To the Jews, then, He says to pray that their flight not be in winter when they would not be able to flee on account of the severity of the weather; and that it would not be on the Sabbath day when they rested according to the law and would not dare to flee.

The chapter also displays for Theophylakt a strong prophetic or anagogical aspect, pointing towards the advent of antichrist before the Second Coming. Commenting on Matthew 24:16–18, Theophylakt takes Jesus’ advice as giving advice for future events: To suggest the utter inevitability of the calamities, He says that one must flee without turning back, and without taking any thought for what is in the houses, neither clothing nor any other possessions. Some say that the “abomination of desolation” means the Antichrist who will come at the time of the desolation of the world and the destruction of the churches and will sit in the temple.45 41

42

43

44 45

Theophylakt of Ohrid, ‘Letter 57, To the Bishop of Vidin’, in P. Gautier (ed.), Théophylacte d’Achrida Lettres (Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, vol. XVI/2; Thessaloniki: Association de Recherches Byzantines, 1986), pp. 322–5; Margaret Mullet’s Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the letters of a Byzantine archbishop (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997) has helped increase Theophylakt’s visibility. Matthew 24: 1–24, PG 123: 407–414; English translations taken from Blessed Theophylakt’s Explanation of the New Testament (trans. C. Stade; 4 vols; Hope Springs: Chrysostom Press, 2007–08); each Gospel volume is published with a separate title page. PG 123: 412B; The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew by Blessed Theophylact (trans. C. Stade; Hope Springs: Chrysostom Press, 2007), p. 207. PG 123: 412C; Stade (trans.), Matthew, p. 207. PG 123: 409D-412A; Stade (trans.), Matthew, pp. 206–7.

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While giving these two aspects their full due, what interests Theophylakt particularly, however, is the moral and spiritual meaning of the verses. What are we to do about all this? History has happened; the second coming will happen, we know not when. What we can do now is to take heed, and amend our lives. The passage which begins the interpretation of verses 16–18 as literal advice for when Antichrist comes continues with advice of a more spiritual nature: They also interpret these thing as follows: he who is on the housetop, that is, he who has attained the heights of the virtues, let him not come down from that height in order to take with him the things of the body. For the house of the soul is the body. But he must also depart from the field, that is, from earthly things, for the field is earthly life. Neither must we return to take our clothing, which is the former wickedness we have put off.46

His interpretation of verse 20, ‘pray that your flight may not be in winter’ also offers a further, spiritual interpretation, in which the flight represents death: ‘But you, O reader, understand it also in this manner: we must pray that our flight from this life, that is, our end, not be on the Sabbath during idleness from good deeds, nor in winter, when no good fruit is brought forth, but rather in tranquillity of soul, free from all disturbance.’47 In his commentary on Luke’s version of same passage (Lk. 21), Theophylakt employs a similar threefold interpretation, albeit to a slightly different moral and doctrinal end. Particularly interesting is the passage on Luke’s parable of the fig tree (21.28–33).48 Theophylakt first uses the parable as a launching pad for an elegant affirmation of the Christian insistence on the resurrection of the body – again, a doctrine that is not much emphasized today. In a lyrical passage, he contrasts the first and second comings of Christ, asserting the first parousia was for the regeneration of our souls, saving them from the corruption of evil, while the second parousia is for the regeneration of our bodies, freeing them from physical corruption: Just as the first coming of the Lord was for the re-fashioning and rebirth of our souls, so the second coming will be for the rebirth of our bodies. Death came first to the souls of Adam and Eve when they disobeyed, and nine hundred years after their disobedience their bodies underwent death in physical actuality. Consequently, our souls are reborn and made better by the first coming of Christ, and our bodies, 46 47 48

PG 123: 412A; Stade (trans.), Matthew, p. 207. PG 123: 412C; Stade (trans.), Matthew, p. 207. PG 123: 1055D-1058A; The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to Luke (trans. C. Stade; Hope Springs: Chrysostom Press, 2007), pp. 274–6.

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by the second coming. Therefore the Lord says, “When these things come to pass, look up, you who are weighted down by corruption, and you will be set free. For your redemption is at hand, that is, the perfect liberation of both your soul and body together.” The prefix apo [of the Greek world apolytrōsis, redemption] intensifies the sense that the body at the second coming will be completely and totally delivered from corruption by the grace of the Lord who abolishes the final enemy, death. First he overthrew the dark principalities and powers and redeemed our souls. But death remained, feeding upon our bodies. When the Lord abolishes death, it will result in our complete freedom and redemption. And when all this comes to pass, the Kingdom of God will at once be present.49

At this point, the reader conversant with Patristic exegesis will most likely be thinking, ‘this is all very nice and pious, but wholly unremarkable, and conventional, and it’s probably all somewhere in Chrysostom, so what’s the point?’ The point is that Theophylakt, like Gregory the Great, seems conventional to us precisely because he was so successful in his Patristic synthesis that he set the conventional exegetical wisdom.50 We have seen how modern commentators such as Gerhard Podskalsky in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité dismiss Theophylakt’s exegetical works as wholly unoriginal, discounting the creative originality in his work of synthesizing the sources he read.51 Like Gregory in the sixth century for the Medieval West, Theophylakt in the eleventh century for the Orthodox East blazed the trail that would become conventional exegetical wisdom. Along the way, his works also afford glimpses of Theophylakt’s own interests, and of his context – psychological and pastoral insights, occasional forays into current theological issues (especially what we should think about Origen) and the special attention paid to various heresies in his commentary on John’s Gospel.52 The range of his interests, working within the fullness of Orthodox tradition, reminds us not to narrow our interests down to modern preoccupations.

49 50

51 52

PG 123: 1057A-B; Stade (trans.), Luke, p. 275. For Gregory as the key figure for the Medieval West in synthesizing the Fathers and transmitting this Patristic synthesis to future generations, see G. R. Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. vii–viii, 146–7, 152–4; also J. Baun, ‘Last Things’, in T. F. X. Noble and J. M. H. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Early Medieval Christianities c.600-c.1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 606–24 (609–10). Podskalsky, ‘Théophylacte’, col. 545. Theophylakt carries on a periodic dialogue (largely negative) with Origen’s exegesis throughout his Gospel commentaries; see, for example, his dismissal of the teaching attributed to Origen that the punishments in hell will have an end, commenting on Matthew 25: 41–46 (PG 123: 433); the Chrysostom Press translation of Theophylakt’s Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to John (2007) provides a detailed ‘Appendix of Heresies’, from Apollinarius to Valentinus, indexed to Theophylakt’s commentary.

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Fr Andrew again, from Discerning the Mystery: ‘engagement with the past is not simply a process whereby we understand the past, but equally a process of self-discovery which can never be complete.’53 Reading the full range of the Greek Fathers, staying in dialogue with them throughout the tradition, we discover much about ourselves. Engaging with them, we remember more fully whence we have come, and learn to examine more critically and mindfully whither we are headed. Thank God for the patient, grace-filled witness of all our teachers, fathers and mothers, both medieval and modern, who have kept faith with the Fathers, and have not disdained to bring us along with them on the road.

53

Louth, Discerning, p. 37.

5

‘Myriad of Names to Represent Her Nobleness’: The Church and the Virgin Mary in the Psalms and Hymns of Byzantium Krastu Banev

Doctrines that do not lead us into prayer are not at the deepest level theological at all, for theology is about our relationship to God. . . . As we seek to contemplate the glory of the Word made flesh, we kneel beside her whose willing assent made it possible.1 The Virgin is the place of God, the shrine at which we worship – not her but the one born of her. . . . Mary is, if you like, theotopos – ‘place of God’! But in truth, she is more that that, she is ѲεοτÓκος, the ‘one who gave birth to God’. She is not just an edifice, an impersonal temple, in which God is found and worshipped; nor is she simply the ground that was fertilised, the fleece on which rain or dew fell (see Ps. 71 [72].6; Judg. 6.36-38) – she is not a passive instrument in God’s hands; She is God’s partner in the conception and birth of his Son.2 Andrew Louth These quotations from the work of Andrew Louth span some 35 years. Put side by side, they frame Louth’s argument for an essential link between theology and prayer by allowing us to perceive it as something central to his vision as a theologian. We see it developed in his 1977 essay on Mary and the Mystery of the Incarnation and then again in his 2011 paper on the Virgin’s role in the work of John Damascene. Here, Louth interpreted the use of Old Testament typology by 1

2

A. Louth, Mary and the Mystery of the Incarnation: An Essay on the Mother of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (Oxford: S. L. G. Press, 1977), pp. 14, 16–18. A. Louth, ‘John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between Humanity and God’, in L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (eds.), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 153–61 (159).

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the Damascene as pointing to the Virgin not just as a ‘place for God’, a theotopos, but as an active partner with God in the divine economy. Louth’s analysis displays a marked affinity with the work of the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky whose influence is visible already in Louth’s 1977 essay. Where their ideas converge is precisely on the notion of human ‘partnership’ with God. In his study ‘Panagia’, for example, Lossky argued that ‘the divine economy preparing the human condition for the Incarnation . . . is not a unilateral one’.3 For support for this weighty theological affirmation, Lossky turned to the fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas, citing the following key passage from his homily On the Annunciation: The Incarnation was not only the work of the Father and of his Virtue and his Spirit; it was also the work of the will and faith of the Virgin. Without the consent of the all-pure one and the co-operation of her faith, his design would have been as unrealizable (ἀμήχανον ἠˆ ν) as it would have been without the intervention of the three Divine Persons themselves.4

Connecting the points charted so far – in Louth’s earliest and latest work and in those of the Patristic and later Russian Orthodox writers on the Theotokos – we find ourselves under the unmistakable colours of a particular Christian vision focused on humanity’s ‘partnership’ in the work of salvation. The human being whose life is uniquely suited to illustrate this partnership is the Virgin Mary with the active role she played at the Incarnation. What I have to say in the pages that follow is also inspired by this vision of active or ‘living theology’; I am happy to dedicate it to the doyen of Patristics at Durham, Andrew Louth, who first encouraged me to write on this topic, and whose fruitful academic career we celebrate with the present volume.

The question of the Virgin’s transformations New Testament writers describe the role of the Virgin Mary in a way which in its brevity is particularly significant for our discussion. In Luke’s account, she is given the ancillary role par excellence: the ‘slave girl of the Lord’ – ἡ δούλη Κυρίου (Lk. 1.38). The importance of this sketchy image of submission and 3

4

V. Lossky, ‘Panagia’, in E. L. Macall (ed.), The Mother of God: A Symposium by Members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949), p. 30. See also his The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke, 1957), p. 141. Ibid. Citation from Cabasilas, ‘On the Annunciation’, 4. Greek text in M. Jugie, Homélies mariales byzantines II (Patrologia Orientalis, vol. 19; Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1925–26), p. 488.

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obedience cannot be overstated as it contrasts so sharply with the image of action which she receives in the later Byzantine tradition. Here, the Virgin is not only a partner with God in the mystery of salvation, but a leader in her own right – the ‘invincible general’ or ὑπέρμαχος στρατηγÓς – protecting the imperial capital itself. This association of the Virgin with the military defence of the empire continues right until the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453 (at which point it does not die, for it re-emerges later in the struggle for Greek national liberation).5 Risking an anachronistic comparison, we may say that for the Romans of Constantinople, and for their emperor, the Virgin provided a nuclear shield against every possible enemy. It is to her mighty protection (or σκέπη) that they turned in moments of great need.6 This faith in the Virgin’s military power had a unique ‘material’ expression once the cult of relics became established in the capital. A tenth-century emperor, for example, sought the help of the Theotokos to fortify his defences by way of wrapping himself in her veil (or ὠμοϕÓριον), which was kept in a special treasury in the imperial chapel at Blachernae. This took place just before a set of important peace negotiations with Symeon of Bulgaria (893–927) whose army was threatening the very survival of the empire. The historian who recorded the event in the late eleventh century presented this act of faith as part of the strategic military preparations before the mission.7 The Theotokos was joined in this effort by no less powerful an ally than Lazarus, Christ’s friend raised from the dead, whose relics had been imported

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On the sixth century as a turning point in this development, see A. Cameron, ‘Theotokos in Sixthcentury Constantinople’, Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978), pp. 79–108. The vitality of the tradition is seen in the established custom of celebrating Greek independence day on the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) in disregard of historical accounts of an earlier proclamation of the antiOttoman insurrection in Kalamata on 23 March 1821, see U. Öskırımlı and S. A. Sophos, Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 53. In Russia, the Byzantine belief in the Virgin’s protection outlived even the communist revolution. On the legend of the Soviet Field-Marshal Zhukov carrying the icon of the Kazan Mother of God as the protector of soldiers in the Second World War, see K. E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory During the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 154. On St Andrew the Fool’s vision of the protecting veil in the Blachernae church, see his Life by Nicephorus, lines 3722–58, in L. Rydén (ed. and trans.), The Life of St. Andrew the Fool (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995), p. 254. On the related Feast of the Protection, see L. Cross, ‘The Protevangelium of James in the Formulation of Eastern Christian Marian Theology’, Studia Patristica 40 (2006), pp. 380–92 (387). John Skylitzes, Synopsis Historiarum, Emperor Romanos Lakapenos, section 12, ll. 20–6: ὁ δὲ Συμεὼν ἀποστείλας ἐνέπρησε τòν τηˆ ς ὑπεραγίας θεοτÓκου ναòν τòν ἐν τῃˆ Πηγῃˆ, ὃν ὁ βασιλεὺς ’Iουστινιανòς ἐδομήσατο, ἐπυρπÓλησε καὶ τὰ κύκλῳ σύμπαντα, καὶ δηˆ λος ἠˆν ἐκ τούτου μὴ εἰρήνην ἀξιωˆ ν. ὁ δὲ βασιλεὺς ἐν τῳˆ ναῳˆ γενÓμενος τωˆ ν Bλαχερνωˆ ν ἅμα τῳˆ πατριάρχῃ, καὶ ἐν τῃˆ ἀγίᾳ σορῳˆ εἰσελθὼν καὶ ἱκετηρίας ᾠδὰς ἀποδοὺς τῳ ˆ θεῳˆ , τò ὠμοϕÓριον τηˆ ς θεοτÓκου λαβὼν ἐξῄει τουˆ ναουˆ, ὅπλοις ἀσϕαλέσι ϕραξάμενος, in J. Thurn (ed.), Ioannis Scylitzae synopsis historiarum (CFHB 5; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1973), p. 219. Cited and discussed in B. V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 54, 211.

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to aid the military operations against the Bulgarians.8 These examples illustrate the completion of a process whereby from her relatively humble beginnings in the New Testament, Mary has been elevated in her capacity as ‘Theotokos’ and ‘Mother of God’ to become the heavenly protector, or πολιουˆ χος, of the City of Constantinople and, by extension, of all Christians.9 Recent scholarship has made it abundantly clear that a development of such magnitude can be explained only if a number of different factors are taken into account. Attempts to offer exclusive monocausal explanations are doomed to failure, irrespective of the brilliance of the insight they use, whether it is a theological, historical or psychoanalytical one. As Averil Cameron has argued, it is the ‘sheer capaciousness of the theme of the Theotokos’ that continues to fascinate scholars and to invite new approaches.10 In considering this vast topic – the ‘wood with shady leaves under which many shelter’ (in the words of the Akathistos: χαˆι ρε, ξύλον εὐσκιÓϕυλλον, ὑϕ’ οὑˆ σκέπονται πολλοί)11 – I need, first, to indicate where in the shade I wish to place my scholarly rug. The limits of this paper are set to examining the relationship between theology and worship in the Byzantine tradition. I will study this interaction in the case of hymns and homilies for the feasts of the Annunciation and the Dormition. To sharpen my focus, I will take as my guide Psalm 44[45] and examine aspects of continuity and change in its interpretation. It is well known that in the mature Byzantine tradition, the ‘queen’ and ‘daughter’ spoken of in this psalm are taken as a reference to the Mother of God.12 As we shall see, however, the earliest Christian commentators had preferred to see in the female figures in the psalm references to the church. Significant and wellstudied13 developments in the fifth century led to a hermeneutical change whereby the typology of the psalm found a new addressee: Mary, the Theotokos, or ‘God-bearer’ – as the theological agreement emerging from the councils at 8

9

10

11

12

13

See the discussion on Aretas of Caesarea’s homilies ‘On Lazarus’, in T. Antonopoulou, ‘Homiletic Activity in Constantinople around 900’, in M. B. Cunningham and P. Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 317–48 (328–9). The ahistorical side of this ultimately successful development was brought to light by C. Mango, ‘Constantinople as Theotokoupolis’, in M. Vassilaki (ed.), Mother of God. Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Milan: Skira Editore, 2000), pp. 17–25. A. Cameron, ‘Introduction’, in L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (eds.), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium, p. 3. Akathistos, Ikos 7 [N, lines 10–11], Greek text in L. M. Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 12. English translation by Archim. Ephrem Lash, http:// www.anastasis.org.uk/akath.htm [accessed 24 October 2012]. This is still the case in Orthodox worship, and in traditional Roman Catholic worship, where the verse is included in the liturgy for the Feast of the Dormition. Summarized in A. Cameron, ‘The Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Religious Development and Myth-making’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Church and Mary (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 1–21. See also her ‘Introduction’, in M. Vasilaki (ed.), Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 3–11.

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Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) defined her, or the ‘Mother of God’ – as she became known especially after the end of the Iconoclast controversy (843).14 Summarizing this development, Brian Daley has written that: ‘In the half century that followed the Council of Chalcedon, the figure of Mary emerged like a comet in Christian devotion and liturgical celebration throughout the world.’15 In what follows, I will aim to revisit the theme of Marian veneration in Byzantium by offering an argument for the re-evaluation of its scriptural basis. Examining the change of hermeneutical addressee – from Church of God to Mother of God – I will concentrate on two questions which, in my view, still await fuller elucidation. First is the speed with which the change took place in the fifth century, and second is the completeness and irreversibility of the process in later centuries. In other words, I will be asking, first, how fifth-century supporters of the Theotokos were able to establish such a vast scriptural support as they did in so short a space of time, and, second, why later Byzantine theologians appear so reticent about the earlier ecclesial layer of interpretation. In order to answer these two questions, I will attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of a ‘mechanism of orality’,16 whereby through repetition and a particular way of dramatization, a set of scriptural titles and prefigurations – the ‘myriad of names’ in my title – came to be applied exclusively to the Mother of God. I will begin with the later tradition and search for its sources in the formative centuries of Byzantine Christianity by examining a selection of hymns and their basis in earlier homilies – the ‘psalms and hymns’ signalled in my title.17 Using as my guide Psalm 44[45], I will study aspects of continuity and change in its interpretations offered in the fifth, the eighth and the fourteenth centuries – periods which I broadly define as ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ Byzantine tradition, respectively. This diachronic investigation will provide the basis for an explanation of both the initial gathering of speed and the eventual irreversibility of the development of Marian veneration. In this context, I will argue for the key role played by dramatized exegesis in both hymns and homilies in securing the acceptance of new elements in the tradition. 14

15 16

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I. Kalavrezou-Maxeiner, ‘Images of the Mother: When the Virgin Mary Became Meter Theou’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990), pp. 165–72. B. Daley, ‘Introduction’, in his On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, p. 6. Here, I develop the definition given in the entry on ‘Oral Poetry’ in R. A. Greene et al. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 979: ‘Perhaps the most significant mechanism of orality is repetition – from sounds and words to verses, passages, and, in epic and ballad, narrative patterns.’ The phrase echoes Paul’s exhortation in Eph. 5.19 and features in the Byzantine rite as an opening line to one of the hymns during Great Vespers in the eighth tone. Παρακλητική (Athens: Fos, 1987), p. 406.

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The mature Byzantine tradition We begin with the late Byzantine tradition, where the positions we are examining have reached their mature state. The fourteenth-century statesman and theologian Nicholas Cabasilas has left us an eloquent account of the rationale behind the exalted theological status of the Virgin.18 From a vast list of possible sources from the mature tradition, I choose to focus on him because of the particular way he uses the psalms to support his view of the Mother of God. In a set of homilies for the main feasts of the Theotokos, Cabasilas presented her as the ‘fruit of all of God’s creation’. Just as every tree exists to bear fruit and is known by its fruit, so, Cabasilas argued, the world was created in order for the Virgin to be born and Christ incarnate from her.19 We note that Cabasilas’ key phrase is, in fact, a direct quotation from the psalms: ‘The earth shall be filled by the fruit of your labour’ (Ps. 103[104].13, LXX). The interpretation he offered was that Mary should be seen as the person spoken of in the psalm: it is her labour as Mother of God which will give birth to Christ, the divine fruit who will satisfy the hunger and thirst of all who inhabit the earth. Cabasilas’ way of reading the psalms was the established practice in the fourteenth century. We see it also in Gregory Palamas who used the psalms, and in particular Psalm 44[45] to support his teaching on the Mother of God. As he explained in his homily the Dormition, she was the ‘queen’ foretold by the prophet David: Today she has moved from earth to heaven, and now has heaven too as a fitting dwelling-place, a palace meet for her. She has stood on the right hand of the King of all, clothed in vesture wrought with gold, and arrayed in divers colours, as the Psalmist and Prophet says of her; and you should take this garment interwoven with gold to mean her divinely radiant body adorned with every type of virtue. For at present she is the only one who has a place in heaven with her divinely glorified body in the company of her Son.20 18

19 20

Biographical information and discussion of sources, in Y. Spiteris and C. G. Conticello, ‘Nicola Cabasilas Chamaetos’, in C. G. Conticello and V. Conticello (eds.), La théologie byzantine et sa tradition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 315–410. For a theological analysis with a view to the continuation of the hesychast tradition in twentieth-century Orthodoxy, see I. I. Ică, Maica Domnului în teologia secolului XX și în spiritualitatea isihastă a secolului XIV: Grigorie Palama, Nicolae Cabasila, Teofan al Niceei (Sibiu: Deisis, 2008). Cabasilas, ‘On the Dormition’, p. 3, in M. Jugie, Homélies mariales byzantines II, p. 497. Palamas, ‘On the Dormition’, Homily 37.8: ἀπò γηˆ ς μετανέστη σήμερον, καὶ ἐκ δεξιωˆ ν παρέστη τουˆ παμβασιλέως ἐν ἱματισμῳ ˆ διαχρύσῳ περιβεβλημένη πεποικιλμένη, κατὰ τò εἰρημένον τῳˆ ψαλμῳδῳˆ προϕήτῃ περὶ αὐτη ˆς. ‘Iματισμòν δὲ νοήσεις διάχρυσον τò θεαυγὲς ἐκείνης σωˆ μα, πεποικιλμένον ταˆι ς παντοδαπαˆι ς ἀρεταˆι ς. In P. K. Chrestou (ed.), Гρηγορίου τουˆ Παλαμαˆ ἅπαντα τὰ ἔργα, vol. 10, in the series Ἔλληνες Πατέρες τηˆς Ἐκκλησίας, 76 (Thessalonica: Πατερικαὶ ἘκδÓσεις ГρηγÓριος ὁ Παλαμαˆ ς, 1985). English translation in Gregory Palamas, Mary the Mother of God: Sermons by Saint Gregory Palamas (trans. C. Veniamin; South Canaan: Mount Thabor, 2005), p. 73. References to Psalm 44[45] are found throughout the homilies.

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In Palamas’s understanding, the chief value of the psalm is its prophetic prefiguration. His interpretation serves as a good example of the difference between pre-modern and modern exegesis: for the latter, the hermeneutical emphasis is to be placed on a reconstructed original context in which the verse’s main import is as part of a wedding song, ‘a joyous celebration of new life and human sexuality’.21 For Palamas, however, the key verse ‘The queen stood at your right hand’ refers to the special status of the mother of the messianic King of All. In particular, he sees it as pointing to Mary’s exaltation after her death: adorned with every virtue as the perfect hesychast, she is now standing in the place of highest honour to the right hand of the King of All.22 These two examples from Cabasilas and Palamas illustrate the point that in the mature Byzantine tradition, the exalted place of the Mother of God was a normative belief supported by a well-developed method of typological interpretation of the psalms. It is in her capacity as the ‘Queen of Heaven’ that she was also believed to act as the protector of Constantinople, the Queen of cities. One could amplify such illustrations almost ad infinitum by extending the range to include not just texts from the whole of the scriptures, but also nontextual evidence such as icons, dedication of buildings, liturgical vestments, use of relics and so on. My choice was governed by one particular detail which helps us trace the roots of this high tradition in the earlier periods.

The key role of hymns to the Mother of God What is interesting about Palamas’s homilies is their special relationship to the theology of earlier hymns. In the introduction to his famous second ‘Homily on the Entry’, he gives us the exceptionally rare opportunity to hear a Byzantine preacher put himself in a clearly defined relation to earlier hymns; and significantly for our purpose, these are hymns to the Theotokos: I do not consider it necessary to make excuses to you who are around me for what will come later in my homily. You will easily forgive when you take everything into account: the speaker, the words, the extraordinary subject, and also the fact that each of you also needs everyone else’s forgiveness when you compose

21

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R. E. Van Harn, W. Brueggemann and B. A. Strawn, Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 156–7. For Palamas’s use of hesychastic vocabulary to describe the life of the Virgin, see J. Meyendorff, Gregory Palamas (trans. G. Lawrence; London: Faith Press, 1964), p. 149, pp. 232–6. For an updated account of scholarship on Palamas, see R. Sinkewicz, ‘Gregory Palamas’, in C. G. Conticello and V. Conticello (eds.), La théologie byzantine et sa tradition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 131–88.

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A Celebration of Living Theology various hymns to the Mother of God (ἡνίκ’ ἂν τῃˆ ѲεοτÓκῳ πλέκοιτε ποικίλους ὕμνους). And, of course, many such hymns are written by you, because we are all obliged to pay this tribute to the Mother of God, as a community and as individuals, alone and in co-operation with others (συχνοὺς δὲ δήπου πλέκετε, πάντες ὄντες ὑπÓχρεῳ ταύτην ἐκτιννύναι τῃˆ τουˆ Ѳεουˆ μητρὶ τὴν εἰσϕοράν, κοινῃˆ τε καὶ καθ’ ἕνα πάντες, δι’ ἡμωˆ ν αὐτωˆ ν τε καὶ ἀλλήλων). But even as you attempt to render the praise you owe, still you realize that you are far from extolling her as is meet (ὑμνεˆιν πρòς ἀξίαν). For that reason you also share the odes composed for her down through the ages (ταˆις ἐκ τουˆ παντòς αἰωˆ νος ὑπὲρ ταύτης ἐξενηνεγμέναις κοινωνουˆντες ᾠδαˆις), and continually, every day and hour, form an inspired, harmonious and ceaseless choir (ἔνθεον καὶ ἐμμεληˆ καὶ ἄληκτον χορείαν) around the heavenly bridechamber. Come then, holy company, hallowed audience, choir in harmony with the heavenly Spirit (χορòς ἡρμοσμένος οὐρανίῳ Πνεύματι), and assist me with this address, making it a joint effort, not just by listening attentively and directing your thoughts, but also by providing help through your sincere prayers, that the Word of the Father may join in from heaven with my words about His Mother, and grant that I may not strike a completely discordant note (παντάπασιν ἀπᾴδοντα), but rather produce something pleasing (ἐναρμÓνιον) to the ears of God-loving people.23

As an accomplished orator, Palamas begins by outlining the difficulty of his task and then proceeds to make the connection between homily and hymn, which is of interest to us. His aspiration as a preacher is clearly indicated: he believes that, ultimately, hymns are to be considered higher than homilies, and so his task as a preacher was to produce a song. He is both preaching on the songs his congregation knew well, and hoping that his own homily will rise up and be greeted by them as a new song. Palamas’s words can be read as a reference to liturgical song, whether the one ‘worthy hymn’ of the Eucharist,24 or the many hymns to the Mother of God understood precisely as the highest standard of theological reflection. This connection between the writing of theology and the composing of song was given a particularly concise expression in an anonymous hymn still used 23

24

Palamas, Homily 53.4. Greek text in P. K. Chrestou (ed.), Гρηγορίου τουˆ Παλαμαˆ ἅπαντα τὰ ἔργα (vol. 11; Thessalonica: Πατερικαὶ ἘκδÓσεις ГρηγÓριος ὁ Παλαμαˆ ς, 1986). English translation by C. Veniamin, Mary the Mother of God, pp. 17–18. Consider the traditional opening words of the anaphora of St John Chrysostom where ‘hymn’ is placed as the first and this the worthiest of offerings: Ἄξιον καὶ δίκαιον σὲ ὑμνεˆι ν, σὲ εὐλογεˆι ν, σὲ αἰνεˆι ν, σοὶ εὐχαριστεˆι ν, σὲ προσκυνεˆι ν ἐν παντὶ τÓπῳ τη ˆς δεσποτείας σου. The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom, Greek text with an English translation (trans. E. Lash; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 31.

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in the Byzantine rite for the feasts of great ‘fathers’ and ‘teachers’: ‘Let us sing the praise today of the Spirit’s mystical trumpets – the God-bearing Fathers – who sang in the midst of the Church a harmonious song of theology: One unchangeable Trinity, nature and divinity . . .’25 Just as with Palamas, this anonymous composition envisions the theological task as including both preacher and audience, singing together a ‘harmonious song’. In Palamas’s case, such songs are the one thing worthy (ἄξιον) of God and, by extension of Mary the Theotokos, the one who ‘bore God’. Thus, it is in the context of worship that theology acquires the confirmation of its genuineness. The singers of ‘harmonious’ songs are inspired by the Spirit. The gift of ‘harmony’ here is not primarily musical but doctrinal: they proclaim the ‘one unchangeable Trinity’ and the effect of their work is visible in the building of unity as they sing in ‘the midst of the Church’. Conversely, those singing ‘out of tune’ are also those singing ‘outside’ of the church. They are, of course, the heretics, or the ‘dividers’ of doctrinal concord, which alone serves as the basis of unity.26 The idea that truth is found in unity understood as harmony is, of course, very ancient and certainly pre-Christian.27 My reason for focusing on it is not because I want to show that Palamas was an educated ‘Hellene’, which by the standards of his time he undoubtedly was. His discussion of harmony is important for us because it serves the purpose of introducing us to the unique way in which earlier hymns provide the background to the mature Byzantine homiletic tradition. We shall have another opportunity to return to this feature later on. For now, it suffices to say that this important connection reveals the degree to which a preacher like Palamas could expect his audience to share in his rhetorical pursuits. Without giving any direct quotations, he appears confident that he can rely on previous knowledge of hymns to build his sermon. This connection points to the very interesting but still relatively little-researched area 25

26

27

Τὰς μυστικὰς σήμερον τουˆ Πνεύματος σάλπιγγας, τοὺς θεοϕÓρους Πατέρας ἀνευϕημήσωμεν, τοὺς μελῳδήσαντας ἐν μέσῳ τη ˆς ’ Eκκλησίας, μέλος ἐναρμÓνιον θεολογίας, Τριάδα μίαν ἀπαράλλακτον, οὐσίαν τε καὶ ѲεÓτητα. Doxastikon at Great Vespers for the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs (Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom) on 29 January, in Mηναˆι ον τουˆ ’Iανουαρίου (Athens: Fos, 1987), p. 436. The same text is used for the commemoration of the Fathers of Nicaea on the Sunday before Pentecost, in Πεντηκοστάριον (Athens: Fos, 1988), p. 186. On how this image of Patristic harmony is presented in the liturgical tradition via a unique set of ‘hymns of hate’ in which heresy is rejected, see E. Lash, ‘Byzantine Hymns of Hate’, in A. Louth and A. Casiday (eds.), Byzantine Orthodoxies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 151–66. At least as old as Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks from whom it was received into mainstream European culture. J. Strohmeier, and P. Westbrook, Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras (Berkeley: Pennsylvania State University, 2003). On God as ‘Master of Song’, see recently J. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), p. 79.

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of interdependence between hymns and homilies in the Byzantine tradition.28 The clarification of the relationship between homilies and hymns, to which I now turn, is a task required for the fuller comprehension of the process by which Mary’s exalted position became normative in later Byzantium.

The middle hymnic tradition If my argument so far is correct, what we should see in Palamas is the attempt of a preacher to turn the mind of his listeners to the hymns which they share together, the ‘odes’, as he says, ‘composed for her down through the ages’. Among a potentially very long list of candidates for such hymnic influence behind Palamas’s preaching, I will focus mainly on the eighth-century theologian and poet, John Damascene, whose fame as writer of hymns was unparalleled in the later Byzantine tradition.29 The link between Gregory Palamas and John Damascene becomes strikingly visible if one compares their respective homilies on the Dormition. We have already seen Palamas speaking of his inability to give an adequate praise for his chosen subject. John Damascene before him lays out exactly the same argument as a rhetorical excuse before the greatness of his task. Here is how he begins his second homily ‘On the Holy and Glorious Dormition’: No human being can worthily praise the holy passing (ἐκδημίαν) of the Mother of God – not if he had ten thousand tongues and as many mouths! . . . It simply lies beyond the realm of oratory. But since God loves what we offer, out of longing and eagerness and good intentions, as best as we know how, and since what pleases her Son is also dear and delightful to God’s Mother, come, let us again grope for words of praise. So we shall obey your orders, O excellent shepherds so beloved of 28

29

My approach here is indebted to the contributions of Niki Tsironis who has argued for a hierarchy of genres where she sees a ‘filtration process’ occurring when a theme ‘makes its first appearance in poetry, then passes over into iconography, and finally enters the liturgical life of the church’. N. Tisronis, ‘From Poetry to Liturgy: the Cult of the Virgin in the Middle Byzantine Era’, in Vassilaki, Images of the Mother of God, pp. 91–9 (91–2). See also Tisronis, ‘Historicity and Poetry in NinthCentury Homiletics: The Homilies of Patriarch Photios and George of Nicomedia’, in Cunningham and Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience, pp. 295–316; Tisronis, ‘The Mother of God in the Iconoclastic Controversy’, in Vassilaki, Images of the Mother of God, pp. 27–39. His fame is rivalled only by that of his half-brother Cosmas, as the tenth-century encyclopaedia Suda testifies with a glowing entry: ‘The lyrical canons of John and Cosmas have not received nor are likely to receive any comparison, as long as our life shall last.’ Suda, ’IοάννηϚ, iota, 467 [online at: http://www.stoa.org/sol/]. On John’s importance as a hymn writer, see recently Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, pp. 252–82. See also A. Гκενάκου– Mποροβίλου, Ἐπιμερισμοὶ κατὰ στοιχεˆι ον γραϕικὰ καὶ ’Iαμβικοὶ ΚανÓνες Χριστουγέννων, Φώτων καὶ Πεντηκοστη ˆ ς, BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA 19 (2010), pp. 83–97.

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God, as we invoke the help of the Word who became flesh from her, who fills every mouth that is open towards him (Ps. 80[81].11), and who is her only ornament, her perfect commendation. We know that when we begin to praise her, we are only paying what we owe, and that once we have offered this honor we become debtors again, so that our debt [of praise] always remains new, even when it has been discharged (ὡς μένειν τò χρέος ἀεὶ ἀρχÓμενον καὶ πληρούμενον). May she whom we celebrate be gracious to us – she who is above all creatures and reigns over all God’s words as Mother of God . . .30

We have seen many of the themes in this passage reappearing in Palamas: beginning with the standard rhetorical amplification of the importance of the subject matter and moving to the idea that all Christians are in ever renewable ‘debt’, or χρέος, however many praises they offer to the Mother of God. The human incapacity to offer fitting praise finds its only cure in the help, which comes from God ‘who fills every mouth that is open towards him’. This reference to the ‘mouth’ open before God comes from the psalms (Ps. 80[81].11). It is used at the start of one of the long eighth-century poems, or canons, for the feast of the Annunciation. The canon is set as a dialogue between the Angel and the Theotokos and is based on the Gospel narrative. Here, I will not attempt to resolve the question of authorship of this uniquely elaborate poetic composition, which is still sung by those who follow the Byzantine rite today.31 Whichever the author – John Damascene or Cosmas of Maïuma – my argument is that we should be prepared to see the background to our second-millennium homilies in precisely such hymns. This is the line I wish to take when looking for the meaning behind rhetorical questions like the one posed by Gregory Palamas, ‘Is there anyone who is unaware that the Virgin Mother is both that bush and those tongs, which held the divine fire without being burnt?’32 What Palamas considers common knowledge here is the typological connection between Moses’ vision of the burning bush and the birth of Christ from the Virgin. The link with earlier hymns which build on this

30

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Greek text in P. B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos (vol. 5; Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1988), p. 516. Translation in Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, p. 203. For the theological dimensions of John’s treatment of this theme, see Louth, St John Damascene, pp. 153–61. John’s authorship is accepted in Nikodimos the Hagiorite’s important commentary, ‘EορτοδρÓμιον, ἤτοι ἑρμηνεία εἰς τοὺς κανÓνας τωˆ ν δεσποτικωˆ ν καὶ θεομητορικωˆ ν ἑορτωˆ ν (vol. 1; Thessalonica: Kypseli, 1987), p. 383 (Venice original from 1836, p. 209). Louth is of the opinion that the dramatic canon belongs to the oeuvre of Cosmas of Maïuma, St John Damascene, p. 255. Homily 37.15: Τίς δὲ οὐκ οˆἰ δεν, ὡς ἡ Παρθενομήτωρ ἐκείνη τε ἡ βάτος καὶ αὕτη ἡ λαβίς ἐστιν, ἡ τò θεˆι ον πυˆρ ἀπυρπολήτως συλλαβουˆ σα; English trans. C. Veniamin in Palamas, Mary the Mother of God, p. 76; see also p. 58 where Palamas makes the same point at the end of his homily ‘On the Annunciation’, Homily 14.14–15.

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typology becomes immediately visible if we compare Gregory’s statement with the fourth ode in the Annunciation canon. The ode begins with the Theotokos asking the question, ‘But I long to know how the nature of mortal men shall undergo union (ἀνάκρασιν) with the Godhead’, to which the Angel replies as follows: The bush that burned with fire And yet remained unconsumed Disclosed the paradoxical mystery That shall come to pass in you. For after bearing child, You shall remain ever-virgin, O, Pure maiden, Full of grace.33

The same connection between the Virgin and Moses’ vision of the bush is made by Joseph the Hymnographer (810–86) from whom we have the largest collection of hymns in the Byzantine rite. In his Canon of the Akathistos, Joseph addresses the Virgin as the ‘cause of joy’ and asks her on behalf of all the faithful to ‘endue our thoughts with grace that we may cry to you, “Hail, Bush unburned” ’.34 These examples should suffice to make it clear how I see the mechanism of orality working in Palamas’s case. His allusions to earlier hymns illustrate how he, as an orator, seeks to build his argument on the prior knowledge of his audience. In terms of rhetorical theory, what Palamas is doing here is to draw on an ἔνδοξον, that one thing all orators seek to have in common with their audiences and which, as Aristotle noted, is used without spending time to explain it.35 Of course, it is also possible that the typological connection between the Burning Bush and the Theotokos could have been known from learned treatises, like the fourth-century Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa where the connection is made explicit: ‘From this [i.e. the bush] we learn also the mystery of the Virgin: The light of divinity which through birth shone from her into human life did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of her virginity was not withered

33

34 35

25 March, Matins Canon, Ode 4, Mηναˆι ον τουˆ Mαρτίου (Athens: Fos, 1987), p. 206: Κατεμήνυσεν ἡ βάτος, ἀκατάϕλεκτος μείνασα, δεξαμένη ϕλÓγα, Κεχαριτωμένη ἀνύμϕευτε, τουˆ κατὰ σὲ Mυστηρίου τò ἀπÓρρητον. μετὰ τÓκον γάρ, μενεˆι ς ’Aγνή, ἀειπάρθενος. Cited and discussed in M. Barker, Great High Priest (London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 258–61. Canon of the Akathistos, Ode 6, 4: χαˆι ρε ἡ ἄϕλεκτος βάτος, in Triodion (Athens: Fos, n.d.), p. 362. As explained by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, 1356b34: οὐδὲ ἡ ῥητορικὴ τò καθ’ ἕκαστον ἔνδοξον θεωρήσει.

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by giving birth.’36 Later, there appeared more homilies expounding on the same theme,37 and yet Palamas’s explicit reference to hymns points us in the direction of John Damascene and his colleague poets as the more likely type of source behind the assumed common knowledge. In a potentially very large field of references that could support this claim, let me now restrict the analysis to my key verses from Psalm 44[45]. The Annunciation canon is unique in the way it uses this psalm in the troparia of the first ode. This hymn is important for our purpose as the Marian typology in it corresponds exactly to the one we found in Palamas: The daughter addressed by David is again the Theotokos. Poetically, as with all canons, the individual troparia follow a metrical pattern established at the start (the so called εἱρμÓς, which in this case is ’Aνοίξω τò στÓμα μου, sung on the fourth tone). This pattern is then repeated line for line in exact numbers of syllables and accents in each of the subsequent troparia. I will discuss the troparia in my own translation in which I will seek to reproduce the metrical pattern of the original38:

Ἀνοίξω τò στóμα μου καὶ πληρωθήσεται Πνεύματος, καὶ λóγον ἐρεύξομαι, τῃˆ Bασιλίδι Mητρί, καὶ ὀϕθήσομαι, ϕαιδρωˆ ς πανηγυρίζων, καὶ ᾄσω γηθóμενος, ταύτης τήν Σύλληψιν.

Narrator I will open my mouth in hope: May it be filled with the Spirit’s grace That praises may overflow For the Mother and Queen. And I will make a scene In joyful celebration And offer my merry song For her Conception now.

¹δέτω σοι Δέσποινα, κινωˆν τὴν λύραν τουˆ Πνεύματος, Δαυὶδ ὁ Προπάτωρ σου.

Let David your forefather Begin, O Lady, the song for you, And moving his hands again

Narrator

36

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Life of Moses, Book 2, 21, in Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses (trans. A. J. Malherbe and E. Ferguson; Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 59. The background of this interpretation is discussed in the notes on pp. 159–61. The connection is explicit also in the first homily of Hesychius ‘On Holy Mary the Theotokos’, Homily 5.2, in M. Aubineau (ed.), Les homélies festales d’Hésychius de Jérusalem (vol. 1; Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1978), pp. 160–2. On the historical and theological context, see Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 132, n. 6. Brian Daley gives the metrical patterns in the second Appendix to his On the Dormition, p. 247. I have kept the syllabotonic pattern he gives but have modified the number of lines from five to eight to follow the musical divisions indicated by the commas in the Greek printed books. On John’s mastery as a poet and writer of canons, see the final chapter in Louth, St John Damascene, pp. 252–82.

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Ἄκουσον θύγατερ, τὴν χαρμóσυνον, ϕωνὴν τὴν τουˆ ’Aγγέλου. χαρὰν γὰρ μηνύει σοι, τὴν ἀνεκλάλητον.

On the harp of the Spirit say: ‘Listen daughter to The glad voice of the Angel, He brings you a message now: Joy, which no speech can tell’.

Bοωˆ σοι γηθομενος. κλˆι νον τò οὐ ˆ ς σου καὶ πρóσχες μοι, Ѳεουˆ καταγγέλλοντι, σύλληψιν ἄσπορον. εὑˆρες χάριν γάρ, ἐνώπιον Κυρίου, ἣν εὑˆρεν οὐδέποτε, ἄλλη τις Πάναγνε.

In gladness I cry to you: Incline your ear, attend to me, Conception as I now tell – for God – but without a seed. For you found the grace, Before the Lord, O Most Pure, As no woman ever had Found before you today.

The Angel

The Theotokos

Гνωσθήτω μοι Ἄγγελε, τωˆν σωˆν ῥημάτων ἡ δύναμις, πωˆ ς ἔσται ὃ εἴρηκας; λέγε σαϕέστατα, πωˆ ς συλλήψομαι, Παρθένος οὐˆσα Κóρη; πωˆ ς δἐ καὶ γενήσομαι, Mήτηρ τουˆ Κτίστου μου;

How powerful are your words, I wish, O Angel, to understand. How shall it be what you spoke? Say it now clearly. How shall I conceive, unmarried girl and Virgin? How also shall I give birth and mother Him who created me?39

This hymn is a prime example of prosopopoeia, or ‘speech in character’. The lines given by John Damascene to the Angel and the Theotokos abound with psalmic references and include Psalm 44[45] whose typology is directed towards the Theotokos. The method of interpretation is identical to the one we know from Palamas. Both authors are interested in the twin questions of who is speaking in the psalm, and to whom the words are addressed. The chief objective of this way of interpretation is to establish the dramatic ‘persona of the speaker’. The opening εἱρμÓς of the canon addresses the question of prophetic inspiration in a direct way: the poet identifies himself as the ‘persona’ who invokes the Spirit with ‘open mouth’, as in Psalm 80[81]. Confident that his prayerful request will be granted, he then affirms his desire to ‘make a scene’ at the celebrations for the 39

25 March, Matins Canon, Ode 1, Greek text from Mηναˆι ον τουˆ Mαρτίου, p. 205.

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Virgin’s conception. Like someone drunk with the wine of prophecy, he expects his ‘merry song’ to flow out of his mouth in a natural way (the reference to Ps. 44[45] is the verb ‘to belch’ but in the future tense: ἐρεύξομαι).40 The vivid image here is connected with the old theme of ‘sober drunkenness’, found, for example, in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of the ‘cup’ of Psalm 22[23].41 In contrast to the earlier tradition of inner mysticism, the poet sees himself as joining a communal celebration. His interpretation has a clear ecclesiological message: the Spirit’s drink is best enjoyed when shared. The feast needs a company and the ‘personae’ the poet asks to join him are the prophet David, the Theotokos and the Archangel Gabriel. Their dialogue relies heavily on verses from the psalm. First, the king and prophet David is invited to begin by asking the daughter-Virgin to ‘listen’ to the Angel. This key verse is shared by David and the Angel who, in the third troparion, elaborates on the same exhortation: ‘incline your ear’, addressing the words to the Virgin. In the rest of the canon, this dramatic structure forms the basis for a unique dialogue between the Theotokos and the Angel. To summarize our findings so far, the contribution of John Damascene and his colleague poets consists of a dramatized reading, or re-enacting, of the psalm which serves to enhance the comprehension of the Incarnation as a central but ultimately incomprehensible event in sacred history. In turn, this is picked up by later preachers who use the earlier hymns in the development of their own homilies. Above all, what we are witnessing is the continuous working of a mechanism of orality, which builds on a common background in the liturgical use of the psalms and depends on a particular way of understanding their dramatized interpretation.

The contribution of dramatized exegesis The dramatized method of exegesis is not unique to John Damascene. Here, he stands in a well-established tradition flourishing among his eighth-century contemporaries among whom one could mention Germanos of Constantinople 40

41

See the rich ‘Commentary on the Canon of the Annunciation’ in Nikodimos, ’EορτοδρÓμιον, vol. 1, pp. 383–5 (Venice original from 1836, pp. 209–15). On the wider Patristic context, see R. C. Hill, ‘Psalm 45: A Locus Classicus for Patristic Thinking on Biblical Inspiration’, Studia Patristica 25 (1993), pp. 95–100. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On Canticles, Ηοm. 12’, in H. Langerbeck (ed.), Gregorii Nysseni Opera (vol. 6; Leiden: Brill, 1960), p. 362 (the term used is νηϕάλιος μέθη). For more references, see L. F. MateoSeco and G. Maspero (eds.), The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa (trans. S. Cherney; Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 686–7. Important discussion in H. Rahner’s 1945 Eranos lecture ‘Earth Spirit and Divine Spirit in Patristic Theology’, in J. Campbell (ed.), Spirit and Nature (trans. Ralph Manheim; London: Routledge & Kegan, 1954), pp. 122–48 (145–8). On the roots of the idea in Philo, see also in the same volume M. Pulver, ‘The Experience of the Pneuma in Philo’, pp. 120–1.

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and his dramatized Homily on the Annunciation.42 This hermeneutical tradition which asks of its practitioners to compose fictitious dialogues between the chief protagonists of a given story stretches back to earlier writers right through to the second-century apologists,43 and from there to antiquity.44 To say, however, that John is traditional and Palamas is simply following him is to miss the mark in our evaluation of the aspects of continuity and change involved in the process. Palamas is referring to earlier hymns, and John is composing a hymn using the psalms, which were universally regarded as the hymn-book, and thus the teaching tool, of the early Church. The continuity is in the reference point, which both authors share. The difference is in the way in which they appropriate their source: the one in song and the other in preaching. The formative importance of the psalms in this regard was highlighted, already in the fourth century, by Athanasius in his Letter to Marcellinus.45 Further testimony is found in Chrysostom, who presented the entire Christian population, of all ages and walks of life, joining in the singing of the psalms.46 Basil of Caesarea’s elucidation of the power of psalmody also relied on a presumed regular use of and intimate familiarity with the psalms by the faithful who, as he says, ‘chant them at home and in the market’.47 We may infer, therefore, that, as in all times, the popularity of the psalms was facilitated by relatively easy-to-learn musical settings. A number of ecclesiastical writers openly admit that these settings connect them directly with the stillflourishing tradition of the synagogue. Thus, Eric Werner has argued that the Christian use of the psalms in worship represents a unique point of liturgical continuity with Second-Temple Judaism.48 Chief among his sources is the fourth-century historian Eusebius who believed that the chanting of the Jewish 42 43

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46 47 48

Now available in English in M. B. Cunningham’s translation in Wider Than Heaven, pp. 221–46. See, for example, Melito’s dialogues which intensify the presentation of the plague of the Egyptians, or Christ’s final victory, in Peri Pascha, §§24–9 and 101–5. English translation by A. Stewart-Sykes, in On Pascha: With the Fragments of Melito (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2001), pp. 43–4 and 65–7. On the didactic role of hymns, see M. E. Gordley, Teaching through Song in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus (trans. R. C. Gregg; London: SPCK, 1980), p. 102: ‘Yet, the Book of the Psalms is like a garden (παράδεισος) containing things of all these kinds [i.e. of the other books of scripture – KB], and it sets them to music, but also exhibits things of its own that it gives in song along with them.’ Greek text in PG 27:12C. Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 150’, PG 55:498: ἅπαντας τοὺς τὴν οἰκουμένην οἰκουˆντας. Basil, ‘On Psalm 1’, PG 29b:212C. See his ‘Notes on the Attitude of the Early church Fathers Towards Hebrew Psalmody’, in E. Ferguson (ed.), Worship in Early Christianity (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 345: ‘It is psalmody and its music which provides the most important link between the Jewish and Christian liturgies’. Another learned authority on the subject has also argued that ‘an uninterrupted liturgical tradition existed from the days of the synagogue to the Byzantine melodies of the mid-seventh century, according to which the reading of the Scriptures was followed by the recitation or chanting of a poetical homily’. E. Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), p. 11. This section was updated with more examples in the second edition of Wellesz’s monograph in 1961, p. 186.

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Therapeuts was like the Psalmody in his own church. The main description of the Therapeuts comes from Philo’s On the Contemplative Life, which Eusebius had cited approvingly as part of his explicit agenda to establish a link between the ascetical practices in his own day and the tradition of the Therapeuts. One point of similarity, noted by Eusebius, concerned the practice of composing elaborate hymns to be chanted by the men and women of the community at the vigils for the great feasts. The responsorial performance of these hymns is indicated in Eusebius’ clarification that the rest of the faithful also participated in the worship listening to the main chanter and then joining in for the refrains.49 Of course, this kind of worship was not restricted to Greek-speaking believers alone. In the Latin speaking world, Augustine’s account of the ‘antiphonal’ singing adopted by the church in Milan ‘after the manner of the Eastern Church’50 is a well-known but by no means unique witness to what has been described as a ‘psalmodic movement’ in early Christianity.51 Augustine even complained that the beauty of the singing of the psalms was distracting him and that he was ‘giving them more respect than is fitting’.52 In the male-dominated culture of late antiquity, it is striking to hear Ambrose advocating that women be permitted to chant the psalms (probably in a separate choir antiphonally with the men of the community).53 On the role of women in psalmody, there is also the important witness of Jerome’s devoted follower, St Paula, who had joined him in Palestine and had acquired such command of Hebrew that she was able to chant the psalms in the original.54 One way of construing Jerome’s testimony would be to say that Paula learned Hebrew by chanting the psalms. This is, after all, how a language has always been passed to the next generation: first through song and poetry, and then through narrative and argument. In a culture dominated by oral communication, therefore, the psalms provided the first and most direct contact with the faith of the community.55 People would start learning about the 49

50

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Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 2.17.22: οἱ λοιποὶ καθ’ ἡσυχίαν ἀκροώμενοι τωˆ ν ὕμνων τὰ ἀκροτελεύτια συνεξηχουˆσιν, in G. Bardy (ed.), Eusèbe de Césarée. Histoire ecclésiastique (vol. 1; Sources chrétiennes 31; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952), p. 77. Augustine, Confessions, 10.7.15, English trans. in The Confessions of St. Augustine (trans. A. C. Outler; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955; repr. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 157. As described by J. McKinnon, and recently analysed by A. Lingas in his ‘Medieval Byzantine Chant and the Sound of Orthodoxy’, in Louth, Byzantine Orthodoxies, pp. 141–2. Augustine, Confessions, 10.33.49 (Outler, p. 200). Ambrose, ‘On Psalm 1’, Pref. 9, PL 14:925A. Jerome, Ep. 108, 26: ‘discere uoluit et consecuta est ita, ut Psalmos hebraeice caneret et sermonem absque ulla Latinae linguae proprietate resonaret’, in CSEL 55 (Lipsiae: G. Freytag, 1912), p. 345. We can see the cross-cultural vitality of this tradition in the example of Tsarist Russia where the traditional bukvar system of primary education relied heavily on the memorization of the psalms in the old Slavonic language. The first changes to this pedagogy came with the reforms under Peter the Great, see J. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 238.

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faith from the psalms, which in turn would require the community to engage in a continuous and focused effort to read the faith in, and from, the singing of the psalms. What emerges clearly from these testimonies is that it was not simply the words of the psalm but their melodious rendition and the antiphonal singing, which produced the desired effects. ‘A chanted psalm shears away despondency’, is how, in the early fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople summarized the belief in the power of the psalms.56 To extract this power, a person chanting a psalm would look for the change (μεταβολή) in the person of the speaker occurring in the text.57 The terminology used here is one familiar from ancient Greek drama. This dramatic interpretation of the psalms, which first appeared in commentaries and then in homilies, was eventually set to song by John Damascene and his colleague poets, serving as the background for later preachers like Palamas who aspired to turn their homily into song, or psalm. As we are examining a process which took more than a millennium to complete, it is important to emphasize again the familiarity of different audiences across time and space with the book of the psalms in particular, more than with any other scripture. Confident in the previous knowledge on the part of their audience both of the psalms as texts and of the traditional dramatic way of their interpretation preachers and hymn writers alike were assured that a particular take on a well-known verse would be understood. Drawing these arguments together, we can say that John Damascene’s dramatized way of using Psalm 44[45] provides a key element of continuity, which in turn assures minimal friction at the points where we see variations introduced. It is clear that his canon serves a double function – both entertaining and educating the audience. Taking a stance of ‘originality’ in the context of this ‘tradition’, John has contributed an original poetic form, which allows for the individual troparia to be chanted antiphonally by two opposite choirs, each taking a role in the exchange between the Angel and the Theotokos.58 Nevertheless, this new development stands in clear continuity with the traditional antiphonal 56

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Proclus, Homily 2.1: ψαλμòς γὰρ μελοδούμενος ἐκτέμνει ἀθυμίας, discussed in Constas, N., Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 164, 180. As recorded in the anonymous commentary attributed to Origen. Selecta in Psalmos, PG 12:1101A: μεταβολή τοũ λέγοντος, and 1072B: προσώπου μεταβολή. Whichever way one wishes to resolve the problem of authorship for this particular commentary, the dramatized exegesis remains of key importance both for Greek tradition as a whole and for Origen in particular, who first articulates its principles in the Prologue to his Commentary on the Song of Songs. On the ‘persona of the speaker’, see B. Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 1987), pp. 263–76. As the festal canons are still chanted during matins on Mt Athos in Greece.

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singing of the psalms and the established dramatized way of their interpretation.59 We can see how this approach would facilitate the involvement of the audience in the celebration, thus making the message more easily comprehensible to the larger population whose level of education would have been significantly lower than that of their preacher.60 Having emphasized continuity, it is time we turn our attention to the element of change in this evolution.

The earlier tradition We began our study with an analysis of fourteenth-century homilies on the Virgin. The aim of my argument was to establish the presence of what I have called a mechanism of orality in the development of the veneration of the Theotokos in Byzantium. To demonstrate this, I looked at the basis of the later homilies in earlier eighth- and ninth-century hymns. In this final section, my focus will be on an even earlier layer of exegetical and homiletic traditions. Gathering evidence from the works of mainly fourth- and fifth-century writers, I will seek to establish the point at which a decisive change occurred in the tradition. As Nicholas Constas has argued,61 Proclus of Constantinople occupies a central position in the list of key fifth-century authors. Thus, it is appropriate to begin with a brief review of his unique contribution. Proclus’s position is summarized in his statement that ‘the entire miracle of the Virgin birth is hidden in the shadows’.62 Here, we note two important moments. First, we see a preacher eagerly affirming that the ‘entire miracle’ is accessible to those who believe, and then restricting access to that miracle by claiming that it is ‘hidden in the shadows’. The second point is expressed via the key notion of ‘shadow’ (as in Hebrews 10), by which Proclus designates the 59

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An illustrious precedent here is set by the famous kontakia of Romanos the Melodist in the sixth century. For his ‘Mary at the Cross’, which is set almost completely in dialogue, see P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis (eds.), Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), pp. 142–9. English trans. in R. J. Schork, Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit: Romanos the Melodist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 106–14. Here, I follow the conclusion of Jan Barkhuizen who has argued for a ‘lively’ connection between preachers and their audiences, ‘Proclus of Constantinople: A Popular Preacher in Fifth-Century Constantinople’, in Cunningham and Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience, pp. 179–200 (192). For a comparison with Chrysostom, which argues the same point regarding the success of Proclus’ dramatized way of preaching, see M. B. Cunningham, ‘Preaching and the Community’, in R. Morris (ed.), Church and People in Byzantium (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, 1990), pp. 29–47 (32–6). N. Constas, ‘Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995), pp. 169–94. Homily 2.9: Bλέπε ὃλον τò παρθενικòν θαυˆ μα σκιαγραϕούμεον, in Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 172.

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typological dimension of the Old Testament. This approach is strikingly visible already in the opening lines of his First Homily: Today the holy Mother of God and Virgin Mary has gathered us here. She is the spotless treasure of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam, the workshop where the two natures were united, This is the feast of the exchange that brought salvation, and she is the palace where the Logos wedded our flesh, she is the bush with human soul, not consumed by the terrible fire of divinity, she is indeed the swift cloud (Isaiah 19.1) which carried in the body the One who is above the Cherubim. Maria, the slave and mother, the virgin and heaven, the only bridge for God to reach humankind . . .63

The fact that the Old Testament typologies listed here were to become a determining feature for all later preachers is a testimony to Proclus’s homiletic genius. His achievement has been described as ‘stunningly innovative’ and assessed as provoking ‘euphoric reactions’ on the part of his audience.64 His rhetorical training notwithstanding, Proclus’s secret to popularity must also be sought in his ability to uncover the ‘entire mystery’ hidden ‘in shadows’. Here is the justification of his own work as preacher: the ‘shadows’ are the Old Testament scriptures from which his perceptible eye was able to extract fresh and original interpretations. A unique example of such a new interpretation is found in the concluding sections of Proclus’s second homily on the Nativity, where he comments on Zechariah’s vision of the lampstand (Zech. 4.4): Who is this lampstand? It is holy Mary (Τίς ἡ λυχνία; ἡ ἁγία Mαρία). Why a lampstand? Because she bore the immaterial light made flesh. And why (is the lampstand) all of gold? Because she remained a virgin even after giving birth. And just as the lampstand is not itself the source of the light but the vehicle of the light, so too, the Virgin is not herself God, but God’s temple.65

How new was this interpretation? Nicholas Constas affirms Proclus’s originality with a reference to all his predecessors claiming that he ‘exhibits no real dependency on any of them’.66 This is argued on the basis of Proclus’s unique Marian reading of the passage. Thus far, the observation is correct but the notion

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Homily 1.1, in Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 137. Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 133. Homily 2.10, in Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 175 (modified). Constas refers to the list provided by Doutreleau (Hyppolytus, Origen, Didymus, Cyril of Alexandria, Ephrem, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrrhus) to which he also adds a reference to Methodius of Olympus’s Symposium 10.6. Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, p. 190.

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of dependency can have a further meaning. The question that emerges with regard to Proclus is whether he was original in the collection of the scriptural types or in their interpretation. It seems to me that the exclusive focus on his original interpretation has left the problem of collecting the types out of focus. Are we to imagine Proclus as someone with whom the Mariological tradition begins, as it were, from point zero, and to whose industry and insight we owe the compilation of the entire vast collection of types? This is clearly not the case for, just like everyone else in this story, Proclus also stands in a long tradition. To assess his role, let us look at one other interpretation of Zechariah’s vision. In the understanding of his contemporary, Cyril of Alexandria, it is the church which is ‘hidden’ in the type of the prophetic lampstand.67 As in Proclus, it is Christ who is the light shining over the church whose seven lights are the apostles, evangelists and teachers. For Proclus, the seven lights are the seven laws fulfilled in Christ. Proclus also sees the seven conduits as the gifts of the Spirit, whereas for Cyril, the conduits represent the assembly of all the faithful. The two olive trees are evergreen for Proclus, because, just like the Old and the New Testaments, they continuously give witness to Christ. For Cyril, they are the Jews and the Gentiles brought into unity under the light of Christ. The two versions display not only marked differences but also some similarities. My reason for contrasting them is not because I wish to challenge Proclus’s originality. The purpose here is to highlight the existence of the type itself as material readily available for preachers to engage with it. If Leena Peltomaa is correct in seeing that veritable cathedral of Marian devotion in sound, the Akathistos Hymn, as the product of the age of Proclus,68 then we have to ask ourselves with what materials it was built. The sheer scale of hermeneutical effort involved demands a more nuanced assessment of Proclus’s relationship to his predecessors. The significance of this observation becomes clear when we relate it to the speed with which Mariological interpretations emerged and came to dominate the hermeneutical space populated by the types.

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In Zach. 2.4: τὴν γάρ τοι λυχνίαν τὴν χρυσηˆ ν ϕαμεν εˆἰ ναι πάλιν τὴν ’Eκκλησίαν, ὡς τετιμημένην ἐν κÓσμῳ, ὡς διαϕανεστάτην ἐν ἀρεταˆι ς, ὡς ὑψουˆ δὴ λίαν ἠρμένην τοˆι ς τηˆ ς ἀληθουˆς θεογνωσίας δÓγμασιν, ἐϕ’ ᾐ ˆ τò λαμπάδιον, τουτέστι Χριστòς, in P. E. Pusey (ed.), Sancti patris nostri Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini in xii prophetas (vol. 2; Oxford: Clarendon, 1868), p. 330. Discussed in M. Simonetti, ‘Note sul commento di Cirillo d’Alessandria ai Profeti minori’, Vetera Christianorum 14 (1977), pp. 301–30. I am grateful to my Durham colleague Dr Matthew Crawford for sharing his copy of this article with me. Peltomaa, Akathistos Hymn, pp. 107–12. This thesis is reviewed and contested by N. Constas who rejects a composition before Chalcedon but is prepared to accept a date ‘possibly toward the close of the fifth century’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49.3 (2005), pp. 355–8 (356).

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Before we focus on the important question of ‘speed’ in this development, however, let us return once more to the images of ‘daughter’ and ‘queen’ from Psalm 44[45]. These are absent from Proclus (and from the Akathistos hymn). Yet the earlier fourth-century tradition gives an important witness to an ecclesial reading of the types, similar in intent to what we observed in Cyril’s interpretation of the prophetic Lampstand. Thus, in contrast to both John Damascene and Gregory Palamas, Basil the Great identifies the ‘daughter’ of the psalm as the Church: ‘He is addressing the Church (προσκαλεˆι ται τὴν ’Eκκλησίαν) to listen and to keep what is commanded. Incline, he says, your ear. Do not run again to the outside myths but accept the humble sound (τò ταπεινÓν) of the words in the gospels. Incline your ear to the teaching offered here.’69 The main difference between this passage and the ones we examined earlier is in the identification of the addressee with the Church who is the ‘daughter’ invited to listen. The problem which the author tries to solve has to do with the ‘humble sound’ of the Scriptures in comparison with the shiny rhetoric of Ancient Greek literary culture. Basil the Great interprets the psalm with a reference to the full conversion expected of each and every believer, and thus of the Church as a whole, which is asked to abandon the ‘old myths’ and turn to the gospel of Christ. Diodore of Tarsus offers an identical interpretation. For him, the verse ‘clad in garment of cold, of a rich variety’ means the ‘manifold graces of the church’ whom the prophet David personally exhorts with the words ‘Listen daughter’.70 The overall message is one of repentance: the fulfilment of the church’s vocation is conditioned on the rejection of idolatry. In the anonymous commentary attributed to Origen, it is again the church which is asked by the Father to ‘incline her ear and to listen’.71 John Chrysostom, Proclus’s illustrious predecessor, develops further the theme of the Church’s obedience. His understanding of our key verses applied to the Church is directly connected with the incarnation, in which Christ ‘the 69 70

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Basil, ‘On Psalm 44’, PG 29:408C–412D. Diodore, ‘Psalm 44’, in Hill, R. C. (trans.), Diodore of Tarsus: Commentary on Psalms 1–51 (Atlanta: SBL, 2005), pp. 146–7. Greek text in J.-M. Olivier (ed.), Diodori Tarsensis commentarii in psalmos. I: Commentarii in psalmos I-L (vol. 1; Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca 6; Turnhout: Brepols, 1980), p. 274: Τò δὲ «ἱματισμῳˆ διαχρύσῳ περιβεβλημένη, πεποικιλμένη» τὰ ποικίλα λέγει χαρίσματα τη ˆ ς ἐκκλησίας. . . . Ἄκουσον, θύγατερ, καὶ ἴδε καὶ κλˆι νον τò οὐˆς σου. Aὐτòς ὁ Δαυεὶδ παραινεˆι τῃˆ ἐκκλησίᾳ. PG 12:1432B: «κλˆι νον τò οὐˆς σου», πρòς τὴν ’Eκκλησίαν ϕησὶν ο Πατήρ. Outside of the Christian tradition, this identification of listening with the call to conversion can be traced to Philo who interpreted Abraham’s abandonment of his fatherland as the soul’s rejection of the old, i.e. pagan myths. Legum allegoriarum 2.59: χιτωˆ νες δ’εἰσὶ τὰ μέρη τουˆ ἀλÓγου, ἃ τò λογικòν ἐπεσκίαζε. καὶ ’Aβραὰμ γυμνουˆται, ὅταν ἀκούσῃ. «ἔξελθε ἐκ τη ˆ ς γη ˆ ς σου καὶ ἐκ τηˆ ς συγγενείας σου» (Gen. 12.1)’. See also the similar motive in De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 5. Greek text in L. Cohn (ed.), Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt (vol. 1; Berlin: Reimer, 1896; repr. W. de Gruyter, 1962).

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king’ of the Church was seen in the humble form of a servant: ‘ “The queen stood on thy right hand”. The queen? How did she [sc. the Church] who was downtrodden and poor become a queen? and where did she ascend? The queen herself stood on high by the side of the king. How? Because the king became a servant; He was not that by nature, but He became so’.72 Chrysostom sees the ‘queen’ of the psalm standing at the ‘right hand’ of Christ who, through the incarnation, has elevated the Church from her low status. Chrysostom’s interest here is in highlighting the progression from the ‘downtrodden and poor’ church of the Old Testament to that of an exalted ‘queen’ in the New. Chrysostom takes this reading even further by applying a host of other scriptural titles: ‘For observe the Church, how she is sometimes a bride, sometimes a daughter, sometimes a virgin, sometimes a bondmaid, sometimes a queen, sometimes a barren woman, sometimes a mountain, sometimes a garden, sometimes fruitful in children, sometimes a lily, sometimes a fountain: She is all things.’73 What we are given here is a collection of images which the later tradition would use for the Mother of God. This will begin with Chrysostom’s successor on the throne of Constantinople just three decades later. Yet, what we saw in Proclus is wholly absent from Chrysostom’s exegetical horizon where all these images, or types, are seen as references to the Church: Do not stray away from the Church; for nothing is stronger than the Church. The Church is your hope, your salvation, your refuge. The Church is higher than the heaven, it is wider than the earth. It never waxes old, but is always in full vigour. Wherefore as significant of its solidity and stability Holy Scripture calls it a mountain: or of its purity a virgin, or of its magnificence a queen; or of its relationship to God a daughter; and to express its productiveness it calls her barren who has borne seven: in fact it employs a myriad of names (μυρία ὀνớματα) to represent her nobleness.74

Apart from the images of queen and daughter, with which we are now familiar, we have here a ‘myriad’ of other names to represent, as Chrysostom put it, the 72

73 74

Chrysostom, ‘On Eutropius’, Homily 2.6, PG 52:402. On the question of authenticity of this homily, see A. Cameron, ‘A Misidentified Homily of Chrysostom’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 32 (1988), pp. 34–48. I follow W. Mayer’s judgement in her ‘John Chrysostom on Poverty’, in P. Allen, B. Neil and W. Mayer (eds.), Preaching Poverty in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Realities (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2009), p. 104, n. 223: ‘Even if it is inauthentic, it nonetheless refers to real events and is consistent with John’s discourse.’ See also Eadem, ‘John Chrysostom’, in Cunningham and Allen (eds.), Preacher and Audience, p. 108. Chrysostom, ‘On Eutropius’, Homily 2.6, PG 52:402. Ibid.

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‘nobleness’ of the Church. Thus, we can speak of an established earlier tradition of ecclesial reading of the types which after Proclus were to receive a new Marian orientation. This ecclesiological approach forms one of the earliest layers of Christian reflection on the meaning of Psalm 44[45].

Original multiplicity The claim for the pre-eminence of the ecclesial reading holds true for the majority of authors with one notable exception – Athanasius of Alexandria. In his Letter to Marcellinus, Athanasius gives an early witness to a Marian reading of our key verse, where he connects the verse from the psalm ‘Hear, O daughter’ to the Archangel Gabriel’s salutation ‘Hail, O favoured one’: ‘Hear, O daughter, and see, and incline your year; forget also your people and your father’s house, because the King has desired your beauty’. Again, this is like that which is said by Gabriel, ‘Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!’ For indeed, having stated that he is Christ, soon thereafter it [sc. the Psalter] made known the human birth from the virgin in saying, ‘Hear O daughter’. Take note that Gabriel calls Mary by name, since he is dissimilar to her in terms of origination, but David the Psalmist properly addresses her as ‘daughter’, because she happened to be from his seed.75

This Athanasian passage stands at the opposite end to the ones from Cabasilas and Palamas with which I began. At both ends, we have a Marian reading of the key verse of Psalm 44[45]. The difference we observe between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries is one of multiplication and dislocation of hermeneutical layers as part of the mechanism of orality which I have analysed. In this context, my argument needs an important qualification: we must not assume a radical change in the sense of something completely new emerging in the fifth century. The Marian reading of Psalm 44[45] in Athanasius’ Letter to Marcellinus is of crucial importance here because it shows the existence, already before the fifth century, of some well defined elements that were designed to form the later tradition. The same applies to Cyril’s reading of the Lampstand of Zacharias. In the case of Athanasius, we have a clear identification of the Virgin Mary with an 75

Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 6 (reference to Lk. 1.28), PG 27:16BC: ’Iδὲ ὁ μὲν Гαβριὴλ ἐξ ὀνÓματος καλεˆι Mαρίαν, ξένος ὢν αὐτη ˆ ς κατὰ τὴν γένεσιν. ὁ δὲ Δαβὶδ ἐκ τουˆ σπέρματος αὑτουˆ τυγχάνουσαν αὐτὴν εἰκÓτως θυγατέρα προσϕωνεˆι ταύτην. English trans. in Athanasius, Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellinus, pp. 104–5.

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Old Testament type; in the case of Cyril, we have the construction of an ecclesial type which will later become an integral part of the new Marian typology. A further witness to the simultaneous presence of the two layers in the earlier tradition is the Protevangelium of James, where, as Andrew Louth has noted, the purity of the young Virgin is presented in parallel to the sanctity of the Temple.76 The connection is made explicit in the detail of the second apparition of the angel: their first meeting at the well has ended with the frightened Virgin running home, where she continues her work spinning the scarlet and purple cloth for the veil of the Temple. And it is at this point, while she is working for the Temple, that the Annunciation and, with it, the Incarnation take place, followed by an explanation by the angel of the miraculous manner of Mary’s conception. What we see here, therefore, is the Marian and the ecclesial threads literally woven together. The knot, which they form, provides the starting point from which the whole story is presented. Thus we can conclude that the difference between the earliest and the later layers is in the progressive flattening and the homogenization of an earlier multiplicity.

Conclusion The idea which I have presented in this paper was born as a quiet but persistent reflection amidst the noisy experience of regular worship in a Greek Orthodox Church. Anyone familiar with this tradition would know of the ubiquitous presence of the Theotokos there. It is, in fact, very probable that ‘de Maria numquam satis’ is a more fitting descriptor for the Orthodox veneration of Mary than it is for any other tradition for there is simply no church building or liturgical office which does not commemorate her.77 Yet, the immersion of a foreigner in the deep waters of Greek Orthodoxy is a slow process. One hears and sees things repeated many times, often standing for hours in a dark

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Louth, ‘John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between Humanity and God’, p. 156; É. de Strycker, La forme la plus ancienne du protévangile de Jacques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961), §23: Καὶ ἔντρομος γενομένη εἰσῄει εἰς τòν οˆἰ κον αὐτηˆς καὶ ἀναπαύσασα τὴν κάλπιν ἔλαβεν τὴν πορϕύραν καὶ ἐκάθισεν ἐπὶ τουˆ θρÓνου καὶ ἡ ˆ λκεν τὴν πορϕύραν. Καὶ ἰδοὺ ἔστη ἄγγελος ἐνώπιον αὐτη ˆ ς λέγων. Mὴ ϕοβουˆ, Mαρία . . . . The claim of James the narrator to be writing from Jerusalem is significant again because of the city’s connection with the Temple; Strycker, La forme la plus ancienne du protévangile de Jacques, §49. I once heard at a meeting with a Roman Catholic group in Durham that in one of their parishes, Marian hymns are sometimes ‘optional’. This is never possible in Orthodox worship. On the contrary, one regularly has at least several hymns; the option is simply whether the bells should ring or not during the main one.

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church, and without a book. The still predominantly oral acquaintance with this tradition has conditioned my reflection on it as well. In particular, this applies to my argument for the existence of superimposed layers of orality in it. What I mean by layers here is perhaps best illustrated with the way Orthodox clergy wear their vestments in a layered fashion, one on top of the other, or the way they are still expected to say some of the most important prayers ‘mystically’ (or ‘quietly’) while the choir sings the appointed psalm or hymn. If one stands in the sanctuary, or if the church has microphones, what is heard is both the voice of the priest and that of the singers precisely as overlapping layers of sound.78 The fascinating discussion on vestments and sounds is here left for another occasion. In this paper, I have focused only on written texts. However, my approach to them was geared towards understanding how they would function as layers in the context of oral communication. This preoccupation conditioned my approach, which started by removing the second-millennium layers to see what is beneath them. Thus, the first part of the paper sought to demonstrate how the Marian homilies of the mature tradition can be related to the hymns of the middle tradition. Gregory Palamas’s explicit reference to earlier hymns offered the key to unlocking this dynamic. As I argued in the second part of the paper, the parallels between Palamas and John Damascene are so close as to allow us to postulate a direct relationship of dependence, with the later homilies mirroring the uniquely exalted position of the Virgin in the hymns. Given the brevity of the New Testament witness, it was the Old Testament which provided the required volume of scriptural support. Thus, in order to give coherence to my argument and to avoid the sense of almost random leaps across centuries, I focused on Psalm 44[45] and on the practice of its dramatized interpretation as stable components against which to record variations. The most significant variation was discussed in the third part of the paper. Here, I focused on the types which for John Chrysostom pointed to the Church but for his successor Proclus three decades later, equally clearly pointed to Mary, the Mother of God. This change of hermeneutical addressee was absolute in the sense that never again did the application of the types revert to the Church: Mary had completely supplanted the Church at the centre of the symbolic system. In this way, the earlier ecclesiological and Marian layers which we had observed in parallel when comparing Basil, Chrysostom and Athanasius became no longer visible. 78

I am grateful to Timothy Carroll, doctoral student at UCL London, whose ethnographic perspective enriched so much our discussion on the points raised in this paragraph.

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There are two aspects about this process which excite further interest and beg an explanation: first is the speed with which the change is effected; second is the completeness and irreversibility of the process. As to the first of these, the reason behind the astonishing speed of the change is the existence by the end of the fourth century of an established collection of typological references. In other words, the hermeneutical process whereby the Church had attracted the symbolism of the Old Testament should be considered to have reached its completion before the age of Proclus. We have seen this working with the established ecclesial type of the prophetic lamp of Zecharias used in a new way by Proclus. The same applies to the images of daughter and queen from Psalm 44[45] as well as to the ‘myriad of names’ evoked by Chrysostom to ‘represent her nobelness’. In this paper, my coverage of the evidence was not exhaustive and i have no analysed all possible sources. Despite this limitation, what I hope to have achieved is to have demonstrated the importance of distinguishing between originality in offering a new interpretation of a given type, and the original effort involved in identifying the type in the first place. If Proclus deserves credit for the former, the latter was the work of a much earlier group of ecclesiastical teachers, some dating from as far back as the second century. Like everyone else in this story, therefore, Proclus is also to be included in the mechanism of orality which had already put together a vast collection of types. We may now legitimately ask in what form this collection had existed. So far, my argument leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with an oral tradition which may or may not have found a concrete expression in a single written text. Here, I find illuminating the parallel with the thesis of Charles Dodd, who had isolated key Old Testament passages that according to him had exercised significant influence on Jesus and his followers (Isa. 53, Ps. 68[69], Dan. 7 etc.): ‘I am not thinking of a book at all, but rather of something belonging to the body of instruction imparted orally in the main, no doubt, to those whose duties in the church led them to O.T. research; a sort of guide to the study of the Bible for Christian teachers.’79 If the parallel is not too far-fetched, the availability of a similar kind of oral instruction in the fourth and the fifth centuries would mean that, when the moment was ripe, the collection of ecclesiological types could be transferred ‘lock-stock-and-barrel’ to a new addressee. The definition of the Council of Ephesus was surely the catalysing factor. The council was held in 431 and its 79

C. H. Dodd, The Old Testament in the New (London: Athlone Press, 1952), pp. 8–9; S. Witmer, Divine Instruction in Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), p. 183.

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influence determined the universal acceptance of Mary’s title as Theotokos. We know how controversial this was from the exchanges between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople prior to the council. During the troublesome years after the council, the rising popularity of Proclus’s homilies must have played a key role in securing the acceptance of the title. In the ancient world, conciliar decisions alone carried little authority until they had stood the test of the corroborative approval of the wider church and the imperial authorities. And here was the chief contribution of the preacher and the hymn writer of later centuries who carried the decision of the council to the minds and hearts of the people and thus secured a favourable reception. As to the second final point, which is to say the fact that the Mother of God completely ousted the Church from the focal position in the symbolic world of later Byzantine hermeneutics, again, interesting avenues of exploration open up. It is possible that the explanation is similar to the first: Proclus’s homilies facilitate the dissemination of the title Theotokos and contribute to the elucidation of the theology which supports it. His message is, in turn, confirmed and disseminated by subsequent hymn writers who rely on earlier homilies. And finally, by a process of reinforcement and exponential growth, from around the turn of the second millennium, these hymns themselves generate new homilies on the Mother of God, among them the homilies of Cabasilas and Palamas from which we quoted at the beginning of this paper. Once in the second millennium, we notice a change in the new prominence given to liturgical song. We observed this development with striking clarity in Palamas. However, it can also be seen in earlier writers like Peter of Damascus whose meditations contain lengthy verbatim quotations from the hymns for Holy Week and from other liturgical services.80 In both, the hymnic references are meshed into their texts in a way which suggests that their authors are quoting from memory. Palamas in particular was explicit in voicing his expectation that his audience will be able to recall the hymns which he considered important as illustrations to his sermons. What connects all these layers of orality in the tradition, and also keeps together the different parts of my paper, is the element of dramatization in the reading of the verses of Psalm 44[45]. We have seen the continuing application of this dramatic device in different genres: from Biblical exegesis, through homilies to 80

Peter of Damascus, ‘The Third Stage of Contemplation’, in Philokalia, translated from the Greek and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, P. Sherrard and K. Ware (vol. 3; London: Faber and Faber, 1979), pp. 116–19. Discussed in K. Banev, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Philokalia’, in B. Bingaman and B. Nassif (eds.), The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 163–74 (170–1).

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hymns, and then again in later homilies. The liturgical echoes between these different layers form the mechanism of orality, which makes the long tradition of Marian veneration in Byzantium a little more comprehensible and also invites us to appreciate more the continuous effort of those who relied on these echoes to keep their audiences moved, entertained and educated.81

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Mr Francis Garcia’s historical acumen and brotherly patience were invaluable for the initial shaping of this text. Dr Avril Pyman’s hospitality made possible its completion. To both, I am profoundly grateful.

Part Three

East and West in Dialogue

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Christianity and Platonism in East and West John Milbank

Introduction In an essay written some time ago in the 1970s by a then very young Rowan Williams, it was argued that the distinction made by the fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas between the divine essence and the equally divine energies impaired both the divine simplicity and the distinction between the created and the uncreated.1 Williams also claimed that this deleterious development was the result in large measure of an excessive influence of neoplatonism, and in particular of those later neoplatonists like Iamblichus and Proclus, often dubbed ‘theurgic’ neoplatonists, besides their Christian successor, Dionysius the Areopagite. In doing so, he seemed to look askance on all notions of metaphysical ‘participation’ unless they were understood in a very minimalist and ‘de-mythologized’ sort of way. What he appeared to favour instead was a strict notion of divine purity and self-containment only breached by acts of the divine willingness to create and to bestow grace, with ‘deification’ reduced to the idea of agreement with the divine will and purged of any sense of a ‘quasi-material’ sharing in the divine substance.2 1

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R. Williams, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’, Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977), pp. 27–44. Williams is on oral record as no longer agreeing with all of this article and now wishing to qualify his critique of Palamas. However, the article has become canonical for the Palamas debate and therefore must still be reckoned with. Many of its crucial points remain valid, and while its strictures on neoplatonism now appear dated, it also unerringly pinpoints just what is at stake concerning questions to do with the Forms, participation, etc. Williams, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’, p. 41. In this article, he restricts ‘participation’ to meaning a true ‘intending’ of God. But he here, like many others, confuses ‘intentionality’, which derives from Augustine and implies that every thought, as a thought ‘of something’, reaches ecstatically beyond itself, with the different (though not incompatible) Aristotelian idea that to know something is to become that thing through ‘information’ by that thing. Ironically, such a notion as applied to knowledge of God would truly place God on the same plane of being as ourselves in just the way Williams wishes to avoid, unless qualified by Platonic notions of participation as an ‘internal’ sharing that paradoxically coincides with an ‘external’ imitation. (See further in the main

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The same link of Palamas with the traditions of the later, ‘theurgic’ neoplatonists is upheld in a recent book by David Bradshaw, but in an opposite, positive spirit.3 He wishes to praise both, and to do so because they both, in his view, allowed that the divine action really does reach outwards and downwards to create and to deify, while at the same time, the inaccessible divine mystery, which is the sole lure of sanctity, is preserved. In this view, the energies of the divine glory really are God, but they are to be distinguished in some fashion from the divine essence itself. Bradshaw hence endorses a ‘strong’ view of participation, which also sustains a sharp triadic separation between the unparticipated, the participated and the participating. In the present paper I wish to claim that both writers are making a false association. With Williams, I wish broadly to criticize Palamas (though in a slightly more muted manner with which he himself now probably agrees). But with Bradshaw, I wish to defend the theurgic tradition of both the pagans and of

text below.) It is clear that later Williams’ views on many matters (probably including intentionality) evolved, yet at this stage, it is interesting to note the degree to which he was under the influence of a Geach/Anscombe reading of Wittgenstein, Aristotle and Aquinas, combined with a Mackinnonderived Kantian insistence that our knowledge is confined within ascertainable finite limits. Insofar as he also exhibited an urge towards Thomism, not only was his Aquinas Aristotelian, but also his Aristotle was read through the post-Fregean eyes favoured by analytic philosophy. One can, of course, agree with Williams after Geach and Anscombe (Three Philosophers, Oxford: Blackwell, 1961, pp. 7–11) that substance is not for Aristotle some sort of Lockean vacuous punctual point to which qualities might be ‘attached’. (Williams suggests – perhaps rather too emphatically – that Palamas is effectively thinking in such terms.) Yet that the substance is always ‘qualified’ is an ontological as well as logical truth, and so, it is too bald when Williams appears to say that Aristotelian categories like substance, quality and accident only apply to epistemological categorisation (‘algebra of terms’) and not to the actual composition of things. For this reading is more than dubious both philosophically and historically. Philosophically speaking, a brown bag is indeed only a bag because we conventionally take it to be a bag in accord with our practical usage, but if we dye the bag black, it will still truly be usable as a bag, since it will still be operatively-speaking an isolatable, unified item, and its inherent qualities of hollowness and containment will remain. Likewise, a tree really can go through many mutations (but not all) and still remain ‘a tree’ in its constitutive ‘shape’ and not just for our classificatory perception. It is therefore not obvious that substance, quality and accident are not indeed in some strange sense ‘thingy’ as well as meaningful. Nor is the Aristotelian view that ousia is the ‘form’ of a thing as well the real thing itself containable on the ‘sense’ side of the Fregean sense/reference divide which is supposed to be mutually exclusive. Historically speaking, there has always been a hesitation between Aristotle’s mainly logical deployment of the categories in the specifically logical works, and his ontological deployment of them in the Metaphysics. Aquinas unquestionably favours the priority of the latter, since (contra Geach’s reading) he regards the logical categories themselves ontologically as being to do with the way formal realities exist in a universal ‘intentional’ mode in our understanding which truly relates us to the thing known (In Met. VII. 1576). And as I mention in the main text below, the granting of the opposite priority to the categories as logical commences with Porphyry – from whence it was taken up again in the Middle Ages by figures like Gilbert of Porreta, on the basis of a misreading of Boethius, which Aquinas later corrected. Yet Porphyry adopted this stance for reasons of a specific sort of Plotinian Platonism which exalted the logical over the ontological precisely because it thought that true intellection can dispense with the mediation of matter. (This logicism will therefore later evolve into subjective idealism and empiricism.)

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Dionysius. In order to sustain this opposite combination to either of them, I will argue that, actually, it is theurgic rather than Plotinian neoplatonism which tends to urge towards a radical divine simplicity, incompatible with Palamas’s famous or infamous distinction. Why should this matter? The real point is that, in order to grasp the coherence of my combination, one must arrive at a correct understanding of the view of participation entertained by Proclus and Dionysius. I contend that this offers an authentic reading of Platonic methexis, which Christian theology both requires and yet further intensifies. This view is neither the ‘mythological’ one of Bradshaw, which tends to suggest that some sort of literal ‘aspect’ of the absolute can be literally ‘shared out’, nor the demythologized view of the young Williams. Rather, it is a view which regards participation as a drastically paradoxical notion which metaphysics and theology nonetheless cannot dispense with. A supreme aspect of this paradoxicality is the coming together

It is therefore arguable that the choice historically has not been one between a pure reading of Aristotle and a Platonically contaminated one, but rather between two alternative neoplatonic options in the hermeneutics of Aristotle, given that a hesitation between the logical and the ontological is but one of many aporetic cruxes which Aristotle in his ‘esoteric’ writings bequeathed (deliberately?) to posterity’. So far then from it being the case, as Williams suggests, that the neoplatonists (whether Plotinian or theurgic) mistook logical for real entities, in seeking to ‘derive’ species from genus, quality and accident from substance and ‘first’ concrete substance from ‘second’ essential substance, they were rather trying to deal with a lacuna of generative explanation of being which Aristotle’s own usage of the categories to describe the very structure of the real – either the material real (substance, accident, quality, relation etc) or the logical real (genus and species as ‘universal states of substance in the mind’) – manifestly left behind him. For example, it is clear that a quality (like ‘stickiness’) can be transferred from one thing to another, yet Aristotle gives no full account of such a process (which would seem to involve a kind of hybrid formal-efficient causality in his own terms), so that if, indeed, as Williams says, a ‘quality’ should not be seen as an isolatable thing in itself, one still has the question of how a certain ‘mode of being’ is conveyed between substances. By suggesting that qualities can ‘proceed’ or ‘emanate’ from one thing to another and that a lesser thing ‘shares’ in the quality of a higher thing, the neoplatonists do not imply, as Williams says that they do, that a quality might, as a kind of quasi-form ‘float virtually free’ of any substance (such a suggestion awaits Avicenna). It is, however, entirely clear that later on Williams became more sympathetic to Plato, and in Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London: SCM, 2001, pp. 215–29), he provides a nuanced account of participation in the Platonic forms. He rightly insists that a Form is not merely a ‘very perfect example’ of that for which it serves as a model, but is in some crucial sense quite unlike that for which it operates as a causal paradigm. However, he goes too far in seeming to rule out all notions of ‘imitation’ of Forms by lower entities, when both Plato and neoplatonism are, in fact, replete with such language (for example Proclus, Elements of Theology, 29); nor is he right to suggest, after David Burrell (in his earlier thought) that for Aquinas analogy has nothing to do with ‘resemblance’, even though for Aquinas, we are only ‘like’ God in terms of God himself as the common medium (p. 343, n. 76.). Neither does he ever make it clear how real the ‘sharing’ element of participation might be – and elsewhere, he exhibits an antipathy to any talk of ‘degrees of being’, despite the fact that it is hard to eliminate this from any authentic version of Thomism, preferring to think in Scotist and Kantian terms of being as simply the zero-sum negation of a negation: ‘is’ is not ‘is not’, since it is not a predicate. What is also apparent is that, while his arguments against both Palamas and Arius would seem to suggest kinship with a Middle Platonic merging of the One with intellection and other qualities, he also exhibits a certain sympathy with Arius as conceiving God to be so transcendent

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of radical divine simplicity with a divine self-partition so radical that it amounts to a kind of ontological kenosis. For this reason, the rebuttal of Palamas, the endorsement of theurgy and the explication of methexis all run naturally together.

Simplicity, participation and the theurgic How should we understand the distinction between the essence and the energies of God as articulated by Palamas? Is David Bradshaw right to say, along with many other Eastern scholars and theologians, that Western Christendom has wrongly neglected this crucial distinction? I shall argue that this claim is mistaken and that the thought of the best theologians in the West is entirely in harmony with a proper comprehension of the relationship between the essence and the energies of God and in continuity with the thought of the Greek Church Fathers. Everything with respect to such a claim turns upon how one understands the distinction between the ‘unparticipated One’ and ‘participation in the One’ in the neoplatonic tradition. Within this tradition itself, there is much variation and,

3

that he can only mediate his nature through a act of gracious choice (p. 227). And he notes here that the Cappadocians faced the same Plotinian dilemma as the great heresiarch: how can the absolutely ineffable God communicate himself? This sympathy seems implausible in view of the fact that the entire bent of Arius would appear to be against the non-Trinitarian notion of God as a lonely and arbitrary absolute will and equally against any notion of a medium hovering ‘between’ the uncreated and the created. And yet, there is always a hesitation in Williams about embracing the full participatory metaphysics that would counter such a perspective. It is a never-resolved (and from my perspective unnecessary) hesitation between a broadly ‘Catholic’ (loosely ‘Thomistic’) perspective on the one hand, and a more Protestant and ‘Barthian’ perspective on the other, which also involves a certain reading of John of the Cross, linked to an advocacy of the spirituality of the English Benedictine tradition. With this latter perspective, we confront God not as participants, but in a naked stripping of all self-imaging (seen, questionably, as almost necessarily delusory) and self-standing (as if we could ever be in some sort of zero-sum rivalry with God, even from the point of view of spiritual experience) and then await the divine voice and verdict in a total solitude and darkness (which can sound very non-ecclesial). In line with this tendency, Williams also at times refuses Catholic notions of ‘created grace’, which would seem indeed to confine him to the view that the divine grace, glory or ‘energy’ is simply God as acting with respect to his eternal will, not a paradoxical ‘streaming forth’ of God that participatorily remains God. But this surely risks adopting a position like that of Palamas’s opponent Barlaam, by affirming a ‘bare’ divine essence, and it is notable that in the article attacking Palamas, Williams scarcely at all alludes to or defends Palamas’s own defence of the hesychastic experience of the uncreated light and the ‘theurgic’ and synergistic practice of the Jesus prayer. Later and elsewhere, he does indeed defend these experiences in his own voice, just as he fully grasps that God as transcendent is non aliud as well as totaliter aliter – but is all of that really compatible with Williams’ more ‘Barthian’ and ‘ultra-apophatic’ moments, which risk hypostasising the negative? David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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quite often, ambiguity. Is the non-participable a literally ‘separated’ ontological realm that in no respect shares itself? As such, is it to be distinguished from another ontological aspect of the absolute principle that is shareable? Or alternatively, should the distinction be understood in a thoroughly paradoxical fashion such that it is the imparticable One that is itself after all participated? This is the view eventually expressed most directly by Nicholas of Cusa, for whom in his De Coniecturis, the ‘oneness-that cannot-be partaken-of ’ ‘coincides’ with ‘the-power-to-be-partaken-of ’.4 These two different versions of participation can be read as two different comprehensions of transcendent gift – gift-terms being often used to denote ‘emanations’ within the neoplatonic corpus.5 For the first understanding, the absolute One is not itself giving, even if it is obscurely causative, because it is thoroughly impersonal. Donation is here a secondary ontological phenomenon, which only commences at a level below that of the absolutely unified. Everything else somehow derives from the One, yet the One gives nothing of itself. I think that this is essentially the model of Plotinus, as Rowan Williams in his article, in fact, agrees. But in the second understanding, donation is primordial. For this version, that which is entirely withheld – the unparticipated – is the seemingly contradictorily reserved element that must persist within a gift in order for it to be a gift at all. For while a giver gives herself without reserve, unless within this giving, she nonetheless persists in a certain reticence, she could not be distinguished as a giver from her gift, nor survive her own generosity in order to be the subject of a possible further giving in the future. Nor could the gift given be a gift, rather than a merely transferred object, if it was not a sign of the giver who remains absent from the gift itself. Finally, if the giver did not remain absent, but insisted on accompanying her own gift, the gift given would be wholly a form of pressure on the recipient, not his to freely appropriate in his own mode and at his own pleasure. It follows that, with this model, the severe restraint of the One is not the result of impersonality, but on the contrary, indicates a certain transcendent eminence of personhood – even if this was never explicitly articulated by the pagan neoplatonists. Such a model was nonetheless the one implicitly adopted by the theurgic neoplatonists, beginning with Iamblichus. To make this claim can seem curious,

4 5

Nicholas of Cusa, De Coniecturis, 11, 59. See for example, Proclus, The Elements of Theology (trans. E. R. Dodds; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), Props. 7, 18, 20, 23.

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because often, as Rowan Williams rightly emphasizes, these thinkers seem to insist yet more than Plotinus on the absolutely ineffable transcendence of a final unity. This can be seen in relation to their conceptions of both practical and theoretical activity, where they introduce novel levels of mediation between the human soul and the One. In the former case, political reform now imitates a level within the divine realm lower than that of the One, in contrast to the position of Plotinus.6 In the latter case, Iamblichus added a new list of higher ‘theurgic’ virtues to Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry’s list of ‘purificatory’, ‘theoretical’ and ‘paradigmatic’ virtues.7 However, the very status of the theurgic as the ‘higher’ virtues suggests something problematic. For theurgy is a ritual-magical practice that usually remains tied to matter, body and the cosmos. Hence the elevation of theurgic virtue implies a kind of height beyond normal height that involves a strange inversion of hierarchy through recuperation of that which ascent normally abandons. This suggests that there is also an aspect of inversion and of supertranscendence in excess of normal hierarchy in the theurgic reconception of the One itself. And this is indeed the case. For what Williams failed to acknowledge is that in the case of Iamblichus and his intellectual successor Proclus, it is clear that when they speak of the absolute One as ‘imparticipable’, this means that it cannot be parcelled out not just on account of its inaccessibility, but also because it is absolutely equally close to everything that proceeds from it – to all finite, restricted entities (Proclus, Elements of Theology, 53, 57). The point then is that the ‘participated’ for these thinkers refers to elements within a hierarchy that have something that is already always specific to sharing, and which they can only impart in diminishing degrees. But at the very summit of the hierarchy stands something that does so by virtue of the fact that it exceeds all hierarchy. What is absolute and first is really only so in terms of ‘aristocratic height’ because it is greatest in terms of ‘democratic scope’, as the very first proposition of Proclus’s Elements of Theology makes clear (1; see also 21). The One is supremely intimate with everything because nothing exists except by virtue of some sort of unity. Indeed, after the energy of emanation has run out, at the bottom of the material scale, the power of unity still remains, which is why for Proclus, matter regains in the very pit of being a certain simplicity characteristic of its trans-existential summit (59).

6

7

See Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 96. O’Meara, Platonopolis, p. 48.

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My use here of political metaphors for theurgic ontology is justified because Iamblichus, Proclus and, later, Damascius all espoused politically a ‘mixed constitution’ in terms of a balance of the One, the Few and the Many, which involved a certain combining of Pythagorean tradition (as found especially in the Pseudo-Archytas) with that of Plato.8 In the latter’s Republic, there is famously an aporia whereby the city must be ruled by the philosopher who alone knows the good through contemplation, and yet civic involvement is likely to contaminate this knowledge. However, the theurgists, unlike the more separatist Plotinus, tended further to integrate the ontological and theoretical with the political, and so to seek to overcome the aporia: the individual good of the philosopher-ruler is inseparable from the common good of all the people. In accord with this accentuated organicism, which may well be the implication of Plato’s Laws rather than his Republic, Iamblichus and Proclus regarded the everyday ritual life of the city as itself the beginning of the process of deification. The philosopher ruler’s monarchic supremacy was not for them, therefore, simply to do with his contemplative ‘height’, but also with the totally inclusive ‘scope’ of his concern with justice for all, which was tantamount to a concern for the salvation of all. In terms of theoretical ontology, the same pattern whereby, at a starry height beyond the mere summit of a pyramid, a ‘reach’ to the entire base of the pyramid establishes a meta-primacy, is repeated when Proclus says that the first ‘principles’ below the strictly divine realm of unity are being, life and intellect, taken in that serial order (103, 115). For from a strictly hierarchical point of view, intellect is more than life which is, in turn, more than being, but the greater reach of being and then life in terms of scope is taken by Proclus to reverse the normal hierarchical succession. From this, one can conclude that ‘non-participability’ is, in fact, something like a hyberbolic degree of self-sharing, such that unity gives everything to be, yet without dividing itself. Somehow it gives itself absolutely and without stint, yet because it really does give, it is not identical with its diversity of gifts which can only be gifts because they remain less than the giver. Hence, each reality is only real because it has fully received unity, yet its unity is after all but particular and incomplete: as a particular limited mode of coherence, it only ‘shares’ in the One. It must be for this reason that Proclus with seeming inconsistency does after all speak of ‘participation in the One’, even though he often deems the One to be imparticipable (3, 5, 21). 8

See again O’Meara, Platonopolis, pp. 87–105.

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The same paradox is revealed in both Iamblichus and Proclus at every level of the scale of being before that of matter – unity, intellectuality, psychic existence – which always consists within itself in a triad of remaining, outgoing and reversion. This triad can also be constituted as imparticipable, participated and participating (23, 30, 35, 64). However, it is clear that the ‘imparticipable’ element at the top of the triad itself shares in the next level above it and transmits this upper level economically within its own level via the outgoing to the lower elements within its own triadic series, which ‘rebound’ upwards. More evidently than Plotinus, the theurgic neoplatonists assume that such procession also involves participation, and therefore one must conclude that by ‘imparticipable’, they mean that which cannot be communicated within the very act of communication as the very condition for the possibility of communication. Moreover, the fact that ‘imparticipability’ recurs at every lower level of the ontological series (or hierarchy) shows that this paradox can be inverted: what is communicated down the series is supremely that which cannot be communicated, since the ‘imparticipable’ element always takes the lead at each stage. It is perhaps for this reason that Proclus says that the descending scale of internally triadic levels can also be considered (beginning at any point upon this scale) as two different series of ‘complete’ imparticipables and ‘dependent’ participations (64). In strict parallel, what descends is the complete, and so indeclinable, as it were alongside the declinable. This second, paradoxical model of methexis, characteristic of theurgic neoplatonism, can be described as ‘participation all the way up’ – or ‘radical participation’, since it does not allow that there is any literal ‘reserve’ in excess of communication, precisely because it is this very reserve which is ‘impossibly’ communicated. I would argue that it was this model that was generally adopted by Christianized neoplatonism, even though this was not evidently, prior to Dionysius the Areopagite and Boethius, under pagan theurgic influence. This was for very good reasons. First, Christianity as a monotheism insisted on the absolute simplicity of God: a simplicity incompatible with different ‘aspects’ or ‘ontological regions’ within the Godhead. Second, in terms of the doctrine that ‘God is Love’, especially as spelt out in Trinitarian terms, Christianity saw ‘sharing’ as an attribute of God’s very essence, even though it also held, for monotheistic reasons, that this essence is radically incommunicable. Such an affirmation was a crucial aspect of the Christian view that God was eminently ‘personal’ in nature. Christianity was therefore committed to both gift and paradox as fundamental dimensions of its theology.

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To para-doxa – an incomprehensibly original excess of glory, which is to say also, an incomprehensibly original excess of gift.9 This tradition was inherited by Gregory Palamas who – it must be stressed – was loyal to it up to a point. For this reason, he never suggested anything like a ‘real distinction’ in God between the reserved ‘essence’ and the shared ‘energies’. The question is whether he nonetheless admitted a kind of ‘formal distinction’ between the two, if we define a formal distinction as roughly ‘a kind of latent division within a real unity, permitting a real if partial separation on some arising occasion’. This mode of distinction is most of all associated with John Duns Scotus, Palamas’s near contemporary in the West. I shall contend below that Palamas did indeed make a distinction within God along these lines and that to do so was to compromise the divine simplicity to a dangerous degree. A further consideration supporting ‘radical participation’ is that the Fathers normally spoke of ousia in the singular, but of energeiai in the plural. This implies that since God is simple, when his energy is single, it is entirely at one with uncreated ousia. However, when the energies are plural, then they are created energies – and this is the way that the Cappadocians generally spoke of them. A comparison can be made with Aquinas’s consideration of grace: this is either uncreated and identical with God’s eternal essence or created, insofar as it acts upon us (ST I-II q. 110 a.1 resp.). For there is no realm ‘between’ the Creator and the Creation, since, for Christianity, this is an absolute ontological divide. One can make the same point about grammatical tense with respect to the Holy Spirit, in keeping with Pauline usage. As one and uncreated, the Holy Spirit is eminent ‘gift’. But insofar as the Spirit acts upon us, he conveys a diversity of created ‘gifts’. There would be no warrant for arguing that the Spirit is, in itself, according to a lesser aspect, incorrigibly plural. Indeed, one point of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, well-grasped by David Bradshaw, is that it is God himself who acts energetically upon his creatures both to create and to restore them.10 So while the Spirit is, in a sense, the point of ‘linkage’ between the Trinity and the Creation, this does not at all imply any ontological ‘middle realm’. On the contrary, the striking Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit as the ontological connection enabling both creation and deification means that it is God himself who mediates between himself and creatures and that the energies which he communicates to them simply are himself. And herein lies one crucial 9

10

This is true conceptually and probably also etymologically. Whatever may be claimed by some, nothing really forbids us from supposing that all Indo-European ‘do’ and ‘da’ roots are originally concerned at once with gift and outgoing manifestation or intentional action – as in ‘I do’. Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, p. 23.

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difference between the Old Testament and the New: in the former, the divine spiritual energies were only revealed as deriving from him, not as also belonging to him – to his very being, his eternal essence.

Palamas, Scotus and the formal distinction The danger, then, of even any formal distinction between the essence and the energies of God is, first, that it refuses the specifically Christian view of God in terms of gift and paradox. Second, that it displaces the primacy of a Trinitarian logic whereby both the order (logos) and the potent vitality (pneuma) that we see in the world derive entirely from a God who is eminently both these things throughout his very being: ‘all the way up’, he is utterance, and ‘all the way up’, he is living breath. However, it is just these points, which in the main, Palamas, as Bradshaw well argues, was trying to sustain. Against Barlaam, who (rather like Avicenna) took the view that God can only act in this world via created mediating powers, he insisted that the power by which God acts upon the creation is God himself and is uncreated; thus his profoundly mystical insistence upon uncreated energeiai.11 For Palamas, the energies are ellampsesi, or ‘the shinings forth’ of the good from the divine essence (Triads III 2.22). Although distinguished from the latter, they are inseparable from it, just as the faculties of seeing and hearing persist in the soul even when they are not being exercised. Despite the latter circumstance, the soul remains ‘without composition’ (Triads III 2.22). Nevertheless, one cannot, for Palamas, say that the soul simply ‘is’ these faculties – within the soul, they somehow introduce both a plurality and a virtuality. Here, a certain initial resemblance to Scotus appears in view: for Scotus, the soul was as simple in nature as God, and correspondingly, simplicity was not the key distinguishing feature of the divine as it was for Aquinas, for whom the soul is composed of the distinction between essence and being, exemplified (in the case of the human soul) as a distinction between its essence and its active powers of sensing and understanding. Scotus made ‘infinity’ and not ‘simplicity’ the crucial mark of the divine, and regarded all modes of activity, whether infinite or finite, as somewhat qualifying any sheerly simple nature.12 11 12

Ibid., pp. 221–62. See Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, IV, dist 43, q 2, 6 for the view that ‘the intellective soul is the proper form of man’, in contrast to Aquinas who, with greater fidelity to Aristotle, sees the power to understand as but a ‘proper accident’ of the animal soul. See also Op. Ox. II d. 16. q. 1, 3–4, 11–12, 16.

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It is for this reason that Duns Scotus takes Augustine’s ‘psychological analogy’ for the Trinity in an over-literalist fashion. The face that the human soul can image God with respect to simplicity is not for Scotus compromised by the distinction of the intellectual faculties of memory, intellect and will, because these are not really distinct from each other and nor are they together distinct from the substance of the soul. Thus in his earlier Oxford version of his Sentence Commentary, Scotus embraces a doctrine of the soul as radically simple which he later qualifies in the Paris version merely in terms of a formal distinction, as opposed to a real one, between all these elements.13 But then he is prepared to see an equally formal distinction between the divine essence and the divine persons, and between the divine persons themselves which he identifies more by attribute than by relation. For even though, for Scotus, God is infinitely different from us, by virtue of an infinitely high degree of intensity of being, he is still univocally ‘the same’ as us in terms of the formal character of his essential quiddity. This is because Scotus, unlike Aquinas, chose to derive his ontology without reserve from a specific semantics which has itself opted to regard being as logically univocal rather than equivocal. (Scotus reversed his earlier position on this score.)14 One thing which appears problematic about Scotus’s schema is that (albeit partly in the name of the primacy of the will) it seems to edge back towards a Plotinian neoplatonism, as mediated by Avicenna, for which ‘essence’, and especially the essence of the first principle, remains locked within itself, and any donative activity constitutes a secondary ontological moment. Thus for Scotus both divine intellection and the Trinitarian emanations are somewhat secondary, in formal terms, to the absolute primacy of infinity as defining the divine nature.15 Yet Palamas appears proximate to Scotus’s onto-theological schema, because he compares God to the Soul and discovers in both a certain ‘composition’ in terms of the distinction between what is always in active exercise and what remains latent. As with the great scholastic from the Borders, we do not have a ‘real distinction’ here, but we do seem to have a ‘formal distinction’ in terms of an irreducible difference within an albeit simple reality that can become apparent. 13 14

15

See O. Boulnois, Être et representation (Paris: PUF, 1999), p. 202. For a correction of the crude and anachronistic ‘analytic’ renderings of univocity by Richard Cross, see C. Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance’, Modern Theology 21.4 (2005), pp. 543–74. See again, Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus’.

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Likewise, Palamas refuses the idea of the greatest height as a democratic scope because he seems to attribute divine omnipresence only to the divine energies and not to the divine essence. Again, in this instance, he indulges in a somewhat univocalist and onto-theological direct comparison between God and the human person. For he says that God’s nature does not consist in being everywhere any more than our own nature consists in being somewhere (Triads III, 2, 9). Once more this suggests a kind of formal distinction between embodied human nature and spatial position, whereas for Aquinas, an embodied being is necessarily individuated, and individuation occurs in part by virtue of spatiallydetermined (or ‘designated’) matter.16 For Scotus, by comparison, individuation is by virtue of a property of haecceitas inherent in an individual thing, while matter is a quasi-form ‘virtually’ detachable from each formed entity.17 In these two accounts, stability and flux are themselves positioned in very different places: for Aquinas, there is an absolute unity of form that ties a creature to a specific, if mobile habitation, even though the highest part of an intellectual creature aspires beyond this. For Scotus, in contrast, the entire specificity of a creature – which in the human case is an intellectual specificity – retains its individual integrity in a more inward, ineffable manner, which means that it is more subject to exterior locational shifts and internal bodily mutation – given the Scotist acceptance of an Avicennian plurality of forms in a single substance18 – or even to de-materialization, without losing its very identity. Aquinas favours the peasant integrity of a dweller in a specific place and heavenwards aspiration that would sustain this integrity in an eminent fashion; Scotus favours the cosmopolitan integrity of a traveller which survives essentially unaltered every horizontal movement and even every vertical one, since they have been levelled to the horizontal plane of univocity of being. Therefore, for Palamas to say that human nature is detachable from location is perhaps surprisingly to approximate to the cosmopolitan ontological option of the Franciscan. By invoking this comparison for God, he denies, as the Dominican theologian explicitly affirms, that God is more like a super-elevated intuitive rusticus, than he is like a kind of map-reading cosmic voyager (SCG 4.1 (3)).19 In consequence, ‘every place’ becomes for Palamas somewhere that God might 16

17 18 19

Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions 11, a 6. Aquinas fluctuated on the issue of whether matter of itself contributes an ‘extensional’ component, but seems finally to have returned to the Avicennian position that it does. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, II. d. 3 p. 1 q. 4 n. 76; qq. 5–6 n. 188; Questiones in Metaphysica 7. q. 5. Ordinatio IV. d. 11 q. 3. n. 54. See J. Milbank and C. Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge 2001), p. 14 for an ironic comment on this point.

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go, just as I might go to Brighton, having heard of it. But for Aquinas, ‘every place’ as the divine location simply is God, in a way remotely analogous to the way in which my bodily positioning is myself, with the proviso, of course, that in God’s case, ‘his place’ (that he is) is in no way a limitation of his being or essence.

Participation in Platonic and Christian tradition Can Palamas’s idea of an ineffable ‘excess’ within God over his own capacities and activities be true to Christian tradition? I would suggest that it even lags behind the direction in which Plato was earlier moving. For Plato increasingly saw the daemonic rather than ‘divine’ force of eros, belonging to the metaxu, the ‘between realm’, as springing directly from the divine and leading back to the divine. And the latter he regarded not just as ousia but also as dynamis, as something never without its mode of self-manifestation, of acting outwards beyond itself.20 Both these elements, of eros and dynamis, were taken up into Christian tradition, and Gregory of Nyssa deploys the category of dynamis in order to explain how the Trinitarian outgoing from the Father can be fully divine.21 In the case of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, we get the idea of God as in himself eternally outflowing in the double mode of the immanent thearchia of the Trinity and the external hierarchia of the Creation – the two motions being absolutely inseparable within the divine simplicity, such that God is paradoxically ‘carried outside of himself ’ (DN IV.13: 712A). Considerably later than Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor operated with a distinction of Logos and logoi which lies profoundly close to that between the essence and the energies. However, this is by no means for Maximus a distinction within the Godhead itself, nor is there for him any ontological limbo between the created logoi and the uncreated Logos. Instead, the logoi participate in the unity of the Logos and convey its simplicity of order in diverse and yet harmoniously coordinated ways. Conversely, the Logos enfolds within its singularity the myriad diversity of the logoi which are the ‘ideas’ in God of every living creature (Ambiguum 7; 41).

20

21

See J. Milbank, ‘The Force of Identity’ in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 194–216. Milbank, ‘The Force of Identity’.

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Jumping to the most authentic development of Eastern theology in the twentieth century, the mature thought of Sergei Bulgakov remained in continuity with Maximus by stressing that the mediation exercised by ‘quasi-hypostatic’ Sophia (the ‘personating’ dimension of the divine essence itself) nonetheless lies paradoxically on either side of the divide to be mediated and never ‘in the middle’.22 Thus, wisdom is either the uncreated divine essence, or it is the created principle of mysteriously vital and ‘personating’ power that shapes the universe from within. No ‘formal distinction’ of the divine Wisdom from the divine essence is ever clearly invoked by Bulgakov and it would, in fact, be adverse to the entire character of his theological ontology. When it comes to the fundamental division in interpreting the distinction between the imparticipable and the participated, it is therefore clear that Christianity has remained consistently wedded to the view that participation goes ‘all the way up’ – ‘radical participation’. However, it is also possible to argue for a certain affinity between this version and the theurgic current within neoplatonism. Indeed, the strange thing is that Bradshaw himself partially makes this argument, and renders it a crucial aspect of his book. Non-theurgic neoplatonism in the tradition of Plotinus (although the latter is by no means entirely without theurgic elements)23 tends to emphasize a retreat into the soul which is also an ascent upwards into the ontological ‘sphere’ of soul that lies above the body. This ascent continues through the sphere of the intellect up to very threshold of the One, where (aporetically) the climb cannot be completed on pain of abolition of the soul and the intellect in favour of a merging with, and mystical ‘non-comprehension’ of ineffable unity. Via Avicenna, this tradition encourages a transmutation of the Platonic doctrine of recollection of transcendent forms through the operation of occasional ‘triggers’, into a doctrine of a priori understanding in the depths of the soul. Ultimately, both Descartes and Kant stand within this lineage. By comparison, theurgic neoplatonism after Iamblichus tends to emphasize how the soul is ‘fully descended’ into the body and remains there in order to execute ritual acts which attract the ‘descent’ of the divine power. While the capacity of the divine to descend remains distinct from the question of participation, there is clearly a strong link: for the ability of the divine at any level to descend suggests that the higher realm itself condescends, rather than 22

23

See J. Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon’ in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 45–85. However, Plotinus tends to view theurgic descent as belonging to the intellectual life of the soul rather than to the cosmos or to external ritual.

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being but the passive subject of an ontological declension. And since, at any level, according to Proclus, the higher rank is relatively imparticipable (for its specific dignity can never be fully communicated) this implies, as already argued, a paradox in the idea of theurgic descent: what cannot decline, nevertheless does, in a kenotic fashion. In principle, this paradox can reach up ‘all the way to the top’ and one can conceive the One itself as the origin of descent and even as in itself descending, precisely because the very highest is so by virtue of its unlimited ‘spatial’ reach. Such an explicit extremity of paradox is perhaps only arrived at within Dionysius’s Christianization of the theurgic, in the course of his incorporation of the ideas of Proclus. It should, however, be noted here that there are also Christian equivalences of the theurgic prior to Dionysius and that, for all Augustine’s opposition to what he saw as the magical, demon-invoking character of pagan theurgics, there is a certain equivalent of the theurgic moment in his Confessiones.24 It is singing a psalm that ‘shows’ (in a Wittgensteinian sense) to us the answer to the conundrum of time, while such liturgical action is only possible because God himself has descended into time at the Incarnation in order to counteract its fallen tendency to ‘dispersal’. Finally, the entire book concludes with a joining of the self with the cosmos to sing a cosmic hymn of praise. What is more, Augustine’s interest in number, and even adoption of an ontology of number, which runs through the whole course of his works, is to a large degree of neo-Pythagorean inspiration, and an increase in the Pythagorean dimension was, as already alluded-to, one characteristic of theurgic neoplatonism. O’Meara notes a specific parallel in Augustine’s early work De Ordine (II xiv, 39–xvi, 44) in which he refers to the fact that Pythagoras led his disciples to the heights of contemplation through the study of mathematics and then finally applied this number-based curriculum to politics. However, O’Meara wrongly argues that Augustine’s later critique of both empire and pagan magic in the City of God imply a complete rejection of this earlier Pythagorean approach to the political.25 He claims this on the basis of the view that Augustine later rejects any theurgicstyle integration of theoria and politics, which would regard political life on earth as training for the divine life, or any earthly city as a reflection of an archetypal heavenly one. The latter notion was much more to the fore in Iamblichus and 24

25

It is not impossible that Augustine knew something of Iamblichus’s works: see O’Meara, Platonopolis, p. 151. Augustine’s later retraction of the endorsement of Pythagoras in the De Ordine at Retractiones I. 3. 3 clearly alludes to its apparent endorsement of a merely pagan and philosophic ascent to the divine and approach to the political.

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Proclus than in Plato himself: but it does find its echo in Augustine, who is of course here also drawing out a Biblical theme. Right up to the end of his career, a participation in ‘Jerusalem, our mother who is above’ remained an important theme for him, and the ‘City of God’ is an eternal and eschatological as well as temporary reality. In the latter respect, it is not the mere aggregate of the truly saved, but a literal earthly polity that combines elevated theory and popular practice as crucially conjoined elements for the way of ascent.26 Most important of all, one can construe Augustine’s reworked account of deification in terms of a greater stress upon free divine descending grace as parallel to the greater stress upon divine descent within later neoplatonism. This parallel only seems counter-intuitive in the light of the excessive account of divine predestination in Augustine’s final anti-Pelagian writings – an excess which the Western Church mostly retreated from. But so long as divine grace remains linked to synergy of divine and human will and to sacramental mediation (as it is in the bulk of Augustine’s writings), then one can see how the critique of ‘Pelagian ascent’ in the case of inner-Christian debates is truly comparable to the critique of ‘Plotinian ascent’ in the case of neoplatonic discussions. The structural parallels between Christianity and theurgic neoplatonism can therefore be extended beyond the bounds of the direct influence of the latter upon the former. Specific impulses within Christianity supporting the double and co-belonging ideas of ‘descent all the way down’ and ‘participation all the way up’ are clearly Biblical, yet one should not atavistically seek to deny the extent to which pagan attention to its own oracles could lead it to go in a convergent direction. In the case of Iamblichus, one sees above all the idea (highly consonant with Christianity) that while prayer is not about changing the minds of the gods, neither is it mere self-therapy. Instead, it is the theoretical and practical endeavour to arrive at a kind of ‘atunement’ with the divine that will truly allow the divine influence to flow into reality. No doubt our ‘atuning’ is also ultimately the work of the gods, but that issue of causality lies at another ontological level. On the finite level, there is a genuine synergy. When it comes to the issue of how far the divine side of causal influence belongs to the divine essence itself, then it is clear that increasingly Iamblichus ascribes to the notion of a single ‘divine world’ that comprised the One, the Good, gods, daemons and heroes, over and against the non-divine world.27 26

27

See J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 382–442. See Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, I. 9–15; Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’; Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, pp. 135–42; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

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The drive towards ‘monotheism’ in his writings lies here and not in a tendency to posit a ‘one beyond the one’ as a counter-movement to the general efflorescence of divine beings that was part of his deliberate defence of pagan polytheism. Indeed, as with his later successor Damascius of Athens, the positing of everyet greater absolutes was not an attempt to define an area absolutely reserved from all communication, but rather an attempt to indicate an ‘Ineffable’ that could comprise both the one and the many, both absolute reserve and generous outflowing.28 Certainly, in one respect, this all-encompassing ‘One’ is thereby all the more replete and withheld, yet only to the degree that no act of selfdonation lies outside its sway. No doubt the arising aporias here (how to avoid both pantheism and acosmism) require a Trinitarian resolution which can fully articulate the idea that God is in himself an ecstasy beyond himself, which includes an ecstatic reach towards the ‘external’ beyond of Creation. All the same, pagan theurgic philosophy increasingly approached the question of participation in terms of paradox. To sum up the argument so far: Plato, theurgic tradition and then Christian theology (with its ideas of Creation ex nihilo and of the Trinity) were gradually able to render mediation ultimate and pertaining to the Godhead itself, without endorsing the idea that God requires the aid of a mediating sphere between divine and non-divine reality. The danger with Palamas may be that he is too Plotinian and insufficiently Iamblichan (or Proclean or Dionysian). For he too much imagines a ‘One beyond the gift’, a distinction within the divine realm, and in consequence, an unacceptable ontological Mittelmarch – to borrow a name from the sagas of Michael Moorcock.29

Divine action and human theurgy The most impressive part of David Bradshaw’s book is his treatment of the category of energeia or actus. He rightly points out that its importance in Christian theology stems not, in the first place, from Aristotle, but rather from St Paul.30 The latter understands God primarily in terms of an active exercise of energetic power – especially in his development of Pneumatology, as already alluded to. This energetic power at once is God and is the mode of divine self-expression. 28

29 30

See Damascius, De Principiis, R. 76–77, 83; J. Milbank, ‘The Mystery of Reason’ pp. 68–117 – for Damascius, see pp. 85–91. It is relevant to the argument of this essay that Damascius sees ‘participation’ as more ineffable than ‘procession’. See M. Moorcock, Von Bek (London: Gollancz, 1991). Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 120–3.

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Accordingly, it is also that which God communicates, in communicating his very self. This perspective, as Bradshaw argues (in the course of some exemplary exegesis), is what allows Paul to think of human action in synergistic terms: our acts are at once fully ours and yet entirely God’s. Human beings when they are acting aright fully concur with God in terms of both operation and trajectory. This is so far entirely in line with my own conclusions. Equally so is Bradshaw’s contention that this Pauline pattern is paralleled to some degree by the thinking of pagan theurgic neoplatonism – which, like all neoplatonism, synthesized Platonic notions of origination with Aristotelian ideas of action. One could argue that Paul implicitly does just the same thing. Again, one can agree with Bradshaw when he goes on to say that, in effect, Dionysius the Areopagite combined the Pauline and the theurgic traditions.31 But where I would part company with Bradshaw is in not allowing that Thomas Aquinas perpetuates and extends just this synthesis.32 Bradshaw’s denial of this is strange because he strongly endorses (and very well explains) the highly Thomistic view that a priority of act over possibility is required by a Christian ontological understanding. He breaks this down in Aristotelian fashion in terms of an equal priority of definition, substance and causal sequence.33 Respectively: a specific possibility is only definable as the possibility of a specific mode of action; possibility cannot ‘exist’ unless it is somewhat in act; nothing merely potential can move itself, and so, the potential can only be activated by the already actual. Bradshaw also understands how Christianity came to combine an Aristotelian actus purus of the first mover, drawing all to itself, with a neoplatonic idea of the first principle as originator. It is this combination which gives the idea of act as continuous outgoing, as a realization of what Aquinas eventually called virtus, or ‘active potential’. Thus, as he says, Christian theology took over from Plotinus a notion of divine action as an emanating act, a continuous subtle flowing-forth like the immediate procession of light.34 But Christianity, as Bradshaw also realizes, was able to think through the combination of activity with outgoing by replacing, following Boethius, the neoplatonic ‘One’ with esse, the infinitive of being, thereby stopping up the hiatus between the anexistential and the existential that could harbour the idea of ‘the One beyond the gift’. (My diagnosis here would seem to conflict with Jean-Luc Marion’s view 31 32 33 34

Ibid., pp. 119–52. Ibid., pp. 221–62. Ibid., pp. 1–23. Ibid., pp. 45–118.

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that the gift should be aligned with the notion of the One or the Good ‘beyond being’.)35 When it comes to the question of pagan theurgy, Bradshaw very insightfully realizes that the same combination that we find in Paul is at work: the idea of an operation that stems from a plenitude of activity and is always operationally effective. Rightly, he points out that this ‘effectiveness’ is especially emphasized by the Hermetica, and that this stress becomes an element in the eventual synthesis of divergent influences regarding the Christian notion of action.36 (The Hermetic element being crucial to the long-term emergence of experimental science.)37 Thus the Hermetic corpus speaks of God’s non-laborious activity as nevertheless a kind of making as well as a kind of doing. It regards energeia as an ‘active power’ or ‘cosmic force’. In the case of these oracular writings, the theurgic often sounds like the overtly ‘magical’, though Bradshaw rightly stresses that for the Hermetica, just as much as for Iamblichus and Proclus, the theurgic is an enticement of divine power and not an attempt to manipulate this power, which remains entirely free in character.38 All that one might add here is that this may be true of most ‘magic’ in most human societies: it is rarely a matter of sheer automatic ‘recipe’ and perhaps only such when it turns demonic.39 But in accordance with his understanding that the theurgic is not mechanical in nature, Bradshaw rightly points out how important the idea of trusting in tradition was to Proclus, and how pistis for him exceeds gnosis at the very summit of contemplative ascent.40 By observing that for Proclus, as less clearly so for Plotinus, the One is involved in the causation of all that lies below the One, Bradshaw proves just how aware he is of the importance of the theoretical divide between the two neoplatonic masters. The greater caution in the case of Plotinus concerning the reach of both descent and ascent eventually gives rise, as already 35 36 37

38 39 40

See Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 131–5. Christian apologists tend to overstress the importance for the Scientific Revolution of the nominalistvoluntarist current that traces back to the Byzantine philosopher John Philoponus. While this current matters enormously, of perhaps more fundamental importance for the western ‘take-off ’ of science was, as David Hart argues, the Christian freeing of Labour, which led, in the Western Middle Ages, to the greatest period of technological innovation in human history so far. The ‘take-off ’ then had much to do with the Baconian idea of learning from the methods of artisans, and so stressing pragmatic, effective knowledge. But before Francis Bacon, this was the counsel of hermeticists and alchemists. One should also note that when it comes to physics, the nominalist current was always in creative tension with a Platonic current, all the way from Grosseteste to Galileo. See D. Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 56–74; C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 131–5. See M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (trans. R. Brain; London: Routledge, 2001). Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 142–52, 268–70.

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mentioned, to an evolution of the Platonic notion of recollection into an a priori dimension of subjective knowing through the thought of Avicenna, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus.41 For since the divine as the psychic does not quite reach into the corporeal realm for Plotinus, conversely, the way back to unity is a matter of climbing to the already given, rather than a waiting-upon an ever renewed gift through a series of ‘triggering’ finite encounters.42 By contrast, Proclus, after Iamblichus, sustains this more sacramental approach to recollection, reinforced by his view that matter itself recaptures something of the lost simplicity of the One, to which ‘doubling’ intellection is oblivious (Elements, 59).43 By invoking the theurgic legacy, Bradshaw therefore grasps well how the idea of energeia as communicating action and consequently of energeia as synergy goes along with the idea of radical ascent and radical descent, whereby the One is itself a donative outgoing. He is also perfectly right to think that Palamas at heart wished to sustain this combination of ideas. But then so did Aquinas. Why does Bradshaw deny the latter truth and why is he unable to see that it is not Aquinas, but after all Palamas who, like Scotus in a parallel conceptual trajectory (though Palamas is the less drastic), compromises this tradition by introducing a distinction within the godhead itself?

Essence and energies The supposed distinction between the essence and energies of God is, of course, a distinction that is different from that between the divine persons and the divine essence. Nevertheless, a certain tendency in some supposedly ‘neopatristic’ modern Orthodox thought to draw the latter distinction too crudely tends to encourage an embrace of the former distinction. Moreover, as Rowan Williams pointed out, Palamas himself saw the distinction between the essence and the energies as being of the same kind as that between the essence and the persons (Theophanies 12).44 Person is a relational term and essence is not. Moreover, one should agree with Aquinas that the divine persons can only be defined as ‘substantial relations’ 41

42

43 44

See J. Schmutz, ‘La doctrine medievale des causes et la théologie de la nature pure (xiii–xviie siècles)’, Revue Thomiste, CII:1 (January–June 2001), pp. 217–64. See J.-L. Chrétien, ‘The Immemorial and Recollection’, in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (trans. J. Bloechl; New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 1–39. See J. Trouillard, La Mystagogie de Proclos (Paris: Broché, 1982). R. Williams, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’.

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for fear of otherwise introducing a real plurality into the godhead. Yet this does not entirely collapse the persons into the relations because ‘person’ is here rather the point of equipoise between relation and substance. So although a person is exhaustively a donating and receiving positional perspective ‘within’ God, it is nevertheless entirely manifestatory of godhead, entirely at one with the divine essence (ST I. q. 29, a.4 resp.). In this way, the relational distinction of persons, though not of essence, by no means entails a formal (as opposed to an ‘intellectual’)45 distinction between essence and persons, as it does for a Scotistic outlook, which tends, like the entire Franciscan trajectory (which derives from the pre-Franciscan Richard of St Victor) to define person in terms of both autonomy and discrete function rather than relationality.46 Quite often, it has been suggested by modern commentators that the Franciscan position on the Trinity is close to that of the Eastern Fathers. But this claim is highly ironic – for in truth, it is a reading of the Greek sources in terms of the Franciscan Scholastic legacy that engenders this illusion.47 This reading can then appear to concur with later misreadings of the legacy in the East, postPhotius,48 which have been accentuated by the supposed ‘neo-patristic’ current in modern times. Such an insight, it should be said, greatly favours ecumenism, because it shows that some divisions cross the Eastern/Western frontiers, and that these divisions can be just as crucial as those which coincide with these frontiers. Increasingly, we see that what we require is a kind of ‘revised Anglican’ position (roughly that of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’) which coincides with the legacy of the nouvelle théologie: for this position, there is a ‘long Patristic period’ which ends around the year 1300 (even though it starts to disintegrate before then and survives vestigally or through multiple revivals and creative revisions after that date). To some extent, one can trace a parallel collapse of this epoch in both East and West, even if its collapse is far more marked in the latter case. Within this perspective, one can then see how the Franciscan scholastic distortion of the tradition tends retrospectively to buttress a Palamite approach to the distinction of the essence from the energies. In either case, one is being 45 46

47

48

Meaning a distinction merely according to our modus cognoscendi. Specifically, the intellectual generation of the Son is seen as ‘natural’, whereas the loving procession of the Spirit is seen as ‘voluntary’. See O. Boulnois, Être et representation, pp. 107–50. The beginning of an understanding of person in terms of ‘self-command’ can be traced back to Bonaventure. See A. Riches, Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). My position here depends upon the by now well-established view that Augustine’s account of the Trinitarian persons in terms of ‘substantive relations’ (as Aquinas later described them) is simply a more rigorous continuation of the same understanding in the Cappadocian Fathers. See L. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See J. Milbank, ‘The Second Difference’ in The Word Made Strange, pp. 171–94.

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invited to entertain the notion both of a certain plurality and of a certain secondariness within the Godhead – even if, in the case of the Trinity, this takes the form (as with Scotus) of equating the essence with the monarchia. And in this double fashion, a muted form of neoplatonic declining emanation within the divine sphere is indeed, as Williams avers, smuggled back within Christianity. Through a further irony, Thomas Aquinas’s entirely Patristic refusal of any such subterfuge is perversely condemned. One crucial reason for Bradshaw’s being led astray at both these points is his surprising inattention to the question of tense. As already mentioned, the ancient theologians whom he cites speak of a single energy within God, and they choose the singular form to indicate an identity between energy and essence. They only speak of many energies to denote the divine activity ad extra, and hence one can infer that plurality denotes (as it logically and grammatically must) a certain diversity that is consequent upon finitude. Indeed Bradshaw himself rightly declares that the description of energeia and of the divine unity are one and the same, citing John Damascene’s definition of energy as ‘the being of the things that are, the reason of the rational, and the intellectual act of those possessing intelligence’ (De Fide Orthodoxa I.13).49 In other words, the energy of finite things is the being of finite things, and both derive from the one source which is God. But then to say that this energeia is ‘God himself as participated by creatures’ is not to imply any distinction from the essence, but rather that, at the point where essence-as-energy is participated, it is diversified to the exact measure that there are diverse creatures. For being and energy here keep exact pace with each other, as Bradshaw himself implies. To create beings is therefore also to pluralize energy, which is otherwise ‘singular’ (that is to say absolutely unified, not, course, ‘individual’). It might seem, as Bradshaw implies, that this is belied by Gregory of Nyssa’s speaking of the divine energeiai of wisdom, goodness and providence as ‘things around the divine nature’ – a concept echoed by Gregory Nazianzus.50 However, what we have here are plural energies seen as ‘tokens’, ‘reflections’ and ‘traces’ ‘left behind by God’ which are therefore things that proceed from God. As Basil puts it in another passage cited by Bradshaw: ‘his energeiai come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach’ (Epistle 234.1). Nothing in these writings suggests that the energies in the plural are not created realities. So when the two Gregories speak of the energies as nevertheless circulating God himself, what 49 50

Bradshaw, Aristotle, p. 209. Ibid., pp. 166–8.

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they surely wish to indicate is the paradox that from the divine standpoint his outgoing also entirely belongs to him, to his indivisible nature. Here, it should be noted that Barlaam’s position, which Palamas vehemently opposed, may well have failed fully to recognize this point, for all his adherence to an exhaustive Latin division of the divine energy between the uncreated and the created. Hence while, as we have seen, Palamas implies a ‘formal distinction’ between the divine essence and the divine energies, Barlaam perhaps implied an equally ‘formal distinction’ between the divine eternal essence and the divine will to create, in a manner that could also seem akin to Scotus, since the Greek Calabrian explicitly rejected what he saw as the Latin view that all things in God are to be identified with the divine essence. Indeed, as John Meyendorff has noted, Cardinal Bessarion explicitly accused him of introducing anti-Thomist Scotistic perspectives within the Byzantine orbit.51 There is little truth therefore in the idea, frequently canvassed in the past, that, by opposing Barlaam, Palamas was, in effect, opposing Aquinas.52 On the contrary, this opposition would rather point in the converse direction, while at the same time, both theologians may have shared a certain faintly traceable ‘Byzantine Scotism’. It seems, as I have already argued, excessive to ascribe to Palamas, as John S. Romanides does, a ‘real distinction’ of the essence and the energies, while his claim that Palamas is actually closer to Ockham than to Scotus equally seems de trop since the crucial point of resemblance that he cites to make this case, namely the non-attribution of the divine ideas to the divine essence, applies already to Scotus.53 All the same, Romanides is astute in pointing out that just this move must imply a certain voluntarism, such that the divine energies for Palamas are not equally intellectual and forceful, as they were (though Romanides denies this) for the Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus and the Damascene, but rather most fundamentally forceful as willed. In this respect, Romanides points out that Palamas sometimes describes the energies as Aneideioi, which he reasonably claims has a certain anti-Platonic resonance. Here also then, one can locate a certain parallel between late medieval tendencies in both West and East.54 Yet in making this case for later Eastern rupture, one needs to be fair to Bradshaw with regard to Gregory of Nyssa. For it is arguable that the latter so 51

52

53 54

See J. S. Romanides, ‘Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics’, on the web at http:// www.romanity.org/htm/rom.15.en.notes_on_the_palamite_controversy.01.htm See A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). This is a fine work which rightly unsettles the usual claims for East/West duality. Perhaps though it is a little too adroit in evading technicalities. Romanides, ‘Notes on the Palamite Controversy’. Ibid.

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strongly conceives of the infinite as a positive property of God that it is as if he envisages a kind of ultimate ‘substantial darkness’ exceeding all positivities of light and so requiring that even the beatific vision remain an endless epectasis.55 It also seems to be the case that, via the mediation of the Damascene, something of this tradition encourages Scotus’s definition of God as first and foremost a positive infinity, ‘a certain ocean of infinite substance’,56 in the Damascene’s phrase. Scotus takes this to imply that the other divine perfections (good, wise, happy, etc.) are contained merely ‘virtually’ in the infinite since any fully actual containment would compromise an absolute primal simplicity which is not diversified even according to the ‘reasons’ of transcendental qualities which remain ‘formally’ distinct in the infinite as much as the absolute, on account of the univocity of being. In effect then, Scotus reads the Cappadocian notion of what lies ‘around’ God as being ‘other’ to the divine essence in a sense that has some grounding in res, rather than merely in our intellectual perception. And this would seem to be precisely parallel to the position of Palamas. One should take this as a misreading of the Damascene, yet it is arguably made possible by a faint lingering of the Plotinian aporia within Cappadocian thought, bequeathed to later writers – according to which aporia, the more the human person ‘sees’ the One, the more it must become identical with the One which exceeds reason, and so forfeit any comprehension of the One, along with the power of understanding as such. In this way, the perspective of participating being is not just diminished as compared with the (non-)perspective of imparticipable being, but radically incommensurate with it. The lingering of this aporia concurs with the way in which the Cappadocian idea of the journey to the ultimate vision of only the ‘back parts of God’ is also a turning ‘within’ the soul and ‘up to’ the psychic, then intellectual and then extra-intellectual mystical sphere, for all that the ‘psychic’ is, as with Plotinus himself, a collective and not a private realm.57 Yet this is at most an ambivalence: in general, the theoretical wound between henology and intellectualism in Plotinus is here at least on well on the way to being healed within Cappadocian understanding. So, if at times there appears to be a tension between a near-conception of God as a kind of hypostasized negativity 55

56 57

See Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, pp. 72–3; Y. de Andia, Henosis: L’Union à Dieu chez Denys L’Areopagite (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996). For Gregory (eg. Contr. Eun. I. 42) God seems to be so ontologically ‘incomprehensible’ (even to himself, as it were) that ‘shape’ in any sense is precluded. By contrast, for Dionysius God is (ontologically) at once unbounded and bounded in a ‘contradictory’ fashion. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I d.8, q. 4, 198–200, commenting on Damascene, Expositio Fidei I.4. See J. Milbank, ‘The Force of Identity’.

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(the absolutely non-circumscribable and unformed infinite) and an affirmation of the divine excellences, precisely because this tension is left unresolved, it never in the Patristic era takes the proto-Palamite form of a distinction within God himself of his essence and his outward-looking attributes. In this respect, one can now read Dionysius not (as for Balthasar and Daniélou) as being in simple continuity with the Cappadocians, but as imbibing elements of pagan theurgic neoplatonism with just the same gesture by which he implicitly removes the faint Plotinian residues in the Cappadocians that are perturbing for a Christian logic.58 Thus by comparison with the Cappadocians, Dionyisus: (1) More emphatically declares that the mystical path negates both negation and affirmation; (2) Defines the infinite negatively (the in-finite) and declares that God is also beyond the opposition of finite and infinite; and (3) Regards the beatific vision not as endless progress into dazzling darkness but as an immediate overwhelming by superabundant light so dazzling that it is obscure. (This reversal of metaphor is arguably important.) The three new emphases run together and they also concur with a newly theurgic emphasis upon a descent of the ‘blinding’ divine light rather than an ascent into divine obscurity.59 This combination of emphases all came to be eventually absorbed by the Christian West and especially by Thomas Aquinas (the via eminentiae; the apophatic in-finite as opposed to Scotus’s positive identity of the divine essence with infinity; the plenitudinous beatific vision unmediated by any finite being; the descent of the divine into sensory understanding and liturgical experience).60 They were seen by the West as compatible with Augustine’s thinking precisely because Dionysius’s accentuated emphasis upon the descending divine gift concurs well, as I have already suggested, with Augustine’s emphatically antiPelagian account of grace. One should also mention here the mediating role played by the reflections of Boethius, who already combined Augustinian influence with ones stemming from the pagan theurgists. Again, as with Dionysius, the strange thing is that Boethius’s seemingly disturbing and very early ‘renaissance’ of pagan mythology and pagan philosophy within Christian thought, in fact, allows a deepening of Christian philosophy precisely by the incorporation of elements of pagan neoplatonism that prove sympathetic to Christianity because they have their origin partially in attempts to rival Christianity. What especially matters here is 58 59

60

See de Andia, Henosis. This means that the French gothic architectural tribute to the patron saint of France gets it exactly right. The Cappadocian position is, in effect, more ‘Romanesque’. See Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 88–111.

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once again the Proclean relationship of ‘height’ to ‘scope’. In one sense, Boethius drastically demythologizes the Biblical God by stressing that he exists and understands in an ‘eternal present’ (nunc stans) and therefore does not literally remember the past, nor will the future. Equivalently, philosophy ‘consoles’ the wise man by lifting him outside the vagaries of time. However, Boethius, after Proclus, emphasizes that divine knowledge is supreme because it is entirely inclusive: God understands all perfectly after the pure mode of subjective intelligence, but to do so is to incorporate, at a higher intellectual level, all the lesser understanding of the imagination and the senses. This echoes the Proclean notion that the One ‘pre-includes’ all of being, and the equally Proclean notion that the highest intelligence is able to reach downwards with a shaping force into everything. But in deploying this echo, Boethius is able to make it resound further by concluding roundly that the entirely ‘removed’ knowledge of God is also a providential knowing and causing of every single specific reality in the created order.61 In this way, the narratives about God in the Bible are saved after all, and the wise man is seen not just as the contemplative, but also as one who accepts and reads the ways of providence, operating through the instruments of fate which are the ordering patterns within things, rather in the way that for Maximus, the Logos operates through the logoi. For Boethius, God is good as a neoplatonic One (though he is also now esse) in a sense that allows him to be grasped in terms of the ‘supra-moral’, or of a Biblical ‘religious beyond the ethical’. Thus God can deal out apparent bad fortune to the good, or good fortune to the weak, because he is always matching material conditions to spiritual needs according to the often invisible exigencies of a truly comprehensive vision which he alone possesses. The wise man but remotely participates in this vision, both through contemplative ascent and through partial discernment of times and places. (This includes for Boethius, as later for Aquinas, a limited acceptance of the role of juridical astrology.) In this way, Boethius managed partially to synthesize an ‘oriental’ concern with disclosure via ascent with an Augustinian concern with time and eschatology. But this ‘apocalyptic’ unity is rendered possible simply in ‘oriental’ terms of the notion that scope constitutes height, now extended by Boethius from spatial to temporal relevance. For all these reasons, one should argue that the ‘renaissance’ of the pagan in both Boethius and Dionysius in fact allowed a deepening reconciliation of Biblical with philosophical culture. The same thing is true in the later case of 61

Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book V.

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Eriugena: the theurgic and Dionysian stress on the role of ‘inappropriate’ images of God allowed him newly to comprehend the philosophical appropriateness of the ‘grotesque’ symbolic character of so many Biblical usages.62 This helps one, indeed, to comprehend how ‘renaissance’ as such is a specifically Christian event: a re-reading of the classical past through Christian eyes that contributes further insight into the scope of Christianity itself. Not accidentally, King Alfred of Wessex’s translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae lay at the heart of the very first European Renaissance (though one can see this also as the consummation of the entire Hiberno-British insular revival of learning after the Fall of Rome) and first great flowering of European vernacular literature in Anglo-Saxon England, which soon gave stimulus to the Carolingian Renaissance, and thence to all subsequent cultural ‘re-births’. Yet despite all the above, Christian suspicions of these incorporations of pagan philosophy linked to pagan practice may still linger. What does Dionysius means when he speaks of proödoi, or ‘processions’ which, as Bradshaw rightly puts it, ‘both are God and manifest God’,63 and which include the processions of the Trinity itself? Does this not imply a diversity within the Godhead? But Dionysius frees himself from any taint of polytheism by emphasizing a dual usage of attributes of excellence such as ‘being itself ’, ‘life itself ’, ‘power itself ’ ‘subsistence of peace itself ’ and so on. (DN XI.6: 953C–956A). In one sense, these are just different ways of referring to the ‘the one transcendent cause and source beyond source of all things’. But in another sense, they refer to ‘the provident acts of power which come forth from God in whom nothing at all participates. I am talking here of being itself, of life itself, of divinity itself which shapes things in a way that each creature, according to capacity, has his share of these’. Clearly then, in the first case, diversity is merely according to what Aquinas will later term our modus significandi and this applies to the Trinitarian instance also. But real diversity arises only in the second case, when something streams forth from God as a created excellence, to be received by specific creatures. It might nonetheless seem as if, from this passage, it is only the ‘streams’ that are participated in by creatures and not God himself. Indeed, Dionysius sounds unequivocal here. So are not the proödoi or dynameis distinguished from the divine essence in just the same way as the energeiai later for Palamas? But the answer is no, because Dionysius himself invites us to read On the Divine Names

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O. Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image: une archéologie du visuel au moyen âge, Ve-XVIe siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2008), pp. 154–71. Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 179–86.

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in paradoxical terms that imply a participation in the imparticipable. For he declares that not some secondary aspect of God, but God himself is ‘ecstatic’ in character: ‘because of the excess of his yearning goodness he comes to be outside of himself ’ (DN IV.13: 712A). Clearly, Dionysius must think (because God is simple and imparticipable) that this statement is also not true, yet he is still able to make it. But much more explicitly he states this coincidentia oppositorum outright: ‘from his transcendence beyond all He is brought down to that which is in all, in accordance with his ecstatic and supersubstantial power of remaining’(DN IV.13: 712 A-B).64 Somehow, for God to go out of himself is his mode of remaining. Or further: the One who absolutely remains is the one who remains even when he entirely leaves himself. Utter sharing is not alien to God because he alone cannot be self-alienated. Curiously, it is Bradshaw himself who draws attention to this passage, yet does not see just how it precludes any Palamite gloss. Such a gloss is equally precluded by the theoretical circumstance, which he also draws attention to, that outgoing as remaining implies that all creatures inevitably return to God, just as they all themselves share in his power of communicative generation. Both return and theurgic co-working with God necessarily follow upon emanation precisely because this is the emanation of the One itself.65 It is surely for this reason that Dionysius can unite as one the descent of the proödoi as ‘names’ from God, with our liturgical utterance of ‘names’ as names for God. The background to this conjuncture may well be Proclus’s commentary on the Cratylus (a rarely commented-upon text, according to the surviving records), where he endorses Plato’s view that names are ‘naturally’ suitable to the things that they name, rather than being mere conventional labels for concepts in the mind, as for Aristotle. For this means that the guarantee of the stability of language does not lie in mental constancy (a position that will in the long run lead, via Porphyry’s Plotinian reading of Aristotle’s categories as more logical than ontological, to transcendentalism, idealism and empiricism),66 but rather in its ‘ritual’ echo of the eternal Forms themselves, which relies upon the assumption that the material things which words invoke must themselves 64 65 66

I am here using Bradshaw’s own translation. See Bradshaw, Aristotle, p. 181. Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 182–6. Adrian Pabst has shown that there is also a pre-Arabic influence route in the West for the development of the Plotinian tradition in an a prioristic direction which also over-semanticizes, by granting Aristotle’s logic a priority over his metaphysics. This lies through Gilbert Porreta’s reading of Boethius’s appropriation of Porphyry’s logic in a fashion that elides Boethius’s ‘Procleanisation’ of this logic. Pabst argues that this Proclean dimension regarding speech about being in Boethius was then restored by Aquinas. See his Metaphysics: the Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). See also note 2 above.

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enjoy remote kinship with the ideal realm. So unless words which lie between meaning and matter can somehow ‘conjure up’ this link, there can be, for both Plato and Proclus, no truth. In this way, Platonism is far more friendly to the materiality of words and the necessity of images for meaning than is the Aristotelian position.67 It is true that, beyond his pagan master Proclus, Dionysius radicalizes this theurgic mode of participation, because he far more decisively refuses plurality within the divine, while fully ascribing to that sharp disjuncture of being implied by the doctrine of creation. Yet even in the case of Proclus, it is Bradshaw himself who once more contends against any simplistic readings of his ontological divisions in the heavenly realm. If (as Bradshaw rather implausibly denies) Dionysius’s proödoi are first-cousins to Proclus’s henads, then it turns out that the latter, rather like the former, are not just the commencement of divine communication, but also belong entirely within the single divine sphere, along with the originary One itself – thus they are said not to ‘proceed’ but to ‘derive’ from the One (Elements, 21).68 In their aspect as abstract excellences, they are distributed to creatures, but in themselves, as Bradshaw rightly says, they ‘are not simply reified divine attributes, but quasi-personal agents possessing intellects, souls and bodies’.69 ‘Gods’ in other words (though situated, as Proclus makes clear, above the Olympian and even the pre-Olympian deities) whose diversity may still for Proclus be subordinated, along with the ‘One’, to a yet more transcendental mode of unity. It is true, as we have already seen, that Proclus says that the henads can be participated, whereas the One cannot. However, one cannot be entirely sure that this statement rules out a paradoxical reading according to which ‘the henads’ denote the One insofar as it is, after all, participable. Proclus does not quite arrive at the thought of ecstasy, yet his schema is not entirely alien to it either.

The Genealogy of forms In this connection, Bradshaw is entirely right to say that Rowan Williams has no warrant for supposing that neoplatonists were ever so naive as to ‘reify 67

68 69

See R. van den Berg, ‘ “A Remark of Genius and Well-Worthy of Platonic Principles”: Proclus’ Criticism of Porphyry’s Semantic Theory’, in G. van Riel and G. Macé (eds.), Platonic Ideas and Concept-Formation in Ancient and Medieval Thought (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), pp. 155–69. Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 144, 270. Ibid., p. 270.

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merely logical distinctions’, such that attributes are wrenched away from the subjects within which they should lie – whether finite or transcendent.70 Indeed, neoplatonism entirely rests upon (a largely correct) ‘henological’ reading of the Platonic forms whereby, as exemplars, they are not taken to be ‘very big things’ nor even to be ‘universals’ (as the neoplatonic commentaries on Plato make clear), since, for example, the universal abstraction ‘animal in general’ can paradoxically only ever be thought of as itself another instance of ‘animal’, just as P. J. Cohen in modern times showed that an ‘indiscernible’ general member of a set can still belong to a set.71 Thus in the Parmenides (132 b-c), Plato rightly suggests that the ‘third man’ argument deployed by Aristotle against ‘Platonic’ forms as ‘super-individuals’ must also apply against the ‘Aristotelian’ view that forms are abstract universals. But in point of fact, Aristotle himself denies in the Metaphysics that substance as essence or form is properly a universal.72 Rather, it can exist both as the form of a particular thing and in the mode of a universal in the mind that comprehends it. But in itself, form is indifferent to either universal or particular. Hence, Lloyd Gerson is right to say that at this point, Aristotle agrees with Platonism about one characteristic of form, even if the Stagirite wrongly (and very oddly) supposes that for Plato forms were super-individuals.73 Moreover, when he attacks forms as separable universals rather than as separable super-individuals, it is possible that he is not criticizing Platonic forms at all, but some other philosophical construal of their character. Relevant here is the evidence from the Phaedrus (249 c) that Plato did not deny the ‘Aristotelian’ process of acquiring a ‘universal’ knowledge of form by process of mental abstraction: indeed, how could the Platonic question as to the nature of the existence of ‘the one in many’ ever arise, were we not capable of this process? However, as the neoplatonic commentaries on this passage suggest, ‘abstraction’ does not render ‘recollection’ redundant because precisely the Aristotelian refusal of the form as mere universal (which would tend to engender a nominalist reduction of universal to fiction) leaves the question of the origin of eidos and of the capacity for specifically intellectual ‘recognition’ of eidos as first derived from the senses, entirely unanswered.74 What mediates 70

71 72 73 74

Williams, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’; Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 268–71. However, I would doubt if Williams would any longer subscribe to this view. See A. Badiou, Being and Event (trans. O. Feltham; London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 367–71. Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII, xii. 11-xvii. 12, 1038b1–1041b33. L. P. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2005), pp. 209–41. See C. Helmig, ‘What is the Systematic Place of Abstraction and Concept Formation in Plato’s Philosophy? Ancient and Modern Readings of Phaedrus 249 b-c’, in Platonic Ideas and Concept Formation in Ancient and Medieval Thought (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), pp. 83–97.

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between ‘abstraction’ and ‘recollection’ (of knowledge once had by a pre-existent soul) for Proclus is a certain ‘trace’ of the forms abiding in the soul: this is not a kind of a priori understanding, but rather a power of the mind to synthesize and unite.75 Thus, we do not for Proclus know ‘in advance’, as for Kant, an innate conceptual repertoire, but rather, we only know what the mind can do after it has done it. This of course raises in a new form the ‘Meno problematic’ concerning how we ever seek to know the unknown: in this case, how can the mind know how to process the sense data in a way that will reproduce the logoi that inhere in created things that it is not already aware of from the outset? Here Proclus suggests that just as the innate logoi ousiōdeis through active exercise and not mere passive recall recollect the forms (and this is entirely true to Plato’s Meno, as opposed to caricatured renderings), so also an imaginative capacity for doxa (meaning here something like ‘obscure manifestation’) unconsciously intuits a latency of shaping thought and thereby mediates between this capacity and sense perception.76 The power of the innate logoi could, for Proclus (perhaps for the first time in the history of philosophy), extend to the creation of new artificial forms having no eternal exemplars (unlike Plato’s bed),77 though it was not capable of a sheer invention rather than recognition of natural forms, since these were for him rather pre-shaped by a logos working independently of human beings in the cosmos. (In other words, he was a proto-Romantic, not a proto-Idealist.) One can conclude that both Plato and the neoplatonists really regarded the Forms as the unifying causal sources of power for the existence of a range of mutually resembling finite realities. They did not consider them as isolated ‘essences’, but rather took them to be but aspects of that single overarching power of unifying origination which is ‘the Good’ and which neoplatonism tended to take simply as ‘the One’ itself.78 Again, the distance from Aristotle here 75 76 77 78

Proclus, In Alcibiades, 191.12–192.5. See once more, Helmig, ‘What is the Systematic Place of Abstraction and Concept Formation’. See Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image, pp. 336–51. While the henological reading of the Eidē is basically correct, this should not be taken to mean that the forms are merely abstract universals, after Aristotle, and not in any sense whatsoever heavenly realities: the forms as unifying principles remain truly transcendent and not simply transcendental. It is just because they are transcendent that Plato can only invoke access to them in irreducibly mythical terms of the recollection by the soul of a previous life, and also for this reason that truth is first intimated as a desire for truth which is a paradoxical ‘knowing in advance’, not fully comprehensible for a merely analytic reason. It is nevertheless because the things recollected are not ‘Kantian’ a priori categories lurking in the depths of the soul itself (although Plotinian Platonism presses in this direction), that the soul ‘recollects’ not by simply drawing something up from memory that was lost, but by actively exercising a capacity for universalizing reason which alone permits it to ‘chime’ with the universalizing activity of the forms. This activity is always itself united under the Form of the Good: in this sense, the Platonic forms were always closer to their later usage as ‘ideas in God’ than has been commonly supposed. The same interpretative perspective

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is not so marked as is often imagined: for under Aristotelian influence, as well as that of the Parmenides, the neoplatonists stressed the intellectual unity of the realm of the forms. In the case of Aristotle, one can see the self-comprehending unmoved mover as playing in a vestigial way the role of the separated forms as both causing and guaranteeing the stability of immanent form as substance, which is the precondition for the possibility of scientific truth. The neoplatonists, however, quite rightly felt that the generative, rather than the teleological aspect of such grounding was left obscure by the Stagirite. Yet, at the same time, they deployed his categories to give a much fuller account of the observable stabilities of finite being – of material substance in other words – than Plato had provided.79 Increasingly, we see the necessity and coherence of this neoplatonic synthesis and the way in which it constitutes indeed a perennial ‘philosophy as such’ if we take philosophy to be (as Stoicism cannot really allow) that ‘more than physics’ which affirms transcendence and at the same time tries to link transcendence to a ‘transcendental’ embrace of all of reality. In other words, to link ‘height’ with ‘coverage’ and so ‘generation’ with ‘existence’. And we have already seen how it was the genius of Proclus already to make these two exigencies coincide as one principle. For all these reasons, Williams was wrong to suppose that in a crude ‘reification of verbal terms’ lies the long-term source of the Palamite error, or that this was half-encouraged by Dionysius. It was no confusion about language that was responsible for a specifically philosophical enquiry into the causes of both resemblance and consistency within being, and the pursuit of that enquiry on the basis of the observation that these two things are always connected: no enduring of ‘substance’ without the persistence of ‘shape’, of morphe or of eidos. Hence, the reasonable supposition, which founds all philosophy as philosophy, rather than mere physical cosmology, that ‘shape’ is what supremely is and causes to be. Ontology began in this way therefore as a kind of speculative phenomenology.80

79 80

suggests that in merely criticizing a bastardized account of the forms, Aristotle also lost sight of their true explicatory function: namely in accounting for the originating as well as the teleological aspect of both the univocal and the analogical power of unification. His account of universals and the universalizing capacity of the mind registers only the latter aspect. As for the notion of ‘unity beyond being’, one should perhaps take this in the sense of ‘hyper-ontological’ rather than simply ‘non-ontological’. Ascription of ‘being’ to the ultimate was avoided only because it has too many connotations of particularity; but later, at first within neoplatonism itself, and then much more consistently within Christian thought, it was realized that a transcendently unifying ‘power-to-be’ could be understood as itself the being of power – as esse in the infinitive. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists, pp. 275–90. One could also argue that this implicitly means that what is, as necessarily unified and selfmanifesting, is most of all the beautiful. Any ontology of morphē is surely thereby an aesthetic ontology.

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The twin legacies of neoplatonism As we have already seen, Williams was also wrong to suppose that the theurgic tradition of neoplatonism was especially to blame for the Palamite deviation because he thought that the twin motivation of Iamblichus and his successors in multiplying hypostases and positing yet further reserved absolutes lay both in the reifying delusion and in the desire to protect ineffability from any donative contamination. To the contrary, the intention was in the first case (in keeping with Plato himself, and probably the occult Platonic tradition, rather than Plotinus)81 to admit ‘the many’ to the sphere of the ultimate. In the second place, as established in section 2 above, it was to posit an absolute that would lie beyond the contrast of the One and the Many. It follows, to recap, that the culpable pagan lineage leading eventually to Palamas would lie if anywhere through an uncorrected Plotinian trajectory – as Williams himself indeed half-allows. For Plotinus, as already discussed, was unable to resolve the aporia whereby the passage from the One involves a denial of the One, such that all truth and intelligence is involved in a kind of ‘untruth’ after all. Theurgic neoplatonism makes an attempt at resolution, even if it is only Christian theurgy and Trinitarian theology that fully reaches it. For, as we have seen, where participation is seen as paradoxical, the One itself is allowed to ‘reach down’, and so finite beings can ‘reach up’ to the One without denying their finitude, nor even their embodiment. The incommensurability of the imparticipable with the participating is overcome, even if the two can never of course coincide. Within this schema, the original Platonic apparatus is fully preserved: an obscure erotic yearning ‘to return’ leads spiritual creatures to seek the truth, which is specifically ‘recollected’ by material and temporal triggers which are occasions now not just for ‘recall’ but for divine revelation. In contrast to this liturgical scenario (which the religion of the Incarnation and the collective body of the incarnate God could hyperbolically exemplify), the lack of descent of either the One or the psyche in Plotinus requires a compensating, and as it were ‘Pelagian’ ascent which is not so much erotic recall as rather retreat into the recesses of one’s own soul, free of cosmic and bodily contamination. 81

For the vexed question of the oral transmission of secret Platonic doctrines, as arguably most indicated in Plato’s epistles (especially the equiprimordiality of the One and the Two and the weaving between them – which later allowed Ralph Cudworth to argue with new textual evidence Augustine’s case for a Platonic anticipation of the Trinity) see H. J. Krämer, Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics (trans. J. R. Catan; New York: SUNY, 1990).

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It is along this trajectory that ‘recollection’ will become transmuted in the Latin West, following the influence of the basically Plotinian Avicenna and of Porphyry’s semanticization of Aristotle’s ontological categories (for Plotinian reasons of the superiority of mind over matter)82 into a kind of a priori understanding. Following the same trajectory, the term transcendens will slowly migrate from implying a scope coterminous with being only secured by transcendent height (i.e. ‘everything’ is ens, unum, res, quid, aliquid, bonum, verum, etc. only because God is eminently such) to implying a new scope secured without height, such that the fact of existence alone entails these meta-generic properties.83 This shift comes about from the outset because of a new ‘representational’ emphasis upon how being is necessarily disclosed to us, within the range of our conceptual repertoire. Eventually, from Suarez to Kant, the logical inference is drawn that if we can only speak of being in such ‘transcendental’ terms, then transcendentality itself belongs on the side of cognition and not of objective reality. So the final result of trying to secure a democracy of scope without a paradoxical ‘suspension’ of the democratic from a monarchic-aristocratic height (as for the model of political theurgism) is the enthronement of a mass subjectivism, a kind of epistemological rule that binds humans within a helpless populism of ‘what they cannot help but collectively believe’. (In effect, the modern sham of representational democracy has turned into an endless attempt to identify the practical equivalent of such belief.) This is the long modern story whereby the Platonic forms were depersonalized and turned into mere categories, mere universal and ‘transcendental’ containers for the reception and classification of particular information, which was their final fate with Kant. What is crucial to grasp here is that the more they became so ‘de-henologized’, then the more they became hypostasized, mutated into ‘reified essences’ (the form of a tree as a kind of super-tree, etc.) as they become for many Franciscan theologians, rather than being any longer the mysterious transcendent powers of unifying coherence. But for this move to really be possible, one required also the notion which emerges in Scotus that these essences are ‘represented’ by God to himself as if they were a secondary aspect of himself and not primordially identical with his own unity: this notion is in effect a ‘re-Platonizing’ in a perverse sense, since it renders the divine ideas – or Platonic forms – ‘other’ than the divine essence itself.84 82 83

84

See footnote 2 above. See J. A. Aertsen, ‘The Concept of “Transcendens” in the Middle Ages: What is Beyond and What is Common’, in Riel and Macé, Platonic Ideas and Concept Formation in Ancient and Medieval Thought, pp. 133–53; L. Honnefelder, La métaphysique comme science transcedentale (trans. I. Mandrella et al.; Paris: PUF, 2002). See Boulnois, Être et representation, pp. 405–55.

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It can be seen then how Palamas’s position, far from representing some supposed timeless Eastern purity, is on the contrary all too kindred with the most dubious shifts within the late Medieval Latin West – never underestimate the power of the zeitgeist to seep along the trade-routes. For just like the Avicennian current in the West, the Palamite theology regresses too much back towards the paganism of Plotinus and therefore is once more captive to the emergent Plotinian aporia. At this point, Rowan Williams was fundamentally right to say that Palamas seemingly avoids the Trinitarian paradoxes of a simple God who nonetheless gives, in favour of a ‘perfectly simple, indivisible, imparticipable interiority’.85 He was also right to say that this effectively displaces the Trinity with such an ineffable essence and to point out (as already mentioned) that Palamas declares that the energeiai are distinct from the ousia ‘in the same way as the hypostases’. All one need add here is that, in either case, Palamas makes an excessive form of distinction, which reminds one of the formal distinction of Scotus, who similarly subordinated the divine persons to a more fundamental divine infinity.

Energy and theophany In my account therefore, diachronic rupture is of more significance than synchronic contrast of traditions. For all the truth of the latter, one can trace a parallel corruption of ‘the great tradition’ in the late medieval period, in both East and West. However, this perspective might plausibly be challenged by arguing that Palamas is but developing the specifically Eastern stress upon theophanic disclosure to the whole human person, as testified by the Bible, yet so neglected in the West. For this argument, the saint was taken in the East to be illuminated by the uncreated light, energy or glory of God, unmediated by created vehicles. But this latter claim I would challenge. First of all, the crucial distinction of tense which we discovered in the Cappadocians and Dionysius applies also to their successors. It is true that Maximus, like the two Gregories, speaks of the qualities of God which do not begin in time, such as goodness, life, immortality, simplicity, immutability, infinity and ‘reality itself ’ as being ‘the things around him’ (tōn peri autou). It is also true that Maximus more clearly distinguishes this ‘around’ from a mere ‘outflowing’.86 However, we cannot take the ‘around’ at all literally, especially as 85 86

Williams, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’, p. 36. Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Theology and Economy, 1.48–50.

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it would make no sense whatsoever to think of ‘simplicity’ or ‘reality’ as apart from God himself. In that case, we must conclude that all these attributes do for Maximus belong to the very essence of God, and indeed he explicitly declares that ‘it is in him [‘the unique Word and God’] as the Creator and Maker of beings that all the principles of things both are and subsist as one in an incomprehensible simplicity’ (Mystagogy, 5). Thus because he sees the essence as being itself active power (‘the principles of thing’), he describes the divine henos as also the one divine energeia (Ad Thalassium, 59). As the citation from the Mystagogia shows, this energetic unity or unified energy is also for him not numerically other than the one divine Logos which is the Son, by virtue of that logic just described whereby the persons, though uniquely relational, are also identical with the essence. Consequently, Maximus’s talk of the divine attributes as the ‘works of God’ which are nonetheless not in time and are uncreated since they have never not been,87 demands to be understood in terms of the most fundamental level of his ontology, which is the relationship between the Logos and the logoi (Ambiguum 7, 1081A-B). If there are eternal ‘works’ of God, and if the Son exhaustively manifests the eternal Father, then these works must be what is eternally expressed in the filial generation, which includes the divine knowledge in the Logos of all logoi that can be created in time. The logoi as the inwardly shaping reasons of created things which yet transcend those things are clearly equivalent to the divine energies, and yet Maximus says that ‘the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One’ (1081C). So far from allowing that the logoi occupy any sort of limbo between uncreated and created, Maximus rather espouses a Trinitarian resolution of the aporia of there being an ‘outside’ of God, who is all in all. God, in himself, as expressive Logos, includes all the diversity of what he creates, while this diversity remains at its very energetic heart, one – one, that is to say, with the very simplicity of Godhead. Thus even when Maximus speaks explicitly of ‘uncreated grace’ (sounding very ‘western’ here), he sees this as ‘begotten’ within the Trinitarian begetting, such that the apparently ancestorless Melchisedec is a paradigm for the reception of abundant grace and antetype of Christ precisely because he was ‘begotten by God through the Word in the Spirit by grace’.88 Given the priority of a Trinitarian heuristic, when Maximus declares that God ‘infinitely transcends’ both the created works which participate and the 87 88

Chapters on Theology and Economy, 1.48–50. Ambiguum 10: 20.

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uncreated works which are participated in,89 one must take this to be an allusion to the inexhaustible mystery of the Paternal arche. The latter also, however, should be understood in terms of the unparticipable which is the very precondition for its own self-sharing. It is only when the Logos emanates and is pluralized that the energeia is pluralized also. Even though the outgoing logoi are for Maximus active, shaping forces within the cosmos, they are still created forces, very like Augustine’s ‘seminal reasons’ which represent a similar vision of the immanently disseminating divine Word.90 Thus, while for Maximus, the logoi are the action upon creatures of the Logos, they are always in the material universe mediated by the typois of phenomenal, sensible reality. Human vision occurs accordingly within the ‘turning’ between typos and logos, which is how, in the Mystagogia, Maximus understands the gyrations of Ezekiel’s chariot wheels (Mystagogy 2). To a remarkable extent, this passage suggests that ‘invisible principles’ and ‘visible figures’ have to be referred to each other for mutual illumination, in a manner consonant with Maximus’s view that the Logos is not just the repository of principles but of the eminent, unified reality of all the logoi. This, in turn, harmonizes with his thoroughly theurgic neoplatonic view (the Mystagogy being directly about liturgy and architecture as theurgy) of God as exceeding even the contrast between principle and consequence. Indeed, the entire theurgic stress of the Mystagogia is upon the necessity of the mediation of divine grace to occur always through the works both of divine creation and of human making. Yet this does not amount straightforwardly to a ‘distancing’ of God, because mediation is not regarded by Maximus as a kind of regrettable need to bridge a gap. To the contrary, for Maximus, as for all the great Christian thinkers, if God is love, then he is gift and participation and therefore is only touched immediately by virtue of mediation itself. Just the same paradox which renders the imparticipable and the participated coincident, renders also the immediate and the mediated coincident.91 And in this light, we can see a profound convergence between Maximus’s insistence on the mediating role of typois, and Augustine’s insistence in the first seven books of his De Trinitate that all theophanic manifestations of the persons of the Trinity always occur through created mediums. This can be allowed to be true, even though the East can rightly claim that Augustine overplays the notion 89 90

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Chapters on Theology and Economy, I. 49. One cannot perhaps entirely rule out an Augustinian influence here upon Maximus, though it has not been demonstrated. I owe this insight to Dr Lucy Gardner of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.

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of the mind rather than the entire human person as the imago dei, probably because of the inadequate development of his Christology and of a Christological site for anthropological speculation. For here, the Maximian insight improves rather than destroys that of Augustine: the mediation by material signs supplies something ‘symbolically’ crucial rather than merely ‘allegorically’ illustrative (as tends to be the danger in Augustine), yet this by no means denies the created character of this mediation upon which Augustine rightly insists. Rather, it augments the theophanic potential of the material creation itself. Given this synthesis, we have a fine insight into the coincidence of the unmediated and the mediated with respect to the vestigium trinitatis in the cosmos: just because there is no third between the Creator and the Creation, each creature, comprising both soul and body, is always in the direct presence of God, but equally, for the same reason, this presence is never direct, but always mediated by the participation of created structures. Augustine, with very great rigour, banished the shadow of any divine ‘economy’ (including the ‘economic Trinity’) other than the providential unfolding of created temporality itself. Maximus’s attention to the typois would ensure that this insight is not compromised by losing the paradox in favour of an ‘immediacy’ of inward, mental access to God without cosmic and corporeal mediation. We have already seen how the Scotist recension of Augustine finally realized a Western and Plotinian temptation to go in this direction. John Damascene remained true to Maximus in most essential respects. The properties ‘good’, ‘holy’, ‘just’ and so on follow from the divine nature and are not to be in any way really distinguished from it. Together with this nature, they compose one energeia that is ‘beneficently divided in divisible things’, while eventually God ‘returns them to his own simplicity’ (De Fide Orthodoxa I. 14). This scheme is exactly that which Aquinas took over from the Damascene (and from Dionysius), and Bradshaw accurately comments that ‘this makes it plain that for John the divine energeia is not simply the divine activity ad extra but God himself as he is participated by creatures’.92 Yes – but what is glossed over here is that, when diversified, the energy becomes ‘energies’ and the uncreated becomes created. For one can only speak of energy in the singular from the divine perspective, according to which, paradoxically, as he shares himself he yet remains undivided. Correspondingly, the fact that creatures qua creatures receive God’s glory as divided means that this reception is what constitutes them as creatures. It is not something ‘in addition’ to their 92

Bradshaw, Aristotle, p. 209.

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creaturehood, any more than God’s glory as divine can be in any way pluralized. The key once more is to see that participation has to be thought as paradox, on pain of positing a common plane between Creator and creature that constitutes a kind of ‘third sphere’ of ontological reality which the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo must rule out of court. It is also important for this argument that for many of the Fathers, the highest term for God was not ‘essence’ (ousia/essentia), but rather To Ōn, or alternatively ‘he who is’, after the Septuagint version of Exodus. This term, which Bradshaw himself wishes to highlight, defines God in his very self as active and outgoing.93 Therefore, it tends to suggest that ‘acting’ and even ‘acting on’ do not in any way diversify the divine activity insofar as it remains purely divine. The Fathers may often speak in this context of the contrast between the sun as the source and the light that beams forth from the Sun, but their Trinitarian use of the same analogue shows that for them, it generally betokens the identity of ray with origin, since what would the sun be ‘in itself ’ if it did not shine forth? As soon as one separates God from his action in any way, one tends to make an equivalent separation between the recipient of divine action and the receiving itself – as if any action could really arise outside of divine donation. This follows because once one has construed the divine action as in some sense other than God himself, it encourages the thought of a yet more radical separation of finite being from divine being, such that it can hold to its finitude as ‘its own’ outside a restricted sharing in divine activity. And this is confirmed by the thought that if the divine energies, though distinct from the divine essence, nevertheless remain fully God, then it would be blasphemous to say that emanated creatures simply are (in toto and in various degrees of intensity) the divine energies. Yet the latter radicalism is what the positions of Dionysius, Maximus and the Damascene genuinely imply and it is this radicalism which alone remains true to the idea of Creation ex nihilo. As Aquinas puts it: creatures ‘are the representatives of God, according to the diverse processions of their perfections’ (ST I. q. 13, a.2 resp.).94 However, this radicalism is often more exemplified in the East than in the West, as I have recently indicated. For whereas in Augustine, divine manifestations are usually seen as mental, as visions ‘arriving to’ mind, in the East (and in 93 94

Ibid., pp. 109–18. This quotation (and one could give many others) gives the lie to Bradshaw’s assertion that ‘Aquinas . . . transforms what for Dionysius had been a means of ascent towards God into a semantic device for clarifying the limits of language’. For all Aquinas’s greater technicality, both he and Dionysius are both equally concerned with both the semantics of naming and the experiential metaphysics of ascent.

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Eriugena in the West), there is more continuing stress, in continuity with the Old Testament, upon divine ‘theophanic’ manifestation, whereby creatures are transfigured both in soul and body. In these instances, as later exemplified by the ‘hesychastic’ tradition of spirituality in the East, it is as if beings are created anew, or as if the veil concealing their original paradisal reality is removed.95 The tradition which Bradshaw is purportedly defending does not then think in terms of energies acting as a mediating third ‘between’ the Creator and the Creation. On the contrary, it thinks of divine disclosure as drastically welling-up from within the created order and in one sense as that very order. If one seeks to deny this, then, as we have just seen, one engenders a certain independence of the being of finite creatures from the being of God. But in that case, the entire idea of synergy, which Bradshaw seeks to argue for, is entirely undone. For one is forced then to speak of a cooperative concursus between infinite and finite causes, as if they both contributed ‘a part’ and lay upon the same ontological plane.96 But synergy rather implies a causal fusion, whereby what is entirely finite, created action at one level, at another higher, incommensurable (though compatible) and more originating level is entirely divine, creative action. Bradshaw is right to see an intimate link between synergy, theurgy and the later hesychastic tradition which (in keeping with Maximus’s understanding of ‘turning’) spoke of the human body as being occasionally illuminated by ‘the uncreated light’. However, if a distinction of the divine essence from the divine energy compromises synergy, then it equally compromises both theurgy and the hesychastic experience – which included the ‘magical’ invocation of God through repeated recitation of the name of Jesus. As we have already seen, Palamas, against Barlaam, half saw this, but his resistance did not go far enough. For if the initiative lies more with divine descent than with human contemplative ascent, it follows that this ascent must be towards a radical unity with the divine essence (albeit that this remains forever uncomprehended by creatures) in order to sustain the divine simplicity at the heart of the condescending divine action. So even though the divine essence cannot, as Aquinas affirmed, be communicated, this must be understood as a paradoxical reserve within the procession that is (as Aquinas equally affirms) out of the divine essence itself.97 Similarly, the uncreated light can only reach us from the divine side if this is God himself – otherwise we might understand our

95 96 97

See Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image, pp. 133–85. See again J. Schmutz, ‘La doctrine mediévale des causes’. See Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 19–59.

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experience of this light in terms of our own Pelagian efforts at unassisted assent to a heavenly, but sub-divine realm. The doctrine of the experience of the uncreated light is therefore not, as Bradshaw alleges, incompatible with a rigorously Thomist construal of simplicity, if one takes it, in keeping with a phenomenological report, as the shining from within and yet from beyond and before itself of a created body. God himself can appear here because he still appears in an entirely mediated form, and not as an unmediated display of his own ‘lesser’, because communicated, aspect. For such an unmediated display still reserves God in his essence behind an eternal mode of mediation seen as an absolute ontological impasse. By contrast, an always mediated display, does, after all, convey to us the simplicity of God in his immediate presence to the process of mediation itself. Indeed, it was precisely because the East at times remained truer than the West to the paradox of a ‘communicated incommunicable’ that it insisted on an always bodily mediated, specifically theophanic mode of divine presence. This is why both Gregory of Nyssa and the highly ‘Eastern’ Eriugena both denied that ontic and corporeal mediation disappears even in the final beatific vision. Not only did they insist that this was through a ‘created light of glory’, they also thought that this light continued to be apprehensible by creatures only through those specific created realities which it illumined.98 We have, however, already indicated why this schema might be problematic, insofar as it suggests a further (and so over ‘essentialized’) inaccessibility of God beyond the inaccessibility that remains even within his created, mediating light. But later than Gregory, Dionysius established in the further East an alternative trajectory, later followed (for the most part) by the distant West: in the beatific vision, we see directly the divine light by means of the divine light without further mediation. Yet even in this case, the mediation by created light remains (ST I q. 12 a.5) and there may well be a case for saying (beyond Aquinas) that this ‘pure medium’ can be construed as being subtly corporeal as well as intellectual. This would allow that the resurrected body is not simply incidental to the beatific vision, while placing a stronger stress upon the circumstance that mediation by a pure medium remains, nonetheless, mediation. And the irreplaceable role of mediation even for the experience of immediacy, I am arguing, goes along with a grasp of a radically paradoxical account of participation. So the distinguishing mark of the archaic East was not ‘more directness of illumination, but with a greater divine reserve’, but rather ‘more mediated 98

Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image, pp. 133–86.

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immediacy of divine illumination because of divine reserve’. There was indeed often a difference from the West here, but the difference did not concern a distinction of the essence from the energies. This only arose much later in the East, and it is somewhat paralleled by the rise of ‘the formal distinction’ in the West. But aside from the Scotist and later nominalist rupture, the West did not, as Bradshaw claims, find any difficulty in thinking of the divine presence as the presence of God himself, rather than as a mere ‘extrinsic’ arrival of grace.

Action and participation: Why Aquinas is more Byzantine than Palamas One could think here of Eckhart’s radical sense of the paradoxical way in which we are, at the heart of ourselves, including our bodily selves, actually ‘not’ ourselves but rather uncreated deity.99 Yet he is here only radicalizing Augustine’s interior intimo meo. As to Aquinas, Bradshaw erroneously reduces his account of creative causality to mere efficiency, where Aquinas frequently insisted that it involved, in simple fusion, also formal and teleological dimensions.100 Bradshaw’s contention here is that, without the essence/energies distinction, Aquinas cannot think of the actus purus composing the divine essence as proceeding outwards and reaching creatures except at the expense of chaining God to necessity and to his own creation. Yet this ignores the fact that for Aquinas, the free decision of God to create was contained within the very generation of the Logos from the Father, such that God is, from all eternity, the God of Love who simply is a free outward donation (ST I q.34 a.3). Aquinas was so little concerned about a false ‘reserve’ in God that he argues that it is a sign of God’s power and not the reverse that he was able to give the power of causality itself to his creatures. Just for this reason, Aquinas entertains (as Bradshaw fails to recognize) the most drastic possible doctrine of synergy. From this follows a radical construal of participation. Aquinas made the middle term of participation not ‘the Good’, but esse, thereby implying the paradox that what is both ‘shared in’ and ‘imitated’ is nothing other than the condition of freestanding itself which is esse, ‘to be’. It is therefore when we ‘are’ and so are most ‘in ourselves’ that we are also most radically dependent, most 99

On Eckhart see J. Milbank, ‘The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectic’ in S. Žižek and J. Milbank (eds.), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox versus Dialectic (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2009) pp. 110–233. 100 Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 242–68.

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given to ourselves as a gift.101 But this renders our causal dependence upon God the most intimate sort of dependence imaginable, in testified keeping with the Proclean view that it is the highest which acts most inwardly and discretely, the first cause which is more strongly at work than secondary ones, even at the bottom of the hierarchical scale (in Liber de Causis, Prop. 1). If Bradshaw were right about Aquinas, then the latter would not have affirmed that the procession of excellences in creatures obscurely conveys to us something of eminent excellence in God himself: like Maimonides, he would have taken the divine names simply as names for divine actions and not for divine attributes.102 This would have left God radically unknown not in the sense of being a mysterious depth, but rather in the sense of being totally uncharacterizable or else able to assume and shed characters at a whim – completely counter to Thomas’s whole trajectory. Yet this appears to be Bradshaw’s view of the great Dominican. He reads Aquinas as if for him the esse commune of creatures participates neither in the divine energies nor in the divine essence, but only in a created ‘likeness’ of the divine, that can be given no assignable content. Thus he cites a passage from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Divine Names as ‘common being . . . participates in a similitude of him [God]’.103 But the passage in question originally reads: esse commune habet ipsum scilicet Deum, ut participans similitudinem Eius (in DN 5.2. 660). This should probably be translated as ‘common being evidently has for itself God as [being] a participated similitude of him’. But what is in any case clear, since it would make neither contextual nor semantic sense, is that the participation is not ‘in’ the similitude but rather is itself the similitude. The ‘resemblance’ to God of creatures is not for Aquinas some sort of all-too-light burden that they incidentally bear: it is rather, exactly as it is for Dionysius, their very condition of being in existence at all.104 101

Rudi te Velde grasps this point exceptionally well: see his Aquinas on God: The ‘Divine Science’ of the Summa Theologiae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 139–42. For an exemplary account of this contrast, see D. B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1987). 103 Bradshaw, Aristotle, p. 252. 104 Bradshaw instead thinks that Aquinas turns resemblance into a kind of extrinsic fact about creatures, which one must speculatively assert, yet which lacks in any substantive content. This means that he denies that Aquinas’s treatment of the divine names is any longer an ontological doctrine (see note 94 above). Unfortunately, far too many neoscholastic and Anglo-Saxon ‘analytic’ renderings of Aquinas on analogy abet Bradshaw at this point. For a refutation of these readings, see Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 46–55; C. Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: his Historical and Contemporary Significance’, pp. 543–74, esp. pp. 567–8, and J. Milbank, ‘On “Thomistic Kabbalah” ’, Modern Theology, 27.1 (2011), pp. 147–85. Pickstock’s article is especially crucial here as, following Alain de Libera, she shows how Aquinas does indeed pay a new attention to the logical dimension of analogy and yet deploys the specifically semantic model of one pivotal meaning for an analogical term as appropriate to our unilateral metaphysical situation vis-à-vis God. 102

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What this indicates is that for Aquinas, the imitating of God and the sharing in God are one and the same thing. Imitation can never be without participation because there is no ‘free-standing’ entity that could copy God such that we could compare original and copy according to a tertium comparationis of being. Instead, since God is himself esse, God is the third term as well as the first, while the second term, which is the imitation only has the ontological space in which it can exercise mimesis because this imitation is also a partaking. However, any ‘pantheism’ is obviated because, in turn, sharing only occurs as a reflection (i.e. participating as imitating) not as a literal ‘portioning-out’ of the indivisible God. Equally avoided is Duns Scotus’s explicit construal of participation as meaning the possession of univocal being as a finite rather than an infinite share.105 For this permits a tertium comparationis (being) other than God, and therefore implicitly allows that imitation of God can be independent of a sharing-in God. Scotus’s approach is in one sense more rationally rigorous than Aquinas, yet at the risk of subordinating God to esse, by too much regarding the participation of the finite in being as a literal ‘segment’: this risks either the notion of finitude as outside the reach of divine omnipresence, or else pantheistic immanence (as will arrive with Spinoza) if one takes the share of being to be also a share of infinitude. Aquinas by contrast sustains divine transcendence, but at the price of a necessary metaphysical complication which he does not fully own up to. Imitation must, it would seem, presuppose a given entity prior to mimesis that can be a ground for reception. Inversely, sharing-a-part need not involve any imitation of the whole. Yet in the case of the imitation of/participation in God, Aquinas is affirming that imitation and participation are preconditions of each other: that not only the copy, but the vehicle for copying derive from sharing; that not only the share but even the very possibility of the share derives from imitation. This amounts to the strongest possible doctrine of both creation and grace as involving the presence of God himself to creatures, while in no way compromising the divine reserve of transcendence. The crucial paradox once more is that it is this very reserve which is communicated – both as an integrity that is shared in by creatures as their own discrete self-standing (the circumstance that ‘they exist’) and as the divine concealed integrity that remains as the further hinterland of all the merely participating integrities. This paradoxicality is confirmed by the way in which Aquinas, following Dionysius who was in turn developing Proclus, emphasizes that to exist as a 105

Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I. d.8 p 1, q. 2 nn. 37–8.

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creature is to return to God and that to exist as a spiritual creature is to exist as conscious return. For Aquinas, Being as such is an outflowing beyond itself, which is oxymoronically contained within itself: thus the God who creates is the God who utters the Logos. Being is also a return upon itself, such that the God who calls is also the God of self-desiring in the Holy Spirit. For spiritual creatures to be called by God to return defines in Aquinas the very activity of knowing as such. Hence the self that knows is at the same time the self that returns to its (true and inner) self in returning to God. But Aquinas also echoes in his own fashion the Proclean view that the ultimate ‘rebound’ of matter is in a unique intimacy of opposition with the ultimate purely spiritual source of all reality. Hence in Aquinas, for human beings to know something is not simply a self-mirroring, but also a mirroring of matter back to itself, such that every act of understanding concludes not only with the redditio in se ipsum, but also with the conversio ad phantasmata, the recreation in the imagination of the original sensed object. In this way, the human being, as the microcosmic bond of the cosmos unites in herself (as Boethius had already indicated) the twin circles whereby not only all ceaselessly returns to the One but all ceaselessly (as Dionysius and then Maximus after him stress) goes out again from the one towards the nether pole of material reality: ‘motus circularis animae est secundum quod ab exterioribus intrat ad seipsum et ibi uniformiter convolvitur, sicut in quodam circulo’ (in De Div. Nom. IV lect 7, n.376). The ultimate paradox of participation here is that the first circle of return simply is the omnipresence of God, but that God as God is also the ‘more than himself ’ (as Dionysius puts it) of the second circle. Not that an energetic aspect of God is more than himself, but that the very divine essence which is absolutely replete is also in itself ‘energetic’, also (impossibly) ‘more than itself ’.106 By contrast, the Palamite position, which Bradshaw upholds, suggests a literally regional reserve beyond any communication. But in that case that which is communicated is turned into too literal a part of God, and its further distinction as ‘uncreated energy’ means that the receptacle of this energy is correspondingly seen as too literally standing outside God. Its reception of too-literal a share therefore will tend to take the form of too-literal an imitation which does not fully have its ground in the sharing of the unshareable. The

106

On all this, see the somewhat enigmatic yet extremely perceptive and suggestive article of A. Speer, ‘The Epistemic Circle: Thomas Aquinas on the Foundation of Knowledge’ in Riel and Macé, Platonic Ideas and Concept Formation, pp. 119–32.

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illuminated hesychast is in consequence seen as directly exhibiting a part of God beyond the scope of imitation, and yet equally as ‘reflecting’ this light in his own body by mere mimesis of the uncreated grace of the supernatural received light, and without any real need to be himself (in soul and body) constituted only as a share in this light – such that one would rightly regard transfiguration as a revealing of the still-persisting paradisal human body occluded by sin.107 Instead of paradoxical coincidence within the participatory process of transcendent source and contingent share, which involves also the coincidence of share and copy, one has instead with Palamas an implied delineation of three separate ontological realms, which allows sharing without imitation and then imitation without sharing. It must all the same be admitted that Palamas is confusing, and that there are passages in his works that remain entirely consistent with the vision of Maximus as already described. These passages are not really dealt with by Bradshaw, as they do not advance his ‘Palamite reading of Palamas’. Thus at one point, Gregory declares that the energies are multiplied according to the multiplicity of creatures, and that one must think of their plurality, with respect to their uncreatedness, as if they were like rays traced from the centre of a circle to its circumference, yet without any pluralization of their original unity (Triads, III 25). This perspective would seem properly to insist that the energies, insofar as they are uncreated, remain one and simple, and therefore ontologically identical with the essence. If such an ascription to a rigorously paradoxical mathematical figure in Palamas is relatively rare, it can still fairly be taken as evidence that one should not ascribe to him a full-blown ‘real distinction’ of the energies from the essence. And yet more consistently, he clearly denies any real identity of the two either. In these cases, he manifests certain emphases, which have to be considered a deviant betrayal of the great tradition of both east and west. These can be summarized as follows:

1. The energies as uncreated are inherently plural (Triads III 7). This is not consistent with the simplicity of the uncreated godhead. 2. Even as uncreated, some energies must be considered to ‘have a beginning’, others not, namely those directed towards the created order (Triads III 8). Rowan Williams already pointed out the oddity and dubiety of this point, which concurs strongly with the Scotist and not Thomist 107

This ‘Traherne-like’ note has sometimes been sounded in the Eastern tradition. Borges’ late story ‘The Rose of Paracelsus’ gets it entirely right here: the earthly paradise has never vanished; thinking it has constitutes our fallenness.

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view that the divine decision to create lies outside what is contained in the Trinitarian taxis.108 3. The Dionysian ‘names of God’ are predicated of (or manifest) the energies alone and not the divine substance (Triads III. 10). This would appear to commit Palamas to a Maimonides-style agnosticism about the divine character. 4. In The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, Palamas is faced with the problem that if the energies are God, yet not the substance of God, then it seems that something belongs to God which is not his substance (Cap. 135). Here, as Rowan Williams points out, he appeals to the example of the Trinitarian relations, yet has to do so in such a way as to imply that the relations and the substance are not really identical. This then opens up him to the supposedly western error of elevating the divine essence to an ontological dignity above that of the Trinity. Palamas indeed speaks explicitly of ‘three realities’ in the Godhead: substance, energy and Trinity (Cap. 75, 126). This dangerous diversification of God puts one in mind of Scotus’s introduction of a ‘secondariness’ of the divine knowledge and willing and so on (comparable to Palamas’s uncreated and unoriginate energies) after the absolutely defining infinitude of the divine essence and a further belatedness – in the wake of the Trinitarian processions – of the divine decision to create (comparable to Palamas’s created and yet originated energies). 5. Palamas, as again Rowan Williams pointed out, is at a loss to know to which ontological category to assign ‘uncreated energies’ if they are neither substance, accident nor relation. He toys with the possibility of ‘quasi-accident’ and yet admits that one cannot really allow any sort of accidentality in the case of the divine (Cap. 127, 135). This is the real difficulty here and not Williams’ notion that he must be confused about Aristotle if he can invoke such seemingly oxymoronic terminology. For, in fact, Aristotle did speak of ‘proper accidents’ (in later scholastic terminology), which always accompany an essence and yet are not themselves of the essence. (This category is exploited by Aquinas in a much more drastic manner in terms of his notion of esse as a proper accident of created essence paradoxically more essential than essence itself.) But Palamas knows that nothing can really accompany God that is not grounded in his essence without totally destroying his simplicity. Hence Williams is 108

For this point and all further comparisons with Scotus below, see Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: his Historical and Contemporary Significance’.

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right to indicate that all that this seems to leave as a possibility is that the ‘energies’ are a lesser sphere of declining emanation within the godhead itself. This would certainly represent a neoplatonic deviation within a supposedly Christian theology. 6. Not only does Palamas introduce a kind of formal distinction between the energies and the essence, he also introduces the same between the energies, or the divine attributes themselves. Thus he insists that the divine foreknowledge is distinct from the divine will, on the grounds that otherwise God would not have foreknowledge of evil, which he does not will (Cap. 100). The ineptitude of Palamas as a metaphysician is here shown by his failure to realize that evil is not something ‘positive’ falling outside the true scope of will as will, or even of knowing as knowing. But the persistence of distinction, which our knowledge is forced to make, even in God, for the sake, supposedly, of retaining cognitive coherence, again puts one in mind of Scotus. This is equally true of his defence of the distinction of the energies from the essence in terms of the argument that the divine will is distinct from the divine nature and yet is still fully God (Cap. 135). For Aquinas, the voluntary adds nothing to the natural in the case of God, but for Duns Scotus, this distinction (as already with Richard of St Victor and Bonaventure) is deployed to distinguish the generation of the Son (‘natural’) from the procession of the Spirit (‘voluntary’).109 7. Finally, Palamas offers an openly crude and non-paradoxical metaphysics of participation. He baldly states that God is ‘inaccessible in some respects’ but ‘everywhere present in other respects’ (Cap. 109). In the very next paragraph, he cites John Chrysostom in support of this divisive reading of the Johannine statement that ‘Of his fullness we have all received.’ (Jn 1.16), blithely unaware that it tells entirely against him. For Chrysostom in comparing the divine energy to fire writes, as cited: ‘For if in the case of fire that which is divided is a substance and a body, and if we both do and do not divide it, how much more will this be true in the case of the energy, indeed the energy from an incorporeal substance’ (Cap. 110). The whole point of this simile is that energy, like fire, remains incomprehensibly undivided in division, so that Chrysostom, instead of talking about ‘an area’ of God that is shared as demarcated against another area that is not, rather talks about a single divine reality as being at once shared out and yet not shared out at all. One should take this as saying that what is true of 109

See footnote 46 above.

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the divine energy (spoken of here in the singular) is true also of the divine substance, since the energy ‘from’ this ineffable substance can only be the energy ‘of ’ this substance. Palamas compounds his error by saying in the same paragraph that when something participates, it literally possesses a ‘part’ of something else. This contrast with Aquinas speaking of a ‘quasipart’, which I have already tried to spell-out in terms of the complex way in which participation and imitation ‘impossibly’ presuppose each other in the unique case of ontological methexis.110 Because he defines participation in this way, Palamas has no real way to distinguish it from the partition of a genus, and therefore he suggests that if we participated in the essence of God himself, we would all be hypostases of God, like the person of the Trinity (Cap. 109). But to participate in, is not fully to embody an essence, and were it so, then it would seem that we are all somehow hypostases of the divine energy or energies! Once more then, the young Williams is essentially vindicated with respect to Palamas: he would seem to court a bizarre combination of emanationism and pantheism. From all the above points, and especially Number 7, we can conclude that the logic of Palamas’s ‘formal distinction’ of essence from energies undoes the logic of radical participation, which is the only logic that can spell out the doctrine of Creation ex nihilo. Equally, for reasons which we have already seen, it undoes the logic of theurgic descent. Bradshaw rightly wants to argue that this logic also spells out the implications of both Creation and deification because it insists that the actus purus of God is one and the same with his effective, external, kenotic operation both in bringing finite being to be and in bringing finite being back from the brink of self-imposed annihilation. This is the tremendous insight of his important book. But I have tried to show how it would be undercut by his other claim in favour of the Palamite distinction of essence from energies. On the contrary, it is Aquinas’s rigorous cleaving to divine simplicity that remains consistent with a Christian theurgic vision derived from Dionysius and with the radical account of participation to which this vision is inseparably conjoined.111 110 111

See further Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 19–59. Bradshaw, Aristotle, pp. 275–7, finally draws a cultural besides an intellectual contrast between East and West. He considers that the over-rationalism of the West, resulting from an attempt to define the essence of God, led to an overly systematizing and defensive posture, manifest in religious war, persecution and excessively zealous moral disciplining of the laity. There is some truth in this charge, and yet a much more specific story must be told about the eventual separation of the rational from the mystical within Latin Christendom. Conversely, one could argue that the relative lack of rationally-developed ‘scholastic’ theology in the East went along with a situation where law and

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Eschatology and the crisis of mediation: West, East and further East In this paper I have tried to show how perennial differences between Christian East and West are of less account than the breakdown in either case of the primordial Christian adaptation of a Platonic metaphysics of participation in the late medieval era. I have also already indicated how an older ‘paradox of participation’ can also be construed as a ‘paradox of mediation’. If the imparticipable is itself participated, then it is equally the immediate that is itself mediated. Since, therefore, the late Middle Ages presents us with a ‘crisis of participation’, we might expect this also to have involved a ‘crisis of mediation’. And the evidence for this is, indeed, forthcoming. The upshot of the hesychast controversy was three councils held at Constantinople in the years 1341, 1347 and 1351 which enshrined as Orthodox dogma the Palamite views that: (1) creatures never see the divine essence, even in the beatific vision and (2) that even during this life, they can glimpse the ‘light of Tabor’ by virtue of a reception of uncreated grace. The apposition is surely striking: on the one hand, mediation is never surpassed; on the other hand, even in this life, we receive immediately God himself, albeit under a secondary aspect.112 Yet it would be a mistake to read this as too simply implying at once a strong commitment to the necessity of mediation and on the other to an optimism about what mediation can communicate. This is true to the extent that the East politics remained (in a Roman legacy), relatively secularized, and there was not the same degree of Christian renewal of law regarding, for instance, marriage and poverty as took place under Canonical influence in the West. And even if the latter, as Ivan Illich and Charles Taylor have argued, over-institutionalized charity, the East lacked the same growth of charitable institutions outside immediate political control. The relative lack also of constitutional government in the East (which continues into the present) is surely connected to the first lack. And even if piety in the West was over-clericalized, this dialectically helped to stimulate lay movements of piety in response. Bradshaw fails to realize that movements which he denigrates like courtly love, chivalry and poetry reworking vernacular legend could lie inside as well as outside the fold of such movements. He also appears to underestimate the extent of continued lay culture in Byzantium. Finally, the horror of the latter at the behaviour of the Crusaders does not negate the truth that they were initially going to the defence of Eastern Churches as being part of Christendom. 112 For this and much of what follows, see G. Geréby, ‘Hidden Themes in Fourteenth-Century Byzantine and Latin Theological Debates: Monarchianism and Crypto-Dyophysitism’, in M. Hinterberger and C. Schabel (eds.), Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History 1204-1500 (Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales - Bibliotheca 11; Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 183–211; Geréby is right about the pervasive quasi-Nestorianism in the West, but fails to point out that, while the Franciscans were especially guilty of this, Aquinas uniquely adopted a fully Byzantine Cyrilline Christology, stressing theandric unity. This is yet another reason why it is a massive mistake to suppose that Franciscan theology was ‘more oriental’ in character. It would be far truer to claim this for the Dominican trajectory – which was more authentically Augustinian also.

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rightly insisted upon the role of the body in theophany and on the validity of devotion to icons (whereas this was only admitted gradually in the West, following in part the lead of Aquinas).113 But it is untrue in the sense that the impossibility of seeing God even at the end implies, in all too ‘Plotinian’ a fashion, that mediation is necessarily a barrier to direct vision and hence that one is always yearning to escape it (‘epectasis’) even though one can never finally do so. Inversely, the stronger possibility for the Councils of seeing God in this life is really the consequence of the unmediated presence of ‘the fringe of God’ himself. In this manner, a disguised suspicion of mediation is present in the verdict of the councils, which even in some manner anticipates the Reformation, as the denial of the category of created grace would imply. Meanwhile, in the West, one can trace an apparently opposite yet secretly complicit development. György Geréby has pointed out how the Latin official dispute concerning the beatific vision, which lasted from 1331 to 1346 was almost exactly contemporary with the Greek hesychast controversy. This dispute began when the Avignon Pope John XXII, to the shock of his Franciscan opponents, headed by William of Ockham, reinstated, after much private Patristic study, the older Western and persisting Eastern view (present in Augustine and still in Bernard of Clairvaux, but rejected by both Aquinas and Dante) that individual souls went to the waiting-room of ‘Abraham’s bosom’ immediately after death and were only sent to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory collectively and in unity with their bodies at the Last Judgement. The debate was closed when the papal bull of John’s successor, the Franciscan Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus, emphatically reinstated the newer opinion, for all that it seems to downgrade the Last Judgement to a clearing-up operation, besides denying that judgement is of humans collectively and in their fully personal embodied, and in some important sense still earthbound forms.114 Just as the councils in the East were really enshrining a novelty, so too in the West: in neither case was the decision simply a matter of formalizing perennial synchronic divergences. The same Bull explicitly insisted, in diametric contrast to the Eastern councils, upon the final direct vision of the divine essence, unmediated by any creature. One should align this, as Geréby does, with the increasing western denial of any ordinary experience of God in this life and the mountingly ‘extrinsic’ conception

113 114

See Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image, pp. 276–83. See J. Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (trans. M. Waldstein; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 136–9.

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of the operation of grace. This gives us then the opposite contrast to the case of the East: in the end, complete vision; but for now, no vision whatsoever. And just as the case of the East might seem to imply both optimism and necessity with regard to mediation, so likewise the case of the West might seem to imply both pessimism and non-necessity. That is to say, for now signs are but extrinsic aids and not participatory symbols, while when we see as we are seen, there will be no need for any intervening vehicles at all. Yet once more, this would be but partially true. It is true with respect to the rising denial of direct experience of God in this life, but this downgrounding of mediation is but a different mode of manifestation of the same downgrading that was occurring in the East, as I have just argued. However, the Bull’s reaffirmation of the West’s traditional view of the visio beatifica does not really imply any such downgrading – except with respect to the too-incidental role of the body and the collectivity in the enjoyment of the vision.115 For mediation is involved here in two respects. First, it is the created mind that sees, albeit without a mediating species and in the divine light alone. So this means that mediation by mind is not a blockage, as it is taken to be in the East, to the immediate vision of God. Second, as Aquinas makes clear, the divine light of glory that we see by remains a created light, even though it no longer falls upon anything. It is in the end therefore as if we were to wake one day and see only sunlight and the sun itself in this light, but nothing besides. Far from there being an absence of medium here therefore, there is rather a seeing of the medium itself and only through this medium to its very source. So once more, as with the case of the seeing mind, mediated vision and the sight of the unmediated are made to coincide. And it is here that we need to reflect that, in the interplay between East and West, the further East is the joker in the pack. For both Iamblichus and Dionysius, the respective founts of pagan and Christian theurgy, were Syrians. It is their tradition which sought to hold together greater remoteness with greater proximity, greater need for mediation with greater immediacy. Thus in the case of Dionysius, his Mystical Theology is actually one important source for the later dominant Western view of the beatific vision precisely because it describes a complete entering ‘into’ God, but as the climax of a cosmic liturgical action.116

115

On this, see P. Blond, ‘The Beatific Vision of St Thomas Aquinas’, in A. Pabst and C. Schneider (eds.), Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 185–212. 116 See once more de Andia, Henosis, pp. 303–73.

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In Dionysius, therefore, we have the combination both of ‘complete’ vision in the end and strong theophany in the here and now. He promotes this ‘double hyperbole’ the most emphatically of all the Patristic writers, yet in a way that does the most justice to the most genuine élan of all their trajectories. According to this double hyperbole, an infinitely saturated mediation (of both mental and bodily intuition) reveals the immediate in the end, while vision in the here and now participates in this extremity in some degree. More specifically, because there is nothing ‘between’ God and the Creation, ‘mediation’ of the divine presence always involves a heightened awareness of something other than us in the world – including the angelic sphere – or of our own personhood. Accordingly, this heightened awareness must convey a stronger sense of the immediate presence of God to us. So for now, mediation heightens immediacy, while in the end, immediacy elevates mediating light to parity with the divine presence. It follows that there is nothing perennially fated about the apparent pairs of contrasting opposites; either the Eastern ‘much now, but never everything’ or the Western ‘nothing now, but in the end everything’. It is rather, for the ‘far eastern’ theurgic resolution of this dire alternative, a case of ‘almost everything now, if you care to see, and in the end, the almost everything become one with the everything’. Eriugena is near to this resolution – but he qualifies this with final epectasis; Aquinas is near it also, but his sense of the theophanic is still too weak and he has too thin an account of the role of resurrected bodies. Yet the Dionysian double hyperbole of deification – here and hereafter – lurks just beneath both the Western and the Eastern surface. To face instead ‘the dire alternatives’ was to forget this. It meant that the East tended increasingly to think that mediation would stand in the way of vision in the end, while for now and always, some measure of sheerly unmediated vision was possible. Equally, it meant that the West tended increasingly to think that for now we receive only information and not presence, while in the end, raw presence will be vouchsafed to us as a reward for obedience, the eschatological persistence of participation being gradually played down. In either case, the loss of the paradoxes of both participation and mediation involves also a slackening of eschatological tension: a proper sense that the end is already now as the immediate in the mediate, and at the same time, that the role of mediation is to drive us forwards to ever greater reception of what is already present. Instead, either expectation is reduced (the East) or the experience of the present as an intrinsic path to finality is diminished and compromised (the West). One result of this was foolish respective declarations of anathema upon perfectly traditional elements of Christian teaching: the final vision of the divine essence,

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created grace, the final collective and embodied judgement of all persons. In the latter respect, it can be seen how a gradual loss of the sense that sacramental mediation through the structures of the created order is always necessary would encourage the view that judgement is but a private affair between God and the individual soul. These anathemas need to be repented of. In order to do so, we need to recover the way back, which is also the way forward. The way, curiously, of renaissance, of vital detour through the pagan in order to recover the Biblical, of the magical in order to recover the gracious, of the always further oriental sense of the unity of the Many with the One (the outgoing with the remaining) in order fully to grasp the Christian vision of the personal and the interpersonal as a scene of peace and reconciliation rather than one of final idolatrous abjection of some rather than others. Idolatrous, because any sense of a persisting refusal of the divine glory would impossibly impair the divine essence, given that the God who remains replete is the very God who gives forever without stint. Double hyperbole has therefore to include also the bias towards mercy for now, with only mercy and the effectiveness of mercy in the end.117

117

This Origenist conclusion is a necessary climax to the entire argument and implies that we need to marry an Eastern account of Judgement (with, of course, notable exceptions, like Julian of Norwich), to a Western account of final vision. The extra-Christian ecumenical reconciling of the monistic with the personal is crucial also.

7

Boethius the Theologian Augustine Casiday

Introduction I have learnt that you, clothed in your great learning, are so knowledgeable in this that arts which men practise in customary ignorance, you have drunk from the very spring of science. For, at long distance, you so entered the schools of Athens, you so mingled in your toga among their cloaked assemblies, that you turned Greek theories into Roman teaching. For you have discovered with what deep thought speculative philosophy, in all its parts, is pondered, by what mental process practical reasoning, in all its divisions, is learnt, as you transmitted to Roman senators every wonder that the sons of Cecrops have given the world. For it is in your translations that Pythagoras the musician and Ptolemy the astronomer are read as Italians; that Nicomachus on arithmetic and Euclid on geometry are heard as Ausonians; that Plato debates on metaphysics and Aristotle on logic in the Roman tongue; you have even rendered Archimedes the engineer to his native Sicilians in Latin dress. And all the arts and sciences which Greek eloquence has set forth through separate men, Rome has received in her native speech by your sole authorship. Your verbal splendour has given them such brightness, the elegance of your language such distinction, that anyone acquainted with both works would prefer yours to the original. You have entered a glorious art, marked out among the noble disciplines, through four gates of learning. Drawn in by authors’ works, you have come to know it where it sits in the inner shrine of nature, through the light of your own genius; it is your practice to understand its problems, your purpose to demonstrate its wonders.1 1

Cassiodorus, Variae I.45.3–5 (trans. S. J. B. Barnish; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), pp. 20–1. My thanks to Prof Richard Price and Dr Nick Thompson for their assistance at key points in preparing this paper.

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So wrote the Ostrogothic king of Italy, Theodoric, to the Roman statesman, polymath and occasional theologian, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, around the year 506, requesting that the latter design and despatch to him a water-clock and a sundial so that his ambassadors could present them to Gundobad, king of the Burgundians.2 Even allowing for the rhetorical inflation of his praise, King Theodoric was right to be impressed by the accomplishments of Boethius – who at this time was roughly 25 years old! Boethius had probably completed by this time his version of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s On arithmetic, his first commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, his On the categorical syllogism, and perhaps his On music and a now-lost treatise On astronomy; within a decade, his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge (complete with a second commentary), Aristotle’s Categories (with commentary), and at least some of his work on Aristotle’s On interpretation (with two commentaries), Prior Analytics, Topics (with a now-lost commentary), along with his own brief treatises On the Catholic Faith and Against Nestorius and Eutyches; and in the final decade of his life, the completed translation of Aristotle’s On interpretation, a commentary on Cicero’s Topics, his own treatises On division, On the order of peripatetic teaching (now lost), Introduction to categorical syllogisms, On hypothetical syllogisms, and On topical differentiae, three further theological works (Whether Father, Son and Holy Spirit are substantially predicated of the divinity, How substances are goods in that they exist although they are not substantial goods, and The Trinity is one God, not three Gods) and, his final work, the Consolation of Philosophy.3 Boethius undertook these translations, commentaries and writings alongside his senatorial responsibilities for public service.4 Though in the fullness of time, he would pay dearly for using his status as a patrician to challenge the king’s decisions, Boethius took satisfaction in defending the interests of Campania against aggressive taxes.5 He regarded his work of translation as being in itself a form of public service, bringing ‘the arts of Greek wisdom’ to Rome much as others before him had augmented the city by building up her empire,6 and he 2

3

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For Ostrogothic Italy, with ample attention to Boethius’ place in it, see John Moorhead, Theodoric in Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). For this summary, I rely on J. Magee and J. Marebon, ‘Appendix: Boethius’ works’, in J. Marenbon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 303–10. See E. Demougeot, ‘La carrière politique de Boèce’, in L. Obertello (ed.), Atti congresso internazionale di studi boeziani (Rome: Herder, 1981), pp. 97–108. Cf. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 1.4.44–49, English trans. in H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (eds.), Boethius: The Theological Tractates (London: Heinemann, 1918), pp. 144–6. Cf. Boethius, In categorias Aristotelis, II (PL 64:201): ‘Et si nos curae officii consularis impediunt quo minus in his studiis omnne otium plenamque operam consumimus pertinere tamen videtur hoc ad aliquam reipublicae, curam, elucubratae rei doctrina cives instruere. Nec male de civibus meis merear, si cum prisca hominum virtus urbium caeterarum ad hanc unam rempublicam, dominationem, imperiumque transtulerit, ego id saltem quod reliquum est, Graecae sapientiae artibus mores nostrae civitatis instruxero.’

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regretted the inevitable distractions that impeded his work when he received the extraordinary honour of being made sole consul for 510. Boethius’s concerns for the common good also involved him in theological controversies, as when in 512, a letter from the eastern bishops on Christological debates was read in a large gathering of prominent Romans.7 In 522, his young sons were joint consuls.8 ‘He praised King Theodoric in the Senate upon the consulate of his sons with a brilliant oration.’9 From that year, Boethius served as Master of Offices in Ravenna, Theodoric’s royal city. In this capacity, he bore responsibility for ‘the discipline of the palace: he lulls the stormy character of insolent guardsmen with the calming breeze of his moderation. He harmonizes so many ranks without the smallest confusion, and sustains in his own person the common burden, which most men see as divided’. Among other things, he controlled access by senators, envoys and other dignitaries to the king’s presence; he confirmed the appointment of provincial governors; he oversaw regulation of the price of food in Ravenna; and he managed a staff equal in privilege to the staff of the Urban and Praetorian Prefects.10 It was from this high office that Boethius disastrously fell a year or so thereafter, in the midst of political intrigues and religious debates.11 We already noted that leading Romans were aware of the roiling debates about the Council of Chalcedon and its Christology. These debates were accompanied by political upheavals in the Greek East. In 482, Patriarch Acacius and Emperor Zeno had advanced the Henotikon (‘Act of Union’), seeking to relieve these problems by reconciling those in Egypt and Libya who considered that council had betrayed Cyril of Alexandria’s legacy, with the partisans of Chalcedonian Christology.12 Pope Felix opposed any perceived compromise of the legacy of Pope Leo and the Council of Chalcedon, going so far as to excommunicate Acacius on 28 July 484.13 It was in this context that John the Deacon, Boethius, his illustrious father-in-law Symmachus and the others were asked by the eastern

7

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10 11

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Boethius, Against Nestorius and Eutyches, preface (ed. Stewart and Rand, pp. 72–6). The letter is reprinted as the twelfth in Pope Symmachus’ corpus by A. Theil, Epistolae romanorum pontificum genuinae (Brunsberg: Peter, 1868), I, pp. 709–17. Cf. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 2.3.28–29 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 184); the years are established by epigraphic evidence. Cf. also A. H. M. Jones et al. (eds.), Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (3 vols; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971–92), vol. 2, sub nominibus. Anecdoton Holderi, ll. 13–14, in H. Usener, Anecdoton Holderi: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in ostrogothischer Zeit (Bonn: Georgi, 1877), p. 4. Cassiodorus, Variae VI.6, quoting VI.6.1 (trans. Barnish, p. 98). On reconstructing Boethius’s final years, see L. Obertello, ‘La morte di Boezio e la verità storica’, in L. Obertello (ed.), Atti congresso internazionale di studi boeziani (Rome: Herder, 1981), pp. 59–70. The text is preserved by Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History III.14, English trans. by Whitby, M., in The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 147–9. On Felix’s life and for his letters 1–12, see Thiel, Epistolae romanorum pontificum genuinae, I: 221– 259; the excommunication is Felix, ep. 7, op. cit., I: 247.

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bishops’ letter to find a tenable position opposed to monophysite Christology (‘Eutychianism’) but immune to criticisms of dividing Christ into two separate persons (‘Nestorianism’). Bad relations between Rome and Constantinople persisted until Emperor Justin I (regn. 518–27) turned his attention westward and in 519 brought the schism to an end – but not its overarching Christological debates. Justin and his nephew Justinian’s interests in the West aimed, of course, at restoring much more than just fraternal churchly relations. Longstanding Roman intuitions about basing civic harmony on religious consensus were already in action. By contrast, Theodoric seemingly preferred good social order over uniformity of belief. An episode involving the Jewish community in Genoa made it clear that Theodoric drew a distinction between cherishing his own beliefs and extending legal protection to those who believe otherwise.14 Theodoric also responded with exactitude when religiously-motivated acts had civic consequences that required his attention. When Catholics destroyed synagogues in Ravenna, Theodoric’s judgement took into account the multiple, distinct religious communities under his realm: he exempted Ostrogoths from the fees levied against other Christians to meet the expenses of rebuilding or repairing the synagogues.15 That episode is retold by an anonymous chronicler, who identifies it as the proximal cause of the deteriorating relations between Theodoric and the ‘Romans’ that rapidly overwhelmed Boethius: Theodoric alienated the Catholics of Rome, in response to which Justin harassed the Arians of Constantinople, and so on and so forth, until irreproachable Catholics like Boethius and, in their turn, Symmachus and Pope John met untimely ends.16 For his own part, Boethius rarely indulged in any theological positioning that might outrage Theodoric. True, Boethius rejected Arianism – but he did so rarely,17 and never with the vehemence that he reserved for other Christological heresies. When Boethius was seen to subvert Theodoric’s authority, it was not for religious reasons but rather because as a Roman senator, he asserted 14 15

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See Cassiodorus, Variae II.27; cf. ibid. IV.33. Anonymus Valesianus, II.14.82, in J. C. Rolfe (ed. and trans.), Ammianus Marcellinus (vol. 3; London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 558. Details about Pope John’s deaths are related by Anonymus Valesianus, II.15.88–93 (ed. Rolfe, pp. 562–6) and Liber pontificalis LV, in The Book of the Popes (trans. L. R. Loomis; New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), pp. 131–8; Symmachus’ death is mentioned in the same passage from Anonymus Valesianus. For example in De Fide Catholica, ll. 32–4 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 54) which he wrote in Rome seemingly under the influence of John the Deacon (cf. Ad Senarium, PL 59:399–408); De trinitate I, ll. 11–13 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 6).

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senatorial rights against the loss of privileges to the Gothic court. For reasons that remain obscure, a certain Cyprianus (also Roman) denounced his fellow patrician Albinus to Theodoric, making an accusation ‘to the effect that he had sent to the emperor Justin a letter hostile to Theodoric’s rule’.18 Rising to Albinus’ defence, Boethius made a rash statement that polarized the situation: ‘The charge of Cyprianus is false, but if Albinus did that, so also have I and the whole senate with one accord done it; it is false my Lord King.’19 Boethius’s solidarity landed him alongside Albinus, imprisoned in the baptistery of a church in Pavia. What befell Albinus we are not told, but the anonymous chronicler relates that Boethius was tortured by having a cord twisted so tightly around his head that his eyes popped and then he was bludgeoned to death. Note that there is no indication that Albinus had appealed to Justin as one antiArian to another. That lacuna is readily filled, though, owing to the prevalence of religious politics in received accounts of the unhappy events leading to Boethius’s execution. The second Valesian chronicle emphasizes the religious dimensions of Theodoric’s policies, going so far as gleefully likening Theodoric’s manner of death (which involved dysentery) to Arius’.20 The earliest account of Boethius’s death in English, written in the tenth century by King Alfred the Great, does not hesitate to make the connections explicitly: Boethius . . . perceiving the manifold wrongs wrought by Theodoric upon the Christian faith and upon the chief men of the Romans, began to recall the glad times and immemorial rights they had once enjoyed under the Caesars, their ancient lords. And so meditating, he began to muse and cast about within himself how he might wrest the sovereignty from the unrighteous king and restore it to them of the true faith and of righteous life. Wherefore, sending word privily to the Caesar at Constantinople, the chief city of the Greeks and the seat of their kings, because this Caesar was of the kin of the ancient lords of the Romans, he prayed him to help them back to their Christian faith and their old laws. But cruel King Theodoric heard of these designs, and straightway commanded that Boethius be thrust into a dungeon and kept fast therein.21

Like many since his time, and perhaps some before, King Alfred regarded Boethius as a martyr. And even though Boethius was more a victim of political clashes than a martyr for Catholic truth, the ease with which politics and 18 19 20 21

Anonymus Valesianus, II.14.85 (ed. Rolfe, p. 561), slightly modified. Anonymus Valesianus, II.14.85 (ed. Rolfe, p. 561). Anonymus Valesianus, II.16.95 (ed. Rolfe, p. 569). King Alfred, Boethius, I, English trans. by Sedgefield, W. J., King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), pp. 1–2.

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theology intermingle in the records stands as a helpful reminder to proceed with care. Our expectations are not entirely reliable guides to the understanding of events that transpired fifteen centuries ago.

Opuscula theologica The interpretation of Boethius’s execution as martyrdom, while not historically persuasive, is not wholly without interest. The failure of politics and theology that leads to viewing Boethius as a martyr is comparable to the lack of differentiation in Boethius’s own writings between theology and philosophy. Paradoxically, if the sort of sharp distinctions needed to come to a reasonable position about the historical circumstances of Boethius’s death are applied indiscriminately to the interpretation of Boethius’s works, then we would understand less – not more – about his theology. Most of Boethius’s five short theological writings are thoroughly permeated by evidence of Boethius’s intensive studies in logic. The earliest of them, On the Catholic Faith, is a competent overview of the major teachings of the Catholic Church and thus provides the lineaments for Boethius’s theology. Of some interest, given his familiarity with Greek, is Boethius’s acknowledgment that the Catholic faith admits of legitimate variations in governance and ritual – a comment surely indicating his awareness that Roman practices are neither universal nor compulsory among Christians.22 Even in these preliminary accounts of the faith, Boethius assigns a prominent place to expositing the Trinity and the divine interrelations that doctrine implies: Now this our religion which is called Christian and Catholic is founded chiefly on the following assertions. From all eternity, that is, before the world was established, and so before all that is meant by time began, there has existed one divine substance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such wise that we confess the Father God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God, and yet not three Gods but one God. Thus the Father hath the Son, begotten of his substance and coeternal with Himself in a manner that He alone knoweth. Him we confess to be the Son in the sense that He is not the same as the Father. Nor has the Father ever been Son, for the human mind must not imagine a divine lineage stretching back into infinity; nor can the Son, being of the same nature in virtue of which he is coeternal with the Father, ever become Father, for the divine lineage must not stretch forward into infinity. But the Holy Spirit is neither Father nor Son, and therefore, albeit of the same divine nature, neither begotten, nor begetting, but proceeding as well from the

22

Boethius, On the Catholic Faith, ll. 261–65 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 70).

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Father as the Son [sed a patre quoque procedentem uel filio]. Yet what the manner of that Procession is we are no more able to state clearly than is the human mind able to understand the generation of the Son from the substance of the Father.23

Already in this passage, Boethius uses formal terminology, for example, when he initially presents the Trinity as divinam patris et filii ac spiritus sancti exsistisse substantiam. Perhaps Boethius intended On the Catholic faith for a wide readership: uniquely among his writings, he does not dedicate it. (The Trinity is one God, not three Gods was dedicated to his father-in-law Symmachus; the other three, to John the Deacon of Rome.) On the Catholic faith also lacks the acid comments with which he set himself and his esteemed peers apart from the riffraff. To John, he confides, ‘I . . . would rather bury my speculations in my own memory than share them with any of those pert and frivolous persons who will not tolerate an argument unless it is made amusing.’24 And to his mentor Symmachus, likewise: ‘For, apart from yourself, wherever I turn my eyes, they fall on either the apathy of the dullard or the jealousy of the shrewd, and a man who casts his thoughts before the common herd – I will not say to consider but to trample under foot, would seem to bring discredit on the study of divinity.’25 The leisure of Greek study that Symmachus and Boethius shared distinguished them from the public at large. Boethius, the patrician who defended the Senate against a king, would certainly not subject the results of his theological study to the scrutiny of the uneducated. Even so, his confidence in a good liberal education knew its limits. He writes, ‘We should not of course press our inquiry further than man’s wit and reason are allowed to climb the height of heavenly knowledge. In all the liberal arts we see the same limit set beyond which reason may not reach.’26 Boethius’s contemplations are disciplined by his profound studies in logic, but directed towards God who cannot be captured by language or category. As Boethius notes, ‘When we say “God”, we seem to denote a substance, but one which is beyond substance.’27 This admission is entirely what we would expect from the pen of a Christian or

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Boethius, On the Catholic Faith, ll. 7–28 (ed. and trans. Stewart and Rand, pp. 52–5). Boethius, How substances are goods in that they exist although they are not substantial goods, ll. 9–11 (ed. and trans. Stewart and Rand, pp. 38–9). Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods, pref. ll. 12–16 (ed. and trans. Stewart and Rand, pp. 4–5). Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods, pref. ll. 23–26 (ed. and trans. Stewart and Rand, pp. 4–5). Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods, 4.14–14 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 16; my translation).

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a Platonist, and certainly from a Christian Platonist. But divine transcendence neither undermines the need for accuracy in matters of theology, nor guarantees that somehow all assertions are equally applicable to God. Conceptual clarity serves not to incarcerate God, but rather to promote theological understanding and (vitally) theological communication. A few examples may suffice to illustrate preoccupations typical of Boethius’s theological writings. As a seasoned translator, Boethius differentiated his key terms. In a well-known passage of his treatise Against Nestorius and Eutyches, where his burden is to attempt to satisfy the request communicated by the eastern bishops’ letter of 512, Boethius glossed ὑπόστασις as ‘individual substance of a rational nature’. In the next lines, he attempted to analyse other Greek terms in order to correlate them accurately with the terms used in Latin theology.28 Here, Boethius builds on the foundation laid by Tertullian. Where Tertullian straightforwardly registered equivalences between the two languages, though, Boethius analysed the terms seeking semantic correspondence that is sturdier than conventional usage. Regular practice at translation led Boethius to consistent usage, which benefitted his theological treatises. Even when he did not offer a concise definition, regular recurrence allows us to extrapolate what he meant. Thus, substantia refers to that which is common to the divine persons: ‘But again when I collectively refer to Father, Son, Holy Spirit, there happens to be not several but one substance.’29 In these matters, Boethius was guided by the implementation of the ten categories for predication – substance, quality, quantity, relationality, place, time, condition, situation, activity and passivity.30 Applying these categories clearly and consistently minimizes the danger of careless, or malevolent, speculation and so promotes orthodoxy. It also consolidates Latin theology. Clearly, Boethius was a careful student of Augustine’s books – he admits as much himself – and it is overwhelmingly probable that he knew Marius Victorinus’ writings as well. But these are low hanging fruit and it is preposterous to think that Boethius’s library was deficient in volumes of theology. Research into Boethius’s philosophical texts has documented his extensive familiarity with a range of works. His Consolation in particular has received a thorough and comprehensive commentary. But my 28

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Boethius, Against Nestorius and Eutyches 3 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 84); see further C. Micaelli, ‘La cristologia del Contra Eutychen et Nestorium’, in his Studi sui Trattati teologici di Boezio (Naples: M. D’Auria Editore, 1988), pp. 43–97. Boethius, Whether Father, Son and Holy Spirit are Substantially Predicated of the Divinity, ll. 9–11 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 32; my translation): Sed cum rursus colligo patrem filium spiritum sanctum, non plures sed una occurit esse substantia. Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods, 4.1–4 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 16).

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preliminary studies indicate that source criticism of his theological writings remains an urgent necessity and will therefore be a theme to which I plan to return in subsequent research. Consolidating Latin theology in this way led Boethius to unexpected conclusions. Reserving the term substantia (and its cognate adverb substantialiter) for unqualified being,31 Boethius comes to the conclusion that the word Trinity pertains to the diversity of divine persons and not to the divine substance. Or, as Boethius puts it, ‘Hence not even [the term] Trinity may be substantially predicated of God; for the Father is not Trinity – since He who is Father is not Son and Holy Spirit – nor yet, by parity of reasoning, is the Son Trinity nor the Holy Spirit Trinity, but the Trinity consists in diversity of Persons, the Unity in simplicity of substance.’32 Here, Boethius is not denying that God is Trinity. Instead, he is stipulating that, when we acknowledge the Trinity, we do so by recognizing that there are three Persons and not by making a claim that the divine substance is three. The further elaboration of Boethius’ theological ruminations preoccupied commentators for centuries and secured his place within the great tradition of Latin theology.

The Consolation Secure as that place is, it has not been uncontroversial. The tenth-century abbot of Corvey, Bovo II, resisted his monks’ requests that he augment his lectures on Boethius by providing written interpretations, but eventually capitulated.33 Bovo had resisted because, he claimed, Boethius’s Consolation was contaminated by admixtures of Plato’s philosophy. Bovo claimed this on the basis of his knowledge of Boethius’s De trinitate and Contra Eutychem et Nestorium;34 Virgil’s Bucolics;35 Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram;36 Jerome’s Quaestiones hebraicae in libro Geneseos;37 Macrobius’ In somnium Scipionis;38 Maurus Servius Honoratus’ In 31 32

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34 35 36 37 38

See Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods, 4.36–45 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 18). Boethius, Whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . ., ll. 51–57 (ed. and trans. Stewart and Rand, pp. 36–7). For Bovo’s commentary and others, see R. B. C. Huygens, ‘Mittelalterliche Kommentare zum “O qui perpetua . . .” ’, Sacris erudiri 6 (1954), pp. 373–427; and now S. E. Fischer, ‘Boethius Christianus sive Platonicus. Frühe mittelalterliche Kommentare zu O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas’, in R. Glei et al. (eds.), Boethius Christianus? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 157–77. Bovo, Commentary III (ed. Huygens, p. 384.45–57). Bovo, Commentary IV (ed. Huygens, p. 384.60–3). Bovo, Commentary V (ed. Huygens, p. 385.85–6). Bovo, Commentary VII (ed. Huygens, p. 386.107). Bovo, Commentary VIII (ed. Huygens, p. 387.133–46), XIV (391.246–260) and cf. ibid. XI (389.184–194).

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tria Virgilli opera expositio39 and Virgil’s Aeneid.40 He might have known Cicero’s De republica, though as the editor has observed, Bovo’s knowledge of that passage could have come from lines by Augustine.41 Indeed, since Bovo’s familiarity with Plato is entirely mediated (chiefly from Macrobius, though also from Jerome), it seems likely enough that he knew Cicero’s work similarly at second hand. Bovo’s illumination of Boethius’s verses by comparing them to Macrobius’ and Servius’ commentaries means that his own commentary has real interest as a specimen of contextualized interpretation. The same cannot be said for the theological agenda it serves, which is characterized by antithetical posturing and cheap comments about philosophy all reposing on conviction that philosophy is depraved.42 Bovo’s responses to cosmology (as attested by Macrobius) are typical: he does not deign to evaluate them from a Christian perspective but merely asserts that the Macrobian and Christian models of the universe are contrary and on that basis implies that Boethius’s poem is suspect.43 Bovo’s position is rooted in a particular confession of Christianity which, on at least one occasion, strikes me as eerily anticipating fundamentalist approaches to the Scriptures that are common today.44 His shrewd assimilation of Boethius’s poem to Macrobius’ and to Servius’ works is in service of a theological programme that lacks any abiding interest. Although Bovo clearly was capable of evaluating ‘O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas’ with reference to writings contemporary to it, his commentary shows no awareness of the poem as literature. That shortcoming in itself is perhaps irrelevant. But what is far more important is that his commentary facilitated the idea that at the end of his life Boethius was inadequately Christian. 39 40 41

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44

Bovo, Commentary XIII (ed. Huygens, pp. 390.235–391.243). Bovo, Commentary XXI (ed. Huygens, p. 396.400–1). Bovo, Commentary XX (ed. Huygens, p. 395.361–5) – a citation owed perhaps to Augustine’s Contra Julianum, as per Huygens’s annotation ad loc. Bovo, Commentary I (ed. Huygens, p. 383.12–15): ‘terrebat insuper ipsa materia officio meo propositoque contraria, quia de platonicorum magis dogmatum uanitate, quam de doctrinae euangelicae ueritate necessario errant aliquanta dicenda.’ That line recurs in secondary literature about Boethius, with increased frequency after its citation by H. Chadwick, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 247. There are other examples. Bovo, Commentary II (p. 384.34– 36): ‘unde nihil tibi nocere credo haec pauca de philosophicis legere dogmatibus, quae multo parcius quam susceptae rei necessitas postulabat me attigisse protestor.’ Bovo, Commentary XII (ed. Huygens, 389.205–390.209): ‘sed cum nos secundum astronomiae praeceptores de ambitu caeli, quo terram, licet per amplissima et inmensurabilia spatia, putant undique circumcigi, aliquid disputamus, absit ut nos quisquam uel hoc contentiose astruere uel antipodarum fabulas recipere arbitretur, quae sunt fidei christianae omnino contrariae.’ Ibid. XIX (394.348–395.352): ‘oportet igitur in hoc loco rei ueritatem acriter intendere et hanc a philosophicis longe separare figmentis, ut istam caeli ac siderum mirabilem in diuersa circumuolutionem non ignotae nobis mundi animae, sed omnipotentis dei ineffabili fieri uirtute credamas.’ Bovo, Commentary XXIV (ed. Huygens, 398.450–455): ‘Haec sancti Hieronimi dicta, quoniam in aliis nostris auctoribus aliquid tale non legimus et ipse quoque contraria quosdam sentire non tacuit, contentiose defendenda non arbitror, immo nullam penitus rationale creaturam a deo in principio conditam secundum scripturarum auctoritatem intellego praeter angelos et homines.’

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Henry Chadwick expressed an essentially similar view when he concluded that the ‘Consolation is a work written by a Platonist who is also a Christian, but it is not a Christian work’.45 Bovo’s theological assertions lend weight to this claim, but like those assertions, the claim is at best obscure and at worst methodologically flawed. Without adequate proof, Bovo and Chadwick made a substantially identical claim that the Consolation was in some meaningful sense un-Christian. This trend in reading Boethius’s Consolation is odd, for no fewer than two reasons. First, why suppose that, as a Christian facing death, Boethius really ought to have written a devotional tract? Interrogating a Christian facing death – as, for instance, we read described in the Ladder of Divine Ascent V.22 – and attempting to determine whether Christianity is adequately in evidence is an outrageous undertaking that discloses more about the interrogator than about the one dying. What it discloses is a constrained attitude towards Christianity that could charitably be called parochial or, with some justice, even sectarian. Secondly, the standard interrogation of Boethius’s Consolation largely ignores its literary character and is therefore clumsy in straightforwardly comparing the Consolation to his commentaries, his tractates and his eventually superfluous translations. It is almost as though Boethius’s critics believe Christians should not dabble with fiction since it contaminates truth – a view which, in a startling display of irony, owes more to Plato’s Republic X than to any distinctly Christian insight known to me. Owing to that peculiar view, a phalanx of worried readers have debated whether Boethius was indeed a Christian: perhaps a casual allegiance slipped away when he was faced with death, so that he prepared himself to die through a gentlemanly and thoroughly pagan exercise in philosophy . . . .That misreading of Boethius’s death has in modern times supplanted the earlier misreading of it as martyrdom. Nearly half a century ago, C. S. Lewis (who was, it bears recalling, himself a Christian and author of imaginative fiction) warned against expecting to find reassuring theological platitudes in the Consolation of Philosophy: If we had asked Boethius why his book contained philosophical rather than religious consolations, I do not doubt that he would have answered, “But did you not read my title? I wrote philosophically, not religiously, because I had chosen the consolations of philosophy, not those of religion, as my subject. You might as well ask why a book on arithmetic does not use geometrical methods”.46

Lewis’s observation is reasonable. But I want to go slightly further. 45 46

Chadwick, Boethius, p. 249. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 77–8.

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The suspicion that Boethius’s Christianity was ultimately inadequate (even if not for his own life, then by implication for the sake of posterity) is found in David Bradshaw’s evaluation of Boethius’s theological texts for the Cambridge Companion to Boethius. Bradshaw notes with evident disapproval some gaps in Boethius’s account of the Catholic faith: ‘the exclusive focus on what the Church asserts, as opposed to what she practices, is certainly striking. There is no mention of prayer, or liturgy, or monasticism, or reverence for the saints, or the elementary duties of charity and almsgiving.’47 It is unclear that such topics are formal necessities for any account of Catholic faith worthy of the name. And in any case, Bradshaw’s frustrated expectation about the mention of liturgy is simply wrong. We noted already that Boethius allowed for legitimate variations of rite and organization within the Catholic Church in his treatise on the Catholic faith; moreover, Boethius elsewhere claims that the Catholic faith is Catholic (at least in part) quod eius cultus per omnes paene mundi terminos emanauit.48 One gets the impression from Bradshaw’s critique that he has identified a suite of features that are supposedly common to Patristic and to Byzantine Theology, and that he takes the putative lack of those features from Boethius’s theology as evidence that Boethius has departed from an earlier consensus. Be that as it may, an extensive survey of theological texts from Boethius’s day indicates that his work is far more typical than Bradshaw’s evaluation suggests: ‘Boethius’ theological work shows the same academic, technical orientation, the same preoccupation with clean dialectical method and with orthodox tradition, that Greek works of the time do.’49 Though their concerns differed, Bovo and Bradshaw appear to have been dissatisfied by Boethius’s failure to conform to their respective ideas of what concerns a theologian ought to have and what sort of writings a theologian should therefore produce. By an interesting coincidence, both critiques presuppose the importance of monasticism – a trait lacking from any account of Boethius’s life. On the one hand, it is tempting to think that the clear distinction between a monastic mode of living and a secular mode of living (or, given the critique of Boethius for his affinity to Plato, a philosophic mode of living – though I doubt that distinction would come readily to most Christians before the middle ages) somehow insulates the monk from the contaminants of the world. And 47

48 49

D. Bradshaw, ‘The Opuscula sacra: Boethius and theology’, in J. Marenbon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 118. Boethius, The Trinity is One God, not Three Gods 1.5–6 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 6). B. E. Daley, ‘Boethius’ Theological Tractates and Early Byzantine Scholasticism’, Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984), pp. 158–91 (177).

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perhaps this salubrious withdrawal in turn vindicates monastic theology. On the other hand, it cannot escape our notice that theologians of no less stature than Eriugena and Aquinas were happy to acknowledge their indebtedness to Boethius’s doctrinal treatises. I do not intend to develop that observation into an argument, but merely note that Boethius’s place in theology is attested by towering figures, while criticisms and misgivings predicated on his familiarity with philosophy tend to erupt from rather less distinguished quarters. The figure of a Roman senator, confident in his social status and defending that status for all it entailed (in conflicts religious as well as political), is perhaps to some of us less compelling than that of the liminal holy-man or the mystical clergyman. That is, a secular philosopher writing Christian theology in the early Middle Ages may not be a congenial authority for those who prefer their history simple and their doctrines repristinated. Perhaps some even recoil at the idea that a Christian could find comfort through a literary exercise that aimed towards God but lacked unambiguous markers of Christian identity. Boethius himself probably would not have understood the idea, implicit in the criticisms surveyed here, that being guided to God by Philosophy is somehow a betrayal of Christ, who (in line with Boethius’s On the Catholic Faith) can lead one even further. God, after all, is God. To give Boethius’s last words as the final words for this paper: There remains one who beholds all, namely God all knowing, and the ever-present eternity of His vision runs alongside the future of our actions, distributing rewards to the good and punishments to the evil. Nor are our hopes and prayers to God in vain, which if they are right cannot be inefficacious. So then turn from vices, acquire virtues, raise your minds to right hopes, offer humble prayers on high. If you would not dissemble, a great necessity is laid upon you for integrity, since you act in the sight of the judge who sees all.50

50

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 5.6.166–76 (ed. Stewart and Rand, p. 410; my translation).

Part Four

Modern Theology

8

Towards a Fair History of Christian Orthodoxy Antoine Arjakovsky

Let me begin by saying that I am very pleased to pay tribute to Andrew Louth. This will surprise you but I sometimes feel that many Patristic scholars are actually Hegel’s disciples. Many of them believe in the end of the History and consider that the Patristic age ends with Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas. After these last authorities, there are only falls and revivals. But this is not a Christian attitude and this is also not true. For Christians, history is necessary, a theanthropic process where the Spirit always blows in a creative way. And for trained historians, history cannot be closed in itself. Thus historical science is always a participation in the past, a vision of the future and an actualization in the present. Bishop Eulogius Guiorguievsky considered Sergius Bulgakov (when he died in 1944) as a true doctor of the Church. He was in this sense an authentic scholar. And nobody doubts that it is also the case of Professor Andrew Louth. About Sergius Bulgakov, Andrew Louth wrote the following: Bulgakov can be seen as perhaps the Russian theologian who sought to grasp the kairos of the encounter of Orthodoxy with the West and unfold the riches of the Orthodox tradition for the benefit of a Western Christendom that had lost so much of the original Christian vision. Although he was more aware than most of the need to engage with philosophical issues, his theology is fundamentally liturgical, the theology of one standing in the Spirit and beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ.1

What I want to argue in this paper is that the Christian orthodox school of Paris has changed many things not only for Patristic methodology but also for contemporaneous historiography. There are different currents in the orthodox 1

A. Louth, ‘Sergei Bulgakov’, in the Nordic Dictionary of Modern Theologians (to be published in Norwegian).

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historiography of the Church today. In the Orthodox world (in its denominational understanding), it is possible to distinguish mainly two creative schools nowadays: the positivist school (of Panayotis Trembelas in Greece; or of the Pravoslavnaja Encyclopedia edited by the Moscow Patriarcate in Russia) that has only an eclectic or alphabetic understanding of the past. It is connected with the identity of the authors between faith and culture. There is another historiographic school (mainly dominant in the West) that can be defined as apophatic, grounded on the communitarian traditions. Its main characteristic is to disconnect faith and culture and show the universal dimension of the Orthodox faith, which means for its authors, of the Orthodox Church. But these two schools are today showing their limits. Historical truth is not only epistemic or doxic, it is also orthodoxic. This is clear for Christians for whom Christ is not only the truth or the life. He is first the way, the hodos, the tao, both truth-and-life. But this becomes clear for agnostic scholars too. History must prevail on memory to create a peaceful and reflexive community of life.2

The apophatic historiography of the Orthodox Church The apophatic historiography identifies Orthodox faith with the Church whose doctrine consists in the recognition of the seven Ecumenical Councils and whose limits are not ethnic or national.3 L’Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient by Vladimir Lossky is not, strictly speaking, an historical study. However, its introduction entitled ‘Théologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient’ has historical considerations. Moreover, the author had a considerable influence over a generation of Orthodox historians, including J. Meyendorff, A. Schmemann, O. Clement, K. Ware, and others. V. Lossky characteristically presents himself as an Orthodox theologian who cannot accept that what happens in the world 2

3

This is defended in a recently published book: A. Arjakovsky, Qu’est-ce que l’orthodoxie? (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). The English translation has been done by Jerry Ryan and is due to be published. A. Eltchaninoff, V. Ern and P. Florensky, Istoria Religii, s prilojeniem stati S. N. Boulgakova ‘O protivoretchivosti sovremmenovo bezreliguioznovo mirovozrenia’, Moskva, Paris, Ruskij Put, 2004 (edition originale, Moskva, Polza, 1909); S. Boulgakov, Orthoxie (Paris: Alcan 1932); J. Meyendorff, L’Eglise orthodoxe hier et aujourd’hui (Paris: Seuil, 1960); T. Ware, Orthodoxie, l’Eglise des sept conciles (Paris: DDB, 1997); A. Schmemann, Le chemin historique de l’orthodoxie (Paris: YMCA Press, 1995); J. Meyendorff and A. Papadakis, L’Eglise dans l’histoire; vol.1, Unite de l’Empire et division des chretiens (Paris: Cerf, 1993); vol. 2: L’Orient chretien et l’essor de la papaute (Paris: Cerf, 2001); M. A. Costa de Beauregard, Pere Ion Bria, Theologue de Foucauld, L’Orthodoxie (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1979); O. Clement, Byzance et le christianisme (Paris: PUF, 1964); O. Clement, L’Essor du christianisme orientale (Paris: PUF, 1964).

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might influence what happens in the Church because of the divine and eternal nature of the Church. He writes: For a ‘Church historian’ the religious factor disappears and is replaced by others – such as the interplay of political and social interests, the role of ethnic and cultural conditions considered as the dominant forces in the life of the Church. People believe that they are more sophisticated, more up to date, when they invoke these factors as the real causes which determine ecclesial history. While recognizing the importance of these conditions, the Christian historian can only envisage them as exterior to the essence of the Church; he cannot renounce seeing the Church as an autonomous body, submitted to another law than that of the determinism of this world. If, for example, one considers the dogmatic question of the procession of the Holy Spirit which divided the Eastern and Western Churches, it cannot be considered as a fortuitous phenomenon in the history of the Church in the strict sense of this term. From a religious viewpoint, it is the only reason which matters in the sequence of events which led to the separation. This dogmatic determination, even though it was perhaps conditioned by several external factors, involved, on both sides, a spiritual commitment, a conscious option in a matter of faith.4

This position was contested in 1954 by Yves Marie Congar in his political, cultural and ecclesial history of the ‘Eastern Schism’.5 For this Dominican theologian, ‘the Eastern schism came about through a progressive drifting apart and was consolidated by the acceptation of this distancing’.6 Notwithstanding this, this book by V. Lossky, published in Paris in 1944, was a turning point in the history of the historical awareness of Oriental Christianity. By showing that all authentic theology is mystical, Lossky invited the historiography of Western Christianity to an in-depth dialogue. In continuity with the task undertaken by S. Bulgakov, M. Lot Borodine and G. Florovsky, he contributed to the reawakening of interest in Patristic theology within the Western world. This renewal led to the creation of the collection Sources Chretiennes, in 1942, and the emergence of a brilliant generation of intellectuals: Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Claude Mondesert, Victor Fontoynont. Vladimir Lossky, who was in contact with these

4 5

6

V. Lossky, Essai sur la theologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient (Paris: Cerf, 1990; 11944), p. 11. Y. Congar, ‘Neuf Cents Ans Apres. Notes sur le “Schism Oriental” ’, in L. Beauduin (ed.), 1054-1954, l’Eglise et les Eglises (Chevetogne: editions de Chevetogne, 1954). These theses were greeted with widespread approval in the academic world. However, some Orthodox intellectuals continued to defend V. Lossky’s concept of a dogmatic explanation of Church history. C. Laporte, Tous les saints de l’Orthodoxie (preface by Mgr Luka, bishop of Western Europe, Patriarch of Serbia; Vevey: Xenia, 2008). The author is also a specialist in the ‘securitization of assets in Switzerland’. Congar, ‘Neuf Cents Ans Apres. Notes sur le “Schism Oriental” ’, p. 8.

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authors who contributed to the journal Dieu Vivant, finished by significantly re-evaluating Western Christian orthodoxy above and beyond the Merovingian period. In his final book, La Vision de Dieu, published by Delachaux and Niestle in 1962, V. Lossky attempts to reconcile the work of the Byzantine Orthodox theologian Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) of the thirteenth century with that of the seventeenth-century Jesuit theologian Denis Petau (1583–1652), a scholar and professor of Church history.7 Lossky understood that the opposition between Byzantine and Latin theology, although real, was ultimately superficial. It is true that the librarian of King Louis XIII and the editor of the works of John Chrysostom qualified as ‘nonsense’ the assertion by Palamas that human beings could not see the Divine Essence. Palamas could have simply reread the Beatitudes to realize that it had been promised to the pure of heart that they would see God. After examining the whole Patristic tradition before judging the contradiction between Petau and Palamas, Lossky concludes by affirming that one must distinguish between the erotic and neoplatonic perspective which the Orientals opposed because of its egoistical inclination and the agapeic and evangelical approach shared by the Fathers of the Church, both Eastern and Western. In this latter perspective, a human being sees the divinity in the measure in which one gives one’s self to God. But if Petau is severely (and rightly, in Lossky’s mind) critical of the scholastic doctrine of the intuitive vision of the Divine Essence propagated by the Jesuits – such as Gabriel Vasquez – in the sixteenth century this is because, in the opinion of the Russian theologian, Western theology cannot be considered as a monolithic block. Lossky concludes his book on this bitter but reconciling note: [Petau] did not realize – and this is the big paradox – that the whole theological work of Palamas is a defense of the immediate vision of God and that the distinction between essence and energy, far from being a separation, a division of God into two parts – one communicable, the other incommunicable – is rather a theological postulate which imposes itself if we want to maintain the realistic (and not simply metaphorical) nature of our deification without having created being annihilated in the Divine Essence.8

This breach opened in the understanding of modern Catholic theology by Vladimir Lossky justifies a re-reading of the history of Western thought according to a non-confessional, post-Manichean dynamic, that is, according to a properly 7 8

Petau boasts of having uncovered no fewer than 8,000 mistakes in the Annales of Baronius. V. Lossky, Vision de Dieu (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestle, 1962), p. 138.

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orthodox perspective.9 In fact, according to Jean-Louis Quantin, the Theologica dogmata of Denis Petau – which appeared between 1644 and 1650 – was very different from scholastic theology. This work tried to interpret the Scriptures through the councils and the Fathers of the Church. The same could be said of the Dogmata Theologica of the Oratorian Louis Thomassin (1619–95) – a work which appeared between 1680 and 1689.10 But V. Lossky’s evolution was not understood immediately by its followers. In the positivist school of Panayotis Trembelas (1886–1977), the Christian dimension of Western history was recognized but not integrated in its history of the Orthodox Church. His Dogmatique de l’Eglise orthodoxe catholique, published in Athens in 1959–61, was translated into French and published in 1966–68. It contributes to a critical re-evaluation of the history of Christianity. This Greek theologian, titular of the chair of liturgy, was strongly influenced by the academic and scholastic thought of C. Androutsos. During the 1950s, P. Trembelas was one of the principle animators of the Zoi Fraternity, founded in 1911 by Fr Eusebius Matthopoulos, and then, after an internal schism in the Fraternity in 1959, he became the leader of the movement’s conservative right wing – which led to the creation of the movement Sotir in June of 1960. Trembelas participated in the 1954 Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Evanston. In 1976, he presided over the Second Congress of Orthodox Theologians at Athens. For 30 years, this book was the official manual used by students in Greek theological faculties. This book is not lacking in sweeping generalities about Catholics ‘who have made the pope and bishops the sole instruments of the divine law of Tradition’ and about Protestants ‘who have gotten rid of the authority of Tradition’.11 But Trembelas admits that the situation he observes was not always the case over the course of history. Luther, for example, accepted the three symbols of faith (the Apostolic Creed, the Nicaean Creed and the Quicumque attributed to Athanasius) as ecumenical, though that tradition had a note of catholicity and was not the exclusive mark of the Western Church. Along the same lines, he recognized that ‘the exercise of ecclesiastical authority imposes itself in questions of faith because of the reciprocal relationships within a body and their natural 9

10

11

Cf the works of Henri de Lubac, Yves Marie Congar, Louis Bouyer, H. U. von Balthasar, etc. Cf. esp. P. Gourad, La gloire et la glorification de l’univers chez Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1998). J.-L. Quantin, ‘The Fathers in Seventeenth Century Roman Catholic theology’, in Backus, The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, vol. 1, p. 963. P. Trembelas, Dogmatique de l’Eglise orthodoxe Catholique (trans. Archmandrite Pierre Dumont; Chevetogne: DDB, 1966), cf. introduction.

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interdependence within the community of the universal Church’.12 Trembelas saw no problem in underlining how the reaction of mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux was beneficial for scholasticism. He particularly appreciated the Italian scholastic Giovanni de Fidenza or Bonaventure (1221–74), the cardinal bishop of Albano, whom he considered as a saint and ‘the most subtle theologian of his times’. Above all, Trembelas had a very great esteem for the Dutch Calvinist theologian Jan Jacob van Oosterzee (1817–82) and his Christ-centred theology. The Utrecht professor did not hesitate to qualify himself as ‘an Evangelical or an orthodox Christian’. Trembelas had a very original criticism of the work of St John Damascene. On the one hand, he rejoices that the West had recognized him as a Doctor of the Church. But, on the other hand, he finds that this Patristic synthesis is not satisfactory for contemporary orthodox theology. John Damascene only treats two sacraments (Baptism and the Eucharist), neglects ecclesiology and concerns himself essentially with ‘light, fire, the stars and the wind’!13 For this reason, Trembelas, along with Gregory Palamas, believes that Orthodox tradition is not based on just the seven ecumenical councils. He adds the fourteenth-century councils of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as well as the seventeenth-century symbolic books by metropolitans P. Moghila and Dositheus of Jerusalem (‘worthy auxiliaries of the Orthodox dogmatist’), the acts of the synods of Constantinople (1638), Jassy (1643) and Jerusalem (1672) and even the works of C. Androutsos (Dogmatique de l’Eglise Othodoxe Orientale, 1907).

The limits of apophatic historiography Such a representation of the history of orthodox tradition does not sit well with Timothy Ware (b. 1934), a British theologian who converted from the Anglican Church to Orthodoxy in 1958. His book The Orthodox Church,14 rewritten several times on the occasion of new editions, and translations, presently enjoys great prestige in the Orthodox world. Kallistos Ware became a priest and monk in 1966, bishop of Diokleia under the aegis of the ecumenical patriarchate in 1982 and metropolitan bishop in 2007. He was a professor at the University of Oxford for 35 years and published numerous works – among them, an English

12 13 14

Trembelas, Dogmatique de l’Eglise orthodoxe Catholique, p. 54. Ibid., p. 72. T. Ware, The Orthodox Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

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translation of the Philokalia. This is a work of great erudition and reveals a deep openness and a spirit of interjuridictional and intercultural understanding of the past of the Orthodox churches. Kallistos Ware has contributed to breaking down the barriers in the Orthodox world and enabled it to rediscover a conciliar identity after centuries of internal divisions and external persecutions. But he could not respond to all the questions of the contemporary historian. Following Vladimir Lossky, he separates the history of the Eastern Churches, which is presented as dolorous and tragic, from their faith and rituals which are presented as immovable and inflexible. This primary methodological position, that is typical of apophatic orthodox historiography, leads K. Ware to take disconcerting stances both on the level of the unfolding of events and on the level of the definition of doctrinal and spiritual truth. We will take three examples. First, K. Ware limits the history of orthodoxy to that of the territories under the jurisdiction of the leaders of the Orthodox Church – which leads him to reject the history of Western orthodox Christianity from the medieval period onward. For Ware, when the pope broke relation with Byzantium in 1054, it was the whole Latin Church which suddenly lost its link with orthodoxy.15 To be sure, this position, commonly accepted in the manuals used in seminaries of the Orthodox Church, is presented, in general, with more nuances.16 John Meyendorff, in particular, insists that the Crusades were the source of the ‘real and definitive rupture’.17 Whatever might be the case, as K. Ware writes, ‘the unity of the Mediterranean world would gradually disappear during the following centuries, beginning with the demise of political unity’.18 This perspective has been shared by the French orthodox historian Olivier Clément, a disciple of Vladimir Lossky, in 1961 in his bestseller L’Eglise Orthodoxe (Paris, PUF, 1961). Clément also shares history and doctrine. But later on, he 15

16

17

18

‘Such is the incident which conventionally marks the beginning of the great schism between the orthodox East and the Latin West . . .’ Ware, L’orthodoxie, p. 60. ‘ . . . But this separation, as most historians now recognize, is not an event whose date can be precisely determined’, Ware, L’orthodoxie, p. 60. J. Meyendorff, L’Eglise orthodoxe, hier et aujourd’hui (Paris: Seuil, 1960), p. 50. This author also uses the dichotomy between history and doctrine and spirituality. This same plan can be found in L’Eglise orthodoxe by Olivier Clement, written during the same period. V. Lossky does not take history into consideration in his Essai sur la theologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient, while A. Schmemann, in his Le chemin historique de l’Orthodoxie, does not treat questions of doctrine and spirituality. In this generation of Neo-Patristic synthesis, it was only the opus of John Zizioulas, L’etre ecclesial, which finally denounced a dichotomy between history and eschatology, which led some to positivism and others to millenniarism. It is because for the Church Fathers, and for Ignatius in particular, truth becomes historical without ceasing to be ontological, that Zizioulas proposes a synthesis between the historical and eschatological perspectives in an article published in the journal Istina in 1974 and entitled ‘La continuite avec les origines apostoliques dans la conscience theologique des Eglises orthodoxes’. Ware, L’orthodoxie, p. 61.

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questioned its own methodology in two books published in 1964 on Medieval Byzantine Christianity, insisted that the history of Western Christianity was an integral part of orthodox Christianity. Clement sees proof for this in the fact that the Orthodox patriarchs agreed, without any condition of prior repentance, to participate in the ecumenical councils of Lyon and Florence, where they signed the acts of reunification. It is difficult to imagine that the history of Western culture suddenly became orthodox again on the morning of 6 July 1439, when the formula of agreement was signed, the Bull Laetentur Coeli, between the Latin theologians (the pope himself participated in the deliberations of the council – a fact unprecedented in the history of ecumenical councils) and the Byzantine theologians (the text was signed not only by the patriarch and the emperor but also by the future patriarch of Constantinople, Georges Scholarios, the humanist Mgr Bessarion, the bishop of Nicaea, Mgr Isidore, the metropolitan of Kiev, etc.). On a larger scale, the disconnect most Orthodox historians make between Eastern and Western orthodoxy from the eleventh century on poses the problem of the recognition by Eastern Orthodox of the principal fruits of this Western culture, from Gothic Architecture to spatial technology, from the holiness of a Francis of Assisi to that of a Martin Luther King. For this reason, Fr Thomas Hopko, the former dean of the Orthodox Institute of Saint Vladimir and the author of correspondence courses on Church history, made it a point to set aside, at the end of each century studied in his courses, brief notes on the evolution of Western Christianity. Hopko usually only relates events – but after mentioning the First Vatican Council and its declaration of papal infallibility, he briefly adds, as if in anticipation of the future age of the reconciliation of memories: ‘ The Curé of Ars and the Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux lived during this epoch.’19 There is a second methodological problem posed by the separation between history and dogma and the unequivocal identification of the doctrine of the seven councils with the Eastern Church. K. Ware affirms that ‘as long as there is not unity in the faith, there cannot be sacramental communion’.20 Such an affirmation, which not only rules out sacramental communion but also the reconciliation of memories, has not always been historically prevalent in the Orthodox Churches. It is common knowledge that, during the Middle Ages, sees which were not in communion with Rome – such as that of Constantinople – were, however, in 19 20

T. Hopko, Cours d’Histoire de l’Eglise (Paris: Saint Sergius Institute, 1984), p. 70. Ware, L’orthodoxie, p. 401.

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mediate communion with the Chair of Peter through their communion with the see of Antioch. As Fr Robert Taft has pointed out, many regions on the border between the Byzantine and Latin Empires – such as Calabria in Italy and Kiev in Russia – practised intercommunion at least until the end of the eighteenth century. Mention can also be made of the intercommunion among ‘the Orthodox’ and ‘Catholics’ authorized from 1969 to 1986 by the synod of the Russian Church.21 More generally, there are many instances in Church history of the recognition of the baptism of repentant heretics which bear silent witness that the frontiers of the visible Church do not quite coincide with those of the mystical Church. As Fr Andre Borrely indicates, this was, at any rate, the position of the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (381) whose sixth canon forbade the re-baptism of repentant Arians. All that has been said does not mean that the Eucharistic hospitality had been automatic in the past. It only means that in the sacramental practices of the first and second millennium of the Christian churches of the East and of the West, the rule of prayer had often been prevalent on the rule of law.22 Third and last, the fact of identifying a Church as Orthodox in virtue of its communitarian tradition is an obstacle to its reconciliation with other historical Christian Churches. As long as the reality of the diaspora of the Eastern Churches is considered only in the perspective of mission – as is the case in chapter 9 of the book by K. Ware – the Orthodox Church finds herself confronted with the phenomenon of proselytism and lack of respect of her ‘canonical territory’. The historical reality of the ecclesial organization of Christianity, however, is that Orthodox ecclesiology has always been pastoral and synodal before becoming territorial and vertical. A. Schmemann has shown that it was the emperor Constantine who, after having legalized the Christian faith, decided to intervene in the affairs of the Church to resolve the Donatist schism (whereas the Church previously had the custom of regulating its inner tensions by confiding in the Holy Spirit through a synodal process). It was also Constantine who made the relationship of the bishop with his community a territorial relationship (whereas at the beginnings the Church was constituted first by the personal relationships of the apostles to the local communities).23 This is apparent when one reads the Letters of St Paul to the communities he helped found. 21

22

23

Cf. A. Arjakovsky, En attendant le concile de l’Église orthodoxe (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2011), p. 311. See my paper ‘On Eucharistic Hospitality’, in A. Arjakovsky, Church, Culture and Identity (Lviv: UCU, 2007), pp. 204–19. Schmemann, Le cheminement, pp. 23, 90.

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A fair historiography It must be said, however, that, in the image of V. Lossky’s own evolution, the Orthodox apophatic historiography has not been monolithic and received its own evolution. This historiography has progressively assimilated the fact that the mystical boundaries of the Church surpass her denominational borders. Kallistos Ware, one of the most recognized bishops in the Orthodox Christian world, in his book The Inner Kingdom, defined orthodoxy as ‘the fullness of life in Christ’, adding that the Orthodox Church does not have a monopoly on truth. To those who want immediate answers in the Orthodox Church, who oppose the truth of the Church with the truth of the century, the orthodoxy of the East with the heresies of the West, K. Ware offers a broader view of orthodoxy: Why should we deny Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Victor Hugo and all the others? Do they not belong to our cultural heritage?. . . . The truth is not an argument that gives systematic responses to all questions, it is a light. And like any light, it is surrounded by shadows and darkness. Have the humility to recognize that there are many issues that elude us, but which the West with the tradition that is his, can help us find answers.24

In his address to the Congress of the Orthodox Fraternity of Western Europe which took place at Amiens in 1977, ‘ The Future and Significance of the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe’, Olivier Clément has shown the same evolution as V. Lossky and K. Ware fighting for an Orthodox reconciliation between ‘natural history’ and ‘super natural doctrine’. This conference questions the whole traditional historiography of the Orthodox Church. Olivier Clément sees the trace of the undivided Church and, consequently, of orthodox doctrine in the history of a ‘Latin West’ which he avoids interpreting as a hermetical concept (if only by the initial recognition that ‘Latinity’ is not its only characteristic just as ‘Byzantinity’ is not the only tradition in the East). For Clément, Roman art and twelfth-century Cistercian theology are undisputable signs of the inspiration of the undivided Spirit. Clement affirms that the growing apart between the East and the West, so well described by Fr Yves Congar, was not an obstacle for the continued expression of orthodox doctrine in both Eastern and Western Europe – even after the failed reception

24

K. Ware, Le royaume intérieur (Le sel de la terre; Paris: Cerf, 1993), p. 15.

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of the Council of Florence. In the 1977 conference at Amiens, O. Clément had this to say: The ferment of the undivided Church has not ceased to be active in this country. The 17th century French School of Spirituality and Pascal, the manifestations of holiness in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Curé of Ars to St Thérèse of Lisieux, from Fr de Foucauld to Madeleine Delbrel and Massignon, a powerful literature of Christian inspiration, from Leon Bloy to Bernanos, the biblical and patristic renewal during the 1950s – all witness to the richness of the Tradition however awkward, however shattered this witness might be; we could develop a whole Christian concept of the wiles of the Holy Spirit!

The Orthodox theologian goes on to say: ‘We cannot be blind to the fact that the influence of the Gospels, of the Eucharist and of at least the first four Ecumenical Councils never ceased in the West and brought forth a holiness perhaps all the more impressive and all the more heroic in that it lacked theological breathing room.’25 Such a perspective, even if it is still a minority opinion, is far from being considered marginal. Mgr Stephanos, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Estonia, has stated that Olivier Clement ‘gave the best of himself ’26 in his address to the conference. The Greek archbishop also notes that Olivier Clement’s remarks concerning Orthodox phyletism are still very much a propos. He cites the text of the professor at the Saint Sergius Institute. O. Clément writes: Among other things, it could first be asked if the link which has been established in the Orthodox Church between nationality and ecclesiastical jurisdiction has not changed its meaning in the Diaspora: originally it meant a transfiguration of the ethnic community by the Church – but it often became a specifically Orthodox form of secularization of the Church by the ethnic community. In such a perspective, Orthodoxy seemed to be only an aspect of national culture. The descendents of the immigrants, in the measure in which they became assimilated, quite naturally abandoned an Orthodoxy that no longer concerned them. The hemorrhage has been gigantic. It has never been measured . . .27 25

26

27

O. Clement, ‘Avenir et signification de la diaspora orthodoxe en Europe occidentale’, in Contacts 103 (1978), republished by Guillou, M. J., ‘Les chances du dialogue entre l’Eglise catholique et l’Eglise orthodoxe’, in Aspects d’Orthodoxie (Colloquium of Strasbourg, Nov. 1978; Paris: PUF, 1981), p. 113. Mgr Stephanos, Metropolitan of Tallin and all Estonia, ‘Olivier Clement et l’unification de l’Orthodoxie en France’ (Paris, 16 January 2010), online here: http://www.orthodoxa.org/FR/ orthodoxie/theologie/hommageOC.htm. Stephanos, ‘Olivier Clement et l’unification de l’Orthodoxie en France’.

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Moreover, a new generation of Orthodox theologians and historians want to put an end to the apologetic aspect of the history of the Orthodox Church. This movement, which started at the beginning of the nineteenth century with historians such as A. Lebedev, was continued into the twentieth century by theologians and courageous bishops such as Fr Alexis Kniazev (1913–91), Fr Alexander Schmemann (1921–83), Fr Nicolas Afanassiev (1893–1966) and Metropolitan Emilianos Timiadis (1916–2008). Alexis Kniazev became the dean of the Saint Sergius Institute in 1965. He participated as an observer in the Second Vatican Council and was involved in many ecumenical undertakings – such as the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible in 1975. Along with Fr Alexander Schmemann, he dared to speak of a profound crisis in the structures of the Orthodox Church ‘due to historic outgrowths’. In 1978, Kniazev wrote: ‘These outgrowths have reached such a point that the Orthodox Church risks losing its true identity and having its catholicity suffocated because its organs have become progressively blocked by purely human interests: political and religious nationalism, provincialism and a bell-tower mentality, servile submission to the imperialistic goals of the State.’28 Alexander Schmemann considered that these different practical heresies originated in ‘the historical sin of Orthodoxy’ – the theocracy of Constantine.29 Schmemann, who was the confessor of Solzhenitsyn, was critical of both caesaro-papism and the romanticism of V. Soloviev, the author of Histoire et avenir de la théocratie,30 whose theses were embraced by the Russian historian Anton Kartachev. The School of Paris was helped by this growing consciousness of the central role of justice in Orthodox theology. The consequence of the theological renewal of the School of Paris was not just the criticism of the confessional definition of Orthodoxy but also of her juridical rigidity dating from the Byzantine epoch. In a 1933 article in the journal Put’, Nicolas Afanassiev proposed distinguishing between an eternal truth found in a canon from a custom that has become outdated.31 He points out, in ‘The canons and canonical consciousness’, that the canonists of the epoch of the emperor Manuel Comnenos (1118–80) did not consider themselves prisoners of the edict of the Council of Trullo which proclaimed the invariability of the canons. But after the fall of Constantinople, their creativity was forgotten and there was a return to a stagnant representation 28

29 30 31

A. Kniazev, ‘La crise des structures et le concile pan orthodoxe’, in Aspects de l’Orthodoxie (Paris: PUF, 1981), p. 107. A. Schmemann, ‘La Theocratie byzantine et l’Eglise orthodoxe’, Dieu vivant 25 (1953), pp. 33–54. A. Soloviev, Histoire et avenir de la theocratie (trans. M. Chmelewsky; Paris: Cujas, 2008). N. Afanassiev, ‘Kanony i kanonitcheskoie soznanie’, Put’ 39 (1933), prilojenie, 16c.

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of orthopraxis. In the opinion of Afanassiev, canonic validity could only be invoked in the measure in which the canon fulfilled the purpose for which it had been decreed. He gives numerous examples which demonstrate the contradiction between the so-called orthodox application of certain canons and their original intent,32 the neglect of certain canons in practice by the Orthodox faithful.33 He also mentions the belief of certain zealots in the eternal validity of the canons.34 Afanassiev indicates that Christ did not give any canonical norm to his Church (he references Lk. 12.14, ‘Who appointed me a judge or an arbitrator between you?’). However, Christ gave life-giving truths and confided the power of the keys to his apostles. For Afanassiev, this power to bind and to unbind excludes the concept of divine right but does authorize the Church to formulate canonical norms – which may differ according to the times and circumstances – as long as the life-giving truths of Christ are respected.

Conclusion The renewal of the paradigm of orthodoxy as ‘true and fair knowledge’ also affects other traditions of Orthodox theology – from Greek theology to Antiochian theology. The approach of Afanassiev, which tries to unite ‘tradition and creativity’, has been prolonged by Metropolitan Maximus of Sardes.35 This latter, who has no qualms about using Latin terminology, believes that ‘the ecclesial consciousness expressed by customs constitutes, down through the centuries, the worthy testimony of faith of the fidelity of the traditio continuativa to the authentic canonical tradition, the traditio constitutiva’.36 Mgr Stylianopoulos went a step further in a critical approach aimed at the very institution of the historic Orthodox Church. He stigmatizes the pride which threatens to make the Orthodox Church a sinful institution.37 The theologian Nikos Nissiotis, for his part, thinks that Christian Orthodox thought ‘too often assists as a spectator 32

33

34 35

36 37

Apostolic canon n. 50 envisaged the excommunication of the priest or bishop who baptized using just one immersion. But the intent of the canon was to respect the words of Christ that baptism be in the name of the Father and of Son and of the Holy Spirit. Apostolic canons 8 and 9 envisage the excommunication of any layperson or cleric who does not stay until the end of a liturgical service. The ecclesial organization which Paul gave to the Corinthians only lasted several decades. Metropolitan Maximus of Sardes, Le patriarcat oecumenique dans l’Eglise Orthodoxe (Thessalonica: IPEP, 1973/Paris: Beauchesne, 1957). Maximus of Sardes, Le patriarcat oecumenique dans l’Eglise Orthodoxe, p. 332. T. Stylianopoulos, ‘Aspects historiques et eschatologiques de la vie de l’Eglise d’apres le Nouveau Testament’, in S. C. Agourides (ed.), Proces-verbaux du 2e congres de theologie orthodoxe, Athenes 19-19 aout, 1976 (Athens: Theological School of the University of Athens, 1978), p. 196.

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of history and ecclesiastical life’ and calls for an auto-criticism of an Orthodox theology which he considers insufficiently eschatological.38 John Zizioulas contributed to the discussion at Athens by criticizing a vision of the truth that is too traditionalist and too intellectual and called for a truth lived in a Eucharistic and koinonic perspective. ‘We cannot say: “First you must accept the true faith and then you will enter into a communion of love”. Love is something which comes from the life of the community. Communion and community are identical.’39

38

39

N. Nissiotis, ‘Introduction’, in Agourides, Proces-verbaux du 2e congres de theologie orthodoxe, p. 75. J. Zizioulas, ‘1st Comment’, Proces-verbaux du 2e congres de theologie orthodoxe, p. 143.

9

Vladimir Lossky’s Reception of Georges Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic Theology Paul L. Gavrilyuk

Ingmar Bergman once remarked about Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.’ Many years ago, having discovered Fr Andrew’s first book, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Clarendon, 1981), I could also say with Bergman that I read someone ‘who was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how’. I am grateful for the opportunity to pay a modest tribute to Fr Andrew in this Festschrift. This paper builds on the argument of a larger book project entitled Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). My book’s central thesis is that Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic synthesis needs to be understood both as a polemic against the modernism of Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdyaev, and as a voice within the Renaissance. I should mention that Fr Andrew Louth has gently nudged me in the direction of developing this thesis by his paper, ‘ The Authority of the Fathers in post-patristic Orthodox theology’, delivered at an international theological conference in Volos, Greece, in June 2010. The history of the reception of Florovsky’s ‘return to the Fathers’ in twentiethcentury Orthodox theology may be divided into three phases. The first phase is marked by his engagement and conflict with the leaders of the Russian Religious Renaissance, especially Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev and Vasily Zenkovsky. This phase lasted roughly from the mid-1920s through to the 1930s. The second

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phase is characterized by a general acceptance of Florovsky’s programme by his younger contemporaries and the next generation of theologians, lasting approximately from the post-war period until the end of the twentieth century. In this century, the third phase is gradually emerging, punctuated by the criticism and revision of Florovsky’s historical methodology. Reception may take different forms, which involve selective appropriation and some modification of that which is being received. Not all Orthodox Patristic scholars of the second part of the twentieth century have been influenced by Florovsky directly. Many currently active Orthodox theologians received Florovsky indirectly, through their mentors, who were more immediately impacted by his thought. As Fr Andrew Louth remarks in his essay ‘The Patristic Revival and Its Protagonists’, published in the Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, one should not underestimate the contribution of the ressourcement movement in the Francophone Catholic scholarship as well as the theological engagement of the Church Fathers in the post-war AngloAmerican scholarship, marked by the creation of the Patristic societies on both sides of the Atlantic. It is often difficult, at times even impossible, to separate the influence directly attributable to Florovsky from that related to broader theological currents of the twentieth century. The person who was most attuned to what Florovsky had to say was Vladimir Lossky. When Florovsky’s magnum opus, The Ways of Russian Theology, came out in 1937, Lossky enthusiastically endorsed both its negative thesis regarding the pseudomorphosis of modern Russian theology and its positive Neo-Patristic programme. Towards the end of his life, Lossky regarded Florovsky as ‘possibly the greatest Orthodox theologian of our time’.1 According to Rowan Williams, Lossky’s most celebrated work, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) was ‘partly a response to Florovsky’s demand, often reiterated, for the ressourcement of Orthodox theology, a return to the Fathers, a “neo-patristic synthesis” ’.2 Florovsky first intersected with the Losskys in Prague, to which Nikolai Lossky brought his family in November 1922, having been banished from Bolshevik Russia by the order of Lenin. Nikolai Lossky was a noted philosopher, who developed a version of personalism drawing on Leibnitz’s monadology and the intuitivist theory of knowledge. A participant in the meetings of the 1

2

Lossky, lecture delivered on 13 December 1956, p. 10, the recording transcribed and quoted by R. Williams, ‘The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique’, unpubl. D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1975), p. 281. Williams, ‘The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky’, pp. 21–2.

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Religious-Philosophical Society of St Petersburg and a friend of Berdyaev and Bulgakov, N. Lossky largely remained on the periphery of the Russian Religious Renaissance. When Bulgakov invited N. Lossky to contribute to the Landmarks symposium, the latter refused, provoking Bulgakov’s comment that his friend preferred to remain in ‘splendid isolation’.3 This disposition also shaped the attitude of Nikolai’s son, Vladimir, towards the religious circles of the Russian Diaspora. At the time when Florovsky was introduced to the Lossky family, Vladimir was approaching 20 and beginning his studies in medieval history at Prague’s Charles University (March 1923–June 1924). Their acquaintance in Prague was brief, since Vladimir soon moved to Paris, where he became a student of philology at the Sorbonne in November 1924. Florovsky, who remained in Prague until the summer of 1926, briefly organized an informal Patristics reading group in the same year, which was attended by Nikolai Lossky and Vasily Zenkovsky. N. Lossky, who after the war moved to the United States, would be involved in bringing Florovsky to New York in order to lead the reorganized St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Academy (as this institution was called in the 1940s).4 The aging philosopher, who was approaching eighty, would formally remain on the faculty of the Seminary until his retirement in 1950. Thus, in terms of his collegial contacts, Florovsky appears to have been closer to Nikolai than to Vladimir. Little is known about V. Lossky’s and Florovsky’s interaction in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time Florovsky moved to Paris in 1926, he would have been aware of the activities of the St Photius Brotherhood in which Lossky played a leading role from 1925.5 The members of the Brotherhood were dedicated to the study of church history and Patristic theology. The stated mission of the Brotherhood was ‘the dogmatic and canonical defence of the unity of the Church, with the goal of securing the triumph of Orthodoxy in the West’.6 It could be argued that this self-congratulating programme was a rhetorical compensation for the modest place that Orthodox theology then occupied in the West. In the modernist and ecumenically-minded Orthodox circles, the reputation of the Brotherhood was that of a self-appointed doctrinal watch-dog. Florovsky did not associate with the Brotherhood, since many other worthwhile projects claimed his attention in Paris. 3 4 5

6

N. Lossky, Vospominaniia: zhizn i filosofskii put’ (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968), p. 134. N. Lossky, Letter to G. Florovsky, 5 July 1947, GFP PUL, Box 17, f. 3. The Brotherhood was founded in 1925 by A. V. Stavrovsky. Lossky was its vice president since its founding and subsequently its president from 1931 to 1940. V. Vasiutinskaia-Markade, ‘Svetloi pamiati o. Grigoriia Kruga’, in G. I. Vzdornov et al. (eds.), Obshchestvo ‘Ikona’ v Parizhe (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2002), p. 238.

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Despite V. Lossky’s and Florovsky’s common interest in the Church Fathers, several factors militated against their close partnership. V. Lossky, who was ten years younger, could not be a serious scholarly match for Florovsky when they first met in 1922. As a scholar, Lossky made his debut only towards the end of the 1920s with two articles on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Florovsky took note of these articles, but did not engage Lossky’s peculiar anti-Thomistic interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s apophatic theology in the relevant chapter of his patrology.7 Moreover, V. Lossky and Florovsky belonged to separate academic and ecclesiological spheres, although they shared a few mutual friends. Lossky’s life revolved around the studies of medieval history at the Sorbonne, where he was a student of Ferdinand Lot (1866–1952) and Étienne Gilson (1884–1978). Lot’s wife, a Russian Byzantinist, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, was a mutual acquaintance of both Florovsky and Lossky, sharing their interest in the retrieval of the Church Fathers. Possibly encouraged by Lossky’s example, at one point in the early 1930s, Florovsky contemplated an opportunity of pursuing a doctorate in Patristic theology at the Sorbonne. Unfortunately, he could not find the time for such a demanding task amidst his conference travel and teaching at the St Sergius Institute.8 The topic of the projected doctoral dissertation was going to be ‘Gregory of Nyssa’s Origenism’. Such a topic would have provided another opportunity for criticizing Bulgakov’s sophiology without naming any names, which was Florovsky’s typical strategy. This period was a turbulent time for the Orthodox Church in the Diaspora due to the continuing jurisdictional disputes. In order to retain a measure of political neutrality, the rector of the St Sergius Institute, metropolitan Evlogy, left the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1931. The move was generally welcomed by the circles of the émigré intelligentsia in Paris. But V. Lossky was one of the few who remained loyal to the Patriarchate of Moscow. While the two patriarchates, Moscow and Constantinople, shared sacramental communion, in practice, different jurisdictional loyalties often dictated different forms of social association. Unlike Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky played a public role as Bulgakov’s opponent in the Sophia Affair. In 1935, the authorities of the Russian Orthodox 7

8

Florovsky apparently drew on Lossky’s 1929 article on Pseudo-Dionysius’s apophaticism in his Vizantiiskie ottsy V-VIII vekov, 201, where he observed that for Pseudo-Dionysius’s commentator, Maximus the Confessor, ‘the whole meaning of apophatic theology lies in reminding us of the ecstatic experience (“mystical theology”)’ of God. G. Florovsky, Letter to F. Lieb, 9 January 1933, in Issledovaniia (2007), p. 574.

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Church (Moscow Patriarchate) approached Lossky, as a leader of the St Photius Brotherhood, and asked him to supply a review of Bulgakov’s teaching. Metropolitan Sergius’ subsequent ukase against sophiology was partly based on the report prepared by Lossky. When this fact became known among those close to Bulgakov and Berdyaev, Lossky and his Brotherhood were vilified as aiding and abetting the attacks of the ‘pro-Bolshevik’ church against the church in the Diaspora. The passions in the Sophia Affair could run very high indeed. For example, one open debate on sophiology at the meeting of Berdyaev’s Religious-Philosophical Academy on Montparnasse deteriorated into a politically charged rally in support of Bulgakov. At the end of the meeting, a member of the St Photius Brotherhood and Lossky’s friend, Maxim Kovalevsky, publicly insulted Berdyaev’s colleague, the philosopher Boris Vysheslavtsev. The latter defended his honour by punching his offender in the nose.9 Although most sophiological disputes ended without shedding blood, speculative theological problems often sparked deep-seated hostilities in the tumultuous world of Russian emigration. After the Sophia Affair, Lossky became a persona non grata at the St Sergius Institute and as a result was never affiliated with the school.10 In 1945, with the collaboration of Evgraf Kovalevsky, Lossky started the Institute of Saint Denis, which attracted a number of Francophone inquirers as students. While Florovsky shared many points of Lossky’s critique of sophiology, associating too closely with Bulgakov’s major theological opponent would have jeopardized Florovsky’s already precarious position at the Saint Sergius Institute. Temperamentally, Lossky was somewhat reclusive, preferring quiet study to the often contentious gatherings of the émigré intellectuals. Florovsky, although he was more sociable, tended to benefit more from arguing with his opponents than from collaborating with like-minded theologians. Because of this disposition, Florovsky was inclined to emphasize his disagreement, rather than common ground, even with Lossky.11 The two theologians became close

9 10

11

N. O. Lossky, Vospominaniia, p. 271. In his letter of 3 November 1951, John Meyendorff wrote to Alexander Schmemann: ‘They say that Lossky had a serious quarrel with Evgraf [Kovalevsky]. On these grounds people began making presuppositions, but I do not think that our ‘gods’ have achieved the necessary level of objectivity of their judgments in order to forget the “Fr Sergius Affair” ’. However, about a year later, Meyendorff sounded more optimistic: ‘We presently have a wonderful opportunity to unite Parisian Orthodox forces by inviting Lossky to teach Dogmatics’. J. Meyendorff, Letter to A. Schmemann, 17 December 1952. Unfortunately, the administration of the Saint Sergius Institute was not prepared to make amends with Lossky. See G. Florovsky, ‘Review of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky’, The Journal of Religion 38 (1958), pp. 207–8.

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when Florovsky briefly returned to Paris after the war (1945–48), as both of them were involved in common ecumenical ventures.12 When Florovsky left for the United States in 1948, he and Lossky continued to correspond and meet at conferences.13 The Georges Florovsky Papers archive at Princeton University Library contains 11 letters from Lossky to Florovsky, written over the period from 1948 until 1957. The tone of Lossky’s letters does not indicate a very close friendship, but rather an attitude of deep respect for his addressee. The two theologians would have met at ecumenical gatherings, such as the meetings of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, as well as at scholarly conferences, such as the Second International Conference for Patristic Studies at Oxford in 1955, which both of them attended. Florovsky and Lossky shared many things in common. They both came from academic families, thoroughly immersed in the pre-revolutionary Russian tradition of liberal arts. Both had a strong background in history and languages. As a college student in St Petersburg, Lossky was initiated into the study of the Middle Ages by Ivan Grevs and into the theology of the Greek Church Fathers by Lev Karsavin. Mentored by Étienne Gilson at the Sorbonne, Lossky had the advantage of receiving the first-rate academic training in medieval theology, which Florovsky lacked. Both of them matured as theologians in Paris, Florovsky reaching his acme in the 1930s and Lossky in the 1940s. They were in equal measure ‘exilic’ theologians, striving to articulate Orthodox theology’s modern identity in the context of Russia Abroad. Both were formed by the West and in the West intellectually, and, in turn, influenced the western understanding of Orthodoxy. Lossky accepted Florovsky’s narrative of the western pseudomorphosis of Russian theology and concurred that to recover its true identity modern Orthodox theology needed to return to the Eastern Church Fathers. Both Florovsky and Lossky found in Patristic theology a spiritual vision focused on the divine revelation, rather than speculative philosophy, although they articulated the relevant terms of contrast in distinct ways. Both grounded their theology in the experience of the Church in contrast to private mysticism and philosophical speculation. They tended to emphasize the unity, coherence and continuity of Patristic thought, often downplaying considerable differences between the Church Fathers. As the recognized theological leaders of their generation, Florovsky and Lossky were united in their common rebellion against the perceived theological 12 13

V. Lossky, Letter to G. Florovsky, 12 January 1948, GFP PUL, Box 17, f. 4. GFP PUL contains 11 letters from Lossky to Florovsky, written over the period from 1948 until 1957. In the letters of 12 January 1948 and of 28 May 1948, Lossky invited Florovsky and his wife for a dinner with his family.

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modernism of the Russian Religious Renaissance. They concurred that the religious vision of the Renaissance was clouded by western philosophies, especially German Idealism; they rejected organicism, determinism, impersonalism and rationalism in the idealist philosophy of history; and they turned to Patristic sources in search for alternatives. Yet, while recovering the Church Fathers, both were constantly engaged with the thought of the Renaissance leaders. For example, both Florovsky and Lossky followed Florensky in recognizing the central place of antinomies in religious language.14 Both Neo-Patristic theologians drew on Berdyaev, Shestov and Karsavin in constructing their own versions of personalism.15 According to a family report, Vladimir Lossky ‘obstinately denied Nicolas [Nikolai] Onufrievich Lossky’s assertion that his eldest son Vladimir was the heir who continued his philosophical thinking.’16 In this case, Vladimir Lossky did protest too much, since he owed at least some aspects of his personalism and intuitivism to his father. V. Lossky’s appreciation of the apophatic dimension of theology is grounded not only in Patristic sources, but also in the work of the twentieth century Russian religious philosopher, Semyon Frank, whom both Lossky and Florovsky knew personally. Most profoundly, Florovsky’s and V. Lossky’s Neo-Patristic theologies were shaped by the polemic against the premier theologian of the Renaissance, Bulgakov. According to Rowan Williams, ‘especially in his treatment of Trinitarian theology, Lossky seems constantly aware of Bulgakov as a controversial interlocutor’.17 These words apply in equal measure to Florovsky’s presentation of Christology and the Patristic doctrine of creation, where oblique polemic with Bulgakov constitutes a Chekhovian subtext. V. Lossky’s criticism of Bulgakov was direct, explicit and public, prompting Florovsky’s caustic remark that Lossky was a ‘sophiologist topsy-turvy’.18 In his presentation of the Patristic doctrine of creation, Florovsky placed a particular emphasis on Athanasius’ distinction between the generation of the Son from the Father as an eternal act of the divine essence and the creation of 14

15

16

17 18

V. N. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood: SVS Press, 1997), pp. 52, 68, 75, 84, 93, 106, 146, 178. For an illuminating account of Lossky’s personalism, see A. Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). N. Lossky, ‘Theology and Spirituality in the Work of Vladimir Lossky’, Ecumenical Review 51 (1999), pp. 288–93 (289). Williams, ‘The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky’, p. 30. B. Krivocheine, Letter to G. Florovsky, 1 June 1955, GFP PUL, Box 21, f. 4. Krivocheine corrects Florovsky’s reading of Lossky: ‘I agree with you [Florovsky] concerning Russian religious philosophy, but cannot count V. N. Lossky as its representative. He is its determined opponent. I think, that the formation of Lossky’s mind was not influenced by Karsavin, but rather by Meister Eckhart and Latin scholasticism. He is not a “sophiologist topsy-turvy” (sofianets na vyvorot), but rather a “thomist topsy-turvy”, although even this would be an exaggeration. I value him as an Orthodox theologian’.

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the world out of nothing as an act of divine will. According to Florovsky, Origen collapsed creation into generation by interpreting both as eternal, whereas Arius collapsed generation into creation out of nothing, arguing that both resulted in something less than God. The distinction between the generation out of essence and creation out of nothing, while fundamental, created a special aporia regarding the ontological status of the plan or foundation of the world as it existed in the mind of God. Bulgakov’s solution was to locate the ideal world and the ideal humanity, or Sophia, on the boundary between created and uncreated. Florovsky dismissed such a solution as aligning the ideal world too closely with the divine essence, similar to pagan Platonism and German idealism. Building on the theology of Maximus the Confessor and John Damascene, Florovsky aligned the divine ideas about creation with the divine will, rather than essence, referring to such ideas as ‘divine volitional thoughts’.19 Lossky followed Florovsky’s lead and connected Maximian ‘volitional thoughts’ with the Palamite divine energies.20 Lossky argued that Bulgakov’s sophiology was deterministic, undermining divine and human freedom, echoing Florovsky’s general critique of German Idealism.21 Lossky also accused Bulgakov of confusing the fundamental ontological distinction between created and uncreated, temporal and eternal, by systematically collapsing them in the idea of Godmanhood.22 According to Lossky, by eternalizing Godmanhood, Bulgakov ran the risk of turning the historical divine incarnation into a cosmic process. Florovsky made a similar criticism in reference to Solovyov’s religious philosophy. Lossky also concurred with Florovsky that speculative philosophy rather than divine revelation was a controlling factor in Bulgakov’s system.23 While the details of Lossky’s argument against Bulgakov cannot be pursued here, the points of contact with Florovsky’s earlier indirect critique of the same are quite striking. After a comprehensive consideration of Lossky’s theological vision, Rowan Williams concluded that: Lossky’s debt to Florovsky is patently very great: the concept of the Church as imago Trinitatis, the rejection of ‘sophiological determinism’, and the stress on the world’s 19

20 21

22 23

G. Florovsky, Vizantiiskie ottsy V-VIII vekov (Paris: YMCA Press, 1933), pp. 205–6. For the discussion of this point, see my paper ‘Georges Florovsky’s Reading of Maximus: Anti-Bulgakov or Pro-Bulgakov?’, in M. Vasiljević (ed.), Knowing the Purpose of Creation through the Resurrection: Proceedings of the Symposium on St. Maximus the Confessor (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press and University of Belgrade Press, 2013), 407–15. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, pp. 94–5. V. Lossky, Spor o Sofii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sviato-Vladimirskovo Bratstva, 1996; first published in French in 1954), pp. 44–61; see Williams, ‘The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky’, p. 53. V. Lossky, Spor o Sofii, p. 42. Ibid., p. 20.

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contingency, the concern with Christ as the restorer of man’s objective nature, and with the transfiguration of the material cosmos, the refusal to divide Scripture from Tradition, and the insistence on the foreignness of ‘external’ authority to the Church, all these are themes that Florovsky had developed before Lossky had begun to write on dogmatics, and there is a clear relation of dependence.24

In addition, Florovsky’s epistemology of catholic transformation, his appeal to ecclesial experience and his privileging of intellectual vision as a paradigm of theological knowledge have points of contact with Lossky. In his religious epistemology, Lossky likewise placed a high premium on experiential knowledge culminating in the vision of God.25 At first glance, Florovsky’s and Lossky’s accounts of experiential knowledge look similar. But apparent similarities begin to disappear when we consider them closer. For Florovsky, the paradigmatic ecclesial experience is Eucharistic communion, whereas, for Lossky, the experiential paradigm is the ultimate folding of all cognitive functions in the mystical union with God, as epitomized by Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology. Moreover, while both theologians subordinated discursive reasoning to knowledge-vision, they nevertheless understood the process of attaining this knowledge in different ways. For Lossky, the apophatic purification of religious language functioned as a spiritual discipline leading the mind to repentance, to the shedding of conceptual idols and to the contemplation of God. Florovsky also recognized that the fullness of ecclesial experience could not be exhausted in language. However, Florovsky was considerably less preoccupied with apophasis than was Lossky. Florovsky stressed the definitive character of the main categories of the ‘perennial philosophy of the Church Fathers’.26 In some respects, in his account of the divinely-given rationality of religious language Florovsky struck a balance between the radical apophaticism of Lossky and the speculative extrapolation of the revelatory truths by Bulgakov. While it is possible to regard Lossky’s theology as a species of the Neo-Patristic synthesis, both in method and in content he departed from Florovsky substantially. In his approach to Patristic sources, Lossky stressed a logical connection 24 25

26

Williams, ‘The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky’, p. 279. See especially his posthumously published Sorbonne lectures, The Vision of God (Bedfordshire: The Faith Press, 1973). As also noted by A. Louth, ‘The Patristic Revival and Its Protagonists’, in Cunningham and Theokritoff, The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, p. 195; ‘Review of Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God. Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion’, SVTQ 51 (2007), pp. 445–9 (446–7). Florovsky also criticized the philosophical apophaticism of S. L. Frank, noting that ‘the apophatic pathos of Frank’s philosophy is excessive’, G. Florovsky, ‘Foreword’ to S. L. Frank, Reality and Man: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Human Nature (trans. Natalie Duddington; New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1966), p. xi.

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of ideas, rather than their concrete historical geneology. For example, following Lev Karsavin, Lossky held that the ‘question of the procession of the Holy Spirit has been the sole dogmatic grounds for the separation of East and West’27 and went so far as to derive the doctrine of papal primacy from the Filioque. Florovsky objected that claims to high papal authority had been made before the Filioque became an issue. Following Vasily Bolotov, Florovsky saw the Filioque as a questionable theologoumenon (theological opinion) rather than a churchdividing issue. As a historian, Florovsky was concerned more about the ‘actual association, rather than the logical deduction of ideas’.28 More generally, it could be said that Florovsky regarded the heritage of the Greek Fathers as having a universal significance and found Lossky’s analysis of the division between East and West exaggerated. Lossky followed Theodore de Régnon’s thesis that the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Trinitarian theology went back to the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine respectively.29 Florovsky was more receptive to the thought of Augustine, especially his ecclesiology, whereas Lossky tended to read the medieval division between East and West back into the Greek and Latin Church Fathers.30 In constructing his Neo-Patristic theology, Lossky placed the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite at the centre. He subsequently drew a connection between Dionysian mysticism and Palamism. On these grounds, Lossky referred to his work as a ‘Palamite’ synthesis. While Florovsky acknowledged that Lossky’s synthesis authentically represented the Orthodox tradition, his own theological accents were placed differently. For Florovsky, the organizing principle of Neo-Patristic theology was neither apophaticism, nor Trinitarian theology, but Chalcedonian Christology. To put the matter more sharply, in Florovsky’s view, Lossky’s Neo-Patristic theology lacked a sufficient Christological emphasis.31 For his part, Lossky saw Florovsky’s ecclesiology as lacking a pneumatological dimension. More generally, it would be wrong to lump Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic theology together with the retrieval of Palamite theology in the works of Vladimir Lossky, Basil Krivocheine, John Meyendorff and other twentieth-century Orthodox 27 28 29

30 31

Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 71. Florovsky, Letter to S. Sakharov, 15 May 1958, Perepiska, pp. 80–1. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 238; cf. G. Florovsky, Vostochnye Ottsy IVgo veka (Paris: YMCA Press, 1931), p. 76. Florovsky, ‘Review of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky’, p. 207. Florovsky, Letter to S. Sakharov, 8 April 1958, Perepiska, p. 68. Florovsky also did not share Lossky’s claim that Christ saves human nature and the Holy Spirit saves human persons.

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scholars. The Palamite distinction between the unknowable essence of God and the divine energies, as well as the associated theological epistemology and anthropology, did not play a noticeable role in Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic synthesis. In his more constructive works, Florovsky tended to dwell more on the fourthand fifth-century Church Fathers, and less on the Byzantine theologians. Despite these differences, Florovsky highly valued Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, endorsing it as ‘an essay in what can be described as a “neopatristic synthesis” ’32 and as ‘probably the best presentation of the Orthodox position in recent times, and indeed a powerful theological book in itself ’.33 When the English translation of Lossky’s book came out in 1957, Florovsky recommended it to all of his students34 at Harvard Divinity School and the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Florovsky especially noted a positive reception of the book among the non-Orthodox students35 and the younger generation of Greek Orthodox scholars.36 Towards the end of their lives, Florovsky and Lossky became in equal measure alienated from their émigré compatriots.37 Lossky’s principal conversation partners were French converts to Orthodoxy, scholars at the Sorbonne, and Catholic theologians, like Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Christophe Dumont and others associated with the ressourcement movement. Lossky also enjoyed friendship with the members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, especially of Derwas Chitty.38 In one of his letters to Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann relates a curious incident that happened at the Fellowship meeting in Abingdon in the summer of

32 33

34 35

36 37

38

Florovsky, ‘Review of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky’, p. 207. G. Florovsky, ‘Review of Wilhelm Niesel’s The Gospel and the Churches: A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962)’, Universitas: A Journal of Religion and the University 1 (1963), pp. 72–4 (pp. 73–4). G. Florovsky, Letter to S. Sakharov, 24 February 1957, Perepiska, p. 42. G. Florovsky, Letter to S. Sakharov, 10 March 1958, Perepiska, p. 48: ‘At Harvard I am teaching a course on eastern monasticism to a small group [of students] and conducting a seminar on St Gregory of Nyssa. All of my non-Orthodox students have read V. N. Lossky’s book [The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church] immediately after its publication in the English translation, whereas the Orthodox think it is “difficult” and uninteresting: little related to “practical life”, that is, to everyday hustle (which is, fortunately, true)’. G. Florovsky, Letter to S. Sakharov, 18 May 1958, Perepiska, p. 88. At the age of 75, Florovsky wrote: ‘In the last chapter of The Ways [of Russian Theology] I adumbrated a program of theological renewal, but it was noticed only by foreigners and was translated into French. Our own show little interest in theology proper, with the exception of those who converted to orthodoxy from western confessions. Instead of talking about “Russian tradition” we should return to the Fathers. The way of orthodox theological renaissance is the way of Neo-Patristic synthesis. I spoke about this at the Patristic congress at Oxford in the past 1967. But for now this remains “the voice of the one crying in the wilderness” ’, Letter to Yu. Ivask, 16 November 1968, Vestnik RKhD 130 (1979), p. 51. A. Schmemann, Letter to G. Florovsky, 12 August 1947, GFP PUL, Box 17, f. 3.

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1947. Chitty presented a paper, which was highly critical of western Christianity in general and of Roman Catholicism in particular. He finished his paper with an observation that ‘the west is a Sleeping Beauty that would be awakened with a kiss of the Prince from the East’. No sooner had he finished his paper than Vladimir Lossky rose from his seat, approached Chitty and kissed him, apparently symbolizing the kiss of the fair Prince. Schmemann commented: ‘This was rather unfair and many Anglicans were shocked.’39 Similar to Lossky, Florovsky also felt more valued by his non-Orthodox colleagues at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton, and in ecumenical circles, rather than by his Russian émigré colleagues. But if only a handful of people in the Russian Diaspora could sufficiently appreciate Florovsky and Lossky, their western friends, as well as their Greek Orthodox admirers, praised them as contemporary ‘Church Fathers’.40 It is noteworthy that Florovsky had no difficulty accepting the title and was not shy to apply it to himself. Once at an ecumenical gathering, Florovsky backed a theological claim by appealing to a Patristic authority. In response, another participant remarked that the ‘age of the church Fathers had ended and was no longer relevant to the modern world’. To that Florovsky reportedly exclaimed: ‘The Fathers are not dead. I am still alive!’41 In their teaching and their writings, both Florovsky and Lossky made the Church Fathers alive, capturing the spirit, not merely the letter of Patristic theology. At this conference, too, we are honouring an Orthodox historian, theologian and priest, who inspired more than a generation of students and scholars to drink at the fountain of Patristic theology. It is with a profound sense of gratitude to God for the scholarly and pastoral gifts that he so richly bestowed on Fr Andrew that I am offering this paper in recognition of his work for the academy and the Church.

39 40

41

Ibid. On Florovsky, see G. C. Papademetriou, ‘Father Georges Florovsky: A Contemporary Church Father’, GOTR 41 (1996), pp. 119–26. On Lossky as the ‘twentieth-century Church Father’, see S. Sakharov, Letter to G. Florovsky, Easter 1958, Perepiska, p. 66. B. Nassif, ‘Georges Florovsky’, in M. Bauman and M. I. Klauber (eds.), Historians of the Christian Tradition (Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1995), pp. 449–68 (p. 461).

Part Five

The Future of Patristics

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Patristics after Neo-Patristics Cyril Hovorun

Patristics as an Orthodox self-identity By coincidence or as a trend, Orthodox Patristic studies recently showed a keen interest in the nature of Patristics as such, and to how it should develop in the future. Indicative in this regard became a conference organized by the Volos Academy for Theological Studies in June 2010, with the topic ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis or Post-Patristic Theology: Can Orthodox Theology be Contextual?’ This conference echoed widely in the Orthodox world and triggered discussions, sometimes heated, about Patristics, Neo-Patristics, Post-Neo-Patristics and PostPatristics. Discussions went hot especially in Greece, where many people, from Metropolitans to lay bloggers, started expressing their views about the role of the Fathers in the modern life of the Church. Although some participants in the discussions ended up with condemning ‘Post-Patristics’ and even ‘Neo-Patristic synthesis’,1 the discussions proved that Patristics matters for the Orthodox a lot and they have their strong concerns about its future. 1

On 15 February 2012, Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus of the Orthodox Church of Greece organized a one-day conference on the topic: ‘Patristic theology and Post-patristic heresy’ (Πατερική Θεολογ ία και μεταπατερική αίρεση). At this conference, another Greek hierarch, Ierotheos (Vlakhos), Metropolitan of Naupaktos, delivered a paper, which was later widely distributed in the Greek media. In this paper, he said: ‘Thus I believe that in this spirit the terms “Neo-Patristic” and “Post-Patristic” emerged. Initially the first term appeared, the “Neo-Patristic”, in a sense that the texts of the Fathers should not be simply repeated. Instead, their “spirit” should be identified and transmitted to our epoch. That it is to say that it should be examined how the Fathers would speak on the modern issues. This, despite good will of some [who suggested this approach], is extremely dangerous, because in effect it undermines the entire Patristic theology. . . . Later on, the term “PostPatristic theology” emerged. It means that we do not need the Fathers anymore, because they lived in other epochs, solved other problems, faced other ontological and cosmological issues, had “a completely different perception of the world”. In result, they cannot help us in our time. . . . Such views are like a mine planted at the base of the Orthodox theology’. This text has been published on many blogs. One of them: http://paterikakeimena.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post_5419.html [accessed 23 June 2012]. In the Greek blogosphere, there is a special blog dedicated to Post-patristic theology (http://metapaterikiairesi.wordpress.com/ [accessed 22 June 2012]).

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Contrary to this trend, a year later, in August 2011, at the 15th International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford, the topic of the nature and future of the Patristic studies remained untouched. Among almost eight hundred lectures, seminars, short communications and workshop papers presented there, no one touches on the issues mentioned above. There was a section at the conference, which was close to our topic, called ‘Patristic Thought Renewed’, but even there, not a single paper dealt with the prospective of the Patristic studies. It seems that mostly the Orthodox are concerned about this issue. This is because for the Orthodox, Patristics is more than just Patristics. It is an essential part of their confessional identity. In application to the Orthodox, Patristics has a sociological meaning, and not just theological. Through Patristics, the Orthodox identify themselves on the confessional map of Christianity. They readily throw the card of the Fathers to the table when they are inquired about what is to be Orthodox and what makes them distinct from other Christians. The way they read the Fathers, the way they understand the place of the Fathers in their life is formative for their understanding of what is Orthodoxy and what is to be a Christian. At the same time, surprisingly, the Orthodox read Fathers less than many of their non-Orthodox fellows do. It is also a matter of fact that Patristic studies are less, significantly less developed in the Orthodox world than in other traditional Christian denominations. Among the participants at the Oxford Patristic conferences, the Orthodox are always a minority group. Moreover, not many of those who condemn Neo-Patristic synthesis and wave banners ‘Fathers or death’ ever carefully and systematically read the Fathers. The Orthodox like to identify themselves and their tradition with the Fathers, but they do not often care about what the Fathers really thought and what did they write. In this regard, two things should be distinguished in relations between the Orthodox flocks and the Fathers: the Fathers as a socio-religious phenomenon, and the Fathers as a matter of thorough studies. Many Orthodox value the former and do not always care about the latter; they will never say that they do not care about what Fathers wrote; they just do not read them. Just a small group of Orthodox believers really study the Fathers. In this small group, a tiny faction of scholars undertake their studies in line with strict academic criteria. There is another faction of scholars who may study the Fathers carefully but sometimes make them instrumental for other expediencies, including ideological ones. They prefer to help fixing the banners ‘Fathers or death’ to those who wave them and who probably do not really care about what the Fathers really taught.

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In other words, relationship between the Orthodox and the Fathers is complex and has many aspects. All Orthodox, without exception, regard the Fathers as an essential identity of their faith. Patristics for them is the dearest among the theological disciplines. At the same time, a minority of the Orthodox really read the Fathers. Most of those few prefer either ethically edifying lessons or entertaining stories of a kind of Apophthegmata. Some use the Fathers for the purposes of ideology or what has been coined as ‘Patristic fundamentalism’. And just a small faction read the Fathers to know their theology. Finally, a microscopic number of the Orthodox study the Fathers in an appropriate academic way. All this brings to our attention the issue of method in reading the Fathers.

Method in Patristics The question of method should be regarded among the key issues in Patristics. Can we speak of any method in application to Patristics? Is there a specific method for studies of the Church Fathers? Most modern Greek theologians would say that method is not applicable to theology in general and to Patristics in particular. That is how they are taught in the Greek Universities. There is a tradition in the Greek faculties of theology to speak about method in theology with suspicion. It appears that those Greek theologians who were taught in Germany and who were probably overfed with methods, induced this suspicion. When they returned to Greece, they just threw out the methods on the ground that method in theology can substitute theology itself. It can be like this. It is also possible that a methodless approach to theology turns itself into a kind of method, which is not helpful for theology. Methodless theology is rather an illusion, which can expose theology to abuses and non-systematic speculations. It can open a way to turn theology into ideology. Therefore, method is applicable to theology and to Patristics in particular. Neo-Patristic synthesis is one of the possible methods of studying Fathers. It gained an amazing popularity among the Orthodox scholars. It won over another method, which Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia calls the ‘Russian Religious Renaissance.’ One of the fathers of the Neo-Patristic synthesis was Fr George Florovsky. He coined the term and circulated it. At the same time, he did not give any clear and exhaustive definition of the Neo-Patristic synthesis. Moreover, there is no any definition on which those who subscribe to this method would definitely agree. A hermeneutical key to this method is its name, ‘Neo-Patristic synthesis’, and probably a slogan, which has been connected to it, ‘Back to the Fathers’!

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Neo-Patristic synthesis and Personalism It seems that a minimalistic definition of the Neo-Patristic synthesis helped this method to win the consent of scholars. It happened to be inclusive enough to satisfy scholars of various schools and opinions. Because of this, I would correct my own attribution of the Neo-Patristic synthesis as a method. It is a successful formula or even a spell, rather than a mere method. As such, it covers many methods and directions. Neo-Patristic synthesis in this regard is similar to Personalism. Indeed, Personalism became extremely popular among the Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century. The following features characterize it:

1. It was declared to be traditional, and yet it was not. 2. It was used to identify what is truly Orthodox, in contrast to the ‘western’. 3. It was a concept widely interpretable that covered a bunch of trends of thought. The same features can be found in the concept of Neo-Patristic synthesis:

1. It was received as traditional, yet it was not, because it was ‘neo-’ and it was ‘synthesis’. 2. It pretended to be an instance of liberation from the ‘Western captivity’ of the Orthodox theology. 3. It allows many, too many, interpretations and is capable of covering a vast number of ideas, methods and outlooks. Both Personalism and Neo-Patristic synthesis do not associate themselves with any particular teaching. Both were designed to be comprehensive. They both function like banners rather than systems of thoughts or beliefs. Finally, they both mimic things that are dear to different groups of their followers. Thus, Orthodox traditionalists see in Personalism an ‘ancient patristic concept of personhood’. Liberal humanists see in it sufficient anthropocentrism. The same is with NeoPatristic synthesis. Traditionalists see in it faithfulness to the tradition of the Fathers. Liberals prefer the words ‘neo’ and ‘synthesis’. Personalism is dialectic. On the one hand, through identification of person with ‘hypostasis’, it pretends to be traditional and Patristic. On the other hand, it in effect evolves around the modern ideas of human personhood. The same dialectic is the formula of Neo-Patristic synthesis. On the one hand, it includes a basic identificator, which no one Orthodox, whether conservative or liberal, can deny, the Fathers of the Church. On the other hand, it allows enough room

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for interpretations, inclusions and further developments by adding prefix ‘neo-’ and the word ‘synthesis’. It is clear that methodologically, Neo-Patristic synthesis emerged from the same intellectual climate that Personalism. Both of them feature striking similarities. There are some important differences between them as well. Personalism appeared to be more efficient to establish connections between traditional theology and modern thought. In fact, it was a mix of broader philosophical insights and traditional theological axioms. Personalism is an extravert. In contrary to it, Neo-Patristic synthesis is an introvert. It does not go much beyond Patristic texts and contexts, did not open up to the world of modern ideas, does not open to the world as such. This does not however mean that initially, it was not intended to be more open. At least the word ‘synthesis’ in the formula suggests this. If so, then it just failed to be as open as its brother Personalism managed to become.

Dialectics of Neo-Patristic synthesis and the Russian Religious Renaissance As mentioned above, Neo-Patristic synthesis was a parallel movement to the Russian Religious Renaissance. To put it more precisely, these two movements were antagonistic. Fr George Florovsky, for instance, as it is well known, was a strong opponent of Fr Sergey Bulgakov, a key figure of the Russian Religious Renaissance. He developed many of his ideas, including the ones connected with Neo-Patristic synthesis, in contrast to the thinking of Fr Sergey Bulgakov. Use of the Fathers was not a specific feature of the Neo-Patristic synthesis only. Adherents of the Russian Religious Renaissance, including Fr Sergey Bulgakov himself, also heavily used the Fathers. Therefore, the distinctiveness of both trends, the Neo-Patristic synthesis and the Russian Religious Renaissance, lies not in acceptance or non-acceptance of the Fathers. It lies elsewhere. A common feature of those who can be associated with the Russian Religious Renaissance is their training in philosophy. Probably this feature conditioned their method in theology. At the same time, the majority of those whom we assign to the Neo-Patristic synthesis received their training in history. Florovsky himself was a historian and widely applied methods of historical research to his Patristic studies. Of course, it was not a historical positivism of the nineteenth century. Florovsky developed a different kind of historicism, which he applied

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to Patristics. This kind of historicism needs to be better researched. This was a kind synthetic historicism of a kind, which was developed in approximately the same time by historians like Arnold Toynbee and Lev Gumilev. The Neo-Patristic synthesis of Fr George Florovsky implied a new synthesis of historicism and theology. Speaking roughly, the difference between the two methods, Russian Religious Renaissance and Neo-Patristic synthesis, is largely conditioned by two different paradigms of thinking, a philosophical and an historical. Of course, it is not only that which distinguishes them. But this is one of the key differentiating features. Relations between the Russian Religious Renaissance and the Neo-Patristic synthesis are dialectical. The Russian Religious Renaissance is a kind of thesis in this dialectic process. The Neo-Patristic synthesis is an antithesis. Indeed, it has been remarked that Fr Florovsky built his method largely on negating Fr Bulgakov’s approaches. Florovsky was in a permanent internal dialogue, or to put it more precisely, argument with Bulgakov. At the same time, the NeoPatristic synthesis itself plays, at least partially, a role of synthesis in the dialectic process initiated by the Russian Religious Renaissance. Indeed, it includes a good deal of philosophical elements which are dear to the Russian Religious Renaissance. Thus, Fr Florovsky, for instance, largely relied on intuition in deconstructing the ‘mind of the Fathers’. In this, he apparently employed the Intuitivism of Nikolai Lossky, the father of another important figure of the NeoPatristic synthesis, Vladimir Lossky. Neo-Patristic synthesis was just partially a synthesis in the dialectic development of Patristics. It remained more an antithesis to the Russian Religious Renaissance. The question therefore is whether there is any approach which could be regarded as synthetic to the dialectic pair of Russian Religious Renaissance and Neo-Patristic synthesis? Should this synthesis be a continuation of the NeoPatristic synthesis? Or should we consider developing a new synthetic approach, which would be dissociated from the Neo-Patristic synthesis? Do we really need to go beyond the Neo-Patristic synthesis? These questions are, in fact, about the future of the Patristic studies.

The future of Patristic studies If a completely new approach will not replace the Neo-Patristic synthesis, the synthesis itself should develop further. What will be the principles on which it or a new synthesis can develop? If we follow the idea of identifying

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different backgrounds behind theological methods, then we should take into consideration that many of modern Orthodox theologians and Patrologists have their background training in science, primarily mathematics and physics. Science has its own matrix of thinking. This matrix appears to be universally applicable to other fields. In our time, it plays the role that in the classical times philosophy played. Philosophy does not play the same role anymore. Science does, as scientific approaches are fully applicable in humanities, social sciences and even theology. People from science in our days easily get prominence in theology. Not many prominent theologians come from philosophy or other humanities. Thus, the matrix of scientific thinking, a new ‘meta-physics’, will condition further development of theology and Patristic studies. It is a ‘meta-physics’ in several senses. First, it is metaphysical because it deals with non-physical matters. Second, it is metaphysical literally; as for many theologians their studies in theology followed studies in physics. Given the scientific matrix of the modern theological thinking, Patristics got a broader potentiality to interact with science. It can and should contribute to the dialogue, which goes on between religion and science. This will open up the Patristics, will make it more an extravert. Speaking more generally, Patristic studies should become more interdisciplinary. They definitely need more interactions with other disciplines, including ethics, social doctrines, philosophy, science, and so on. An interaction with the analytic philosophy and modern language theories can be of particular interest for the future of the Patristic studies. The importance of the former is conditioned by the increasing transcultural interactions in which theology is also engaged. These interactions urge us to look for ways of translating traditional theologies to different modern contexts, including African, Asian, and so on. When speaking about translating theologies to different contexts, one should apparently imply deconstruction of traditional expressive languages and reconstructing theological senses in new languages. These languages are not just linguistic phenomena. They are predominantly cultural and contextual phenomena. They include a complexity of a person’s thinking, expressing and understanding him or herself. To ‘deconstruct’ the languages of the Fathers, in order to translate their messages to other contexts, one has to distinguish between the Truth, which the Fathers contemplated and the languages they used to express this Truth. The concept of the Consensus Patrum can be helpful for such a distinction, though it should be essentially refurbished. Vasiliy Bolotov introduced the idea of Consensus Patrum in the second half of the nineteenth century as an instrument to facilitate the

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rapprochement with Anglicans and Old Catholics. In the understanding of Bolotov, Consensus Patrum can be calculated as an arithmetic average. As it was initially designed, it was static, too algebraic. I doubt we can use it like this now. The thought of the Fathers cannot be reduced to the arithmetic average. It is too dynamic, too complex. Its complexity can be described with instruments of higher mathematics at least.

Language of the Fathers Distinguishing between the language and the sense in the Patristic thought may help us to develop further the idea of synthesis suggested by Fr George Florovsky. Can the language of the Fathers be used to express the ideas, which came to theology from outside? It certainly can and has been already achieved. An eloquent example is the above-mentioned Personalism, which was a set of new ideas expressed in a quasi-patristic language. Can the success of Personalism be repeated (now, of course, without pretention that it would be a traditional Patristic doctrine)? This is possible and even necessary, in order to secure a vitally important communication between the realm of the Fathers’ thought and the realm of the modern thought. Modern ideas dressed in the vestments of the traditional Patristic language enrich the Orthodox theology. In the past, it sometimes looked like smuggling. Now we can freely explore and take on board of the Orthodox theology ideas from outside, making them comprehensible and digestible in our context by reformulating them in traditional Patristic terms. An opposite way is also possible. That is when we distil the ideas of the Fathers and then vest them in new languages. It is essential to communicate these ideas to different contexts, not connected with the Patristic one. An example can be China. It might be a fascinating task to dress Fathers’ ideas in terms, for instance, of traditional Confucian philosophy. The ideas of the Fathers can and should be translated to many other contexts. This and other similar tasks bring Patristic studies far beyond Neo-Patristic synthesis and even Patristics itself.

Complexity of Fathers’ voices Theology and Patristic studies in the future should include complexity not only of the languages in which the Fathers can be re-articulated. The future

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Patristics also needs to take seriously the complexity of the Fathers’ thinking and writings. It is clear now that the Fathers did not speak in unison, of a kind that the Byzantine music features. Their voices, in fact, sound polyphonically. Sometimes, they do not necessarily sound as consonance. Dissonances of the type of Monteverdi, or even Scriabin and Stravinsky, can be also identified in the Fathers’ writings. This does not diminish the harmony and aesthetics of the Fathers’ thinking. It just indicates their existing on different levels. Or let us use another analogy. Classic Patristic studies represent the Fathers in a style of academic art, which keeps proportions and prospective, where figures are placed in harmony and Raphaelite order. Modern scholarship realizes that the Fathers can be also depicted in a pre-Raphaelite or Impressionistic way. One can even argue that criteria of modern art are also applicable to the Fathers. Thus, the Fathers represent a kind of aesthetics, which sometimes is not obvious and does not immediately bring visual satisfaction. Sometimes, one has to look carefully through dots and lines in order to see sense and beauty, which the Fathers witnessed and wanted to share with us.

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‘Following the Holy Fathers’: Is there a Future for Patristic Studies?1 Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan of Diokleia

Continuity in the midst of change ‘Roads go ever ever on’, wrote J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. This is certainly true of the attempts made during the past 50 years to revise the undergraduate syllabus of the Oxford School of Theology. There has been a lengthy series of different proposals, some adopted and others rejected, and the discussions are still continuing today. Yet, throughout this whole process of change, until very recently one thing has remained constant. Among the core subjects in the single School of Theology,2 there has always been a paper on the Development of Doctrine in the Early Church to AD 451. It is only in the most recent proposals for revision that early Christian doctrine, while still remaining part of the syllabus, has lost its place as a mandatory subject that all are required to take in the final examination. This prospective demotion of Patristics in the Oxford syllabus leads us to ask: Should early doctrine in fact have a central place in any degree course devoted to the serious study of Christian theology? If so, why? For myself, I am deeply disturbed by the tendency to marginalize Patristics, alike at Oxford and elsewhere. When in 1960, I embarked on doctoral research at Oxford, among the eight professors in the Faculty of Theology, no less than three were Patristic specialists: the Regius Professor of Divinity, Henry Chadwick; the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, F. L. Cross; and the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, S. L. Greenslade. Among the tutorial fellows, who acted as

1 2

Ptarmigan Inaugural Lecture, delivered to the Oxford Theological Faculty on 9 November 2011. This does not apply to the Joint School of Philosophy and Theology.

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college chaplains, there were also a number who taught early Christian doctrine, such as Christopher Stead, subsequently professor at Cambridge, and David Jenkins, later Bishop of Durham. A few years after this, the Patristic presence in the Oxford faculty was notably strengthened by the arrival of Andrew Louth. Today, the situation at Oxford is markedly different. The faculty possesses a lectureship specifically devoted to Patristics, and in recent years, this has been supplemented by the temporary appointment of a fixed-term lecturer in the subject. But among the professors, not one is a specialist in early Christian doctrine or early church history. Whatever the eminence of the faculty in other fields, it cannot be said that Oxford is today a centre of Patristic studies in the way that it was in the past. Now here is a curious paradox. In the academic world at large, whether in Britain or internationally, there is no lack of interest in Patristics, and it continues to attract large numbers of gifted research students. Abundant evidence of this is provided by the remarkable success of the International Conference on Patristic Studies, founded by Dr Cross in 1951, and held every four years at Oxford under the auspices of the Theology Faculty. This is attended by over 600 people – places have been oversubscribed on recent occasions – and the proportion of younger participants is highly encouraging. Yet, over past decades, there has been a steady erosion of established Patristic posts in British universities, and I gather from my friends in France that the same trend is to be discerned there as well. Why is this happening? Why should there be no lack of enthusiasm for Patristic studies among younger scholars, while at the same time the number of senior posts in the field is diminishing? I do not have a ready explanation for this paradox. Yet, undoubtedly, it challenges us to ask: Is there a future for Patristic studies, here at Oxford and in other universities? ‘Following the Holy Fathers . . . ’ , states the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith (451) at the beginning of its main doctrinal section. Is it still important for us to follow the Fathers, and, if so, in what spirit are we to embark upon this voyage of Patristic exploration? More particularly, let us ask in this connection three questions: who? why? how? Who are the Fathers? Why should we study them? How is such a study to be undertaken?

Who are the Fathers? In the first place, then, what do we mean by the phrase ‘the Fathers’? How far does the ‘Age of the Fathers’ extend, and what limits, if any, can we set to it? It

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is easy to specify where the Patristic era commences: it begins where the New Testament ends. But when does it conclude? In the syllabus of the Oxford Theology School, the study of early Christian doctrine comes to an end in 451 with the Fourth Ecumenical Council, Chalcedon. This reflects the classic Anglican standpoint: five centuries, four councils. The year 451 forms indeed a reasonable terminus ad quem in an undergraduate course; during three years, it is not possible to study everything, and so a clear delimitation needs to be set to the Patristic component in the syllabus. There are, however, serious drawbacks in choosing Chalcedon as the end-point of the Patristic era. The 20 years from Ephesus to Chalcedon (431–51) certainly constitute a crucial chapter in the evolution of Christology, but developments do not end there. Debates about the person of Christ continued in an intensive way over the following 230 years. The next two Ecumenical Councils, the Fifth (553) and the Sixth (680–1), are a direct continuation of the Fourth Council; Chalcedon cannot be properly evaluated unless seen in the light of Constantinople II and Constantinople III. Those who stop at 451 have heard less than half the story. Surely Leontius of Byzantium in the sixth century, St Maximus the Confessor in the seventh, and St John Damascene in the eighth are to be regarded as belonging to the ‘Age of the Fathers’. Moreover, the Iconoclast Controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries is to be seen, from one point of view, as the extension of earlier Christological disputes. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) is integrally related to its six predecessors. If it is hard to assign a clear ending to the Patristic period in Eastern Christendom, a similar difficulty arises in the Latin West. Is St Gregory the Great (died 604) the last of the Latin Fathers or the first of the medievals? Five hundred years later, St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) is often viewed as the last of the Latin Fathers. It is interesting to note in this connection that Calvin – whose debt to the Patristic age we shall shortly have occasion to mention – quotes St Bernard almost as often as he quotes St Augustine. Any specific end-point is apt to appear arbitrary. As a member of the Orthodox tradition, I personally would wish to include among the Fathers St Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), with his dynamic understanding of the Holy Spirit, and St Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), with his panentheistic vision of the omnipresent divine energies. There is also good reason to treat the sacramental theologian St Nicolas Cabasilas (c.1322–c.1395) and the liturgist St Symeon of Thessalonica (died 1429) as Patristic writers. Any sharp demarcation between ‘Patristic’ and ‘Byzantine’ theology is difficult to justify.

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Even after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, during the Ottoman period, the Patristic era continued uninterrupted in the Christian East. A writer such as St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (c.1749–1809), editor of the Philokalia, is still essentially Patristic in spirit. Indeed, from an Eastern Orthodox viewpoint, it can be persuasively argued that the Patristic era has never in fact come to an end. Orthodox theology has known no ‘medieval’ or ‘Scholastic’ period, in the Western sense, and it has only been peripherally influenced by the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment. We Orthodox are still theologizing in what is basically a Patristic mode. One of those who has strenuously maintained that no limit should be set to the ‘Age of the Fathers’ is Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), the greatest Russian, and indeed Orthodox, theologian during the twentieth century. ‘There should be no restriction at all’, he wrote (italics in the original). ‘ . . . . The Church is still fully authoritative as she has been in the ages past, since the Spirit of Truth quickens her now no less effectively as in ancient times’.3 Could there not be new Fathers of the Church in the third millennium, equal to St Athanasius, the Cappadocians, St Cyril of Alexandria or St Leo the Great? If, then, we ask ‘Who are the Fathers?’ there can be, for an Orthodox Christian, but one response: ‘the Age of the Fathers’ has not yet come to an end.

Why study the Fathers? This brings us to our second question: Why study the Fathers? Here, for the purposes of our present inquiry, let us restrict ourselves to a consideration of the Fathers during the early period, up to Chalcedon. Why, it may be asked, should the writers in this particular epoch be of such crucial importance in any balanced syllabus of theological study? An answer to this second question can be found by considering the difference between Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics and sixteenth-century Reformed Christians, whether Anglican, Lutheran or Calvinist, on the one hand, and such bodies as Christian Scientists, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other. Both groups appeal to the Bible. The fundamental difference between them lies in the fact that the members of the first group all interpret Scripture, in varying 3

‘St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers’, in Florovsky, G., Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works, vol. 1; Belmont: Nordland, 1972), pp. 111–12.

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degrees, according to the criteria of the early Ecumenical Councils, whereas the members of the second group do not. The biblical hermeneutics of a Greek Orthodox theologian will not be the same as those of an American Baptist; a High Church Anglican will speak in different terms from a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. But, despite numerous contrasts, all of them share, to a greater or lesser extent, the common tradition of the Fathers, the agreed acceptance of the shape that the Church of the first five centuries gave to the Christian understanding of the Trinitarian nature of God and the Incarnation. Calvin’s Institutes, for example, are full of Patristic references. When, however, we turn to the Christian Scientists, the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we move into another world. They are no longer viewing Scripture through Patristic spectacles. That is why it would be ill-considered, and indeed unscientific and irresponsible, to imagine that in our study of theology, we can leap directly from the New Testament to the thirteenth, the sixteenth or the twenty-first century, while heedlessly ignoring the doctrinal development that took place in the centuries immediately following the apostolic era. During those centuries – let us say, from the early second to the mid-fifth century – there was formulated a particular way of reading the New Testament that has prevailed, despite many modifications, up to our own day. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and other medieval Scholastics understood Scripture in the perspective of Nicaea and Chalcedon. So likewise did the major figures in the Reformation, Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Cranmer. This is also true of most major Christian thinkers in the twentieth century. It does not apply, perhaps, to certain postmodernist theologians. But it is undoubtedly the case with writers such as Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, William Temple, Michael Ramsey and John Macquarrie. All of these, explicitly or implicitly, took for granted the heritage of the Fathers. In this way, it might be said that the Fathers are an experience that every theologian ought to undergo, because it is the common experience of the whole Church. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, told of the Irish mathematician Rowan Hamilton.4 As a child prodigy, at the age of about 12, he asked his father to explain the relationship between the divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ. His father told him to work out the problem for himself, and he came back with four successive answers, representing Nestorianism, Eutychianism, 4

I owe this anecdote to R. P. C. Hanson, ‘The Age of the Fathers: Its Significance and Limits’, Eastern Churches Review 2.2 (1968), p. 137. I am much indebted to Hanson’s article.

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Monophysitism and finally the Chalcedonian solution. Recounting this story, R. P. C. Hanson said of the early Fathers: They first encountered the problems, made the mistakes, felt their way around the pitfalls, explored the blind alleys, drew the conclusions, which to a large extent we all meet and must meet if we are true to original Christianity and we can use right reason. . . . We all must necessarily travel over much of the ground travelled by the Fathers and . . . they must accompany us as we travel it, whether as cheering forerunners, or as awful examples.5

If the New Testament – and, for that matter, the Bible as a whole – is approached and expounded in isolation from the tradition of the Church, it collapses, just as the tradition of the Church, if interpreted and taught without reference to the New Testament and the Bible, becomes empty and self-defeating. Here, then, is a powerful reason for retaining early Christian doctrine as one of the core subjects in the syllabus of the Oxford Theology School.

How should the Fathers be studied? If such is the decisive importance of the Patristic heritage, in what spirit should the Fathers be studied?6 Three points in particular need to be kept in mind. First, there was for the Fathers an essential connection between theology and worship, between doctrine and prayer. Any treatment of the Fathers that is predominantly philosophical, and that leaves out of account the dimension of liturgy and spirituality, will be gravely incomplete. In the second place, and closely connected with this first point, full value should be given to the apophatic aspect of Patristic theology. The Fathers, while regarding the reasoning brain as a gift from God, to be used to the full, at the same time believed that human beings are endowed with a higher faculty of inner vision, the nous or spiritual intellect, superior to the dianoia or discursive reason;7 and through this higher faculty, we apprehend that God is a mystery beyond our understanding, revealed in Jesus Christ and yet still hidden: ‘Truly, you are a God who hide yourself ’ 5 6

7

Hanson, ‘The Age of the Fathers’, p. 137. On the Patristic understanding of theology, see C. Scouteris, The Meaning of the Terms ‘Theology’, ‘To Theologize’, and ‘Theologian’ in the Teaching of the Greek Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers up to and including the Cappadocians [in Greek] (Athens, 1972). On the nous/dianoia distinction, see P. Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1987), especially pp. 33–4, 53–6, 80–6; P. Sherrard, Human Image: World Image. The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1992), especially pp. 82–93.

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(Isa. 45.15). Thirdly, the Fathers are to be viewed, not merely in archaeological terms, as voices from the distant past, but they are to be interpreted as living witnesses, as our contemporaries. In developing these three points, I shall take as my mentors three writers who belong broadly to what has been termed ‘the Russian religious renaissance’:8 Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Meyendorff (1926–92).9 The connection between theology and worship is summed up in the wellknown saying of Evagrius of Pontus (died 399), disciple of the Cappadocians and of the Desert Fathers: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.’10 In the words of Lossky, ‘Far from being mutually opposed, theology and mysticism support and complete each other. One is impossible without the other. . . . Mysticism is . . . the perfecting and crown of all theology . . . [it is] theology par excellence.’11 St Diadochus of Photice (mid fifth century) spoke of theology as a charisma or ‘gift of grace’, which – more than any other such gift – ‘inflames our heart and moves it to the love of God’s goodness’.12 ‘The nous that abides untroubled in the movements that theology inspires,’ he said, ‘ . . . is enlarged to the full extent that love effects’,13 and devotes itself to theology ‘with joy’.14 Passages such as this make it clear that theology, in the Patristic sense, is far more than an ‘academic’ discipline on a level with geology or palaeontology, for it involves prayer and ascetic practice, and is inseparable from the quest for sanctity. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) said, ‘Only saints can paint icons’;15 and by the same token, it may be claimed that the true theologians are the saints.16 This Patristic approach to theology is not something that the modern student would immediately appreciate when perusing, for example, the standard manual of J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines. Yet if we fail to take into account

8

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

See N. Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963); P. Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). For a fuller discussion of Lossky and Florovsky, see K. Ware, ‘Orthodox theology today: trends and tasks’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12.2 (2012), pp. 105–21, especially pp. 106–13. Evagrius, ‘On Prayer’ 60 [61] (PG 79:1180B): Palmer, G. E. H., P. Sherrard and K. Ware (trans.), The Philokalia: The Complete Text (vol. 1; London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 62. V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke, 1957), pp. 8–9. Diadochus of Photice, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discernment: One Hundred Texts 66 and 67 (ed. Edouard des Places, Sources chrétiennes 5bis; Paris: Cerf, 1955), p. 127, lines 1, 11–13. Diadochus of Photice, On Spiritual Knowledge 7 (ed. des Places), p. 87, lines 11–15. Diadochus of Photice, On Spiritual Knowledge 68 (ed. des Places), p. 128, line 8. P. Florensky, ‘On the Icon’, in John Lindsay Opie (trans.), Eastern Churches Review 8.1 (1976), p. 26. See Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts I, ii, 12; I, iii, 10; III. i. 32 (ed. J. Meyendorff, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–31; Louvain, 1959), pp. 99–101, 129–31, 619–21.

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that this was what theology meant to the Fathers, we shall gravely distort their message. Turning to the apophatic spirit of Patristic thought, we find this typically expressed in a passage of St Isaac of Nineveh (died c.700), ‘Isaac the Syrian’, as he is usually known in the Orthodox tradition: Accurate designations can only be established concerning earthly things. The things of the Age to come do not possess a true name, but can only be apprehended by simple cognition, which is exalted above all names and signs and forms and colours and habits and composite denominations. When, therefore, the knowledge of the soul exalts itself above this circle of visible things, the Fathers use concerning this knowledge any designations they wish, for no one knows their real names. . . . As the holy Dionysius [the Areopagite] says, we employ riddles.17

Comparing the two possible theological ‘ways’ – cataphatic or positive theology that proceeds by affirmations, and apophatic or negative theology that proceeds by negations – Vladimir Lossky wrote: ‘The first leads us to some knowledge of God, but is an imperfect way. The perfect way, the only way which is fitting in regard to God, who is of His very nature unknowable, is the second – which leads us finally to total ignorance. . . . It is by unknowing (agnosia) that one may know Him who is above every possible object of knowledge.’18 It will be noted here that for Lossky, as for Patristic authors such as St Dionysius the Areopagite (?c.500), the two ‘ways’ are not simply equal and complementary, but the apophatic stands definitely on a higher level than the cataphatic. Moreover, the ‘ignorance’ or ‘unknowing’, of which Lossky and Dionysius speak, is not to be construed simply as an absence or void. It signifies not separation from God but union with Him in love. All of this has to be taken fully into account if we are to understand aright the Fathers’ method of theologizing. As regards the third point, the need to treat the Fathers as contemporary witnesses, this is a theme particularly emphasized by Georges Florovsky. He used the slogan ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis’, and in this phrase, he underlined the qualification ‘Neo’. He was fiercely opposed to a mere ‘theology of repetition’. Both Florovsky and John Meyendorff, when appealing to the Patristic tradition, 17

18

Isaac the Syrian, Homily 22: Mystical Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (trans. A. J. Wensinck; Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923), pp. 114–15 (trans. adapted). Compare Homily 23: The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian (trans. D. Miller; Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984), p. 118. Compare Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names IV, 11 (PG 3:708D–709A), (ed. Suchla, B. G., Patristische Texte und Studien 33; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 156–7; Letter IX, 1 (PG 3: 1104B), (eds. G. Heil and A. M. Ritter, Patristische Texte und Studien 36; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1991), p. 193. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 25.

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were careful to describe this as a ‘living tradition’. In Meyendorff ’s words, ‘True tradition is always a living tradition. It changes while remaining always the same. It changes because it faces different situations, not because its essential content is modified.’19 This passage comes from a collection of his articles to which Meyendorff gave precisely the title Living Tradition, with conscious reference to the influential volume of that name issued before the Second World War by the professors of the Orthodox Theological Institute of St Sergius in Paris.20 In a key statement, Florovsky affirmed: ‘“To follow” the Fathers does not mean just “to quote” them. “To follow” the Fathers means to acquire their “mind,” their phronema.’21 Even if Florovsky was somewhat vague concerning what exactly this common ‘mind’ of the Fathers contains and how it is to be discerned,22 yet his basic meaning is clear: what matters is not simply the exact words of the Fathers but their vision, their primary intention and their existential attitude. We are to advance beyond the letter of the patristic writings to their inner spirit. It is not enough to reproduce word for word what the Fathers said in the fourth or fifth century. We are to ask what they would be saying if they were alive today. Meyendorff took the same view as Florovsky: ‘Simply to repeat what the Fathers said is to be unfaithful to their spirit’; it is not enough to use ‘yesterday’s arguments to confront new heresies’.23 We are to treat the Fathers as living masters, as partners in a continuing dialogue. What the Fathers provide is not fixed and irrevocable solutions but essentially a way, a path of ongoing exploration. The Patristic heritage has to be re-thought in each new generation. From this it follows that, in our study of the Patristic tradition and our appropriation of the Fathers, we have to adopt towards them an attitude that is rigorously critical. Diakrisis, discernment, is indispensable. ‘For us to be “traditional” ’, Meyendorff insisted, ‘implies an imitation of the Fathers in their creative work of discernment.’24 A firm distinction has to be drawn between ‘Tradition’ (with an initial capital and in the singular) and ‘traditions’ (with a lower case initial letter and in the plural). As Meyendorff observed, ‘The Christian notion of Tradition thus implies . . . a responsible freedom of the Church to discern the will of God.’25

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

J. Meyendorff, Living Tradition: Orthodox Witness in the Contemporary World (Crestwood: SVS Press, 1978), p. 8 (italics in the original). Zhivoe Predanie, Pravoslavie v Sovremennosti (Paris: YMCA Press, n.d. [?1937]). Florovsky, ‘St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers’, p. 109 (italics in the original). See Ware, ‘Orthodox theology today’, pp. 111–13. Meyendorff, Living Tradition, p. 7 (italics in the original). Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 34.

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‘No renewal’, stated Florovsky, ‘is possible without a return to the sources’ – and by this, he means a return to the Fathers. ‘But it must be a return to the sources, to the Well of living water, and not simply a retirement into a library or museum of venerable and respectable but outlived relics.’26 ‘By studying the Fathers’, he asserted, ‘we are compelled to face the problems’;27 ‘the old and the new are [to be] merged into a living whole’;28 ‘Orthodoxy cannot be maintained simply by inertia’.29 On the penultimate page of the New Testament, we read: ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev. 21.5). Surely these words of the Risen Christ can and should be applied to the Patristic heritage. Georges Florovsky liked to describe that heritage, in the words of St Irenaeus of Lyons, as depositum juvenescens, a ‘selfrejuvenating deposit’, a creative and dynamic source of new life.30 If such is the spirit in which the Fathers are studied, as a Well of living water, then there will certainly be a future for Patristic studies, both here at Oxford and elsewhere. Our motto should be, not ‘Back to the Fathers!’ but ‘Forward with the Fathers!’

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27

28

29

30

G. Florovsky, ‘The Legacy and Task of Orthodox Theology’, Anglican Theological Review 31.2 (1949), p. 70. G. Florovsky, ‘Letter to A. F. Dobbie-Bateman’, in Gallaher, A. B., ‘Georges Florovsky on reading the Life of St Seraphim’, Sobornost: Incorporating Eastern Churches Review 27.1 (2005), p. 62 (italics in the original). My understanding of Florovsky has been much enhanced by discussions with Dr Gallaher. G. Florovsky, ‘The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement’, Theology Today 7.1 (1959), p. 74. G. Florovsky, ‘To the Orthodox People: the Responsibility of the Orthodox in America’, in Florovsky, G., Ecumenism I: A Doctrinal Approach (Collected Works, vol. 13; Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989), p. 177. Florovsky, ‘St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers’, p. 106.

A Bibliography of Prof Andrew Louth1

Monographs The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: from Plato to Denys, pp. xviii ⫹ 215 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. ISBN 0-19-826655-3. Paperback: 1983. Japanese translation: 1988; ISBN 3016-271250-6100. Slovene translation: 1993. Korean translation: 2001; ISBN 89-419-0122-7. Romanian translation: 2002; ISBN 9739344-64-X. Second revised edition [with Afterword (2006)]: 2007; ISBN 978-0-19929140-3). Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, pp. xiv ⫹ 150 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1983; reprinted 1985. ISBN 0-19-826657-X; Paperback: 1989. Romanian translation: 1999. ISBN 973-9344-23-2). Denys the Areopagite, pp. x ⫹ 134 (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989; ISBN 0-22566538-7; re-issued, Continuum, 2001; ISBN 0-8264-5772-X. Romanian translation: 1997; ISBN 973-97750-1-2. Italian translation forthcoming). The Wilderness of God, pp. x ⫹ 166 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1991. ISBN 0-232-51876-9. American edition: Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997. Korean translation: 1993. ISBN 89-7236-066-X. Revised edition: 2003. ISBN 0-23252497-1). Maximus the Confessor, pp. x ⫹ 230 (London: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-11845-X). Wisdom of the Byzantine Church. Evagrios of Pontos and Maximos the Confessor. 1997 Paine Lectures in Religion, pp. 45 (Columbia MO: Department of Religious Studies, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1998). St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, pp. xvi ⫹ 327 (Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-925238-6 Paperback: 2004). Greek East and Latin West: the Church ad 681–1071, The Church in History, vol. III, pp. xviii ⫹ 382 ⫹ 18 illustrations ⫹ 8 maps (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-88141-320-5). Heart in Pilgrimage: St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms, Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series, pp. 16 (New York: Fordham University, 2008).

1

As at 22 August 2013; edited by Justin A. Mihoc.

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Editions Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, pp. 199 (trans. M. Staniforth; revised trans. with new introduction and notes by Andrew Louth: Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987. ISBN 0-14-044475-0). Eusebius: The History of the Church, pp. xl ⫹ 435 (trans. G. A. Williamson; revised trans. with new introduction and notes by Andrew Louth; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1989. ISBN 0-14-044535-8). The Wisdom of the Greek Fathers, pp. 48 (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1997. ISBN 0-74593727-6. Polish translation, 1998: ISBN 83-7168-159-3. Danish translation, 1998 ISBN 87-7739-372-4). (with Marco Conti): Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament, vol. 1, Genesis 1-11, pp. lii ⫹ 204 (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8308-1471-X). Editor, with John Behr and Dimitri Conomos, Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. ISBN 0-88141-248-1). St John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, pp. 163 (trans., introduction and notes by Andrew Louth, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. ISBN 0-88141-245-7). Editor, with Frances Young and Lewis Ayres, Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-46083-2). Editor, with Augustine Casiday, Byzantine Orthodoxies, Papers from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23–5 March 2002 (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7546-5496-4).

Translations From German Several chapters in Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord (vols. 2–5; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982–91). Alfred Schindler, ‘Augustine and the History of the Roman Empire’, Studia Patristica 22 (1989), 326–36. Basil Studer, Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of the Early Church (trans. and edited by Andrew Louth; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). Gabriel Bunge, The Rublev Trinity (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007).

From French Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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From Greek Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God. Heidegger and the Areopagite (trans. Haralambos Ventis, edited with an introduction by Andrew Louth; London-New York: T&T Clark, 2004).

Articles ‘Barth and the Problem of Natural Theology’, Downside Review 87 (1969), 268–77. ‘Reason and Revelation in St Athanasius’, Scottish Journal of Theology 23 (1970), 385–96. ‘The Concept of the Soul in Athanasius’ Contra Gentes-De Incarnatione’, Studia Patristica 13 (1975), 227–31. Theology and Spirituality, a paper given to the Origen Society in Oxford (published as a pamphlet, Fairacres Publications, 1976; revised and expanded ed., 1979; reprinted several times). Mary and the Mystery of the Incarnation. An essay on the Mother of God in the theology of Karl Barth (published as a pamphlet, Fairacres Publications, 1977). Commentary on an Agreed Statement on Ministry and Ordination 1973 (published as a pamphlet, London: Church Literature Association, 1977). ‘The Hermeneutical Question approached through the Fathers’ (a paper given at the 1977 Conference of the Oxford and Bonn Theological Faculties), Sobornost 7:7 (1978), 541–9. ‘The Greatest Fantasy’ (a review-article of Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism), PN Review 17 (1980), 36–8. ‘Messalianism and Pelagianism’, Studia Patristica 17 (1982), 127–35. ‘The Influence of Denys the Areopagite on Eastern and Western Spirituality in the fourteenth century’, Sobornost/Eastern Churches Review 4 (1982), 185–200. ‘The Communion of Saints’ (a review-article of the New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Donald Davie), PN Review 27 (1982), 60–1. ‘St Bernard and our Lady’, Downside Review 101 (1983), 165–76. ‘The Oxford Movement, the Fathers and the Bible’, Sobornost/Eastern Churches Review 6 (1984), 30–45. ‘Envy as the chief sin in Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa’, Studia Patristica 15 (1984), 458–60. ‘William of St-Thierry and Cistercian Spirituality’, Downside Review 102 (1984), 262–70. ‘Athanasius’ understanding of the Humanity of Christ’, Studia Patristica 16 (1985), 309–18. ‘Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the Areopagite’, Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986), 432–8. ‘Augustine and George Herbert’, Atti del Congresso Internazionale su s. Agostino nel XVI centenario della Conversione, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 26 (1987), 291–6.

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‘St Athanasius and the Greek Life of Antony’, Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988), 504–9. ‘Augustine on Language’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3 (1989), 151–8. ‘The use of the term ἴδιος in Alexandrian theology from Alexander to Cyril’, Studia Patristica 19 (1989), 198–202. ‘The Date of Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica’, Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990), 111–23. ‘Apathetic Love in Clement of Alexandria’, Studia Patristica 18:3 (1989 [actually published 1991]), 413–19. ‘The Mystery of Christ and the Shape of the Liturgy’, The New Theologian 2/2 (Winter 1991–92), 21–6. ‘The Book of Proverbs in the Byzantine Office’, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 37 (1992), 209–12. Eros and Mysticism. Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs, Guild of Pastoral Psychology Pamphlet no. 241 (London, 1992). ‘The Image of Heloise in English Literature’, Downside Review 111 (1993), 45–64. ‘St Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Desert’, Epiphany Journal 13:4 (1993), 6–17. ‘St Denys the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor: a Question of Influence’, Studia Patristica 27 (1993), 166–74. Knowing the Unknowable God: Hesychasm and the Kabbalah’, Sobornast 16:2 (1994), 9–23. A Christian Theologian at the Court of the Caliph: some Cross-Cultural Reflections, an inaugural lecture given at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 24 November 1994 (Goldsmiths, 1995). ‘A Christian Theologian at the court of the Caliph: some cross-cultural reflections’ (revised version of lecture), Dialogos 3 (1996), 4–19. ‘Apophatic Theology: Before and after the Areopagite’, Bogoslovni Vestnik 56 (1996), 297–310. ‘Review essay: The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of Dumitru Stăniloae’, Modern Theology 13 (1997), 253–67. ‘St Gregory Nazianzen on Bishops and the Episcopate’, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 58 (1997), 281–5. ‘The Transfiguration in the Theology of St Maximos the Confessor’, The Forerunner 29 (Summer, 1997), 1–8. ‘St Maximos the Confessor between East and West’, Studia Patristica 32 (1997), 332–45. ‘Specificul misiunii Bisericii în viziunea epocii patristice’, Renașterea 8 (new series), 9:93 (1997), 8 (Romanian translation of article in Greek Orthodox Theological Review 44). ‘The Transfiguration in the Theology of St Maximos the Confessor’, in Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, Theologia Orthodoxa, 1–2, Anul XLII (1997 [actually somewhat later]), 19–30. ‘They Speak to Us across the Centuries: 4. St Maximos the Confessor’, Expository Times 109:4 (1998), 100–3.

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‘Apofaticna teologija: Dionizij Areopagitski’, in Poligrafi 2 (1997 [actually 1998]), special edition 7/8 ‘Logos in Kozmos’, 127–44 (Slovene translation of article in Hermathena 165). ‘Sfântul Maxim, Monah și Mărturisitor: Actualitatea Lui’, Revista Teologică (Revista Oficială a Mitropoliei Ardealului) Serie Nouă, VII (79), nr. 4 (1997), 132–9 (Romanian translation of article in Expository Times 109). ‘Did John Moschos really die in Constantinople?’, Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1998), 149–54. ‘Recent Research on St Maximus the Confessor: a Survey’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42 (1998), 67–84. ‘V. A. Demant’, Tufton Review 3:1 (1999), 8–18. ‘L’avenir et les défis de l’éducation théologique orthodoxe en Europe Occidentale: l’Angleterre’, Planète St. Serge. Les feuillets de Saint Serge 6 (Pentecôte 1999), 16–21. ‘Apophatic Theology: Denys the Areopagite’, Hermathena 165 (Winter 1998), 71–84. ‘St Augustine’s Interpretation of the Transfiguration of Christ’, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 68 (2000), 375–82. ‘The Church’s Mission: Patristic Presuppositions’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 44:1–4 (1999 [actually March 2001]), 649–56. ‘The Christian Doctrine of Creation’, The Forerunner 37 (Summer 2001), 1–14. ‘Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers’ (2001 St Augustine Lecture), Augustinian Studies 33 (2002), 1–16. ‘An Invasion of Icons?’, Art and Christianity Enquiry Bulletin 33 (2003), 2–3. ‘The Call of Beauty: Orthodox Spirituality’, Retreats 2003, 10–11. ‘“Beauty will save the world”: The Formation of Byzantine Spirituality’, Theology Today 61 (2004), 67–77. ‘Theology, Contemplation and the University’, Studies in Christian Ethics 17 (2004), 69–79. ‘The Ecclesiology of Saint Maximos the Confessor’, International Journal of the Study of the Christian Church 4 (2004), 109–20. ‘Twenty-five Years of Patristic Studies’, Sourozh 100 (2005), 22–34. ‘The Eucharist in the theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’, Sobornost 27:2 (2005), 36–56. ‘“What a piece of work is a man!” Patristic ideas about what it is to be human’, Forerunner 46 (Winter 2005–06), 15–24. ‘Prière de Jésus et déification chez Florensky et Boulgakov’, Contacts 57:211 (2005), 203–15. ‘Christian Hymnography from Romanos the Melodist to John Damascene’, Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (2005), 195–206. ‘Mysticism: Name and Thing’, Archæus IX (2005), 9–21. ‘Sur les Lamentations d’Adam de saint Silouane’, Buisson Ardent. Cahiers Saint-Silouan l’Athonite 11 (2005), 55–60. ‘The Eucharist in the theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’, Sobornost 27:2 (2005), 36–56.

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‘There is nothing untrue in the Protevangelion’s joyful, inaccurate tales’, The Times, Saturday, 2 September 2006. ‘Severos of Antioch: an Orthodox View’, Sobornost 28:2 (2006), 6–18. Obituary: Jaroslav Pelikan, Sobornost 28:2 (2006), 56–9. ‘St John Damascene as Monastic Theologian’, Downside Review 125 (2007), 197–220. ‘A revised Orthodox ceremony of marriage?’, Sobornost 29:2 (2007), 51–74. ‘What is Theology? What is Orthodox Theology?’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51 (2007), 435–44. ‘Review essay on John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (2nd ed.), Communion and Otherness’, Sobornost 30:1 (2008), 94–100. ‘The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), 573–83. ‘The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine world: Maximus to Palamas’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), 585–99. ‘Inspiration of the Scriptures’, Sobornost 31:1 (2009), 29–44. ‘Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation’, Modern Theology 25 (2009), 329–40. ‘Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian’, Irish Theological Quarterly 74 (2009), 243–57. ‘Ignatios or Eusebios: two models of patristic ecclesiology’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10 (2010), 46–56. ‘Evagrios on Anger’, Studia Patristica 47 (2010), 179–85. ‘St Maximos’ Doctrine of the logoi of Creation’, Studia Patristica 48 (2010), 77–84. ‘Orthodoxy and the Problem of Identity’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12 (2012), 96–104. ‘Virtue Ethics: St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas compared’, Studies in Christian Ethics 26 (2013), 351–63. ‘Symbolism and the Angels in Dionysios the Areopagite’, Studia Patristica 58 (2013), 109–15.

Articles in Books and Dictionaries ‘Bernard and Affective Mysticism’, in The Influence of St Bernard, ed. Benedicta Ward SLG (Oxford: Fairacres Publications, 1976), 1–10. ‘Manhood into God: the Oxford Movement, the Fathers and the Deification of Man’, in Essays Catholic and Radical, eds. K. Leech and R. Williams (London: Bowerdean Press, 1983), 70–80. ‘Beatitude’, ‘Denys the Areopagite’, ‘Gnosticism’, ‘Greek Spirituality’, and ‘Mysticism’ in the Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. G. Wakefield (London: SCM Press, 1983). ‘The Mysterious Leap of Faith’, in In Vitro Veritas: More Tracts for our Times, eds. T. Sutcliffe and P. Moore (London: St Mary’s Bourne Street Publications, 1984), 262–70.

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‘Augustine’, ‘The Cappadocian Fathers’, ‘Denys the Areopagite’ and ‘Maximus the Confessor’, in The Study of Spirituality, eds. C. Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Yarnold SJ (London: SPCK, 1986), 135–45, 161–8, 184–95. ‘The Nature of Theological Understanding: some parallels between Newman and Gadamer’, in Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, ed. G. Rowell (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), 96–109. ‘The Place of the Heart of the World in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in The Analogy of Beauty, ed. J. Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 147–63. ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in The Religion of the Incarnation Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi, ed. R. Morgan (Bristol: Classical Press, 1989), 33–45. Articles on ‘Allegorical Interpretation’ and ‘Mysticism’ in the Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, eds. d R. J. Coggins and J. L. Houlden (London: SCM Press/ Philadelphia PA: Trinity Press, 1990), 12–14, 478–9. ‘Mysticism’, in Early Christianity. Origin and Evolution to AD 600. In honour of W. H. C. Frend, ed. I. Hazlitt (London: SPCK, 1991), 208–17. ‘Eros and Mysticism. Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, in Jung and the Monotheisms, ed. Joel Ryce-Menuhin (London: Routledge, 1993), 241–54. (also published separately, see above). ‘St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor: the Shaping of Tradition’, in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine. Essays in honour of Maurice Wiles, eds. Sarah Coakley and David Pailin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 117–30. ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 25–8. ‘Mystik II. Kirchengeschichtlich’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXIII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 547–80. ‘Platonism in the Middle English Mystics’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 52–64. ‘Waterland, Daniel’, ‘Walton, Izaak’, ‘Weston, Frank’, ‘Wheatly, Charles’, ‘Whichcote, Benjamin’, ‘Wilberforce, Robert Isaac’, ‘Wilson, Thomas’, ‘Wither, Georges’, ‘Wordsworth, Christophe’, ‘Worthington, John’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, fascicules 106/107 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994). ‘The Orthodox Church’, in A Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century World History, eds. Jeremy Black and Roy Porter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 532–3. ‘Introduction’ to St Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. Chanted Sermons by the Great Sixth-century Poet and Singer (trans. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash; San Francisco: HarperCollins for the International Sacred Literature Trust, 1995), xv–xxii. ‘Paradies. IV Theologiegeschichtlich’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXV (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 714–19. ‘Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century’, in Unity and Diversity in the Church, ed. R. N. Swanston, Studies in Church History 32 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1–17.

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‘Orthodoxy and Art’, in Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World, eds. Andrew Walker and Costa Carras (London: SPCK, 1996), 159–77. ‘Dionysius (4) the Areopagite’, in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, eds. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (3rd edn; Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 477–8. ‘Plato/Platonismus. III. Christlicher Platonismus’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXVI (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 702–7. ‘Proclus, Philosoph (412–485)’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXVII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 468–71. Contributions on ‘Christianity’ to the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. J. Bowker (Oxford University Press, 1997). Many articles (see p. vi), in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. 3 by E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy’, in Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident, Actes de Colloque International, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994, ed. Ysabel de Andia (Paris: Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 151, 1997), 329–39. ‘The Body in Western Catholic Christianity’, in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley, Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 111–30. ‘St John Damascene: Preacher and Poet’, in Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics, eds. Pauline Allen and Mary B. Cunningham (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 247–66. ‘The Theology of the Word made Flesh’, in The Bible as Book. The Manuscript Tradition, eds. John L. Sharpe III and Kimberley van Kampen (London: The British Library/ New Castle DE: Oak Knoll Press in association with The Scriptorium: Center for Christian Antiquities, 1998), 223–8. Articles on ‘Ascèse’, ‘Martyre’, ‘Prière’, ‘Spirituelle (théologie)’, ‘Vie spirituelle’, for Dictionnaire critique de Théologie, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 89–93, 711–13, 928–33, 1101–4, 1224–9. ‘Dogma and Spirituality in St Maximus the Confessor’, in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, eds. Pauline Allen, Raymond Canning and Lawrence Cross (vol. 1; Everton Park, Queensland: Centre for Early Christian Studies, 1998), 197–208. ‘Romanus der Melode, 4. Wirkung’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXIX (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 399–400. Articles on 68 popes (from Hilarus to Stephen V/VI), in Lives of the Popes, ed. Michael J. Walsh (London: Salamander Books, 1998), 46–94. Survey Article on ‘Byzantine Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy’ for The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity, eds. Ken Parry, David J. Melling et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 97–102. ‘Wisdom and the Russians: the sophiology of Fr Sergei Bulgakov’, in Where shall Wisdom be found?, ed. Stephen C. Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 169–81.

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[with Dr C. T. R. Hayward], ‘Sanctus’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXX (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 20–9. ‘Later Theologians of the Greek East’, in The Early Christian World, ed. Philip Esler (vol. 1; London: Routledge, 2000), 580–601. ‘Palestine under the Arabs, 650–750: the Crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy’, in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 36 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), 67–77. Articles on ‘Byzantine Theology: 6th-16th centuries’, Fasting’, ‘Iconoclasm’, ‘Iconography’, ‘Typology’, ‘Virgin Birth’ for the Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 86–8, 236–7, 318–20, 727–9, 740. Articles on ‘Athanasius’, ‘Constantine I the Great’, ‘Demetrios’, ‘Germanos’, ‘Helena’, ‘John Damascene’, ‘Kabasilas’, ‘Mary’, ‘Maximos’, ‘Philo’, ‘Theology’, in Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition, ed. Graham Speake (London-Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), 188–9, 373–5, 460–1, 667–8, 719–20, 585–6, 869–70, 1008–9, 1017–18, 1303–4, 1627–9. Many chapters for Patrologia V. I Padri orientali dal Concilio di Calcedonia (451) a Giovanni Damasceno (†750), ed. Angelo di Berardino (Genoa: Marietti, 2000), 39, 89–90, 93–4, 103–5, 108, 110–32, 134, 146–9, 151, 155–8, 177–68, 229–33, 244–9, 274–5, 277–85, 286–69, 291–304, 305–6, 406–8. Article on ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ for the Dictionary of Historical Theology, ed. Trevor Hart (Carlisle: Paternoster Press/Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 161–2. ‘Dionysios the Areopagite and the terminology of the apophatic’, in Language and Negativity: Apophaticism in Theology and Literature, ed. Henny Fiskå Hägg (Oslo: Novus Press, 2000), 29–50. ‘Postpatristic Byzantine Theologians’, in The Medieval Theologians, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 37–54. ‘Τὸ σχῆμα τῆς Ὀρθοδοξίας στούς ἁγίους Γρηγόριο Παλαμᾶ καὶ Ἰωάννη Δαμασκηνό’, in Ὁ Ἅγιος Γρηγόριος ὁ Παλαμὰς στἡν Ἱστορία καὶ τὸ Παρόν, ed. Γεωργίος Ι. Μαντζαρίδης (Ἅγιον Ὂρος: Ἱερὰ Μεγίστη Μονὴ Βατοπαιδίου, 2000), 645–51. ‘Ὀρθοδοξὶα καὶ Τέχνη’, in Ζωντανὴ Ὀρθοδοξὶα στὸν σύγχρονο κόσμο, eds. Andrew Walker and Costa Carras (Athens: Ἑστία, 2000), 194–214 (Greek translation of ‘Orthodoxy and Art’). ‘Synesius von Cyrene’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXXII (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 524–7. ‘John of Damascus and the Making of the Byzantine Theological Synthesis’, in The Sabaïte Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the fifth century to the present day, ed. Joseph Patrich, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 98 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 301–4. ‘The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of Dumitru Stăniloae’, in Dumitru Stăniloae: Tradition and Modernity in Theology, ed. Lucian Turcescu (Iaşi-Oxford-Palm Beach-Portland: The Center for Romanian Studies, 2002), 53–70 (reprint of 1997 review article).

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‘Trishagion’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Bd. XXXII (BerlinNew York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 121–4. ‘Wisdom, Inner and Outer: Byzantine Theology, 6th–16th centuries’, in Christian Thought. A Brief History, eds. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 38–46 (reprint of article, ‘Byzantine Theology: 6th–16th centuries’, in Oxford Companion to Christian Thought). ‘Dionysios the Areopagite’, in Christianity and the Mystical, The WaySupplement 102 (2001/2), 7–14. ‘Evagrios on Prayer’, in ‘Standing up to Godwards’: Essays in Mystical and Monastic Theology in honour of the Reverend John Clark on his sixty-fifth birthday, ed. James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 204 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2002), 163–72. ‘Holiness and the Vision of God in the Eastern Fathers’, in Holiness, Past and Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London-New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 217–38. ‘Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾿ναι μαϰϱύς ὁ δϱόμος, Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage’, in Χϱιστιανιϰὴ Θεσσαλονιϰή, Ὁ Ἱεϱὸς Νάος τοῦ Ἁγ ίου Δημητϱίου, Πϱοσϰύνημα Ἀνατολῆς ϰαὶ Δύσεως (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2001 [actually 2003]), 97–102. ‘Biographical Sketch’ and ‘The Theology of the Philokalia’, in Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West, eds. John Behr, Andrew Louth, Dimitri Conomos (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 13–27, 351–61. ‘The Πηγ ὴ Γνώσεως of St John Damascene: Its Date and Development’, in Porphyrogenita. Essays on the History and Literature of Byzantium and the Latin East in honour of Julian Chrysostomides, eds. Ch. Dendrinos et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 335–40. ‘Icon and Incarnation: St John Damascene and the Seventh Œcumenical Synod’, in Christus bei den Vätern: Forscher aus dem Osten und Westen Europas an den Quellen des gemeinsamen Glaubens, eds. Ysabel de Andia and Peter Leander Hofrichter, Pro Oriente Band XXVII, Wiener Patristische Tagungen I (Innsbruck-Vienna: TyroliaVerlag, 2003), 258–62. ‘The Cosmic Vision of Saint Maximos the Confessor’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, eds. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 184–96. Chapters on ‘Eusebius and the Birth of Church History’, ‘Fourth Century Alexandrians: Athanasius and Didymus’, ‘Palestine: Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius’, ‘The Cappadocians’, ‘John Chrysostom and the Antiochene School to Theodoret of Cyr’, ‘Conciliar Records and Canons’, ‘Cyril of Alexandria’, ‘Hagiography’, ‘The Literature of the Monastic Movement’, for Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, eds. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 266–301, 342–61, 373–81, 391–5.

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‘Alexei Tolstoy’s Ioann Damaskin’, in Life conquers Death: Religion and Literature (Moscow: KVADRAT-S, 2004), 34–9 [also published separately, in Russian, together with the poem: Ioann Damaskin (Moscow: Sretensky Monastery, 2004).]. ‘The Collectio Sabbaitica and sixth-century Origenism’, in Origenianum Octavum. Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, ed. L. Perrone, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 164 (vol. II; Leuven: Uitverij Peeters, 2003 [actually 2004]), 1167–75. ‘Light, Vision and Religious Experience in Byzantium’, in The Presence of Light. Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew Kapstein (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85–103. ‘Thomas Taylor’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (vol. 53; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 988–9. ‘The Holy Spirit in the theology of St John Damascene’, in Der Heilige Geist im Leben der Kirche, eds. Ysabel de Andia and Peter Leander Hofrichter, Pro Oriente Band XXIX, Wiener Patristicshe Tagungen II (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2005), 229–36. ‘“Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things”: Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible’, in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison and Marco Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 15–24. ‘La preghiera di Gesù e la teologia della divinizzazione’, in La Preghiera di Gesù, eds. I. Alfeev, V. A. Kotel’nikov, A. Louth, M. Van Parys, e AA. VV. (Magnano BI: Edizione Qiqajon, 2005), 277–91. ‘The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the Twentieth Century’, in Le Feu sur la terre. Mélanges offerts au Père Boris Bobrinskoy pour son 80e anniversaire, eds. Archimandrite Job Getcha and Michel Stavrou, Analecta Sergiana 3 (Paris: Presses Saint-Serge, 2005), 169–76. ‘The Eastern Empire in the sixth century’, ‘The Byzantine Empire in the seventh century’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1 c.500 – c.700, ed. Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 93–117, 291–316. Articles on ‘allegory’, ‘Andrew of Crete’, ‘Antioch’, ‘Athanasius’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘Leontios of Neapolis’, ‘Syriac Christianity’ in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, eds. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11–12, 15, 21–2, 39–40, 69, 260, 414–15. ‘St Gregory Palamas and the Holy Mountain’, in Mount Athos: the Sacred Bridge. The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain, eds. Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 49–67. ‘Is Development of Doctrine a valid category for Orthodox Theology?’, in Orthodoxy and Western Culture. A Collection of essays honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on his eightieth birthday, eds. Valerie Hotchkiss and Patrick Henry (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 45–63.

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‘The Oak of Mamre, the Fathers and St. Andrei Rublev: Patristic Interpretation of the Hospitality of Abraham and Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity’, in The Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Russian History and Culture, ed. Vladimir Tsurikov (Jordanville NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2005), 90–8. ‘The Eucharist and Hesychasm, with Special Reference to Theophanes III, Metropolitan of Nicaea’, in The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy, eds. István Perczel, Réka Forrai and György Geréby, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, De Wulf-Mansion Centre, Series 1, XXXV (Leuven: Leuven Unversity Press, 2005), 199–205. ‘The Appeal to the Cappadocian Fathers and Dionysios the Areopagite in the iconoclast controversy’, in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, eds. Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 271–82. ‘Introduction’ in Byzantine Orthodoxies, Papers from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23–5 March 2002, eds. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2006), 1–11. ‘Da Romano il melode a Giovanni di Damasco. L’innografia cristiana’, in Giovanni di Damasco: un padre al sorgere dell’Islam, eds. B. Flusin, S. H. Griffith, G. Khodr, D. J. Sahas, J.-M. Spieser et AA. VV. (Magnano BI: Edizioni Qiqajon, 2006), 241–56 [Italian translation of article published above]. ‘Die Spiritualität des frühen christlichen Mönchtums’, in Handbuch Spiritualität: Zugänge, Traditionen, Interreligiöse Prozesse, ed. Karl Baier (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 159–70. ‘Photios as a Theologian’, in Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In honour of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth M. Jeffreys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 206–23. ‘St Gregory of Nazianzus on the Monarchy of the Father’, in Gott Vater und Schöpfer, eds. Ysabel de Andia and Peter Leander Hofrichter, Pro Oriente Band XXXI, Wiener Patristische Tagungen III (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2007), 107–13. ‘The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, eds. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Unversity Press, 2007), 32–44. ‘Eastern Orthodox Eschatology’, in the Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233–47. ‘Pagans and Christians on Providence’, in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority and Change, ed. by J. H. D. Scourfield (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 279–97. ‘The Emergence of Byzantine Orthodoxy: ad 600–1095’, in the Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, Early Medieval Christianities c.600–c.1100, eds. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–64. ‘Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning—an Orthodox Perspective’, in Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning. Exploring a Way for Cntemporary Ecumenism, ed. Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 361–72.

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‘“Heart in Pilgrimage”: St Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms’, in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, eds. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 291–304 (also published separately: see above). ‘Sergei Bulgakov’, in Moderne teologi. Tradisjon og nytenkning hos det 20. århundrets theologer, eds. Ståle Johannes Kristiansen and Svein Rise (Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget, 2008), 353–65. ‘The Patristic Revival and its Protagonists’, in the Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Theology, eds. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 188–202. ‘Justinian and his legacy (500–600)’, ‘Byzantium transforming (600–700)’, in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, c.500–1492, ed. Jonathan Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 99–129, 221–48. [Revised versions of chapters in the New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1]. ‘The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor’, and ‘The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine world: Maximus to Palamas’, in Rethinking Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 43–69 [reprint of articles in Modern Theology 24 (2008), see above]. ‘Space, Time and the Liturgy’, in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word, eds. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 215–31. ‘The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast Controversy’ [in Russian], in Православное учение о церковных таинствах. V Международная Богословская Конференция Русской Православной Церкви. Москва, 13–16 ноября 2007. Vol 2: Евхаристия: богословие и Священство (Москва: Синодальная Библейско-Богословская комиссия, 2009), 124–9. ‘Why did the Syrians reject the Council of Chalcedon’, in Chalcedon in Context. Church Councils 400–700, eds. Richard Price and Mary Whitby (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 107–16. ‘Maximos the Confessor’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Theologians, ed. Ian S. Markham (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 153–69. ‘From the Doctrine of Christ to the Person of Christ: St Maximos the Confessor on the Transfiguration of Christ’, in In the Shadow of the Incarnation. Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in honor of Brian E. Daley, S. J., ed. Peter W. Martens (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 [really 2009]), 260–75. ‘Eucharist and Church according to St Maximos the Confessor’, in Einheit und Katholizität der Kirche, eds. Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, Gregor Emmenegger, Pro Oriente XXXII, Wiener Patristische Tagungen IV (Innsbruck-Vienna: TyroliaVerlag, 2009), 319–30. ‘The Six Days of Creation according to the Greek Fathers’, in Reading Genesis after Darwin, eds. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–55.

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‘Christology and Heresy’, in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 187–98. ‘Between Creation and Transfiguration: the Environment in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition’, in Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, eds. David G. Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, Christopher Southgate and Francesca Stavrakopoulou (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 211–22. ‘La Lotta per la carità: Massimo il Confessore’, in La Lotta Spirituale nella tradizione ortodossa, eds. Sabina Chialà, Lisa Cremaschi e Adalberto Mainardi (Magnano: Edizioni Qiqajon, 2010), 95–112. ‘Patristic Scholarship and Ecumenism’, in Patristique et Œcuménisme: themes, contexts, personages, ed. Cristian Bădiliță (Paris: Beauchesne, 2010), 1–15. ‘Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition’, in Heiligkeit und Apostolizität der Kirche, eds. Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali and Gregor Emmenegger, Wiener Patristische Tagungen V (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2010), 235–9. ‘The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World’, Friends of Mount Athos, Annual Report 2010 (Athos, 2010), 37–52. Articles on ‘Byzantine Theology’, ‘Cabasilas, Nicholas’, ‘Gregory Palamas’, ‘John of Damascus’, ‘Stăniloae, Dumitru’, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 160–2, 484–5, 654, 1191. ‘John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between Humanity and God’, in The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium. Texts and Images, eds. Leslie Brubaker and Mary B. Cunningham, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies (Farnham/ Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 153–61. ‘Late Patristic Developments on the Trinity in the East’, The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, eds. Gilles Emery OP and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 138–51. ‘Introduction’ to Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, III. The Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savior (trans. Ioan Ioniță; Brookline MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011), xi–xv. ‘French Ressourcement Theology and Orthodoxy: a Living Mutual Relationship?’, in Ressourcement. A Movement for Renewal in twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, eds. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray with the assistance of Patricia Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 495–507. ‘The Fathers on Genesis’, in The Book of Genesis. Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, eds. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, David L. Petersen. Supplements of Vetus Testamentum, 152 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012), 561–78. ‘The Holy Spirit in Creation and Re-Creation: The Byzantine Fathers’, in The Spirit in Creation and New Creation, ed. Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2012), 171–8.

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‘The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World’, in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, eds. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 50–60, 286–7 (notes). ‘Apophatic and Kataphatic Theologies’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, eds. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 137–46. ‘St. Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology’, in Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus. Essays on History, Theology, and Culture, ed. Christopher A. Beeley (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 252–66. ‘Sergei Bulgakov’, in Key Theological Thinkers: from Modern to Postmodern, eds. Staale Johannes Kristiansen and Svein Rise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 341–51 [English original of article above, Moderne teologi (2008)]. ‘Constructing the Apostolic Past: The Case of Dionysius the Areopagite’, in The Church on its Past, Studies in Church History 49, eds. Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 42–51. ‘The Views of St Maximus the Confessor on the Institutional Church’, in Knowing the Purpose of Creation through the Resurrection, Proceedings of the Symposium of St Maximus the Confessor, Belgrade, 18–22 October 2012, ed. Bp Maxim (Vasiljević) (Alhambra CA: Sebastian Press, 2013), 347–55.

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Index of References Biblical

Eph.

5.19

79n. 17

Gen. 12.1

96

Heb.

10

93

Judg. 6.36-38

75

Rev.

21.5

223

Ps.

Patristic

68 [69] 71 [72].6 80 [81] 80 [81].11 103 [104].13 150

90n. 47, 91n. 53 89 78–80, 87–9, 92, 96, 98, 100–2 101 75 88 85 80 90n. 46

19.1 45.15 53

94 220 101

Isa.

1 22 [23] 44 [45]

Dan. 7

101

Zech. 4.4

94

Mt.

24 24.1-24 24.16-18 24.19 25.41-46

71 71n. 42 71 71 73n. 52

Lk.

1.28 1.38 12.14 21 21.28-33 24.13

98n. 75 76 189 72 72 18

Jn.

1.16 1.18

154 18

Gal.

1.12 2.20

18 18

Ambrose of Milan ‘On Psalm 1’ 91n. 53 Andreas of Samosata Impugnatio XII Anathematismorum Cyrilli 28n. 34 Andrew of Crete De sanctorum imaginum veneratione 56n. 71 Great Kanon 54, 55nn. 66–7 Homilies 52n. 54 On the Annunciation 52 On the Circumcision of the Lord and St Basil 56 On the Dormition 53, 54nn. 63–4 On the Nativity 57n. 77 On the Transfiguration 55nn. 68–9 Aretas of Caesarea Homilies On Lazarus 78n. 8 Athanasius of Alexandria Letter to Marcellinus 98 Augustine of Hippo Agains Julian 170n. 41 City of God 121–2 Confessions 91nn. 50–2, 121 De Genesi ad litteram 169 De Ordine 121 On Trinity 143 Retractiones 121n. 25 Basil of Caesarea Epistle 234 128 ‘On Psalm 1’ 90n. 47 Basil the Great ‘On Psalm 44’ 96n. 69

258

Index of References

Benedict XII Benedictus Deus 157 Boethius Ad Senarium 164n. 17 Against Nestorius and Eutyches 162, 163n. 7, 168–9 Consolation of Philosophy 132, 162, 163n. 8, 168–9, 171, 173n. 50 How substances are goods in that they exist although they are not substantial goods 162, 167n. 24 On the Catholic Faith 162, 164n. 17, 166–7, 173 On Trinity 164n. 17, 169 The Trinity is one God, not three Gods 162, 167, 168n. 30, 169n. 31, 172n. 48 Whether Father, Son and Holy Spirit are substantially predicated of the divinity 162, 168n. 29, 169n. 32 Cassiodorus Variae 161n. 1, 163n. 10, 164n. 14 Cyril of Alexandria Against Nestorius 27 Commentary on Zacharias 95n. 67, 98 Epistles 23, 26n. 24, 27–8, 33, 36–7 Diadochus of Photice On Spiritual Knowledge and Discernment 220 Diodore of Tarsus Commentaries on Psalms 96n. 70 Dionysius the Areopagite Letter IX 221n. 17 Mystical Theology 194n. 7, 158 On the Divine Names 43, 49, 53, 55, 119, 133–4, 149, 221n. 17 On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 46 Duns Scotus Opus Oxoniense 116n. 12, 117 Ordinatio 118nn. 17–18, 130n. 56, 150n. 105 Questiones in Metaphysica 118n. 17 Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 14n. 21, 64, 91n. 49 Eustathios of Thessaloniki On the Capture of Thessalonike 70n. 40 Euthymios Zigabenos Panoply of Doctrine 61, 62n. 9

Evagrius of Pontus On Prayer 220n. 10 Evagrius Scholasticus Ecclesiastical History 163n. 12 Germanos I of Constantinople Ecclesiastical History 49, 50n. 46 In presentationem s. deiparae 51n. 51 On the Annunciation 51n. 52, 52, 90 Gregory of Nyssa Against Eunomius 18n. 33 Life of Moses 86, 87n. 36 ‘On Canticles’ 89n. 41 Gregory Palamas ‘On the Annunciation’ 85n. 32 ‘On the Dormition’ 80, 84–5, 102 ‘On the Entry’ 81–2 The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 153–5 Theophanies 126 Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 116, 118, 152–3, 220 Hesychius ‘On Holy Mary the Theotokos’ 87n. 37 Irenaeus of Lyons Against Heresies 15, 223 Ep. to Victor (apud Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.24) 14n. 21 Isaac the Syrian Homily 22 221 Homily 23 221n. 17 Jerome Epistle 108 91n. 54 Hebrew Questions on Genesis 169 John Chrysostom ‘On Eutropius’ 97 ‘On Psalm 150’ 90n. 46 John Climacus Ladder of Divine Ascent 171 John Damascene Fountain Head of Knowledge 20 Dialogues 20n. 1 On the Holy and Glorious Dormition 84 The Orthodox Faith 48, 128, 130n. 56, 144 Three treatises on the divine images 48, 49nn. 42–3, 65

Index of References John Geometres Life of the Virgin 66–7 Metaphrasis of the Odes 61n. 4, 66n. 27 John Skylitzes Synopsis of Histories 77n. 7 John Xiphilinos the Younger Homilies 67 Joseph the Hymnographer Canon of the Akathistos 86 Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love 160n. 117 Maximus the Confessor Ambigua 119, 142 Chapters on Theology and Economy 141n. 86, 143n. 89 Mystagogy 44, 142–3 Questions to Thalassius 142 Melito Homily on the Passover 90n. 43 Methodius of Olympus Symposium 94n. 66 Nicephorus Life of St Andrew the Fool 77n. 6 Nicholas Cabasilas On the Annunciation 76 On the Dormition 80, 102 Nicholas of Cusa On Conjectures 111 Niketas Magistros Life of Andrew of Crete 51n. 53 Nikodimos the Hagiorite Philokalia 183, 217 Origen Commentary on the Song of Songs 92n. 57 Homilies on the Psalms 92n. 57, 96 Peter of Damascus The Third Stage of Contemplation 102n. 80 Proclus of Constantinople The Elements of Theology 109n. 2, 111n. 5, 112–14, 126, 135 Homilies 92–4, 102 Protevangelium of James 77n. 6, 99 Socrates Scholasticus Ecclesiastical History

26n. 22

259

Theodoret of Cyrus Refutation of the Twelve Anathemas 28n. 34 Theophanes Kerameus Homilies 67 Theophylakt of Ohrid The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to John 73 The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to Luke 72–3 The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew 71 Letter 57 71n. 41 Thomas Aquinas Commentary on the Divine Names 149, 151 Quodlibetal Questions 118n. 16 Summa Contra Gentiles 118 Summa Theologica 115, 127, 145, 147–8 Philosophical Anonymous Hermetica 125 Aristotle Categories 108–9n. 2, 134, 140, 162 Metaphysics 108n. 2, 136 On Interpretation 162 Prior Analytics 162 Rhetoric 86n. 35 Topics 162 Ps-Aristotle The Book of Causes 149 Boethius In categorias Aristotelis 162n. 6 Introduction to categorical syllogisms 162 On astronomy 162 On division 162 On hypothetical syllogisms 162 On music 162 On the categorical syllogism 162 On the order of peripatetic teaching 162 On topical differentiae 162 Cicero On the Commonwealth Topics 162 Damascius On Principles 123n. 28

170

260 Iamblichus On the Mysteries

Index of References

122n. 27

Nicomachus of Gerasa On Arithmetic 162 Philo of Alexandria Allegorical Interpretation 96n. 71 On the Contemplative Life 91 On the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel 96n. 71 Plato Laws 113 Meno 137 Parmenides 136, 138 Phaedrus 136 Republic 113, 171 Porphyry Isagoge 162 Proclus of Constantinople Commentary on the Cratylus 134 In Alcibiades 137n. 75 Conciliar Collectio Atheniensis 48

33n. 58, 34nn. 60–1, 35nn. 62–7 73-79 31n. 45 74 31n. 46, 33n. 54 75 31n. 47, 33n. 54 75-76 31n. 48 76 31n. 49 77 31nn. 48–9, 32n. 52 78 32n. 51 Collectio Casinensis 84 25nn. 19–21, 33n. 56 Canones Concilii Chalcedonensis 33n. 55 Collectio Vaticana 4-6 26n. 24 25 24n. 11 31 24nn. 12–13 43 23n. 9 44-47 28n. 35

44-48 82 84 92 93 94 146

23n. 10 29n. 39 29n. 36 29nn. 37–8 33n. 57 34n. 59 24nn. 14–15, 25n. 16, 27n. 27 151 25nn. 17–18, 27nn. 28–30 155 27n. 31 156 28n. 32 157 28n. 33 159 30n. 40 163 30nn. 41–2 164 33n. 56 Collectio Veronensis 21-22 29n. 39 Liturgical Akathistos Hymn 78, 95–6 Cosmas of Maïuma Canons for the Feast of the Annunciation 85 Great Vespers for the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs 83n. 25 Joseph the Hymnographer Canon of the Akathistos 86 Liturgy of St John Chrysostom 82n. 24 Matins, Canon for the Feast of the Annunciation 86, 88n. 39 Symeon Metaphrastes Menalogion 61 Classical Ammianus Marcellinus Anonymus Valesianus 164nn. 15–16, 165nn. 18–20 Macrobius In somnium Scipionis 169 Maurus Servius Honoratus In tria Virgilii opera exposition 170 Virgil Aeneid 170 Bucolics 169