Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology 9780192882820, 0192882821

Table of contents :
Cover
Selected Essays: Volume II: Studies in Theology
Copyright
Dedication
Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
I
II
1: The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers
I
II
III
2: The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of Early Christian Dogma . . .
3: The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar
4: Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs
5: The Image of Heloise in English Literature
6: Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾽ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage
7: The Theology of the Philokalia
8: Theology, Contemplation, and the University
9: Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God
10: The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov
Bulgakov the Priest
Eucharist and Incarnation
The Eucharistic Transmutation
Eucharistic Communion
The Holy Grail
Our Identity as Christians
David Jones
11: The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov
12: Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?
‘Development’ in Western Historical Disciplines
Newman’s Understanding of Development
Romanticism and Development
Probing the Orthodox Reluctance
Learning from a Genuinely Critical Intelligence
Theological Ideas in the Context of Worship
Refreshing the Memory of the Church
13: The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the Twentieth Century
14: Pagans and Christians on Providence
I
II
III
15: What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?
16: The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology
Incarnation: The Cosmic Dimension of Theosis
Transformation: The Human Dimension of Theosis
Apophatic Theology: The Divine-HumanUnion
Conclusion
17: Inspiration of the Scriptures
Western Presuppositions and Orthodox Theology
Starting from Practice
The Shape of the Scriptures
The Old Testament and the Christian Church
Christ the Centre of the Scriptures
Scriptural Inspiration?
18: Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian
19: Space, Time, and the Liturgy
Ancient Conceptions of Space and Time
The Divine Liturgy
20: Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition
21: Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
22: The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World
23: Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium
24: Theology of the ‘In-Between’
25: Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and Christian Identityin Late Antiquity
Church Structures and Christian Identity
Making Christians: The Cult of the Martyrs
26: Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology
The Background of the Notion of Analogy
Analogy in Christian Theology
The Doctrine of Analogy in the Twentieth Century
Seeking for Analogy in Orthodox Theology
Dumitru Stăniloae
Vladimir Lossky
Maximos’ ‘Signature Doctrine’ of the Logoi
27: Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View
28: Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some Reflections on the Development of Mariology
29: The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015
Stages in the Recovery of the Icon: Scholars and Attempts to Clean Icons
. . . and Connoisseurs
The Icon Revealed
Evgeny Trubetskoy
Fr Pavel Florensky
Recreating the Tradition of Icon Painting: Leonid Uspensky
. . . and Fotis Kontoglou
St Maria of Paris and Sister Joanna Reitlinger
Conclusion
30: Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox Reflections
Introduction
Mary and the Church as Virgin Mother
Sergii Bulgakov
Vladimir Lossky
Paul Evdokimov
Conclusion
31: What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?
Mysticism in the Air
Contemporary Mystical Writings
Meister Eckhart
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
The Divine Darkness
Lossky’s Mystical Theology
32: The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim
33: Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am Kreuz
34: Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology
35: Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′: The Experience of the Russian Émigrés
36: Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion
37: Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology
Evagrios and the Trinity
From μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς to μονάς καὶ τριάς
Μονάς and τριάς in Christian Theology
The Trinitarian Theology of Maximos the Confessor . . .
. . . and John Damascene
Maximos and John Compared
Appendix: Numerology and the Trinity
Details of Original Publication
Index

Citation preview

Selected Essays

Selected Essays Volume II Studies in Theology A N D R EW L O U T H Edited by

L EW I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932341 ISBN 978–0–19–288282–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For my offspring Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac

Editors Preface and Acknowledgments Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone Patristic studies for the past four decades, and a key theological figure within Orthodoxy (especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for three. Andrew is also a thinker known far beyond the world of those devoted to the study of early and Byzantine Christianity, and far beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His works have been a major source for all those—­across many Christian traditions—­ interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the resources of clas­ sic­al Christianity (especially as it is developed in the Greek world between Plato and John Damascene). His monographs cover a considerable range, from his early and much appreciated two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and Discerning the Mystery to his translations and commentaries, and on to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and Development in Byzantine Theology and Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071. Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge are rendered all the clearer in his recon­ ceptualizing and editing of the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2022). But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a significant essay­ ist; many of his most significant contributions to scholarship and to theology are scattered throughout journals and edited collections, some of which are rather difficult to access. These contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at insti­ tutions and to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of the theo­ logic­al community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in his long contribution as co-­editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early Christian Studies,” and “Oxford Early Christian Texts.” The present two volumes attempt to reveal something of that range and erudition by presenting seventy-­four of his essays, in a selection made by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is that Andrew has not included any of the many pieces he has produced for “handbooks” over many years. Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented something of a challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic theology is also intrinsic to his work as a theologian—­the division is not one between history and theology. But neither is it one simply between the theology of the Fathers over against work in modern theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would contradict Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which engagement with the Fathers is the enduring heart of theological work, however much it also must reflect on the

viii  Editors Preface and Acknowledgments streams of thought that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on exploring the thought and world of figures in the early Christian world (and in a few cases exploring the links between that world and the world of Byzantine Christianity) appear in the first volume. In the second volume many of the essays consider broader theological topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological writers (especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-­century Orthodox diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early Christian theology. The essays in this second volume are offered in chronological order, allowing the reader to gain a sense of how Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays were written at a variety of points over the past half-­century a number of them use styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were written. We have therefore left the wording of the essays as they were published. Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and friends helped to prepare these essays for publication, especially the arduous task of checking pre-­published electronic versions against the final published forms, and turning PDFs into text. We would like to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis, Fr Demetrios Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr Christopher Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher. We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals, and others who have granted permission for the essays collected in these volumes to be reprinted.

October 2022

Lewis Ayres and John Behr

Contents Abbreviations

xi

Introduction1 1. The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers 2. The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of Early Christian Dogma . . .

7 17

3. The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar 24 4. Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs 36 5. The Image of Heloise in English Literature

50

6. Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾿ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage 67 7. The Theology of the Philokalia 72 8. Theology, Contemplation, and the University

81

9. Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God

91

10. The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov

106

11. The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov

122

12. Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology? 131 13. The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the Twentieth Century

145

14. Pagans and Christians on Providence

154

15. What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?

171

16. The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology

178

17. Inspiration of the Scriptures

191

18. Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian

203

x Contents

19. Space, Time, and the Liturgy

217

20. Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition

235

21. Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church

240

22. The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World

254

23. Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium

268

24. Theology of the ‘In-­Between’

278

25. Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity

288

26. Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology

298

27. Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View

312

28. Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some Reflections on the Development of Mariology

326

29. The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015

341

30. Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox Reflections 362 31. What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?

378

32. The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim 390 33. Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am Kreuz 403 34. Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology

415

35. Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the Russian Émigrés

428

36. Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion

441

37. Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology

448

Details of Original Publication Index

471 473

Abbreviations Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their original ­publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal or series titles), they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical and Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).

Introduction I Looking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am struck by the fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each volume there are only three essays published before 1990, by which time I was in my late 40s—­one well before, in 1978, ‘The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest in the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder why. Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two books came in rapid succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (1981), and Discerning the Mystery (1983). That first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather led to my being classified (still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysticism’ (in some ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006 with its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the ‘mystical tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested in ‘mysticism’ as in a form of religion independent of institutions or dogmas (what has come to be called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism as, in a tradition revived by William James at the beginning of the nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’, rather my interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer, both personal and liturgical. Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, as I see it now, an approach to theology for  which the practice of prayer, and what such practice presupposed, was indispensable—­indispensable, not in the sense that theology demanded prayer, and therefore faith, so that the answers had smuggled themselves in before being asked, but indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the transcendent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the nature of things could be encompassed by human conceptuality, ruling out the notion of a closed universe. There has remained lodged in my memory—­largely unconscious, though surfacing from time to time—­some lines of thought discussed by Thomas Vargish in his book, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind (1970). Discussing Newman’s ‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought” . . . ­elastic and delicate enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the uniqueness of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much as delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes progress by being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties” ’ (p. 87, quoting William Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the Fathers’ use of Scripture, as discussed in the earliest Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0001

2  Selected Essays, Volume II essay included in these books—­a freedom from both the prescriptive nature of Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single determinative meaning to be found in Scripture. I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright, perceptively pointed out to me after reading Discerning the Mystery). Another—­quite different—­aspect of these early books is contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to Denys’. For there had never been any question for me but that that book would begin with Plato—­an interpretation of Plato much indebted to A.-J. Festugière’s seminal work, Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon (3rd edition, 1967). Plato has remained important to me—­probably returned to more often than to any Christian writer—­possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics (and G. H. Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities, not ideas humanly constructed). It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were, reception into the Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware, soon followed. That was at the end of 1989, the year in which my third book, Denys the Areopagite, was published—­in response to a request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding Christian Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity, because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely uninformed way, and it already seemed to me that two profound influences on the Damascene were Dionysios the Areopagite and St Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then full of Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading everything I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense that, ultimately, I was going to write something on the Damascene led me, a few years later, to agree to the request of Carol Harrison, the editor of the Early Christian Fathers, to prod­ uce a volume for the series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books were conceived in sequence—­but not as a trilogy, for they are very different, the first on Dionysios—­Denys, as I called him then—­simply an introduction, the second on Maximos an even shorter introduction accompanied by translations of a brief selection of his works, mostly drawn from his theological, as opposed to his spiritual, works (an opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos), and the third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during the construction of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of Islam. So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not anticipated, what still seem to me the three writers who, together by inheriting and interpreting the Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and, indeed, its best, and most enduring elements). Plato, and especially the developments of Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and I became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and Christianity.

Introduction  3 The books speak for themselves, and many of the articles in this collection fill out aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of theology and philosophy, prayer and asceticism, and liturgy and song.

II Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual development, though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly must now seem) of my formation as a theologian. I never studied for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no Doktorvater. I did, however, while studying for the Anglican priesthood in Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there under Professor Tom (T.  F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that degree was the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the most important sections of which were on the place of natural theology in his Church Dogmatics and doctrine of analogy. The chief influence on me during undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one, preparing for Part III) was without doubt Donald MacKinnon, the Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose guidance I took two courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of the Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the style of phil­ oso­ phy of religion that I mostly encountered in Cambridge (I don’t think MacKinnon made much sense of it either) and rather made my own way by careful textual study of the texts—­Descartes to Kant—­that we were expected to read; but it was from MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his students that I learnt to think (or rather—­though that is perhaps the same thing—­ discovered that I could think). Another don at Cambridge, with whom I had a few supervisions in patristics, was Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal even though largely by way of disagreeing with him—­a disagreement that con­ tinued when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and Fellow and Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though probably due to my philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new joint degree in Philosophy and Theology had just been introduced), did not specify what area of theology I was to pursue, so I decided to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick, who moved from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ Church in 1970, whom I held in awe, though I never got to know him very well (though well enough in the eyes of others to be asked to write his obituary for the Independent). I also came to know, in the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently departed Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies during my time in Oxford (and before and after): my debt to him is incalculable.

4  Selected Essays, Volume II There are many others to whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of this volume. Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or entirely) knew through their books; in the later 1970s (as I remember it), I often devoted the long vacation to reading some massive work that I wanted to come to terms with. One year it was Hans-­Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then) feeble German. Another year it was A.-J.  Festugière’s monumental four-­ volume work, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of which tells you more about its origins (in the notes he made in the course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock, the Budé edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its contents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical thought of late antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse Médiévale (4 vols, 1959–64), another work that starts from a particular problem and casts light much more widely. Hans Urs von Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced by Donald MacKinnon, came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for which I translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by John Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of Theologik. My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they seemed to fill out and deepen insights that I had originally discovered in Western writers, such as those already mentioned. It was mostly through reading their works, though I came to know personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course, Fr Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in Oxford when I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony of Essex. One Orthodox thinker whom I read early on was the French convert, Olivier Clément, the dis­ciple of Vladimir Lossky, who has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov became increasingly important to me (I encountered him first in the French translations by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his Russian, as well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal about Florensky from Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed biography, published in 2010, already by then a great friend. She is an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and helped me to see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the broader cultural context of the Silver Age. In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek theology, not least Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly wide reading in Greek literature—­ especially the amazing poets of the twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis—­through whom I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and interpreted them (but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also encountered through my reading in Greek literature and had some sense of his theological insights before ever engaging with Yannaras, with whose writings I have tried to

Introduction  5 keep up over the years (in recent years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent translations). Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis, which opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of Orthodoxy (a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to translate). Something of this engagement with Orthodoxy—­mostly the fruit of my becoming Orthodox, which seemed to me a fulfilment of my intellectual and spiritual development, not a rejection of the West (although such anti-­Westernism has been a Leitmotiv of too much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian millennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (2015), which were the result of four years spent as Visiting Professor at the Amsterdam Centre of Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit, now the St Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of Radboud, Nijmegen. Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat passed over is my ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1985 to 1995. During this period Goldsmiths went through a major change from being an Institute with Recognized Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually became head—­for five years—­of a new department of Historical and Cultural Studies, made up of the old departments of History, Art History, and Religious Studies, in which I taught early medieval and Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul Fouracre, a fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from him, a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—­very ­different were the ways of the theologian’s mind—­ which affected my own way of thinking about history (and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of that are to be found in my volume, Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The Church in History, originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff. Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am not at all sure what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my aim has been to elucidate their thought and their concerns. It looks like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intellectual history, but one thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—­as so many essays in intellectual history seem to imagine—­float in some kind of noetic ether; ideas are thought by people, who live at a particular time and in a particular place. Their ideas are part of the way in which they have sought to make sense of the world in which they lived, and theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are the products of human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel and the Church in a world created by God and governed by his providence, in however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation (inspired by another who greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun who spent her final years near Whitby in Yorkshire) that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology, Modern Orthodox Thinkers.

6  Selected Essays, Volume II I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my friends and colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking to bring this collection of essays of mine to publication. Although the work of publication is theirs, what is to be found in these volumes is, for better or worse, mine, and I would like to dedicate the volumes to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac. Andrew Louth Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022

1 The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers In the more traditional English theological courses, the student first comes across consideration of Christian theology for its own sake in the study of the Fathers of the early Church. Biblical Studies tend to be approached from a literary, his­tor­ ic­al, and expository point of view, rather than from a theological point of view.1 The idea of theology, the idea of dogma, emerges for the English student out of his study of the Fathers. This means that the way theology emerged in the Fathers and the form it took tend to be treated as normative, or at least as a point de départ. The doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation are the two foci in such an approach to theology. Even those English theologians who think of themselves as liberal or radical, and who wish to reject such an approach to the­ ology, are seen, in their very reaction against it, to be taking up a position in rela­ tion to the patristic tradition, thus revealing the marks of their initial approach to theology. All this seems to me to be different from German Protestant theology. In Lutheran theology, say, it seems—­at any rate from the outside—­that whether or not the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are held or rejected, other theological themes are central. The doctrine of justification by faith becomes a principle of profound and far-­reaching significance, particularly when it takes the form of the dialectic between Law and Gospel. In this contrast there are advantages on both sides. The apprehension of the fundamental significance of the doctrine of justification by faith can lend great clarity to Lutheran theology. Here is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae; here is a criterion that enables us to see whether we are being faithful to God’s word or not. It is a criterion for distinguishing between both relevance and irrelevance. That God justifies the wicked, that this justification is apprehended by faith, not by anything we do but by our standing before God and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner’—this concentrates theology in such a way that irrelevance seems out of place. Theology embraces everything indeed—­but under God. And

1  This is a generalization that admits of many exceptions, but it might be epitomized in the contrast between two commentaries on the Fourth Gospel—­the English one by C. K. Barrett and the German one by Rudolf Bultmann. Each admirable in its own way, but very different.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0002

8  Selected Essays, Volume II so the irrelevance with which human ingenuity loves to distract itself is seen for what it is. German theology is a serious business, and it knows it. The Anglican approach to theology is much less conscious. Anglicans tend to approach theology through the concerns and interests of the Fathers because that is the way they have been introduced to it. And they may see in these concerns some great principle being worked out. Such a principle, for instance, may be dis­ cerned in the way the Fathers tried to think through the implications of the Greek preoccupation with virtue (areté), and all the ways of fostering it (paideia), in the light of the Gospel. Here the Fathers are grappling with Hellenistic modes of thought so as to exploit the support such a preoccupation gives to their view of creation, while at the same time questioning it fundamentally when it appears to threaten their understanding of the radical newness of the grace of God. But this is not like grasping the central significance of the doctrine of justification: it is a personal aperçu, the idiosyncrasy of the individual scholar—­and a peculiarly scholarly idiosyncrasy at that, for the working out of the Gospel in Hellenistic modes of thought is not obviously our problem. But Anglican theology rarely takes that form; more often the unconscious acceptance of the Fathers’ approach simply means that the doctrines enshrined in the creeds are accepted as the pro­ gramme of theology. And this can mean an academic discussion of doctrines that have little obvious relevance to anything except the particular controversies—­ now long dead—­in which they were originally enunciated. However, it seems to me that the Anglican approach can be something consciously approved, even if unconsciously accepted. In this paper, I want to indicate how this might be so and then how such a position might suggest an approach to the hermeneutical ques­ tion rather different from that of German theology.

I I begin by making a virtue of the fact that, as I have said, this English approach is not so much consciously adopted as unconsciously received. It is not, I think, a mere quirk of the syllabus that we have come to theology through the Fathers. It owes a great deal to the inherent structure of Anglican theology.2 Although our departments of theology look very secular in England, without the confessional ties found in Germany, the tradition of theology they have received has come from the ancient universities where theology was once Anglican theology. And Anglican theology is not Reformation theology, though it has been deeply influenced by the Reformation (and perhaps even more by the Renaissance). It is 2  In passing I ought to apologize for the way I am using ‘English’ and ‘Anglican’ as if they were synonymous. They are not, of course, though the influence of the Anglican approach extends in England beyond the borders of the Anglican Church.

The Hermeneutical Question  9 not confessional, but ecclesial or churchly. By that I mean there is no equivalent in Anglicanism of the Augsburg Confession, or the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Scots Confession. Anglican theology starts from a faith lived, not from a particular—­and local—­definition of that faith. The XXXIX Articles—­the nearest thing Anglicans have to such a confession—­are subscribed to ‘not as articles of faith, but as theological verities, for the preservation of unity among ourselves’ (to quote the seventeenth-­century Archbishop Bramhall).3 And the way in which they are subscribed to is worth noting. An Anglican priest professes his agree­ ment with the doctrine of the Church of England as set forth ‘in the XXXIX Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal’. He is not just agreeing to a formula, but affirming that he belongs to a particular community, which wor­ ships God and celebrates its faith in Christ in a particular way, and that through this community he belongs to the Catholic Church of Christ. Anglicanism, there­ fore, tends to see the Reformation not so much as an appeal to Scripture against the Church, as making clear a continuity in the Church’s life that had been blurred in the later Middle Ages. And so, to quote Bramhall again, the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England after the Reformation are as much the same Church as a garden, before it is weeded and after it is weeded, is the same garden; or a vine, before it is pruned and after it is pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches, is one and the same vine.4

The Anglican, then, begins within the Church, within the worshipping com­ munity, accepting the faith rather than consciously confessing it. And Scripture is something given to him within the Church, by the tradition, by the handing-­on, that is the continuity of the Church. This does not mean that Scripture is sub­or­ din­ated to the Church. In the light of Scripture the Church can be reformed, the garden weeded, the vine pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches. And this is not an event but ideally a process, for the Church always stands under the Word, always finds through Scripture its way of obedience to her Lord. Under the Word she finds herself to be ecclesia semper reformanda, in the words of Pope John XXIII. As I see it, the way in which the Scriptures show the Church her way of obedi­ ence rests on no principle. The problem of hermeneutics is not the search for some key of interpretation that will enable us to extract from the word of Scripture the meaning of the Gospel today. Rather it rests on the faith of the Church that in the Scriptures God speaks to his Church, the faith—­classical Anglicanism often says the experience—­that the Scriptures which the Church offers us and to which she

3  John Bramhall, Works, Library of Anglo-­Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1842–45), ii. 261. 4 Bramhall, Works, i. 113.

10  Selected Essays, Volume II leads us kindle the light of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. So Archbishop Laud said: I admit no ordinary rule left now in the church, of divine and infallible verity, and so of faith, but the Scripture. And I believe the entire Scripture, first, by the tradition of the Church; then, by all other credible motives . . . and last of all, by the light which shines in Scripture itself, kindled in believers by the Spirit of God. Then, I believe the entire Scripture infallibly, and by a divine infallibility am sure of my object. Then am I so sure of my believing, which is the act of my faith, conversant about this object: for no man believes, but he must needs know in himself whether he believes or no, and wherein and how far he doubts. Then I am infallibly assured of my Creed, the tradition of the Church inducing, and the Scripture confirming it. And I believe both Scripture and Creed, in the same uncorrupted sense which the primitive Church believed them . . .5

If you like, the Scriptures are experienced as self-­authenticating. But this experi­ ence, though inevitably an experience of the individual, is but the experience of the individual within the Church. Only in the Church is the believer led to approach Scripture in such a way that he hears the Word of God speaking to him from it. Only in the Church—­it is this which leads the Anglican to stress the importance of the Fathers of the early Church. Scripture cannot be considered in isolation—­ indeed it does not exist in isolation. The Scriptures are the Scriptures of the Church: the Old Testament inherited from Israel, the New Testament the apos­ tolic writings. Indeed, seen as witness they are Church documents, the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ—­prophets and apostles being members of the Church of which Christ is the head. There is no fundamental divide between the Church in which and for which the Scriptures were written and the Church of the Fathers—­not if theology is seen essentially as a reflection on God’s Word taking place within the bosom of the Church. If the Reformation discerned a continuity that had been obscured by the later Middle Ages, it was a continuity manifest in a theology closer in spirit and teaching to that of the Fathers. So unless we are to drive a wedge between Scripture and the Church, the reflection of the Fathers on Scripture must be given very great weight, to say the least. But what do we mean by the ‘Fathers’? Most fundamentally, I do not mean a particular group of theological writers—­the Fathers of the Undivided Church (whatever that is)—though clearly I have in mind the Fathers of the first five cen­ turies after Christ. But I do not want to limit the term ‘Father’ either to those whom the later Church accepted as ‘Fathers’ or to a particular period. Rather it

5  William Laud, Works, Library of Anglo-­Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1847–60), ii. 366f.

The Hermeneutical Question  11 seems to me that the Fathers manifest a particular approach to theology espe­ cially evident in the early centuries of the Church’s history. For the Fathers see theology as the expounding of the mystery of Christ to which the Scriptures wit­ ness. Another element—­which passes beyond the ‘theology of the Fathers’ (pre­ cisely as that phrase begins to be used)—comes in when theological orthodoxy begins to mean whether you agree with some earlier theologian. In the Fathers there is a direct access to Scripture as the source and criterion of theology. It is something else when Athanasius or Cyril or Augustine become the test of ortho­ doxy. But this defines no period, even though the period of the first five centuries is a peculiarly potent witness to such theology. Rather the ‘theology of the Fathers’ characterizes a certain approach to theology; an approach in which one can dis­ cern a certain directness in expounding Scripture, a certain boldness—­ parrhesia—­in their expounding of the mystery of the faith. It is in that parrhesia that the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith—­of the Trinity and the Incarnation—­achieved their first and enduring expression. And it is because it comes out of this parrhesia that it is enduring. To speak of the Fathers is to speak of a way of exploring the mystery of faith that is characterized by this parrhesia, and so there is, in a sense, no ‘patristic period’. In the Cistercian theology of the twelfth century, especially in St Bernard, we recognize the voice of those who form part of the consensus patrum.

II There is something exemplary about the Fathers’ approach to Scripture, and it is because classical Anglican theology followed this example that it has what value it has. Can we say more about the ‘way of the Fathers’? There seem to be two basic premises that lie behind the Fathers’ approach to Scripture. First, that Scripture must be interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith; and second, that Scripture admits of spiritual or allegorical interpretation. (True, the Fathers often frown on allegory—­and not only the Antiochene school—­but all admit a typo­ logical interpretation of Scripture that for my purposes in this paper can be sub­ sumed under allegory.) First, Scripture interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith. This rule of faith—­at any rate in the pre-­Nicene Church—­is a free-­hand summary of the threefold faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, professed in Baptism. It is the faith handed down within the Church, it is the faith that admits to Baptism, and in that sense defines the Church, the community of the baptized. Scripture is handed down within the Church and so is interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith that defines the Church. But the rule of faith is no formula—­it is not a form of words, but the truth the words enshrine. Even after Nicaea, after the def­ in­ition of the faith in a formula, a creed, a symbol, we know—­as we have learnt

12  Selected Essays, Volume II from the researches of Dr Kelly6—that the Nicene faith did not mean to the Fathers any formula, but the truth that formula enshrines. Indeed it seems to me that Newman was close to the mind of the Fathers when he declared in his Arians of the Fourth Century that freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church . . . because when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth, instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is otherwise possible.7

At the heart of the faith of the Fathers is no principle, or creed, or formula, but a mystery, a mystery that is lived, a mystery that claims the whole man, a mystery that we apprehend not simply with our minds but in ways that are unconscious and unfathomable, a mystery that draws out our love. And that mystery is Christ. It is not simply a question of believing the right things. It is not even a question of simply hearing the Word of Christ; more deeply it is a matter of being close to him, at the deepest level, in prayer. So we find St Ignatius of Antioch saying: ‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his stillness, that he may be perfect, that he may act through what he says, and be known through his silence’.8 Before any articulation of our confession of Christ, there is an inarticulate close­ ness to Christ, to that creative silence out of which the Word comes,9 to that still­ ness (hesuchia) in which are wrought the mysteries that cry out.10 This is the ultimate meaning of interpreting Scripture in accordance with the rule of faith: not simply subordinating Scripture to the articulated faith of the Church, but lis­ tening to the Scriptures from a contemplative stillness that is being with Christ. And this is something given and known in the life of the Church, in the tradition that is the movement of the Spirit in the Church. Interpreting Scripture within the Church does not at all mean subordinating Scripture to the Church, but inter­ preting Scripture within the life of the Church, finding in Scripture the voice of God calling us to obedience, renewed discipleship, new life. It is to see Scripture as the Word of God, because in listening to it God’s Word may be heard, and God’s Word is the incarnate Son of God, and it is his word, his voice, that we may hear speaking to us through Scripture. The other feature of patristic interpretation of Scripture is allegory (understood in a broad sense). This is often immediately and simply dismissed by modern scholars. The Fathers, it is maintained, used allegory as a way of accommodating

6 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (Longman, 1950), passim. 7 J. H. Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (Pickering, 1876), pp. 36f. 8  Ignatios of Antioch, Ad Eph. xv. 9 Ignatios, Ad Magn. viii. 2. 10 Ignatios, Ad Eph. xix. 1.

The Hermeneutical Question  13 their belief in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures with their unwillingness—­ rather, inability—­to believe what the Scriptures plainly taught. It was particularly used in relation to the Old Testament, and without such resort to allegory the Fathers would hardly have resisted Marcionism. What is wrong with allegory, it is said, is that it is entirely uncontrolled, entirely arbitrary, and robs the text of Scripture of any real authority even while appearing to concede to it the very full­ est authority, because with the use of allegory any text can be made to mean any­ thing. Its origins are highly suspect, too. It goes back to Stoic attempts to justify the Homeric tales against the criticisms of the Platonists and Epicureans, and in Heraclitus’ Homeric Questions we have a clear—­if unintended—­insight into how arbitrary allegory can be, when he defines allegory as ‘speaking one thing and signifying something other than what is said’.11 There is much truth in all this, but it seems to me to miss the central point behind the patristic resort to allegory. While it is true that one often gets the impression when reading Origen, say, that the text of Scripture which justifies his use of allegory is Galatians 4:24 (‘Now this is an allegory . . .’), this seems to me to be only a formal, and polemical, justification. The real justification for the use of allegory is found elsewhere in Paul: in II Corinthians 3 and I Corinthians 13. The contrast between shadow and reality, letter and spirit, death and life, the veiled and the manifest; the contrast between seeing through a glass darkly and then ‘face to face’, in which latter glorified state love alone remains—­this is the context in which the Fathers see the use of allegory. ‘Tout ce qui ne va point à la charité est figure. L’unique objet de l’Écriture est la charité’.12 Pascal’s words are a good sum­ mary of the patristic understanding of allegory. The sole truth, the sole reality, is Christ, and him we know through love. All else is shadow, all else is allegory, all else has value only so far as it points towards the Truth, Jesus Christ. We might put this another way round and say that Christ ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ is Truth, or Reality, so overwhelming, so overpower­ ing, that our feeble minds cannot grasp it. We can only grasp the truth partially. That is why there is such diversity in the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ. Our minds need to be drawn gradually to the whole truth, that is Christ, which might otherwise overpower us or be accepted by us in a way that radically distorted it. You will recall how Ambrose recommended the neophyte Augustine to read Isaiah. Not because Isaiah is a more direct witness to Christ than the Gospels; certainly not because it is easier; but because at that moment in Augustine’s development Isaiah could lead him more surely to Christ. Why? Perhaps because the immensely intellectual convert from Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism needed to be baffled, needed to realize that now he knew only in part. And it is the way of allegory to help us to grasp what is contained in Scripture 11  Quoted in R. M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (SPCK, 1957), p. 10. 12  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Louis Lafuma (Seuil, 1962), no. 270.

14  Selected Essays, Volume II ‘in part’. The use of allegory is a recognition of the fact that here is not the whole truth, but a partial reflection of it through which we might be enabled to discern the truth itself. Allegory is appropriate precisely because it is not a definite method yielding clear and predictable results. Allegory helps us to discern through Scripture a truth not contained in Scripture, but simply witnessed to by it. In Scripture we have the truth, broken up, fragmented, so that we can grasp it, so that we can receive it as a gift, and then look through it and beyond it to the Giver, to Christ who is the Truth. Such an approach to Scripture is not ‘scientific’ and is not meant to be: it is contemplative, it is a way of prayer.

III And he who approaches the prophetic words with care and attention will feel from his very reading a trace of their divine inspiration and will be convinced by his own feelings that the words which are believed by us to be from God are not the compositions of men. Now the light which was contained within the law of Moses, but was hid­ den away under a veil, shone forth at the advent of Jesus, when the veil was taken away and there came at once to men’s knowledge those ‘good things’ of which the letter of the law held a ‘shadow’.13 That is Origen, and if we follow through the way in which he explains his approach to Scripture, we see that his engagement with Scripture is discussed in terms drawn from the tradition of mystical theology. It is not simply a question of expounding the message of the Scriptures, much more it is a matter of being able to discern the Word, or rather of being alert to the Word’s disclosing of himself through this engagement with Scripture. So, commenting on the verse from the Song of Songs, ‘Behold, here he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills’, Origen says: Now if at any time a soul who is constrained by love for the Word of God is in the thick of an argument about some passage—­and everyone knows from his own experience how when one gets into a tight corner like this one gets shut up in the straits of propositions and enquiries—­if at such a time some riddles or obscure sayings of the Law or the Prophets hand in the soul, and if then she should chance to perceive him to be present, and from afar should catch the sound of his voice, forthwith she is uplifted. And when he has begun more and more to draw near to her senses and to illuminate the things that are obscure,

13  De Principiis IV. i. 6.

The Hermeneutical Question  15 then she sees him ‘leaping upon the mountains and the hills’; that is to say, he then suggests to her interpretations of a high and lofty sort, so that this soul can rightly say: ‘Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills’.14

Understood like this, allegory is not obviously absurd. It is in fact an attempt to be faithful to the fragmentary, partial nature of the Scriptural witness, and also to the sort of witness Scripture is. Here lies its advantage over exclusive dependence on the historical-­critical method for theological interpretation of Scripture. For that method seeks to discover what the writer of some text originally meant by what he said, and also what grounds he had for saying it. But theological interpretation of the text of Scripture goes beyond this. It is an attempt to see Scripture as a wit­ ness, as pointing to the Word, to Jesus Christ, in whose presence we live in the Church through the Spirit. It may be important to understand what the original writers said, and why they said it, but that is not the end of exegesis. Resort to allegory sees this, because it seeks to take us beyond the text to someone who could be captured by no text, to our Lord himself. The historical-­critical method—­ precisely because it is a method that might be expected to yield results—­runs the risk of duping us into supposing that its results are what we are after when we attend to the witness of Scripture. But the task of listening to Scripture is just that—­to listen to the Word speaking to us through Scripture. It is not the task of piecing together the fragmentary witness of Scripture to make some construction of our own. In the end we pass beyond our own efforts, we let go our intellect and what we spin from it, and simply listen. Allegory keeps this end before us. Even if all that I have said about allegory is granted—­that is a way of interpret­ ing the partial, fragmentary witness of the Scriptures so that the Truth that is Christ may be discerned through it—­a difficulty remains. How do we know that what is discerned beyond the letter of Scripture is really there? How can we escape the apparent arbitrariness of allegory? Here we need to be sure what sort of question we are asking, or rather what sort of answer we would accept as an answer, and whether we are not in fact beg­ ging the question anyway. For to speak of the ‘arbitrariness’ of allegory is perhaps to itch for some method that will exclude arbitrariness: the historical-­critical method, say, which yields (we hope) definite, non-­arbitrary results. But the Fathers do not see allegory as arbitrary, rather they see what we might call an openness in allegory; an openness to God, an openness to God’s manifestation of himself in Scripture so that we are responding through it to the mystery to which it is a mystery to which it is a witness. And in this openness are found the springs of our apprehension of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. 14  Comm. in Cant. III. 11 (tr. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26 (Longmans, 1957), 209, slightly edited).

16  Selected Essays, Volume II For the doctrine of the Incarnation is, from this point of view, to do with the fact that the period of the Incarnation is the period where there is made possible being with God through being with a man. The ‘one thing necessary’ (Luke 10:42) that Mary of Bethany found sitting at Jesus’ feet was a being with and listening to Jesus, which was being with and listening to God. The heart of the Gospel is not a message but a fact; and it is this to which the doctrine of the Incarnation bears witness. And for this Scripture is and must be interpreted within the tradition of the Church, a tradition that is most basically nourished by countless Christian lives lived close to the mystery that is Christ. ‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his stillness . . .’ He who truly understands the Word of God declared and articulated in Scripture is one who silently and inarticulately waits on God in stillness. And this latter is more fundamental; just as the fact of the Incarnation, the fact that God condescended to be with us men, is more fundamental than any message we may derive from this. Scripture is the prophetic and apostolic witness to the Incarnation of God; it is the Church’s witness, handed down by the Church and received within the Church. And this is no human movement. To speak of the Church’s tradition is to speak of the Spirit. To speak of any true witness to Christ is to speak of the Spirit: no man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Spirit. And here we stumble across the springs of our apprehension of God as Trinity. The openness of allegory would be arbitrariness if we were simply surrendering our reason to some human convention. But the openness of allegory is the recog­ nition of the fact—­ the experience—­ that we are brought to the meaning of Scripture—­the mystery of Christ revealing the Father—­by the Spirit, not by our own ingenuity. For the Fathers do not suppose that their understanding of Scripture is a purely human affair. The whole end of revelation would be rendered nugatory if the Spirit who inspired the apostles and prophets did not also move the hearts of believers to recognize and obey the word of God speaking to them through their writings. In the theology of the Fathers, their acceptance of a con­ templative approach to Scripture leads inevitably to the idea that the revelation of the Father through the Son, to which the Scriptures bear witness, is discerned also in God, in the Spirit. ‘All knowledge of the Father, when the Son reveals him, is made known through the Holy Spirit’.15 So Origen. And Basil echoes him: ‘For the mind illuminated by the Spirit beholds the Son, and in Him contemplates, as in an Image, the Father’.16 To hear the Word of God in the Scriptures is to be in the Spirit, to be up into the life of the Blessed Trinity, which is the love that binds them together. And we pass beyond allegory, beyond figure. We pass into the sole object of the Scriptures, love.*17 15  De Princ. I. iii. 4 (tr. G. W. Butterworth, Origen on First Principles (SPCK, 1936), 32). 16  Ep. ccxxxvi. *  A paper read to the Oxford-­Bonn Theological Seminar, 1977.

2

The Greatest Fantasy As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of Early Christian Dogma . . .

Review Article of Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, 3 vols Marxism has been one of the most pervasive, and most successful, movements in the last century and a half. As a political movement it has conquered two great empires—­a large part of the surface of the globe—­and does not appear to have exhausted its energies. But it is more than a political movement; as a philosophy or world view, it has had immense influence, not only in the realms of thought where it originated, in philosophy, economics, and the study of society, but in literature, literary criticism, and music, and even theology. Its influence is met with at almost every turn in many contexts—­as a kind of set of mind, or group of premises, or a handy collection of axioms. In this book, Leszek Kołakowski, one-­ time professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Warsaw, examines the whole phenomenon: its origins, the thought of Karl Marx, its blossoming in the period of the Second International, and its attaining the status of an orthodoxy as the ideology of the Communist States that followed in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In some ways this book reads like a history of dogma: antecedents are determined, the thought of the founding fathers is examined, and the fate of those ideas is traced through history. Indeed, the analogy is even closer, for we seem to find in Marxism’s second century something not unlike the phenomenon of gnosticism in the second century of Christianity. Whatever its origins, from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, gnosticism took the form of a bewildering array of attempts to (mis-)understand Christianity by assimilating it to the climate of thought of the second century: it was a collection of, for a time, fashionable and exciting, but for that reason one-­sided, interpretations of the Faith. In the second and third volumes of Kołakowski’s work we find chapters with titles like: ‘German Orthodoxy: Karl Kautsky’, ‘Jean Jaurès: Marxism as a Soteriology’, ‘Paul Lafargue: A Hedonist Marxism’, ‘Georges Sorel: A Jansenist Marxism’, ‘Stanislaw Brzozowski: Marxism as Historical Subjectivism’—all those from the period of the Second International, and later: ‘György Lukács: Reason in the Service of Dogma’ and ‘Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a Futuristic Gnosis’. But in most histories of Christian

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0003

18  Selected Essays, VOLUME II dogma gnosticism is a phenomenon that blossoms and decays, while Christian Orthodoxy grows steadily and inherits the earth, and histories of dogma are usually written from some dwelling place within that inheritance. There might seem to be something similar here, with Marxism-­Leninism taking the place of the orthodoxy which grows from strength to strength. But Main Currents of Marxism is not written from within the fold, as the titles of the successive volumes indicate: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown. It is as if a history of Christian dogma had been written by Julian the Apostate. But the titles of the successive volumes are misleading too. They suggest that Marxism grew, flowered, and then went awry and collapsed; that the later developments of Marxism betrayed the promise of its origins. That is a common apologia for Marxism by those who wish to espouse the cause but are unable to stomach the realities of Soviet Communism (though there have been, and still are, many who do not find the horrors of Stalinism or Marxism that unpalatable). But it is not a line pursued by Kołakowski. For him the Leninist version of socialism ‘was a possible interpretation, though certainly not the only possible one, of Marx’s doctrine’ (I.418); it can fairly claim to be a legitimate successor of Marx. And Stalinism is a legitimate—­the only legitimate—­development of Leninism. ‘There is absolutely nothing in the worst excesses of the worst years of Stalinism that cannot be justified on Leninist principles’ (II.517). For Kołakowski it is quite wrong to try and represent the period of Stalinism as the result of the wickedness and mania of a single despot, Stalin, and it is likewise wrong to suggest that things have changed much in principle as a result of the subsequent denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ which developed under Stalin: ‘on Stalin’s death the Soviet system changed from a personal tyranny to that of an oligarchy’ (III.456). During the Great Purge of the late thirties, ‘the whole country was in the grip of a monstrous fit of madness, induced apparently—­but the appearance was deceptive—­by the will of a single despot’ (III.82). The line from Marx to Lenin is direct, though other lines could have developed; the line from Lenin to Stalin is direct and in­ev­ it­able. The worm was in the bud. Marxism is not a great and hopeful movement that went wrong. Rather ‘Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled’ (III.523). And the dream turned into a nightmare. Kołakowski’s work is primarily a treatise—­and a masterly one—­in the history of ideas. He writes as a historian, fairly and dispassionately, and, though he does not conceal his own opinions, they usually present themselves as a critical questioning of the ideas under discussion. He begins in the beginning, as they say, with a survey of the origins of dialectic, a survey that takes us back to the thought of Plotinus, Christian Platonism, Eriugena, Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa, and leads us into the immediate hinterland of the Enlightenment with Böhme,

The Greatest Fantasy  19 Angelus Silesius, and Fénelon. The survey then proceeds through the thought of the Enlightenment, by way of Rousseau and Hume, to Kant and Fichte, and finally to Hegel and his fully-­fledged notion of dialectic. What Kołakowski shows us in this survey is how a notion of dialectic is evolved in man’s attempt to come to terms with his experience of transience and contingency. In the Platonist and Neo-­Platonist tradition—­Christian and pagan—­man’s experience of transience is an experience of alienation from himself, from his true being, and it is overcome by being transcended—­in union with the Eternal and Absolute, or, with Kant and Fichte, in a process of infinite progress towards the Absolute. A new philosophical possibility and a new eschatology comes into view with the conception of humanity self-­present as an Absolute in its own finitude, and the rejection of all solutions that involve man realizing himself by the actualization, or at the command, of an antecedent absolute Being. This new philosophical prospect is that displayed in the work of Marx. (I.80)

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, as Kołakowski insists in the very first ­sentence of his work, and it was in his apprehending of this ‘new philosophical ­prospect’ that Marx found his basic ideas. Kołakowski traces Marx’s thought from its earliest phase, through his criticism of Hegel and Feuerbach, his ‘discovery of the proletariat’ and his development of the key ideas of the alienation of labour and the dehumanization of man, to his understanding of Communism as a historical trend and the idea of class struggle leading to revolution and the overthrow of the structures of dehumanization. After discussing the development of Marx’s thought up to The German Ideology, he gives an interesting survey of socialist ideas in the first half of the nineteenth century, in comparison with Marxian socialism, and then embarks on an analysis of the ideas of Kapital. On the question of the ‘Young Marx’, i.e. whether there is any fundamental difference between the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 (only published in 1932) and the Marx of Das Kapital, Kołakowski argues for continuity of development in Marx’s thought and finds unconvincing the attempts to drive a wedge between the Young Marx and the later Marx. This is not the place to go into the detail of Kołakowski’s interpretation of Marx, except to say that his treatment is magisterial in its balance and clarity. Often enough clarity cannot be achieved, for Marx himself does not provide a clear exposition even of important matters—­such as his theory of value—­nevertheless Kołakowski’s ex­pos­ition displays clarity in that concepts that can be explained are lucidly explained and where matters become murkier he at least points out the source of the difficulty and confusion. In common with most modern interpreters of Marx’s thought, he follows Lukács in laying stress on Marx’s ‘philosophy of praxis’, about which, indeed, he is particularly illuminating. Commenting on the famous phrase from Marx’s eleventh Thesis against

20  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Feuerbach—‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’—Kołakowski says: To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself, an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of understanding it.  This can only come about when the subject and object coincide, when the difference between educator and educated disappears, and when thought itself becomes a revolutionary act, the self-­recognition of human existence.  (I.144)

Summing up what must be one of the definitive accounts of Marx’s thought, Kołakowski discerns three motifs: the Romantic motif, the Faustian or Promethean motif, and a motif supplied by the rationalist, determinist Enlightenment. It is, in fact, from the Romantics that Marx derived the main lines of his criticism of cap­ it­al­ist society, only for the Romantics this was conservative nostalgia, whereas Marx looked forward to a revolution that would transcend the features of cap­it­al­ ist society. There was to be no retreat from technology, rather armed with technology mankind was to perfect its control over natural forces and in that way revive his lost harmony with nature. Here emerges his Promethean motif: man is on the brink of being able to understand and thus control the immanent forces that govern his destiny. This features in Marx as a kind of social reductionism: everything is reduced to social conditions and Marx finds it difficult to admit that man is limited in other ways. As Kołakowski remarks, ‘Marx’s ignoring of the body and physical death, sex and aggression, geography and human fertility—­all of which he turns into purely social realities—­is one of the most characteristic yet most neglected features of his Utopia’ (I.414). In this stress on social conditions determining man there emerges the last motif, that derived from the rationalist, determinist Enlightenment: for Marx believes that here he has discovered the determinative laws of human society—­what he presents us with is not prophecy, but science (though this must be qualified for Marx himself who regards these ‘social laws’ as applying only to the development of society up to the proletarian revolution: ‘the revolutionary movement of the proletariat is not the exemplification of a law in this sense, for although it is caused by history it is also the awareness of history’ (I.415). Here the Promethean motif emerges as Marx’s philosophy of praxis). The other ‘founder’ of Marxism is Engels, also discussed in the first volume. Kołakowski brings out the peculiar nature of Engels’ thought in contrast to Marx, as well as the way in which it is a development of his thought. With Engels, Marx’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ is dissolved by a much more thoroughgoing ‘scientism’ than we find in Marx. Marxism is assimilated to the fashionable currents of Darwinism and evolution of the latter half of the nineteenth century: far from human history moving to a point where man understands the laws of history and

The Greatest Fantasy  21 achieves union with his environment, human history is simply an exemplification of the laws of nature and it is these laws that point to the coming classless society. With Engels, then, we have a new version of Marxism, ‘differing as much from its original as did post-­Darwinian European culture from the age that preceded it’ (I.181). It is the ‘new’ Marxism of Engels that has a continuous history, and the second volume, The Golden Age, discusses its manifestations in the period of the Second International (1899‒1914). It is the breadth and magisterial quality of this volume that lends it its value, for this was perhaps the most decisive period for Marxism’s influence in the wider realms of culture (though this influence was often delayed), and this volume enables us to see the phenomenon as a whole. It was Engels’ Marxism that set the stage, and his cruder ‘scientism’ that constituted much of the appeal of Marxism. The sail of Marxism was filled with the prevailing winds of thought: evolutionism, the tendency to find in an evolutionary scientism some sort of basis for a mathesis universalis. Marxism was ‘scientific’; those who lacked conviction were reactionary obscurantists. Germany, France, Italy, Austria-­ Hungary, Poland: these are the centres of the Golden Age of Marxism—­and, of course, Russia. (It is interesting that Kołakowski has nothing to say about any English manifestations of Marxism in this period. ‘Why?’ is a question worthy of reflection. The fact that the British representative at the inaugural congress of the Second International was William Morris is perhaps in some way symbolic.) But half the second volume is devoted, quite properly, to the growth of Russian Communism and in particular to the figure of Lenin. And with Lenin we begin in a sense to move outside the history of ideas, or at least find ourselves in a situation where, in accordance with the views of some of the cruder manifestations of Marxism, the history of ideas becomes simply an epiphenomenon of the history of society. Lenin’s own thought is inconsistent and incoherent, and is not inspired by any concern for the truth. ‘He was not in search of answers to any philo­soph­ ic­ al questions, for all the important ones had been solved by Marx and Engels . . . Lenin was not seeking. He believed firmly that the revolutionary movement must have clear-­cut, uniform Weltanschauung, and that pluralism in this respect was a grave political danger’ (II.458). What he provided was a coarsening of Marx and Engels, a subjugation of all thought to ‘dialectical materialism’, which becomes a magic key to unlock all problems. Kołakowski indicates the intellectual banality of it all, and also shows how such anti-­intellectualism led to qualification in the name of ‘dialectical materialism’ of the proper autonomy of scientific research. There is a direct line from Lenin to the Lysenko affair in Stalin’s time. But further: this subjugation of thought to the crude categories of ‘diamat’ (as it is engagingly called) is a manifestation of Lenin’s concern for power, power for the party, though with Lenin’s understanding of party orthodoxy that could hardly mean anything else than power for himself. So, of Lenin’s writings Kołakowski can say, ‘the obscurities of his text are not due so much to inherent philosophical

22  Selected Essays, VOLUME II difficulties as to Lenin’s indolent and superficial approach and his contempt for all problems that could not be put to direct use in the struggle for power’. The third volume, The Breakdown, moves on to deal with Stalin and Communism after Stalin. As we have seen, Kołakowski sees Stalin as a worthy successor to Lenin and deprecates the use of the term ‘Stalinism’, as if it were a diseased form of an otherwise healthy Communism. Kołakowski explains the Great Purge by saying that it was intended to demonstrate and effect the genuinely totalitarian nature of Communist society. It was an attack on the party lest the party become a focus for devotion independent of the citizen’s total possession by the State, lest it become a source of values, of an ideology, in terms of which the State itself could be criticized. ‘The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology’ (III.85). For Kołakowski this is a result of the natural logic of the system, not an aberration. He admits that, under the tsars, Russia had been equally totalitarian in principle (though not so effectively in practice), but finds little consolation in this, as the whole system can be perfectly well justified in Marxist terms: ‘if freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more freedom; as the “objective” conditions of unity have been achieved, namely the confiscation of bourgeois property, all mani­fest­ations of discontent are relics of the bourgeois past and should be treated accordingly’ (I.428 f.). The effect of ‘Stalinism’ was to produce the ‘new Soviet man’: ‘an ideological schizophrenic, a liar who believed what he was saying, a man capable of incessant, voluntary acts of intellectual self-­mutilation’ (III.97). The third volume also discusses representatives of European thought who stood in the shadow of Stalinist Russia: Trotsky, Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, and Bloch. Apart from Gramsci (who was imprisoned in 1927 and was therefore outside Stalin’s influence), Korsch (who was expelled from the party in 1926), and Goldmann (who never belonged to the party anyway), Kołakowski has severe things to say about them all. Lukács is ‘perhaps the most striking example in the twentieth century of what may be called the betrayal of reason by those whose profession is to use and defend it’; Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is ‘a model of professional bombast concealing poverty of thought’; ‘there is probably no other philosopher in our day who deserves as completely as Marcuse to be called the ideologist of obscurantism’; and although he finds some kind things to say about him, ‘Bloch must be termed a preacher of intellectual irresponsibility’. Nonetheless, his discussion of all these writers is painstaking and sheds valuable rays of light where otherwise there is but the murky darkness of obscurity. In the final chapter Kołakowski sketches what he sees as the collapse of Marxism as an ideology in the countries of the Communist bloc. Marxism is practically extinct as a doctrine, though it performs a useful service in justifying Soviet imperialism and the whole internal policy of oppression,

The Greatest Fantasy  23 exploitation and privilege. As in Eastern Europe the rulers have to resort to other ideological values than Communism if they wish to find common ground with their subjects. As far as the Russian people itself is concerned the values in question are those of chauvinism and imperial glory, while all the peoples of the Soviet Union are susceptible to xenophobia, especially anti-­Chinese nationalism and anti-­Semitism. This is all that remains of Marxism in the first state in the world to be constituted on allegedly Marxist principles. This nationalist and to some extent racist outlook is the true, unavowed ideology of the Soviet state, not only protected but inculcated by means of allusions and unprinted texts; and, unlike Marxism, it awakens a real echo in popular feeling.  (III.473)

This is clearly a work of the very greatest importance and interest. The translation of the Polish original by P.  S.  Falla is fluent, though the proof-­reading has not been perfect. It is perhaps unfortunate that the title suggests no more than a text book in the history of political ideas, for this book is more than that, precisely because it fulfils that function so well. ‘The greatest fantasy of our century’—but, just for that reason, Kołakowski’s exposing its inadequacies as a political theory will not do away with the fantasy. Men do not indulge in fantasies on rational grounds, and so showing these grounds to be false or inadequate will not stop them. To some extent, as Kołakowski shows, Marxism has been so attractive because it indulged men’s ir­ration­al hopes that in reason can be found the key to human destiny. Marxism has posed as a science: and Kołakowski shows how at the height of its influence Marxism made that claim in a particularly blatant way. But here Kołakowski is himself ambiguous. In his criticism of Marcuse he remarks at one point that ‘the destructive effects of technology can only be combated by the further development of technology itself ’ (III.420), which sounds like saying that more of the disease will work a cure. But what if we are wrong in thinking that man is such a being who could finally be master of his destiny, who could, with the help of technology, finally turn his environment into just that—­that is, so control nature that it becomes simply man’s environment? . . . but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—­sullen, untamed and intractable . . . destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. (T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, I.1‒2, 8‒10)

3 The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar The Heart of the World was published in 1945 and was Hans Urs von Balthasar’s first sustained piece of theological writing. By then he had behind him his studies in philosophy and literature which culminated in his vast thesis, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, and his studies at Lyons in the Jesuit scholasticate under Père Henri de Lubac, in which he had read deeply the Greek Fathers, especially Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Part of the fruit of those studies had already been published, the rest was shortly to appear, and must already have been nearing completion when Balthasar broke away from such historical studies (though Balthasar had never allowed himself to be a purely historical investigator) to write The Heart of the World. Five years earlier Balthasar had moved to Basel as a student chaplain, and it was in Basel that Balthasar very soon came to know Adrienne von Speyr—­a meeting that issued in Adrienne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in the November of 1940. The Heart of the World was, then, written out of the initial impact of his friendship with that remarkable woman, whose influence on his own thought Balthasar readily admits. Balthasar has said that, as he prepared Adrienne for reception into the Roman Catholic Church, everything he said found in her a response that seemed to come from the receptiveness of one who had known forever what he had to tell her, so that the effect of her coming to Catholicism was the unleashing of an apprehension of the dimensions of a faith that had previously been pent up.1 The sense of barriers broken down and an almost uncontrollable stream bursting forth is very much the impression Heart of the World gives: we can readily believe that this reflects what he had discovered (and evoked) in Adrienne von Speyr. It is common for a man’s early works to foreshadow in significant (and sometimes—­with hindsight—­unexpected) ways the works of his maturity. In the case of Hans Urs von Balthasar this seems to be strikingly so and the aim of this essay is to explore this a little. But The Heart of the World also strikes us in another way, for it is not only a remarkable foreshadowing of his later work, in that many of the concerns of that work can already be discerned here, it is also an uncanny crystallization of the vision of Adrienne von Speyr, as Balthasar later sketched it 1  Hans Urs von Balthasar, First Glance at Adrienne Von Speyer, trans. A.  Lawry and S.  Englund (Ignatius, 1985), 31.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0004

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  25 in his introductory book to Adrienne’s writings, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr. A paragraph of The Heart of the World beginning ‘The magic of Holy Saturday . . .’2 evokes immediately the peculiar quality of Adrienne’s vision and one of its most central themes; when we read that,we know where we are. But I shall suggest that there is more than such an echo of Adrienne in The Heart of the World. This essay then will have two dimensions: the relationship of The Heart of the World to the visionary theology of Adrienne von Speyr, and its relationship to the  immense theological achievement of which it is the very beginning. Two dimensions—­or two poles: for there is no chance of treating first the one and then the other, for Adrienne’s influence pervades the whole of Balthasar’s theological oeuvre, and the themes Balthasar finds in her are the great themes of his own theological vision. Rather we shall start from Balthasar’s own account of Adrienne von Speyr’s message and then show how all this is developed in Heart of the World, and foreshadows the themes found in his mature work. The treatment will be sketchy but (I hope) suggestive; anything else would be beyond the scope of an essay. But first, Adrienne von Speyr. Balthasar’s own account of her teaching, somewhat compressed, runs like this. The fundamental structure of her vision is Marian: at its heart is Mary’s fiat, Mary’s Yes to God. This ‘Yes’ and its consequence in the Incarnation yield two fundamental emphases. The first is an emphasis on obedience, and on the idea of complete self-­oblation represented in the idea of the vowed life. What is involved in such a life is obviously endless, but two things in particular are developed: first, the profound nature of sin, which goes beyond any personal sin, for the vowed life leads directly to a participation in the sin of the world, in the sense of the bearing of the weight of that sin; and secondly, the nakedness of the soul before God, implied in such avowed life and necessary if such a vowed life is to be possible and genuine—­a nakedness of the soul before God which can only be realized through the practice of the sacrament of confession. The second fundamental emphasis is fruitfulness: the consequences of this vowed obedience are best seen as fruits, rather than results or effects or successes. But all this—­fruitfulness and obedience—­is only possible in relation to Christ’s obedience, the obedience of the Son. Mary’s obedience was a foreshadowing of that obedience, and only possible in its strength; our obedience is a following or imitation (Nachfolge—­not Nachahmung). And it is the obedience of the Son that discloses the mystery of the Christian life. The obedience of the Son can be viewed in two ways: first, as an unfolding of the inter-­Trinitarian life of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; secondly, as the perfecting of the relationship of the creature to God, something explored in the understanding of the Church as

2  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, trans. E. S. Leiva (Ignatius, 1980), 152.

26  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the Body and Bride of Christ. Two ways: but inseparable—­for life in the Church is a participation in the life of the Trinity. To quote Balthasar: In Christ the mystery of love’s triune life is open to us; Christian existence for Adrienne takes place within this openness, indeed, strictly speaking, within the Trinity itself: en route from the Father to the world with the Son, led by the Spirit; en route with the Son and the world led home by him, to the Father, led by the Spirit.3

Balthasar goes on to say that this language may seem too bold, that the language of separation of the Persons may seem to go beyond the safe language of orthodoxy. But he remarks—­and in doing so introduces us to another fundamental theme of Adrienne’s— But one must not forget that Adrienne proceeds from the obedience of the Son of God who humbles himself to be ‘the servant of Yahweh’; in fact, from the very situation where the trinitarian opposition stands out most strongly: the Mount of Olives, the Cross, the descent into Hell. But it is also precisely there that the mystery of unity is definitively known in the revelation of absolute love.4

And he goes on to speak of two ideas that are prominent here: the Cross as a Trinitarian event, and the participation of the Father and the Spirit in the event of the God-­forsakenness of the Son—­beyond that, of the mystery of our being represented on the Cross in the Son, and how henceforth the Father can only consider and deal with the world through the Son. And we are in the presence of the most characteristic motif of Adrienne: the mystery of Holy Saturday. Now it requires absolutely no effort at all to show how all this is present in and informs the structure and message of The Heart of the World. The characteristic emphasis on the Trinity and on the Trinitarian dimensions of Christ’s mission and especially suffering and death: that is a fundamental Leitmotiv in the work. The centrality of obedience, the emphasis on fruitfulness (developed in particular in chapter IV which is a meditation on the text, ‘I am the Vine, ye are the branches’), the descent into Hell and the mystery of Holy Saturday: it is all there. Indeed the movement from the second part of the work called The Suffering to the third part, The Victory, is the movement from Good Friday to Easter Morning through the mystery of Holy Saturday. Any explicit Marian dimension in the work is perhaps muted—­a few references—­but that does not alter the fundamentally Marian structure of the work.

3 Balthasar, First Glance, 60.

4 Balthasar, First Glance, 61.

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  27 Let us take a few of these themes and see how they are developed. We begin with the Trinity. Heart of the World begins with an evocation of the way in which human existence is fragmented into individuals, each cut off from the other. Men are bound by limits which are impenetrable barriers. Although they seem occasionally to be breached, this is an illusion, and the isolation and loneliness of human existence supervene. This, with the idea that human sin is all that binds men together—­but does so in order to render the separation and isolation more final—­seems to me a view that recalls ideas Bernanos presents in his Journal d’un curé de campagne. The doctrine of the Trinity makes its first explicit appearance as something that gives a vision of a wholeness that includes difference but excludes isolation. This is a new mystery, inconceivable to mere creatures: that even distance from God and the coolness of reverence are an image and a likeness of God and of divine life. What is most incomprehensible is, in fact, the truest reality: precisely by not being God do you resemble God. And precisely by being outside of God are you in God. For to be over against God is itself a divine thing. As a person who is incomparable you reflect the uniqueness of your God. For in God’s unity, too, there are found distance and reflection and eternal mission: Father and Son over against one another and yet one in the Spirit and in the nature that seals the Three of them together. Not only the Primal Image is God, but also the Likeness and the Reflected Image. Not only the unity is unconditional; it is also divine to be Two when there is a Third that binds them together. For this reason was the world created in this Second One, and in this Third One does it abide in God. But the meaning of creation remains unexplainable so long as the veil covers the eternal Image. This life would be nothing but destiny, this time only sorrow, all love but decay, if the pulse of Being did not throb in the eternal, triune Life.5

The first thing that strikes one about this quotation is what sort of a doctrine of the Trinity we have to do with. We are in fact reaching back behind Augustine to the doctrine of the Trinity found in the Greek Fathers. The crucial difference between Augustine and the Greeks (and it is a change Augustine consciously made, for in his early writings he has the Greek theology, derived perhaps from Ambrose or Hilary) is that for the Greeks the image of God is the Son, who is also God, whereas for Augustine the image of God is something other than God, indeed the highest created spiritual substance, man’s soul (and indeed the angels), which is a Trinitarian image of the Trinitarian God. God is over against us as Trinity: therefore we are not God. For the Greeks, God is over against us as God (the Father), revealed to us as God (the Son), and present in us as God 5 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 35.

28  Selected Essays, VOLUME II (the  Holy Spirit). This characterization of the Greek patristic doctrine of the Trinity, which has become familiar to us from the writings of Karl Rahner, is presupposed here by Balthasar—­and it can hardly be by chance (all his work on Origen, and perhaps more significantly Maximus the Confessor, was already behind him). And like the Greek patristic doctrine of the Trinity what we have in Balthasar is an articulation of Christian vision by means of a modification of Platonic or Neoplatonic terms. The preceding paragraph has worked towards this understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity by means of the Neoplatonic categories of procession and return (proodos and epistrophe—­Ausgang and Rückkehr). But whereas, in Neoplatonic thought, return is valued above procession, because procession is a declension in being whereas return is its recovery, this is not so with Balthasar. For it is not the rhythm of his creation that it should go out from God by progression and go back to its source in a movement of return. Rather are both these things as one, inseparable, and the going forth is no less unconditional than the return, nor the mission less God-­willed than the longing for God. And perhaps the going forth from God is still more divine that the return home to God, since the greatest thing is not for us to know God and reflect this know­ ledge back to him as if we were gleaming mirrors, but for us to proclaim God as burning torches proclaim the light.6

This Neoplatonic dimension in Balthasar’s thought seems to me more important than one might expect. Thérèse is seen as correcting a common misconception among the Fathers and scholastics about the relationship between contemplation and action—­a relationship which is both stated and (it seems to me) corrected in deeply Neoplatonic terms.7 There are far more references to Proclus than you would expect in The Glory of the Lord and his key idea of amethektos metechomenon runs like a thread through the work.8 But perhaps most significant—­and something we shall come back to—­is Balthasar’s concern, which he shares with Procline Neoplatonism, with the mystery of generation. In the passage I have just discussed the doctrine of the Trinity is presented somewhat abstractly and schematically, though the reference to the ‘pulse of the life of the Trinity’ hints at something more engaged. As The Heart of the World develops and the Heart, the Sacred Heart, the Heart of the World, is introduced, this is drawn into the context of the doctrine of the Trinity—­or rather it is a point of vantage from which the Trinitarian relations are discussed and experienced. 6 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 33 f. 7  See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Thérèse of Liseux (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953), 138–40. 8 The Greek phrase is explicitly cited at Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit, I (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 21961), 293 (ET: 305); III/1 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 21965), 948; III/2 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 21965), 12.

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  29 The divine Ocean forced into the tiny wellspring of a human Heart! The mighty oak-­tree of divinity planted in the small, fragile pot of an earthly Heart! God, sublime on the throne of his majesty, and the Servant—­toiling with sweat and kneeling in the dust of adoration—­no longer to be distinguished from one another! The eternal God’s awareness of his kingship pressed into the nescience of human abasement! All the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge stored in the narrow chamber of human poverty! The vision of the eternal Father shrouded in the intuitions of faith’s obscurity! The rock of divine certainty floating on the tides of an earthly hope! The triangle of the Trinity balanced by one tip upon a human Heart!9

But the true dimensions of Balthasar’s doctrine of the Trinity are revealed as the Son, the Heart, descends into suffering and death, and the Trinity is manifest, distended in the God-­forsakenness of the Son. This is foreshadowed a few pages later where we read that the true miracle of the human heart is revealed in the fact that the perfect Yes to the Father’s will could be uttered in the midst of a storm of impulses impelling the death-­tormented Lamb to take flight; that the eternal distance of love between Father and Son (eternally enfolding the one in the other by the embrace of both in the Spirit) could become the yawning gap between heaven and hell, from whose pit the Son groans his ‘I thirst’, the Spirit now no longer anything but the huge, separating and impassable chaos; that the Trinity could, in suffering’s distorted image, so disfigure itself into the relationship between judge and sinner . . .10

But this is only a foreshadowing of something that is developed more fully later, as Balthasar takes us into the mystery of the Son’s God-­forsakenness and the way this utter failure and weakness bear fruit in the mystery of Holy Saturday. We find this touched on, or developed, in several places. Quite a typical one is this: You fall into the bottomless; you are lost. Not the faintest shimmer of hope delimits this fear. For in what could you still have hope? That the Father might still pardon you? He will not cannot does not want to do it. Only for the price of your sacrifice does he intend to pardon the world: the world, not you. Nothing at all is said about anything beyond your fear. Mercy? But you are yourself God’s mercy, and it consists in your own ruination. Someone has to be the scapegoat, and you are it. Indeed, you yourself wanted it this way. Do you want to avert God’s lightning-­bolt from men? Then it will have to strike you.

9 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 49.

10 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 54.

30  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ‘Father,’ you cry out, ‘if it is possible . . .’ But now it is not even possible. Every fragment and shred of possibility has disappeared. You cry into the void: ‘Father!’ And the echo resounds. The Father has heard nothing. You have sunk too low into the depths: how are those up in heaven still to hear you? ‘Father, I am your Son, your beloved Son, born from you before time began!’ But the Father no longer knows you. You have been eaten up by the leprosy of all cre­ ation: how should he still recognize your face? The Father has gone over to your enemies. Together they have plotted their war-­plan against you. He has loved your murderers so much that he has betrayed you, his Only-­begotten. He has given you up like a lost outpost; he has let go of you like a lost son. Are you sure that he still really exists? Is there a God? If a God existed he would be love itself; he certainly could not be sheer hardness, more unrelenting than a wall of bronze. If there were a God, he would have to manifest himself at least in his majesty; you would have to feel at least a breath of his eternity; you would at least be allowed to kiss the hem of his garment when, in his sublimeness, he walked away over you, perhaps crushing you heedlessly underfoot. Oh, how gladly you would allow yourself to be trampled by that adored foot! But, instead of gazing into the pupil of God’s eye, you stare into the void of a black eye-­socket. And so you stagger over to men; now that eternal love is dead and the chill of the world’s expanse wraps you in its ice, you seek some measure of life in men’s animal warmth. But these are asleep. Let them sleep; let even the beloved disciple sleep. They would never understand that God no longer loves.11

As Balthasar’s Christ stares ‘into the void of a black eye-­socket’ (in die Leere einer schwarzen Augenhohle), we recall Jean Paul’s Christ in Siebenkäs who, searching beyond the world after the divine eye, felt it staring back at him ‘with an empty, bottomless eye-­socket’—‘Keep shouting, discordant tones, destroy the shadows with your cries; for He is not’ (mit einer leeren bodenlosen Augenhöhle’— ‘Schreiet fort, Misstöne, zerschreiet die Schatten; denn Er ist nicht). There is no God, God is dead. Long before Jean Paul was dragged onto the theological scene in the sixties, there are echoes of him in Balthasar’s The Heart of the World. And this is picked up still later in the book: Immeasurable emptiness (not solitude) streams forth from the hanging body. Nothing but this fantastic emptiness is any longer at work here . . . There is nothing more but nothingness itself The world is dead. Love is dead. God is dead.12 It is Good Friday. And we descend into Hell, enter into the chaos of Holy Saturday.

11 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 109–10.

12 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 150.

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  31 Chaos. Beyond heaven and hell. Shapeless nothingness behind the bounds of creation. Is that God? God died on the Cross. Is that death? No dead are to be seen. Is it the end? Nothing that ends is any longer there. Is it the beginning? The beginning of what? In the beginning was the Word. What kind of word? What incomprehensible, formless, meaningless word? But look: What is this light glimmer that wavers and begins to take form in the endless void? It has neither content nor contour. A nameless thing, more solitary than God, it emerges out of pure emptiness. It is no one. It is anterior to everything. Is it the beginning? It is small and undefined as a drop. Perhaps it is water. But it does not flow. It is not water. It is thicker, more opaque, more viscous than water. It is also not blood, for blood is red, blood is alive, blood has a loud human speech. This is neither water nor blood. It is older than both, a chaotic drop. Slowly, slowly, un­believ­ably slowly the drop begins to quicken. We do not know whether this movement is infinite fatigue at death’s extremity or the first beginning—­of what? Quiet, quiet! Hold the breath of your thoughts! It’s still much too early in the day to think of hope. The seed is still much too weak to start whispering about love. But look there: it is indeed moving, a weak, viscous flow. It’s still much too early to speak of a wellspring. It trickles, lost in the chaos, directionless, without gravity. But more copiously now. A wellspring in the chaos. It leaps out of pure nothingness, it leaps out of itself It is not the beginning of God, who eternally and mightily brings himself into existence as Life and Love and triune Bliss. It is not the beginning of creation, which gently and in slumber slips out of the Creator’s hands. It is a beginning without parallel, as if Life were arising from Death, as if weariness (already such weariness as no amount of sleep could ever dispel) and the uttermost decay of power were melting at creation’s outer edge, were beginning to flow, because flowing is perhaps a sign and a likeness of weariness which can no longer contain itself, because everything that is strong and solid must in the end dissolve into water. But hadn’t it—­in the beginning—­also been born from water? And is this wellspring in the chaos, this trickling weariness, not the beginning of a new creation? The magic of Holy Saturday. The chaotic fountain remains directionless. Could this be the residue of the Son’s love which, poured out to the last when every vessel cracked and the old world perished, is now making a path for itself to the Father through the glooms of nought? . . .13

Two themes, at least, are intertwined here. There is the theme that in the God-­ forsakenness of the Son, the Chaos that stretches between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit, and that this provides the principle for the new life that is the fruit of the Trinity’s embrace of the world in all its sinfulness and fallenness. But there is, too, the exploitation of the theme of the mystery of birth. The mystery of

13 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 150–2.

32  Selected Essays, VOLUME II birth is central in Balthasar’s understanding of the Trinity, of the creation and of the re-­creation, as this passage makes clear. Just how important it is in Balthasar’s understanding emerges in Herrlichkeit III/1 (Im Raum der Metaphysik), where the development of the final section begins with the remark, ‘If one surveys western metaphysics as a whole, one must wonder how little the riddle of propagation—­ not only of organic natures, but above all of man, who is spiritual—­has disturbed the philosophers.’14 It may not have disturbed philosophers, but it has fascinated Balthasar, at least from the time of Heart of the World. All these passages have been cited to illuminate the place of the doctrine of the Trinity in the development of Heart of the World. But they force on us another idea that is also fundamental in Balthasar’s theology: that of substitution, and substitutionary atonement. ‘Stellvertretung’ would be the German, but in The Heart of the World Balthasar does not use much technical language, though once he refers to Christ as stellvertretende Suhne. And although ‘substitution’ is narrower in meaning than ‘Stellvertretung’, it is, I think, the word needed in English. For Balthasar, Christ stood in our place, bore the suffering and death that was our lot, was ‘made sin’ for us. It is the lack of such a doctrine of substitution that is one of the things Balthasar holds against Karl Rahner. It is not to the point if Rahner, where he deals with the Cross, indulges in continual polemic against a legalistic doctrine of satisfaction (misjudging thereby Anselm’s ultimate intention), for it is a matter of the interpretation of the New Testament expression, that Christ bore our sins on the Cross

—so Balthasar complains against Rahner in Cordula.15 Balthasar, on the contrary, delights in the sort of language such a legalistic doctrine of satisfaction makes its own. So, for instance, from the passages just quoted, Balthasar speaks of the Trinity being distorted in the Passion into the relationship between the judge and the sinner.16 The relationship of judge and sinner is a distortion, but it is real none the less. He says, too, ‘only for the price of your sacrifice does he intend to pardon the world’.17 Christ is the scapegoat (Sündenbock). ‘The Father has gone over to your enemies . . . He has loved your murderers so much that he has betrayed you . . . He has given you up . . . let go of you . . .’18 He is very keen on language of the Father betraying the Son: he speaks of the moment when the Father in disguise joins the ‘traitors, and the heart is left, alone’;19 or of the language of the Judge 14 Balthasar, Herrlichkeit, III/1, 945. 15  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cordula (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966), 91; and cf. the excursus on Rahner’s soteriology in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik III (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980), 253–62. 16 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 54. 17 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 109. 18 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 110. 19 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 53.

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  33 condemning, and exacting the penalty from, the Son: ‘what if the imperious ­command of the angry Judge should blaze against me with terrible threats?’20 This insistence on the reality of substitution, a reality that presses the notion to the point of paradox, is something that continues to mark Balthasar’s theology. We have seen that it is part of his long­standing criticism of Rahner’s theology. In his own attempt at a dogmatics—­Theodramatik—­there is an extended discussion of this theme in which in his historical survey21 he develops first the patristic theme of an admirabile commercium between God and man in Christ, and then moves on to discuss two ways in which the theology of the atonement is approached in modern theology. These two ways focus on the themes of solidarity and substitution (‘Substitution’ is the German word used here). ‘Solidarity’ is the word modern theologians, he feels, are happiest with: it avoids the language of sacrifice and redemption which is felt to be incomprehensible to modern man. But Balthasar finds this word too shallow, too frail to bear the weight of the Christian understanding of the atonement. So he turns to an examination of the language of substitution—­something developed especially in Protestant theology to which Balthasar gives his (for him unusually) sympathetic attention. Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant scholastics are discussed, and then modern theo­lo­ gians such as Barth, Pannenberg, and Moltmann. Balthasar clearly finds in the radicalism of the language of substitution something that approaches more nearly what is needed to convey the radical nature of what God has done for us in Christ. In a concluding section, Balthasar attempts to meet the charge that the language of sacrifice and substitution is no longer comprehensible by drawing on the work of René Girard where he finds the idea of the scapegoat given a new relevance. He  also seeks support for this approach in the work of Sergei Bulgakov and A. Feuillet. We have noticed how Balthasar draws on Barth as he develops the notion of substitution: the parallel with Barth is confirmed in the way Balthasar views the relationship between the Cross and the Resurrection. For Barth the Resurrection is the revelation of what has been achieved in the Cross (though it is revelation that can only be seen in the light of the Resurrection—­so he can hold it against Bach’s St Matthew Passion that it is a treatment of the Passion without any reference to the Resurrection).22 Something similar is true for Balthasar: Where did I triumph if not on the Cross? Are you as blind as the Jews and the pagans to think that Golgotha was my downfall and my failure? Do you believe it was only later—­three days later—­that I recovered from my death and climbed up laboriously from the pit of Hades to appear among you once again? Look: 20 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 71. 21 Balthasar, Theodramatik III, 224–94. 22  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (T & T Cark, 1958), 280.

34  Selected Essays, VOLUME II this is my secret, and there is no other in heaven or on earth: My Cross is ­salvation, my Death is victory, my Darkness is light.23

And later in the same chapter: ‘This was my victory. In the Cross was Easter. In death the grave of the world was burst open. In the leap into the void was the ascension to heaven. Now I fill the world, and at last every soul lives from my dying’24—a passage that links his understanding of substitution with his understanding of death and resurrection. Of course for Barth this doctrine of substitution means that holiness is no longer any concern of man’s: man’s existence is worldly, and the world has been redeemed by Christ (or that is what I take him to mean). One of the things Barth finds puzzling about Balthasar is his interest in such people as Thérèse and Elizabeth of Dijon.25 Balthasar is indeed concerned with holiness, and can talk about mysticism—­but for him both these are capable of being misunderstood, and a proper grasp of what Christ did can prevent that misunderstanding. Balthasar’s understanding of holiness has its own characteristic stress. The passage last quoted continues: ‘And wherever a man decides to forsake himself, to give up his own narrowness, his self-­will, his power, his blockaded resistance to me, there my Kingdom flourishes.’ That gives the tone of the holiness that is, for Balthasar, demanded of the Christian. It is concerned with fruitfulness, not results or achievement. It demands great effort, but it is an effort of preparation—­preparation for God. In another place he says (of Mary Magdalene—­ the type of the Christian—­at the tomb): ‘And so you stare into the void. For in fact: the grave is empty, you are yourself empty, and are, therefore, already pure, and only this staring spasm keeps you from looking behind you.’26 We are reminded of Adrienne von Speyr and her emphasis on Ausräumung: an Ausräumung, a draining out, emptying out, so that our life can be Christ’s. And the keynote here is obedience: ‘it is not ecstasy that redeems, but rather obedience’, as Balthasar puts it.27 In this context it is perhaps worth recalling how Balthasar in First Glance twists round the definition of mysticism as an experiential perception of the reality and being of God (cognitio experimentalis Dei), so that mysticism, in that sense, is primarily realized in Christ and only through him realized in us: realized in Christ ‘in his existence (and his consciousness), his suffering and Resurrection, his presence in the Eucharist and other sacraments’.28 One is reminded of Barth’s comment on ‘experience’ in a discussion with some Swiss Methodist preachers: ‘I do not deny the experience of salvation . . . But the experience of salvation is what happened on Golgotha. In contrast to that my own experience is only a vessel.’29 23 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 175. 24 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 181. 25  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (T & T Clark, 1956), 858–9. 26 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 159. 27 Balthasar, Heart of the World, 55. 28  See Balthasar, First Glance, 86. 29  Quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth (SCM Press, 1975), 447.

The Place of The Heart of the World in Balthasar  35 One could go on. There is much more that could be said—­and much that is difficult to articulate. The very language and structure of the work are significant. The relation of God to man, of Christ’s redemption and our response, is so close that they cannot be separated—­and so the book is in some ways repetitive, though it is the repetition of a spiral, not of a circle. Also the style is appropriate to a mystery that entices us and involves us: it comes as no surprise that when Balthasar eventually writes a dogmatics it is called Theodramatik, or (perhaps it is the same thing) when Balthasar focuses his concern with beauty and form on one art form, it is drama. But enough has been said to show how the fundamental perceptions of Balthasar’s theology have already crystallized in this early work, so that Heart of the World can be seen to contain in nuce not only the characteristic themes of his theology, but also the style which is inseparable from the apprehension of these themes.

4

Eros and Mysticism Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs

‘Eros and mysticism’—such a title suggests, I suppose, one side of the phe­nom­ enon of religion, and to many a side that they find congenial. Eros—­a force that arises from deep within ourselves, not wholly understood by ourselves but reach­ ing through the whole of the human person, all that it is to be human, sometimes creatively, healingly, sometimes with a shattering and destructive force. Eros—­ opposed to logos, the rational discriminating faculty that tends to look outside for signs of order, that seeks to rule the realm within, to impose structure on it, to subdue it and control it. Eros, then—­in a religious sense—­stands for the hidden mysterious depths, interpreted by symbol, as opposed to a rational system, sup­ ported by an institution, the religion of dogma. And mysticism suggests some­ thing of the same contrast: mysticism being a quest into the unknown, shocking and upsetting to the representatives of traditional religious structures: by its emphasis on the unknowable reality of God, the Infinite, it calls in question the tidy rationalizations of dogma. The mystic is feared—­and often persecuted—­by the representatives of dogmatic religion: one thinks of the great Sufi mystic, al-­ Hallaj, or within Christianity of the condemnation at Avignon in the early four­ teenth century of Meister Eckhart, or the persecution faced by St John of the Cross in sixteenth-­century Spain. Eros and mysticism, then—­as opposed to logos and dogma. It is a contrast that strikes a chord of understanding with most of us living in the West in the late twentieth century, and we can trace an awareness of such a contrast well back into the last century and beyond. What I want to do here, however, is to look back behind this contrast: I want to look at some strands in early Christianity and suggest that these contrasts—­ between eros and logos, between mysticism and dogma—­are really complemen­ tary parts of a greater whole, and that we catch at least glimpses of such a vision of wholeness in some of the early Christian writers, some of the Fathers, as they are called. I want to do this by selecting—­from among a great mass of writings—­just one genre, and that is commentaries on the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is one of the shortest books in the Hebrew Bible. It belongs to the third part of the Hebrew Canon, the Writings, and within that it is usually classed as part of what is called Wisdom literature, though it is in many respects rather different from the rest of the Wisdom literature. These books of Wisdom—­ which include the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0005

Eros and Mysticism  37 (Qoheleth)—were ascribed to King Solomon, the son of David. Consequently, the Song of Songs was taken to be a collection of love songs, perhaps an epithalamion or wedding song, composed by Solomon for one of his (many) wives, a Shulamite (see S. of S. 6:13). It is clearly a piece of oriental love poetry, and bears comparison with other examples of the genre: in particular, in its evident and unashamed delight in the sensuousness of human love-­making. In this poem (or poems) the man describes the hair, the neck, the breasts of his beloved, while the woman longs for the kisses and the caresses of her lover. There are different voices in the Song, so that it can be regarded either as a dramatic poem in dialogue, or as a collection of love songs loosely strung together: on the one hand, there is the voice of the bridegroom speaking to his beloved or to his companions, while on the other there is the voice of the bride responding to her lover, or musing to herself or to her maids. The Song contains an account of their courtship, their snatched meetings, her longing for him during his absence, and doubts as to whether he will return, provoking an agonized search for him, and his calling to her and coming to her at night. Some texts of the Bible—­the New English Bible, for instance—­print the Song out as a dialogue, specifying the parts for the bride and the bridegroom, but this is unusual; it is usually left to the wit of the reader.1 It is, as I have said, a very sensuous poem. Many readers will know Eric Gill’s illustrations for various editions of the Song; the sensuousness of his etchings—­ especially those he did in white line on black to illustrate an edition of the Latin Vulgate text of the Song—­match the poem itself very well.2 For all the obviousness of the celebration of human love between man and woman in the Song of Songs, however, the Song of Songs was never interpreted in such a way by Christians. Perhaps that ought to be put more precisely: it is not that any denied that, on the surface, it was a human love song; it is rather that they felt that its sacred meaning did not lie on the surface (it is true that one early Christian writer, Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia, who died in 428, did think that the Song of Songs was nothing but a human love song, but he argued that for this reason it should not be regarded as a sacred book for Christians at all. His was a lone voice). Christians felt that it was an allegory, pointing to some higher truth. There are two points that need to be emphasized about this. First, Christians—­ and not only Christians—­thought that the real meaning of any sacred, inspired writing (for Christians, the Bible) could not simply be its surface meaning: the real meaning was a deeper meaning, and allegory was the key that unlocked this

1  There is a translation into English verse of the Song of Songs by Peter Jay, with an introduction by David Goldstein and illustrations by Nikos Stavroulakis (Anvil Press Poetry, 1975). But I am not sure that the older translations—­in the Authorized Version of the Bible and especially in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate—­do not capture more of the strange beauty of the Song of Songs. I am not enough of a Hebraist to say anything about the original. 2 In Eric Gill: The Engravings (The Herbert Press, 1990; originally published in a limited edition by Christopher Skelton, 1983), plates 61–8, 662–70.

38  Selected Essays, VOLUME II hidden meaning. What Christians applied to the Song of Songs they applied gen­ erally to the Scriptures. Second, however Christians interpreted the Song of Songs, they always regarded it as fundamentally a love song: the allegory was an allegory of love. In fact, it was very easy to interpret the Song of Songs allegorically, as the Bible itself had already interpreted the relationship between God and humanity as a love relationship. The prophets had shown the way: Hosea represented God as deeply in love with Israel, for all her faithlessness,3 and the prophet Ezekiel takes up the same theme.4 Following this lead, already in early Christian times the Jewish rabbis had interpreted the Song of Songs as referring to the love between God and Israel. The New Testament develops the idea of God’s love very strik­ ingly: a patient, self-­sacrificing love, of which the crucifixion of the Son of God is the culminating expression. Bridal imagery, marriage imagery, is also used. In Ephesians (5:32) the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to the love between husband and wife; in the Apocalypse the apostle John sees the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband (Apoc. 21:2). All this made it very easy and natural for Christians to interpret the Song of Songs as referring to the relationship of love between Christ and the Church. Such an interpretation is first found in a commentary ascribed to Hippolytus, the first antipope (died 235), belonging to the beginning of the third century. Soon after, this interpretation was taken up by the great early Christian theologian Origen, about whom I shall have more to say. With Origen the idea that the Song refers to the relationship between Christ and the Church is supple­ mented by another: that it refers to the love between Christ and the soul of the individual Christian. It is this that opens the door to the later mystical in­ter­pret­ ation of the Song of Songs which became very popular—­there are several dozen commentaries on the Song of Songs surviving from the early Middle Ages5—an interpretation that culminates in the poems of St John of the Cross and their mys­ tical interpretation, for all the poems that form the basis of his mystical treatises are based on the Song of Songs. Let us now look in somewhat more detail at some of these commentaries on the Song of Songs. I want to concentrate on the works of two early Christian theo­ logians: Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa. Origen belongs to the third century, to the period when Christians still faced persecution by the authorities of the Roman Empire. At the beginning of the third century Origen’s father, Leonides, was mar­ tyred and, the story goes, Origen was only saved from accompanying his father by

3  See Hosea, chs 2 and 3; also 6:4 ff., 11:8 ff. But it is a constant theme. 4  See especially the long allegory in Ezekiel, ch. 16. 5  See the list of Latin commentaries to 1200, printed as an appendix in E. Ann Matter, The Voice of the Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 203–10.

Eros and Mysticism  39 his mother’s hiding his clothes, so that he could not go out.6 Origen himself was to die as a result of the great persecution that took place under the Emperor Decius in 251: he was tortured—­they wanted his recantation, not his death—­and he died some years later of the injuries he had sustained. In between, the Church in the parts where Origen was seems to have enjoyed relative peace, and Origen’s fame as a Christian thinker was such that Julia Mamaea, the mother of the Emperor Alexander, invited him to visit her in Antioch to talk to her about Christianity. For the first part of his life, Origen lived where he had been born, in Alexandria, and taught and studied there; but in the late 230s he set up a Christian academy in Caesarea, on the Palestinian coast, having fallen out with his bishop back in Alexandria. Three centuries after his death, at the fifth Ecumenical Council called by the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople in 553, Origen was condemned as a heretic: as a result most of his works were destroyed. What survives is very con­ siderable, but it is only a small part of his immense output. His works on the Song of Songs survive only in part, in a Latin translation: three books (out of ten) of his Commentary on the Song, translated by Rufinus, and two Homilies (out of an uncertain number) translated by Jerome.7 They represent the two kinds of biblical interpretation that Origen engaged in. His Commentaries were intended for those who were studying with him; on the one hand, they sometimes contain quite a technical discussion of the text; on the other, they are intended for people who are already well grounded in theological studies (which included the study of phil­ oso­phy) and expound the deeper mysteries of the Christian faith. His Homilies are rather different: they are sermons that Origen gave at the celebration of the Christian liturgy in Caesarea; they were intended for Christians in general, not just for his students, and may have been heard by pagans and Jews interested in Christianity who were allowed to attend the first part of the Christian liturgy, which consisted of readings from Scripture, prayers, and a sermon. The contrast between Origen’s Commentaries and Homilies is very suggestive: they seem to represent an esoteric and an exoteric teaching. In fact, the contrast is not usually that great: Origen was prepared to draw even quite simple Christians towards deep matters. In the case of the Song of Songs, however, there is a very palpable contrast: the Homilies are concerned almost exclusively with interpreting the Song in terms of the relationship between Christ and the Church; in the Commentary such an ecclesial interpretation, while still there, lies in the back­ ground and the interpretation that focuses on the love between Christ and the individual soul comes to the fore.

6  The story is told by Eusebius in his History of the Church, 6.2.5 (in the Penguin Classics, rev. edn (Penguin, 1989), 180). Book 6 of the History of the Church is more or less a life of Origen. 7  There is an English translation by R.  P.  Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers, 26 (The Newman Press and Longmans, Green & Co., 1957).

40  Selected Essays, VOLUME II How does Origen interpret the Song? I think this can be answered at a number of different levels. In the course of his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen actually sets out some principles for the interpretation of Scripture as a whole: All the things in the visible category can be related to the invisible, the corporeal to the incorporeal, and the manifest to those that are hidden; so that the creation of the world itself, fashioned in this wise as it is, can be understood through the divine wisdom, which from actual things and copies teaches us things unseen by means of those that are seen, and carries us over from earthly things to heavenly. But this relationship does not obtain only with creatures; the Divine Scripture itself is written with wisdom of a rather similar sort.8

The idea that the world—­the cosmos—­and Scripture are, as it were, parallel to each other and point beyond themselves to a deeper reality is the key to Origen’s understanding of everything. The one who reads Scripture, like the one who seeks to understand nature, is not just finding out things, but is being led to a deeper understanding, a deeper harmony. So with the Song of Songs, the mystery of human love points beyond itself—­to the ‘love that moves the sun and other stars’, to the love that calls us to union with the cause of all. But so far as the Song of Songs is concerned, Origen offers two approaches to understanding it, both of them concerned with placing it within what for him, as a Christian, is the Old Testament. The first way turns on the title, the Song of Songs: in Hebrew (Shir ha-­Shirim) this is a superlative, he notes. The Song of Songs is, then, the most sublime song, the highest of all songs. In both the first Homily and the Commentary, he spells this out by saying that the Song is the summit of all the songs sung in the Old Testament: more precisely he sees it as the seventh, and thus most sublime, of a sequence of songs (though the sequence he gives is not the same in the Homily and the Commentary), and to sing it one must have progressed through each of the six earlier songs. In the first Homily he puts it like this: You must come out of Egypt and, when the land of Egypt lies behind you, you must cross the Red Sea if you are to sing the first song, saying: Let us sing unto the Lord, for He is gloriously magnified (Song of Moses: Exod. 15). But though you have uttered this first song, you are still a long way from the Song of Songs. Pursue your spiritual journey through the wilderness until you come to the well which the kings dug so that there you may sing the second song (Numbers 21:17-­20). After that, come to the threshold of the holy land that, standing on the bank of Jordan, you may sing another song of Moses, saying: Hear, O heaven,

8  Comm. III.12, trans. Lawson, 223.

Eros and Mysticism  41 and I will speak, and let the earth give ear to the words of my mouth (Deut. 32). Again you must fight under Joshua and possess the holy land as your inherit­ ance; and a bee must prophesy for you and judge you—­Deborah, you under­ stand, means ‘bee’—in order that you may take that song also on your lips, which is found in the Book of Judges (Judges 5: The Song of Deborah). Mount up hence to the Book of Kings, and come to the Song of David, when he fled out of the hand of all his enemies and out of the hand of Saul, and said: The Lord is my stay and my strength and my refuge and my saviour (2 Sam. 22:2-­51, The Song of David). You must go on next to Isaiah, so that with him you may say: I will sing to the Beloved the song of my vineyard (Isa. 5). And when you have been through all the songs, then set your course for greater heights, so that as a fair soul with her spouse you may sing this Song of Songs too.9

It is, I think, worth noting a few points about this way of ‘locating’ the Song of Songs. First, this series of songs begins with the Song of the crossing of the Red Sea, the Song of the Exodus (this is true of the sequence of songs given in the prologue to his commentary to the Song of Songs, too). For the early Christians the crossing of the Red Sea was seen as a type or figure of baptism: as God saved Israel by water at the Exodus, so in baptism, through water, the Christian shares in the Paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. The Song of Moses, for Christians, is the song of their being called by God through baptism: it is the Song of the second exodus, as it were. For Origen the soul’s quest for God begins by the soul’s being called by God through baptism: the mystic is no esoteric, pursuing his or her own peculiar way, but a Christian realizing more and more deeply the meaning of the life to which he or she is called in baptism. Second, these songs are the songs of a journey, a journey through deserts and battles, a journey in which the soul suffers want and privation, and needs to learn to find its sus­ten­ ance in wells (cf. Ps. 84:6). It is no comfortable way, but a hard and often discour­ aging way, in which the soul learns to rely more and more on God and His grace. But third, from beginning to end, the Christian sings: however hard the way, it is still, for the Christian, a joyful way. That is one approach to the Song of Songs. It is, in a way, especially characteris­ tic of Origen: it is not much picked up by later commentators on the Song, though for Origen himself it is sufficiently important to find a place both in his Homilies and his Commentary on the Song. Origen’s other way of placing the Song of Songs, however, caught on and made a profound impression on the whole of the subsequent Christian mystical tradition. This is based on the fact that in the Christian ordering of the books of the Old Testament the Song of Songs is the third of the books of Wisdom, after Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Origen is fond of

9  Hom. 1.1, trans. Lawson, 266 f.

42  Selected Essays, VOLUME II triads, and fond of pointing out parallels between triads. Here he points out a parallel between the triad of Wisdom books and a triad of branches of phil­oso­ phy: ethics, physics, and ‘epoptics’. Ethics is the study of moral behaviour, espe­ cially the study of virtue: this corresponds to the Book of Proverbs. Physics is the study of nature (in Greek: physis), the study of the cosmos as God created it: this corresponds to the book of Ecclesiastes. ‘Epoptics’—the word comes from the Greek epopteia, and means mystic contemplation—­corresponds to the Song of Songs. These three branches of philosophy, these three books of wisdom, cor­res­ pond to the three stages of the Christian life, leading to union with God. The first stage is concerned with restoring balance within the human person by the learn­ ing of virtue; the second stage is concerned with a true contemplation of the nature of things, a seeing the world in God, or a contemplation of the cosmos with detachment and delight; this second stage leads us to the source of all, and in the third stage, the soul comes to contemplate God himself in a union of love. These three stages are called by Evagrius, one of the Desert Fathers of the end of the fourth century who was a careful student of Origen, praktike, physike, theologia: an active (practical in that sense) struggle against temptations in the pursuit of virtue, leading to natural contemplation, and then finally to theology, meaning not what academics do in studies but what we do in prayer—­a prayerful com­ muning with God that leads to a union of love. It was the same Evagrius who said, ‘If you are a theologian, you pray truly: if you pray truly, you are a theologian’.10 Evagrius’ three stages of praktike, physike, and theologia—­clearly derived from Origen—­became the standard vocabulary of Greek and Byzantine ascetical the­ ology. But in the West, the so-­called ‘three ways’—or purgation, illumination, and union—­are clearly a variant of Origen’s three ways based on the three books of Wisdom. But these three ways are also based on three branches of philosophy: more is going on here than a development of themes from the Bible; Origen is drawing on philosophy, too. Origen thought that a study of ancient philosophy was essential for the Christian theologian. He himself, as a young Christian, sat at the feet of the Alexandrian philosopher Ammonius Saccas, one of whose other disciples was the great pagan philosopher Plotinus, and in his Christian academy at Caesarea he insisted that his pupils drank deeply of the wisdom of ancient Greek phil­oso­ phy. In fact, Origen was immensely learned in Greek philosophy, and certainly knew far more than we ever shall: his citations from, and comments on, Greek philosophers, especially in his lengthy reply to the Greek critic of Christianity Celsus,11 are often enough indispensable for our understanding of some of the less-­known Greek philosophers. So far as his interpretation of the Song of Songs 10  In his On Prayer 61; English trans, in The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1 (Faber, 1979), 62. 11 See Origen: Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge University Press, 1953).

Eros and Mysticism  43 is concerned, the main thing to notice is that Origen knew and valued Plato’s dia­ logues devoted to the nature of eros, the Banquet or Symposium and the Phaedrus. In the prologue to his Commentary he makes use of the distinction Plato has Pausanius introduce in his speech in the Symposium between heavenly love and earthly love—­eros ouranios and eros pandemos. But more importantly, like Plato, Origen presents the purification and spiritualizing of love as a process in which love retains all its passion, indeed becomes more and more deeply passionate. Just as in Diotima’s speech, love, as it is abstracted from the physical and the particu­ lar, becomes more and more intense, so the spiritual love with which the soul responds to the word, the Logos, of God is something deeply passionate: The soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when, having clearly beheld the beauty and fairness of the Word of God, it falls deeply in love with His loveliness and receives from the Word Himself a certain dart and wound of love. For this Word is the image and splendour of the invisible God . . . . If, then, a man can so extend his thinking as to ponder and consider the beauty and grace of all the things that have been created in the Word, the very charm of them will so smite him, the grandeur of their brightness will so pierce him as with a chosen dart—­as says the prophet (Isa. 49.2)—that he will suffer from the dart Himself a saving wound, and will be kindled with the blessed fire of His Love.12

There is another theme Origen introduces that is especially important for his interpretation of the Song of Songs. This contrast just mentioned between heav­ enly love and earthly love parallels, for Origen, a much deeper contrast between the inner and the outer man. It is the inner man that is created in the image of God: it is the inner man that has an affinity with God himself and so can know union with him in love. The outer man is the human being turned outwards, out­ wards towards the world perceived through the senses; the inner man is the human being turned inwards, inwards towards the world perceived through . . . well, how? Origen continues the contrast in the simplest way: turned inwards towards the world perceived through the spiritual senses. Through these spiritual senses we perceive the spiritual world: the realm of God, the angels and souls that have woken up to spiritual reality. But most human beings are so turned outwards—­turned inside out, really—­have poured so much of themselves into the external world, which is not so much the physical world as a world valued in terms of the external—­a world of reputation and ambition, a world of possessions and consumption—­most human beings are so committed to that world that the world of spiritual reality is dead to them—­or rather, they are dead to it. But if we will turn inwards, if we will allow ourselves to hear the call of the word of God,

12  Comm. prologue, trans. Lawson, 26 f.

44  Selected Essays, VOLUME II then we will begin to wake up within, so to speak, to the spiritual world. From then on, it is a matter of becoming accustomed to this inner world of spiritual reality, and as we become used to it our spiritual senses will quicken, will come to life. The Song of Songs invites the development of such a doctrine of the spiritual senses, precisely because it is so sensuous in its imagery. It is not just a matter of seeing and hearing, but of touching and smelling and tasting. As Origen draws out his doctrine of the spiritual senses, he builds up a picture of someone inwardly aware, able to respond to the smallest sign of the divine presence with a delicate, loving sensitivity. Later writers (not Origen himself) will interpret this as a state of apatheia—­a state not of insensitivity, as the word has often been misunder­ stood in the West, but of inner calm that makes possible a kind of acute attentive­ ness—­to God, to the spiritual world, and so to the souls of others. So Origen says ‘that soul only is perfect who has her sense of smell so pure and purged that she can catch the fragrance of the spikenard and myrrh and cypress that proceed from the Word of God, and can inhale the grace of the divine odour’.13 I want to leave Origen now, not that I have done any more than barely scratch the surface of his interpretation of the Song, but because I want to move on to say a little about St Gregory of Nyssa. St Gregory of Nyssa lived more than a century later than Origen: he was born in about 330 into a Roman Empire governed by a Christian emperor, Constantine. He is regarded as one of the Cappadocian Fathers—­along with his elder brother, Basil, and the friend of his brother, also called Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus—­together they played an important part in the victory of orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine world. He is called ‘of Nyssa’ because in the early 370s he was made bishop of that small town in Cappadocia (the Eastern province in Asia Minor that stretches to the Euphrates): one of sev­ eral ‘reliable’ bishops, appointed by Basil, bishop of Caesarea, the metropolis of Cappadocia, so as to create an orthodox powerbase in Asia Minor. He played a prominent role at the Second Ecumenical Council held at Constantinople in 381, which set the standard of orthodoxy for the Emperor Theodosius’ state Church. From about 386 onwards he lost influence at court and spent his final years (he died shortly after 394) back in Nyssa as its bishop. It is to this last period that his Homilies on the Song of Songs belong.14 They are homilies—­sermons preached to a congregation. But although they are dedicated to a famous (aristocratic and wealthy) deaconess, Olympias, renowned for her asceticism, there is no reason to suppose that they were delivered anywhere else than in his cathedral church in Nyssa to his ordinary congregation during Lent. There is, then, quite a contrast between Origen’s academic setting in a Church under persecution and Gregory’s

13  Comm. II.11, trans. Lawson, 168. 14  There appear to be two American translations, one published by Brill (1988), and one published by the Hellenic College Press (1987). Long extracts are translated in J. Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, trans. H. Musurillo (John Murray, 1962), from which my quotations are taken.

Eros and Mysticism  45 setting in a small town in Cappadocia in a period when any persecution was mounted by the state Church to which he belonged. But there is another contrast too—­it is really part of the same contrast—­in Origen’s day orthodoxy was ill-­ defined, and Origen was able to pursue quite daring speculations without the fear of ecclesiastics’ breathing down his neck; in Gregory’s day, orthodoxy was much more clearly defined—­the Council of Constantinople had condemned Arianism, Apollinarianism, Manichaeism, and Macedonianism, to mention but a few of the heresies named—­and Gregory was closely identified with those who had thus defined orthodoxy. Underlying many of the controversies that had clarified orthodoxy and outlawed the several heresies was the problem of Platonism. Origen, we have seen, was influenced by Platonism and sympathetic to it: in par­ ticular, he endorsed the Platonic belief that the soul was akin to God, and that the realization of this kinship in all its fullness was the essential task of the soul. Gregory, on the other hand, felt that any kinship between the soul and God had to be qualified by the fact that God had created the universe out of nothing: this meant that there was a great gulf between God and all else, so that (as he put it) there was much greater affinity between the most glorious archangel and a stone than between that archangel and God, because, however glorious, an archangel was, like a stone, created, created out of nothing, and therefore utterly remote from the uncreated splendour of God. It is this emphasis on the gulf between the uncreated Trinity and the created cosmos (the ‘all things visible and invisible’ of the Nicene Creed), an emphasis felt even more acutely by Gregory after his con­ troversy with the extreme Arian, Eunomius, that informs and lies behind the whole of his reflection on God and the cosmos, God and humanity—­and in par­ ticular his understanding of the Song of Songs. The most immediate way to illustrate this is to see how Gregory develops Origen’s idea of the three stages of the spiritual life: the stage of active virtue, the stage of natural contemplation, and, finally, the stage of loving union with God. Origen saw this as a process of ever-­growing illumination: the darkness of the soul separated from God by its sin is gradually dispelled by the radiance of God so that finally the soul is penetrated by the divine light and contemplates God in a gaze of love. Gregory takes up this idea—­he wrote commentaries on Ecclesiastes and the Song, which represent the second and third stages—­but it is transformed by his sense of the gulf between the created soul and God. In his Homilies on the Song, he expresses this most clearly by introducing the theme of Moses’ experi­ ence of God: something he will treat at length in his last work, the Life of Moses. He puts it like this: Moses’ vision of God began with light: afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect he saw God in the dark­ ness. Now the doctrine we are taught here is as follows. Our initial withdrawal from wrong and erroneous ideas of God is a transition from darkness to light.

46  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Next comes a closer awareness of hidden things, and by this the soul is guided through sense phenomena to the world of the invisible. And this awareness is a kind of cloud, which overshadows all appearances, and slowly guides and accus­ toms the soul to look towards what is hidden. Next the soul makes progress through all these stages and goes on higher, and as she leaves below all that human nature can attain, she enters within the secret chamber of the divine knowledge, and here she is cut off on all sides by the divine darkness. Now she leaves outside all that can be grasped by sense or by reason, and the only thing left for her contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible. And here God is, as the Scriptures tell us in connection with Moses: ‘But Moses went into the dark cloud wherein God was’.  (Exod. 20:21)15

In contrast to Origen, Gregory’s three stages are an advance into deeper and deeper darkness: only the first stage is experienced as illumination, as we aban­ don error for the truth. Thereafter, the closer we come to the truth that God is, the more the soul feels that it is entering a deeper and deeper darkness. So Moses passes from light (phos—­the experience of the Burning Bush), into the cloud (nephele—­as he begins the ascent of Mount Sinai) to thick darkness (gnophos—­on top of the mountain). Even the very term contemplation (theoria) is abandoned by Gregory when he comes to speak of the third stage, union with God in love: sight is a misleading analogy or metaphor for the soul’s experience of closeness to God. The sense of entering darkness, of going beyond one’s own powers, is one that Gregory sometimes expresses as a kind of spiritual vertigo. For instance, in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, he says: And though the mind in its restlessness ranges through all that is knowable, it has never yet discovered a way of comprehending eternity in such wise that it might place itself outside of it, and go beyond the idea of eternity itself and that Being which is above all being. It is like someone who finds himself on a moun­ tain ridge. Imagine a sheer, steep crag, of reddish appearance below, extending into eternity; on top there is this ridge which looks down over a projecting rim into a bottomless chasm. Now imagine what a person would probably experi­ ence if he put his foot on the edge of this ridge which overlooks the chasm and found no solid footing nor anything to hold on to. This is what I think the soul experiences when it goes beyond its footing in material things, in its quest for that which has no dimension and which exists from all eternity. For here there is nothing it can take hold of, neither place nor time, neither measure nor any­ thing else; it does not allow our minds to approach. And thus the soul, slipping at every point from what cannot be grasped, becomes dizzy and perplexed and

15  Homily XI on the Song (From Glory to Glory, 247).

Eros and Mysticism  47 returns once again to what is connatural to it, content now to know merely this about the Transcendent, that it is completely different from the nature of the things that the soul knows.16

His Homilies on the Song Gregory, then, sees the union between the soul and God as a union in which the soul lets go of all that can make sense and ventures on an infinite quest of love that can never be satisfied: it is a continual reaching forward into the Infinite that God is: The soul, having gone out at the word of her Beloved, looks for Him but does not find Him. She calls on Him, though He cannot be reached by any verbal symbol, and she is told by the watchman that she is in love with the unattainable, and that the object of her longing cannot be apprehended. In this way she is, in a certain sense, wounded and beaten because of the frustration of what she desires, now that she thinks that her yearning for the Other cannot be fulfilled or satisfied. But the veil of her grief is removed when she learns that the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfilment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent. Thus the veil of her despair is torn away and the bride realizes that she will always discover more and more of the incomprehensible and unhoped for beauty of her Spouse throughout all eternity. Then she is torn by an even more urgent longing, and through the daughters of Jerusalem she communicates to her Beloved the dispositions of her heart. For she has received within her God’s special dart, she has been wounded in the heart by the point of faith, she has been mortally wounded by the arrow of love. And ‘God is love.’17

Here, it seems to me, Gregory develops Origen’s doctrine of the spiritual senses in an extraordinarily interesting way. Origen, we have seen, develops this doctrine as a kind of ‘psychology of the doctrine of theologia conceived as the highest degree of the spiritual life’, as Karl Rahner once put it.18 Gregory’s development of this doctrine amounts to a reflection on the very notion of perception. For the Greeks, sight—­for Plato the ‘keenest of the senses’19—is the paradigm of all the senses: seeing is the real way of perceiving; the other senses are imperfect ways of seeing, so to speak. Consequently understanding—­intellectual perception—­is regarded as a kind of intellectual ‘seeing’. It is not difficult to deduce what is going on behind all this. Sight is the sense that gives the greatest sense of objectivity in 16  Comm. on Eccles. 7 (From Glory to Glory, 127). 17  Homily XII on the Song (From Glory to Glory, 270 f.). 18  Quoted in my Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Clarendon Press, 1981), 68 f. 19  Phaedrus 250D; cf. Republic VI:508B.

48  Selected Essays, VOLUME II what is perceived, and gives us the greatest sense of control: we see things at a distance; we can control our encounter with them. Understanding, as intellectual ‘sight’, takes over these characteristics: it is objective; what we understand we can begin to control. But for Gregory, intellectual ‘seeing’—theoria—­is no longer pos­ sible in the darkness, gnophos, where God is encountered, and so with every encouragement from the Song of Songs, he turns to the other senses, smell, taste, touch (not hearing, especially) to characterize the experience that takes place in the darkness. It is an experience of immediacy and presence, which is undeniable but very difficult to objectify (just as smells and tastes are very hard to objectify): [The Soul] is encompassed by a divine night, during which her Spouse approaches, but does not reveal Himself. But how can that which is invisible reveal itself in the night? By the fact that He gives the soul some sense of His presence, even while He eludes her clear apprehension, concealed as He is by the invisibility of His nature.20

For Gregory, the Song of Songs is about the soul’s quest of love for the invisible and unknowable God, who reveals himself by his presence and by transforming the soul into himself in a quite unobjectifiable way. God becomes known to the soul not as he is in himself—­something that is literally unknowable—­but in the power of his presence, which transforms the soul into what he is through grace and virtue. So Gregory speaks of the bridegroom in the Song smelling the spike­ nard that the bride wears between her breasts and says: I think that the Word teaches us that by His very nature He transcends the entire order and structure of the created universe, that He is inaccessible, intangible and incomprehensible. But in His stead we have this perfume within us distilled from the perfection of our virtues; and this imitates in its purity His essential incorruptibility, in its stability His immutability, and in all the virtues we possess we represent His true virtue, which as the prophet Habakkuk says, covers all the heavens.  (Hab. 3:3)21

In these two brief sketches I hope to have shown something of the way in which the themes of eros and mysticism are developed by the early Christian Fathers by means of meditation on the Bible’s allegory of love: the Song of Songs. But I hope I have shown, too, how logos and dogma are part of eros and mysticism for the Fathers, how, if eros is a striving beyond what can be understood—­logos, so to speak—­it is a striving that accepts and transcends what can be understood, what has been revealed, rather than something detached from understanding 20  Homily XI on the Song (From Glory to Glory, 248). 21  Homily III on the Song (From Glory to Glory, 164).

Eros and Mysticism  49 al­together. But perhaps what is most striking is the way in which dogma and mys­ ticism interrelate: how it is dogma itself—­the dogmas of the Trinity and creating out of nothing, together with, as we would discover if we had time to go into Gregory’s mysticism in more detail, the dogma of the incarnation—­how it is dogma itself that lends to Gregory’s mysticism a greater tentativeness, a greater sense of a mystery transcending human understanding, than we seem to find in Origen. But in both Origen and St Gregory we find an attempt to develop the allegory of love that makes love and its purification the very heart of the Christian understanding of God.

5

The Image of Heloise in English Literature More perhaps than any other woman of the Middle Ages Heloise has appealed to later ages. The story of her influence is long and varied: in her huge doctoral thesis, Héloïse dans l’histoire et dans la légende,1 Charlotte Charrier traced, both in general and in meticulous detail, the several stages of the legend of Heloise, from la très sage Héloïse of the Middle Ages, through la héroine galante et précieuse of the seventeenth century, and l’abbesse gémissante of the eighteenth, to la grande sainte de l’amour of the nineteenth century, enshrined with her lover Peter Abelard in their joint tomb—­autel consacré à l’amour—­in the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, after which she succumbs to the érudition et grivoiserie of scholars and fin-­ de-­siècle littérateurs. Mme Charrier traces Heloise’s image and influence in French literature for the most part, but as Etienne Gilson once remarked, ‘en vérité la littérature anglaise a mieux honoré que la nôtre le mémoire d’Héloïse et d’Abélard’.2 In saying that, Gilson had in mind especially the presentations of Heloise in Alexander Pope’s poem, ‘Eloïsa to Abelard’, in George Moore’s novel, Héloïse and Abélard and in Helen Waddell’s novel, Peter Abelard. This paper is devoted to looking at the image of Heloise in these three works, and to asking some questions about the relationship between Heloise and her reputation. But first we need to remind ourselves of the story of Heloise and Abelard. The source for our knowledge of the story is a series of letters written by Abelard and Heloise about fifteen years after the events to which they relate, when Abelard had become abbot of the abbey of St-­Gildas in Brittany and Heloise abbess of the Benedictine community of Le Paraclet on the Seine, way up beyond Paris in the county of Blois, the buildings of which had been built by Abelard and to which Heloise had gone with her nuns after their expulsion from Argenteuil. I shall assume that the collection of letters is genuine;3 not that doubts have not been raised about them from time to time over the last couple of centuries, but the

1 Charlotte Charrier, Héloïse dans l’histoire et dans la légende (Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1933). 2 E. Gilson, Héloïse et Abélard. Études sur le moyen âge et l’humanisme (J. Vrin, 1938). 3  All quotations are taken from Betty Radice’s excellent translation: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Penguin Classics (Penguin, 1974). (= Letters)

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0006

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  51 replies to such doubts—­notably by Etienne Gilson and more recently, to more recent doubts, by Peter Dronke4 seem to me convincing. The first of these letters is a long letter of consolation written by Peter Abelard to an unknown friend. Abelard consoles his friend by painting a gloomy picture of his own misfortunes—­ it is called Historia calamitatum, a history of misfortunes—­amongst which he counted his entanglement with Heloise. Heloise came across this letter—­not, perhaps, by accident—­and the reading of it provoked a letter to Abelard in which she says: ‘Why don’t you write me a letter of consolation? Have I not a right to your support and comfort?’ Abelard’s reply is a bit feeble: he says he did not think she needed any consolation as for all he knew she was a highly regarded abbess, one to whom others turned for consolation rather than in need of it herself. Heloise’s reply disillusions him, telling him that there has been no inner conversion on her part, that her whole monastic vocation is an act of obedience, not to God, but to him, Abelard, her husband, and therefore hypocritical. This at last provokes a real response from Abelard: he presents all that has happened to them as a just punishment from a merciful God who is calling them to himself. He tries to direct Heloise’s eyes away from himself to Jesus’ love for her, and begs her to respond to this love, so that at least they may look forward to being united in heaven. Heloise’s reply to that is to say that she will, yet again, obey him, and shut up, but can they write about something else? Then begins the bulk of the correspondence (and probably the reason why it was preserved) which is about how best to adapt Benedict’s rule for monks to the needs of women religious. I have dwelt a little on the nature of our sources for the story of Heloise and Abelard because it does bear directly on what we can hope to draw from them. If deeply felt—­and they are—­these letters are also highly stylized, and if we forget that, we are likely to be misled. For instance, in the Historia calamitatum Abelard writes about his affair with Heloise as a misfortune. That is how he is bound to write about it in that context: but we cannot draw from that alone the conclusion that that is all it meant to him. What is the story these letters tell us? Abelard was born at Le Pallet in Brittany. He was the eldest, but gave up his inheritance in favour of his brothers and went in search of learning. He was brilliant, very sharp-­witted, and not averse from making fools of those who were his teachers. He was called a ‘masterless man’ and indeed he never shows any gratitude to those from whom he learnt. He came to Paris, where was the greatest of the cathedral schools—­the forerunners of our universities—­in the early twelfth century and there taught first logic and philosophy and later theology. By 1117, he was the most popular teacher in Europe and getting on for 40 years old. It was then that he met Heloise. She was the niece of one of the canons of Notre Dame, Fulbert—­otherwise we know nothing about 4 Gilson, Héloïse et Abélard, 11–36; P.  Dronke, ed., Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies, W. P. Ker Lecture, no. 26 (University of Glasgow Press, 1976).

52  Selected Essays, VOLUME II her background—­and already well known (as we learn from the letter Peter of Cluny sent her after Abelard’s death) as something of a prodigy: a clever young lady, fluent in Latin. Abelard presents his dealings with her as a calculated seduction on his part: he arranged with her uncle to live in his house, where Heloise lived, and become her private tutor. They became lovers: truly, for Abelard himself passed from cold seducer to impassioned lover. He neglected his work, he served up old lectures; and instead wrote love-­songs for Heloise, which became popular and were still being sung, he says, at the time he was writing. They have not, however, survived. Fulbert eventually found out, the lovers were separated: and then Heloise discovered that she was pregnant. She told Abelard in an ecstatic, joyful letter, and soon, when Fulbert was away, Abelard had Heloise smuggled out of Paris, disguised as a nun, and sent her to Brittany to stay with his sister, probably called Denise. There Heloise gave birth to their child, a son whom she called Astralabe (or perhaps, Peter Astralabe). Fulbert went out of his mind and so moved Abelard that he offered to make amends by marrying Heloise. (Or at least that is what Abelard says: but part of the reason might well have been that he wanted Heloise where he could still see her, and marriage was the only way he could get her back to Paris.) But, for the sake of his reputation, he wanted the marriage to be kept secret. Fulbert agreed—­but not Heloise. For two reasons: first, that Fulbert would never keep the marriage secret, a secret marriage would be no recompense for a public wrong; but second, and more deeply, because, as far as Heloise herself was concerned, marriage was ultimately incompatible with the life of a philosopher that she wished for Abelard. Abelard belonged to the world, not to her; the domesticity of marriage was incompatible with the contemplative life, understood by her in classical terms as the life of the intellect. If she married him, she would go down in history as one more woman who had brought ruin to a man (along with Eve, Delilah, Solomon’s wives, and Job’s wife, as she spelled it out later). And anyway marriage could add nothing to what they had given each other. She argued (says Abelard) that the name of mistress instead of wife would be dearer to her and more ­honourable for me—­only love freely given should keep me for her, not the constriction of a marriage tie, and if we had to be parted for a time, we should find the joy of being together all the sweeter the rarer our meetings were.5

Heloise expanded on this in their correspondence by saying that she would have preferred to be Abelard’s whore to being Augustus’s empress.6 She bases her argument on the ‘ethic of pure intention’—central to Abelard’s ethical system and to Heloise’s life. The intention with which we act is all-­important. At the level of intention their relationship was perfect, and that was the highest and only im­port­ ant level. So Heloise can say, 5  Radice, trans., Letters, 74.

6  Radice, trans., Letters, 114.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  53 Wholly guilty though I am, I am also, as you know, wholly innocent. It is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime, and justice should weigh not what was done but the spirit in which it is done. What my intention towards you has always been, you alone who have known it can judge.7

Heloise loved Abelard with a pure love, for himself alone, and needed nothing else. Abelard loved Heloise, but his love was mixed with a jealous possessiveness, indeed it seems he never really trusted Heloise, for in the last of the personal letters he can still say, speaking of how God had used their marriage for good, ‘Had you not previously been joined to me in wedlock, you might easily have clung to the world when I withdrew from it, either at the suggestion of your relatives, or in enjoyment of carnal delights’.8 That he could still harbour such thoughts of Heloise is amazing. But nothing Heloise could say made any impression on Abelard, he was insistent, and she bent her will to his as always, only saying, ‘We shall both be destroyed. All that is left us is suffering as great as our love has been’.9 Abelard brought Heloise back from Brittany and they were secretly married in a church in Paris after spending the night there in vigil together. Heloise went back to stay with her uncle. They met rarely and furtively. But as Heloise had predicted, Fulbert did not keep his promise and talked about the marriage. Heloise denied Fulbert’s story and was abused, or even beaten, by him. At that Abelard had Heloise removed to the convent at Argenteuil where she had been educated. There she stayed, wearing the habit of a novice, but not the veil, and there Abelard visited her, and there, at least once, they made love in the refectory as there was nowhere else they could go—­something for which the chastened Abelard reproached himself later. But the idea that Abelard had packed Heloise off to a convent was the last straw for Fulbert, and one night some of his servants, having bribed Abelard’s servant, broke into his room and castrated him. Filled with shame and disgust, Abelard became a monk at the royal abbey of St-­Denis, just north of Paris, not before however having required Heloise to become a nun at Argenteuil: something she did willingly enough, because Abelard commanded it, not because she wanted to. Heloise took the veil, with a verse from Lucan’s Pharsalia on her lips, casting herself in the role of Pompey’s Cornelia, ready to sacrifice her life for her husband. Abelard did not last long at St-­Denis. The monks there might well have expected to find him indulgent towards their monastic laxity—­as well as being something of a catch for the monastery as one of the most famous teachers in Europe—­but not a bit of it: Abelard took the monastic life seriously and was crit­ ic­al of the state of affairs at St-­Denis. Eventually he left and founded a kind of hermitage at Le Paraclet. Still later he became abbot of St-­Gildas de Rhuys and there too made himself unpopular with his monks because of his rigour. It was when he was there that he heard that the nuns of Argenteuil had been turned out 7  Radice, trans., Letters, 115 f. 9  Radice, trans., Letters, 74.

8  Radice, trans., Letters, 149 (italics mine).

54  Selected Essays, VOLUME II by his old enemies from St-­Denis. He hastened to make Le Paraclet available to them, and Heloise moved there with her nuns (for she had become prioress of Argenteuil) and became abbess of the new foundation. It was shortly after that that the correspondence was written from which we know of the story of Heloise and Abelard. In these letters, as we have seen, Abelard reveals himself as repentant of his past entanglement with Heloise. Not so Heloise! Far from being repentant, it is because of her love for Abelard that she became a nun, and because of her love that she has remained a nun. The bliss that they knew together for so short a time—­for it was bliss to Heloise still—­remained with her. She repents of their marriage, a marriage she had never wanted, because that marriage had destroyed, so she thought, her beloved, her Abelard. But she cannot repent of their love, nor of how they expressed their love. ‘How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires?’ And she goes on: In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—­they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them ­awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word. In my utter wretchedness, that cry from a suffering soul could well be mine: ‘Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of the body doomed to this death?’ Would that in truth I could go on: ‘The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord’.10

We are concerned with Heloise and it is a real question whether we can go any further than this. Abelard replied to the letter from which we have just quoted, and in her reply to that Heloise says that she will obey him and write no longer about what Abelard has called ‘her old perpetual complaint’:11 thus in writing at least I may moderate what it is difficult or rather impossible to forestall in speech. For nothing is less under our control than the heart—­having no power to command it we are forced to obey . . . I will therefore hold my hands

10  Radice, trans., Letters, 132 f.

11  Radice, trans., Letters, 137.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  55 from writing words which I cannot restrain my tongue from speaking; would that a grieving heart would be as ready to obey as a writer’s hand!12

And then they go on to monastic matters. But did Heloise ever change? The passage just quoted does not suggest that she had by then, and there is no later evidence: Heloise’s letter to Peter of Cluny after Abelard’s death and the interment of his body in the chapel of Le Paraclet is quite formal and quite unrevealing.13 Most modern scholars seem to think that Abelard’s words did at last reach Heloise’s heart; some even suggest that nothing else would have made sense to any of their contemporaries, and that the very preservation of the correspondence indicates that Heloise at last followed Abelard by her conversion. If that were the point of the correspondence, then it would surely have been made more explicit. And as to what contemporaries could or could not have thought, Peter Dronke’s W. P. Ker Lecture proves that the medieval mind was broader than we might think. On this particular point—­of Heloise’s conversion—­the Carmen ad Astralabium contains these lines: This is the burden of complaint of our Heloise, whereby she often says to me, as to herself, ‘If I cannot be saved without repenting of what I used to commit, there is no hope for me. The joys of what we did are still so sweet that, after delight beyond measure, even remembering brings relief ’.14

The Carmen consists of verses written by Abelard to his son, Astralabe. If they are genuine, then they prove that, some years after their correspondence, Abelard still found Heloise unrepentant. If they are not genuine, then they prove that even later, presumably (and Heloise outlived Abelard by twenty years) the idea of an unrepentant Heloise was certainly thinkable by her contemporaries, and indeed thought. That, I hope, puts us in a position to turn now to the image of Heloise found in Pope, George Moore, and Helen Waddell and see how much Heloise has inspired their understanding of her, and how much their expectations have influenced their vision of her. We should, however, be clear that we are not really dealing with equals in this. Only Helen Waddell had access to the original correspondence and used it, and—­ even more important—­had a deep enough understanding of much else that was written in the early twelfth century to be able to see it in context. George Moore knew a lot, though how much he relied on the original text of the letters and how much he allowed himself to be influenced by the translations into French and English then available—­all pretty free and some little more than paraphrases—­is 12  Radice, trans., Letters, 159. 13  Radice, trans., Letters, 285. 14  Text of Carmen ad Astralabium, in Dronk, ed., Abelard and Heloise, 43–5; trans. 15.

56  Selected Essays, VOLUME II hard to say, as his own imagination is so busily at work. With Pope we can be sure he had not looked at the Latin—­his poem was published a year before (1717) the first English edition of the original: he relied on the very free English version by John Hughes (1713), itself a translation of a French paraphrase. Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’15 fits snugly into Mme Charrier’s characterization of the eighteenth-­century’s view of Heloise as l’abbesse gémissante. In the poem Heloise addresses Abelard, and behind it we can detect both of the personal letters she wrote to him: mainly the first, although supplemented by parts of the second letter, in particular her account of how alive her love for Abelard still is. The imagery in which Heloise’s words to Abelard are clothed is wholly that of the eighteenth century. There is a good deal about melancholy: But o’er the twilight groves and dusky caves, Long-­sounding [a]isles, and intermingled graves, Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-­like silence, and a dead repose.

The understanding of the monastic life is one of death, the burial of living human beings in dark cloisters, away from the world. Pope reaches for the imagery of the Vestal Virgin to underline this, recalling the fate of the Vestal Virgin who, if unfaithful, was buried alive, but who, if she accepts her living death, can find in that a kind of ethereal serenity: How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d . . .

The combination of deathly gloom and idealized serenity in this picture of the religious life is a long way from the very practical and down-­to-­earth approach we find in Heloise’s third letter to Abelard, in which she outlines the ways in which the Rule of St Benedict falls short of the actual situation of women religious. But the real interest of Pope is in Heloise and her love for Abelard. And here, it seems to me, he keeps close to what Heloise actually says in her letters: Yet here for ever, ever must I stay; Sad proof how well a lover can obey! . . .  Ev’n here, where frozen chastity retires, Love finds an altar for forbidden fires. I ought to grieve, but cannot what I ought; 15  G.  Tillotson, ed. with introduction, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 2 (Clarendon Press, 1940), 291–350.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  57 I mourn the lover, not lament the fault; I view my crime, but kindle at the view, Repent old pleasures, and solicit new; Now turned to heaven, I weep my past offence, Now think of thee, and curse my innocence. Of all affliction taught a lover yet, ‘Tis sure the hardest science to forget!

That catches fairly closely Heloise’s sense, expressed in her second letter to Abelard, of the need to repent and yet its impossibility for her. Even when Pope goes beyond anything Heloise actually says in her letters, it is difficult not to think that he has still caught the tone of the cry of her heart. Come! with thy looks, thy words, relieve my woe; Those still at least are left thee to bestow. Still on that breast enamour’d let me lie, Still drink delicious poison from thy eye, Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be prest; Give all thou canst—­and let me dream the rest. Ah no! instruct me other joys to prize, With other beauties charm my partial eyes, Full in my view set all the bright abode, And make my soul quit Abelard for God.

Pope certainly catches the tornness of Heloise’s soul, drawn irrevocably to Abelard, yet begging from him a remedy. But if anything, it is the way she asks for this remedy, in terms of quitting Abelard for God (what she actually says is that she wants a remedy that accepts that her weakness is irremediable), that sits ill on her lips, rather than her impassioned plea to the castrated Abelard, for all that there is nothing explicitly of the latter in anything she wrote. Or are we being too indulgent to Pope, too bewitched by his verse? Some scholars would have us see the ‘romantic’ Heloise as something that belongs to a different and later period in the development of Western sensibility. Ideas of romantic love were not current at the beginning of the twelfth century: the romantic aura that surrounds Pope’s Heloise was something neither she nor Abelard could have been conscious of. Clearly there is nothing at all romantic about Abelard’s expressed attitude towards his affair with Heloise. But Heloise? Sir Richard Southern insists that it was the same with her: ‘in describing the act of sexual intercourse, whether in marriage or  otherwise, she too would use the vocabulary of drains and sewers’.16 Yes, as Abelard reports her arguments against their marriage in the Historia calamitatum, 16  In his ‘The Letters of Abelard and Heloise’, in R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Blackwell, 1970), 86–104, at 94.

58  Selected Essays, VOLUME II but not, I think, in her second letter to Abelard, quoted earlier: there she speaks rather of amantium voluptates dulces. Most of the metal from which Pope coined his poem especially when he is expressing Heloise’s heart, rather than setting the scene—­seems to me honest metal. Oh happy state! when souls each other draw, When love is liberty, and nature, law: All then is full, possessing, and possest, No craving Void left aking in the breast: Ev’n thought meets thought ere from the lips it part, And each warm wish springs mutual from the heart. This sure is bliss (if bliss on earth there be) And once the lot of Abelard and me.

Pope’s is a short poem, but George Moore’s novel Héloïse and Abelard is enormous: much has to be supplied, and supplied from Moore’s imagination. The story of Heloise and Abelard that we sketched at the beginning is freely embroidered. Heloise is given noble—­and romantic—­parents: her mother married, for love, a man beneath her though of no mean birth. It is his death in the crusades that consigns Heloise to the care of her uncle Fulbert, who has her sent to Argenteuil to be educated. He sees nothing of his niece till one day his conscience pricks him and he sends for Heloise to come and stay with him. He dreads the disturbance he fears she will cause to his delight in books—­for him, the pagan classics, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, and so on—­but instead he finds Heloise a more than competent Latinist, though familiar as yet only with Christian Latin authors. Fulbert introduces her to the classical Latin writers: and much of Moore’s picture of Heloise finds its development here. The story of Abelard is embroidered too. In the Historia calamitatum Abelard says that after he had himself been teaching for a while, he fell ill through overwork—­doubtless he had a nervous breakdown and went home and for some years was absent from France. (There is no mystery about that way of putting it, for Brittany was a duchy, independent of France.) Moore fills in these years by having Abelard become a gleeman—­a jongleur—­in the service of a trouvère, Comte de Rodeboeuf. By means of this device, Moore is able to expand on what is no more than a tantalizing hint in the story of Abelard and Heloise: Abelard’s mention that he wrote love-­songs for Heloise in the early days of their love. That hint is expanded into episodes in Abelard’s life when he plays a leading role in the growth of the French love-­song with the troubadours and trouvères, into stories that Abelard tells Heloise of his days as a jongleur—­stories drawn from the songs of the troubadours: one of his sources is Flamenca, a detail betrayed by the names of the servant-­maids of Flamietta, as Flamenca becomes; and from stories about the troubadours: the account of

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  59 Bernard of Ventadour’s youth—­one of the greatest of the troubadours—­is retold at one point. But all this serves a further purpose: for the linking of Abelard with the troubadours provides a romantic aura for his love-­affair with Heloise—­it is placed in the context of the amour courtois of the twelfth century, as George Moore understands it. The other thing Moore does to the story of Heloise and Abelard is not so much embroidery as sheer falsification. Instead of Heloise taking the veil at Argenteuil in obedience to Abelard after his castration and the shame and disgust that he felt at it, Heloise instead takes the veil willingly, as part of a scheme they had planned together, whereby Heloise would become a nun and Abelard a priest, so that once Abelard had established himself as a priest and teacher Heloise could leave her convent and live with him as his concubine. But after becoming a nun at Argenteuil, Heloise hears nothing of Abelard for years—­ and in particular, nothing of his emasculation—­and waits and waits for Abelard in growing despair. Just as the nuns are expelled from Argenteuil she learns from Abbot Suger of St-­Denis of Abelard’s emasculation, but refuses to believe it. Hearing of their expulsion from Argenteuil, Abelard goes in search of Heloise and finds her and her nuns begging their living in Paris. He offers them Le Paraclet, deserted since his departure for St-­Gildas, as a convent. At that meeting Heloise learns from his own lips of Abelard’s emasculation and his consequent decision to become a monk, is plunged into utter despair, and is only prevented from committing suicide by Abelard’s happening upon her almost in the act. The novel ends with their setting off for Le Paraclet together. All of this makes one want to despair altogether of George Moore’s treatment of Heloise and Abelard, and I think it will be best to draw a veil over it. But it still leaves us with two things to look at: the evocation of the troubadours and the ideal of amour courtois as a context for Heloise and Abelard’s love, and what Moore makes of Heloise’s encounter with the pagan Latin classics. Well, to start off with, the involvement of Abelard with the trouvères is pure Irish blarney. There were no trouvères in northern France in the first quarter of the twelfth century. True enough the first of the troubadours (the originals, found in southern France from Bordeaux across to Provence; the trouvères were their, somewhat later, imitators)—Guillaume of Aquitaine and Poitiers—­flourished then: but even George Moore didn’t have the nerve to pack Abelard off to Provence! The love-­ songs that Abelard wrote for Heloise were, we may be sure, in Latin, not French, and so all the splendid and interesting stuff George Moore makes of Abelard as an early protagonist of the vernacular is imagination, too. Nonetheless, the troubadour interest provides the novelist with material for love-­songs for Abelard to sing to Heloise, and he conveys their haunting beauty splendidly in English: In the orchard and beneath a hawthorn-­tree The twain lie hand on hand and knee to knee

60  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Until the watchman cries, the planets flee, Ah God! Ah God! the dawn! it comes so soon.17

Another thing we might wonder about is whether the ideal of amour courtois—­ even if anachronistic in northern France in the first decade of the twelfth century—­does provide a true romantic aura for the love-­affair of Heloise and Abelard. The formal account of amour courtois, as presented, say, by Andreas Capellanus, is of the love of a knight for a lady who is the wife of another. The lady imposes on her knight devoirs which he fulfils, and she rewards him with the sight of her, or a kiss, a caress, and ultimately, the asag, a night together naked extremo praetermisso solatio, as Andreas puts it, without the final solace (of sexual union).18 That is certainly not George Moore’s picture of the love of the troubadours, and if it were, it would not be at all appropriate to Heloise and Abelard. Heloise was no grand lady, but a young girl, and there was nothing restrained and tantalizing about her love for Abelard. Scholars are apt to take the canons of amour courtois very seriously indeed, and if they are right, Moore has distorted history for the sake of fiction. But not all scholars would disagree with George Moore. Henri-­Irenée Marrou, in his book on the troubadours, emphasizes the artificiality of Andreas Capellanus’s account and also his anxiety not to suffer condemnation by the Church (not that he was successful in that: his De Amore was condemned by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, in 1277, the same year that Aquinas suffered condemnation, and by the same bishop!), and contrasts his view of amour courtois with what he finds in the genuine songs of the troubadours (especially Flamenca, one of Moore’s sources, which contains the only actual account of asag—­a mutual love of two people for each other alone rather than for what they possess or represent, a love that is equal and where each seeks the other’s delight. That would fit Heloise’s love for Abelard, if not his love for her.)19 In the next century Jean de Meun, in his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, finds a place in it for la très sage Héloise. But although the Roman de la Rose itself is inspired by the ideals of amour courtois, that is less true of Jean de Meun’s continuation. He makes use of Heloise’s argument against marriage, which chimes in with that ideal, but his admiration for Heloise is not so much because she suits his purposes as it is a genuine admiration for her love for Abelard. ‘I do not believe, by my soul,’ he says, ‘that there’s ever been such a woman since’.20 But what is most interesting in George Moore’s picture of Heloise is found in the early chapters when Heloise, first with Fulbert and later with Abelard, 17  George Moore, Heloïse and Abélard (Heineman, 1921; 4th impression, 1928), 139. 18  Andreas Capellanus, De Amore, I.471; in Andreas Capellanus, On Love, Trojel’s text (1892) with trans. by P. G. Walsh (Duckworth, 1982), 180. 19 H.-I. Marrou, Les troubadours (Editions du Seuil, 1971; originally published under the pseudonym of Henri Davenson), 151–63, esp. 153 f. 20  On Jean de Meun, see Dronke, ed., Abelard and Heloise, 28 f.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  61 dis­covers the pagan Latin authors. It is Vergil especially who floods her soul, and with him she discovers the beauty of the world. She stood for a long time looking at the landscape before her, wondering at the leaves. One after another the leaves, faded, discoloured, detached themselves from the stems, fluttered and fell into the stream and were borne away. And turning her eyes from the willows to the fields, she noticed how quiet and reposeful they were, as if weary and glad to dream a little while before the white oxen came forth again to turn them into tilth, preparing them for the sower who would come after the plough. The death of the year, she said, just as Virgil described it a thousand years gone by. A year dies every year and is born again, and that for ever and ever. Her eyes followed the clouds, bringing as they passed over the sun a little dimness that she welcomed, and while admiring the fields she asked herself how it was that she had never before perceived how beautiful they were, though she had been looking at them ever since she returned from Argenteuil, the same fields under different aspects and signs, always beautiful under dark skies or somnolent blue. It was Virgil who opened her eyes and gave her sight to see the world and remembrance of much that she had seen and almost forgotten (she had seen without thinking), and now recalling the great grey valley of the Seine, and the river looping through it, with poplar-­trees stark against the sky, she fell to thinking that for six years she had lived in Argenteuil without seeing anything but wide spaces of earth and sky.

And a little further on: If it had not been for Virgil I should only have known the story of the world as told in relations of martyrdoms and miracles, and have seen the world only in relics of the saints. But he unsealed my eyes, and by night and day the skies and seas will be beautiful to me, and along the coasts that the galleys drove against in their flight from smoking Troy I shall see wreckage and Dido, the unfortunate Queen whose lover the gods raped from her, Aeneas having been chosen by them for their fateful purpose.21

Heloise’s soul is shaped, for George Moore, by her experience of beauty, of ­natural beauty, of tragic beauty, mediated to her by the pagan Latin writers. And it shapes her thoughts on her first encounter with Abelard, when instead of going to gather violets she strays into the cloister at Notre Dame and hears one of his lectures:

21 Moore, Heloise and Abelard, 43 f.

62  Selected Essays, VOLUME II As Abélard spoke these words Héloïse remembered the words of the chorus in Seneca’s Medea: new worlds shall be discovered in the age to come, the imprisoning ocean shall be thrown open till there shall be no land alone, no Ultima Thule.22 George Moore paints his Heloise as a young girl flooded by the experience of pagan Rome—­or part of it, the part that struck the mind of a late-­nineteenth-­ century free thinker, for it is a paganism without religion, a contradiction in terms indeed—­a secular delight in nature and beauty. So, at one point, Heloise says to Abelard: ‘I know not how it is . . . but I never could take any interest in religion.’ ‘Never take any interest in religion?’ he repeated, deeply concerned, for her words seemed to Abelard an avowal of her whole nature.23 Heloise a pagan heroine? Out of obedience to Abelard she took the veil at Argenteuil with some lines from Lucan’s Pharsalia on her lips, casting herself as a Cornelia sacrificing her life for her husband. Her writings are studded with quota­ tions from the pagan classics, but scarcely more so than Abelard’s (and it is he who quotes Vergil—­for George Moore the deepest influence on Heloise—­not she). Heloise does not have much to say about God in her letters: it is Abelard, she says, who knows her heart, not God, and Abelard she obeys, rather than God. There is enough, perhaps, to give colour to the idea of Heloise as a pagan heroine, but it is not exactly the paganism of George Moore. Heloise’s paganism is Stoic—­it is Seneca and Lucan she quotes—­and much of this Stoic paganism is placed in the context of what she has learnt from Jerome. The paganism that Moore sees influencing Heloise—­ a sense of beauty, a sense of nature—­ is indeed something Western culture owes to the pagan classics, especially Vergil, but we have no evidence that Heloise felt it (nor, it may be admitted, that she did not). Helen Waddell’s novel is something quite different—­and quite remarkable. It is the work of a medieval scholar who knew and loved the writers of the Middle Ages, especially the early Middle Ages, the ‘dark’ ages. But she was a scholar who could never separate her heart and her head: there is nothing dry about her scholarship. The men and women she wrote about in her Wandering Scholars and Medieval Latin Lyrics were real men and women for her, whom she loved or hated but was rarely indifferent to. Listen to her writing about the authors of the verses known as the Carmina Burana: It seems not possible that poetry should be so gay as this. These poets are young, as Keats and Shelley and Swinburne were never young, with the youth of wavering branches and running water. They do not look before and after, they make light of frozen thawings and of ruined springs, and if they came in the end to

22 Moore, Heloise and Abelard, 83.

23 Moore, Heloise and Abelard, 144.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  63 write their Ecclesiastes, the man who compiled this anthology has kept record only of their youth.24

Not the style one usually finds in the notes to a work of scholarship. All this applies still more so to her novel Peter Abelard. Helen Waddell loved Peter Abelard—­was in love with him, really—­and in the novel she becomes Heloise. Everything, or almost everything, in the novel is put together from genuine medieval material that Helen Waddell had gathered in her years as a scholar—­ especially in Paris—­preparing the books just mentioned. Indeed the Paris of Peter Abelard is more the Paris she knew in the twenties, imagined back into the Middle Ages, than anything else. Only one character is completely invented, and that is Gilles de Vannes, the gross, easy-­going canon of Notre Dame, friend of Heloise and Abelard, of Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter of Cluny. But he is a happy invention. The novel was long thought of: though published in 1933, it was planned from before the First World War, even long before her first visit to Paris in the early twenties. That she envisaged it as an account of Peter Abelard written by his lover is suggested by a dream she had, and recorded while she was in Paris. It was in June 1924, she had been in Paris about a year and had worn herself out. She was admitted to the Institut Pasteur and after several delirious nights she fell asleep and dreamt: suddenly I was Héloïse, not as I had ever imagined her, but an old woman, abbess of the Paraclete, with Abélard twenty years dead: and I was sitting in a great chair lecturing to my nuns on his Introductio ad Theologiam. It was near the end of the lecture, and I pronounced the benediction, and sat watching them go out, two by two. And one of them, the youngest and prettiest of my nuns for whom I felt some indulgence, glanced at me sideways as she went out, and I heard her whisper to the older sister beside her, ‘Elle parle toujours Abelard’. It stabbed me. And even when the first hurt of it was past, the realization that what was once a glory in men’s minds had become an old woman’s wearisome iteration, I began wondering if it were indeed true: if after all these years I were lecturing on this theology for the sake of now and then naming his name. And from that I began to remember that his theology had been condemned as heresy: and—­for by this time Abelard had done his work upon me and had brought me to some sense of God—­I began to wonder if I had perilled the souls in my charge by teaching them heretical doctrine for the sake of gratifying this ancient lust. And from that there stirred in me again the old dread for Abelard’s own soul. But I remembered that Peter the Venerable had absolved him on his death-­ bed and had sent me a copy of the absolution, signed with his seal: and I rose 24  Helen Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics, 5th edn (Constable, 1948), 332 (originally published 1933).

64  Selected Essays, VOLUME II and went to the ark where the charters of the convent were kept, and took from it the parchment of the absolution: and I sat there hour after hour, fingering the rough edges of the great seal of Cluny in my hands, and finding some dim comfort in it. Then the morning came, and with no sense of transition I was myself, but with full awareness of the other who I had been all the night before: and when the Mother Superior came to see me during the morning, I laughed and said, ‘Ma Mère, I too was an Abbess all last night.’25

But what does Helen Waddell make of Heloise? To be honest it is not easy to say, for she so identifies with her. It might have been easier if she had even written Heloise, the novel she planned to write as a sequel to Peter Abelard: but that, as with much else, was lost in the utter depression that swallowed up the last fifteen or twenty years that she saw of her life. We can see from the passage just quoted that she saw Heloise as eventually coming to a sense of God as Abelard had hoped (and even thinking of her love for him as her ‘ancient lust’): but there is nothing of that in the novel we have which ends with Abelard still at Le Paraclet, several years before the letters were written. Nothing? Well not quite nothing. There are hints of what Heloise is to become, and these hints grow out of the character of Heloise as the novel reveals it. That character is one of utter simplicity: Heloise is one who having given herself to Abelard has given herself wholly and for ever. There is a scene in the novel in which Heloise bursts in upon Gilles only to find with him the abbot of Clairvaux, Bernard (whom Helen Waddell plainly dislikes, as did most of his contemporaries). Gilles notices at once an affinity between them: ‘They both . . . lived and moved in some other life than their own: both had the same inner radiance, the same clear line of cheekbone and jaw.’ Bernard immediately sees Heloise as destined for the religious life and tells her: ‘there is no half-­way house with such as you. Let you once give, you give, I think, for eternity.’ ‘And what, Father,’ said Heloise quickly, ‘if one has already given? If there is no more oil in the lamp?’26 Towards the end of the novel, Gilles recalls that scene to Heloise, now prioress at Argenteuil, and repeats Bernard’s words. She smiled again, the old defiant smile. ‘And I said, “But what if there is nothing left to give?” ’ ‘Then . . . there is nothing, Heloise?’ ‘Nothing . . .’ Heloise replies and she goes on to say that her religious life is all outward pure hypocrisy, nothing is done in it for the love of God.

Gilles reminds her that her reputation is quite other: her love and compassion, her pity for others, is known to all—­the common people regard her as a saint. ‘She 25  From a letter to George Saintsbury, first published as appendix I in Monica Blackett, The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell (Constable, 1973); from a quotation on 220 f. Also printed in Dame Felicitas Corrigan’s fine Helen Waddell: A Biography (Gollancz, 1986), 216. 26  Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard (Reprint Society, 1950; originally 1933), 100 f.

The Image of Heloise in English Literature  65 dropped her head in her hands and was silent for a while. “It is only the happy who are hard, Gilles. I think perhaps it is better for the world if—­if one has a broken heart. One is quick to recognize it, elsewhere . . .” ’ When Heloise had arrived, Gilles—­observant as before—­had noted her face: It was a still face now: the line from the wings of the nose to the side of her mouth should never have been graven so deep. He had seen it graven in a year, the line that comes from a mouth set not to cry. Thank God, it was less deep now than it had been. But the eyes—­it was the eyes that opened the gates of mercy on mankind.27

These closing pages of the novel have a context, and that context is repeated allusion to Abelard’s theory of the atonement: his belief that we are redeemed by God’s love, God’s love manifest in the Passion of Christ.28 Suffering, all suffering, is God’s suffering, a suffering out of love that calls forth from us a response of love. The penultimate chapter of the novel ends on this note, after Thibault and Abelard, in the woods around Le Paraclet, have rescued a rabbit from a trap, but too late: ‘it lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.’ And their thoughts turn to the meaning of suffering and find their rest in the ideal that ‘all the time God suffers. More than we do.’29 And in the last chapter, when Heloise visits Gilles de Vannes, Gilles has just been reading Abelard’s commentary on Romans and the discussion there of the atonement, when she arrives. We have seen earlier that Abelard’s ethic of intention and pure love is Heloise’s life, as she reveals it in the letters. Perhaps here Helen Waddell is suggesting something deeper still: that the kind of love Heloise bore Abelard, a love that would not flinch whatever the suffering, was the kind of love Abelard came to realize that God showed us in Christ, and that it is in such love, and only there, that there is any hope for redemption and mercy for mankind. ‘The eyes that opened the gates of mercy on mankind’ opened Abelard’s eyes to see the face of God in Jesus as the ultimate source of the mercy mankind stands in need of.30 Do we need to conclude? The three pictures of Heloise we have seen are very different, yet all take wing from something in the Heloise we find in her letters 27 Waddell, Peter Abelard, 275–9. 28  For the best recent discussion of Abelard’s doctrine of the atonement, see R. E. Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abelard (Clarendon Press, 1970). 29 Waddell, Peter Abelard, 269. 30  Gilson affirms something similar, though not in his Héloïse et Abélard (cited above). In his earl­ ier La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (J. Vrin, 1934), he said, ‘la doctrine abélardienne de l’amour divin se réduit a ceci, qu’il ne faut pas aimer Dieu comme Abélard aimait Héloïse, mais comme Héloïse aimait Abélard’ (p. 186). Weingart takes Gilson to task over this, arguing that Abelard’s doctrine of disinterested love springs from the originality of his theology of the atonement (The Logic of Divine Love, 191, n. 1): Helen Waddell’s suggestion in the novel seems to support Gilson with Weingart’s own argument!

66  Selected Essays, VOLUME II and Abelard’s account of their love in the Historia calamitatum. And all go beyond what can be recorded on paper, all seek to enter Heloise’ s soul, or—­with Helen Waddell—­to plumb the depths of what love between man and woman can mean, a love in which they can learn not just about each other, or themselves, but something of the love of God that holds each of us in being. And there we pass beyond the province of the historian, beyond, what can be known and proved, and surrender to the mystery of love—­in human relationships, and in God.*31 *  This was written before the controversy over the Epistulae duorum amantium and the suggestion that these are love letters between Abelard and Heloise from the time of their affair, a suggestion now largely abandoned: see David Luscombe, ed., The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Clarendon Press, 2013), xxxii–­xxxiv (discussion of the controversy); Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

6 Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾽ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage

From the fourth century onwards, pilgrimage became one of the best attested forms of Christian devotion. Before that, we are hampered by lack of evidence, though there is a little evidence to suggest that Christians made their way to the Holy Land on what we must regard as pilgrimage in the third century,1 but so long as Christians were a persecuted sect in the Roman Empire it is not likely that pilgrimage was anything but occasional. But from the fourth century onwards, there is ample evidence of pilgrimage, first of all to the Holy Land, then to great centres of Christianity such as Rome and, later Constantinople, and then to what we might call provincial, regional, or even local centres of pilgrimage, of which the most notable—­which we must call the least provincial—­were Seleucia in Isauria, with its shrine of St Thekla, the shrines of saints Kyros and John, and of St Menas in Lower Egypt, the shrine built around the pillar on which St Symeon Stylites had prayed, and—­ a little later but more enduring—­ the shrine of St Demetrios in Thessaloniki. The evidence for such pilgrimage varies: only comparatively rarely, particularly in comparison with the West, do we find literary accounts (what were to be called later, in Greek, προσκυνητήρια) of such pilgrimage, and these mainly relate to the great centres of pilgrimage, especially to the Holy Land. But we are much better provided with material evidence, principally in the form of pilgrimage tokens: cameos, ampullae, reliquaries. Let us begin our reflection on the Church of St Demetrios as a pilgrim shrine with a brief look at the surviving pilgrim tokens from that shrine. Several of these have been recently displayed at exhibitions of Byzantine art held throughout the world. For instance, at the exhibition, The Glory of Byzantium,2 held in New York last year, there were several examples of such tokens. One was a pilgrim’s ampulla (cat. no. 118): made of lead, dated to the thirteenth century, with St Demetrios depicted on one side, and on the other, either St Theodora of Thessaloniki or the Mother of God in an attitude of prayer.  The ampulla would have contained μύρον from the μυρόβλητος icon 1 See E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire ad 312–460 (Clarendon Press, 1982), 4. 2  Catalogue: Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds., The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, ad 843–1261 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0007

68  Selected Essays, VOLUME II of St Demetrios. Such a lead ampulla would have been a token for a pilgrim of quite modest means. Two other exhibits at that exhibition (cat. nos. 116, 117) would have been much more costly: reliquaries in gold and cloisonné enamel. Both of them were enkolpia and had depicted on the front icons of, in one case, St George and, in the other case, St Demetrios—­the icon of St George is a later add­ition, presumably to replace an original icon of St Demetrios that had become detached. But the enkolpia opened up, and inside both of them were icons of a recumbent St Demetrios under a ciborium, as in the shrine at Thessaloniki, and inscriptions that make plain that the enkolpia contained blood and oil from the μυρόβλητος icon of St Demetrios, together with a prayer for protection. It seems very likely that these enkolpia belonged to high-­ranking Byzantine soldiers, who had made a pilgrimage to Thessaloniki to seek the protection of the great defender of the city, St Demetrios. Another similar enkolpion, displayed at the exhibition in New York (cat. no. 108), depicted, also in gold and cloisonné enamel, the two saints Demetrios and Nestor on front and back: it was part of the booty brought back to the West—­by the bishop of Halberstadt!—after the treacherous Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. Other pilgrim tokens that survive are cameos, one of which was displayed in this city last year in the exhibition of Treasures from Mount Athos (cat. no. 9. 13).3 This deep-­blue, nearly circular cameo, depicting St Demetrios with a shield and short lance, is one of around twenty similar cameos made from the same mould, now in museums around the world. Such mass-­produced, glass paste cameos were clearly inexpensive tokens bought by pilgrims at the shrine in Thessaloniki. Just one last example: very much a luxury item, exhibited in the New York last year (cat. no. 36). This was a mini­ ature copy of the shrine of St Demetrios, with a panel with the saints Nestor and Louros, and on the other side a panel with Christ crowning the Emperor Constantine X Doukas and his wife, Eudokia Makrembolitissa; the inscription records all this, and asserts that it is a ‘true image (σαφής τύπος) of the ciborium of the lance-­pierced martyr Demetrios’ and was made for John Autoreianos, a high-­ranking courtier. Originally, this reliquary contained a smaller box, now at the Great Lavra on Mount Athos (and therefore not displayed here last year), which was apparently the real reliquary which fitted inside the silver-­gilt copy of the shrine: its inscription tells us that it contained the sacred blood of the martyr Demetrios, which ‘confirmed John’s divine faith and deep desire’. The catalogue entry makes the plausible suggestion that this reliquary was given to the imperial couple by John after Constantine fell ill in 1066, and entrusted the rule of the empire to his wife, Eudokia, whom Michael Psellos regarded as ‘the wisest woman of her time’. If so, we are to think of John making pilgrimage to Thessaloniki and bringing back the small reliquary, which he presented within the miniature copy

3 Catalogue: Treasures of Mount Athos (Thessaloniki, 1997).

Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage  69 of the shrine, in the hope that the emperor might be healed by the intercession of St Demetrios. But Constantine died the following year. These remaining witnesses to the pilgrimage cult of St Demetrios in the first half of the present millennium (the earliest is the reliquary we have just discussed, which must belong to the 1060s, the others probably belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth century) give us some impression of what was sought by pilgrims: healing and protection from the martyr saint who had so notably protected the city of Thessaloniki from the Slavs and Avars at the end of the sixth and the seventh centuries. The provenance of these relics also yields a little information about who the pilgrims were. The cameos are now all over the world: it is possible that originally they were all taken from Thessaloniki to another part of the Byzantine world. But that is, I think, unlikely: it is more probable that they bear witness to pilgrimage to Thessaloniki from both East and West, as the title our conference suggests. But the reliquary we have just discussed is now in Moscow. By what route it found its way there we do not know, but it reminds us of the links between Thessaloniki and Russia, links that go back to the creation of Slavonic as a literary language and the beginnings of mission to the Slavs by those two sons of this city, Constantine/Cyril and his brother Methodius. The very popularity of the name Dimitry in Russia suggests that Thessaloniki was a place of pilgrimage for Russians. Indeed, the only literary account of pilgrimage to Thessaloniki in medieval times of which I am aware is the account by Ignaty of Smolensk of his pilgrimage to Mount Athos and Thessaloniki in 1405. It is a disappointing account, nothing more than an itinerary;4 but nevertheless it reminds us that the Church of St Demetrios was προσκύνημα ἀνατολῆς καὶ δύσεως καὶ βορρᾶ. Pilgrims came, we have seen, to seek healing and protection at the shrine of St Demetrios, and to take from the shrine his continuing protection: one of the inscriptions prays for the saint’s help in life and in death. But pilgrims came and they went. Pilgrimage is not just the goal, the shrine; it is also the way—­the way there and the way back. These two aspects of pilgrimage are brought out in the different words for pilgrimage in Greek and in Latin. In Greek we say προσκύνημα (or, in Byzantine Greek, προσκύνησις); in Latin the word is peregrinatio. The Greek word points to the pilgrim’s goal: the reverencing or veneration of the sacred place, or relics, to which his pilgrimage leads. But the Latin word points to the state of being a pilgrim: a peregrinus was an alien, a foreigner, someone who did not belong, who was only passing through; the corresponding word in Greek would be ξένος. So in its root meaning peregrinatio corresponds less to the word προσκύνημα than to the word ξενιτεία. We need to understand both these aspects if we are to grasp the nature of pilgrimage. A pilgrim goes somewhere, but to go there he leaves his home, his settled society, he becomes a stranger, a ξένος, in the 4 See George  P.  Majeska, Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Studies, XIX (Washington, DC, 1984), 55.

70  Selected Essays, VOLUME II regions he passes through; at the shrine, the goal of his pilgrimage, he meets ­others who have made themselves ξένοι, he shares with them in his veneration of the saint or the shrine or the place, and then they return, each to their own home, altered by the sacredness they have encountered at the place they have visited.5 The whole process—­the going away and the coming back—­is necessary: you cannot be a pilgrim to your home—­you belong there, there you are not a ξένος. What is the point of becoming a ξένος? We can see this by recalling two passages from the New Testament. First, Christ’s words: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matt. 8:20). The Incarnation was an act of ξενιτεία: in becoming man, Christ entered into a far country, human society fallen and turned away from God; and those who follow him, those who respond to his call to repentance, μετάνοια, follow him into a state of ξενιτεία, a condition in which they are no longer at home in this world. The other passage is from the Epistle to the Hebrews: These all died in faith . . . having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles—­ξένοι καὶ παρεπίδημοι—­on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Heb. 11:13–16)

Living in faith is to acknowledge that you are a ξένος; being a pilgrim is what it is to live by faith, so it follows that physical, spatial pilgrimage is simply to externalize—­to ‘live out’, as we say in English—­the inward reality of what it is to be a Christian, living in faith, following Christ. Setting out from home, the pilgrim moves away from the familiar to the unfamiliar; he learns to see things with new eyes; one can speak of ‘cleansing the doors of perception’,6 so that even familiar things appear in a new light to the pilgrim. That idea of passing to a new place, seeing things in a new light, recalls a phrase that will be familiar to us all: Τῆς μετανοίας ἄνοιξόν μοι πύλας, Ζωοδότα. Each Sunday in Lent we sing those words at Orthros, for each Lent we set out on a journey, treading a path that we can only reach by passing through the gates of repentance. Each Lent, Orthodox Christians are invited to make their own that ξενιτεία that lies at the heart of the monastic life. For pilgrimage is more than spatial pilgrimage—­the journey to another place, a sacred place—­to be a real pilgrimage it must also further that inner journey that we 5  This account of pilgrimage is based on that given by Vincent Turner and Edith Turner in their book, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Basil Blackwell, 1978), though I have not used their technical language. 6  A phrase used by Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 11; the expression is derived from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage  71 make in the course of our life, a journey that we have to begin again and again, as we seek to make our way through the gates of repentance. These are then the two sides of pilgrimage: the place sought out, the shrine, the place where events took place, where physical, historical relics are to be found, where, to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, ‘prayer has been valid’. That is one pole of pilgrimage: it witnesses to the historical events with which Christianity is bound up, preeminently the historical events of the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God, but also the historical events of those in whom the grace of the resurrection was manifest. This historical dimension calls for faith, acknowledgment, reverence, προσκύνησις. But the other pole is the journey we need to make: need to make for us to be able to make a true προσκύνησις of the heart. For this journey works an inner transformation, and involves an inner journey, even more than an outer journey, though the outer journey is often ne­ces­sary. It is the journey of the life of each one of us, and a journey that is pressing—­we must not linger on the way. Early Greek Christians saw a prefiguration of that sense of life as an urgent journey, full of dangers and distractions, in Homer’s Odyssey:7 Odysseus prefigured both Christ, in his journey into a far country to save us, and Christians, in their journey to their distant homeland. Cavafy, in his poem Ἰθάκη, makes the same link, seeing in the Odyssey the journey which is our life. He is perhaps, too, inclined to linger on the way, and to make of the goal a mere pretext for a journey. But nonetheless we make his words ours: νὰ εὔχεσαι νά ᾽ναι μακρὺς ὁ δρόμος γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις. (Pray that your journey may be long, Full of adventures, full of insights.)

7  See Hugo Rahner, ‘Holy Homer’, published in English as Part III of his Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (Burns & Oates, 1963), 283–386.

7 The Theology of the Philokalia In the year 1782, there was published in Venice the first edition of a work called Φιλοκαλία τῶν Ἱερῶν Νηπτικῶν, ‘Anthology of the Sacred Ascetics’, compiled by St Makarios, bishop of Corinth, and St Nikodimos, a monk of the Holy Mountain of Athos. This marked a turning point in Orthodox theology, for it can be argued that all that has been most vital in Orthodox theology over the last couple of cen­ tur­ies has been inspired, or at least touched, by this work. For the Philokalia was part of a movement of renewal within Orthodoxy at the end of the eighteenth century, a movement of renewal that was to be tested in the nineteenth century in the Balkans, as Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania threw off the Ottoman yoke, and that in more propitious conditions inspired literary, philosophical, and theological movements in nineteenth-­century Russia. This movement of renewal ran parallel with similar movements in Western Europe that may loosely be clas­ sified in the term ‘Romanticism’; how much the Philokalic movement shared with these contemporary movements is a subject that is still largely to be explored. In  the twentieth century the inspiration of the Philokalia is perhaps even more striking: the so-­called ‘Paris school’ was both directly, in so far as it embraced Palamism, and indirectly, through its roots in nineteenth-­century Slavophilism and Symbolism (Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Solov´ev), indebted to the Philokalia; and particular theologians, most notably Fr Dumitru Stăniloae, but also Christos Yannaras, Olivier Clément, Paul Evdokimov, and certainly Bishop Kallistos him­ self, display a similar indebtedness. But the influence of the Philokalia has been felt beyond such intellectual circles, and indeed beyond Orthodoxy itself: it has been remarked that the practice of the Jesus Prayer, surely the spiritual heart of the Philokalia, became in the course of the twentieth century more widespread than at any earlier time; and the monastic spirituality of the Philokalia also found a distinctive voice in that century through such as St Silouan and his disciple, Fr  Sophrony, the Romanian monk, Fr Cleopa, and various abbots of the Holy Mountain, such as Fr Aimilianos of Simonpetra, though perhaps the most poign­ ant manifestation of the spirituality of the Philokalia was in the notorious prison camps of Soviet Russia and other countries that fell under the Communist yoke in the twentieth century. Among the many lasting achievements of Bishop Kallistos, one that will per­ haps have the widest influence is his part in producing the first complete English

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0008

The Theology of the Philokalia  73 translation of the Philokalia.1 It is, therefore, especially appropriate that at least one contribution to a volume in his honour should seek to explore something of  the theological vision that the Philokalia both has expressed and con­tinues to inspire. To mention the date 1782 in connexion with the Philokalia is somewhat decep­ tive. The year before, 1781, was the date of the publication of the first edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The significance of that date is clear: in that year Kant declared to the world the principles of his critical philosophy, which was to transform the history of philosophy in the Western world. The year 1781 is the beginning, faltering at first, to be sure, of that influence. Certainly Kant’s critical philosophy can be related to movements in philosophy earlier in the eighteenth century, but its origins prior to 1781 lie essentially in the intellec­ tual biography of the sage of Königsberg. The significance of 1782 in relation to the Philokalia is rather different. The Philokalia is an anthology of theological and ascetical texts, collected and arranged by Makarios and Nikodimos (it seems likely that Makarios had most to do with the collection, and Nikodimos most to do with arrangement). Such a collection of texts belongs to a monastic tradition: a monastic tradition, on the one hand, of very great antiquity, and, on the other, of more immediate provenance. For the collecting of such texts by individual monks is something that most likely goes back to the very origins of Christian monasti­ cism: collections of biblical texts, psalm verses, sayings of notable ascetics, strik­ ing passages from books read. The Philokalia itself contains examples of such collections (most notably, the huge collection ascribed to the otherwise unknown Peter of Damascus, that comprises nearly an eighth of the whole work). To begin with, perhaps, such collections were made by individual monks as an aid to their life of prayer and contemplation: they were texts to meditate upon. Some of these collections may have circulated more widely, among the disciples of a notable master, for example. Such collections paralleled the practice, much in evidence from the fifth century onwards, of compiling collections (florilegia) of passages from the Fathers on theological matters, particularly that most contested theo­ logical issue in the East at that time, the doctrine of Christ. One of the most famous of these collections, which attempted to cover the whole range of Christian doctrine, was St John Damascene’s Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. That collection, like many such collections, took the form of a century, that is, a collection of a hundred chapters or paragraphs. The first, apparently, to 1  G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans from the Greek and ed., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, 4 vols. (out of 5) so far (Faber and Faber, 1979–95). Bishop Kallistos also wrote the article on the Philokalia in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité: vol. 12, part  1 (Beauchesne, 1984), cols. 1336–52, s.v. ‘Philocalie’.

74  Selected Essays, VOLUME II compile such centuries was Evagrios, the disciple of the Cappadocians and the great exponent of the spirituality of the Fathers of the Egyptian desert, where he spent the last dozen or so years of his life. The ‘century’ was a monastic literary genre; with its relatively short chapters, such a century would constitute a con­ venient booklet that a monk could copy for himself and keep by his side. But such cen­tur­ies, or the materials from which the chapters were drawn, could be gath­ ered together, sometimes to produce quite a substantial work, such as the ‘Collection’ (Synagoge) made by Paul of the Constantinopolitan monastery of the Mother of God Evergetis in the eleventh century. So, on the one hand, the Philokalia, as a collection, belongs to an ancient monastic literary genre. But, on the other hand, it belongs to a more defined monastic tradition: that associated with the revival on the Holy Mountain of Athos that began in twelfth century, called ‘hesychasm’. This spiritual movement attracted criticism in the fourteenth century, was defended by Gregory Palamas, and upheld by synods in Constantinople in the 1340s and 1350s. As one goes through the collection of writings in the Philokalia (they are arranged in what is intended to be chrono­ logic­al order), one finds that they converge on works by St Gregory Palamas and his disciples, precursors, and supporters: the Philokalia is a hesychast anthology. At the heart of hesychasm as a mediæval movement (the word ‘hesychasm’ can be used much more widely to denote the form of the monastic ideal that values con­ templative quiet or ἡσυχία) lay the use of the Jesus prayer as a way of achieving prayer of the heart: it is for this reason that I earlier described the Jesus prayer as the spiritual heart of the Philokalia. The very collection constituted by the Philokalia, then, belongs to a tradition, defined both simply as monastic, and more specifically as hesychast. The date 1782 is therefore much less significant that the date 1781 in relation to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is not even the case that 1782 has much significance so far as the precise collection of works comprised by the Philokalia is concerned, as the date 1861 has in relation to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, for instance. This is evident from the fact that the Slavonic Dobrotoliubye, published eleven years later in Moscow, was probably already in the process of translation, when the saints Makarios and Nikodimos published their collection in 1782. They were drawing on an already fairly fixed canon of hesychast works, just as St Païssy Velichkovsky was in his collection. Simply reflecting on the fact of the publication of the Philokalia has forced on our attention the place of tradition in the formation of the work. Tradition, then, is perhaps where we should start in our consideration of the theological vision of the Philokalia. The publication of such an extensive collec­ tion of texts is to make certain claims about the tradition that these writings rep­ resent. This can be put in two ways: first, the selection of texts has the effect of defining the shape of the tradition, and second, the nature of the texts themselves serves to define what is essential about this tradition. In general terms, of course,

The Theology of the Philokalia  75 the tradition claimed by the Philokalia is that of the Fathers. But the notion of patristic authority, the authority of the Fathers, is one that requires some def­in­ ition: which Fathers? And why? Are certain Fathers more important than others? Is there a hierarchy, as it were, among the Fathers claimed as authoritative? The selection presented by the Philokalia suggests certain answers to these questions. At first sight these answers seem strange: where are the great Fathers of Orthodoxy, St Athanasios and St Cyril, and particularly the ‘three great hierarchs and universal teachers’, St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian, and St John Chrysostom? Could it be that the Philokalia is setting aside doctrinal Orthodoxy in favour of ascetic authenticity, for all the Fathers chosen are, as the title of the work indicates, ‘neptic’ Fathers, that is ascetics, those trained in watchfulness or vigilance? That suggestion can be set aside for two reasons. It would not be true to suggest that the saints who compiled the Philokalia, Makarios and Nikodimos, sat light to doctrinal Orthodoxy; St Nikodimos himself shows his concern for correct doctrine both in his collection of and commentary on the Sacred Canons, the Pedalion, or the ‘Rudder’, and, more engagingly, in his commentary on the li­tur­ gic­al canons for the Great Feasts, the Heortodromion. Furthermore, the two Fathers to whom individually most space is devoted in the Philokalia, St Maximos the Confessor and St Gregory Palamas, are two saints who set such great store by doctrinal Orthodoxy as to face persecution, and in the case of St Maximos, mar­ tyrdom, for its sake. Doctrinal Orthodoxy is hardly set aside, then, rather the selection of Fathers in the Philokalia has another motive: to take one directly to engagement with God, leading to deification, that it is the whole point of doctri­ nal Orthodoxy to safeguard. The Fathers mentioned above are omitted, not because what they have to say is unimportant, but because the Philokalia starts from a different starting point, namely, what is required of us in our search for the truth that Orthodoxy enshrines. The Philokalia has a particular purpose, but it presupposes the whole context of Orthodox monasticism, or better, of faithful Orthodox living, especially the Divine Liturgy, in which the mysteries of the faith are proclaimed and celebrated and the faithful offered participation in the divine life through communion in the Precious Body and Pure Blood of Christ. If the texts selected in the Philokalia are not directly concerned with doctrinal Orthodoxy, equally they are little concerned with the sacraments and the sacra­ mental life, and yet both St Makarios and St Nikodimos were fervent advocates of a return to frequent communion on the part of the faithful in the Body and Blood of Christ. Nevertheless, the Fathers selected in the Philokalia represent a particular com­ plexion; if we approach the Fathers through the Philokalia, we enter the world of the Fathers from a particular direction, so to speak. We do not, at first, encounter the great preachers, or the great thinkers, as such (that qualification is necessary, since both Maximos and Gregory Palamas were great thinkers, and Palamas a great preacher); we may later advance to them, but they are not the first we meet

76  Selected Essays, VOLUME II on the way of the Philokalia. We meet first those who have lived the Christian life with an uncompromising directness, we meet those who devoted their lives to prayer and communion with God. Ivan Kireevsky, the Russian intellectual who supported the monks of Optina Pustyn´ in their enterprise of making known in Russian the works of the Fathers, primarily the Fathers of the Philokalic tradition, said of the Fathers that they were ‘eyewitnesses concerning a country they have been to’.2 They are not simply right or eloquent and moving, they speak of what they know, they speak from experience of a country where they have been. It is as such that the Philokalia introduces us to the Fathers. The particular approach of the Philokalia is made clear in one of the shortest (and also one of the latest) pieces included: the ‘Fourteen Chapters on Prayer’3 by Kallistos the Patriarch.4 Kallistos begins his treatise with the words, ‘If you want to learn the truth, take as your example the lyre-­player.’ Note that it is the truth Kallistos is concerned with, even though it is the skill and discipline of the lyre-­ player that he is to evoke. He begins to develop his theme thus: For even here below he inclines his head and gives what is heard the additional force of a song, holding the plectrum in his hand. And as the strings skilfully sound together with one another, the lyre gives out music, and there wells up within the lyre-­player the sweetness of honey.

Kallistos picks up this image of something ‘welling up’ (ἁλλόμενος) within the lyre-­player, and links it with the living water Jesus promised to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. One who wishes to know the truth is like the lyre-­player in that this truth comes from within, from the heart, that we must discover: for she, seeking this water perceived by the senses, found the water of life in herself, welling up within. For as the earth has water naturally and it straightway flows forth, so also the earth of the heart has this water naturally, welling up and pouring forth, that is the fatherly light, which that Adam destroyed through disobedience.

Kalllistos’ example of such water flowing from within is St Ignatios, the bearer of God, the first-­century martyr-­bishop of Antioch:5

2 I. V. Kireevsky, Otryvki, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1861; reprinted Ann Arbor, 1983), 334; cf. 340 (English translation in On Spiritual Unity, A Slavophile Reader, trans. and ed. Boris Jakim and Robert Bird (Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 283; cf. 288). 3  Not reached yet in the English translation referred to above. It can be found in the first edition (Venice, 1782), 1100–2. 4  Either Kallistos I, patriarch in 1350–3, 1355–63, a former Athonite monk who presided over the synod that upheld the hesychasts in 1351, or Kallistos II Xanthopoulos, patriarch in 1397: Bishop Kallistos himself tentatively suggests the latter (‘Philocalie’, 1342). 5  Does this suggest that Kallistos was Kallistos II Xanthopoulos, whose brother was called Ignatios?

The Theology of the Philokalia  77 For just as water flows from an ever-­flowing fountain, so the living water, that wells up, flows from the soul. As was also the case in the soul of the God-­bearing man, Ignatios, which prepared him to say: There is in me no fire that loves mat­ ter, but it is water, active and speaking.6

The discovery of this living water, radiating light within, is a matter of our remov­ ing obstacles within ourselves: it is a matter of discipline, which Kallistos sum­ marizes in terms of ascetic struggle, purifying the intellect so that the divine rays of truth are reflected in it, and bringing calm to the heart, thus making possible prayer in which we are ‘transformed by the ray of the divine light and given shape by the burning fire of the divine spirit’. This purified and transformed state is, however, fragile: ‘the intellect, purified through watchfulness, is easily darkened, if it does not continuously devote itself to the memory of Jesus’: there are still constant distractions, but ‘the soul, wounded with divine love for Christ, follows him as his beloved.’ In fourteen short paragraphs, Kallistos weaves together all the themes of the Philokalia, taking his example the musician playing his lyre, so that the pray-­er is one who turns his life into a song, a love-­song to Christ. The Philokalia, then, points to a particular understanding of tradition: patris­ tic, certainly, but in the sense that these Fathers can become our Fathers, and take us along paths of the Spirit that they know by experience. The purpose of this is, as stated on the title-­page of the Philokalia, that ‘through ethical philosophy, in accordance with praxis and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illuminated and perfected’. In those few words there is packed a wealth of meaning. The Philokalia invites those who use it on a quest, a quest for truth (philosophy). But this quest, as we have seen Patriarch Kallistos makes clear, is not simply a matter of intellectual investigation: it is a quest that involves the whole human person, the whole way in which we conduct our lives (ethical philosophy). What this means is spelt out by talking of ‘praxis and contemplation’, terms that go back to Aristotle, but are here used in the sense they had acquired in monastic use since the fourth century, praxis meaning what we do, mainly in trying to live out our Christian lives and struggle against temptations to compromise, ‘contemplation’ meaning the undistracted, non-­possessive knowledge of reality, pre-­eminently the transcendent reality of God. Praxis, ascetic struggle, prepares the way for con­ templation by purification, and contemplation itself finds its fulfilment in il­lu­ min­ation and ultimately in perfection or union with God or theosis, deification. Such a work would be classed in the West as one of practical piety (albeit monastic), rather than a work of theology: to be placed alongside Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, for example, rather than Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. St Nikodimos’ own interest in works of practical piety such as Scupoli’s Unseen 6  The quotation from St Ignatios is one of the most famous: ‘My love is crucified, and there is not in me any fire that loves matter. It is water, living and speaking in me, saying to me from within: Come to the Father!’ (Romans 7. 2).

78  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Warfare and the Jesuit Pinamonti’s Spiritual Exercises, both of which he translated into Greek, might encourage such a classification. That would be a mistake, and a serious one, for much of the historical importance of the Philokalia lies in the way it has revealed the essential unity of what have come to be called in the West ‘the­ ology’ and ‘spirituality’, a unity that Orthodoxy, at its best, preserved. The first point we might note about the programme of the Philokalia, as stated on the title-­page, is that it concerns the nous, the intellect. That ought, from the perspective of Western theology, to occasion pause for thought, for we have argued that the Philokalia characterizes the patristic tradition as fundamentally experien­ tial. In the West, an emphasis on experience normally entails opposition to the intellect: to quote the Cloud of Unknowing, ‘by love may he [God] be getyn & holden; bot bi thought neither’.7 In the East, on the contrary, it is the nous, the intellect, that comes to know God. This is not a simple contrast, for the Greek word nous embraces a richer concept than the English word ‘intellect’ (which is why the word ‘intellect’ sounds odd in this context in English, and is thus often avoided). Whereas ‘intellect’ can refer simply to the human ability to argue and calculate (as in the notion of an IQ), nous is the means by which the soul ‘aspires to a knowledge that is a direct contact, a “feeling” (sentiment), a touching, something seen. It aspires to a union where there is total fusion, the interpenetration of two living beings’, as Festugière once put it.8 The aetiolated sense of the English word ‘intellect’ reflects our normal experience of intellectual activity: normal, that is, in a fallen world, where the intellect devotes its energies to negotiating the world of the senses, calculating and planning. The Greek word nous still trails clouds of the glory that it is meant to be: that in virtue of which we human beings are created in the image of God, and therefore capable of entering into com­mu­nion with God and, in some sense, knowing him and his creation. This kind of knowledge is con­ templation: simple regarding, beholding, without the necessity of seeking to con­ trol or manipulate. And such contemplation entails trans­form­ation of the one who contemplates: what the Philokalia calls perfection, union, or deification. This is an intensely practical matter. Here again we find ourselves tripping over our words: for us, ‘practical’ is opposed to ‘theoretical’, whereas in the world of the Philokalia what is ‘practical’, that is, a matter of ascetic struggle, prepares the way for theoria, contemplation. To say that this is a practical matter is to say that the way to contemplation is a way to be pursued, not just something to think about. The Philokalia is a manual of practical advice, presented in a host of differing, though related, forms, because the way to contemplation is an intensely personal matter, taking different forms in accordance with the different unique persons that we human beings are. It is intensely personal because contemplation is 7  Phyllis Hodgson, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 6, Early English Text Society, Original Series, no. 218 (Oxford University Press, 1944), 26. 8 A.-J. Festugière, La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, vol. 1, 2nd edn (J. Gabalda et Cie, 1950), 65.

The Theology of the Philokalia  79 another way of talking about the fulfilment of the unique personal relationship existing between each of us and our God, and this fulfilment involves the discov­ ery of ourselves, the discovery of our heart. It is because of this personal dimen­ sion that the Philokalia does not, and was never meant to, stand alone. Throughout the Philokalia, the importance of finding a spiritual father is emphasized, for it is only under such guidance that one has much hope of finding one’s own way through ascetic struggle to contemplation. Wherever the influence of the Philokalia has been felt, it has been accompanied by a renewal of the idea of spiritual father­ hood; that is strikingly true of nineteenth-­century Russia, where the novelty of the renewed institution of starchestvo is palpable in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. This is another aspect of patristic tradition to which the Philokalia provides access: not so much a tradition of the Fathers, as a fatherly tradition, in which fathers help their children to enter into the fruits of their experience. The heart—­the prayer of the heart: these are closely associated with the Philokalia. But such terms are easily misunderstood, especially in the West. It is not the heart in opposition to the intellect; nor is prayer of the heart an emotional prayer involving the feelings (even though one of the signs of true prayer of the heart is, we are told, the gift of tears). It is the heart, as we find it in the Scriptures, particularly the Old Testament, and especially the Psalms: the heart that medi­ tates, desires, pants, is vexed; that has secrets, and is deep; that can be fixed, smit­ ten, and withered like grass, or like wax; that cries out to God; that can be broken and contrite, and made clean. It is the centre of the human person, the source of everything that we are. It is not opposed to the intellect, or rather opposition between the heart and the intellect is a sign—­the sign, the cause, even—­of the fragmented state that we ordinarily experience. In that fragmented state, we no longer live from the centre of ourselves, we have become genuinely ‘eccentric’ beings, lost within ourselves, easily taken unawares by aspects of ourselves of which we are scarcely conscious, or which we have suppressed. Our task in prayer is to unite the intellect and the heart, to find the place of the heart and draw the intellect down into it: there, when the heart has been found and the intellect is devoted to guarding it, true prayer, the prayer of the heart, becomes possible. Our holy fathers, says the unknown author of The Three Methods of Prayer, concentrated wholly on this one task of guarding the heart, convinced that through this practice they would also possess every other virtue, whereas with­ out it no virtue could be firmly established. Some of the fathers have called this practice stillness of heart, other attentiveness, others the guarding of the heart, others watchfulness and rebuttal, and others again the investigation of thoughts and the guarding of the intellect. But all of them alike worked the earth of their own heart, and in this way they were fed on the divine manna.9 9  Palmer et al., trans. and ed., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4, 71.

80  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The theology of the Philokalia is, then, a true theology in that it envisages a genu­ ine understanding of God. But such understanding of God is not, and could never be, an understanding of God in which God becomes a province of human under­ standing: si enim comprehendis, non est Deus.10 It is rather a knowledge of God through genuine participation in God, in which the human person is made whole and reunited, in which the intellect finds the place of the heart, and is able once more to contemplate God. The Philokalia is less concerned with what we know in such contemplation, than with the way back to such contemplative experience. The way of return is arduous, because human beings have so thoroughly become lost in the thicket that creation becomes if it is perceived in detachment from the Creator to whom it owes its being. There would be no return at all, if God had not, in his Son, shared human experience of a fallen world to the point of dying, thereby making death the gateway of life. But not even the mystery of the Incarnation enables human beings to find their way to God unless they them­ selves learn to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’, in William Blake’s phrase.11 Perhaps the most eloquent evocation of the nature of the Philokalic experience is to be found in the introduction to the English translation: ‘Philokalia’ itself means love of the beautiful, the exalted, the excellent, under­ stood as the transcendent source of life and the revelation of Truth. It is through such love that, as the subtitle of the original edition puts it, ‘the intellect is puri­ fied, illumined and made perfect’. The texts were collected with a view to this purification, illumination and perfection. They show the way to awaken and develop attention and consciousness, to attain that state of watchfulness which is the hallmark of sanctity. They describe the conditions most effective for learning what their authors call the art of arts and the science of sciences, a learning which is not a matter of information or agility of mind but of a radical change of will and heart leading man towards the highest possibilities open to him, shap­ ing and nourishing the unseen part of his being, and helping him to spiritual fulfilment and union with God. The Philokalia is an itinerary through the laby­ rinth of time, a silent way of love and gnosis through the deserts and empti­ nesses of life, especially of modern life, a vivifying and fadeless presence. It is an active force revealing a spiritual path and inducing man to follow it. It is a sum­ mons to him to overcome his ignorance, to uncover the knowledge that lies within, to rid himself of illusion, and to be receptive to the grace of the Holy Spirit who teaches all things and brings all things to remembrance.12

10 Augustine, Sermo 117 (PL 38. 663). 11  Cf. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’ : in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (The Nonesuch Press, 1946), 187. 12  Palmer et al., trans. and ed., The Philokalia, vol. 1, 13–14.

8

Theology, Contemplation, and the University Universities have been around for a long time, at least in Western Europe, and over the centuries have undergone many changes.1 Nevertheless, even now, when the pace of change has increased beyond anything known in the past, it might be worth reminding ourselves of the beginnings of the university system, and asking what we might learn now from what was intended then. Then, theology, the sub­ ject I profess, was much more central to the university than it is now, and that change reflects changes in society that are hardly likely to be reversed, nor would one want simply to return to the past, even if it were possible. That is why ‘theol­ ogy’ appears in my title. The presence of the word ‘contemplation’ needs further explanation, which will, I hope, emerge as we proceed. The medieval university emerged in the twelfth century from the monastic and cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages. These schools had preserved elements of the education of classical Latin antiquity after the collapse of the educational system of late antiquity in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the region of what was to become Western Europe slipped from the public administration of the Roman Empire. Bede, in Northumbria, at the beginning of the eighth century was one concerned to equip monastic schools for education, for alongside his exe­get­ ic­al and historical works, he wrote textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, two sub­ jects which, together with dialectic, constituted the trivium, the elementary part of the medieval curriculum, with which the monastic schools were mostly concerned. The trivium enabled one to read and write and think in Latin, providing thereby access to the Scriptures and the liturgy of the Church of the Latin West, and inci­ dentally, also to the Latin classics. Beyond the trivium lay the quadrivium—­music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—­which completed the so-­called liberal arts, artes liberales. Teaching in monastic schools seems to have advanced this far only patchily; some of Bede’s works advance into the quadrivium, with a work on metre (considered part of music) and on the computation of Easter, which involved some knowledge of astronomy. It was this pattern of learning that was inherited by the medieval university. What was the purpose of this learning? In the monastic school, the purpose seems clear enough: to provide monks, for monks had to sing the divine office, 1  Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Durham. Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0009

82  Selected Essays, VOLUME II which involved reading, and be able to make further copies of the Scriptures and liturgical books, and other works as required—­they needed to read and write in Latin. The monastic schools existed to enable monks to fulfil their vocation as monks; and fundamentally that meant to come to know God, who has revealed himself in Scripture and in the Incarnation, to praise him and to love him. That goal could be described as contemplation, contemplatio. The monastic life was often characterized as consisting of several steps, sometimes three or even five, but most commonly four: lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio—­reading, medi­ tation, prayer, and contemplation. The early stages were rooted in the disciplines learnt at school: reading and meditation, this latter meaning, not what it might mean nowadays in the context of Eastern meditation, but rather trying to grasp the significance of what one had read, by pondering over it, thinking about it, relating one passage from the Bible to another (for it was mostly with Scripture that monastic lectio was concerned). This reading, thinking, pondering, ul­tim­ ate­ly led the monk to contemplation: to looking at God, being aware of his pres­ ence. Such contemplation was not thought of as an achievement—­the next step on the ladder, at which you arrived if you were sufficiently diligent—­it was rather a gift, something received. The early stages of reading and meditating prepared the monk to receive this gift, it made him receptive. But beholding God, feeling awareness of his presence, was a gift, not an attainment. The gift could be given without the preparation; God is not limited by human readiness, but such mi­racu­ lous illumination was not normal. Augustine had faced this problem long ago, and remarked that the command to love both God and our neighbour entails that we shall want to pass on the fruits of contemplation to our fellow human beings, that is, we shall be inspired to teach, which would make little sense if we had never had to learn in the first place; as he put it, ‘for charity itself, which holds humans together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if humans could teach nothing to each other’.2 In the cathedral schools, from which the university evolved, this pattern of learning was detached from the immediate practical context of the monastery—­a process carried still further by the university—­but the pattern itself was not fun­ damentally altered. I would like now to explore a little what this understanding of learning entails. What we have looked at in its immediate monastic context has a history that goes back to the roots of Western culture, which perhaps gives another reason for heeding what it tells us about the nature of knowledge and learning. Behind the pattern of monastic learning lies the distinction between the active life and the contemplative life, the βίος πρακτικός and the βίος θεωρητικός, a dis­ tinction expressed in this form as early as Aristotle, though much older: Plato was

2 Augustine, De Doctrine Christiana, prol. 6.

Theology, Contemplation, and the University  83 certainly aware of the distinction, too.3 For Aristotle, this was the distinction between the life of worldly activity—­the world of business and commerce, the world of farming and manufacture, the world of everyday life—­and, in contrast, the world of thought. The active life is concerned with doing things, and the moral and political questions that this entails; the contemplative life is concerned with beholding things. The word θεωρία is derived from a verb meaning to look, or to see: for the Greeks, knowing was a kind of seeing, a sort of intellectual seeing. Contemplation is, then, knowledge, knowledge of reality itself, as opposed to knowing how: the kind of know-­how involved in getting things done. To this con­ trast between the active life and contemplation there corresponds a distinction in our understanding of what it is to be human between reason conceived as puz­ zling things out, solving problems, calculating, and making decisions—­referred to by the Greek words φρόνησις and διάνοια, or in Latin by ratio—­and reason con­ ceived as receptive of truth, beholding, looking—­referred to by the Greek words θεωρία or σοφία (wisdom), or νοῦς (intellect), in Latin intellectus. Augustine expressed this distinction by using scientia for the kind of knowledge attained by ratio, and sapientia, wisdom, for the kind of knowledge received by intellectus. Human intelligence operates at two levels: a basic level concerned with doing things, and another level concerned with simply beholding, contemplating, know­ ing reality. This contrast can be expressed in various ways. One distinction, which Aristotle discusses both at the beginning of the Metaphysics and in book 10 of his Nicomachean Ethics, can be expressed by saying that in what concerns ratio we are doing things for a reason—­what we are doing is not done for its own sake, but for some other purpose—­while in what concerns intellectus we are doing things for their own sake: in religious terms, looking at God, gazing on him, is not done for any reason, there is no ulterior motive, it is done for its own sake; similarly with knowing things created—­contemplative knowing simply is concerned with what they are, rather than with the purposes to which we can put them. In a more modern idiom, this distinction is not unlike Heidegger’s distinction between Vorhandensein—­the being of things that we are simply concerned with for our own purposes, and Dasein, being for its own sake. There is another distinction, also explored by Aristotle in the places just mentioned: the realm of ratio is quite human; it is a perfectly proper human activity to engage in business, to make things, to set ourselves goals and try to achieve them; but the realm of intellectus can be said both to fulfil what it is to be human, for it is the exercise of what is highest in human nature, and also to transcend what it is to be human, for con­ templation belongs to the gods. In contemplation what is highest in human nature

3  In what follows, I am deeply in debt to a work I read long ago, the ideas of which have remained with me: Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture (Faber and Faber, 1952).

84  Selected Essays, VOLUME II finds its fulfilment, and that highest is what is divine in human beings: human nature finds its fulfilment in transcending itself. But there is something missing in my attempts to summarize what Aristotle thought about the relationship between the active and the contemplative lives: an understanding that continued through until the times of the medieval university. It is missing because the very terms I am using, terms in modern English, dis­ guise the relationships implicit in Aristotle’s Greek, or in the schoolmen’s Latin. We might start with the word ‘school’, as in monastic schools, also used to describe the separate divisions of the medieval university. The Latin is schola, from the Greek σχολή, which means ‘leisure’. When Aristotle expresses the relationship between active and the contemplative lives, he says, ‘for we engage in business in order to have leisure’: ἀσχολούμεθα γὰρ ἵνα σχολάζωμεν, literally: we are unleis­ ured in order to be leisured. Latin has the same idea: business, negotium, is the negation of otium, rest or leisure. Our modern use of language puts this quite the other way about: it is work that is the key term, leisure is an odd, slightly embar­ rassing, word: time not devoted to work, time left over. We need leisure, of course, but it is mostly conceived in the modern world as an opportunity for rest and entertainment, so that we may return to work refreshed. Again, our words betray us: refreshment is a means to an end, it is not the refreshment, the refrigerium, we hope for beyond this life of toil and effort, the refrigerium which we pray may be granted to the departed, for instance. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century this is perhaps even more odd, given that technological advance has soaked up much of what human work once had to accomplish, and thus provided humans, at any rate in the technologically advanced West, with more time of leisure overall than ever before. But to pursue that would be to anticipate. Before I move on, let me make one further etymological point. The word θεωρία, we noticed, derives from the verb to see, but we noticed that it has for Aristotle something of a religious aura, in that it is the exercise of the divine part of human nature, the occupation of the gods. The Latin word used to translate θεωρία is contemplatio, which must originally have meant something like ‘what goes on in a temple’, referring to the act of beholding the statue of the divinity enshrined in the temple. We shall return later to these religious overtones of contemplation. How does all this bear on how human knowledge was understood by the medi­ eval university, and more pressingly what relevance has that to us today? The medieval monastery, at least in its Benedictine manifestation, divided the day into three parts, roughly equal in duration, devoted to working, praying, and sleeping. The monk was a man of flesh and blood; he needed to work and eat in order to live, he was certainly engaged in the life of ratio; he needed sleep in order to make that possible; but he also devoted time to prayer, which included contemplation. To that end the monastic school equipped him with enough of the liberal arts to enable him to prepare himself to rise to the life of contemplation. The medieval

Theology, Contemplation, and the University  85 university focused on that latter part. As Sir Richard Southern was beginning to show us in his, alas unfinished, final work, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe,4 the medieval universities were engaged in a massive enter­ prise to recover all the human learning that had become fragmented as a result of the fall of human kind, and more immediately through the laying waste of the achievement of classical culture; but sought to recover this so that, as far as might be possible in the fallen world, the universe could once more be contemplated as a whole, and lead human minds up to contemplation of God. The same pattern can be seen here as had been explored in much greater depth in the Byzantine ascetic tradition: the achievement of such detachment that the universe could be contemplated for what it is, created by God—­what the Greeks called ‘natural con­ templation’—and thus lead the mind to contemplation of God himself. The book of nature and the book of creation were understood to be complementary, both capable of being understood in the light of the Incarnation of the Word of God through whom creation came to be, a light of which human beings began to be aware as they sought loving detachment in the following of the Crucified and Risen Christ. The schoolmen devoted themselves to this amazing undertaking; the university, school, was a place of σχολή, leisure, where men had time to think and ponder. The enterprise failed, no doubt. The world was still fallen, political and economic tur­ moil swept their efforts away, though perhaps not so quickly or lastingly as we moderns like to suppose. The endeavour of the schoolmen was also skewed, in that they were developing only one part—­and not the richest part—­of the Christian tradition; not that many of them were unaware of the intellectual riches of the Greeks, but the Greeks who were their contemporaries were pol­it­ic­al­ly weak and anyway regarded by the West as heretics as a result of the Great Schism. But the universities continued, and adapted to the times. It is some aspects of that process to which I want to turn my attention now. The medieval university was a place for the study of the liberal arts that made possible a life of thought, of contemplation. The liberal arts (that is, free arts, as opposed to the servile arts to which a man is bound) make possible the exercise of freedom and the develop­ ment of what is divine in humans, whereby human nature transcends itself. Contemplation, too, we have seen is a gift: not the result of labour, but something given and received. Somewhere in the more recent history of the West, all that changed. We have already seen that in the way the words we use turn on its head the understanding that saw work as a temporary suspension of leisure in order to make leisure pos­ sible: leisure in which one can think and ponder, and disinterestedly receive knowledge and understanding as illumination. Immanuel Kant must, I think, 4 Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols (Blackwell, 1995–2001).

86  Selected Essays, VOLUME II have had something to do with it, though he was likely a symptom of wider changes rather than the cause of them. Let me cite two points that lead me to think thus. First, there are Kant’s remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, where he speaks of reason ‘constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining’, or as ‘an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions he has himself formulated’.5 Compelling, constraining—­even torture is hinted at—­in order to extort the truth in accordance with one’s own categories. This is the exercise of ratio not intellectus, and there is no suggestion that there is any realm for the contemplative know­ ing of intellectus, indeed quite the contrary. Second, there is Kant’s understanding of virtue where, to oversimplify, the difficulty of acting virtuously is seen as some measure of its authenticity: moral virtue is the product of work, or toil. No one doubts that virtue is sometimes, even often, difficult; we live in a fallen world, much conspires to hide the good from us. But the whole of the ancient Christian tradition saw virtue as something natural: for a human being to be virtuous is to act in accordance with his or her true nature, true created nature. This perception is one that the Christian tradition shares with much other ancient wisdom: cf. the principle of wu-­wei in Taoism. Much toil may be required to reverse the effects of the fall—­this is the realm of ratio—­but the purpose of all this is to make possible the exercise of intellectus, devoting itself to contemplation of God and the created order. Another nail in the coffin of these traditional ideas of contemplation that go back, as we have seen, to the roots of Western culture, was provided by Karl Marx, in his famous comment from the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.’6 Philosophy is precisely not the contemplation of reality; it is to be participation in revolutionary struggle. It is certainly in the Marxist notion of the ‘intellectual worker’ that the classical idea of thinking as contemplation, which lies at the root of the idea of the university, is finally overthrown. The world process is one of revolutionary struggle, in which all are called on to participate by working, including the intellectual who is to bring his or her gifts of analysis to elucidating the progress towards the dawn of the final classless society—­though what was to happen when that was achieved always remained rather vague; it was, however, hardly to be the life of contemplation. It might seem strange, in the early twenty-­first century, to evoke the ideals of Marxism—­twenty, thirty years ago, perhaps, but not now, after the collapse of Communism as an ideology in the former Soviet Union and most of its satellites. But it is odd how ideas linger in what might seem the strangest quarters. One

5  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan, 1963; ori­gin­ al­ly printed 1929), 20. 6 Quoted from T.  B.  Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, eds., Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (Pelican Books, 1963; first published 1956), 84.

Theology, Contemplation, and the University  87 would never have thought of the old Committee of Vice-­ Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) as a hotbed of Marxism, and yet it is in university manage­ ment that the Trotskyist or Maoist doctrine of perpetual revolution seems to hold sway! It is also in such quarters that the idea of the academic as an intellectual worker seems tenacious. It is not perhaps the Marxist version of this that is embraced; it is rather what one might call the consumerist version. But the effect is much the same, so far as the undermining of the idea of the university as a place for the pursuit of the intellectual virtue of contemplation—­an idea that lies at the roots of Western culture—­is concerned. If we academics are workers, then there should be a product and it had better be saleable, or at least subject to qual­ ity control. This is the rationale of Quality Assurance Assessment (QAA) and Research Assessment Exercise (RAE): we produce education, which is consumed by students; and research, consumed by our peers; and these things can be quan­ tified and assessed. If our departments are going to be 5 or 5*, then in an Arts department each member must produce, say, a book and three weighty articles in each assessment period. If, in the end, jobs are on the line, then university lectur­ ers will end up as people who can produce that amount. In the case of teaching, the next stage has already been reached: namely, not a direct assessment of the quality of teaching (too subjective), but an assessment of procedures, regardless of the fact that any set of procedures becomes a game to be played—­and academ­ ics are quite good at playing games! If it were simply a matter of the way in which turning universities into educa­ tional businesses, with appropriate management for fulfilling five-­year plans, or whatever, is making the job of being an academic miserable, then perhaps we could batten down the hatches and wait for the madness to pass, or take early retirement. But I fear it is much more serious than that. Western culture, as we have known it from the time of classical Greece onwards, has always recognized that there is something more to human life than a productive, well-­run society. If that were all human life meant, then, as Plato sourly suggests, we might just as well be communities of ants or bees. But there is something beyond that, a life in which the human mind glimpses something beyond what it can achieve. But this kind of human activity needs time, time in which to be undistracted and open to what lies beyond our planning and plotting and playing games with each other. Universities and academies make this possible: and what they make possible needs no other justification. Our justification as academics is not that we turn out students with transferable skills of comprehension, analysis, and an ability to communicate intelligibly (as the kind of Cambridge degree I went through was said to equip you with the skills to produce a paper on anything given insufficient time: quite a useful skill for heads of department required to give inaugural lec­ tures in term-­time!). We do that, and it may well be only universities that can do that, but if that is regarded as the reason for our existence, then I fear that we shall cease even to achieve that. Our justification must be that academics are people

88  Selected Essays, VOLUME II paid to have time to think. We do other things too, and do them well, but if that principle is no longer conceded, then society has lost something essential; it is, I would argue, no longer civilized in the sense in which we speak of Western civ­il­ iza­tion (and the same principle of making it possible for some people to have leis­ure to think has been enshrined, it seems to me, in all, or most of, the forms of human civilization). But the situation now is, if anything, worse than I have sug­ gested: the principle of leisure to contemplate is not only not conceded, it is no longer even understood. It has been eliminated by government policy that, first, industrializes universities (turning them into some sort of intellectual factory), and then seeks to employ the principle of supermarket: pile them high and sell them cheap. There have been too few voices from within the academy that have pointed out the fundamental threat posed by this policy. And it is a fundamental threat, not only to the nearly 900-­year tradition of the university, but also to civilization itself. That might seem extreme, but let me complete my jeremiad. Right from Aristotle, and indeed earlier, the acknowledg­ ment of the supreme value of contemplation, and the need that there be those who may devote their time to this, has been linked to acknowledgment that human beings are not simply earth-­ bound entities. In contemplation, for Aristotle, humans glimpsed what was divine in them, they realized a certain affin­ ity with the gods. This insight was transposed into Christian terms by means of the doctrine of human creation in the image of God: in virtue of being in the image of God human beings could find a kinship with God, which was purely gift, something given, in which they genuinely transcended themselves, or what they could make of themselves, and that kinship was discovered in contemplation, not necessarily of God but most fully in prayer or contemplation of God. It is fas­cin­ at­ing how the convergence of the Greek notion of contemplation and the biblical notion of creation in God’s image leads to the doctrine that the true state of the intellect is prayer, so that true prayer is described in the Byzantine tradition as  a ‘noetic’ (or perhaps better: ‘noeral’) activity: but we must leave that for the moment. We might put this in a more modern idiom. Heidegger made a distinction, developed notably in his The Origin of the Work of Art,7 between the world, die Welt, and the earth, die Erde. The world was our environment, the world that we have increasingly shaped to our purposes, the world in which we are at home, which we have made our home. The earth was what lay behind all this, something beyond human fashioning, something that irrupts into the world, often with alarming consequences. The world is something we are familiar with, we know our way around it; it is the world explored by our reason in the sense of ratio. But if we are too much at home in the world, if we lose sight of the realm of the earth, 7  Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, most easily accessible in M.  Heidegger, Holzwege (Viltorio Klostermann, 1963), 7–68.

Theology, Contemplation, and the University  89 then we have lost touch with reality. It was, for Heidegger, the role of the poet to preserve a sense of the realm of the earth, to break down our being lulled into a sense of security by our familiarity with the world. We might think of contempla­ tion, the dispassionate beholding of reality, in a similar way: such patient attend­ ing to reality can prevent our mistaking the familiar tangle of assumption and custom for reality, a tangle that modern technology and the insistent demands of modern consumerist society can very easily bind into a tight web. This whole tradition of contemplative leisure, vacare in otio, can be, and is, criticized as ‘elitist’, and to be ‘elitist’ is a terrible thing nowadays. But it must, I think, be defended as elitist, though we must be sure we know what we are defend­ ing. It must not be a social elitism: leisure to contemplate perhaps conjures up a ‘leisured class’, though the English leisured class, at least, often enough only had the leisure to be bored. ‘Contemplation’ is, I think, free from such crude carica­ ture. We should not be surprised if there is some correlation between being intel­ lectually gifted and given to contemplation, though the kind of intellectual endowment that can be measured, the IQ, may have less to do with it than we might at first think. But only a minority are ever likely to come to exercise the contemplative faculty to any degree, whether that degree is measured in what I would regard as the most fundamental terms—­the contemplation attained by a St Silouan or the Romanian elder Cleopa, neither of whom would be likely to be found in an academy (though it would do the academy good to pay attention to them)—or what this essay is mostly concerned with, the provision of time to think for those inclined to it. But if the fact that only a minority are likely to become adepts at exercise of the contemplative faculty is to be called ‘elitist’, then so be it: they have truly been chosen, which is what an ‘elite’ is. For we need elites in that sense, in the same way as we need gifted pianists and singers, poets and artists, and even lutenists—­who also constitute ‘elites’. But there are other factors in our society that militate against acceptance of a contemplative elite, especially in an academy, the most important of which is the way in which non-­productive time is no longer publicly valued. We have already noticed the way in which our notion of work and leisure inverts the way in which these are related in the classical languages of the West. The consequence of that inversion goes deep: non-­productive time is what is left over from work, and is a time for rest so that we may return to work refreshed. More insidiously, non-­ productive time is when we become not producers, workers, but consumers, and the leisure industry and advertising conspire to make that leisure ‘productive’. The positive valuing of non-­productive time was encouraged in the not-­too-­distant past by the provision of holidays—­Sundays and other religious feast days. First, Protestantism reduced sharply the number of religious feast days, and then an odd alliance of consumerism and impatience with the tiresome variability of the feasts dependent on Easter sought to sever the link between holidays and the holy. But the principle of these feasts also goes back to the beginnings of what we

90  Selected Essays, VOLUME II know as civilization, and is a contemplative, religious principle. In the Laws, Plato tells us: But the gods, in their compassion for the hardships incident to our human lot, have appointed the cycle of their festivals to provide relief from this fatigue, beside giving us the Muses, their leader Apollo, and Dionysus to share these fes­ tivals with us and keep them right, with all the spiritual sustenance these deities bring to the feast.8

The principle of public religious feasts involving freedom from work was contem­ plative, in that participation in the religious feasts gave to all a glimpse of the divine realm that transcends us. As that principle has been lost to our society, it is perhaps not surprising that other ways of valuing the contemplative, for instance the institution of universities, has ceased even to be understood. Σχολάσατε καὶ γνῶτε ὅτι ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ θεός: Have leisure and know that I am God—­the translation in the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, of the psalm verse, ren­ dered in the English translation of the Hebrew as: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Originally the University would have recognized its purpose in that psalm verse, while at the same time acknowledging that elsewhere—­here on earth in prayer and worship, and in a life devoted to prayer and worship—­that purpose was fulfilled. It would also have recognized that the ultimate fulfilment of that verse was only to be found in heaven, so that, in a way, the university itself was a preparation for heaven, rather than being, as we experience it nowadays, a rehearsal for purgatory. But let me end with the words with which St Augustine closed his great work, the City of God. He has just mentioned the final, seventh age of humanity, that will find its fulfilment in heaven: this seventh—­he says—­will be our Sabbath, and its end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, an eighth eternal day, sanctified by the resurrection of Christ, which prefigures the eternal rest of both spirit and body. There we shall be still (vacabimus, the Latin equivalent of σχολάσομεν) and see, shall see and love, shall love and praise. Behold what shall be in the end without end! For what else is our end, except to reach the kingdom which has no end?9

Or, in Augustine’s wonderful Latin: Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum cuius nullus est finis? 8 Plato, Laws II.653CD, trans. A. E. Taylor (J. M. Dent, 1934), 30. 9 Augustine, De Civitate Dei XXII.30.5.

9 Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God Sergii Bulgakov was born in 1871 in the central Russian town of Livny, the son of a priest, indeed, he reckoned, in the seventh generation of a priestly family. He therefore grew up in a deeply Orthodox atmosphere, though his home life was not particularly happy. At the age of 12 he rebelled and by the age of 14 he turned away from the Church, becoming a Marxist intellectual. For the next fifteen years he finished his school education and then studied in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and London. He became a Marxist economist. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, his thoughts were moving away from Marxism towards the literary and spiritual culture of Russia. In 1901 he delivered a public lecture on Dostoevsky in Kiev, which was received with enormous enthusiasm. For the next decade or so, Bulgakov pursued an academic career, first in Kiev and from 1906 in Moscow, as a political economist, though his writings were more and more concerned with religious and spiritual matters. Even in a work called The Philosophy of Economics (1912), the beginnings of his interest in the divine Wisdom, Sophia, are manifest. He was active politically in these years, serving as a member of the second Duma in 1906‒7. In 1917 he was lay delegate at the Russian church council, or sobor, which restored the patriarchate, abolished by Peter the Great, and attempted a reform of the Russian Church, though its efforts were cut short by the Revolution. In 1918 he accepted priestly ordination. After the Revolution, he was expelled from his academic position at Moscow University, and finally in January 1923 he was among those members of the intelligentsia, unacceptable to the Communists, who were sent into exile. In 1926 he became the first dean of the lnstitut St Serge in Paris, where he remained until his death in 1943. His years in Paris were clouded by the attack on his theology of Sophia, but it is from the Paris period that most of his works of theology belong (the most notable theological work from his Russian period is his Unfading Light, published in 1917, when he was still a layman). Such are the bare bones of the life of Fr Sergii Bulgakov, from which it is clear that his life was a series of journeys, physically from Russia to the West, and spiritually from a devout, if cramped, Orthodox childhood, through teenage rebellion, participation in both revolutionary Marxism and the spiritual revival of Russian intellectual life, back again to the Church, which he came to serve as priest and theologian. After his death, there was published a short book of Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0010

92  Selected Essays, VOLUME II reminiscences, Autobiographical Sketches, in which Bulgakov reflected on his eventful life. He did more than simply recount his life, he also granted the reader glimpses into his inner life, and the events and experiences that had shaped him. It is, in fact, in terms of a series of experiences that he presents his return from his atheistic nihilism to belief in God, and to the practice of the Orthodox faith in which he had been brought up as a child. It is also in terms of an experience that he presents most concisely his vision of the Divine Wisdom, Sophia.1 So as an introduction and way in to Bulgakov’s understanding of the Mother of God, we shall dwell a little on these experiences, as he recounts them. He begins his account of his gradual conversion in 1895, when he was 24 years old. For a decade I have lived without faith and, after early stormy doubts, a religious emptiness reigned in my soul. One evening we were driving across the southern steppes of Russia, and the strong-­scented spring grass was gilded by the rays of a glorious sunset. Far in the distance I saw the blue outlines of the Caucasus. This was my first sight of the mountains. I looked with ecstatic delight at their rising slopes. I drank in the light and the air of the steppes. I listened to the revelation of nature. My soul was accustomed to the dull pain of seeing nature as a lifeless desert and of treating its surface beauty as a deceptive mask. Yet, contrary to my intellectual convictions, I could not be reconciled to nature without God. Suddenly, in that evening hour, my soul was joyfully stirred. I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask of deception—­if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!2

A further stage in this recovery of the faith he had known in childhood took place with his discovery of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, three years later in Dresden: 1  Bulgakov’s understanding of Sophia cannot be fully grasped without exploring its background in Western idealism and mysticism, and more particularly in the Russian symbolist poet and philosopher, Vladimir Solov’ev, and others influenced by Solov’ev, especially Bulgakov’s friend, Fr Pavel Florensky. For my take on this (no more), see my article ‘Wisdom and the Russians: The Sophiology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’. In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, ed. Stephen  C.  Barton (T.  & T.  Clark, 1999), 169–81. 2  Prot. Sergii Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki (YMCA-­Press, 1991), 61–2. English translation by Natalie Duddington and James Pain in A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (SPCK, 1976), 10–11.

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  93 It was a foggy autumn morning. I went to the art gallery in order to do my duty as a tourist. My knowledge of European painting was negligible. I did not know what to expect. The eyes of the Heavenly Queen, the Mother who holds in her arms the Eternal Infant, pierced my soul. I cried joyful and yet bitter tears, and with them the ice melted from my soul, and some of my psychological knots were loosened. This was an aesthetic emotion, but it was also a new knowledge; it was a miracle. I was then still a Marxist, but I was obliged to call my contemplation of the Madonna by the name of “prayer.” I went to the Zwinger Gallery early in the mornings in order to pray and weep in front of the Virgin . . .3

But it was not until ten years later in 1908 that he found himself able to enter again into the communion of the Church. He recounts the event in these words: One sunny autumn day . . . I made my way to a solitary hermitage lost in the forest, when I was surrounded by the familiar sights of northern nature. I was still in the clutches of doubt and hesitation. I had come there as a companion of a friend; secretly I hoped that I might meet God. But my determination deserted me, and while I was at Vespers I remained cold and unfeeling. When the prayers for those preparing for confession began, I almost ran out of the church. I walked in deep distress towards the guest house, seeing nothing around me, and suddenly found myself in front of the elder’s cell. I had been led there. I intended to go in another direction but absent-­mindedly made a wrong turn in the confusion of my distress. A miracle had happened to me. I realized it then without any doubt. The father, seeing his prodigal son, ran to meet me. I heard from the elder that all human sin was like a drop of water in comparison with the ocean of divine love. I left him, pardoned and reconciled, trembling and in tears, feeling myself returned as on wings within the precincts of the Church. At the door of the chapel I met my surprised and delighted companion, who had seen me leave in a state of acute distress. He was the witness of my conversion in this life. It was another evening and another sunset, but this time a northern and not a southern one. The bells were calling to prayer. I listened to them as if l heard them for the first time in my life, for they invited me also to join the fellowship of believers. I looked on the world with new eyes. The next morning at the Eucharist I knew that I was a participant in the Covenant, for our Lord hung on the cross and shed his blood for me and because of me; that the most blessed meal was being prepared by the priest for me, and that the gospel narrative about the feast in the house of Simon the leper and about the woman who loved

3 Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki, 63–4; Duddington and Pain, trans., A Bulgakov Anthology, 11.

94  Selected Essays, VOLUME II much was addressed personally to me. It was on that day that I partook of the blessed Body and Blood of my Lord.4

There are some features of this prolonged conversion back to God that invite comment. First, the place of nature: the first step in his conversion is a change in his attitude to nature—­instead of seeing it lifeless and deceptive in its beauty, he sees it as true, and in its truth disclosing God. This conversion to nature could only take place if he converted to God: “I could not be reconciled to nature without God.” Furthermore, this conversion to nature is also a conversion to himself, a conversion from seeing himself as some kind of hard­headed thinker to finding in himself an openness to tenderness, sweetness, innocence—­all of which recalled his childhood, which he had rejected. It was proof that this conversion was taking place that he reacted as he did before the Sistine Madonna. The eyes of the Mother of God, depicted by Raphael, “pierced his soul”; he wept, he felt “some of [his] psychological knots . . . loosened.” But it was more than an aesthetic emotion; he calls it a “new knowledge,” manifest in contemplation that he feels constrained to call “prayer.” Note that, for Bulgakov, prayer goes beyond some emotional response; it involves what he calls “knowledge”—“new knowledge”—for prayer means engagement with the reality of God and the saints. In contrast to these earlier accounts, the final episode is much less marked by emotion, and more by his entering into the perception of new realities—­the realities of the Christian faith, the realities of repentance and forgiveness. The perception of these new realities transforms his perception of the world: “I looked on the world with new eyes”—with God he had found reconciliation with nature. All of this seems to me to be recapitulated fifteen years later, when, newly exiled from Russia, he had the chance to go into the former Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then still a mosque. Human tongue cannot express the lightness, the clarity, the simplicity, the wonderful harmony which completely dispels all sense of heaviness—­the heaviness of the cupola and the walls. A sea of light pours from above and dominates all this space, enclosed and yet free. The grace of the columns and the beauty of their marble lace, the royal dignity—­not luxury, but regality—­of the golden walls and the marvellous ornamentation: it captivates and melts the heart, subdues and convinces. It creates a sense of inner transparency; the weightiness and limitations of the small and suffering self disappear; the self is gone, the soul is healed of it, losing itself in these arches and merging into them. It becomes the world: I am in the world and the world is in me . . . This is indeed Sophia, the real unity of the world in the Logos, the co-­inherence of all with all, the world of 4 Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki, 65–6; Duddington and Pain, trans., A Bulgakov Anthology, 11–12.

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  95 divine ideas, κόσμος νοητός. It is Plato baptized by the Hellenic genius of Byzantium—­it is his world, his lofty realm to which souls ascend for the contemplation of ldeas. The pagan Sophia of Plato beholds herself mirrored in the Christian Sophia, the divine Wisdom. Truly, the church of Hagia Sophia is the artistic, tangible proof and manifestation of Hagia Sophia—­of the Sophianic nature of the world and the cosmic nature of Sophia. It is neither heaven nor earth, but the vault of heaven above the earth. We perceive here neither God nor man, but divinity, the divine veil thrown over the world. How true was our ancestors’ feeling in this temple, how right they were in saying that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth! Indeed they were neither in heaven nor on earth, they were in Hagia Sophia—­between the two: this is the μεταξύ of Plato’s philosophical intuition. Hagia Sophia is the last silent testimony to the future ages of the Greek genius: a revelation in stone . . . The church of Hagia Sophia is Plato’s realm of ideas in stone rising above the chaos of non­ being and subduing it through persuasion: the actual pleroma, all as a single whole, pan-­unity. Here it is manifested and shown to the world. O Lord, how holy, how marvellous, how precious is this manifestation!5

This is, in my view, one of the clearest of Bulgakov’s statements about Sophia, its clarity perhaps due to the fact that he is not trying to define it, or defend it against misconception, but simply evoke it. Its Platonic roots are evident, but what has grown from these roots is a sense of heaven as a canopy lightly touching the earth—­a canopy, or a veil, the pokrov that the Mother of God holds over the world. The emphasis on lightness, gentleness, is a symbol of the way the divine holds the creaturely in being, which also suggests something of the holiness of the world—­there is no sharp contrast between a godless world and divine grace or power. Nature is reconciled with God. These seem to me some of the intuitions that inform Bulgakov’s theology, and especially within that his understanding of the Mother of God. They are also, as I have suggested, the intuitions behind his much-­ misunderstood ideas about Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. But there is a further point to be underlined. In all these experiences, Bulgakov is inwardly moved—­vnutrennij, inward, is one of his favourite words—­his heart is pierced. For what he learnt from these experiences was not some fresh information, but rather an attitude—­of gentle acknowledgment of God’s presence—­an attitude of prayer, repentance, love. In Hagia Sophia his thoughts turned, seemingly inevitably, to the story of Prince Vladimir’s envoys and their experience, during the Divine Liturgy there, of an unearthly beauty, in the presence of which they knew not whether they were in heaven or on earth, a beauty of which they could only say, “we cannot forget that beauty.” 5 Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki, 94–5; Duddington and Pain, trans., A Bulgakov Anthology, 13–14.

96  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Fr Sergii Bulgakov discusses the Mother of God in several places in his vast work. I shall simply concentrate on two works: first, the only work expressly devoted to the Mother of God, The Burning Bush, and his last, unfinished work, The Bride of the Lamb. The Burning Bush6 (or, literally, the unburnt bush) is the second volume of his so-­called small trilogy, the first volume of which is The Friend of the Bridegroom7 and the last, Jacob’s Ladder. It is a trilogy, then, on St John the Forerunner, the Mother of God, and the Angels: all figures who recall prayer and the liturgy, as St John and the Mother of God are the figures that flank Christ in postures of prayer in the Deisis icon, and the angels are intrinsically bound up with liturgical celebration and the offering of prayer. This simply reaffirms the significance of prayerfulness in Bulgakov’s approach to theology, that we have just noted. The Bride of the Lamb is the last volume of his final great trilogy, in which it is preceded by volumes called The Lamb of God, and The Comforter—­on Christ and the Holy Spirit.8 The last volume, on which he was engaged when he died and which was published after his death, is on the Church and eschatology, and it is significant that it is to the section of eschatology that his discussion of the Mother of God belongs. The burning bush of Exodus 3 was taken by the Fathers to be a prefiguring of the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God: the bush burned and was not consumed, just as Mary conceived the Son of God and yet remained a virgin, intact after childbirth. Both of these were seen to speak of the presence of the divine which transfigures but does not harm the creature. Bulgakov’s book, The Burning Bush, is a rather technical theological treatise, and is presented explicitly as an Orthodox critique of Roman Catholic Mariology, though his own exposition of the meaning of the Mother of God, when disentangled, goes much deeper than a mere critique. It is, however, worth noticing at the outset the main thrust of his critique of Roman Catholic Mariology. This critique is mainly directed, not so much at the tenets of such Mariology (it is important to remember the date of this critique, 1927, not only long before Vatican II, but even before the movements that were to lead to that council, as well as before the papal proclamation of the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in 1950), but at the notion of natura pura, pure nature, that was important for the kind of scholasticism that Bulgakov had encountered in the West. Pure nature was conceived of as nature in itself, untouched by God, and without any orientation towards God. The notion had evolved in the context of the Western understanding of nature and grace, that  went back to Augustine: the idea of pure nature was thought necessary to 6  Prot. Sergii Bulgakov, Kupina Neopalimaya (YMCA-­Press, 1927). References to this book are given in parentheses: KN + page number. 7 Now available in an English translation by Boris Jakim: Sergius Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom (Eerdmans, 2003). 8  There is an English translation by Boris Jakim: Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Eerdmans, 2002). References to this book are given in parenthesis: BL + page number.

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  97 preserve the notion of the gratuity of grace, to prevent any idea that nature, in itself, could naturally evoke the response of God’s grace. Bulgakov’s fundamental objection to this, though he expresses this mainly in an allusive rather than any direct way, is that the idea of nature untouched by God is fundamentally unchristian: if nature is created by God, it is profoundly touched by God, and however distorted it might be as a result of the Fall, so long as it exists, it exists because created by God—­and therefore touched by God, loved by God. So we find Bulgakov saying that in Paradise “God comes in the cool of the day to talk with man, as with a friend, and that ‘conversation’ was no donum superadditum [no specially added gift] in relation to his incorrupt nature, but on the contrary, that conversation was something quite normal” (KN 25). His rejection of the notion of pura natura is, it seems to me, the other side of his profound sense, already noticed, of the holiness of nature; it is a fault in us, because of the Fall, to experience nature bereft of God, the reality is quite other. It is also worth remarking that it was this very notion of natura pura that was the focus of Henri de Lubac’s attack on the debased scholastic theology of his day in his work, Surnaturel (1946), for which he was dis­cip­lined; and although he refined his ideas in the later works, Le mystère de surnaturel and Augustinisme et la théologie moderne (both 1965, by which time de Lubac was a peritus at Vatican II), he still rejected the notion of natura pura. It is worth reflecting how far Bulgakov’s criticisms anticipate those of de Lubac, which seem now to have been accepted by modern Roman Catholic theology. The beginning of The Burning Bush lays down an important principle for Bulgakov’s understanding of the Mother of God: namely, that the source of the Church’s teaching on the Mother of God lies in “the liturgy inspired by the Spirit and the prayerful life of dogma.” This principle is echoed in The Bride of the Lamb, which emphasizes the silence that surrounds the Mother of God, not a silence of ignorance, as if we simply shook our heads and said we did not know, but rather a silence inspiring reverence and careful, prayerful attention. So it is not at all surprising to find that when Bulgakov develops positively the Orthodox understanding of the Mother of God, this is supported by references to liturgical texts. A good deal of The Burning Bush is concerned with the question of the Virgin Mother’s sinlessness. This is, it seems to me, because of the large place given to polemics against Roman Catholic Mariology, and especially the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. That doctrine (defined in 1854) sought to define in a particular way the sinlessness of the Mother of God; Bulgakov accepts the doctrine of the All-­Holy Virgin’s sinlessness, but not the notion of her immaculate conception. Nevertheless, Bulgakov establishes his starting point from liturgical texts: “In its innumerable services devoted to the Mother of God, the Holy Orthodox Church teaches firmly and clearly about the complete sinlessness of Mary in her birth, her holy childhood and adolescence, in the Annunciation, in the Birth of her Son, and in her whole life” (KN 13, with a footnote listing

98  Selected Essays, VOLUME II li­tur­gic­al texts, running to four-­and-­a-­half pages). He begins by setting out some principles in relation to the question of the Virgin Mother’s sinlessness: 1. Mary is without personal sin; 2. She is, however, not “alone without sin,” for that is Christ’s prerogative, and further, unlike Christ she suffered natural death, the consequences of Adam’s original sin; 3. She calls God her Saviour, in the Magnificat. It follows from these three principles that Mary’s state is not a sinless natural state, but the result of her personal attitude to sin, her personal overcoming of sin. Bulgakov goes on to ponder how one subject to original sin, as Mary was, could nevertheless be sinless: a discussion which involves a careful consideration of the nature of original sin. He begins, in complete accord with the approach of the Greek Fathers, from the doctrine of human creation in God’s image; from this it follows that the soul has a trihypostatic form or image and that humankind exercises the role of microcosm in relation to the cosmos. He sets this starting point against the Western scholastic notion of humanity as a natura pura, something that we have already looked at. In contrast to his understanding of what is entailed by the notion of humanity as natura pura, Bulgakov argues that there is no cre­ ation without God, no human life without a relationship with God, either affirmed or repudiated. So he characterizes the Fall of humanity in these terms: Thus first-­formed man in his nature is neither mortal nor given to concupiscence [both characteristics of humanity as natura pura], since in his nature is included a blessed life with God and in God, since he was made in the world for God. But, as a created being, he knows in himself created weakness and the instability of nature; in him is hidden the possibility of life not only in God and  for God, but in the world and for the world. And in original sin man ­extinguishes in himself the blessed life, cuts off direct blessed communication, “conversation,” with God, he commits murder against himself, changing from being man the friend of God and becoming a natural being immersed in the cosmos. (KN 26 f.)

Thus, the Fall affects humankind’s relationship with God and also our relationship with the world. On the one hand, fallen humanity has lost contact with God, by repudiating him, by repudiating the source of its life, and in doing this it disrupts the harmony of soul and body, which opens up the possibility of death—­the separation of soul and body. On the other hand, humankind appears to itself to be the ontological centre of the world, and begins to lord it over the cosmos, to exploit the cosmos for its own ends. So Bulgakov can say that, as a result of the Fall, “the world falls into orphanhood, it no longer has anyone to look after it. The Fall into sin is manifest as a cosmic catastrophe, ‘cursing’ the earth” (KN 27).

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  99 Another consequence of the Fall Bulgakov dwells on, which is a consequence of the disruption of the harmony between soul and body, humankind and the cosmos, is the creation of a polarity between individual and nature. On the one hand, there are isolated, self-­oriented individuals, and on the other, “a certain onto­ logic­al solidarity of the whole human race, substantiated by its metaphysical unity, not that ‘everyone is guilty before all’ (as Dostoevsky said), but everyone—­ and each one—­doing things for himself and his own sake, does them in and for the whole of humanity” (KN 31f.)—with disastrous consequences. Individuals then are trapped in the necessary universality of their nature. This is strikingly similar to the understanding of the human condition expressed by the priest in Georges Bernanos’ famous novel, Journal d’un curé de campagne. In a conversation with the countess, he speaks of the way in which even our thoughts have an influence beyond anything we could imagine: it goes with the bad as well as the good, for thousands that the wind carries away, that the thorns choke, that the sun scorches, only one puts down roots. The seed of bad and good fly everywhere. The great misfortune is that human justice always intervenes too late: it reproves and punishes the acts, without being able to reach higher or further to the one who committed them. But our hidden faults poison the air that others breathe . . .

The countess exclaims that this is pure folly; if one believed that, one would no longer be able to live; to which the priest replies, “I believe it, Madame. I believe that if God gave us any clear idea of the solidarity that binds us one to another, in good and in bad, we indeed could not live.”9 But to return to Bulgakov, this polarity of individual and nature, brought about by the Fall, has destroyed what God intended by his original creation: the human hypostasis freely summing up in itself as microcosm the manifold variety of the cosmos, which hypostasis Bulgakov calls “the centre of love, a wise ray of Sophia’ ” (KN 35).10 It is, however, into this state of polarity that we are born, and we all realize for ourselves the original sin of Adam by our personal sin. It was into this state of polarity that the Mother of God was born, and if she is sinless, then she is sinless in this fallen world. The personal sinlessness of the Mother of God is therefore different from the sinless state that Eve lost: First-­formed Eve did not know the weight of original sin, which pressed on the Virgin Mary herself. For this reason, too, the primal sinlessness of Eve remained untested, unjustified, free; in contrast, the freedom from personal sin of the

9  Georges Bernanos, Œuvres Romanesques, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard, 1961), 1158–9. 10  This use of hypostasis (Russian: ypostas, the first letter being the now obsolete ‘v’) to refer to true personhood, in contrast to a polarity of individual and nature is already established terminology in Bulgakov (found earlier in Unfading Light). It would be interesting to know who first developed it.

100  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Virgin Mary manifests not only her personal victory [podvig], but also the victory of the whole Old Testament Church, of all the forefathers and fathers in God, that is of the summit of the ascent of the whole human race, of the lily of paradise that blossomed on the tree of humanity.  (KN 70)

The sinlessness of the Mother of God is not then some natural state miraculously created by God (as Bulgakov understood the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to assert), but the result of God’s providence, working through the history of salvation, and culminating in her personal faithfulness. It is such that Mary is glorified by all Christians. The final section of The Burning Bush (after a long analysis of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception) is devoted to the subject of the glorification of the Mother of God. What Mary achieved in her faithfulness to God, in her personal involvement in the mystery of the Incarnation, renders her transparent to God—­and in a way transparent to the cosmos, too—­and in this mutual transparency we can see restored the original vocation of Adam and Eve. But all this is true of Mary as a creature, not as some kind of demi-­goddess. Bulgakov begins his exposition in this section by exploring the imagery of the Temple: The Virgin Mary became the Temple, in which the Holy Spirit dwells for the Incarnation of Christ, but like human beings, because of her nature born in original sin, like each human being, she needs baptism and acceptance of the Holy Spirit, and she receives the fiery tongue of the Holy Spirit together with all the Apostles, the whole Church. The grace of the Annunciation is equivalent to the grace of Pentecost. Like humankind, weighed down by original sin, Mary needs expiation in the blood of Christ and avails herself of this through the gift of the Holy Spirit—­in the language of the sacraments of the Church, she was baptized (in the Holy Spirit and fire), and chrismated (sealed by the Spirit). (KN 113)

But for Mary this is a personal victory over sin through God’s grace; for, as Bulgakov says, “grace never coerces and always reveals a place of human victory [podvig] and freedom” (KN 116). The Virgin Mary’s role in saving history has consequences for her role in the cosmos, to describe which Bulgakov has recourse to the language of Sophia: “the Mother of God, personally sinless and purified from original sin, appears as the expression of perpetual virginity in creation, fully revealed as Sophia among humankind” (KN 117). The cosmic role of the Mother of God can be summed up under several headings. First, she is the centre of the world, the spiritual centre of all humankind, of all creation. Therefore, she is called queen of heaven and earth, or simply, heavenly queen. Second, she is

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  101 the glory of the world, the world glorified in God and with God, and in herself possessing and giving birth to God. It is necessary to understand this in its full ontological significance, to realize the full theological meaning of honouring her as “more honourable that the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim.” In the glory of the Mother of God is revealed the glory of creation. The Mother of God is the personal manifestation of the Wisdom of God, of Sophia, the other meaning of which is Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.  (KN 137‒8)

Third, she is “Spirit-­bearing,” indeed the pre-­eminent case of a Spirit-­bearing person, the nearest thing to an incarnation of the Spirit (KN 141). Fourth, she is involved in the mystery of the Trinity and in the mystery of humanity: this is part of what is meant by speaking of her “manifesting Sophia.” Bulgakov develops something of what he means by this in a meditation on the icon of the Mother of God and Christ: God-­man and Spirit-­bearer, Son and Mother, manifesting the revelation of the Father through the second and third Hypostases, they also manifest the complete image of God with humankind, or vice versa the image of humankind with God. (KN 142)

According to Genesis 1:27, God created humankind in his own image, “male and female.” Bulgakov develops this explicit biblical reference to gender: Male is truth in beauty, female is beauty in truth: beauty and truth are indivisible and united, but together they distinctly celebrate, like two images of one beginning, a revelation of the Father, of the begotten Son and of the proceeding Spirit. These two images belong to the fullness of the image of God in humankind. (KN 142)

The relation of the Mother of God to the mystery of the Trinity is developed particularly in relation to the Holy Spirit, and it is in this connection that the Sophianic dimension finds expression. Bulgakov picks up again the theme introduced earlier that at the Annunciation Mary became “Spirit-­bearer.” In her obedience to the Spirit her union with the Spirit is deepened, and she becomes “truly Mother of God” [sushchaya Bogoroditsa]: “she becomes God­mother spiritually, and in the power of that she conceives in her womb the Son Emmanuel” (KN 157). The Mother of God is also Bride of God, a theme Bulgakov develops by way of reflection on the icon of the Mother of God known as the “icon of umilenie” (often translated, in this context, “loving-­kindness”), the most famous example of which is the Vladimir Mother of God: here the tenderness between Mary and Christ recalls not only her maternal relationship to Christ, but also her relation as

102  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the beloved bride (Bulgakov refers to the use of the Song of Songs in this context, where particularly in sermons on the Dormition the relationship between Christ and his Mother is interpreted through the imagery used in the Song to describe the relationship of the Bride and the Bridegroom). Mary as Mother of God becomes the mother of the whole human race, and as bride becomes in her person identical with the Church (KN 187‒8), something already developed in the “sisters” of the bride, who accompany her in the Song of Songs.11 Bulgakov draws out the significance of all this by appealing directly to the notion of the Divine Wisdom, Sophia: And if the fulness of creation, its truth and beauty, its intellectual glory, is divine Sophia, as the revelation of the Holy Trinity, this comes to be repeated with reference to the Mother of God. The Mother of God is sophianic to the highest degree. She is the fulness of Sophia in creation and in this sense she is created Sophia. The words of the Lord at the end of his Sermon on the Mount—“wisdom, sofiva, is justified of her children” (Mt 11:19)—above all, refers precisely to the Mother of God. Sophia is the foundation, the pillar and ground of the truth, in its fulness revealing the Mother of God, and in this sense she is, as it were, the personal expression of Sophia in creation, the personal form of the earthly Church . . . In the God-­mother, heavenly and created Wisdom are united, the Holy Spirit, living in her, with a created human hypostasis. Her flesh becomes completely spiritual and transparent to heaven, in her is fulfilled the goal of the created world. She is its justification, goal and purpose. She is also, in this sense, the glory of the world.  (KN 189, 191)

It is this that makes sense, for Bulgakov, of the dormition of the Mother of God: she is “created Wisdom, glorified and crowned in heaven, as heavenly Queen. The purpose of the dormition of the God-­mother is revealed here in a new light” (KN 191). As such, in her death or dormition, she “does not abandon the world” (in the words of the apolytikion for the feast of the Dormition): this continuing presence in the world is manifest in her appearances to the Saints, in her protection [pokrov] of the world, in the miracles of her icons. It is manifest especially in her presence through those who are “her kin” [eya roda], as she called St Seraphim of 11  Bulgakov has interesting reflections on the Song of Songs, never read in the services of the Orthodox Church. He remarks, “In this light the meaning and power of the Song of Songs and the essential meaning of this mysterious hymn of love becomes comprehensible because of the teaching of the New Testament about the Church, since in truth this song from the Old Testament forms the most New Testament part of the whole canon” (KN 187); and in a footnote he adds, “In connexion with this a remarkable aspect of the use in Church of the Song of Songs becomes comprehensible: that it is never read in divine services. One needs to think about this, because, as in the whole life of the Church, everything is accomplished in the Song of Songs. And at the same time the divine services of the Church are saturated with it, its images occur in what is most intimate and habitual in the use of the Church.”

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  103 Sarov (KN 206).12 This is a presence in the world, for the world, and this in two senses: she is for the world as the one who, to quote the kontakion for the Dormition, is “unsleeping in her prayers, unfailing hope in intercession,” and she is also the bride of God who with the Spirit calls to the Bridegroom, “Come Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Rev 22:17, 20). The theme of the Mother of God as the Bride of God leads naturally to the treatment of the Mother of God in Bulgakov’s last work, The Bride of the Lamb. Much of what Bulgakov has to say here repeats what we have already found in The Burning Bush. There are, however, three points where Bulgakov develops his earl­ ier insights. The first has already been mentioned: what Bulgakov has to say about the way in which our understanding of the Mother of God arises from silence, which I suggested was parallel to the way in The Burning Bush he seeks the sources of his understanding of the Virgin Mother in the prayers of the Orthodox services. In The Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov remarks: Have we not already known for a long time and has it not even become habitual for us that holy silence crowns the humility of the Lord’s servant, who is more honourable than the cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the ­ser­aph­im, as the liturgical hymn says?  (BL 410)

Later on, Bulgakov expands this reference to silence: The sacred silence that veils her presence in the kingdom of resurrection does not permit us to forget the power of this presence in the light of the love that emanates from it. The image of the Mother and Ever-­Virgin irresistibly penetrates into every human heart by virtue of a holy humanity transparent to the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Only satanic dementia remains, for a time, insensitive to the Most Pure One, who is the “many-­sorrowed wound of the demons” (Akathistos, ikos 2), the “fall of the demons” (ikos 6). But for the human race, she is the living bridge that connects it to her Son and God, “conducting to heaven those who are on earth” (ibid.).  (BL 459‒60)

This silent appeal of the Mother of God points to an important aspect of Bulgakov’s understanding of her place in the divine economy, an aspect that is predominant in this last of his works: and that aspect is eschatological—­the Mother of God as the Bride, calling on Christ the Bridegroom to come, with an inexhaustible hope in the fulfilment that his Second Coming will accomplish.

12  Bulgakov develops this notion of the Mother of God’s continuing presence in the world in his discussion of the parousia of the Mother of God in BL 412–14.

104  Selected Essays, VOLUME II And since redemption is accomplished not only by the sacrifice of the Son sent by the Father, but also by the Holy Spirit, healing the sores of creation, the Holy Spirit continues its work of healing and restoration as long as that which is unhealed and unrestored remains. And the Holy Spirit can penetrate even the doors of hell. The heart of the Mother of God, the Spirit-­Bearer, is pierced by the sword of hell because of her compassionate love; and her maternal intercession is effected starting with the Dread Judgment, which is the beginning, not the end, of the judgment. And the “Mother of God’s way of sorrows,” revealed to the vision of the Russian people, continues. Just as Christ’s love extends also to the damned and rejected (more precisely, to those who have damned and rejected themselves), so the maternal love does not cease either, which perhaps tries even harder for them and feels an even greater compassion for them, for it is love that damns and rejects them. There can be no final rejection of creation by God’s love, just as there can be no final abandonment of creation by the “pitying heart” of the Church’s love.  (BL 515)

More and more Bulgakov came to question the traditional teaching about the permanence of hell; for him it was incompatible with the primacy of love in Christian teaching to place any kind of limit on hope in the divine love. One of the appendices to The Bride of the Lamb, “On the Question of the Apocatastasis of the Fallen Spirits,”13 is devoted to this subject, coming to the conclusion that it is inconsistent with what we know of the love and wisdom of God to accept the notion of eternal torment, though he questions the appropriateness of language of “apocatastasis” or restoration, because it would seem to devalue “the deification of creation through divine humanity, i.e., in the Incarnation and Pentecost.”14 His meditation on the Mother of God made an important contribution to this growing conviction. In his emphasis on hope that is inextinguishable, Bulgakov shows a certain affinity with Hans Urs von Balthasar in his reflections on this subject. For Bulgakov, Mary is pre-­eminently Spirit-­Bearer and Bride: the Bride who appears in Revelation, the Bride who is presented as the City “coming down from God out of heaven,” the revelation of the final union of God with humankind, the Bride, too, who with the Spirit calls on the Bridegroom to come. The final words of The Bride of the Lamb reflect on this: This is the most general and complete revelation that we have of the Church as humanity in Divine-­humanity. And if this is the case, then is not the Most Pure

13  Not included in Baris Jakim’s translation of The Bride of the Lamb, though a separate translation by Jakim of this appendix is available in: Sergius Bulgakov: Apocatastasis and Transfiguration (The Variable Press, 1995), 7–30. 14 Jakim, Sergius Bulgakov, 30.

Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God  105 Mother of God herself in her glory this personal head of the Church, the personal humanity of Divine-­humanity? Is she not the Heavenly Jerusalem, which returns to earth from its heavenly home in the parousia of the Mother of God, in order to become here the spiritualized tabernacle of God with men? Is she not Sophia herself, creaturely but entirely deified, the peak of all creation, more venerable than the cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the seraphim? Is she not the glory and the joy of the saved peoples at the marriage feast of the Lamb? Is she not that perfect union of the divine and the human in which all creation, both the angelic choir and humankind rejoices? She, the Spirit-­Bearer, is Spirit and Bride, manifesting in her very being the image of the hypostatic Spirit of God. And about her it is said in the final words of the New Testament: “And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”

10

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov ‘The Eucharist in the theology of Bulgakov’—rather than more directly Bulgakov’s Eucharistic theology—­because it becomes clear if one tries to get some sense of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’s importance that so much of his impact was as a person and a priest, much more so than what he wrote, for all its bulk. In a recent, excellent issue of that fine journal, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Alexis Klimoff records how one of Bulgakov’s students at St Serge, Alexander Schmemann, later dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, spoke of ‘the incomprehensible gulf which he and many others perceived between the saintly and luminous personal­ ity of Bulgakov on the one hand, and his ponderous philosophical edifice on the other’.1 Quite how negatively Schmemann viewed Bulgakov’s theological oeuvre is clear from the remarks he confided to his diary, which only enhances his percep­ tion of Bulgakov’s ‘saintly and luminous personality’.2 That personality found expression in the priest and pastor and spiritual counsellor that Bulgakov was. Quite how powerful that personality was is evident from the fact that echoes of it can still be perceived more than sixty years after his death, and one of the reasons, I would suggest, that the works that gave expression to his ‘ponderous philo­soph­ ic­al edifice’ are now being published in English translation is that something of his personality breathes through these works. So this is where I want to begin: with Bulgakov the priest. A priest, deeply committed to the Eucharistic Liturgy, which he celebrated every morning, at least at some periods of his life.

Bulgakov the Priest I have not been able to find many reminiscences of Bulgakov the priest that do more than mention the power of his priestly presence, but I cite three. First, from Metropolitan Evlogii’s address at his funeral, in which he addressed the departed priest in these words:

1  Alexis Klimoff, ‘Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy’, SVTQ 49 (2005), 67–100, here 81. 2 Cf. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann 1973–1983 (SVS, 2000), 261–2; cited by Klimoff, ‘Georges Florovsky’, 81, n. 47.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0011

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  107 Dear Father Sergii: You were a Christian sage, a teacher of the Church in the purest and most lofty sense. You were enlightened by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding, the Comforter to whom you dedicated your scholarly work. He transformed the Saul in you into Paul. He guided you to your last breath. Twenty-­six years ago you partook of His gracious gifts in the sacrament of ordination, and you bore the cross of the priesthood in the Holy Spirit. It is significant that you received this gift on the day of the Holy Spirit—­ when he descended upon the holy apostles in tongues of fire. Thus you had a share in them. You were an apostle in your life . . . . It is significant, too, that you celebrated your last Liturgy on earth on that very day of the Holy Spirit, the anniversary of your ordination as a priest . . . How bright your countenance was on that day! Your soul was conscious of its last triumph in this world. And it was on that day that the Lord called you to cease your priestly service on earth so as to continue it there, at the throne of God, in the choir of holy Angels and Apostles.3

We have, from another hand—­Sister Joanna Reitlinger’s, who tended Bulgakov in his last days—­an account of that final Liturgy: The stroke occurred on the night from the 5th to the 6th of June, Monday to Tuesday, after the feast day of the Spirit. On the eve of this feast day, as always on this day which was the anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Father Sergii performed the liturgy in an especially inspired manner. His closest spirit­ ual children, all those who could make it, were present at this liturgy and took Communion. It is amazing that, although Father Sergii did not have a specific premonition of his imminent end (to be sure, he expected the end to come at any time), many of his spiritual children later noticed how particularly signifi­ cant was this final confession, as if it were a ‘farewell’ confession in which Father Sergii left us his testament and synthesized the main thing that he wished to say to each of us . . . . All this was imperceptible, and it was full of trepidation—­a trepidation that was a constant feature of Father Sergii’s whole tremulous life, to which all self-­assurance was so foreign despite the definitiveness and magnitude of this life.4

A further indication of the impact of his priestly ministry that I have been able to find (or remember—­there must be many better examples I haven’t come across or have forgotten) comes in the section of Fr Alexander Elchaninov’s Diary of a 3 Quoted in James Pain’s introduction to A Bulgakov Anthology. Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), xvi–­xvii. 4  From Sister Joanna Reitlinger, ‘The Final Days of Father Sergius Bulgakov: A Memoir’. In Sergius Bulgakov: Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Boris Jakim, Variable Readings in Russian Philosophy, N° 2 (The Variable Press, 1995), 31–53, here 39.

108  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Russian Priest called ‘Advice to Young Priests’. There we find a section called ‘Advice by Father Sergii Bulgakov (from Father John of Kronstadt)’5—the fact that Elchaninov felt moved to include this brief section speaks volumes for his respect for Bulgakov as a priest. I have gathered these together, because it seems to me that at the heart of every­thing Bulgakov had to say there lies his own experience as a priest, and in his perception of priesthood, the role of the priest in the celebration of the Liturgy was central (almost all the advice recorded by Fr Elchaninov is about how to cele­ brate the Liturgy). Bulgakov doesn’t write about the Eucharistic Liturgy so much as write out of the Eucharistic Liturgy. This means that we shall find the place of the Eucharist in his theology not just in the, comparatively few, works in which he expressly considered the Eucharist, but really throughout his theology. Sister Joanna Reitlinger goes on to say, in the passage already quoted, After the liturgy, Father Sergii invited everyone to tea in his quarters. Several tables were placed in his study, and traditional refreshment was set out. He wished to do this very well, inasmuch as there was always something holy in this, a continuation of the ‘common task’ of the liturgy in ordinary life, in the everyday human community . . . .6

Just as for Bulgakov the Liturgy spilled over into ‘ordinary life’, so the Eucharist spilled over everything he wrote, and informed his whole theology. One can find this in the way his theology always presses beyond the strictly theological into reflections about the Christian life, and the impact of the Christian mystery, through the lives of Christians, in their society—‘towards a political theology’, as the present archbishop of Canterbury has it.7 But there are other, more unmistak­ able ways in which the Eucharist shapes his theology. An example can be found in the subjects of his so-­called little trilogy’—The Burning Bush, The Friend of the Bridegroom, Jacob’s Ladder—­on the Mother of God, John the Baptist, and the Angels. The choice of the Mother of God and St John the Baptist is certainly influ­ enced by the iconographic tradition, and especially the icon called the Deisis— ‘Intercession’—in which a seated Christ is flanked by the Mother of God and St John with their hands raised in an attitude of prayer. They are the two who are closest to Christ, and this closeness is manifest in prayer. These considerations are already liturgical, but the final volume on the angels makes these considerations more precisely Eucharistic, for all these volumes are concerned with the conjunc­ tion of the two worlds—­the earthly and the heavenly—­a conjunction manifest in

5  Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest (Faber & Faber, 1967), 219. 6  Reitlinger, ‘The Final Days’, 39. 7  In the title of his recent book on Bulgakov: Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (T. & T. Clark, 1999).

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  109 different ways in the Mother of God and St John, but realized most immediately for us in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, when we join together with ‘thou­ sands of Archangels and ten thousands of Angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-­winged and many-­eyed . . .’. But considering together the Mother of God and the Baptist has a more precisely Eucharistic reference, as Bulgakov him­ self makes clear when he recalls that in the preparation service, the proskomidi, as the priest cuts fragments to set beside the Lamb, the bread to be consecrated, the first two fragments are in honour of the Mother of God and then of the Baptist. Similarly in the Eucharistic prayer, after the epiclesis, first to be commemorated is the Mother of God, followed immediately by St John the Baptist.8 The way in which such precise liturgical references feed Bulgakov’s theological reflection is something very striking, and I don’t really know anyone else of whom this is true to the same extent. It may, perhaps, have something to do with the fact that Bulgakov was already approaching 50 by the time he was ordained priest, for it is especially the priest’s part of the Liturgy—­the actions not seen by the people and the prayers said quietly—­on which Bulgakov seems to draw, and it may be that coming to all this late in life meant that it made a peculiar impact on him. A final recollection: several times Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, who arrived at the Institut St Serge just after Bulgakov’s death, records a saying of Bulgakov’s to the effect that ‘the whole of his theological vision he had drawn from the bottom of the eucha­ ristic chalice’.9 I think that remark may be a traditional priestly proverb, but, even if that is so, it is striking that Fr Bobrinskoy specifically attributes it to Bulgakov.

Eucharist and Incarnation The Eucharist is, then, not just an isolated theological topic alongside others; it is, for Bulgakov, something all-­embracing. But it is also a specific topic to which Bulgakov addressed himself several times, notably in an article, ‘The Eucharistic Dogma’, first published in Put´ (‘The Way’) in 1930. But before we look at what is, in fact, a rather difficult essay, let us look briefly at what he says elsewhere ex­pli­ cit­ly on the Eucharistic Liturgy. In The Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov says that One should always remember that, although the eucharist is one of the ‘seven’ sacraments (according to the present count), it actually has a significance that is greater than that: it is the sacrament of sacraments, the central sacrament of the Church . . . .10 8 S. Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom, trans. by Boris Jakim (Eerdmanns, 2003), 136. 9 B. Bobrinskoy, La compassion du Pere (Editions du Cerf, 2000), 160, cf. 173; B. Bobrinskoy, La mystere de la Trinite (Editions du Cerf, 1986; 1996 imprint), 149 (presumably from an oral tradition, as no reference is given). 10 S. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (T. & T. Clark, 2002), 286.

110  Selected Essays, VOLUME II It is more than just a sacrament of communion, to which Protestantism has often reduced it, and even to think of it as sacrament and sacrifice, as Aquinas did, is to start to divide up what is a seamless mystery. The holy Eucharist, ‘given by the Lord, in remembrance of me’, is, in an utterly real sense, ‘the power of the Incarnation, the realised and abiding divine-­humanity, including all the faithful’; it is the ‘abiding of Christ in the world, his connection with the world, despite the ascension’; this ‘mysterious abiding of Christ in the world through the Divine Eucharist lasts “until he come”, when the mysterious “remembrance” will be replaced by the new coming of the Lord and the abiding with Him: “and so shall we ever be with the Lord” ’.11 Communion with the body and blood is therefore not yet all that the Eucharist signifies as the divine ‘It is finished’, as the sacrificial and abiding Incarnation. It is the sacrament of sacraments, the foundation of all the sacraments, and its accomplishing power is Pentecost, the coming into the world of the Holy Spirit, who ‘shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, what­ soever I have said unto you’. ‘In remembrance of me’ and ‘to bring . . . to your remembrance’ are closely connected, which is expressed in the fact that the ‘breaking of bread’ appears in the life of the Church only after Pentecost, as the accomplishment of divine-­humanity.12

Bulgakov’s consideration of the Eucharist starts from the Incarnation and the way in which the Eucharist continues to make accessible the Incarnation: it is the way Christ abides with us. Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic gifts, the bread and wine, are important, as we shall see, but it is not where Bulgakov starts. He starts with the Church, attentive to the Spirit, looking to the second coming of Christ: it is there that we shall see the significance of the Eucharist. What he has to say about the Eucharist in his book, The Orthodox Church, complements what we have just heard: During the Eucharist not only are the holy gifts consecrated, but by symbolic acts, readings and prayers, the whole mystery of the Incarnation is renewed from the Grotto of Bethlehem to the Mount of Olives, from the Nativity to the Ascension. The consecration of the holy gifts attributed by Western theology to the moment when the priest pronounces the words of Christ, ‘this is my Body’ . . . ‘this is my Blood’, this consecration is effected—­according to Orthodox thought—­during the whole liturgy, beginning with the ‘preparation’. It is com­ pleted at the moment when the words of Our Lord are pronounced and when the Holy Spirit is invoked (‘epiclesis’) . . .13 11 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 286. 12 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 286 f. 13 S. Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (The Centenary Press, 1935), 154–5.

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  111 For Bulgakov, the theology of the Eucharist is about the whole of the Divine Liturgy, not just the way in which the gifts of bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Eucharistic Transmutation However, the question of that change is a theological matter, and ‘The Eucharistic Dogma’ is largely devoted to it. This is, as I have said, a difficult article. This is mainly because, like his book The Burning Bush, in it Bulgakov is concerned to engage with Roman Catholic theology, so his presentation of Orthodox theology tends to become a reverse image of what he sees the Roman Catholic doctrine to be. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that his grasp of Roman Catholic theology in this case is much less astute than in The Burning Bush: bluntly, I don’t think that Bulgakov really grasped what the doctrine of transubstantiation is try­ ing to say. For Bulgakov, the Eucharistic dogma is about the transmutation of the holy gifts of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. ‘Transmutation’ is the word Boris Jakim uses to represent the Russian words prelagiutsia and prelozhenie.14 What this transmutation means (as Bulgakov will go on to expound) is that the bread and wine become other than themselves—­become the Body and Blood of Christ—­without ceasing to be what they are themselves as things in this world. This transmutation is, as Bulgakov puts it, ‘not a physical, but a meta­phys­ ic­al event’.15 A word Bulgakov is fond of in this (and other contexts) is ‘antinomy’, a dignified (and Kantian) word for a contradiction, but a contradiction in which we are reluctant to abandon either term of the contradiction. This ‘antinomic’ transmutation, that takes place in the Eucharist, means that there is a real change—­the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ—­but in this change the bread and wine are not destroyed as things in this world. Bulgakov then turns to the Western doctrine of the Eucharist. What is wrong with this doctrine (and really, he argues, there is little difference between Catholic and Protestant here) is that it has been reified: it is concerned with what happens to the things, the bread and wine, as a result of the transmutation. The doctrine becomes, as he puts it, a question of ‘sacramental natural science, so to speak. The thing itself, that is the Eucharistic matter, stands at the centre of the question here’.16 This approach fits well with what we have already seen of Bulgakov’s own  approach to the Eucharist, which does not concentrate on the ‘eucharistic elements’ but takes in the whole liturgical action. He then embarks on a more 14 S. Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, trans. Boris Jakim (Lindisfarne Press, 1997), 63 n. 15 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 63. 16 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 70.

112  Selected Essays, VOLUME II specific criticism of the doctrine of transubstantiation, which he interprets as asserting that, while the accidents of bread and wine remain, the substance or inner core of them is destroyed and replaced by the Body and Blood of Christ. He talks of the ‘cosmism’ of the doctrine of transubstantiation.17 It is very difficult to think ourselves back to 1930, when this article was written. Roman Catholicism has changed a good deal as a result of Vatican II, and many of these changes bear on liturgical matters. Modern Roman Catholicism makes much less of the service of Benediction (with the reserved host) and exposition of the consecrated host (though they have by no means vanished) than would have been the case in Bulgakov’s day, so when he accuses the Roman Catholic doctrine of asserting a ‘direct dwelling of the Lord in the host’,18 which involves both a denial of the Ascension and finds its expression in the cult of the Eucharistic presence, he is reflecting an aspect of Roman Catholic Eucharistic devotional practice that is much less evident nowadays. It is in these terms that he sees the doctrine of tran­ sub­stan­ti­ation, for even though he refers to Aquinas’ exposition of tran­sub­stan­ti­ ation in the Summa Theologiae, he undertakes no careful reading of this doctrine.19 He sees the doctrine as a way of explaining the ‘how’ of the Eucharistic presence, whereas Karl Rahner, for example, argues that it should be understood as really affirming unmistakably the ‘that’ of the presence.20 Rahner’s reading of transubstantiation seems to me to be difficult to distinguish from what Bulgakov means by ‘transmutation’, but how far Bulgakov’s reading of transubstantiation really reflects the (or even an) understanding of transubstantiation to be found among his Roman Catholic contemporaries I am not in a position to judge. Bulgakov then acknowledges that Orthodoxy has itself tended to get caught up in the false presuppositions of the Western position, and sets out how Orthodoxy needs to respond on this question. His proposed methodology is worth quoting in full: But Orthodoxy has not yet said its word here. For this, it is necessary, first of all, to return to the theology of the fathers (one thousand years into the past), to the patristic doctrine, and to use it as a true guide, creatively to unfold it and apply it to our time. Secondly, it is necessary to make a total change in the statement of the question, where one gets away from Catholic cosmism, which reifies the eucharistic problematic, and in the unfolding of this problematic to rely not on Aristotle’s Metaphysics but on the Gospel. In other words, the question must be

17 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 79. 18 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 81. 19  Cf. Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 69. The fact that the reference to Aquinas is completely wrong does not inspire confidence. The reference should be: Summa Theologiae III. 73–83. 20 Karl Rahner, ‘The Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, Theological Investigations IV (DLT, 1966), 287–311, esp. 302–3.

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  113 returned to the domain of Christology, for it is essentially and wholly a Christological question.21

That sounds to me a good outline of a ‘Neopatristic’ approach, not usually associ­ ated with Bulgakov: back to the Fathers and arguing ἁλιευτικῶς, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀριστοτελικῶς—‘like the fishermen, and not like Aristotle’, in St Gregory the Theologian’s words!22

Eucharistic Communion We cannot here follow the detail of Bulgakov’s appeal to the Fathers over the question of the Eucharist, but his essential point is that, according to the Fathers, in this following the clear witness of the New Testament, the purpose of the Eucharist is not primarily to effect Christ’s presence, but rather to offer the faith­ ful communion in the Body and Blood of Christ. What the holy gifts become is, first of all, divine food.23 In partaking of this divine food, we feed on Christ’s body and blood, but not—­if this were possible or even if it made sense—­on the his­tor­ ic­al body and blood of Christ, but on his now glorified body and blood. To quote Bulgakov: The transmutation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist is not accomplished in the personal presence of Christ, for the ascended Lord, having departed the earth, abides in heaven at the right hand of the Father. A new, different relation is thereby established between the bread and wine as things of this world, as earthly food, and the body and blood of the Lord in the glorified state of resurrection, ascension, and the sitting at the right hand of the Father, that is, in the state of supramundane, supracosmic, or supraphysical abiding. Of course, in its essence, this Body is identical to the Body that was conceived in Mary’s womb . . . . But this self-­ identity is united with such a change of the glorified body compared with the earthly body that this is also manifested in the glorified body’s relation to the  world: the body of the Lord, which belonged to this world prior to the Resurrection and even prior to the Ascension, now no longer belongs to it, but is supramundane, metacosmic. The formulation of the eucharistic problem derives from this.24

21 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 82. 22  Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 23.12. 23  As the Council of Trent said in its decree on the Eucharist, this sacrament was instituted by Christ ut sumatur (‘to be consumed’): Denzinger-­Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 36th edn (Herder, 1976), §1643. 24 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 90 f.

114  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The key to this lies in understanding correctly the mystery of the Ascension of the Lord, or more correctly, His Assumption—­Ἀνάληψσις, Voznesenie—­into heaven. This is a bodily assumption—­Christ’s body is no longer to be encountered on earth—­but it is not the end of the Incarnation, rather it is the making eternal of the Incarnation.25 The kontakion for the Feast makes this clear: When you had fulfilled your dispensation for us, and united things on earth with things in heaven, you were taken up in glory, Christ our God; in no way divided, but remaining inseparable, you cried to those who loved you: I am with you, and there is no one against you.

The dispensation, the oikonomia, has been fulfilled and its purpose achieved in the reunion of earth and heaven. Christ is taken up into heaven, but is now ‘in no way divided’ from us, but ‘remains—­or abides—­inseparable from us’—in­sep­ar­able from each of us in a way that was not possible during the days of his earthly life—­as he says: ‘I am with you, and there is no one against you.’ The kontakion itself contains the Bulgakovian ‘antinomy’: ‘taken up’—‘in no way divided, but remaining inseparable’. Bulgakov comments: Here, we once again have an antinomic determination, the two terms of which . . . are inseparably joined: the body of Christ, which belongs to human nature and this world, ascends, departs this world; that which is of the world becomes supramundane, already belongs to divine life, manifesting both a per­ fect deification of human nature and a perfect incarnation26 of the divine nature. It is here that we find the foundation of the eucharistic dogma.27

How this works itself out in the Eucharistic dogma can again be developed by starting from a liturgical text: this time the words—­redolent with antinomy—­spoken by the priest as he divides the consecrated lamb in preparation for communion: The Lamb of God is broken and distributed, broken yet not divided, ever eaten yet never consumed, but sanctifies those who partake.

The consecrated bread is broken up for communion, and in receiving it, we par­ take of the glorified body and blood of Christ, and are thus drawn into union with Him—­and also with one another—­and sanctified and deified. The main part of the article ends by referring to the troparion said after communion, before the consecrated gifts: 25 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 97. 26  Jakim (Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist) has the ugly ‘inhumanization’, presumably a rather too literal translation of vochelovechenie. 27 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 104.

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  115 O Christ, great and most holy Passover! O Wisdom and Word and Power of God! Grant that we may more perfectly partake of you in the unfading day of your Kingdom.

For Bulgakov the truth represented by the Ascension is fulfilled, not contradicted, by the Eucharist and our communion in the Body and Blood of Christ, and that means, too, that we partake of Christ as the ‘one who comes’, or, the better to bring out the force of the present participle, ὁ ἐρχόμενος, the ‘one who is coming’, whom we shall finally encounter in the ‘unfading day of the Kingdom’. In the article, there is a lot of detail that I have passed over, much of which consists of biblical-­liturgical meditation of great interest, but this is probably enough for the moment. Let me just repeat, as Bulgakov does himself, that, for him, the question of the transmutation of the Eucharistic elements is a Christological question, not a cosmological one: it is not about what happens to the material reality of the holy gifts, but who it is that we encounter when we receive them as the food of the Kingdom, the ‘bread of heaven’, the ‘medicine of incorruptibility’.

The Holy Grail A couple of years after the article ‘The Eucharistic Dogma’, Bulgakov published, again in Put´, an article on ‘The Holy Grail’.28 Were it not for the fact that Boris Jakim prefaced his translation of ‘The Eucharistic Dogma’ with this other article, I would probably not have thought it worthwhile discussing it (and indeed, would probably have not known of its existence at all), but Jakim’s putting them together means that anyone reading the one might well read the other, and could well be puzzled, as the article on ‘The Holy Grail’ is a pretty unusual text. So I thought I would include a discussion of it here. It is presented as a ‘dogmatic exegesis’ of John 19.34: ‘But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it bore witness, and his witness is true’. It is significant—­Bulgakov himself draws attention to the fact29—that this verse is recited by the priest when, during the proskomidi he pierces the lamb and pours wine and water into the Eucharistic chalice. What catches Bulgakov’s interest is what happened to the blood and water that flowed from the side of Christ onto the ground at the foot of the cross, and what is the meaning of this blood and water—­part of the physical reality of the Incarnate Christ—­that remains part of the world after the resurrection of Christ. 28  In fact these two essays seem to form the first two parts of a trilogy, the last part of which was not available when I wrote this article, as it was only published in Russian in 2005, and in English transla­ tion, by Mark Roosien, in 2021. 29 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 31.

116  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The Eucharistic Blood is the Blood of the Risen Christ, but there remains in the world—­after the Resurrection and the Ascension—­the physical blood and water that flowed from the side of the dying Christ. The main way in which Bulgakov seeks an interpretation is clear from the title of the article: it is in terms of the Holy Grail, the sacred chalice in which Joseph of Arimatheia collected the blood of Christ (the only interpretation of the identity of the Grail of which Bulgakov seems aware), that he seeks the key to this mystery. That Bulgakov takes this line is interesting. So far as I am aware, the legend of the Holy Grail has no place in the Russian (or any other Orthodox) tradition; it is very much a Western legend, emerging in written form first in the late twelfth century in the verse of Chrétien de Troyes, and slightly later in the mediaeval Welsh of the Mabinogion, though these are doubtless based on oral tradition of, maybe, some antiquity (especially, perhaps, in the case of the latter). From then on the legend is taken up in various forms, the standard English version being Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. In the various written forms, it belongs to the stories of courtly romance, connected with King Arthur and his knights. All this, of course, has English, or rather British, links: it is part of the ‘matter of Britain’, the legends that preserved, or created, a sense of Christian identity with the British inhabitants of Britain prior to the pagan Anglo-­Saxons. What even such a brief account reveals is how little use, despite the title of the article, Bulgakov makes of the Grail legend. So far as I can see, the only literary source that he men­ tions is Tennyson’s Idylls of a King.30 It is the link between the Grail legend and the supposed fate of the blood from the side of Christ that interests Bulgakov, not the history of the Grail legend itself. This is odd, for in the Russian émigré com­ munity in Paris where Bulgakov was writing, there was one Russian emigrée who was a genuine expert on the Grail legends—­someone Bulgakov certainly knew, if only from the so-­called Berdyaev Colloquium in which they both participated.31 For Myrrha Lot-­Borodine, well known to theologians for her articles on deifica­ tion, her translation of St Maximos the Confessor’s Mystagogia, and her book on Nicolas Kavasilas, was a scholar who specialized in the Arthurian romances. This interest mostly found expression in articles and translations; her book—­a fine one—­De l’amour profane à l’amour sacré. Études de psychologie sentimentale au Moyen Age, was only published posthumously in 1961, the year after Vladimir Lossky’s similarly posthumous Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, and like it with a preface by Étienne Gilson.32 What Bulgakov learnt from Lot-­Borodine, if anything, it is hard to say for he is very sparing with references to sources for the Grail legend in his article. 30 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 31, n. 9. 31  See Andrew Blane (ed.)’s ‘Sketch of a Life of Georges Florovsky’, Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual—­Orthodox Churchman (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 54. 32  Myrrha Lot-­Borodine, De l’amour profane à l’amour sacré. Études de psychologie sentimentale au Moyen Age (Librairie Nizet, 1961).

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  117 Bulgakov’s interest is really confined to the question as to what the significance could be of the blood and water (both the water from his side and the ‘bloody sweat’ of the Agony, as Bulgakov specifies)33 that remains in the world, and was not raised up with the body of Christ in His resurrection. The blood and water that flowed into the world abide in the world. They sanc­ tify the world as the pledge of its future transfiguration. Through the precious streams of Christ’s blood and water that flowed out of his side, all creation was sanctified—­ heaven and earth, our earthly world, and all the stellar worlds. The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept, expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His ­honourable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water that flowed out of His side; and the chalice of the Grail is the ciborium and repository of this relic. And the whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is inaccessible to veneration; in its holiness it is hidden in the world from the world. However, it exists in the world as an invisible power, and it becomes vis­ible, appears to pure hearts who are worthy of its appearance.34

The point of this is that the blood and water from the side of Christ sanctify the world naturally: it has nothing to do with grace, it is an inescapable fact. Although the blood and water fell on a particular place on the earth—­save for the blood caught in Joseph’s chalice—­it is the whole world that receives it; in a way, it is the whole world that is the Grail. There is a kind of natural sacrament alongside the Church’s sacrament of the Eucharist, which is why in the Western legend the Grail is full of Eucharistic overtones. Bulgakov’s article is brief and allusive, and I am not sure that I have fully grasped what he is saying. But this parallelism between the receiving of Christ through the fruits—­or perhaps better, the by-­products—­of his passion and Christ’s presence in the world as a result of the Ascension which, we have seen, is the basis of Bulgakov’s Eucharistic theology means that this nat­ ural presence can be interpreted in terms of his supramundane presence—­with implications for all human striving after God, especially through suffering. He quotes a verse of Tyutchev: In the form of a slave the King of Heaven Traversed all of you, blessing all, My native land35

33 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 26 n. 34 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 33. 35 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 52, n. 23.

118  Selected Essays, VOLUME II seeing in this another way in which the presence of Christ in the world through ‘natural’ means is given expression.36 There are other legends, or stories, that express much the same idea—­like the Russian children’s story, ‘Babushka’, about a woman who, having been too busy to go with the wise men to see the child king, goes after them with her presents, always arriving when Christ has gone on, and is still searching for the Christ child. But because the natural connection is through the by-­products of suffering, it is suffering in which the world finds its identity as the Grail. Our life participates in His life in His humanity; our sufferings participate in His sufferings . . . . The Golgotha mystery continues invisibly in the world. This thought is terrible and staggering in its significance, but it is sweet and elevating in its comfort. It truly places us before the face of Christ, makes His presence not distant and abstract but near and concrete. Because of his love of creation, Christ took upon Himself the sin and sorrow of the world. To human suffering He, God, responds with His own suffering. God is with us!37

And there follows a moving paragraph on the sufferings of Russia (written, remember, in 1932).38 There is much that is odd about this, though it perhaps appears less odd, if one recalls something of the motivation behind Bulgakov’s sophiology, namely the conviction that everything, simply by existing through the divine Sophia, is touched with holiness—­nothing is beyond the presence of God. But here is not the place to pursue that. What I want to do, in my final words, is to reflect on what seems to me the underlying purpose in Bulgakov’s reflections on the Holy Grail, and see whether there is anything there that we might want to embrace, even if in a rather different form.

Our Identity as Christians As I mentioned earlier on, the group of legends connected with the Grail are to do with ways of affirming identity over time. For us British—­to keep it simple—­ the ‘matter of Britain’ is about our Christian roots as a nation. It is actually a British way of doing something that all the Orthodox nations have accomplished 36  Though he—­characteristically—­gives a Eucharistic illustration of this presence—‘a certain real­ ity, and not merely a case of poetic liberty’—in the words exchanged by the clergy at the kiss of peace: ‘Christ is in our midst’—‘He is and He will be’. 37 Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, 54. 38  I also wonder whether there is not a connection here with the fact that shortly after his arrival in the West he was diagnosed as suffering from sclerosis, with the likelihood of a stroke or heart attack at any time. As Sister Joanna has revealed, this awareness was always with him (Reitlinger, ‘The Final Days’, 31).

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  119 in their own way: finding an identity in which being British—­or Russian or Greek or Romanian or Georgian or Bulgarian or Serbian and so on—­and being Christian are the same thing. It is no mistake that Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur appeared at the beginning of the Tudor period, pre-­eminently a period when the English were seeking a new identity. It is interesting how often these legends find the source of identity in defeat. This is an old insight: it is the point of Virgil’s Aeneid, giving the Romans a lineage that found its origins in the sack of Troy—­the lacrimae rerum, the ‘tears of things’. The death of Arthur is the begin­ ning of the history of the Britons, as the death of Prince Lazar is the defining moment in the history of Serbia. Suffering is ennobled; it becomes creative. Bulgakov wanted to provide such an insight with a Christian, theological justifi­ cation; it was not, for him, simply a truth of nature. It is interesting, too, to note how the Orthodox in the West have tried—­are trying—­to find an identity that fuses their identity as Orthodox and their identity as members of Western nations. The diary Vladimir Lossky wrote at the beginning of the Second World War shows how Lossky sought to find an identity as a Russian Orthodox and French by looking to the saints of the Undivided Church,39 which is closely paral­ lel to what many English Orthodox do by reviving devotion to the saints—­British and Anglo-­Saxon—­of the first millennium.40 There are dangers: the close prox­ imity of 1054 and 1066 easily leads the Orthodox to embrace the kind of romanti­ cism about the Saxons found in Scott’s Ivanhoe—­and the Celtic fringe beckons alluringly! It is this fusing of natural categories—­race, nation, culture, language—­ with the categories of the Christian faith that transcend nature that Bulgakov is seeking to justify in his reflections on the Holy Grail. The biggest theological question mark we may put against this would be whether the Christian vocation is not precisely to be peregrini, resident aliens, the ξένοι καὶ παρεπίδημοι ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς of Hebrews 11:13, who have no patria, but are seeking one, looking for a ‘city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God’ (Hebrews 11:10).

David Jones Such a fusing together of the legends of national identity, memory embedded in language, and the salvific force of the Christian Gospel is the stuff of great art—­as the genre of courtly romance and its use of the Grail legend indicates. And all this makes me think of a great artist and poet of the last century, David Jones, who drew together many of these themes both in his visual art—­paintings, etchings,

39  In Vladimir Lossky, Sept jours sur les routes de France, juin 1940 (Cerf, 1998). 40  See Metropolitan Makarios (Tillyrides)’s contribution to Bishop Kallistos’ Festschrift, ‘Orthodoxy in Britain: Past, Present and Future’: Abba: the Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 135–55.

120  Selected Essays, VOLUME II drawings, engravings—­and in his poetic and quasi-­poetic works, the greatest of which is his book-­length poem, The Anathemata.41 A Londoner of Anglo-­Welsh descent, perhaps the greatest experience of his life—­one that he spent the rest of his life trying to get to the bottom of—­was his service in the British Army during the First World War. There he experienced all the horror of trench warfare, but also the raw humanity and camaderie that it called forth. After the war he con­ verted to Catholicism, and this put him in touch with a whole symbolic universe, on which he drew in his art. He often sets the Great War against what he came to learn about the experience of Roman legionaries, amongst whom he imagined those involved in the events of Christ’s crucifixion, and developed a complex of allusive symbolism, in which everything that he had experienced began to make some sense, or at least fall into some pattern. In this the Grail legends were im­port­ant, not least as providing a bridge between the Christianity of the Roman Britons, brought to Britain probably, at least in part, by Roman legionaries who had embraced Christianity, and the nation, including Celtic Wales, to which he belonged. Without embarking on at least another paper, if not a whole course of lectures, it is difficult to illustrate this, as David Jones’ vision is elaborately allu­ sive, but at its centre stands the Liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church pre-­ Vatican II, which he saw stretching back with little change to the Christianity the Roman Britons knew. I want to end by taking one passage, introducing it and then reading it. It is the closing section of ‘The Sleeping Lord’, a poem in a last collection of work prepared by David Jones, but published posthumously.42 The ‘sleeping Lord’—the lord who is dead but will, when the occasion demands, rise again to come to the defence of his people—­contains some kind of allusion to the Resurrection of Christ, and is also an extraordinarily widespread and tenacious piece of mythology, woven in various ways into the legend of the Grail: the Danes have it with Holger the Dane, sleeping beneath the great tower in Copenhagen; the Greeks have it in the legend that the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, did not die in defence of the city, but vanished into the walls of Hagia Sophia and will emerge again when the time comes; the Britons have in the legend of the inscription on Arthur’s tomb—­Rex quondam rexque futurus, ‘the once and future King’. It is a legend rooted in the place and people that makes me, or you, or any­ one else, who we are. David Jones’ sleeping Lord seems to fuse with the landscape, the very landscape he depicted in some of his pictures of the 1920s, forty-­odd years before the poem was written (‘November 1966 to March 1967’43). It reminds me of the kind of antinomy, the holding together of opposites, to which Bulgakov keeps on returning as he meditates on the Holy Grail.

41  David Jones, The Anathemata (Faber & Faber, 1952). 42  David Jones, The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments (Faber & Faber, 1974). 43 Jones, The Sleeping Lord, 96.

The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov  121 Yet he sleeps on very deep is his slumber: how long as he been the sleeping lord? are the clammy ferns his rustling valance does the buried rowan ward him from evil, or does he ward the tanglewood and the denizens of the wood are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard or are their knarred limbs strong with his sap? Do the small black horses grass on the hunch of his shoulders? are the hills his couch or is he the couchant hills? Are the slumbering valleys him in slumber are the still undulations the still limbs of him sleeping? Is the configuration of the lands the furrowed body of the lord are the scarred ridges his dented greaves do the trickling gullies yet drain his hog-­wounds? Does the land wait the sleeping lord or is the wasted land that very lord who sleeps?44

44 Jones, The Sleeping Lord, 96.

11

The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov In addressing a topic defined in this way—­as two subjects—­it sometimes seems that the subjects relate as in a Venn diagram, with two areas overlapping, and the subject limited to the area of overlap, and when that is the case, one is grateful, as the overlap is smaller than either of the areas mentioned, so one is limited to what they have in common; the mention of two subjects serves to narrow the area of study. But sometimes it is not like this at all: instead of a Venn diagram, it seems to be more like mixing two chemical substances and looking at the reaction: each topic is involved as a whole and the bringing together of the two creates something new, raising considerations beyond either of the topics taken on its own. And so in this case, with the two topics of the Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification; what we shall find, I think, is not so much a matter of relationships defined as the areas of overlap, but rather a dynamic engagement between the two, leading to issues being considered in a rather new light. That makes it rather difficult to get a handle on the subject: each topic seems transformed by the proximity of the other. What I shall try to do is attempt several approaches to the subject, and thus treat it in an impressionistic, rather than a systematic way. This, in fact very much reflects the works that I shall be drawing on, principally those of Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov, for neither of these writers is at all systematic, even though Bulgakov made at least one attempt to be systematic, in his great trilogy On Divine Wisdom and Divine Humanity. However, enough of preliminaries . . . Perhaps the first and clearest assertion of the close relationship—­one might say, coinherence—­of our two themes is found in the very title of that defining work of modern Orthodoxy, the Philokalia. For its full title reads: ‘The Philokalia—­or Anthology—­of the sacred ascetics, gathered together from our holy and god-­bearing Fathers, in which, through ethical philosophy, in accordance with both practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined and perfected’. It is familiar language in the Byzantine tradition, reaching back to Dionysios the Areopagite, where the triad of purification, illumination, and perfection or union is the unfolding of the process Dionysios himself calls deification. The Philokalia is then a treatise about deification. But it is also a treatise that Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0012

The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification  123 recapitulates the Byzantine ascetic tradition culminating in the works of the fourteenth-­century hesychasts, in which the Jesus Prayer came to hold a central place. Furthermore, the immediate influence of the Philokalia, especially in its Slavonic and Russian forms as the Dobrotolyubie, is deeply entwined with the growing practice of the Jesus Prayer in nineteenth-­century Russia, not least as evidenced in the Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika, known in English as The Way of the Pilgrim. This approach to considering the relationship between the Jesus Prayer and deification suggests one important conclusion already: that in mentioning deification here, we are concerned with deification in a fundamental sense, not simply as a theme. I make this point because a lot of confusion has been caused in a good deal of recent theology by the fashion for rediscovering a theology of deification in the West. Often enough this is entirely legitimate—­for instance in the so-­called mystical writers of the late Middle Ages, or such figures as St John of the Cross—­but sometimes it seems to be a confusion, for the language of deification often does little more than introduce a theme, or add a certain élan: something that became very evident in the papers and discussions at a conference on Theosis, held in May this year at Drew University, in the United States.1 This is not the case here, rather we are concerned with the theology of deification in its full distinctive sense, which involves, I would suggest, several elements. First of all, the idea that the goal or purpose of creation is deification: deification is not simply another word for salvation—­it is expressive of God’s original purpose for the whole created order, which was to have been a transfiguring engagement with the created order, through human kind, the image of God and bond of the cosmos. Secondly, this is a real engagement with God, a real participation in the divine life. Thirdly, such an engagement demands of human kind an openness to real transformation, which, in turn, involves a genuine and demanding asceticism. That all of this is envisaged by the ascetical programme of the Philokalia is obvious. It is therefore involved in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, as the Philokalia was both inspired by and also became an inspiration for the Jesus Prayer. How this is so is what I hope to explore a little in this paper. Let us start with the doctrine of deification. There are several themes that contribute to this doctrine. First, the doctrine of human creation in the image of God, particularly the way in which, in many of the Fathers, this doctrine entails the idea that man, created in the image of God, will find his fulfilment by assimilation to God’s likeness: this expresses an aspect of the first requirement of the theology of deification, mentioned above, that it is concerned with the arc that passes from creation to deification—­the primary arc of theology, as it were, 1  The proceedings published as Michael  J.  Christensen and Jeff Wittung, eds., Partakers of the Divine Nature: Deification/Theosis in the Christian Traditions (Baker Academic, 2007). See especially the contribution by Gösta Hallonsten, 281–93.

124  Selected Essays, VOLUME II transcending the lesser arc that passes from Fall to Redemption, that has so occupied Western theology. Another theme is the Platonic one of homoiôsis theou, that, for the Greek Fathers especially, suggested ways of drawing out the significance of the idea just mentioned of man, created in God’s image or eikôn, destined to assimilation to his likeness or homoiôsis. A further theme is that expressed so pellucidly by St Athanasius, when he said that the Word of God ‘became man so that we might become God’,2 and echoed throughout Christian theology in what has come to be known as the tantum-­quantum formula, that as far as God became man, so far we might become God, and variations on this, drawing out different aspects of this glorious exchange, this admirabile commercium, between God and human kind. A yet further theme is the idea so fundamental to the Apostle Paul, that we are called to huiothesia, adoption as sons through the Holy Spirit, so that we are ‘sons in the Son’, co-­heirs with Christ, able to call on God as ‘Father’, Abba. There are other ways of thinking of deification, particularly the notion that, in some way, human kind is to acquire the divine attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, universal love, perfection, eternal life, but these seem to me aspects or refinements of the fundamental themes already noted. These fundamental themes are tightly entwined in patristic theology, but perhaps the one that becomes most central is that which sees deification as the fundamental consequence of Incarnation. It is this which provides the hinge, as it were, between the theology of deification and the Jesus Prayer, for the Jesus Prayer, quite simply, quite fundamentally, creates or expresses that relationship with the Lord in which our transformation, our deification, takes place. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’: this prayer is often said to contain the whole of the Gospel, to be a summary in prayer of the fundamental belief of Orthodox Christianity. I vividly remember being told this, many years ago now, by the now-­departed Vladyka Antony. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’: there we have a confession of Christ as the incarnate Son of God, a confession only possible in the Spirit of God, and thus a confession of both the Incarnation and the Trinity—­a confession, note, not simply an assertion. ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner’: there we have the confession of the purpose of the Incarnation, the Son of man coming to seek and to save them that are lost, but the confession that I, first of all, need that mercy, need to repent of my sins and turn to the only One who can save me. There are, however, two striking aspects about the way in which the Jesus Prayer articulates the confession and this plea, that we can discuss under the two headings: the Name and the Heart. The prayer is a calling on the name of Jesus. At least from the time of Plato’s Cratylos, there has been argument about whether words have an intrinsic meaning, or whether they are simply conventional. The extreme position, that a name

2 Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.

The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification  125 is simply given by the speaker, is that of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, ‘in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—­neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—­that’s all.’3

Alice’s doubts are justified; such arbitrariness would rob language of the possibility of communication. Florensky and Bulgakov, in this following some of the reflection inspired by Herder and Humboldt in the nineteenth century, and certainly anticipating ideas in the philosophy of language that were to become influential in the twentieth, call into question the simple dichotomy between intrinsic and conventional names. Neither of these positions takes seriously the fact that there is no thought without language:4 the connection between words and things cannot be purely arbitrary, for we have no way of thinking of things without words, nor can it be entirely intrinsic, otherwise there would be only one language, or all languages would be isomorphic with some supposed ultimate language. The truth is rather something along these lines: that we grow into a way of perceiving the world, mediated by language. Both Florensky and Bulgakov share the common nineteenth-­century hankering after the idea there is some ultimate lost, pre-­Babel language, something of which we can discern through etymology (Florensky pursues this more freely than Bulgakov),5 but it seems to me that much of what they want to affirm could find adequate support in a philosophy of language that gave central significance to Wittgenstein’s dictum that ‘words have meaning in a stream of life’. In other words, we learn to use words as we learn to speak and to think; there is certainly an element of conventionality about the meaning of words, but the element of conventionality is deeply embedded in what it is, say, to be English in the twenty-­first century, or to belong to a community that uses language in a distinctive way, which could include the Christian Church, or more narrowly the Orthodox Church, but despite this few words are used in accordance with a consciously adopted convention (an example of this might be the decision to make a distinction between hypostasis and ousia found in the Cappadocian Fathers). So we find Florensky speaking at the very beginning of his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth of ‘the Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper’, something only grasped ‘through direct Orthodox experience’, so that he 3  Lewis Carroll, Complete Works (The Nonesuch Press, 1939), 196. 4  Affirmed in the very first sentence of Bulgakov’s Philosophy of the Name: see S.  Boulgakov, Le philosophie du verbe et du nom (L’Âge d’Homme, 1991), 9. 5  On this, see the quite fascinating discussion in Maurice Olender, Les langues du paradis. Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentiel (Éditions du Seuil, 1989).

126  Selected Essays, VOLUME II concludes his introductory letter by affirming ‘[T]o become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way.’6 Understood in this way, words and names are far more than arbitrary labels: they enshrine a shared experience and the power of that experience. The story of Adam’s naming the animals is then seen as an aspect of Adam’s role of being the bond of creation, in virtue of his creation in the image of God to form a microcosm of the cosmos. Bulgakov makes much of this cosmic dimension of language. Beyond this is another kind of naming, in which the element of the conventional is reduced to vanishing point: the naming of God, or rather God’s naming of himself. In the Old Testament, God’s name, the name he gives himself, is ineffable—­literally ‘not uttered’—outside the high-­priestly blessing in the Temple, where the utterance of the Divine Name simply confirms the divine presence already promised by God’s covenant with Israel. To utter it outside that context is literally to ‘take it in vain’, to utter a word empty of its reality, since it is not in our human power to grant it its reality, which is divine. It is God himself who ‘puts his name’ where he chooses to dwell—­in the tabernacle or the temple (see Deut. 12:5, 11; 14: 23, 24, etc.). This notion of the name as a place of encounter is fulfilled in the New Testament in the one named Jesus. The name of Jesus fulfils and replaces the ineffable name of the God of the Old Testament. Bulgakov puts it in this way: Having the divine energy and that of the human nature, the Name of the God-­ man does not represent the transcensus of the Old Testament Name, the irruption of the immanent into the transcendent, outside man and the world in the divine realm, which is neither man nor the world. Only the high priest could pronounce it in the secret place of the Holy of Holies, protected by every sacred means at the liturgical moment. Now, all of us are called, in the Holy of Holies of our heart, in virtue of our royal priesthood, to invoke the Name by which Jesus is present. For the Jew of old, the Name of God was like the summit of Sinai, shrouded with clouds and lightning, where Moses alone entered, while outside the rite, rigorously fixed by the law, all invocation was sinful and at fault. The name of Jesus is given ‘at every time, and at every hour’ (final prayer of the canonical hours). We should be quite conscious of this difference, of this op­pos­ ition, even, between the Name of transcendent Divinity, remote and terrible, only dwelling in the Temple, according to the inflexible witness of Scripture, and the Name of Jesus, of which every human heart is the temple, and every believer the priest, bearing the seal of the Name.7 6 P.  Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny (Moscow, 1914, reprinted by Gregg International, Farnborough, 1970: Eng. trans. by Boris Jakim, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth [Princeton University Press, 1997]), 8 (Jakim, 9). 7 S. Boulgakov, La Philosophie du Verbe et du Nom, 200–1 (my translation from C. Andronikof ’s French).

The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification  127 The pronouncing of the name of Jesus in the Jesus Prayer is, then, a repetition in the heart of the Name of Jesus placed there in baptism, no magical invocation, but an effective evocation of the ‘grace and truth’ of Jesus Christ (John 1:17). This name is invoked in the heart. The latter part of the prayer—‘have mercy on me’—quotes from the opening words of Psalm 50: ‘Have mercy on me, O God, in accordance with your great mercy’. This is the psalm most frequently recited in Orthodox prayers, both private and public; its first verse is the one perhaps most frequently alluded to in Orthodox liturgical poetry—­think how many troparia end with a reference to God ‘who grants to the world his great mercy’; for a start, three out of the eight resurrection apolytikia end by referring to God who gives or grants tô(i) kosmô(i) to mega eleos (in tones 3, 4, and 7). This psalm is, too, the psalm of the heart. ‘Create a clean heart in me, and renew a right spirit within me . . . A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart God will not despise’ (vv. 12, 19). The Jesus Prayer is often called the prayer of the heart, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Jesus Prayer is usually spoken of in connection with the prayer of the heart. Both St Theophan the Recluse and St Ignatii Brianchaninov spoke of the use of the Jesus Prayer as a way of finding the heart.8 Again, we face a problem not unlike that we discussed above in connection with the Name. There the problem was whether names and words are conventional or in some sense intrinsic; here the question is whether reference to the heart is literal or metaphorical. At least on a superficial reading, Florensky takes reference to the heart in these contexts literally; he has a few pages in Letter Nine of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (on Creation) on how the heart is physically the centre of the human person,9 and this is followed up by a five-­page appendix (chapter XXVIII) on ‘Homotypy in the Structure of the Human Body’.10 A more careful reading of Florensky reveals something more subtle. It is not simply that the heart that ‘can be broken and contrite’ (Ps. 50:19), that can be ‘created anew’ (Ps. 50:12), that elsewhere in Scripture ‘can be fixed, trusting in the Lord’ (Ps. 111:7–8), that ‘is deceitful above all things’ (Jer. 17:9), that ‘melts’ (Nahum 2:10), that is made glad with wine (Ps. 103:15), that has secrets (Ps. 43:21), from which come thoughts (Ps. 32:11, 72:7), even evil thoughts (Matt. 15:19)—that this heart, the spiritual centre of the human person, is nothing but the organ that pumps blood round the body (something the ancients were perhaps unaware of, but not Florensky!). It is rather that he sees the heart as a kind of hinge between the phys­ic­al and spiritual realms. He remarks on the parallelism of heart and spirit in the two verses from Psalm 50 quoted above: ‘ “spirit” is equivalent to “heart.” . . . The heart

8  See the passages collected by Igumen Chariton of Valaam in The Art of Prayer—­ET of Umnoe Delanie. O Molitve Iisusovoy, Valaam 1936 (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 189–90. 9 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 266–8–; Jakim, 194–5. 10 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 587–92; Jakim, 414–19.

128  Selected Essays, VOLUME II is the centre of our spiritual life, and to be spiritualized is to organize one’s heart, to organize it appropriately, to integrate one’s heart into a state of chastity’.11 The psalm itself, it seems to me, bears out such an approach. It is a prayer of the utmost inwardness, and yet it combines an astonishing number of references to parts of the body: ‘in wickedness was I conceived’, ‘you will sprinkle me with hyssop’, ‘the bones which you humbled’, ‘my tongue will rejoice . . . you will open my lips, and my mouth . . .’ (vv. 7, 9, 10, 16, 17). The experiences the psalmist refers to are both spiritual and physical, and it is the heart/spirit that is at the point where the spiritual and the physical meet. Florensky has a couple of pages in which he explores the etymology of the words for heart in Russian (serdtse) and Hebrew (libb), as representatives of the Indo-­European and Semitic languages, respectively.12 Though in somewhat different ways, both words have the sense of something within, something surrounded by something else. It becomes evident from Florensky’s brief discussion that the word heart in its simplest sense, referring to the bodily organ, is already a metaphor, referring to the heart as the ‘central’ organ. It is, in fact, scarcely possible to distinguish between literal and metaphor in this case, what we have is a range of significations—­central, inward, governing, root, source, etc.—that converge and diverge in a bewildering variety of ways. But they provide a web of significations by which we grasp something of the reality of that which is not relatively inward, but—­humanly speaking—­utterly inward (I say, ‘humanly’, for Augustine’s exclamation that God is interior intimo meo, ‘more inward than my inmost self ’, needs to be taken into account). This suggests, however, that the heart/spirit as a meeting point between the spiritual and physical is not to be conceived of as being between two parallel realms, as it were; it is rather that inwardness, in the sense of being at the centre, yields to a realm defined by inwardness. This is, of course, at some level metaphorical, but this should not surprise us. It was long ago that Dionysios the Areopagite asserted as a principle that all language that refers to spiritual things is metaphorical, since the language that we use has its primary significance in the realm of everyday reality; for this very reason Dionysios goes on to suggest that the metaphors and images that we use of spiritual things should, for preference, be images remote from the realm of spirit, lest we invest our images with too direct—­or, just as likely, too abstract—­a significance, for we are only guessing and gesturing about things spiritual. But such metaphors, like words and concepts in general, come to form a tradition of accustomed use. It is not just that we use metaphors of spiritual matters, but that these metaphors come to shape our ex­peri­ence of things spiritual. I mean this quite generally—­not just of ‘things of the Spirit’ in a theological sense, but also of our understanding of our own nature and of the web of relationships that make up human society; in all these cases the 11 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 268–9; Jakim, 196. 12 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 269–71; Jakim, 196–7.

The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification  129 metaphors we use, the stories we tell ourselves (and our children), shape our experience. The metaphors we use—­and our inability as well to use metaphors that seem inaccessible to us—­have profound implications for what we make of our experience of what it is to be human, both individually and as societies and communities. If this is true, then it is either meaningless—­or very dangerous—­to make a sharp separation between the empirical heart, that beats away throughout our lifetime, and the ‘spiritual’ heart, that can be contrite, and in its brokenness come to know God. The meaninglessness and the danger come to much the same thing. If we make this divide, then much in human experience is shot through with caverns of meaninglessness. Where are we to reach if we deny ourselves ways of talking about love, for instance, even ordinary human romantic love, in terms of the heart? It is all too clear where we reach: to a rather shallow Darwinianism that sees sex simply in terms of continuation of the human species, or to a similarly shallow psychologism, that conceives the spiritual in terms of psychological impulses and drives. It may seem that I have drifted from my subject. But I don’t think so. These considerations not only help us to grasp the subtle way in which Florensky talks about the heart; they also help us to understand how Florensky’s ninth letter, which we have been exploring—­ostensibly about creation—­revolves round two apparently widely diverse subjects: asceticism and modern science. For Florensky, these two subjects can only be understood if we hold fast to two fundamental ‘feelings and ideas’ about creation itself: first, ‘the lawlike unity of creation’, and secondly, an affirmation of ‘the genuine reality of creation as such’.13 It would be a digression if, in this context, I were to pursue his ideas about science. But Florensky’s understanding of asceticism is directly relevant. After introducing the notion of the heart in the way already mentioned, Florensky goes on to say: Purification of the heart gives communion with God, and communion with God rectifies and orders the whole person of the ascetic. Spreading over and permeating the whole person, the light of Divine love also sanctifies the boundary of the person, the body, and, from there, radiates into the nature that is outside the person. Through the root by which the spiritual person reaches into the heavens, grace also sanctifies all that surrounds the ascetic and flows into the core of all creation. The body, that common boundary of man and the rest of creation, unites them.14

A little later on he says, ‘Purification of the heart opens the eyes to the world above and thereby organizes the whole man. The soul is sanctified and the body is 13 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 278; Jakim, 202. 14 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 271; Jakim, 198.

130  Selected Essays, VOLUME II sanctified; to a holy soul is joined a holy body’.15 Florensky mentions fasting and argues that it is the intellectualism of the intelligentsia that following Descartes makes a sharp divide between reason and body, consigning the body to the realm of the machine, that can make no sense of fasting because it has no place for the body. Another quotation from Florensky makes clear the way in which asceticism, for him, restores us to a genuine understanding of and love for the created order: The higher the Christian ascetic ascends on his path to the heavenly land, the brighter his inner eye shines, the deeper the Holy Spirit descends into his heart—­the more clearly then will he see the inner, absolutely valuable core of creation, the more intensely then will pity for the prodigal child of God burn in his soul. And when the spirit descended on the saints in their highest flights of prayer, they shone with blindingly radiant love for creation. The Mother of Heaven herself told one of her chosen that ‘to be a monk is to devote oneself to prayer for the whole world’.16

It is this route that is opened up by the discovery of the heart, the purification of the heart, the naming of the divine name of Jesus within the heart, that is the purpose of praying the Jesus Prayer. In this way the Jesus Prayer is revealed as central to the asceticism that is necessary if we are to accomplish the response to God’s Incarnation that is deification. It is, I suggest, by means of these two themes of the Name and the Heart that a theology of deification develops from the Jesus Prayer. It is a theology in the fundamental sense of the word: not simply a theory, in the debased meaning that word has acquired in modern Western languages, but a practice and a life in which God is spoken and in that utterance we find grace and truth.

15 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 293; Jakim, 213. 16 Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdenie Istiny, 296–7; Jakim, 216.

12

Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology? Debate over the question of development of doctrine has been conducted largely in terms of Catholic-­Protestant dialogue—­or polemic.1 In the last century it was often seen as the most fundamental issue in the division of Western Christendom. It was very much in this spirit that John Henry Newman himself approached the concept of development, claiming that the writing of his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was the decisive intellectual step towards his decision in 1845 to leave the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic. The now classic discussion of the notion of development, by Jaroslav Pelikan in lectures that appeared in 1969 as Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena,2 also conceived the issue in primarily Catholic–­Protestant terms and, implicitly, urged Protestants to recognize development as a category they could no longer ignore. But at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, any adequate discussion of such a central matter for the understanding of the study of Christian doctrine needs to take account of the perspective of those who embrace the Orthodox tradition, including me and the one we are honouring. The first time I became aware of any Orthodox attitude to the notion of development was when, many years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to Archbishop Athenagoras, then, and until his death, the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, the leader of the Greek Orthodox community in the UK. He began a conversation with me, then a young Anglican priest, by asserting that he was sure we were at one in rejecting the notion of development. It is this, he said, that divides us most fundamentally from Rome. I can’t remember much of the discussion, but I do remember that I was quite surprised. To me, a young Anglo-­Catholic priest who counted Newman a hero, it seemed that development was almost obvious. It was clear that such doctrines as the Trinity and Christology were affirmed only in a very inchoate way in the pre-­ Nicene Church compared with the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries, so a notion of development was needed if one was to maintain that these fundamental doctrines were an essential part of Christian confession. 1  This lecture was delivered on 2 May 2003 in the Swift Lecture Hall at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the first of a series of lectures in honour of Jaroslav Pelikan. 2  Jaroslav Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (Yale University Press, 1969). Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0013

132  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Now, years later, if asked about development, I would be a little unsure as to how, as an Orthodox theologian, to respond. It is not a topic much discussed in Orthodox theology, save by some of the more traditionalist theologians of Greece and Russia who would wholeheartedly agree with the late Archbishop Athenagoras. Something like the notion of development is occasionally used explicitly, but in the cases I can think of it is not Newman’s idea but rather the classically Protestant understanding which sees any development as negative—­not growth but distortion. One might think, for instance, of Fr Georges Florovsky’s use of the biological category, borrowed from Oswald Spengler, of pseudo-­morphosis in relation to the history of Russian theology. Conversely, Orthodox theology has tended over the last half-­century or so to be presented in a basically historical guise—­as well as Fr Florovsky, others too are or were more of a historical than a philosophical bent—­ Vladimir Lossky, Fr John Meyendorff, Fr Alexander Schmemann, Bishop Kallistos Ware—­and this historical approach has meant that Christian doctrine is presented as a historical development even though the category of development is not generally invoked explicitly. On occasions when, one might have thought, it would be of value to employ such a notion, it is striking that Orthodox theologians do not do so. A couple of examples spring to mind—­the doctrine of icons and the distinction between essence and energies in the Godhead. It would seem obvious to a historian that neither the eighth-­century doctrine of the necessity of making and venerating icons nor the fourteenth-­century Palamite distinction between essence and energies can really be found in the fourth-­century Fathers—­especially, in both cases, St Basil the Great—­to whom appeal is generally made, yet I know of no Orthodox theologian who calls on the category of authentic development to justify the later doctrine. Development does not seem to be perceived as an available category for Orthodox theology. So, I feel myself venturing onto virgin territory as an Orthodox theologian choosing to discuss this topic. Yet it seems a quite pertinent subject to raise when honouring Professor Pelikan, whose great five-­volume work has the general title, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,3 and who, a few years ago, was chrismated and received in the Orthodox Church.

‘Development’ in Western Historical Disciplines We begin with the fundamental question: What is development of doctrine? What do we mean by ‘development’ in this context? It has a general and some more specific senses or connotations or entailments. 3 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1971–89).

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  133 The general sense of development is easy to characterize and seems almost obvious to anyone trained in Western historical disciplines. In this sense, development is something acknowledged as one acquires a sense of history, including the sense that ideas are not floating eternal truths but thoughts entertained and pursued by human beings living in human societies that develop through time. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this sense of historical development—­ the growth of such a sense marks a kind of caesura in the history of Western thought. It is a product of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, of the power of reason to analyse the structures of human society and at the same time of the rejection of the Enlightenment’s attempt to escape the constraints of history in some universally valid society, a rejection which came to value the societies of the past—­Classical Greece or the Western Middle Ages—­as societies very different from ours but perhaps exemplifying values that were slipping from the grasp of modern Western people. This produced both a sense of the distance of the past and a nostalgia for some aspects of those earlier societies, especially their sense of community. This sense of historical epochs is an important element in Hegel, for whom a grasp of philosophy is gained through understanding its historical development and our place at the culmination of this centuries-­long progress of the human spirit. Newman, too, has a sense, very differently articulated, of historical sequence. In his Essay in particular he is concerned to demonstrate that we can intelligently affirm that Christian doctrine asserts the same faith in different historical circumstances only by appeal to a notion of development that allows for real differences in the ways Christians express their beliefs in different eras. I suspect that anyone educated in Western historical disciplines finds it very difficult to imagine how else one might think about intellectual history and therefore the history of Christian doctrine. Ideas are expressed in terms of a developing human society, and even if they correspond to eternal realities, they do this in ways that are historically conditioned and consequently subject to change. One reason such a notion is less accessible to Orthodox theology is readily apparent. If development is a concept traceable to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, then it belongs to movements bypassed on ‘The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy’, to evoke the title of Fr Schmemann’s famous book. But many Orthodox theologians in what we call the ‘diaspora’ have actually been educated in Western historical disciplines. That ideas are historically conditioned is not in the least foreign to them, though this notion tends to be used in a one-­sided way. The idea that the West, from Charlemagne onwards, developed in a historically conditioned way is part of the thesis of Fr John Romanides in Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine,4 but Fr Romanides did not seem to see that this is

4  John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1982).

134  Selected Essays, VOLUME II presumably true of the Byzantines just as much as the Carolingians. He utilizes the notion of development, in relation to the West, but in a negative way—­a phenomenon we have already noticed.

Newman’s Understanding of Development However, the notion of development as Newman expounded it is more than this general sense of historical development. It involves at least three specific senses, or connotations or entailments. First, development—­or rather authentic development—­does not just mean change; it means progress. Development of doctrine does not just mean that the expression of doctrine is historically conditioned and therefore subject to change; it means some sort of advance in doctrine, growth, or accumulation—­ in Newman’s own words, it involves ‘the germination, growth and perfection of some living, that is, influential truth, or apparent truth, in the minds of men during a sufficient period’ (p. 99).5 Newman draws on a whole range of images or metaphors of growth or advance. Take this famous passage: It is indeed sometime said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a phil­ oso­phy or a sect, which, on the contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and, for a time, savours of the soil. Its vital elem­ent needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom, more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first, no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent: it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time, it makes essays that fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall about it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations, and old principles reappear under new forms; it changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  (p. 100)

There are at least three images being used here. There is the image of the stream, growing from a trickle at the source to a great river carrying all before it, passing 5  Citations from the Essay are referenced by the page number in parentheses, according to the edition prepared by J.  M.  Cameron from the first (1845) edition for Pelican Classics (Penguin Books, 1974).

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  135 through different regions, remaining the same but constantly changing, and only revealing its real nature and power in the course of its mighty flow—­think of the contrast between the trickle that emerges from the fountain at Donaueschingen and the great river Danube that flows through Vienna or Budapest. There is the  image of a plant or an animal (sometimes Newman’s language suggests an amœba-­like being), growing and developing. Finally there is the image of a p ­ eople or a community, moving on to new territory and developing new forms of life in a new setting—­not without struggle and conflict. These three images are rather different, though in the context of Newman’s rhetoric the differences are made to seem complementary. The central one, controlling the impression created by the other two, is the organic metaphor—­in this case there is unequivocal growth or progress of something that remains the same organism. This is what we would expect from the earlier quotation of Newman, in which development is characterized in primarily organic terms. But neither rivers nor human communities are organisms, though in the latter case we often use organic imagery of the development of human societies. The use of organic metaphors for a community is, however, not without at­tend­ ant dangers, despite—­or perhaps because of—­its popularity. When we talk of societies learning or being a repository of memory, we are using these terms in a sense much less clear than when we talk of a child learning or of memory constituting a major part of an individual’s sense of identity. What a society forgets, for instance, does not remain latent in that society in the way what is forgotten remains latent in an individual (at least in some cases). The organic metaphor draws our attention to the positive aspect of change and development in a way that may not be altogether appropriate in the case of human communities, even the community that is the Church. This is something we shall develop later. Second, and rather strangely, Newman’s idea of development appears to anticipate Darwin’s notion of evolution in the way that it envisages what to a historian might appear to be unpredictable jumps in the development of Christian doctrine. Newman’s careful distinction of his idea of development from others that had already found a place in earlier Catholic theology is explored with characteristic lucidity by Owen Chadwick in From Bossuet to Newman.6 Newman explicitly goes beyond logical or mathematical development, which is simply drawing lo­gic­al conclusions from initial premises. Again this is seen to be a characteristic of life, which is broader and deeper (as Newman might have said) than what can be discerned by human reason. Third, Newman’s idea of development entails an infallible teaching office to adjudicate. Here Newman abandons his reliance on the organic model. For him, there needs to be some definite way of distinguishing authentic development from corruption. Newman is no longer prepared to stick to his organic metaphor, 6  Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (Cambridge University Press, 1957).

136  Selected Essays, VOLUME II and makes it clear that recognition of authentic development ultimately needs an unquestioned and unquestionable authority, such as developed in the teaching office of the see of St Peter (though there is a certain circularity in the argument here, as the development of the teaching office of the pope is an example of development). These three specific points are linked. The organic idea opens up the notion of development, taking it beyond mere logical development; this is emphasized in the second point, which makes a great deal (particularly in the examples Newman gives from Church history) of the way in which these developments could hardly have been predicted; which opens the way for Newman’s final point, that an infallible teaching authority is necessary to distinguish authentic development from corruption. It is important to realize that this final point is essential for Newman. Discussions of development, often forgetting that this was where his argument was leading, simply recount the various tests he gave for distinguishing authentic development from corruption—­Preservation of Type or Idea, Continuity of Principles, Power of Assimilation, Early Anticipation, Logical Sequence, Preservative Additions, and Chronic Continuance (to use the terminology of the first edition of the Essay). But these tests need to be applied, and Newman was not prepared to leave their application to scholars and theologians.

Romanticism and Development Now, clearly, Orthodox are in agreement with Protestants in resisting Newman’s final step to an infallible authority. The other two specific points are more amen­able to assimilation. This might seem odd, as it could well be argued that the first two points are expressions of a fundamentally Romantic attitude to faith. They emphasize the organic and look for authenticity in evidence of life. For Newman, this is rooted in the second of the two proverbs that had guided him from his earliest days: ‘Holiness rather than peace’, and ‘Growth the only evidence of life’. But this only shows how much a man of his times Newman was, for it was a characteristic of Romanticism to see authenticity in life and feelings rather than in rationally ascertained truths. One only need glance through Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection to see ample evidence for this in the religious sphere, something summed up in his exclamation, ‘Evidences of ­ Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-­knowledge of his need for it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence . . ..’7 There is much of the same feel in Newman’s Essay, which is concerned with evoking a sense of the living organic development of

7  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (George Bell and Sons, 1904), 272.

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  137 Christianity as a movement to which one wants to belong, outside which there is simply torpor and corruption. But despite—­or because of—­the Romantic roots of the idea of a developing organism, it is an idea that is very congenial to at least some Orthodox theo­lo­ gians, especially Russians. Such an organic conception of the Church is central to Alexei Khomiakov, whom we find declaring, ‘Wherefore it must be understood that Creeds and prayers and works are nothing of themselves, but are only an external manifestation of the inward spirit’8—the Church is an organism and to belong to the Church is primarily manifest in living its life. Khomiakov’s idea of sobornost´ as characterizing the Church seems to me an entailment of his profound sense of the organic nature of the Church—­the Church is a living organism, and the members of the Church are characterized by sharing in that life; sobornost´, togetherness, characterizes the life of Christians in the Church. This sense of togetherness is so emphasized that the Orthodox Christian has no sense of identity over against the Church, nor does he or she feel the need for anything to define the nature and extent of the Church. Within the Church there is unity and freedom—­both signs of authentic life. In contrast, the Western Church has lost this sense of sobornost´ and either protects unity by authority at the expense of freedom—­the Catholic way, not noticeably diminished since Vatican II—­or affirms freedom to the point of destroying unity—­the Protestant way. I suspect that here too we can see the influence of Romanticism, a Romanticism imbibed from German sources to which the Slavophils, like Khomiakov, had turned with enthusiasm. Andrei Walicky calls the Slavophils in general, and Khomiakov in particular, conservative romantics,9 a term that might well be applied to Coleridge. A comparative study of Khomiakov and Coleridge would reveal interesting convergences.

Probing the Orthodox Reluctance Despite the way the idea of sobornost´ expresses an organic notion of the Church and therefore, one might suppose, could render Orthodox theologians open to the first two specific points evoked by Newman—­those expressing his sense of development as organic—­it is nevertheless the case that Orthodox theologians are not at all happy with the idea of development. As I mentioned earlier, even in cases where the notion of development might seem very helpful—­the theology of icons and the Palamite distinction between essence and energies—­we do not find

8  From Khomiakov’s essay on the Church, in W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, vol. I (Rivington, Percival and Co., 1895), 201. 9  Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Clarendon Press, 1980), 107.

138  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Orthodox theologians availing themselves of this idea. I want to probe this reluctance. I begin by confessing that, to some extent at least, the reluctance reveals what seems to be a weakness in Orthodox theology. There is a tendency in Orthodox theology to represent the teaching of the various Fathers of the Church in a rather flat way, as if they had all lived at the same time, so historical considerations are scarcely necessary. In this respect, such Orthodox theology recalls older ways of presenting the history of doctrine in the West. It has been remarked of several of the older histories of dogma (I won’t single any one out) that so far as any sense of historical, political, and/or social context is concerned, the whole story of Christian doctrine might well have taken place on the moon. The same failing is to be found in what Karl Rahner called ‘Denzinger theology’, where extracts drawn from Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum were simply laid side by side without any attention to context and therefore to meaning. The overcoming of this kind of theology in the West has been one of the more serious contributions to the possibility of ecumenical theology, as Professor Pelikan long ago remarked in the lectures already referred to.10 Simply understanding our history has helped towards the realization that in many cases what appear to be examples of dogmatic opposition are really ex­amples of much the same thing being asserted in strikingly different historical contexts. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency in Orthodox theology to give an account of historical doctrine that tends to be unhistorical or ahistorical. This is a weakness we Orthodox need to overcome. A sense of critical distance in expounding the thoughts of those of different ages does not necessarily entail any lack of commitment to the truths the Fathers were expressing. We need that sense of critical distance if we are not to gloss one Father with another and so lose a sense of their individuality and historical context. For instance, we shall, I am sure, understand the Cappadocian Fathers better if we know something about the social and political circumstances of fourth-­century Cappadocia. However, there is a reason for Orthodox reluctance to make very much of the sense of historical development. One way of putting it is to recall the language we habitually use in speaking of Christian teachers from the past centuries. We Orthodox call them the ‘Holy Fathers’—we do not approach them as dead ­teachers from the past, as we might Plato or one of the Classical philosophers. We regard them as living now in the life of the Resurrection, more alive than we are, as they are closer to the Source of Life. This goes beyond the fact that great ­thinkers, poets, and artists of the past are not in any normal way superseded by their successors (and in the case of Plato, there are even traditions, such as one 10 Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine, 51–62.

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  139 preserved among the writings of St Anastasios of Sinai, that see him coming to faith in the Resurrection).11 We do not hope to surpass the Fathers in our grasp of the mystery of Christ; rather, we look to them to help us to a deeper understanding. We do not stand over against the Fathers; we come to them to learn from them. This entails that if development means that there is a historical advance in Christian doctrine, making our understanding of the faith deeper or more profound than that of the Fathers, at least in principle, then such a notion of development cannot be accepted as a category of Orthodox theology. We shall not advance beyond the faith of the Fathers, nor shall we advance beyond the faith of the apostles. As we sing at Pentecost, in the troparion for the feast, ‘Blessed are you, Christ our God, who revealed the fishermen to be most wise by sending down to them the Holy Spirit, and so through them catching the whole world in a net. Lover of humankind, glory to You!’ This sense of the witness of the Holy Fathers is something not found at all vividly in Western scholarship. Scholarship inspired by the idea of development can produce a kind of hubris; as if we know more than they did and can sit in judgement on them, whereas real scholarship is aware that, in fact, we know very much less than the Fathers did both about extant Christian tradition (for instance, the Cappadocian Fathers probably knew more of Origen than we ever shall, just as Origen himself knew more about Hellenistic philosophy than we can hope to with the sources that have come down to us, not to mention the multitude of second-­century Christian traditions) and about the circumstances of their time, where we rely on sources, often late and fragmentary, that happen to have survived. Awareness of this should induce a sense, if not of humility, at least of caution in our judgements. As a young Romanian Orthodox former student and friend of mine remarks in a recent article, The conviction that we know more than the actors in the events of the fourth century makes possible the presentation of the ‘development of Christian doctrine’ in terms of intellectual emancipation. It is quite perplexing to see the confidence of so many contemporary scholars who depict the fourth-­ century controversies as a mere fruit of mutual misunderstanding.12

11  Preserved as Quaestio 111 in Anastasios, Quaestiones et responsiones (PG 89.764C). A learned man, accustomed to curse Plato daily, has a dream in which Plato appears to him and says. “Man, stop cursing me; for you are merely harming yourself. I do not deny that I was a sinner; but, when Christ descended into hell, no one believed in Him sooner than I did.” 12  Mihail Neamţu, ‘The Unfolding of Truth: Eunomius of Cyzicus and Gregory of Nyssa in debate over Orthodoxy (360–381)’, Archæus VI (2002), fasc. 1–2:113. English somewhat modified.

140  Selected Essays, VOLUME II We might recall what T. S. Eliot remarked in an early essay: ‘Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’13

Learning from a Genuinely Critical Intelligence This does not mean retracting what I said earlier about how much Orthodox the­ ology has to learn from cultivating a genuinely critical intelligence. On the contrary, the way in which historical scholarship can place the Fathers more securely in their historical context should make them more alive, not less. Yes, we may discover things that we might like to forget (and which certainly the hagi­og­raph­ers have passed over)—Athanasius and Cyril were prepared to resort to violence, Basil had a rather grim way of treating his friends, and so on. But averting our gaze from the less ad­mir­able features of those we admire is no way of honouring them. Saints—­we call them the Holy Fathers—­are not unreal ideals but genuine human beings, with all their faults, beginning to respond to the transfiguring power of the Holy Spirit. However, historical scholarship may raise more fundamental questions: Who are the Fathers? Why honour Athanasius rather than Arius, Gregory of Nyssa rather than his fellow Cappadocian Eunomius, or (a more difficult one) Leontius of Byzantium (though he is not honoured as a saint) rather than Severus of Antioch, dubbed by the Orthodox a ‘monophysite’? I think from within Orthodoxy all we can say is that the Fathers are our Fathers, because we are their children. Behind this assertion lies faith in the Holy Spirit’s guiding of the Church through the tradition of the Fathers and the Councils. A Western theologian might well feel this inadequate, and want either, with Newman, an infallible teaching authority, or with my friend and mentor, Professor Maurice Wiles, the freedom to revise the tradition and make a Father of Arius—­though it seems to me that he does not make the final step very convincingly. To recall what we said earlier about Khomiakov and the notion of sobornost´: it has never been very clear how Khomiakov found authority and freedom united in sobornost´, but nevertheless the idea of sobornost´ seems to have meant something, even outside the bounds of Orthodoxy, to judge from the way it has been taken up in twentieth-­century Western ecclesiology.

Theological Ideas in the Context of Worship Hence, though I would welcome a greater historical sense in Orthodox theology (and there is plenty of evidence that this is becoming more common), it seems to 13 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd enlarged edn (Faber & Faber, 1951), 16. From the essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1919.

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  141 me that this would not entail that the idea of development itself is a valid category for Orthodox theology. In discussion of development, attention is sometimes drawn to what J. N. D. Kelly called ‘a highly original theory of doctrinal development’ put forward by St Gregory Nazianzen.14 In the last of his Theological Orations Gregory says, Here, growth towards perfection comes through additions. In this way, the old covenant made clear proclamation of the Father, a less definite one of the Son. The new covenant made the Son manifest and gave us a glimpse of the Spirit’s Godhead. At the present time, the Spirit resides among us, giving us a clearer manifestation of himself than before.15

Though Kelly calls it a ‘theory of doctrinal development’, Gregory’s idea is very different from Newman’s, for Gregory is not suggesting that the fourth century had a deeper grasp of the Holy Spirit than the first. The rest of the paragraph makes clear that the manifestation of the Spirit reaches its fullness among those in whom he resides after Pentecost—­the fishermen made ‘most wise’ by the coming of the Holy Spirit. It is becoming customary in modern patristic scholarship to emphasize the difference between Basil the Great, with his reserve about affirming clearly the Spirit’s divinity, and Gregory of Nazianzus, with his explicit affirmation of the Spirit as God and indeed homoousios. But they shared a great deal in their approach to theology, and this we can see here. The Holy Spirit is manifest through his residing with us—­it is in the community of the Church, in the sacramental community, that the Spirit is revealed. Basil had argued similarly in his work On the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Spirit belongs to the dogmata, as he calls them, those doctrines preserved within the bosom of the Church by unwritten traditions. All the examples Basil gives of these unwritten traditions are liturgical—­the use of the sign of the cross, facing East for prayer, the epiclesis in the Eucharist, blessings of water for baptism and oil for unction; the Trinitarian doxology is the explicit occasion of his work On the Holy Spirit.16 This means that, again, emphasis is put on the experience of being part of the sacramental community of the Church. Some modern Western theologians have sought to promote the idea that it is in the context of worship that theological ideas emerge and are tested.17 This

14 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 2nd edn (A. & C. Black, 1960), 261. 15  Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 31.26, Wickham’s translation in On God and Christ: St Gregory of Nazianzus: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 137. A not dissimilar idea of progressive disclosure of the Persons of the Godhead can be found in Origen, De Principiis I.3.1. 16  See Basil, De Spiritu Sancto 27.66 (for unwritten traditions), 2.4 (for the Trinitarian doxology). 17 See, e.g., Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (Epworth, 1980).

142  Selected Essays, VOLUME II seems to me a thoroughly Orthodox insight. It would indeed be interesting to look at the notion of development in the context of Christian worship. The first thing to emerge would be a much greater sense of continuity, or stability, in what is called development. The doctrine of Christ’s divinity and lordship is immediately apparent in the Church’s tradition of prayer and worship; the same can be said for the doctrine of the Trinity. Christian doctrine would then be seen as the attempt to articulate what is involved in the Church’s sacramental worship. Seen like this—­to digress briefly—­we can see how close to the central tradition of the Church is that mysterious theologian who called himself Dionysios the Areopagite, for he sees theology as an attempt to elucidate the terms we use, the names we use, when we praise God—­hymnein is the Greek word. Such a theology may be demanding in intellectual terms—­ such is certainly the case with Dionysios—­but it can scarcely become merely intellectual, for it is grounded in the sacramental life of the Church and our participation in it through prayer. Theology, in the sense the word has nowadays, means, then, seeking to give expression to the truth glimpsed in prayer and worship. The history of doctrine is not properly characterized as a “search for doctrine,” as Richard Hanson put it.18 It is rather a search for truth, an attempt to give expression to the truth experienced in communion with God through the sacramental communion of the Church. It is a search for truth, because we are seeking to find ways of expressing that truth, using the historically conditioned categories available to us. These expressions of truth we may expect to change over time, and there may well be cumulative change, because the ‘dead writers’ are that which we know, but to speak of this as ‘development of doctrine’ is perhaps to mistake our categories. To quote again from my young Romanian friend, Mihail Neamţu: Like Christ’s apostles and their immediate heirs, martyred in the first three ­centuries, the Christian theologians of the fourth century were not in search of a doctrine, but in search of truth. To spread the Gospel to the Gentiles meant for St Paul to present the image of Christ in different cultural idioms, which despite their peculiarity were meant to preserve the universality of a unique proc­lam­ ation. This explains why the elements of the Christian doctrine of God stemmed from the earliest times of the Church and could acquire new connotations even one thousand years after Nicæa . . . . The profound dogmatic elaborations of the fourth century, on the side of the orthodox theologians, did not bring the apostolic faith somewhere further, on to a deeper level of understanding. Given their relative flexibility regarding the language, the champions of orthodoxy in the fourth century only provided new means of conceptualization of what is essentially encapsulated in the proclamation of Christ’s lordship and divinity 18  As in the title of his book, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (T. & T. Clark, 1988).

Development of Doctrine in Orthodox Theology?  143 . . . . ‘Development of doctrine’, within and beyond the fourth century, represents not the evolution from a primitive stage (of the primitive Church) towards more recent and more intelligent levels of understanding, but the spontaneous process of unfolding of what is already given in the apostolic and unsurpassable confession of Christ as ‘God and Lord’.19

These wise words seem to me to represent an authentic Orthodox understanding of the limitations of the idea of doctrinal development.

Refreshing the Memory of the Church We can, perhaps, take this a step further.20 I have suggested that we cannot expect to surpass the Fathers because it is as Fathers in the faith that we reverence them. This might lead to a deeper reflection, if we consider what they thought theology to be. The word theologos in the Greek Christian tradition does not mean what the word customarily means nowadays—­that is, someone able to present a religious view of things, or who expounds the religious teaching of the Church (when, indeed, it is not used pejoratively).21 It is, rather, a word with a very restricted connotation—­primarily the inspired authors of sacred Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments, with a tendency to regard John the Evangelist as the pre-­eminent theologian. Only rarely is it used with any wider connotation, and it still carries the charge of its original meaning. St Gregory Nazianzen comes to be given the title, ranking his exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity alongside the teaching of the fourth Evangelist. Evagrios’ oft-­cited assertion—‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly, you will be a theologian’22— in reality exalts the one who has acquired true prayer to the level of the scriptural writers.23 The central theological task, as the Fathers see it, is to interpret the writings of the theologoi, that is, the Scriptures, in the light of the mystery of Christ. It is a task that cannot be surpassed; it remains for us all the touchstone of any authentic ‘theology’ in our sense. There is no development beyond seeking, again and again, to deepen our understanding of the Scriptures in the light of the mystery of Christ. 19  Neamţu, ‘The Unfolding of Truth’, 119–20. English again somewhat modified. 20  I owe this insight to discussions with Fr John Behr, though it is not perhaps expressed quite in the way he would. 21 See A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1986), 4:802, s.v. the­ ology, 1.d. 22 Evagrios, On Prayer 61. 23  See my ‘ “. . . And If You Pray Truly, You Are a Theologian”: Some Reflections on Early Christian Spirituality’, Wisdom of the Byzantine Church: Evagrios and Maximos the Confessor (Department of Religious Studies, University of Missouri, 1998), esp. 7 f. Also published as ‘Evagrios: The “Noetic” Language of Prayer’, Chapter 9 in Selected Essays, volume I.

144  Selected Essays, VOLUME II So I would conclude that, though the notion of development is bound up with ways of historical understanding from which we Orthodox have plenty to learn, the idea of development itself is not an acceptable category in Orthodox theology. This might seem a dispiriting conclusion, especially as we honour a scholar and theologian who has devoted his life to historical theology. But that would be to misunderstand the nature of my conclusion. Historical methods, I repeat, have much to offer theology, especially perhaps Orthodox theology. What such methods implement, however, is not the tracing of some upward curve of development but rather the preserving of access in the present to the great theologians of the past. Historical theology is, if you like, a way of refreshing, or revitalizing, the memory of the Church. It prevents our paying too much attention to the clamouring voices of our contemporaries, and en­ables us to hear the voices of the great witnesses of the past, those to whom we owe our faith, our Fathers in the faith. And no one perhaps, in our lifetime, has so  helped keep Christian memory alive—­over the whole Christian tradition, both  temporally and geographically—­as Professor Jaroslav Pelikan, whom we ­honour today.

13 The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the Twentieth Century The question of the authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the twentieth century was actually raised among the members of the diaspora, and the purpose of this paper is to place that issue in its historical context. The issue was raised directly, of course, in connexion with the ‘controversy over Sophia’: Spor o Sofii, the title of a book by one of the protagonists, Vladimir Lossky.1 Although the controversy led to no censure of Fr Sergii Bulgakov by his own ecclesiastical authorities, the fact that Bulgakov died in the course of the Second World War, so that, after the war, the theological scene among the Orthodox in the West was dominated by Fr Georges Florovsky and Lossky himself, meant that, for the rest of the twentieth century, Orthodox theology in the diaspora has been largely determined by the alternative agenda set by Florovsky and Lossky, an agenda called by Florovsky ‘the Neo-­Patristic synthesis’.2 For Florovsky, the controversy over Sophia was perhaps something of a side-­show: in his massive study, Puti Russkogo Bogosloviya, the only extensive monograph he ever produced,3 Florovsky dismissed the history of Russian theology, and called on Russian Orthodox theology to return to the Fathers, specifically to the Greek Fathers, and in this way to discover ‘Christian Hellenism’ and provide the basis for his much-­vaunted ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’. This makes it look as if Orthodox theology was rescued in the middle of the twentieth century from what Florovsky called the ‘Babylonian Captivity of the Russian Church’4 and analysed as an example of ‘pseudo-­morphosis’, a category he took from Oswald Spengler’s Der  Untergang des Abendlandes.5 Just as Orthodox iconography had largely 1  Republished, together with other material on the controversy and some other articles of Vladimir Lossky’s, as Spor o Sofii. Stat’i raznykh let (Izdatel’stvo Svyato-­Vladimirskogo Bratstva, 1996); Spor o Sofii is on pages 7–79. 2 See Myroslaw Tataryn, ‘Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944): Time for a New Look’, and Thomas Hopko’s comment, ‘Receiving Father Bulgakov’, in St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42 (1998), 315–38, 373–83. 3  Georges Florovsky, Puti Russkogo Bogosloviya (Paris, 1937), reprinted with an introduction by Fr John Meyendorff ( YMCA-­Press, 1981). English translation by Robert  L.  Nichols: Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1 (Nordland Publishing Co., 1979); vol. 2 (Bücherverstriebsanstalt, 1987). 4 Florovsky, Puti, 89; Nichols: Ways of Russian Theology, 121. 5  Introduced at the end of ch. 2 of Florovsky, Puti, 56; Nichols: Ways of Russian Theology, 85.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0014

146  Selected Essays, VOLUME II succumbed to Western influences by the beginning of the twentieth century, and stood in need of being saved by such as Leonid Ouspensky and Fotis Kontoglou, who sought to rediscover the roots of the Orthodox iconographic tradition, so, too, had Orthodox theology been overwhelmed by the methods of Western the­ ology, and needed to be rescued and restored to its true sources in the Fathers, especially the Greek Fathers. There may be something in this way of presenting the history of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century, but it seems to me a vast oversimplification.6 Where, we might ask, was the real turning point in the history of modern Orthodox theology? If there is such a turning point, then I would associate this, not in the twentieth century with a final turning away from the influence of nineteenth-­century German Idealism, something Florovsky hoped he could discern in the rejection of sophiology, but in the late eighteenth century with the publication of the Philokalia in Venice in 1782. It is that publication, it seems to me, which heralds the renewal of the sources of Orthodox theology, initiating a weaning off the kind of theology represented in the ‘Symbolic Books’, in which indeed Orthodox theology had been presented in the categories of post-­scholastic Western theology.7 The publication of the Philokalia epitomizes a whole movement of return to the patristic roots of Orthodox theology, the brightest star of  which was St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, the editor, together with St Makarios of Corinth, of the Philokalia.8 For the Philokalia was only one, if perhaps the most important, of Nikodimos’ projects. The following year he published an edition of the Evergetinos, an ascetic anthology in some ways comparable with the Philokalia. He compiled from the Fathers commentaries on many books of the bible; he produced an invaluable commentary, again drawing heavily on the Fathers, on the canons for the great feasts (his Heortodromion); he published an edition of the extant works of St Symeon the New Theologian, and prepared an edition of the works of St Gregory Palamas, which vanished in Vienna, whence it had been sent for printing. In all of this we see massive labour devoted to a return to the Fathers. But more than that, it is a return of the Fathers with what one might call a particular complexion: it is not simply a scientific rediscovery of Christian antiquity, it is the recovery of the patristic tradition as it had been handed down in the monastic tradition of prayer. Such appeal to the Fathers can never be simply archaeological; moreover, it involves selection—­the creation (or recognition) of a certain profile. Nikodimos was drawn to those Fathers in whom

6  As, indeed, is that picture of what Ouspensky, at least, was up to in his rediscovery of the icon: something that emerges from Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (Reaktion Books, 2002; Russian original, 1995). 7  See, most recently, Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo (Yale University Press, 2003), 419–26. 8  On this, see further my ‘The Theology of the Philokalia’. In Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West, Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos Ware, ed. John Behr, Andrew Louth, and Dimitri Conomos (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 351–61 (also printed as Chapter 7 in this volume).

The Authority of the Fathers  147 the ascetic and dogmatic traditions converged; neither the dogmatic tradition on its own nor the ascetic tradition on its own, but those in whom these two trad­ itions mutually fertilized each other, notably St Maximos the Confessor and St Gregory Palamas, the two Fathers devoted most space in the Philokalia. Through them are encountered more ancient Fathers, but already selected, as it were, by their reception by such as Maximos and Gregory: Athanasius and Cyril, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysios the Areopagite and John Damascene. What we are finding is not just a return to the Fathers of the past, but the building up of a sense of the patristic tradition, both as a selection of Fathers brought to our attention, but, more fundamentally, a sense of the patristic tradition as one in which God is encountered in prayer, so that, in the saying of Evagrios, found in the Philokalia, ‘a theologian is one who prays truly, and one who prays truly is a theologian’. This rediscovery of the patristic tradition is, for Nikodimos, part of a whole deepening of the Christian life, going together with his insistence on frequent communion and on the importance of spiritual fatherhood, starchestvo. The initial impact was felt in the nineteenth century, not so much in Greece, dominated by the finally successful political struggle against the Turks, but in Russia, through the parallel spiritual movement of renewal represented by Paissy Velichkovsky (I put it like that, for it seems to me that St Paissy was not indebted to the Philokalia as such in any simple way, but rather to the tradition that it represents, for he had already begun his work of translation by the time the Philokalia itself was published). For we find in nineteenth-­century Russia what can rightly be called a ‘philokalic’ revival: a revival of monasticism as a way of prayer, of spiritual fatherhood, combined with an enthusiasm for the Fathers themselves. This found an echo among the Slavophils: Ivan Kireevsky, for instance, was associated with the monastery of Optino—­Optina Pustyn´—and helped that monastery in the task of publishing the works of the Fathers. The translation of the Philokalia, especially the Russian translation by St Feofan the Recluse, also forms part of a recovery of the Fathers. Kireevsky spoke of the Fathers as ‘eyewitnesses concerning a country they have been to’.9 This rediscovery of the Fathers may not have made much impact in the nineteenth century on the way theology was taught in the Orthodox seminaries and theological academies—­ and to that extent Florovsky’s criticism is justified—­though this tradition of recourse to the Fathers was not limited to the lay intelligentsia: it owed much to the labour of translation in the theological academies, something Fr Bobrinskoy himself has drawn attention to in a recent article, in which he cites Olivier Clément’s remark that ‘à la fin du XIXe siècle, la Russie disposait, dans sa langue, de la meilleure bibliothèque

9 I. V. Kireevsky, Otryvki, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1861; reprinted Ann Arbor, 1983), 334, cf. 340. English translation in Boris Jakim and Robert Bird, trans. and ed., On Spiritual Unity, A Slavophile Reader (Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 283, cf. 288.

148  Selected Essays, VOLUME II patristique de l’Europe’.10 This doubtless made possible Bulgakov’s genuine recourse to patristic learning, for instance, to which attention has been drawn by recent research.11 There was more to Russian lay theology (to which Bulgakov was heir) than German idealism. The story of the revival of modern Orthodox theology is not simply an Orthodox story, however, for the revival of interest in the Fathers in nineteenth-­ century Russia was not at all an isolated phenomenon. In England, the Oxford Movement led to enormous activity in making the works of the Fathers known in English translation, and awakened an interest that reached beyond the Movement itself.12 Similar revivals can be found elsewhere in contemporary Europe, and the fruit of this revival may be seen by the end of the century in a deepening scholarly interest in the Fathers. Whatever one may think of Harnack’s theology, his immense erudition was devoted to creating a scholarly discipline called ‘patristics’. This parallel revival of patristics in Western Christianity is an important part of our story, for the Russian émigrés found themselves in an intellectual climate in the West that was by no means ignorant of the Fathers. So far as the émigrés in Paris were concerned—­and these are central to any understanding of the Western diaspora—­there is a story here of mutual interest and encouragement.13 For the period after the First World War saw a growing interest in, and commitment to, the works of the Fathers in the West. Part of the reason for this must have been a reaction amongst Roman Catholics to the condemnation of the Modernists in the early years of the twentieth century. Anti-­Modernism made both biblical (especially New Testament) scholarship and any interest, other than rather conservative, in current theological problems dangerous, which must have encouraged livelier minds to turn to patristics, where theology could be pursued more freely under the cover of history. Henri (later Cardinal) de Lubac springs to mind, and his influence in the years after 1918 as mentor to many Jesuits in training at Lyon-­ Fourvière was profound; Jean (later Cardinal) Daniélou and Hans Urs (later nearly Cardinal) von Balthasar were amongst his disciples.14 But the growing interest in French Catholic theology in the Fathers found inspiration elsewhere. Daniélou reveals in his introduction to the reprint in book form of Myrrha Lot-­ Borodine’s articles on deification in the Fathers that his reading of these articles

10  Boris Bobrinskoy, ‘Le renouveau actuel de la patristique dans l’orthodoxie’, Les pères de l’Église au XXe siècle. Histoire-­littérature-­théologie (Les Éditions du Cerf, 1997), 437–44; quotation from Clément on p. 440. 11  See, e.g., Rowan Williams, Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (T. & T. Clark, 1999), 8–11, for his knowledge of Palamas. 12  The English cannot have been much behind the Russians in their provision of patristic writings in translation, though, with a few exceptions such as St Gregory the Great and St John Damascene, the notion of patristics did not reach beyond 451. 13  Emphasized by Père Bobrinskoy, ‘Le renouveau actuel’, 441. 14 Though none of these found their pursuit of historical theology entirely unhindered in the period before Vatican II.

The Authority of the Fathers  149 had a decisive effect on his development; they ‘cristallisaient quelque chose que je cherchais, une vision de l’homme transfiguré par les énergies divines’.15 Daniélou’s enthusiasm for the Fathers found expression in several ways: one of them, shared with his colleague Père Mondésert, leading to the distinguished series of, at first, translations, and later fine editions, of the Fathers, Sources Chrétiennes. One must acknowledge a mutual influence here: Orthodox stimulating an already existing interest in the Fathers, leading to research into the Fathers, and the publication of the results, much of it in editions that provided later Orthodox theologians with some of their prime sources of access to the Fathers. If a search for a ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’ has been part of the agenda of Orthodox theology in the latter half of the twentieth century, then the resources for that search have been provided to a considerable extent by the labours of non-­ Orthodox scholars, largely, but not solely, Roman Catholic. It is here that the importance of the Philokalia can be felt, for, though Orthodox theologians have become accustomed to what one might think of as a much richer palate of patristic writers, something I shall return to, Orthodox patristic scholarship, in the latter half of the twentieth century, can be seen to have taken its lead from the vision of the Philokalia. At one level this is manifest in the efforts devoted by patristic scholars to making available the Philokalia itself: nothing really compares to the life work of Fr Dumitru Staniloae, who does not come within the scope of this paper, concerned as it is with the diaspora, but I think, in particular, of the English translation of the Philokalia, the work of Gerald Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and (now) Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, all English converts to Orthodoxy. Indeed, Bishop Kallistos’ scholarly career illustrates my theme of the importance of the Philokalia in Orthodox scholarship perhaps too neatly: all his scholarship revolves round the themes of the Philokalia, for it is to the ascetic, or ‘neptic’ (to use the word from the sub-­ title of the Philokalia), tradition that he has constantly addressed himself in a range of mainly articles and lectures, all of which bear witness to his deep scholarship and desire to communicate the wealth of the Orthodox tradition to our contemporaries. This ‘philokalic’ influence can be seen in the two Fathers who have attracted much of the attention of Orthodox scholarship in the diaspora, St Symeon the New Theologian and St Gregory Palamas. A critical edition of Symeon’s works we owe to, among others, Archbishop Krivochéine, and critical scholarship on Palamas began with Jean Meyendorff, who also contributed, with Boris Bobrinskoy, to Christou’s edition (though it needs to be said that Stăniloae’s early work on Palamas had critical recourse to manuscripts, though it did not lead to any published edition, for reasons too obvious to mention).

15  M. Lot-­Borodine, La déification de l’homme, Bibliothèque Œcuménique 9 (Cerf, 1970), 10.

150  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The Philokalia, then, came to shape the perception of the patristic phronema among the Orthodox theologians of the diaspora, both émigrés and converts. But there were other influences on his shaping of the patristic phronema, for the much greater availability of editions of the Fathers has had an effect. Origen, for instance, is not counted among the Fathers. He has, however, attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention that has, at least, deflected attention from heretical ‘Origenism’ and brought to the forefront the ascetic intellectual devoted to the Incarnate Word.16 Perhaps we Orthodox are still a bit reluctant to grant Origen a place among the Fathers—­and that reluctance has some justification—­but one can see something of a more welcoming attitude to Origen in the work of the young Orthodox theologian, John Behr—­ who succeeded to Meyendorff ’s academic position at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary—­most notably in his recent book, The Way to Nicaea.17 But someone much closer to the philokalic trad­ition, who suffered the same condemnation as Origen, namely Evagrios, is perhaps being more readily admitted to the ranks of the Fathers, to judge by the ready acceptance in Orthodox circles of the stout defence of Evagrios mounted by Fr Gabriel Bunge (an index of the reception of Bunge’s Evagrios in Orthodox circles is, perhaps, the extent to which Bunge’s works may be found in Romanian translation).18 Where the ancient theologians have not been condemned, the broadening and deepening of the patristic tradition has taken place much more readily. I began by referring to the dispute over the authority for Orthodox theology of the Fathers, as it emerged in the controversy over sophiology in the Paris school. Florovsky’s idea of a ‘Neo-­ Patristic synthesis’ was opposed to the ‘pseudo-­ morphosis’ of Orthodox theology in the Symbolic books, though he was more concerned about the Idealist musings of the Slavophils and their successors. As the dust settled after the Second World War, it looked as if Florovsky’s plea had been heard: the tradition represented by Solov′ev, Florensky, and Bulgakov was more or less extinct,19 and most Orthodox theology could be characterized as patristic, at least in aspiration. The nearest thing to a ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’ was to be found in the works of Vladimir Lossky—­no pupil of Florovsky’s!—especially his Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. After his untimely death, his disciple, Olivier Clément, continued his approach, though in an in­im­it­ able way, and the same patristic orientation was to be found in the next gen­er­ ation, Meyendorff, Bobrinskoy, and in England, Bishop Kallistos. (In fact, the closest approach to the fleshing out of a Neo-­Patristic synthesis is to be found not

16 Here one must mention, above all, the work of Henri Crouzel, though both de Lubac and Daniélou made significant contributions to the revaluation of Origen. 17  John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001). 18  See also the recent article by a young Orthodox scholar, Augustine Casiday, ‘Gabriel Bunge and the Study of Evagrius Ponticus’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48 (2004), 249–97. 19  An exception must be made for the work of Paul Evdokimov who gave the tradition he inherited from Bulgakov a somewhat Jungian twist.

The Authority of the Fathers  151 in the diaspora at all, but in the œuvre of the Romanian theologian, Fr Stăniloae—­ but that is another story.) But this patristic turn in Orthodox theology would seem to have less to do with Fr Florovsky than with the patristic revival associated with the Philokalia that Florovsky himself had ignored, and the encouragement Orthodox theologians in the diaspora found among their Catholic contemporaries. Florovsky never made it clear what he meant by a ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’, and in the years after the Second World War, though he continued to be an inspiring teacher and played a notable role in the ecumenical movement, he never devoted himself to the kind of task that would be involved even in sketching it out. What we find in the post-­war Orthodox theologians bears much more clearly the signs of a philokalic approach: a concern for ascetic theology as the basis of any perception of God (though Florovsky had lectured on ascetic theologians from the Desert Fathers to Climacus in the 1930s at the Institut St-­Serge), together with a deepening interest in Palamas, a theologian in whom Florovsky betrayed little or no interest. There is something else that belies Fr Florovsky’s apparently prophetic analysis of the course of Orthodox theology. If one asks if there is anything that characterizes the patristically orientated theology of the Western Orthodox diaspora in the second half of the twentieth century, then one would be tempted to point to the theme of the opposition between person and individual, and the suggestion that we discover the true nature of personhood in the communion of Persons in the Trinity. This is a huge issue that can scarcely be discussed now, save to make the following point. Although such personalism rooted in the Trinity is traced back to the Fathers, especially the Cappadocians, and also Maximos, there seems no real foundation for this claim. Hypostasis is used by the Fathers to mean a particular individual; there is no sense of opposition between person (hypostasis) and individual (atomos). In reality, the opposition of person and individual emerges from what has been called the ‘conservative romanticism’ of the Slavophils, and by the time of Bulgakov, at least, the term ipostas (a Russification of hypostasis) is used to represent the ‘theological’ notion of the person. In the intellectual climate of Paris between the wars, when there was a remarkable degree of openness between Catholic and Orthodox intellectuals, this understanding of ipostas chimed in with the prevalent existentialism, then associated with such Catholic thinkers as Gabriel Marcel. That, combined with the influential vulgarisation of Régnon’s insight, imbibed by Lossky and many others, that in reflecting on the Trinity the Greek East started from the three persons, while the Latin West started from the unity of the essence, quickly led to the kind of Trinitarian personalist existentialism characteristic of much modern Orthodox theology (though Lossky himself was more cautious20). It will be evident that 20  See Vladimir Lossky’s article, ‘La notion théologique de la personne humaine’, À l’image et à la resemblance de Dieu (Aubier Montaigne, 1967), 109–21.

152  Selected Essays, VOLUME II I  have reservations about such personalist existentialism, but my point here is simpler. Such personalist existentialism is less evidence for the vitality of any ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’ than for the continuing influence of nineteenth-­century religious philosophy on the Russian émigré intellectuals, even those who thought they had rejected it in favour of a patristic metaphysics. The question of the authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox diaspora is more than a matter of making a list of patristic positions and drawing conclusions from them, it is rather a matter of the cultivation of a patristic phronema (Florovsky was right in this!) in the light of which we can approach the problems of our own times with the courage and the faith of the Fathers. But the search for such a patristic phronema is already an engagement of minds shaped by modern questions seeking in the Fathers principles of enlightenment. It is this subtler—­and ultimately more important—­acknowledgment of the authority of the Fathers, manifest less in direct exposition of the works of the Fathers than in the practice of a patristic phronema, that is characteristic of the work of Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, in whose honour these reflections are offered. Not that Bobrinskoy is not learned in the Fathers, with several pertinent articles to his name and his edition of Palamas’ two Apodeictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, made for Christou’s edition mentioned above, but his learning has found its preferred expression as informing his theological thought more broadly. For instance, in his work Le mystère de la Trinité, his explicit discussion of patristic reflection on the Trinity is certainly significant, but it barely constitutes a third of the book, much the largest section of that book being devoted to biblical and liturgical material. It would, however, be more true to say that the whole work is informed by a patristic phronema. For it is with a mind formed by the reflection—­ and, perhaps more importantly, the prayer—­ of the Fathers that Bobrinskoy approaches the biblical and liturgical witness to the mystery of the Trinity, and like the Fathers his reflection takes the form of sustained meditation on that bib­ lical witness (one of the oddities of a theology that prides itself on being patristic and manifests this by citing almost exclusively patristic texts is that the Fathers themselves are concerned to draw their wisdom directly from the Scriptures). Moreover, this reflection on the Scriptures is conducted by a mind informed by modern scholarship, so that Fr Bobrinskoy in his theological reflection recalls the scribe of the kingdom of heaven, commended by the Lord, who ‘brings forth out of his treasure things new and old’. The same characteristic is found in his more recent volume of essays, La compassion du Père, in which his reflections are shaped by a concern to awaken an awareness of the One revealed by the Son and the Holy Spirit, so often apparently neglected in presentations of Christian the­ ology that concentrate on the Son and the Spirit—­a neglect which, he seems to suggest, may perhaps be linked to the loss in modern Western society of any deep sense of the meaning and value of fatherhood. Here the concerns are deeply those of the present-­day world, informed by an equally deep understanding of the place

The Authority of the Fathers  153 of fatherhood in the life of the Trinity and in the life of the Church, an understanding—­a phronema—­that can be characterized as patristic, both in its sources and in the quality of loving concern for the world, that we may call ‘fatherly’, and indeed ‘priestly’. For in Father Bobrinskoy’s understanding of the task of the theologian—­which is not the only one, one of the glories of the Orthodox diaspora has been the prominence of the vocation of the ‘lay theologian’—the patristic phronema is manifest in both the rigour of the scholar and the pastoral concern of the priest. It is not fortuitous that more than once he quotes Fr Bulgakov’s remark that he had ‘puisé toute sa vision théologique au fond de la calice eucharistique’.21

21 B. Bobrinskoy, La compassion du Père (Éditions du Cerf, 2000), 160, cf. 173; B. Bobrinskoy, Le mystère de la Trinité (Éditions du Cerf, 1986; 1996 imprint), 149 (presumably from an oral tradition, as the remark is quoted in slightly different words each time).

14 Pagans and Christians on Providence In his commentary on Proclus’ Elements of Theology, E.  R.  Dodds famously remarked that ‘the topic of πρόνοια bulks almost as large in Neoplatonism as does that of predestination and grace in the Christian theology of the period’.1 In fact, it seems to me that Dodds’ judgement would be more accurate if the comparison were between Greek and Latin theological or philosophical reflection, rather than between (pagan2) Neoplatonism and Christianity, for in the Greek Christian world there was, and continued to be, a great deal of reflection on the notion of πρόνοια or providence. God’s providential care for the universe has been a fundamental belief among Christians from the beginning. It was not long—­at least by the time of the so-­called Christian Platonists of Alexandria—­before Christian reflection on providence drew on the long history of reflection on such problems found in classical and Hellenistic philosophy. In the period Dodds had in mind—­ from the mid-­third century onwards—­works on providence by Christians are at least as numerous—­if not more numerous—­as works by pagan Neoplatonists. Indeed, in the Byzantine period, apart from reflection on providence in general, there emerged what amounted to almost a literary genre, concerned the question of ‘predestined terms of life’ (περὶ ὅρων ζωὴς), that is, whether the date of death is determined for each individual. This question was discussed by many Byzantine writers, drawing on philosophical considerations as well as some of the discussions in the Fathers, notably Basil in his famous sermon on God not being the author of evil.3 Theophylact Simocates, the historian of the reign of the Emperor Maurice, may be said to have inaugurated the genre at the beginning of the seventh century. Those who followed his example include Anastasios of Sinai (also seventh century; the question is discussed in later works ascribed to him, as well as in authentic works), Patriarch Germanos I and John Damascene (eighth century), Patriarch Photios (ninth century), Patriarch Nicholas I Mystikos (tenth century), Niketas Stethatos and Michael Psellos (eleventh century), Nicholas of Methone and Michael Glykas (twelfth century), Theognostos and Nikephoros 1 Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. and trans. with intro. and commentary by E. R. Dodds, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1963), 263. 2  Let me apologize straightaway for the use of the term ‘pagans’ to mean non-­Christians. It is unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, lumping together a diverse group of thinkers simply because they are not Christians, and even suggesting a degree of unity that we should not expect to find. It is, however, not easy to think of a conveniently brief alternative, and the later ‘pagans’ we shall consider did, in fact, think of themselves as embracing a religion opposed to Christianity. 3  Basil of Caesarea, hom. 9 (PG 31: 329–53).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0015

Pagans and Christians on Providence  155 Blemmydes (thirteenth century), and Theodore Metochites (fourteenth century, the date also of an anonymous dialogue entitled Hermippos). Finally from the fifteenth century, the last century of Byzantium, there survive treatises by two of the Orthodox participants in the Council of Ferrara-­ Florence (1438‒9), Mark Eugenikos and George Scholarios (later Gennadios II, the first patriarch of Constantinople under the Ottomans), as well as Theophanes of Medeia and Joseph Bryennios.4 It is not, however, with this later period that we shall be concerned in this paper, but rather with the doctrine of providence in the classical and Hellenistic philosophers, and the way in which this reflection influenced early Christian understanding of providence. We shall take our investigation up to the end of the fourth century ad, and the work by a little-­known Christian bishop—­De natura hominis by Nemesios of Emesa—­which culminates with a lengthy discussion, informed by his extensive knowledge of the Greek philosophical tradition, of fate, freewill, and providence. We shall also confine our discussion to those who wrote in Greek. One reason for focusing on the doctrine of providence in considering the reception of the tradition of Greek philosophy among early Christian thinkers is that the doctrine seems to be central to the sense of affinity many early Christians appear to have found with Plato and Platonism: an affinity manifest in the admiration the fourth-­century bishop, Athanasios of Alexandria, evinced for Plato in referring to him as ‘that great one among the Greeks [i.e., pagans]’ (ὁ μέγας παρ’ Ἕλλησι Πλάτων),5 and also in the story preserved among the writings ascribed to the seventh-­century abbot of Sinai, Anastasios, where it is related that it was the custom of a certain learned Christian to curse Plato daily; eventually Plato himself appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Man, stop cursing me; for you are merely harming yourself. I do not deny that I was a sinner; but, when Christ descended into hell, no one believed in Him sooner than I did.’6 For belief in the gods, their providence and their impartiality was required by Plato for the citizens of the kallipolis for which he legislated in the Laws;7 refusal to accept these tenets merited severest punishment, and after death the loss of the right to burial. Such an emphasis on what one might call a moral universe, ruled by Divine

4 See Nikephoros Blemmydes, Gegen die Vorherstimmung des Todesstunde, ed. with intro. W. Lackner (Academy of Athens, 1985), XLIII–­LXXXIV (with details of editions of Byzantine authors and on p. LIII list of authors cited and the position they took on whether the terms of life are predestined or not). There are also (less complete) discussions of this series of treatises by Leendert Westerink in Theophylactus Simocates, On Predestined Terms of Life, ed. with intro. and trans. C. Garton and L. G. Westerink, Arethusa Monographs 6 (SUNY Press, 1978), ix–­xii, and by Charles Garton in Germanos, On Predestined Terms of Life, ed. with intro. and trans. C.  Garton and L.G. Westerink, Arethusa Monographs 7 (SUNY Press, 1979), xiv–­xxvi. 5 Athanasios, inc. 2. 18–19; C.  Kannengiesser, ed., Athanase d’Alexandrie. Sur l’incarnation du verbe, Sources Chrétiennes 199 (Cerf, 1973), 264. 6  Anastasios of Sinai, qu. et resp. 111 (PG 89: 764C). 7  See Leg. X.899 ff.

156  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Justice, provided precisely the worldview that the Christians needed to express their own understanding of the relationship between God and human kind.8 We shall, first, discuss the development of reflection on providence and fate among Greek philosophers up to the end of the second century; second, we shall look at Christian reflection on providence, and its use of considerations found among the philosophers; third, we shall look at early Neoplatonism; and finally, we shall seek to draw some conclusions.

I Nowhere in Plato’s works does he formally set out his doctrine of providence, but there are four places where he reflects on providence or issues closely linked to it. The most important discussions are found in his later works, the Timaeus and the Laws. In Laws X, Plato presents a lengthy defence of the idea of divine providence, that is, that the gods care for human kind. This doctrine, as already mentioned, is presented as a fundamentally religious doctrine—­that is, it is presented as concerned with the relationship between gods and human kind, rather than primarily concerned with the ordered harmony of the cosmos (though it involves this)—as well as being one of the beliefs about the gods needed to ensure the smooth running of his ideal state. The Timaeus, although it does not explicitly discuss providence, presents a picture of the ‘cosmos as truly a living being, endowed with soul and reason, brought into being by the providence of God’ (30bc). The evidence of divine providence in the universe is found in reason, rationality, λόγος, which has sought to reproduce in the realm of becoming the pattern of truth found in the realm of the Ideas or Forms. Reason has not been, could not have been, entirely successful, for the realm of becoming is just that, and not the realm of being; there is a kind of brute necessity, and all reason can do no more than ‘rule it by persuasion so that most of what came to be was for the best’ (48A). The rational structure of the universe is, then, the mark of divine providence, but such providence is not all-­ruling, the result is not a universe absolutely determined by the divine will. In two other places in Plato’s works, there is reflection that bears on the questions of providence. The first is in the myth of Er in the last book of the Republic. One purpose of this myth is to explain the inequality of human fate. Some are

8  Such a view of the affinity of Platonism and Christianity has long been held: notable proponents of this view can be found in C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria (Oxford University Press, 1913; first published 1886); R. Arnou, ‘Platonisme des Pères’, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique 12, 2258–392; E. von Ivánka, Plato Christianus (Johannes Verlag, 1964). It has recently been attacked, in the case of Origen, but with wider implications, in M. Edwards, Origen against Plato (Ashgate, 2002). Here is not the place to discuss Edwards’ arguments, save to say that Edwards’ case is more narrowly defined than to constitute an attack on Christian Platonism as such.

Pagans and Christians on Providence  157 born with every advantage, others are born slaves; does not this tell against the impartial providence of the gods? Plato’s reply, in the myth of Er, is that we each choose our own destiny. Before being born to another life, the soul makes its own choice in the light of the values that it has come to acknowledge as a result of its experience so far: ‘no δαίμων will cast lots for you, you will choose your own δαίμων . . . blame lies with the one who chooses; god is blameless’ (X.  617E). Δαίμων is difficult to translate here. Plato himself had defined a δαίμων as a being intermediate between the gods and men (Symposium 202E), but Herakleitos had already by Plato’s time identified a human’s δαίμων with his character (ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων: Diels-­Kranz, fr. 119). Both meanings seem to be in play here: no other (semi-­divine) being will make the choice for one, one chooses one’s own character . . . Furthermore, whatever character one chooses it is nevertheless pos­ sible with that character to pursue virtue, for ‘virtue knows no master’ (X. 617E). One is responsible, therefore, not only for the character one has, but also for what one makes of it. A final place is in the Phaedrus, with its the explanation of the ‘ordinance of Adrasteia [necessity, or the inescapable]’. This is again about souls choosing their lot: whatever soul has become a follower of the gods, and discerned something of the truth, will be free from sorrow until the next cycle begins . . . but when it is not able to follow or to see, meeting with some mischance, and burdened with forgetfulness and vice, weighed down with that burden, it loses its wings and falls to the earth, thus runs the law . . .

and there follow nine fates from a philosopher to a tyrant (248C‒E). Again the point is that the kind of life possible to us in this life, even though it depends on birth and other circumstances beyond our control (including a mysterious pos­ sible ‘mischance’, συντυχία, which Plato does not explain), is determined by our pre-­natal choice, so that the diversity of human destiny is not evidence for the unfairness of the gods, but rather the reverse: it is evidence of the different choices the souls have made, and the different lots that correspond to these choices are in fact evidence of the impartial providence of the gods. From this emerges a fairly consistent picture of a cosmos ruled for the most part by reason, where we can expect more or less regular patterns of consequence, but not an absolutely predetermined state of affairs; there is room for human choice, and even our conditions of life, where much is determined by birth and other circumstances outside our control, have been chosen by our souls prior to their birth in bodies. In Aristotle’s surviving works, there is nothing that can be called a doctrine of providence, and this for two reasons. First, Aristotle has not a robust enough notion of the divine; either the divine is an ultimate principle, the unmoved

158  Selected Essays, VOLUME II mover, ‘causing motion by being loved’ (Metaph. Λ. 1072B), but hardly able to care for the beings that aspire towards it, or the divine refers to beings of a purely contemplative nature, who for precisely this reason are only and eternally concerned with what is eternal.9 Second, Aristotle does not think that in this realm of change and decay there is enough regularity: there are always exceptions, rules only apply for the most part. In the heavens, things are different: there the motions of the stars and the planets can be reduced to mathematical laws, but this is not thought of as due to providence. In late antiquity, however, Aristotle was widely credited with the belief that in the superlunary world providence held sway, but that it was too weak to be effective beneath the moon. No such notion is found in any extant treatise thought to be authentically by Aristotle, but it is found in a treatise included in the Aristotelian corpus, called ‘On the Cosmos’, De mundo. No one believes nowadays that this work is by Aristotle; it is stylistically quite different from the extant authentic works, and while it draws on authentic Aristotelian doctrines, it seems to be dependent on later thinkers for some ideas, e.g. on Posidonius in its meteorology.10 It used to be thought that it was simply owing to this pseudo-­Aristotelian treatise that the idea that Aristotle restricted providence to the superlunary realm had become widespread amongst the Christian Fathers, but it is now thought that this doctrine may have been found among the now lost earlier treatises of Aristotle.11 Despite the absence of any doctrine of providence, however, there is in Aristotle’s surviving works a notion that was to play an important role in later discussion of providence and fate, and that is the notion of τὰ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, what is ‘up to us’ (to use Hankinson’s felicitous translation12): namely, those matters that are our responsibility, both actions within our control and conditions, such as (good or bad) habits, that are due to former patterns of behaviour within our control.13 The discussions of providence and fate in the early Christian period are almost wholly conditioned by the discussion they received in Stoic circles. Central to the Stoic discussion was the idea of εἱμαρμένη, usually translated ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’. The notion of fate is also found in Plato, but it is little developed and subordinate to his belief in the providence of the gods.14 Several times Plato appeals to a popular 9  Cf., e.g., Eth. Nic. X. 10  See D. J. Furley in: Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-­to-­be and Passing away, and On the Cosmos, ed. and trans. D. J. Furley and E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1955), 337–41; A.  J.  Festugière, Le Dieu cosmique, vol. 2: La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste (Gabalda, 1949), 477–501. 11  D. Runia, ‘Festugière Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1989), 19 and n. 40. 12 R.  J.  Hankinson, ‘Determinism and Indeterminism’. In The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. K. Algra et al. (Cambridge university Press, 1999), 513–41, esp. 531–4. 13  See, e.g., Eth. Nic. III. 1114B–1115A. 14  As Baltes puts it: ‘für den [sc. Plato] der Begriff der εἱμαρμένη noch nicht zum philosophischen Fachterminus verfestigt war’: Dörries and Baltes, Der Platonismus im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert nach Christus, vol. 3: Der Platonismus in der Antike (Fromann and Holzboog, 1993), 320.

Pagans and Christians on Providence  159 idea of fate (e.g., that ‘no one can escape his fate’, something that ‘women say’, Grg. 512E, cf. Phdr. 255B), and he uses the term, εἱμαρμένη, to describe the summoning of the souls to their next incarnation (Phd. 115A, cf. 113A), and refers to ‘laws of fate’ (νόμοι εἱμαρμὲνοι: Tim. 41E2 f.) and ‘the order and law of fate’ (ἡ τῆς εἱμαρμένης τάξις καὶ νόμος: Leg. 904C8 f.). It is not difficult to see how the Stoic notion of fate is developed from these hints in Plato. Stoic cosmology was based on that found in Plato’s Timaeus, but the distinction between reason and necessity is collapsed, and reason and necessity are identified. This is parallel to the collapsing together of other concepts kept distinct by Plato and others, such as God and nature, or the spiritual and the material. For the Stoics, all these were two sides of the same coin: to speak of soul was to speak of the leading part of the human being, τὸ ἡγεμονικόν; to speak of God or the λόγος was to speak of the ‘skilful fire’, πῦρ τεχνικόν, that gave shape and structure to nature, with which it was identical. Most of what we know about the Stoics we know from those, Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans—­and Christians—­who argued with them. They present a picture of an absolutely deterministic cosmos, that allows no scope at all for free choice. The word εἱμαρμένη is sometimes presented by the Stoics as etymo­logic­ al­ly derived from εἱρμός, a chain, rather than from μείρομαι, which would render the meaning ‘what is allotted or decreed’, or εἴρω, to say, with the meaning ‘what has been said [or decreed]’ (giving it the same etymology as the Latin fatum, from fari, to speak): it is thus presented as a binding chain (of causes).15 The extent of the influence of the Stoic notion of fate, or at least the way in which it governed the terms of the debate in Hellenistic times about determinism and human freedom, can be judged from the fact that the word εἱμαρμένη becomes the term universally used—­ by Platonists, Peripatetics, and Epicureans—­ for the ordered structure of the cosmos, Platonists and Peripatetics arguing that such an ordered structure of causes does not disallow the possibility that some things are genuinely ‘up to us’. But there is more to the Stoic doctrine of fate than the notion that everything is determined. This universal rationality of the cosmos is but an aspect of the ordered structure, διακόσμησις, of the cosmos, its ordered harmonious beauty.16 It is, indeed, arguable that the notion of harmony lies at the centre of the whole Stoic vision. It is this harmony that manifests the fundamental goodness of the cosmos; it is this harmony that inspires humans with a desire to form part of that harmony. And the conviction of the overruling nature of this harmony explains both the human aspiration to play a role in that harmony—­to contribute a beautiful solo part, as it were—­and the fact that whatever we do, we shall form part of that harmony, even if it is only making a discordant grumble that sets off the beautiful melodies of those who live ‘in accordance with nature’. Another aspect 15 See SVF II. 917, 918. 16 See SVF I. 201, II. 526; applied especially to the order of the visible, changing cosmos: II. 528, 590.

160  Selected Essays, VOLUME II of the Stoic understanding of the providentially ordered structure of the cosmos (for the Stoics providence and fate were closely interrelated, and could sometimes be more or less identified17) also derives from the Timaeus and the seriousness with which the Stoics took Plato’s idea of the cosmos as modelled on the human being, so that it was in consequence ζῷον ἔμψυχον ἕννουν, a ‘living being with soul and reason’,18 a doctrine that Christians came to express by calling human kind a ‘little cosmos’, μικρὸς κόσμος.19 In consequence the Stoics regarded the cosmos as ordered, not just for the good, but for the human good, a view rejected as absurd by Platonists and Peripatetics, but, as we shall see, enthusiastically embraced by Christians, who were also inspired by the Stoic understanding of the harmony of the cosmos.20 A brief account of current Platonic doctrine on providence or fate (or a current Platonic account) in the early Christian centuries can be found in the second-­ century handbook of Platonic doctrine, Alcinous’ Didaskalikos: a textbook of what is often called ‘Middle Platonism’, to distinguish this period of Platonism (roughly late second century bc to the early third century ad) from Plato himself and his immediate successors in the Academy from Plotinus and the ‘Neoplatonists’ (neither of these terms—­Middle Platonist, Neoplatonist—­is contemporary with the philosophers themselves; they are modern scholarly designations). It is striking that chapter 26 is presented as an account of fate, εἱμαρμένη; the word providence (πρόνοια) does not appear at all.21 But Alcinous’ account of fate is not that of the Stoics. With them he accepts that there are sequences of causes, and that everything takes place in such ordered sequences—­all things are ἐν εἱμαρμένῃ, within the sphere of fated, but they are not fated (καθειρμάρθαι): fate has the status of a law, but it does not determine what each person will do, otherwise the notion of what is ‘up to us’ would vanish, along with the notion of praise and blame. He explains this by appealing to the kind of considerations we have found in Plato’s myth of Er and in the Phaedrus (there are verbal echoes of these passages in what Alcinous has to say22). There are certain sets of consequences, but these are set in train by human actions that are free. ‘The soul, therefore, owns no master, and it is in its power to act or not, and it is not compelled to this, but the consequences

17 See SVF I. 176, II. 528, 913, 933. 18 Plato, Tim. 29B8; affirmed by the Stoics: SVF II. 633–45. 19  E.g. Gregory of Nazianzus, or. 28. 22 (A. J. Mason, The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge University Press, 1899), 56. 15); Maximus the Confessor, myst. 7 (Ch. Sotiropoulos, I Mystagogia tou agiou Maximou tou Omologitou, critical edn, intro., notes, and Modern Greek trans. (Athens, 1993), 188, 3–4). 20 See SVF II. 1153–67; and M. Spanneut, Le stoïcisme des pères de l’Église, Patristica Sorbonensia 1 (le Seuil, 1957), 380–4. 21 Alcinous, Enseignement des doctrines de Platon, ed. J. Whittaker (Les Belles Lettres, 1990), 51–2; Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism, ed. J. Dillon (Oxford University Press, 1993), 34–5. 22  ‘A soul chooses’: Did. 179. 9, cf. Phdr. 248C2‒5 and Rep. 617E5. The soul is said to be without master (ἀδέσποτον: Did. 179. 10), as is virtue in Rep. 617E3.

Pagans and Christians on Providence  161 of the action will be fulfilled in accordance with fate.’23 He gives the example of Paris’ abduction of Helen: his action in abducting her was not fated—­he could have refrained—­but once he had abducted her, the consequence that the Greeks would go to war was. Very similar discussions of what is often called the doctrine of ‘co-­ fatalities’ can be found in roughly contemporary works such as the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De fato,24 and another similarly titled work ascribed to Plutarch (and certainly by a Platonist).

II If we now turn to Christian reflection on these themes, we immediately encounter one striking difference: for Christians the doctrine of providence is a fundamental credendum, while fate, far from being another word for much the same thing, as it had become in contemporary pagan writers, is a grave error, to be firmly rejected. For illustration of this conviction—­the rejection of εἱμαρμένη—­it suffices to consult Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon. The article, of more than two columns, is almost entirely devoted to citations denying the existence of fate, asserting that it is a pagan belief and incompatible with Christianity, with dire consequences of immorality and absurdity, lending support to the equally absurd beliefs of astrology, and destructive of freewill; if there is such a thing as fate, then humans, or at least Christians, can rise above it, for its power has been destroyed by Christ.25 It is not that the Christians were ignorant of the terms of the philo­ soph­ic­al debate. The authors of many of the sources drawn on by Lampe knew more than we ever shall about the works of classical and Hellenistic philosophy: Christians such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Hippolytus, who are among our main quarries for what remains of many of these philosophers. Alongside this outright rejection of fate, we find an emphatic assertion of providence. Clement of Rome, at the end of the first century, appeals to the harmony of the universe, the evidence and result of God’s providential governance, which is to be an inspiration for Christian behaviour.26 Early Christian writers regularly speak of God as enveloping the universe, or affirm with the second-­century apolo­gist, Athenagoras, that ‘the Maker’s care (ἐπιμέλεια) extends to everything, the invisible as well as the visible, the small and the great’,27 or speak of providence extending both to universals and to individuals, particular providence 23  Dillon’s translation: Dillon ed., Handbook, 35. 24  De fato 16: R.  W.  Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias on Fate (Duckworth, 1983), 194–5 (trans.: 64–6). 25 G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford University Press, 1961), 416–17. 26  i Clem. 20; K. Bihlmeyer, Die Apostolischen Väter, part I, 3rd edn, revised by W. Schneemelcher (Mohr, 1970), 46–7. 27 Athenagoras, res. 18. 2; Athenagoras, Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. W. R. Schoedel (Oxford University Press, 1972), 132–3.

162  Selected Essays, VOLUME II being the preserve of the angels.28 The sources of this understanding of ­providence are, certainly, scriptural, even if occasionally they are draped in philo­soph­ic­al language. The teaching of Jesus in the Gospels about God the Father’s care for the least creature, even individual hairs on one’s head (Matt. 10:29‒31), or the reference in the Psalms to the care of humans confided to the angels (Ps. 90:11): these are the immediate source for Athenagoras’ stress on the universality of divine providence. This also gives a clue as to why the Christians embrace providence and reject fate, for providence is to the Christians primarily a religious doctrine—­about God’s care for his creation. Fate is also, perhaps, seen by them as religious—­only an aspect of religion associated with astrology and divination, which Christians universally rejected. Their pagan contemporaries, on the contrary, were primarily philosophers; the philosophical debate was presented in terms of fate or destiny and human freedom, providence being either not mentioned at all (despite the prominence of πρόνοια in Plato’s ­doctrine) or introduced as an argument against the determinist consequences of the Stoic doctrine of fate (as its opponents understood it), for instance in Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De fato 17. In the course of time Christians in presenting their doctrine of providence demonstrate awareness of the philosophical debate about fate and freewill. However, despite the fact that Christians and pagans seem to be discussing much the same problem in trying to reconcile providence/fate with human self-­determination, Christian awareness of the pagan debate does not affect their uniformly negative understanding of the notion of εἱμαρμένη that they inherited from the earliest Christian writers. This is evident from the time of Clement of Alexandria onwards.29 Origen demonstrates a profound familiarity with all aspects of the Hellenistic debate over fate, particularly in his tussle with the Platonist philosopher Celsus.30 Nemesios, too, in a more explicit way, sets out his understanding of the debate over fate in his De natura hominis. Although it is in Contra Celsum that we find the most explicit evidence for Origen’s familiarity with the Hellenistic debate over fate, it is his use of classical, Platonic arguments about fate and destiny in De principiis that I want to discuss here. Providence is central for Origen’s understanding of human engagement with God. Immediately, his thought on providence is determined by his rejection of gnosticism, which maintained that the universe was evidently not ruled by providence; on the contrary, it was largely given over to evil powers. One of the arguments that the Gnostics used in support of their rejection of providence was 28 Athenagoras, leg. 24. 3; Schoedel, ed., Legatio and De Resurrectione, 58. 29 E.g., Exc. Theot. 69–75,ed O.  Stählin, 2nd edn. rev. L.  Früchtel and U.  Treu, GCS 17 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970, 129. 16–130. 29). 30  See especially Cels. IV, ed. and French translation M. Borret, Source chrétiennes 136 (Paris: Cerf, 1968); English trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

Pagans and Christians on Providence  163 the manifest inequality of the human condition: some human beings were born to wealthy parents, benefited from a fine education, and then had the means and opportunity to pursue wisdom and goodness, others were born in much less favourable circumstances and could only survive by undertaking menial tasks, or even resorting to crime. Following from this the Gnostics regarded it as evident that humans are not equal, but have different natures, so that some are spiritual (πνευματικοί), others, the irredeemable, are material (ὑλικοί), while still others are simply alive (ψυχικοί), capable of turning either way. There is no equal or just providence, rather human society, not to mention the rest of the cosmos, is made up of beings with different natures, good, bad, and indifferent, which are a matter of chance, or the result of the activity of different divine creators. To meet this, Origen turns to the Platonic defence of providence found in Republic X: to the principle, αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος (‘blame lies with the one who chooses; god is blameless’). For the diversity in the human lot is not due to conditions of birth over which humans have no control, rather, for Origen, as in the myth of Er, souls choose their human lot—­some choose well, others badly. Providence comes in by arranging matters so that the human lot chosen befits the rational choice made pre-­natally. All rational beings were created equal, but they have come into this material cosmos as a result of their turning away from God, and that turning-­ away from God was a matter of free, individual, rational choice, in which there was enormous variety, from those rational beings whose attention to God wavered for but a moment—­to these correspond the highest ranks of angels—­to those whose rejection of God was thorough-­going—­the devil and the fallen angels or demons—­with human beings in the middle. The variety of the cosmos is an index of the justice of divine providence. As Origen himself puts it, at the end of the passage from De Principiis that I have been summarizing: This . . . was the cause of the diversity among rational creatures, a cause that takes its origin not from the will or judgment of the Creator, but from the decision of the creature’s own freedom. God, however, who then felt it just to arrange his creation according to merit, gathered the diversities of minds into the harmony of a single world, so as to furnish, as it were, out of these diverse vessels or souls or minds, one house, in which there must be ‘not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some unto honour and some unto dishonour’ (2 Tim. 2: 8). These were the reasons, as I think, which gave rise to the diversity of this world, wherein divine providence arranges all creatures individually in positions corresponding to the diversity of the movements [of their wills] and the fixed purpose of their minds.31 31  princ. II. 9. 6; P.  Koetschau, ed., De Principiis, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderten 22 (De Gruyter, 1913), 170. 2–12; trans. G. W. Butterworth, Origen on First Principles (SPCK, 1936), 134, slightly modified.

164  Selected Essays, VOLUME II This diversity not only manifests the even-­handedness of providence, it also shows the way in which God’s providential care adjusts to the different capacity and condition of each of the fallen rational creatures. For each different human lot is fitted to the state of the soul that chose it so as to help it to realize the nature of its turning away from God, come to repentance and seek to ascend again to the pure contemplation of God from which it has fallen. Πρόνοια disposes the cosmos so that it is a place for appropriate παίδευσις, to echo the title of Hans Koch’s fine study of Origen (a thesis explored further by Marguerite Harl).32 The cosmos is a place of punishment and training—­παίδευσις—­enabling souls to realize, each in its own way, the extent of its fall from God and providing, in that very human lot—­in much the way that Plato envisaged in the Myth of Er, as well as in other myths, such as those in Phaedo and Phaedrus—­the opportunity for a form of training, ἄσκησις, that will enable the soul to develop those faculties it has damaged, or lost, as a result of its fall from contemplation of God, and return to that state of contemplation. Origen’s vision here is impressive, though problematic. The problematic elem­ ent that his contemporaries latched on to was its closeness to the Platonic myths of the soul, just mentioned, which for Plato were bound up with the idea of metempsychosis. Nowadays most scholars doubt whether Origen believed in metempsychosis, though there is dispute as to whether he believed in pre-­ existence of souls (to most Platonists tantamount of metempsychosis),33 but his contemporaries can hardly be blamed for thinking that his vision endorsed a belief in metempsychosis. Another problematic element, much less remarked on by his contemporaries, concerns the role of Christ and the Incarnation. Origen’s understanding of the providential ordering of the cosmos is so complete it is not clear why an Incarnation would be needed at all, save perhaps to provide an accelerated ascent for some chosen souls.34 But what is interesting for our purposes is the way in which Origen’s defence of providence against the Gnostics draws on Plato’s own defence of the apparent inequality of the human lot. We see here, I think, a quite fundamental affinity with Plato’s conviction of the central place of providence in the cosmos—­an affinity so profound that it creates problems for Origen’s own Christian convictions—­which is much more revealing of the significance of Plato for Origen than the learned skirmishings we find in Contra Celsum. A similar conviction of the fundamental insight of Plato’s grasp of providence can be found in the last of the Christian works we shall deal with here. This is the 32 See H. Koch, Pronoia und Paideusis. Studien über Origenes und sein Verhältnis zum Platonismus (De Gruyter, 1932) and M. Harl, Origène et la fonction révélatrice du Verbe Incarné (Seuil, 1958). 33  That Origen accepted the doctrine of the pre-­existence of souls is firmly rejected by H. Crouzel, Origène (Lethielleux, 1985) and Edwards, Origen against Plato, though the argument from De principiis, discussed above, seems to require it. Other scholars (e.g., J. Daniélou, Origène (Le table Ronde, 1948) and A. Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars (Oxford University Press, 1991)) accept that Origen was committed to a belief in pre-­existent souls. 34  This is the argument of Koch, Pronoia; and Harl, Origène.

Pagans and Christians on Providence  165 treatise, De natura hominis, written by Nemesios, a late-­fourth-­century bishop of Emesa, present-­day Homs in Syria. We know nothing about Nemesios, save what can be gleaned from this work (and it reveals nothing personal). The work itself had an erratic reception history, and, maybe for that reason, but also because it fits into none of the conventional trajectories of Dogmengeschichte, it has been largely neglected by modern theological scholarship. Initially, it seems to have had little impact, though Nemesios’ discussion of Christological matters was referred to in the sixth-­century debates over Christology. In the seventh century, however, Maximos the Confessor made use of Nemesios’ work, especially his discussion of providence, thus establishing it as a resource for early Byzantine the­ ology. John of Damascus shared Maximos’ regard for Nemesios, and drew on it heavily (not just for his doctrine of providence), thus establishing a tradition of recourse to the work that endured throughout the Byzantine centuries, and was passed on to Western mediaeval scholasticism. Despite its evident importance in the history of theology, it is only recently that it has become easily accessible in a good critical text, with the publication in 1987 of Moreno Morani’s Teubner edition;35 Matthaei’s 1802 edition was a decent edition for its day, but the reprint in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca was so full of mistakes as to make it virtually un­usable. The first thing that strikes one about Nemesios’ work is his learning, and it is this that has attracted the attention of what scholarship there has been on Nemesios, notably Werner Jaeger’s now ninety-­year-­old monograph.36 With each topic that he discusses—­from formation of human kind from soul and body, through a detailed examination of the constitution of the body and the faculties of the soul, to his analysis of human freedom, leading into his final discussion of fate and providence—­Nemesios gives us an account of the different views of the philosophical schools, among which he especially favours the views of Plato. This, as we shall see, is markedly true of his treatment of providence. Although Nemesios is writing a philosophical treatise and has a thorough grasp of the philosophical debate, he betrays his Christian principles in following the tradition we have seen above of deploring any notion of fate, and discussing the substantive issue essentially in terms of providence. Fate is discussed as a problem: a problem that threatens the integrity of the human and the nature of religion. The consequences of a belief in fate are set out uncompromisingly: Laws are absurd, courts are superfluous in that those they punish are guiltless, blame and praise are alike irrational, and prayers are profitless, if everything 35 Nemesius, De natura hominis, ed. M. Morani (Teubner, 1987). There is translation by W. Telfer, from Matthaei’s 1802 edition, with an introduction and running commentary, in W.  Telfer, trans., Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (SCM Press, 1955), 203–453. (In following references to nat. hom.; I have given page and line references to Morani’s edition.) 36 W. Jaeger, Nemesius von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Posidonios (Weidmann, 1964).

166  Selected Essays, VOLUME II happens in accordance with fate. Providence is abolished together with religion, added to which, man is found to be nothing but a plaything of celestial motion, for by this not only are the members of the body moved to various actions but also the thoughts of his soul. In a word, those who assert such things destroy the concept of what is up to us, as well as the nature of the possible. (nat. hom. 35: 104. 15‒22)

However, Nemesios finds this doctrine of fate, εἱμαρμένη, in Plato, whom he respects, and so he is obliged to discuss it (in nat. hom. 38). As we have seen, although Plato himself makes a few references to εἱμαρμένη, he is much more interested in providence, πρόνοια. Nemesios found his account of ‘Plato’s’ doctrine not directly in the text of Plato himself—­though he sums up the key concepts as we have discussed them above—­ but, as Telfer suggests, in some commentary on the Timaeus, now lost (Telfer 1955, 407). In summary, his account is this. ‘Plato’ uses the word εἱμαρμένη in two ways: κατ’ οὐσίαν and κατ’ ἐνέργειαν—­as an essential notion and in action. As an essential notion, εἱμαρμένη is identical with the world-­soul of the Timaeus; in action it is the ‘inescapable and inviolable divine law operating through causality’—this law is called (as in the Phaedrus) the ‘ordinance of the Inescapable’ (θεσμὸν ἀδραστείας), through which everything is ordered and everything takes place. This active fate is also said to operate in accordance with providence. However, providence is the more general notion, for although everything fated takes place in accordance with providence, not everything providential is fated. This divine law, at once fate and providence, embraces everything, both the principles of our actions (τὰ καθ’ ὑπόθεσιν) and their consequences (τὰ ἐξ ὑποθέσεως). The principles of our actions, our ‘assents, judgments and impulses’, are ‘up to us’ (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν); the consequences of our actions, however, are a matter of fate, and beyond our control (though not necessarily beyond our foresight). What is up to us comes under the general away of providence, i.e. God works through our free choices to achieve the designs of his providence, while the consequences of our actions are ruled by fate. It follows, then, that while everything comes under the sway of providence, not everything is determined from all eternity by fate, for the principles of our actions—­the ­reasons behind what we do—­are up to us. This, Nemesios assures us, is in accordance with the Platonic principles affirmed in the Myth of Er in the Republic that ‘blame lies with the one who chooses, God is blameless’ and ‘virtue knows no master’. What ‘Plato’ does then, according to Nemesios, is to call the purpose and will of God fate, and subject fate to providence: all this, Nemesios remarks, differs little from the Scriptures, which say that providence alone rules over all (Nemesios gives no reference, and in fact is hardly likely to be quoting, as the word πρόνοια is rare in the Scriptures; he may intend a general reference to Matt. 10:29‒31 or Ps. 135 (136)). There is, according to Nemesios, one important difference from the Scriptures, in that according to this account of ‘Plato’s’ teaching, the consequences

Pagans and Christians on Providence  167 of our actions follow necessarily (in accordance with the doctrine, discussed above in relation to Alcinous, of co-­fatalities). For Nemesios, the deliverances of providence do not follow by necessity (κατ’ ἀνάγκην), but within a range of possibilities (ἐνδεχομένως). For if providence operated by necessity—­that is, if what followed from our actions followed as a matter of necessity—­then ‘the greater part of prayer would be laid waste’. For prayer is not only concerned with our intentions, but also with the consequences of our actions. If we decide to go to sea, what happens to us then is not fated, and therefore beyond the power of prayer, but depends on God’s providence, so prayer to God is still valuable.37 Nemesios goes on to assert that God is not subject to necessity, rather he is the creator of necessity. Nemesios then goes on to discuss the problem of freewill (‘what is up to us’ or what is in our control, τὸ αὐτεξούσιον), at some length, exploring how freewill works together with divine providence, how far freewill extends, and how freewill is to be seen as part of what it means to be a rational being (nat. hom. 39‒41). He then returns, in the final—­and culminating—­chapters of De natura hominis (chapters 42‒3) to the question of providence. He begins by demonstrating the truth of providence: the saving history of the Old Testament (so powerful that ‘no Jew, even if beside himself, could fail to recognize providence’: 42: 120. 15); for Christians, ‘the most divine, and in its overwhelming love for human kind most incredible, act of providence: God’s incarnation for our sake’ (42: 120. 20‒1); and, for the pagans, the evidence of the ordered movements of the cosmos, the signs of divine retribution, the structure and proportion of our bodies, and the beauty of the animal kingdom. Another evidence of providence is the universal ac­know­ ledg­ment among humans of the need for prayer, sacred offerings, and holy places, as well as the zeal to do good. Nemesios gives definitions of providence. Providence is ‘the care that comes from God to the beings that are’ (42: 125. 4‒5), or ‘the purpose of God by which the things that are receive their fitting outcome’ (42: 125. 6‒7). If providence is the divine purpose, then it necessarily follows that everything works out in the best way, as is most fitting to God, and that there is no better order of things, for ‘it is necessary that the maker of beings and the source of providence are the same’ (42: 125. 10). Nemesios then goes on to discuss the scope of providence: does it concern things in general, or particular beings and events as well? What for Nemesios is the truth about providence is presented as the teaching of Plato. According to Nemesios, Plato teaches that providence holds sway over both what is general and what is particular. He divides providence into three: primary providence, that of the first God, that extends through the realm of the ideas and also of the whole of the cosmos, that is to say, the heavens and the stars; then there is the providence of the ‘second gods

37  This paragraph is a close paraphrase of nat. hom. 38 (109. 10–110. 21).

168  Selected Essays, VOLUME II who traverse the heavens’, ‘ruling the generation of individual animals and plants, and indeed everything that belongs to the realm of change and decay’ (43: 126. 4‒6); a third providence rules actions that are concerned with the course of life, and is consigned to δαίμονες, who are guardians of human affairs. Nemesios’ discussion continues by considering other ideas of providence—­all (in his view) inferior to those of ‘Plato’—found among the philosophers, and then turns to the objections to the idea that God exercises providence over particular events and people; these objections he reduces to three, ‘that God does not know that it would be good to care for these, or that he does not wish to, or that he cannot’ (43: 130. 9‒10). These objections are dealt with, and dismissed, at some length. There are two things that seem to me to be striking about Nemesios’ treatment of fate and providence. The first is that he follows the already established Christian tradition that puts providence at the centre and rejects the notion of fate as compromising human freewill and, indeed, any real notion of divine providence. The second is that he is keen to identify the truth with what he regards as Plato’s doctrine. However, he reads Plato through the lenses of later Platonic tradition (some of which is now lost to us), which based its understanding of fate/providence on exegesis of the Timaeus, coupled with ideas about human responsibility drawn from, principally, the Myth of Er and the Phaedrus. It is an odd thought that he would have made matters so much easier for himself had he based himself simply on Plato, and ignored the Platonic tradition; for in Plato he would have found little mention of εἱμαρμένη, which is so abhorrent to him, and could have developed from Plato himself a doctrine of simple providence. He was, however, too learned in the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, and shared to too great a degree the assumptions of that tradition, for that simple route to be open to him. Instead, he ventures to criticize Plato’s doctrine of fate (and indeed the doctrine of co-­ fatalities that he criticizes is firmly based on Platonic texts, as we have seen in our discussion of Alcinous), and then lays emphasis on his doctrine of threefold providence.

III I want finally, and briefly, to look sideways, as it were, at the developing Neoplatonic tradition, that is, at the direction the Platonic tradition came to take with Plotinus and those influenced by him. There are three treatises in the Enneads devoted to fate and providence: Enneads III. 1‒3. In reality these represent two treatises, one on fate and one on providence, the second treatise having been divided by Porphyry so as to make up the desired number of ‘enneads’: fifty-­ four. In the chronological numeration, they are treatises 3 and 47‒8; they are therefore widely different in time of composition, the treatise on fate being one of the earliest of Plotinus’ treatises, and the one on providence being one of the last.

Pagans and Christians on Providence  169 Furthermore, the short treatise on fate is largely unoriginal, being (as Armstrong put it) ‘very much a conventional Platonic school discussion of its period’,38 while the treatise of providence is a lengthy treatise in which Plotinus introduces some significant new ideas, notably his notion of λόγος as the rational forming prin­ ciple through which providence is effected. Here is not the place to enter into any detailed discussion of how Plotinus develops the Platonic tradition of providence; what is striking is that it is just this that he does. It is the doctrine of providence that is primary; fate or destiny, εἱμαρμένη, appears simply as a lower providence.39 This distinction between higher providence, concerned with the intelligible world, and lower fate, concerned with the material world, is commonplace among the ‘Middle Platonists’ (though not found in Alcinous, whom we have discussed above),40 but, as we have already noticed, for Alcinous, in this followed by other Middle Platonists, the principal subject of the philosophical discussion is fate, not providence, whereas in Plotinus’ mature treatise, fate is only mentioned in passing; it is rather providence that engages Plotinus’ attention. This shift of attention from fate to providence is characteristic of Neoplatonism: Sallustius has a chapter devoted to the providence of the gods,41 the Alexandrian Neoplatonist Hierocles wrote a major work, now lost save for fragments, on providence,42 and providence is important in the works of Proclus.43 These Neoplatonists do not, like the Christians, reject the notion of fate—­far from it—­but they do subject it in their discussion to providence, in contrast to the Middle Platonists. Is there any reason for this? It seems to me that it might be explained as part of the greater commitment to religion we find in the post-­Plotinian Neoplatonists. Just as the concept of faith, πίστις, is revised in the Neoplatonic tradition and changes from the very lowly form of knowledge, indeed scarcely a form of knowledge at all, that we find  in Plato’s Republic,44 to being a necessary disposition, if we are to hope to gain any understanding of mysteries beyond human grasp in later Neoplatonism,45 so, we might argue, the notion of the providence of the gods assumes much greater significance in the Neoplatonists than it had been granted by the Middle Platonists—­only this time it could claim the authority of Plato himself. The parallel between Christians and Neoplatonists in their estimate of providence is 38 A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus, vol. III, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University press, 6). 39  Enneads III. 3. 5. 40 Armstrong, Plotinus, 126 n.; Dörries and Baltes, Der Platonismus, 86–8 (texts), 320–7 (commentary); J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Duckwoth, 1977), 84–8, 166–8, 208–11, 294–8, 320–6, 360. 41 Sallustius, De diis et mundo 9; Saloustios, Des dieux et du monde, ed. and trans. G. Rochefort (Les Belles Lettres, 1960), 13–15. 42 See H. S. Schibli, Hierocles of Alexandria (Oxford University Press, 2002). 43 Proclus, Elements of Theology, §§120–6 (Dodds, ed., The Elements of Theology, 104–12), as well as two treatises devoted expressly to providence: de decem dubitationibus circa providentiam and de providentia et fato. 44  See the analogy of the divided line: Rep. 509D–511E, esp. 511E1. 45 See J. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 231–46; and most recently, M. Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith (Oxford University, 2004), 4–14.

170  Selected Essays, VOLUME II striking, and probably neither coincidental nor evidence of Christian influence on Neoplatonism, but rather evidence for the greater appeal of religious con­sid­er­ ations in the period we call late antiquity. To discuss the reasons for this would be to embark on another paper. E. R. Dodds’ theory of a deepening ‘Age of Anxiety’ has fewer followers nowadays than it once did, though for some any evidence of greater receptiveness to religious claims is tantamount to the endorsement of such a theory.46 Perhaps the most value-­free way of putting the shift we can see here is to say that it is evidence—­among both Christians and non-­Christians—­of a deepening interest in the intelligible world, the κόσμος νοητός, as a realm of transcendent reality. 46 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 1968).

15

What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology? ‘What is theology?’ We first need to avoid a trap set by the word itself. There are lots of areas of knowledge designated by the suffix -logy: biology, anthropology, psychology, psephology, geology . . . I’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked me what I am a professor of, and in response to my saying ‘theology’ have responded by saying how fascinating it must be to study rocks, and the formation of continents, and so forth! There is the danger of setting theology down alongside all these academic disciplines—­mostly sciences—­and assuming that theology is one of them, the difference being the object of our study: we study God, other scientists study the phenomenon of life, or what it is to be human, or the mind, of the process of voting, . . . or rocks. If we lazily grant this assumption, then we are well on the way to all the problems that beset modern theology: its academic nature and the consequent gap between the ‘pew and the pulpit’, as our Protestant friends put it, together with the array of specializations that make up academic theology, about which Fr John spoke: biblical theology (split up into Old Testament, New Testament, and even Intertestamental), historical theology and/or church history (again split up by period), dogmatic theology, systematic theology, moral theology, and so the list goes on—­specializations that quickly become autonomous, as if moral theologians need know nothing about the New Testament! But, in fact, the term theology, theologia, is a good deal older than the other -ologies. Theologia, and the related terms theologos (‘theologian’), theologein (the verb—­whatever it is that ‘theologians’ do) go back to Plato, who seems to have coined the word, and it means speaking—­uttering a logos—­about God or the gods.1 The early Christian use is interestingly specific: the most common use of theologos is to designate one of the scriptural authors, only gradually extended to designate anyone else, and then very restrictively, so that it is only regularly applied to Gregory ‘the Theologian’ and Symeon ‘the New Theologian’ in the Orthodox tradition. To speak truly of God is a rare grace, and to call Gregory or Symeon a theologos is to make a claim in no way commonplace: it is to set them alongside the scriptural authors, alongside John the Theologian, par excellence.

1  See Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Clarendon Press, 1947), 4 f.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0016

172  Selected Essays, VOLUME II And then there is the famous remark of Evagrios’: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly, you will be a theologian’.2 To speak truly of God requires true prayer, for it is only in true prayer that one really knows God, and only one who knows God can speak of him.3 Almost a millennium later, St Gregory Palamas has something very similar to say to Barlaam, when he affirms: ‘it is not safe for those who do not know how to speak to God to speak about God’.4 To think too easily that theology just means the ‘study of God’ is, then, to run into all sorts of possible misconceptions. This was something that the theologians of the Russian émigré tradition were very much aware of, as they sought to ar­ticu­ late their understanding of theology in a Western context in the last century. It is interesting—­ it was perhaps an advantage—­ that none of them—­ Fr Georges Florovsky, Fr Sergii Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky—­were products of the Theological Academies of Russia, and Florovsky, as we all know, very deliberately turned his back on the tradition of the Theological Academies, consigning them to what he called the ‘Babylonian Captivity of the Russian Church’, and sought to return to the more authentic tradition of the Fathers. Despite the well-­known differences between these émigré theologians, they had a great deal in common. They all shared the ‘personalism’ of nineteenth-­century Russian thought: the understanding that the ‘person’ (which they often called ipostas, the Russian version of the Greek hypostasis) was distinct from the ‘individual’, the fate to which human kind seemed to be committed with the breakdown of traditional societies and the advance of modern industrialization; Soviet ‘collectivization’ treated humans as interchangeable (and disposable) individuals, whereas communities fostered the growth of persons. Also, and not unrelated, they all had an understanding of the­ ology as based on encounter with God. In the West they discovered that, although official Western theology, the debased scholasticism of the Catholic seminaries, as well as the tired liberalism of Protestantism, was something hard to stomach, there were those in the West who shared their sense of the way theology needed to go, though our émigrés were perhaps more aware of what they had in common with their Roman Catholic friends than with the Protestants (Barth, in particular, could have made a good ally, but few Orthodox theologians knew enough to make the connexion). Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology was intended to clear the ground for the new approach to theology that he came to call the ‘Neo-­patristic synthesis’. In that work he recounted the errant wanderings of Russian theology to the point where

2 Evagrios, On Prayer 61. 3  See my ‘ “. . . And If You Pray Truly, You Are a Theologian”: Some Reflections on Early Christian Spirituality’, Wisdom of the Byzantine Church, 1997 Paine Lectures in Religion (University of Missouri-­ Columbia, 1998), 1–11. Also printed as ‘Evagrios: The ‘Noetic’ Language of Prayer’, Chapter  9 in Selected Essays, volume I. 4 Palamas, Ep. 1 to Barlaam 41; Gregory Palamas, Συγγράματα I, ed. P. K. Chrestou (Thessaloniki, 1962), 248.

What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?  173 it needed to be recalled to the ‘patristic style and method’ which had been ‘lost’. This ‘patristic theology must be grasped from within’, he declared.5 Florovsky spoke of ‘intuition’ as well as ‘erudition’, and argued that to regain this patristic way of thinking, or phronema, ‘Russian theological thought must still pass through the strictest school of Christian Hellenism’.6 Lossky was to echo Florovsky in this, and though they both thought that Bulgakov was a kind of misbegotten progeny of the ‘Babylonian captivity’ (in captivity now not so much to arid scholasticism as to the all-­too-­fertile imaginings of German Idealism, with its roots in gnosticism and esotericism), in truth, Bulgakov shared many of their concerns, though perhaps he had more of a sense of what was needed if Orthodox theology was to speak in the West with a voice not too forbiddingly alien (I am not suggesting that he solved this problem, but he was certainly aware of it). There is, then, a deep tradition of genuine reflection about the nature of the­ ology, and in particular, Orthodox theology, on which we can and must draw in our new situation. But we are in a new situation; things have changed and in a variety of ways our problems are different from the great theologians of the Russian emigration. These differences are both internal and external, both concerned with who we Orthodox are and what challenges are presented us by the world in which we live and to which we belong. The question of who we are is becoming more and more pressing. There are now Orthodox theologians whose intellectual training is wholly or mostly Western: Metropolitan Kallistos is a fine example, but the same is true in a different way of Fr Schmemann, Fr Meyendorff, and Fr Bobrinskoy; they are not Russian theologians who find themselves in the West, but people of Russian descent, educated in the West, and therefore with an intellectual formation that is genuinely Western. It is, it seems to me, becoming difficult to be clear what constitutes Orthodox theology and who is an Orthodox theologian. At the conference in the spring of 2007 in Fordham on ‘Orthodox Readings of Augustine’, the issue of what counts as Orthodox theology was publicly—­and somewhat acrimoniously—­aired.7 Is an Orthodox theologian a theologian who is Orthodox? Or are there theologians who are Orthodox whose theology is scarcely Orthodox? (Or even: are there theologians who are not Orthodox, but whose theology is? For instance, the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams?) Another ingredient in the mix that makes up this issue is that, since the time of the period entre deux guerres and immediately after, the Orthodox voice in the West is much less exclusively Russian. There are now

5  Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 2: The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 6 vols. (Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 294. 6 Florovsky, Ways, 297. 7  Another example of what seems to me a battle to lay claim to the title of Orthodox theology can be found in Alan Brown’s contribution to the recent Festschrift for Metropolitan John of Pergamon: ‘On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology’. In The Theology of John Zizioulas, ed. Douglas H. Knight (Ashgate, 2007), 35–78.

174  Selected Essays, VOLUME II plenty of other voices—­Greek, Serbian, Romanian—­and since the collapse of the Soviet Union we can now hear the voices of those who are not émigrés and who encounter the West in a very different way. It is still striking, however, that many of these newer voices—­for example, to stick to an older generation and avoid a multitude of names, Fr Dumitru Stăniloae, Fr Justin Popović, and Christos Yannaras—­still seem to share an understanding of theology as outlined above: marked by personalism, theology as rooted in encounter with God, and also the importance of the Fathers. The world of Orthodox theology is now peopled with a diversity of voices that was less true (or less evidently true) of the last century. The question of what defines an Orthodox theology, or Orthodox theology, is one that is going to demand some attention. How could we define Orthodox theology? A theology that is faithful to Scripture and the Œcumenical Councils? That would, however, scarcely distinguish Roman Catholic theology from Orthodox theology. To expand this base by adding the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1351, and 1368—as Lossky did explicitly,8 and others have done implicitly—­looks a little artificial, while to include the ‘symbolic books’ of the seventeenth century would seem to reduce Orthodoxy to a denomination, which I think any Orthodox would repudiate.9 I have no definitive answer, but I have some suggestions for discussion. First, who is a theologian? Not primarily academic theologians. According to the Divine Liturgy, it is the bishops who have the grace ‘rightly to divide (define? discern?) the word of Your truth’, not theologians, however learned. Another fundamental definition of theologian that we have already quoted (and we Orthodox do quote this all the time) is that of Evagrios who equated the state of pure prayer with theology. These are the primary meanings of the term ‘theologian’, so, I would suggest, that it doesn’t matter that much how we define academic theo­lo­ gians; they aren’t that important! But let me suggest some criteria for genuinely Orthodox theology.10 First, Orthodox theology, like the life of the Orthodox Christian, is focused on the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal mystery, and its celebration both Sunday by Sunday and pre-­eminently in the Paschal Vigil, is something we are so conscious of that we are sometimes tempted to say that it is distinctively Orthodox—­as if the resurrection was not central to any form of Christianity. But within Orthodoxy it is very prominent, and for those who have made a pilgrimage to Orthodoxy the experience of the Paschal Vigil, the contagious joy of that occasion, is usually an important milestone. And so it should be. It is here, as we contemplate the death and resurrection of Christ—­the sorrowful joy, matching the ‘joyful sorrow’ of 8  See Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God (Faith Press, 1963), 10. 9  As Yannaras does in a recent book: see the chapter ‘O “omologiakos”-ismos’ [‘ “Confessional”ism’], Enantia sti Thriskeia [Against Religion] (Ekdosis Ikaros, 2006), 276–83. 10  This list was inspired by, though is not identical with, the list offered in an article by Fr Boris Bobrinskoy: ‘Être orthodoxe dans le monde occidental’, Contacts 69 (2007), 283–92.

What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?  175 which St John Climacus speaks as marking the ascetic life—­that we come to understand who Christ is. There are a multitude of ways of expressing this, all of them falling short of the mystery, but let me take one, picking up a central theme in Fr John’s lecture yesterday. It is here that we learn what is meant by being able ‘to call upon the God of Heaven as Father, and to say: Our Father . . .’ In the Garden of Gethsemane, we hear the Lord calling on God as Father: ‘Abba, Father, let this cup pass, yet not what I will, but what you will’. Then, on the cross, the Lord calls out: ‘Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing’, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’. And finally, in the Garden of the Resurrection, the Lord speaks to the weeping Magdalene of ‘My Father and your Father, my God and your God’—extending to us participation in the mystery of being children of the One we call Father and who is our Father. What holds the whole paschal mystery together is Jesus’ prayer to his Father as Father, his prayer to the One who created everything and in whose hands are all the issues of life and death as ‘Father’, however dark and humanly desperate things seemed to be. It was the conviction of St Maximos the Confessor that this prayer to the Father was a prayer both human and divine, the expression of both his human and his divine will, that led him to resist to the point of death any attempt by the Byzantine Emperor and his compliant hierarchs to fudge the reality of Christ’s experience in the Garden and on the Cross. A second criterion is that Orthodox theology is apophatic. This was the conviction of all the great Orthodox theologians of the last century, though we need to note that they did not all mean the same thing when they spoke of theology as apophatic, and they all thought that apophatic theology means a lot more than simply a theology that privileges the moment of negation: it is more than a qualifier, ‘Of course, the reality is all much more than this’. For Lossky, it meant that the human intellect, encountering God, is not just conscious of its frailty, but more fundamentally challenged to its very depths by an act (or state) of ‘the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God’: a metanoia in which ‘knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries’.11 Fr Stăniloae saw in the apophatic dimension of theology the pressure of experience, an experience that could never be fully grasped and expounded.12 While for Christos Yannaras, the apophatic dimension of theology, which he called an ‘apophaticism of the person’ as opposed to an ‘apophaticism of essence’, expresses the inexhaustibility of personal knowledge—­ and there is no other knowledge of God than personal knowledge—­and ‘leads Christian theology to use the language of poetry and

11  Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957), 238. 12  Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994), 96 ff.

176  Selected Essays, VOLUME II images for the interpretation of dogmas much more than the language of conventional logic and schematic concepts’.13 Third, what about academic theology as such: the theology taught in seminaries and universities, and expressed in learned journals and monographs? Here the situation is interestingly complicated. There are Orthodox journals, and Orthodox presses, and Orthodox faculties, but a lot of Orthodox theology finds expression in journals not exclusively Orthodox, university presses, and many Orthodox theologians belong to faculties in secular universities (or ‘public’ universities, as we call them in England), or in confessional universities, Catholic or Protestant, and often enough not in faculties of theology (which often enough have been transmogrified into faculties of religious studies), but faculties of philosophy, or history, or some other discipline. Academic theology tends to ‘borrow’ the approach of another discipline—­history, or less commonly philosophy (it is striking how few Orthodox theologians would be regarded as systematic theologians by their academic peers). Florovsky reflected on the role of the Christian his­tor­ ian as theologian in a famous paper, interestingly written originally as a contribution to the Festschrift for the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich: ‘The Predicament of the Christian Historian’.14 In it he made the important point, which relates to his ‘personalism’ noted above, that the Christian historian’s approach to history is concerned not with ‘objects’ but with ‘subjects’; it is a personal engagement with persons, not an impersonal survey of events and happenings. This is not the point to explore this further, but I would like to use it as a springboard for my final remarks which concern not so much the place of Orthodox theology in the world of secular learning but rather the place of Christian theology (Fr Georges spoke of the predicament of the ‘Christian’ historian, not simply the ‘Orthodox’ historian). It seems to me that the importance of there remaining a Christian voice within an increasingly secular academe, and one that Orthodox must face if they are not to allow themselves to be enclosed in a ghetto (something against which Fr Chad Hatfield has spoken challengingly), is that there is a dimension beyond the dis­cip­ lines of human learning and science that Christian theologians, whatever their academic ‘specialism’, must bear witness to. We are faced by a multitude of problems: problems concerning the environment, profound bioethical problems, especially those concerned with the beginning and end of earthly life, economic and political problems, problems concerned with justice, a justice that is to mean fairness not just between the different classes, but between nations and con­tin­ ents, all these problems raised in a context of relativist post-­modernism, glo­bal­ iza­tion and consumerism. It is too easy for these problems to be seen simply as questions of human management, so that all we need to do is work out a human 13  Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith (T. & T. Clark, 1991), 17. 14 Now most conveniently found in Georges Florovsky, Christianity and Culture, vol. 2: The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Nordland Publishing Company, 1974), 31–65 and 233–6 (notes).

What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?  177 solution and impose it—­an approach that is likely to lead to a sense of being utterly overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the issues, which itself will lead to despair, or an ostrich-­like attempt to ignore them, or a temptation to adopt draconian solutions that will undermine the very humanity that we feel to be at threat, or to a kind of hubris that imagines that, of course, we shall devise techniques, for the human is in control, now even in control of the process of evolution itself. The Christian has to try and see that all these problems take on a different dimension if we can see the universe as created by God, and all existence, including our existence, as a gift, a gift to be received in thanksgiving. Earlier, when speaking of the different valencies of apophatic theology, I might have mentioned the theologian who introduced the term ‘apophatic’ into Christian use, namely Dionysios the Areopagite. One of the implications for Dionysios of his apophaticism is that when we speak of God, we are not describing an object more or less accurately, but rather we are praising the One to whom we owe everything. The fundamental attitude to existence on the part of the Christian is to be one of praise and thanksgiving, eucharistia, the very name of the central Christian sacrament: an attitude of thanksgiving, not suspicion, or resentment, or simply world-­ weary acceptance. That attitude will foster an approach to the problems faced by humanity that is not caught between despair and hubris, but is rather marked by humility and confidence, a confidence inspired not by ourselves or our resourcefulness, but by a recognition of God as Creator, and a creator who cares for his creation. With such an attitude, our responsibility will be no less, but if we realize that God is creator, preserver, redeemer, and sustainer, we shall look for signs of his love in the cosmos, and find it in the cosmic cross, expressing that love, which the Fathers saw as reaching out through the universe, from the heights to the depths, from the furthest East to the furthest West, as was symbolized in the ceremony performed over the last few days in the lowering and raising of the Cross to each of the four points of the compass, as we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy and Life-­Giving Cross. Our responsibility for the world in which we live will be no less, for though we realize that all does not depend on us, for we are not creators, our conviction is and remains that upholding all is the love of God, to which we respond with a response of love, as we contemplate the mystery of God’s love revealed in the Cross.

16 The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology It is often claimed that the doctrine of deification, θέωσις, is distinctive to Greek patristic or to Orthodox theology; and that claim is made both negatively and positively. Negatively it has often been claimed that deification stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the biblical doctrine of justification, and represents most clearly the way in which Greek and Orthodox theology has strayed from authentic Christianity. Positively the claim is often made by Orthodox theo­lo­ gians that deification is distinctive to Orthodox theology, and by other Christians, Protestant and Catholic, that it is in the doctrine of θέωσις that Western Christians will find what they are most in need of from the Orthodox tradition. It was in these terms that Professor Cunliffe-­Jones, many years ago, commended ‘the Christian humanism of the conception of theosis—­the transformation and re-­creation of mankind by the power of God’;1 it is doubtless something of the same hope that has lain behind the organization of this conference. This perception of the centrality of deification for Orthodox theology is borne out by the fact that three important studies on this subject have recently been published. The first, Emil Bartos’ Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology,2 focuses on the work of the Romanian priest, Fr Dumitru Stāniloae—­a figure often considered to be the greatest Orthodox theologian of the last century. The second book is Bishop Joachim Giosanu’s La déification de l’homme d’après la pensée du Père Dumitru Stăniloaë.3 The third is Dr Norman Russell’s major study of deifica­ tion, which I have read more than once on its journey towards the published text.4 I could not express my thoughts on the subject of theosis without drawing deeply on what I have learned from that reading. Instead of building on this illu­ minating and thorough analysis of the history of the doctrine of deification in the Greek Fathers, I will content myself to look at the place of deification in Orthodox theology.

1  H. Cunliffe-­Jones, Christian Theology since 1600 (Duckworth, 1970), 124. 2  Emil Bartos, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Stăniloae (Paternoster Press, 1999). 3 Évêque Joachim Giosanu, La déification de l’homme d’après la pensée du Père Stăniloaë (Trinitas, 2003). 4  Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in Greek Patristic Theology, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0017

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It has often struck me that in theology—­as in other subjects—­analysis of con­ cepts can seem to miss the point in a tantalizing way. One breaks the concept down into its constituent parts, and analyses each of these parts—­historically and conceptually—­and then puts it all back together again, but still one seems to have missed the significance that it holds for those who value it. This is notably true in the literature on deification of Ben Drewery’s elegant and concise paper on deifi­ cation, contributed to the Festschrift for Gordon Rupp.5 The concept of deification is analysed in a way that displays Drewery’s excellent grasp of the meaning given to this term in various Greek theologians; his criticism is sharp and clearly put. But what is interesting about his presentation is that when he comes to express his own perception of the truth with which deification is meant to be bound up, he does not himself attempt to present an alternative concept—­his understanding of justification, for instance, a doctrine I don’t think he mentions—­rather he quotes from hymns, especially those of Charles Wesley, that characterize his own Methodist tradition. Deification is a concept that he can analyse and for which he does not much care; what matters to him is the doctrine of Scriptural holiness, not analysed as a concept, but expressed in the devotional verse of hymns. The Methodist Drewery grasps very well the place of the doctrine of Scriptural holi­ ness, the Methodist doctrine that others have argued displays many points of convergence with the doctrine of deification, but has no feel at all for the place of the doctrine of deification, which appears to him a concept of dubious lineage and dangerous connotations. What I want to do in this lecture is to say something about the place of deification in Orthodox theology. What I mean by ‘place’ is the way the doctrine functions in the whole Orthodox experience, including the pattern of theology. In studying the history of Christian theology, we have often paid too little attention to what I would call the pattern of theology: the mosaic, as it were, that emerges when the various doctrines of the faith are fitted together. We tend to take for granted the pattern of theology that we are familiar with from our own Christian experience, or from what we have picked up in our reading and thinking, and impose that pattern on whatever it is we are studying. If the pattern does not fit, we complain that there seems to be an inadequate grasp of whatever is involved in that lack of fit. It takes a lot of humil­ ity and patience to revise our framework, and try and work out what framework was assumed, or adopted, by whomever it is or whatever tradition it is that we are trying to understand. This is, I think, particularly true of attempts on the part of the non-­Orthodox to understand the doctrine of deification. For whatever reasons, the doctrine of deification ceased to have a central role in Western theology from about the twelfth century, though it had a continuing place among the mystics, with all the marginalization, and suspicion, and also allure, 5  Ben Drewery, ‘Deification’. In Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp, ed. Peter Brooks (SCM Press, 1975), 33–62.

180  Selected Essays, VOLUME II that such relegation entailed.6 It is no longer part of the pattern of either Catholic or Protestant theology; Western attempts to understand it have consequently to assimilate it to an alien framework, and not surprisingly it fits very awkwardly. How does it fit into the pattern of theology found in the Greek Fathers and in modern Orthodox theology? (I am not confusing these, as if they were the same, but I do think that in this case the answers are much the same, which is not surprising, given the importance to modern Orthodox theology of the vision of the Greek Fathers.)

Incarnation: The Cosmic Dimension of Theosis I want to proceed by suggesting various ways in which deification finds a signifi­ cant place in Orthodox theology, in relation to other doctrines, and indeed—­ perhaps more important—­in relation to Orthodox experience as a whole. Let me start by looking at the most famous patristic assertion of the doctrine of deifica­ tion, St Athanasios’ words towards the end of De Incarnatione: He [the Word of God] became human that we might become God; and he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father; and he endured insults from humans that we might inherit incorruption.7

The doctrine of deification is presented as a counterpart of the doctrine of the Incarnation. It might, however, be better to speak of the event of deification and the event of the Incarnation, for Athanasios is talking about something that hap­ pened; he is talking about the engagement between God and human kind in the Incarnation, and its consequences. Deification expresses the full extent of the consequences of the Incarnation; as in the Incarnation God the Word shared with us in what it is to be human, so in deification we shall come to share in what it is to be God—­as St Irenaeus put it, ‘in his immense love he became what we are, that he might make us what he is’.8 He shared our life, to the point of death, that we might be redeemed from death and come to share the divine life. This notion of an exchange, of what the Latin Fathers called admirabile commercium, is the place where deification fits; it is not so much a doctrine to be analysed as a way of capturing the nature and extent of our response to the Incarnation. The rest of the sentence quoted draws out something of the nature of the exchange: the Word becoming visible though a body, so that we might find access to the invisible Godhead; the Word in the body submitting to insult and outrage that we might attain a state beyond all that outrage and insult entail, the state he calls incorruption, ἀφθαρσία. We shall explore a little later on more of what this entails. 6  While it is still important in the mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, it is absent from Peter Lombard, and Aquinas only uses the language of deificatio of Chrust’s human nature, not of human beings. 7 Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54. 8 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V. praef.

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Deification is, then, to do with human destiny, a destiny that finds its fulfilment in a face-­to-­face encounter with God, an encounter in which God takes the initia­ tive by meeting us in the Incarnation, where we behold ‘the glory as of the Only-­ Begotten from the Father’ (Jn 1:14), ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor 4:6). It is important for a full grasp of what this means to realize that deifi­ cation is not to be equated with redemption. Christ certainly came to save us, and in our response to his saving action and word we are redeemed; but deification belongs to a broader conception of the divine οἰκονομία: deification is the fulfil­ ment of creation, not just the rectification of the Fall. One way of putting this is to think in terms of an arc stretching from creation to deification, representing what is and remains God’s intention: the creation of the cosmos that, though human kind, is destined to share in the divine life, to be deified. Progress along this arc has been frustrated by human kind, in Adam, failing to work with God’s pur­ poses, leading to the Fall, which needs to be put right by redemption. There is, then, what one might think of as a lesser arc, leading from Fall to redemption, the purpose of which is to restore the function of the greater arc, from creation to deification. The loss of the notion of deification leads to lack of awareness of the greater arc from creation to deification, and thereby to concentration on the lesser arc, from Fall to Redemption; it is, I think, not unfair to suggest that such a con­ centration on the lesser arc at the expense of the greater arc has been characteris­ tic of much Western theology. The consequences are evident: a loss of the sense of the cosmic dimension of theology, a tendency to see the created order as little more than a background for the great drama of redemption, with the result that the Incarnation is seen simply as a means of redemption, the putting right of the Fall of Adam: O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!—as the Praeconium Pascale has it: ‘O certainly necessary sin of Adam, which Christ has destroyed by death! O happy fault, which deserved to have such and so great a Redeemer!’9 Orthodox theology has never lost sight of the greater arc, leading from cre­ ation to deification. One can see this in the theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov, whose patristic learning is often—­unjustly, I think—­impuned. In the first volume of last, great trilogy, The Divine Wisdom and the Divine Humanity, he has this to say: God wants to communicate to the world his divine life and himself to ‘dwell’ in the world, to become human, in order to make of human kind a god, too. That transcends the limits of human imagination and daring, it is the mystery of the love of God ‘hidden from the beginning in God’ (Eph. 3:9), unknown to the angels themselves (Eph. 3:10, 1 Pet. 1:112; 1 Tim. 3:16). The love of God knows no limits and cannot reach its furthest limit in the fulness of the divine

9 The Praecomium Paschale is part of the Easter Vigil in the Western Church; see Missale Romanum (F. Pustet, 1963), 227–8; translation is mine.

182  Selected Essays, VOLUME II abnegation for the sake of the world: the Incarnation. And if the very nature of the world, raised from non-­being to its created state, does not appear here as an obstacle, its fallen state is not one either. God comes even to a fallen world; the love of God is not repelled by the powerlessness of the creature, nor by his fallen image, nor even by the sin of the world: the Lamb of God, who voluntarily bears the sins of the world, is manifest in him. In this way, God gives all for the divini­ zation of the world and its salvation, and nothing remains that he has not given. Such is the love of God, such is Love. Such it is in the interior life of the Trinity, in the reciprocal surrender of the three hypostases, and such it is in the relation of God to the world. If it is in such a way that we are to understand the Incarnation—­and Christ himself teaches us to understand it in such a way (John 3:16)—there is no longer any room to ask if the Incarnation would have taken place apart from the Fall. The greater contains the lesser, the conclusion presup­ poses the antecedent, and the concrete includes the general. The love of God for fallen human kind, which finds it in no way repugnant to take the failed nature of Adam, already contains the love of stainless human kind. And that is expressed in the wisdom of the brief words of the Nicene Creed: ‘for our sake and for our salvation’. This and, in all the diversity and all the generality of its meaning, contains the theology of the Incarnation. In particular, this and can be taken in the sense of identification (as that is to say). So it is understood by those who consider that salvation is the reason for the Incarnation; in fact, concretely, that is indeed what it signifies for fallen humanity. But this and can equally be understood in a distinctive sense (that is to say ‘and in particular’, or similar expressions), separating the general from the particular, in other words without limiting the power of the Incarnation nor exhausting it solely in redemption. The Word became flesh: one must understand this in all the plenitude of its meaning, from the theological point of view and the cosmic, the an­thropo­ logic­al, the Christological and the soteriological. The last, the most concrete, includes and does not exclude the other meanings; so, too, the theology of the Incarnation cannot be limited to the bounds of soteriology; that would be, moreover, impossible, as the history of dogma bears witness . . . The Incarnation is the interior basis of creation, its final cause. God did not create the world to hold it at a distance from him, at that insurmountable metaphysical distance that separates the Creator from the creation, but in order to surmount that distance and unite himself completely with the world; not only from the outside, as Creator, nor even as providence, but from within: ‘the Word became flesh’. That is why the Incarnation is already predetermined in human kind.10

10  Translated from the French version: S. Boulgakoff, Du verbe incarné (Aubier, 1943), 97–8. The echoes of Barth’s doctrine of the covenant as the inner ground of creation are pre-­echoes; Bulgakov’s work was first published in 1933, when only the first volume of Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik had been published.

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The doctrine of deification preserves this sense that God created the world to unite it to himself; it preserves the sense that the purpose of creation is to achieve union with God. Human kind, fashioned in his image to be a microcosm and bond of the cosmos, was to have a key role in that process of deification; in the Incarnation, the Word comes to human kind as a human being to take on this role himself, to fulfil the human purpose for the cosmos—­something on which St Maximos the Confessor meditated in the forty-­ first of his Ambigua, or ‘Difficulties’. This is the first way in which I would suggest we should think of the place of deification in the Orthodox understanding of things. Deification is a way of expressing a sense of the ‘plan—­οἰκονομία—­of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things’ (Eph. 3:9), a plan that is not exhausted in redemption made necessary by the Fall of human kind; it is a way of summing up the purpose of creation. Consciousness of the arch that stretches from creation to deification is essential to preserving a sense of the cosmic dimension of the divine economy. Another way of ‘placing’ the doctrine of deification emerges if we consider more deeply the quotation from St Athanasios already cited. Deification is pre­ sented as the effect of the Incarnation, the result of human response to the Word’s becoming flesh. What is envisaged is a transformation, a transfiguration, of human beings. Those are big words, but what is certainly meant is a real change: a change which is the result of coming to share in the life of God. This change involves a kind of reconstitution of our humanity, a reshaping, a straightening out of all the distortions and corruptions that we have brought upon our humanity by misusing—­abusing—­our human capacities, and by living out our lives in accord­ ance with values and principles that fall a long way short of the values and prin­ ciples inherent in creation as God intended it. This reconstitution of human nature is something impossible without the grace of God, without everything implied in God the Word’s living out what it is to be human, and thereby on the one hand showing us what it is to be truly human, and on the other experiencing and overcoming the accumulated power of evil that has manifested itself in human nature and human affairs—­ultimately experiencing and overcoming the power of death itself. This reconstitution of our human nature is therefore some­ thing beyond our human powers—­no self-­help will be anywhere near adequate—­ but on the other hand it is something that involves the most profound commitment of our human powers; it is not a change in which we will be passively put right—­ some sort of moral and spiritual surgery—­it is a change that requires our utmost cooperation, that calls for a truly ascetic struggle. No the­ology can call itself Orthodox in the true sense that does not embrace such an ascetic commitment. It is for this reason that the most important work for Orthodox theology pub­ lished in modern times is not any of the so-­called ‘Symbolical Books’, which defined the Orthodox faith in relation to Catholicism and Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor even any of the works of the Russian

184  Selected Essays, VOLUME II émigré theologians of the last century—­great though many of these are—­but a compilation of ascetic texts made by St Makarios of Corinth and St Nicodimos of the Holy Mountain, called the Philokalia, published in 1782. One could indeed argue that everything that is most vital about modern Orthodoxy can be traced back to that work, such is its towering importance.11 The title page of the Philokalia reads: ‘Anthology [Philokalia] of the holy ascetics [or: watchful ones], gathered from our holy and god-­bearing Fathers, in which, through ethical phil­ oso­phy in accordance with practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined and perfected . . .’ The purpose of the book, then, is the purification, illumination, and perfection of the intellect—­a process that will render it capable of pure prayer, that is, authentic communication with God, in which the intellect or the heart, the spiritual principle of the human person, attains its ultimate goal. This process is not possible apart from the body, nor indeed without attention to communion with others made possible through the body; the purpose of asceti­ cism is to restore the original faculties of created reality, which involves individual effort, but which cannot be achieved on one’s own, nor indeed apart from the whole of God’s creation in which the human is to play a key role. It is to one of the works contained in the Philokalia that I want to turn to develop a little the ascetic implications of St Athanasios’ fundamental assertion that the Word ‘became human and we might become God’. It is one of the shorter works in the collection, St Maximos the Confessor’s treatise, On the Lord’s Prayer. As Fr Gabriel Bunge observes, in his wonderful book on prayer in the patristic tradition recently translated into English, it is striking that the Lord left us, not a creed, but a prayer: it is in and through a prayer that the most fundamental sum­ mary of our beliefs are contained.12 It is this insight that St Maximos develops in his short treatise. Of the Lord’s Prayer, he remarks: For hidden within a limited compass this prayer contains the whole purpose and aim of which we have just spoken; or, rather, it openly proclaims this purpose and aim to those whose intellects are strong enough to perceive them. The prayer includes petitions for everything that the divine Logos effected through his self-­emptying in the incarnation, and it teaches us to strive for those bless­ ings of which the true provider is God the Father alone through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit.13 11  See my contribution to the Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, ‘The Theology of the Philokalia’, Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 351–61 (also published as Chapter 7 in this volume). 12  Gabriel Bunge OSB, Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer according to the Patristic Tradition (Ignatius Press, 2002), see 11. 13  Maximos the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, ed. P.  Van Deun, Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca 23 (Brepols / University Press, 1991), ll. 62–9; translation in G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, ed. and trans., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2 (Faber and Faber, 1981), 286.

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He goes on to say a little later that our response to the Incarnation, through which we receive deification, imitates the action of the Word in the Incarnation—­our deification mirrors his Incarnation, the principle St Athanasios enunciated—­and, in particular, our response involves a κένωσις, a self-­emptying, that mirrors the κένωσις, the self-­emptying, through which the Word of God assumed humanity: The Logos bestows adoption on us when He grants us that birth which, tran­ scending nature, comes by grace from above through the Spirit. The guarding and preservation of this with God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the prac­ tice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace. Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying Himself of His own sublime glory, the Logos of God truly became man.14

Our κένωσις is a self-­emptying of the passions, passions which St Maximos defines as ‘impulses of the soul contrary to nature’.15 Emptied of such passions, the soul is restored to its natural state—­the Logos, Maximos says, ‘restores human nature to itself ’16—so that, to quote from a little later on in the treatise, ‘our whole intellect be directed towards God, tensed by our incensive power as if by some nerve, and fired with longing by our desire at its most ardent’.17 In this restored state, the beauty of the soul, lent it by grace, is revealed. But this self-­emptying of the passions, of all distortions and corruptions that lay waste our nature, cannot take place without serious ascetic struggle, because it involves a real change in our nature: a change that restores it to its truly natural state. Here is perhaps a good place to clear up a misconception about deification, namely, that it involves the transformation of our human nature into something other than human, some kind of apotheosis that removes our humanity: to quote some frequently quoted words, ‘If the aim of the Christian is to cease to be “human, all too human”, it would be a natural corollary in Christology to regard the humanity of our Lord as a problem rather than a datum’.18 For the Orthodox tradition, and for St Maximos in particular, nothing could be further from the truth: the aim of the Christian is to become once again truly human, to become the human partners of God as we were originally created, and as human partners to share in the divine life. It may well be that Nietzsche’s ‘menschliches, 14  Maximos the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, ll. 97–106; translation, modified: Palmer et al., ed. and trans, Philokalia, 287. 15 Maximos, Centuries on Love I. 35. 16 Maximos, On the Lord’s Prayer, l. 135; translation: Palmer et al., ed. and trans, Philokalia, 288. 17 Maximos, On the Lord’s Prayer, ll. 542–5; translation: Palmer et al., ed. and trans, Philokalia, 298. 18  Quoted from Drewery, ‘Deification’, 61, where he is quoting from H. E. W. Turner, The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption (Mowbray, 1952), 82–3, who is himself quoting J.  L.  Haire, ‘On Behalf of Chalcedon’. In Essays in Christology for Karl Barth, ed. T. H. L. Parker (Lutterworth Press, 1956), 104–5.

186  Selected Essays, VOLUME II a­ llzumenschliches’ is hardly a good way of summing up what this entails, but that is ­perhaps not surprising; better, perhaps, is the remark of Bulgakov’s: ‘God comes in the cool of the day to talk with man, as with a friend, and that “conversation” was no donum superadditum in relation to his incorrupt nature, but, on the contrary, that conversation was something quite normal’.19 That is, part of what it is to be human is to speak with God as ‘with a friend’ and all that such intimacy with God entails: which is what deification means. Deification, then, is not a transcending of what it means to be human, but the fulfilment of what it is to be human. Although we need to realize how far we are from that fulfilment, that realization is greatly impeded by the conviction that to be human is to be fallen and frail (‘all too human’). As Nicholas Berdyaev remarked, ‘There can be no question of the work of a great artist being poor, low, and insignificant simply because it is created. But the Creator of the world is the greatest of artists, and there is no reason why it should be denied that He can create something divine and lofty.’20 Deification reveals the divine and lofty purpose for which human kind was created. This is the first way in which I would suggest we should think of the place of deification in the Orthodox understanding of things.

Transformation: The Human Dimension of Theosis The second way in which I suggest we can see the doctrine of deification ‘placed’ in Orthodox theology lays stress on the real change involved in the trans­fig­ur­ ation of human nature that deification entails, a change only possible through the transfiguring power of God combined with a genuine and costly commitment to ascetic struggle on our part. Orthodox theology wants to speak of this change in terms of ontology, not because this change involves a conversion into something other than human, but rather because the change involved is fundamental, rad­ ical, a rebuilding of what it is to be human from the roots up. It is not a matter of some superficial change in patterns of behaviour—­though it involves a radical change in our way of life—­still less is it a matter of our simply being regarded in a different light by God—­as justification by faith alone is sometimes taken to imply—­it is something fundamental, and ontological language is often used to express this. This change restores human nature to its true purpose, to be com­ panions of God, through Christ in the Holy Spirit, and to be partakers of the divine life and the divine nature. Human beings are to speak with God as ‘with a friend’, as Bulgakov put it in the passage just quoted. In the Old Testament, Moses is spoken of as enjoying such a relationship with God: as we read in Exodus, ‘Thus the Lord used to speak with Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33:11). It is for this reason that Moses came to be, for many of the Fathers, 19 S. Bulgakov, Kupina Neopalimaya (YMCA Press, 1927), 25. 20 N. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Geoffrey Bles, 1937), 27.

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the archetype for the human encounter with God. ‘Face to face’: in these terms the fulfilment of our relationship with God is represented. ‘Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known’ (1 Cor. 13:12). The Transfiguration of the Lord, at which significantly Moses was present, is the great Gospel account in which the chosen dis­ciples come face to face with Jesus as God. In the fourth Gospel, in which, as has often been remarked, the event of the Transfiguration does not occur because the reality of the Transfiguration is always present, Jesus calls his disciples friends (John 15:15). What is meant by this face-­to-­face vision of God? First of all, it must mean that God has a face: the face revealed in the Transfiguration, the face of which the Apostle Paul speaks when he talks of God ‘who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6). Our final encounter with God is an encounter, an engagement, with an Other; it is not to be dissolved in the Ultimate. But that encounter is on our part too a transfiguration: ‘when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2)—a transfiguration in which we shall become ‘like him’. It is striking that it is in conjunction with a reference to the Transfiguration that the Apostle Peter speaks of our becoming ‘partakers of the divine nature’. What does this mean? What kind of transfiguration—­transformation—­is envis­ aged? When we speak of becoming partakers of the divine nature, or of becoming God, we are speaking of what we know not, something beyond any human con­ ception. As the prophet Isaias professed, ‘Truly, thou art a God who hidest thy­ self ’ (Is. 45:15), and, as Dionysios the Areopagite reminds us, as revealed in Jesus Christ, ‘he is hidden after his manifestation or, to speak more divinely, even in his manifestation. For even this mystery of Jesus is hidden, and what it is in itself can be expressed by no word or concept, and what can be spoken remains ineffable and what can be understood remains unknown’.21 What it is to be divine is beyond our comprehension, and indeed is revealed as precisely beyond our comprehen­ sion: deification is not becoming something we know and understand (as seems to be suggested by those who are sure that becoming divine means to cease to be human), it is to enter into a mystery, beyond anything we can understand. This is often called an apophatic approach, attitude, or way of union.

Apophatic Theology: The Divine-­Human Union There are, it seems to me, two sides—­at least—­to what is meant by such prizing of the apophatic. First of all, to quote the great living Greek philosopher, Christos Yannaras, 21  Dionysios the Areopagite, Ep. 3. Translations from Dionysios the Areopagite are my own, some­ times based on C. Luibheid and P. Rorem, trans., Pseudo-­Dionysios: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1987).

188  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The apophatic attitude leads Christian theology to use the language of poetry and images for the interpretation of dogmas much more than the language of conventional logic and schematic concepts. The conventional logic of everyday understanding can very easily give man a false sense of a sure knowledge which, being won by the intellect, is already exhausted by it, completely possessed by it. While poetry, with the symbolisms and images which it uses, always exhibits a sense from within the words and beyond the words, a concept which cor­res­ ponds more to common experiences of life and less to cerebral conceptions.22

Historically, this perception has been most evident in Orthodoxy in the symbol­ ism that has come to surround the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and in the wealth of liturgical poetry that characterizes the Church’s worship. The mystery of God is not something explored by the ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’, but rather something celebrated in the hymns and ritual actions of the Christian commu­ nity, as no one has seen more clearly that Dionysios the Areopagite. The beauty of the soul, that Maximos sees created by our ascetic struggle, is a response to the beauty of God, manifest in creation and celebrated in the liturgy, a beauty that calls us back to God (here the Greek has a convenient play of words between κάλλος, beauty, and καλεῖν, to call). That is one side of the apophatic approach we need to grasp if we are to construe deification properly. The other side is the rejection itself of the ultimacy of our concepts, the entry into darkness and unknowing, evoked by Dionysios the Areopagite in his brief and pregnant treatise, Mystical Theology. Trinity, beyond being, beyond godhead, beyond goodness! Guardian of the divine wisdom of Christians! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the highest peak of the hidden oracles, where the mysteries of theology lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the dazzling darkness of hidden silence. In the deepest darkness they pour overwhelming light on what transcends mani­fest­ ation, and in what is wholly beyond touch and sight they fill to overflowing our sightless minds with splendours beyond all beauty.23

Dionysios goes on to compare those who pursue this path to sculptors, who bring beauty out of stone by cutting away: ‘like those who make a natural statue by removing every hindrance that gets in the way of the pure vision of the hidden object, and simply by cutting away from itself make manifest the concealed beauty’.24 It is a familiar image, going back through Gregory of Nyssa to Plotinus,25 22 C. Yannaras, The Elements of Faith (T. & T. Clark, 1991), 17. 23  Dionysios the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1. 1. 24  Dionysios the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 2. 25  Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II. 313; Gregory of Nyssa, Inscriptions of the Psalms II. 11; Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 14; and Plotinus, Enneads I. 6. 9.

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and that lineage is important, for Dionysios’ allusion to it makes clear that this process of cutting away is not simply a matter of refining, and ultimately reject­ ing, concepts, but a matter of cutting away and refining oneself, or as Gregory himself expresses it, submitting oneself to Christ himself who cuts away whatever it is in us that hides the true image of God in which we were created. That Dionysios has in mind a process by which we are transformed, rather than simply some sort of dialectic process, becomes clear in the next chapter of the Mystical Theology, where he asserts that the more we look upwards, the more our words are confined to the simple vision of the intelligible; so that now as we plunge into that darkness that is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing . . . ascending from below to what is transcendent, the more it climbs, the more language falters, and passing beyond any ascent it will be wholly speechless and wholly united to the One who is ineffable.26

What is the nature of this being reduced to silence as we find ourselves closer and closer—­ultimately united with—­the One who is beyond any human conception? It is certainly the failure of language expressive of awe before the divine: the same awe that can find expression in a babbling overflow of symbols and similes. But it is not the divine over against us, it is the divine with which we are being united, the divine grace that penetrates within, cutting away all that is opposed to it, and revealing within the divine image in which we have been created in all its glory and beauty. This sense of the apophatic attitude as not constituting some limita­ tion to our knowledge, but rather as disclosing the transforming encounter with God Himself, is perhaps best expressed in some words of Vladimir Lossky, in the concluding chapter of his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: We have had again and again, in the course of our study of the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, to refer to the apophatic attitude which is characteristic of its religious thought. As we have seen, the negations which draw attention to the divine incomprehensibility are not prohibitions upon knowledge: apophati­ cism, so far from being a limitation, enables us to transcend all concepts, every sphere of philosophical speculation. It is a tendency towards an ever-­greater plenitude, in which knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries. It is, moreover, an existential theology involving man’s entire being, which sets him upon the way of union, which obliges him to be changed, to transform his nature that he may attain to the true gnosis which is contemplation of the

26  Dionysios the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 3.

190  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Holy Trinity. Now, this ‘change of heart’, this μετάνοια, means repentance. The apophatic way of Eastern theology is the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God. It is the constant transformation of the creature tending towards its completeness: towards that union with God which is brought about through divine grace and human freedom.27

This then, I would suggest, is a further way in which deification may be ‘placed’ in Orthodox theology: deification witnesses to the rooting of theology in the trans­ forming encounter with God, now known most fully in the Incarnation, and approached through the ‘gates of repentance’.

Conclusion What I have attempted to demonstrate in this lecture is that the doctrine of deifi­ cation in Orthodox theology is not some isolated theologoumenon, but has what one might call structural significance. In various ways, I have suggested, deifica­ tion, by the place it occupies in Orthodox theology, determines the shape of that theology: first, it is a counterpart to the doctrine of the Incarnation, and also anchors the greater arch of the divine economy, which reaches from creation to deification, thereby securing the cosmic dimension of theology; second, it wit­ nesses to the real change that is involved in responding to the encounter with God offered in Christ through the Holy Spirit—­a real change that requires a ser­ious ascetic commitment on our part; and finally, it witnesses to the deeper meaning of the emphasis on the apophatic found in Orthodox theology, a meaning rooted in the ‘the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God’.

27 V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957), 238.

17 Inspiration of the Scriptures Western Presuppositions and Orthodox Theology In modern Western theology, the notion of inspiration has become—­and has been for a long time—­a matter of contention. There is no doubt that, in the ques­ tion of the authority of the Scriptures, appeal to inspiration, in one form or another, is traditional. It is not just as old as Christianity, it is something inherited from our Jewish forefathers, and indeed from the Classical culture in which the Gospel was first preached. We must, however, beware of supposing that, in the Western debate over inspiration, those who reject it, or find it unnecessary, can simply be regarded as opposed to tradition, while those who defend inspiration must be seen as defenders of tradition, though I am sure that they think they are. The reason for this caveat is that the modern Western debate is just that—­a mod­ ern Western debate—­the product, along with much of the rest of Western the­ ology, of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In this case, I suggest, it amounts to the following. First of all, behind the debate lies the Reformation with its principle of sola scriptura, ‘Scripture alone’. The doctrine of scriptural in­spir­ ation is the justification for this Protestant principle, and even the Catholic position tends to take on something of the Protestant idea: at its most extreme in the idea that there are two distinct sources of inspiration, Scripture and Tradition, that complement each other. Second, however, the Enlightenment, in the development of biblical criticism, poses problems for the authority of the Bible seen in isolation, and therefore determines the terms of the debate over inspiration: it is biblical criticism that calls in question the traditional doctrine of inspiration by calling in question the authority of the Bible. Oddly, and interestingly, the Catholic response was initially to defend biblical inspiration as such and in isolation to the hilt; it was only someone like Newman, with his profound patristic formation, who found the challenge of the Enlightenment and biblical criticism an example of a much more general ration­ alism, rather than a deadly threat to the historical foundations of the Faith. A stubborn, soi-­disant conservatism, in the form of traditionalism, is very tempting for Orthodox theologians; in matters of biblical criticism, starting with the ques­ tion of biblical inspiration, there is a temptation, as in many other areas, to find a position somewhat to the right, so to speak, of the Catholics, rather than explor­ ing a radical grasp of tradition that goes deeper than the quarrels of the West. We should, I think, strive to be radical, rather than conservative, and recall the point Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0018

192  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Alexei Khomiakov made in his correspondence with William Palmer, that ‘all the West knows but one datum, a; whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Romanists, or with the negative –, as with the Protestants, the a remains the same’.1 The Orthodox position is, often enough, on neither side, but tran­ scends them both.

Starting from Practice How might we begin to understand the Orthodox attitude to Scripture and its authority and interpretation? I suggest we should start, not from theory, but from practice, that is, by looking at the way in which we use the Scriptures. Let us begin by looking at how we use the Scriptures liturgically. The Gospel Book has a central liturgical role: it normally rests on the holy table in the altar; it is carried in  procession; it is venerated. It both contains the Gospels—­either the four Gospels, or the passages from the Gospels as they are used liturgically—­and, more im­port­ant, it symbolizes the Gospel, the Good News, not just God’s message for humankind, but, more fundamentally, God’s gift of himself to humankind in the life, death, and resurrection of his only-­begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. But it does contain ‘writing in ink’: accounts of the life, death, resurrec­ tion, and ascension of Christ, and also the records of his teaching. When we read from it, we stand up (the deacon’s command could well be translated: ‘Wisdom! Let us stand up and listen to the Holy Gospel’)—out of respect for Christ, in whose presence we are. As we have noted, before we read from the Gospel—­and indeed before we read from any part of the Scriptures—­the deacon exclaims ‘Wisdom!’. The origin of that custom is, so far as I am aware, not fully understood, but it is at least a call for serious attention as we listen to the word of God: here truly is wisdom, we are reminded. We read from each of the Gospels; in the case of Matthew, Luke, and John, we read them more or less continuously, beginning Matthew during the week after Pentecost, Luke after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and John during the fifty days, the Pentecost, of Paschal celebration itself. The most important sections are reserved for Saturdays and Sundays, and were clearly ­chosen first, with the weekdays going continuously through the rest, as inspection of the Calendar makes clear (though this is less true of the Paschal period, which perhaps suggests that during the Paschal season attendance at church on a daily basis was expected; the Quinisext Synod (691‒2) certainly envisages attendance at the liturgy during the whole of Easter Week, the Week of Renewal: see canon 66). The shortest of the Gospels, Mark, is read more episodically, presumably because so much of it is contained in Matthew and Luke, but it is the Gospel we 1  See W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church (Rivington, Percival & Co., 1895), 67.

Inspiration of the Scriptures  193 use for the Gospel readings during Lent. The rest of the New Testament, apart from the Apocalypse (which is never read at all liturgically), is read as the Apostle: the Acts of the Apostles during the Paschal season, and the Apostolic epistles in the order found in the Greek New Testament (the Slavonic New Testament fol­ lows a different order, placing the ‘Catholic’ epistles first, in this more like the Syriac order), beginning after the Sunday of All Saints, again with the more important sections selected for the weekend readings. The New Testament is read, then, in its entirety (save for the Apocalypse) with scrupulous care. The case is very different with the Old Testament, which is read very se­lect­ ive­ly. It is only during Lent that the Old Testament is read in sequence: Genesis and Isaias during the six weeks of Lent, and then during Holy Week Exodus and Job and Ezekiel (more a collection of extracts than a continuous reading, how­ ever). Otherwise, there are selected readings from the Old Testament for the more important feast days (the selections are very limited). Particularly important are the lengthy sequences of readings on the vigils of Christmas, Epiphany, and Pascha (on Holy Saturday): especially the latter two. Apart from the readings from Isaias and Ezekiel at the Sixth Hour during Lent and Holy Week, all these readings are at Vespers (whatever time of day it is held). There are two further liturgical uses of Scripture to be added. First, during Holy Week, the whole of the Gospels up to the Passion Narratives are read on the first three days, the Passion Narratives themselves being read during the Matins of Holy Friday. Second, there is the use of the Psalms (to which one should add the biblical canticles). The psalms and canticles are read differently, not as lections, but rather as prayers (compare, for instance, the rubric about the reading of the Six Psalms at the beginning of matins: ‘with due attention and with the fear of God, as though speaking with Christ himself, our God invisibly present, and in sorrow for our sins’). They are read in two ways. First, the canticles and certain psalms form part of the various offices: at Vespers, Psalm 103, a song celebrating creation at the beginning of the liturgical day, a group of psalms beginning with Psalm 140 and its verse asking that ‘my prayer ascend as incense before you, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice’ and the canticle of Symeon ‘who received God [in his arms]’ (Luke 2:29–32); at Matins, the ‘Six Psalms’ and the biblical canticles (usually by default); and various fixed psalms at the lesser hours. Second, the whole of the psalter, divided into twenty sections called kathismata (‘sittings’), is read in the course of each week, spread over vespers and matins (and the lesser hours during Lent and Holy Week).

The Shape of the Scriptures What does this account of the Orthodox use of Scripture tell us about our under­ standing of it? First of all, it suggests that Scripture is not regarded as an

194  Selected Essays, VOLUME II undifferentiated whole, a uniform collection of ‘inspired books’. In fact, one might well wonder whether there is anything in Orthodox practice corresponding to the idea of the ‘Bible’. We use various books containing the scriptures: it is only in the case of the New Testament and the Psalms that we use special books, containing the Gospels, the ‘Apostle’ or the Psalms; for the readings from the Old Testament we find them in the liturgical books—­the Triodion or the Menaia. It was, perhaps, only with the advent of printing that the notion of the ‘Bible’ gained any real cur­ rency (the fifty codices of the Scriptures that Constantine asked Eusebius of Caesarea to provide for Constantinople in 335 were clearly an exception2). Second, it is the Gospel that stands at the heart of the Scriptures, and that in two senses: first, it is the Gospels that are regarded as most important, but second, what is meant by the ‘Gospel’ is not so much the Gospels as the Gospel itself. The Gospels are important because they are the most obvious (though not in fact in their form as Gospels the earliest) witness to the Gospel, the Good News of Christ, or rather: the Good News which is Christ. The liturgical place of the Gospel is in the Divine Liturgy (on rare occasions there is a Gospel at Vespers, but this is usually when Vespers forms a preface to the Divine Liturgy, or on the first three days of Holy Week the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts): it is, as it were, an aspect of the encounter with Christ that takes place in the Eucharistic celebration. To the Eucharist belongs, too, the readings from the ‘Apostle’: the rest of the Apostles’ primary, and indispensable, witness to Christ. It is at Vespers, for the most part, as we have seen, that the Old Testament is read. Vespers marks the beginning of the liturgical day; as the sun sets we look for­ ward to the day when the sun will never set, the ‘light that knows no evening’, φῶς ἀνέσπερον. Vespers is a service of anticipation, and it is there the Old Testament belongs: looking forward to the coming of Christ, anticipating his coming. But this mood of anticipation is not something we have put behind us. Vespers looks forward to the following day, to the celebration of the Eucharist, to a celebration that is itself an anticipation of the heavenly banquet, celebrated donec veniat, ‘until he comes’ (1 Cor. 11:26). It is into this context of anticipation and yearning towards the future that the liturgical use of the Scriptures fits: the Old Testament readings at vespers looking to the fulfilment of the coming of Christ in the flesh, celebrated in the Divine Liturgy, at which the Apostle and the Gospel are read as witnesses to that coming, with the celebration of the Eucharist itself looking for­ ward to the coming of Christ. This pattern of looking forward to the final mani­ festation of Christ as the coming, Risen One is found in our observance of Lent, marked by comparatively intensive reading of the Old Testament; for Lent is an extended preparation of celebration of the Resurrection at Easter. This pattern is the same as that marked out by St Maximos the Confessor as the threefold

2 Eusebius, Life of Constantine IV. 36.

Inspiration of the Scriptures  195 sequence of shadow–­image–­truth; the shadow belonging to the Old Testament, the image to the New, while the truth will be finally and fully revealed in the com­ ing kingdom. The other use of the Old Testament we noted above—­in the Psalms and Canticles—­also fits in here. They are prayers or songs, or prayerful songs, to be sung or chanted; as we take them on our lips we join with the worship of the Temple of the Old Covenant, and we join our experience with that of the chosen People of God from the beginning, the chosen People who, as it is put in the Epistle to the Hebrews, were ‘seeking a homeland’, who ‘desired a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city’ (Heb. 11:14, 16).

The Old Testament and the Christian Church This sense of Scripture as having a shape, focused on the Gospel, is something that emerges if we look at what was involved in the early Church’s appropriation of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, or, looked at another way, the early Church’s stubborn refusal to relinquish the Old Testament Scriptures in the face of that emphasis on the newness of the Gospel, based on an aspect of the Apostolic preaching, and associated with those whom modern scholars still persist in call­ ing the ‘gnostics’. For although the Early Church inherited its Scriptures from the Jewish Synagogue, it quickly came to interpret them in its own way. What this involved can be set out, with some simplification, fairly straightforwardly. For the Jews themselves, the Scriptures had a shape: at the centre was the Torah, the Pentateuch, which set forth God’s will for humankind in general, and his chosen People in particular, as it had been revealed to Moses. This was the heart of the Scripture; here one could learn how to live a life close to God. The rest of the Old Testament—­the Former and the Latter Prophets (the ‘former prophets’ being the historical books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and the Writings—­were sec­ ondary to the Torah, providing support and interpretation. The ‘shape’ of Scripture implied was something like a mountain, the Torah constituting the peak, and the rest the foothills. But in the early Church, we see another pattern emerging: at the centre is Christ (though the metaphor is much more linear, and Christ is rather the culmination than the centre), not himself Scripture at all, and what is of first importance in the Old Testament Scriptures (simply the ‘Scriptures’ for Christians until the end of the second century) are the prophetic books, which point forward to the coming of the Messiah, the Christ. This can be seen very readily if we look at the Gospels in the New Testament and compare them with the epistles of the Apostle Paul. In Paul’s epistles, we can still see the Jewish shape of the Scriptures, for Paul, with his rabbinic training, continues to argue from the Torah, using the rest of the Scripture, including the prophets, as supporting evidence (the prominence of the Psalms for St Paul,

196  Selected Essays, VOLUME II understood in a messianic way, is already evidence of a shift from his rabbinic training). But in the Gospels, written rather later, you can begin to see a Christian use of Scripture, much more a reflection of Christian catechesis, for the bulk of the references to the Old Testament is now to the prophetic books. As this Christian use develops, it becomes clear that it is not so much a matter of a change of emphasis, from concentrating on the Torah to concentrating on the Prophets, rather it is a question of how the books of the Scriptures are regarded as such. For the Christian use of Scripture comes to regard all the books of the Old Testament as prophetic: the stories of the Pentateuch come to be seen as referring to Christ typologically; the Law found in the books of the Torah is now seen to be fulfilled in Christ, and the ceremonial laws are regarded as, in a host of ways, prefiguring Christ (it is striking how those elements of the worship of the Tabernacle and the Temple that expressed God’s presence with his people come to be seen as prefiguring the Mother of God: the ark of the covenant, the rod of Aaron, the jar of manna); Moses himself comes to be regarded as much as prophet as legislator. So the Old Testament comes to be seen as precisely that: the Old Testament, the ancient revelation that has been fulfilled in Christ, to which the New Testament bears witness. One can see an illustration of this change in the way in which the books of the Old Testament come to be ordered (though this is something not to be made too much of, as it is only when you put all the books together—­something that was probably a rare occurrence—­that you have to decide on their order; if the Scriptures are kept as a collection of scrolls in a box or cupboard, then the question of order is much less pressing). But the order of the books from the point of view of Rabbinic Judaism is Torah–­ Nebiim–­ Kethubim, Law–­ Prophets–­ Writings; they are listed in order of importance, the Torah standing first as of primary importance, that to which every­ thing else refers. The fourth-­century Codex Vaticanus (though not the other ancient Christian codices) has a significantly different order: the Pentateuch is followed by the historical books (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kingdoms, Paraleipomena (the rest, or the omissions, included with Ruth among the Writings in the Jewish lists), I and II Esdras), then the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and finally by the prophets: the Twelve Minor Prophets, and then Isaias, Jeremy (together with Baruch, Lamentations, and the Letter of Jeremy), Ezekiel, and Daniel. Very similar lists, beginning with the historical books, continuing with the books in verse, as they are often called, and ending with the prophetic books are, with some slight variations, found among the Fathers: for instance, Melito of Sardis, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanios, Gregory of Nazianzus, Amphilochios of Iconium, Pseudo-­Chrysostom, John Damascene, as well as in the canons of the synod of Laodicea, the Apostolic Canons, and among the Latins, Augustine and Isidore of Seville.3 One might say that the Rabbinic Jewish order is a descending order, placing what is most important first, 3 See  H.  B.  Swete, Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge University Press, 1900), 201–14.

Inspiration of the Scriptures  197 while the Christian order is an ascending order, beginning with the historical and rising to the prophetic, which then ushers in the New Testament, the fulfilment of what is foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

Christ the Centre of the Scriptures What all this suggests is where we began: the Christian focus is on Christ—­it is the Gospel that stands at the centre. The Old Testament is seen as prophetic (as a whole), because it is seen as pointing to Christ; it is the manifold promise of what is to find its fulfilment in Christ. At the centre of the Christian understanding of Scripture stands, not a book, not even the book of the Gospels, not a person sim­ ply, not even the person of Christ, but an encounter with Christ. For a Christian, to read the Scriptures properly is constantly to face the question from the One who stands in our midst: ‘Who do you say that I am?’—the question the Lord addressed to his disciples (Matt. 16:15). And for us, as for the disciples, it is the Old Testament that provides us with the concepts, the terms, the images we need to answer this question. We shall draw on other resources as we seek to answer that question; very soon Christians began to answer that question by saying, in effect, ‘You are the Word, the Logos, of God’, and though that may to begin with have been yet another way of drawing on the imagery of the Old Testament (‘word’ translating memra, the word of God pronounced in blessing), it soon became a way of drawing on other resources, more familiar to the Greek-­speaking (and -thinking) world, in which the Gospel was being preached (‘word’ now cor­ responding to λόγος, the principle Greek philosophy saw at the heart of reality). But—­as the early Christians themselves came to learn—­there is no way of bypass­ ing the Old Testament; it is there that we find the concepts, the values, the way of life in terms of which we can understand Christ most fully. The Mother of God is, in a way, a symbol of this. She is the one presented to us as one ‘who kept all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2:19, cf. 2:51), a heart that had been formed by a piety nourished on the Scriptures and the religious practices of Israel. Furthermore, it is striking how much our understanding of her is represented in terms of fulfilment of Old Testament figures, as we have already noticed. There is an article by Fr Ephrem called ‘Mary in Eastern Church Literature’, that might well have been called, significantly, I think, ‘Mary in the Old Testament’.4 Mention of which raises a curious point about Orthodox use of the Old Testament. As we have seen, the Old Testament is read in a very selective way in the course of the Orthodox liturgical services, but the kind of imagery found in the liturgical texts, not least in reference to the Mother of God, depends on detailed allusion to the texts of the Old Testament, which presumes very close familiarity with those 4 Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, ‘Mary in Eastern Church Literature’. In Mary in Doctrine and Devotion, ed. Alberic Stacpoole OSB (The Columba Press, 1990), 58–80.

198  Selected Essays, VOLUME II texts. There is, then, something of a paradox in Orthodox recourse to the Old Testament: detailed familiarity is presumed without any express provision for acquiring such familiarity, at least in the liturgical services. It was not always so: Egeria, in her account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, tells us that the bishop spent three hours each morning during Lent, going through ‘the whole Bible, beginning with Genesis, and first relating the literal meaning of each passage, then interpreting its spiritual meaning’.5 Vladimir Lossky made it his practice to read the whole of the Bible once each year.6 However we achieve it, such a close acquaintance with the Scriptures is needed, if we are to be in any position to grasp the meaning, often allusive, of the liturgical hymns. If, at the centre of our understanding of Scriptures, stands an encounter with Christ, then a number of consequences follow. First of all, as the Lord’s response to Peter indicates, our response to the question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ is not at all a matter of human ingenuity: ‘Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’. The New Testament is quite clear about this: St Paul tells us, ‘No one can say that Jesus is Lord, save in the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). No amount of human ingenuity can lead us to confession of Christ, what is required is something quite different: openness, humility, expectancy, and long­ ing. This, perhaps (though maybe I am simply trying to fit everything in), is another way in which the psalms fit in. We have looked at the significance of the vesperal readings from the Old Testament, and the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel, all of which leads us to an encounter with Christ. The psalms, which pro­ vide a constant undertow to all the liturgical offices, are there to inculcate this attitude of prayerful expectancy, humble openness, required by those who would be open to the coming of the Spirit, and the consequent encounter with Christ. There is something else about this encounter with Christ that stands at the heart of our reading of the Scriptures, and that is that he is the one who comes, who is coming, ὁ ἐρχόμενος. In the creed we confess our belief in the one ‘who is coming’, as the Thyateira translation rightly has it (‘he shall come’ renders a future tense that is not there), and similarly in the Sanctus we exclaim, ‘Blessed is he who comes [is coming]’. The Christ we encounter is not just the One who came, but rather the one who is coming—­in the Eucharist, in our hearts, and at the end—­the one who is coming and is to come. To recognize and acknowledge Christ is not to identify him, as it were, but to look for his coming in hope and to live in that hope.

Scriptural Inspiration? What then about scriptural inspiration? What we have said so far makes it clear that if we are going to talk about inspired Scriptures, this is not at all a matter of 5 Egeria, Travels to the Holy Land 46. 2. (I owe this reference to Fr John Behr.) 6  See his son, Fr Nicholas Lossky’s, mémoire in Vladimir Lossky, Sept jours sur les routes de France. Juin 1940 (Éditions du Cerf, 1998), 72.

Inspiration of the Scriptures  199 seeing the Scriptures as a collection of inspired oracles. This seems to me to be evident from the way in which the scope of the Scriptures (to use a term St Athanasios used) has changed in the passage from the Old to the New Covenant (as we Christians put it). The authority of the Scriptures we now call the Old Testament rests, not so much on their inspiration, as on their reception by the Church as prophetic witness to Christ. It is the fact that the Church recognizes in these Scriptures the witness to Christ by which it lives that gives them their authority. To talk of inspiration in this context is perhaps a way of acknowledging that in recognizing authentic witness to Christ in the Scriptures the Church is not simply reading something back into the Scriptures, but recognizing something that is there; though this in no simple way, for to recognize in Isaias, say, funda­ mental prophetic witness to Christ is not to short-­circuit historical questions about the prophet’s (or prophets’) immediate intention in their utterances (as if Isa. 7: 14 really refers to the Virginal Conception of Christ, and does not refer to something in the immediate historical circumstances of the prophet). In the case of the New Testament, the place of inspiration in our understanding of their authority seems to me even further displaced. For two reasons: first, the writings of the New Testament (with the exception of the Apocalypse, which has the un­usual distinction of never being read liturgically in Orthodox practice) could hardly look less like a collection of inspired oracles; the epistles are occasional pieces, not in the least like treatises, and the Gospels place more stress on what the Lord did than on his inspired words. But second, there are, in fact, lots of early Christian writings that not only look like collections of inspired oracles, but seem to have been consciously composed as such: but these are the so-­called apoc­ ryph­al (or in many cases Gnostic) Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, which the Church decisively refused to regard as scriptural, because it did not recognize in them the apostolic witness to Christ. So again, the authority of the New Testament is not directly a matter of their inspiration, but of their reception by the Church as apostolic witness to Christ. If we take this approach, then a lot of problems that beset Western theories of inspiration vanish, or at the very least appear in a very different light. Take, for instance, the question as to what is the authoritative (‘inspired’) text of the Old Testament. For us Orthodox there is no question: it is what was virtually univer­ sally regarded by Christians as the Christian Old Testament until the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, that is, the ancient Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, known as the Septuagint.7 And why? Because this is what we use. It is the psalter of the Septuagint that we use in the offices (indeed, in the West, it was a Latin psalter based on the Septuagint—­Jerome’s rather conservative

7  Something that a few biblical scholars have recently come to recognize. See Mogens Müller, The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 206 (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Martin Hengel, The Septuagint as Christian Scripture (T. & T. Clark, 2002).

200  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ‘Gallican Psalter’—that was used in worship until the middle of the twentieth ­century, when it was replaced by a truly dire Latin translation based on the Hebrew, which did not survive the liturgical reforms of Vatican II: the translation used in those passages of the psalms found in the Liturgia Horarum (1971) pre­ serves many felicities from the traditional Latin translation), and the text of the Septuagint that we employ for the readings. This text of the Septuagint is not, however, the critical text of the Septuagint edited by Alfred Rahlfs (and published a few decades ago in Greece with ecclesiastical authority), for what Rahlfs was doing was trying to establish the text as it emerged in the centuries immediately before Christ, in which endeavour he allowed himself considerable critical free­ dom, often producing a conjectural text with no authority in the manuscripts at all.8 The text ‘received’ by the Church was, in fact, no single, straightforward text, for in the third century, in his Hexapla, Origen had produced a text that included in six columns the Hebrew, the Septuagint, and several other ancient Greek trans­ lations. In his homilies and commentaries, he had used the Hexapla not to estab­ lish some definitive critical text (often supposed by scholars to have been the purpose of the Hexapla), but rather to provide a range of ways in which the Scriptural text could be read. The text (or rather: texts) of the Septuagint used by the Greek Fathers from the fourth century onwards seem often to have in­corp­or­ ated ‘hexaplaric’ readings, which is why some of the readings found in the Menaia and Triodion are not ‘Septuagintal’; they do not follow Rahlfs’ ‘critical’ text, but one or other of the hexaplaric readings. This rather amoeba-­like ‘text’ of the Old Testament—­which is authoritative for Orthodox Christians—­is, in all its variety, deeply embedded in its liturgical reception, for it is this text that is quoted and alluded to in the rich liturgical poetry of the Orthodox Church. Reception, in this case, is not a matter of some simple act of recognition—­certainly nothing as sim­ ple as a synodical decision9—rather it is a matter of the way in which the themes and the imagery (especially the imagery) of the Old Testament books are woven into the celebration of our faith in the liturgical songs. But the fluid state of the Old Testament text actually acknowledged in our liturgical use makes it very dif­ ficult to articulate any understanding of inspiration as the source of the authority of the biblical text. Rather, in accordance with what we argued earlier, inspiration is to be found in the way the Old Testament text has been read by those who composed the liturgical texts, and those who sing them and hear them. It is when we are ‘filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and 8  Notably Jer. 1:6, where Rahlfs reads ‘O Lord God’, while all the manuscripts read ‘The One that is, Lord God’. This phrase forms the opening words of the Anaphora of St Basil. Jerome took the Hebrew ahah, which the Septuagint translates as a present participle, to be an exclamation (as did Rahlfs), but an exclamation of awe, translating the phrase: A, a, a, Domine Deus. It has always seemed to me that it would be rather wonderful to begin the anaphora like that! 9  Even the synodical decisions there are—­e.g., the reaffirmation in canon 2 of the Quinisext Synod of the Apostolic Canons, which include canon 85, or the various canons of the Fathers, giving lists of Scriptural books—­do not relate closely to actual Orthodox practice.

Inspiration of the Scriptures  201 spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all [our] heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father’ (Eph. 5:18‒20), that we may speak most convincingly of inspiration. In fact, this problem is inescapable—­whatever view of inspiration one has. For the Old Testament, especially, is a collection of works, gathered together in vari­ ous forms at different moments in history; even individual books now have the form given them by later compilers. Take, for example, the psalms: how are we to read them? As works by inspired, largely unknown poets, living at various moments in the history of Israel? As a collection of songs, composed (largely) by King David? As the hymn book of the Second Temple? As the psalter of the Christian Church? A doctrine of inspiration forces one to decide, generally to decide on the earliest moment of composition. But I would rather say: all of these, in this way making our use of the psalms something through which we join our prayer with Christ, or use these as ways of praying to Christ (the two pre­dom­in­ ant Christian ways of understanding the psalms), but also doing this in solidarity with the whole chosen people of God down the ages, all of whom have, in the Spirit, taken these hymns or poems on their lips. It has become evident by now that seeing the authority of the Scriptures in the Church’s recognition of them as authentic prophetic and apostolic witness does not mean an appeal to primarily institutional authority. It can hardly mean that, anyway, for, as noted above, the only canons listing the Scriptural books do not correspond with Orthodox use: they can only be taken as indicative, not as defini­ tive. But there is a more fundamental reason: simply that the notion of a ‘canon’ of Scripture is a misuse of words, for the word ‘canon’ does not mean a list, but a rule, and that rule is the rule of faith, the living expression of the apostolic faith by the Church. Inspiration is, then, I would suggest, recognition in the Spirit that in these writings we encounter the coming Christ, not as individuals, but as part of the whole Church living in the hope of Christ’s coming again. The ‘canonical books’ are precious to us, because these are the books in which generation after generation of Christians have come to encounter Christ as the One who is com­ ing and to come. A final point,10 earlier on in this paper, I alluded to St Theodore the Studite’s description of the Gospels as ‘writing in ink’ (in contrast to icons, which he called ‘writing in gold’). That expression has a kind of brute reality about it: the Gospels are bits of tangible reality, written with ink on paper. This implies a certain given­ ness about them; they are what they are, not just what we take them to be. For all the emphasis I have placed on reception by the Church as the token of au­then­ti­ city, it is not the case that such reception creates the authenticity of the witness of the Scriptures; such reception is acknowledgement of something there. That

10  Several ideas in this paragraph I owe to discussion with Fr John Behr.

202  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ‘something there’ is, however, not something contained in the Scripture; it is not something that can be reduced to the ink and paper, just as an icon cannot be reduced to wood and paint: they both point beyond themselves. Our relationship to that beyond is not something we can ever finally spell out: it involves faith as acknowledgement of the mystery of God, trust in the communion of saints to which we belong as Christians, some serious attempt on our part to ‘lay aside every care of this life, that we may receive the King of all . . .’ Inspiration can be a way of speaking about all this, especially if we realize that inspiration is needed to interpret as well as to write, just as a musician needs inspiration, as well as the composer. Here, too, perhaps we Orthodox need to discover, in a place where we have often perhaps been all too confident, that dimension of the apophatic of which we have made so much elsewhere in our understanding of theology.11 There is, it seems to me, a potent symbol of the apophatic dimension of the Gospel of the Resurrection in the ceremonial attached to the proclamation of the Gospel passages concerning the Resurrection of Christ at Matins. Except during Bright Week,12 the priest does not read the Matins Gospel of the Resurrection in the body of the church, but from within the altar: suggesting an announcement from the empty tomb, rather than a tangible fact belonging to the world. The lan­ guage of inspiration evokes mystery—­which is a reason for not relinquishing such language too hastily. We need, however, to locate that mystery correctly: not, I would suggest, in the mechanics of the production of the inspired text, as often seems to be implied, but rather in the mystery of which the Scriptures speak, and to which they invite us, the mystery of the Incarnate Son of God, crucified and risen, and revealed in the Spirit.

11  On this, see the extraordinarily interesting article by Simon Crisp, ‘Orthodox Biblical Scholarship between Patristics and Postmodernity: A View from the West’. In Auslegung der Bibel, ed. James  D.  G.  Dunn et al., Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 130 (Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 123–37. 12  It is consonant with the interpretation give above that at Easter Matins itself no Gospel text is prescribed at all in the Pentekostarion: the empty church, symbolizing the empty tomb, is the Gospel. This is obscured by the common practice nowadays of reading the second eothinon (Matins Gospel) outside the church.

18 Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian The completion of Boris Jakim’s translation of the larger of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’s trilogies, On Godmanhood (or On Divine Humanity, as Jakim prefers), prompts reflection on how Bulgakov understood the task of the theologian.1 For though in this trilogy he covers the ground of a traditional dogmatic theology, he does this in a quite unusual way. This can hardly have been other than deliberate. It is striking, too, that round about the same time (the first volume, The Lamb of God, was published in 1933), another great theologian was also struggling with the problem of how to present a dogmatic theology: namely, Karl Barth, whose first attempt at dogmatic theology, Die Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf,2 the first volume of which appeared in 1927, was then aborted, as Barth embarked on  his monumental, and renamed, Church—­not Christian—­Dogmatics in 1932. Dissatisfaction with the traditional shape of dogmatic treatises (though the trad­ ition­al shape of Protestant dogmatics had already been altered by Schleiermacher, so that Barth’s problems were not exactly the same as Bulgakov’s, or indeed his Catholic contemporaries) was in the air, for in the Catholic world, the most vital movements in theology—­those associated with the movement of Ressourcement, focused especially on the Jesuit house at Lyon-­Fourvière, where de Lubac was teaching—­pursue theology in a different vein, and also raise questions that affect the structural principles of a dogmatic theology (this seems true both of de Lubac’s questioning of the traditional disjunction between the natural and the supernatural, and Rahner’s later reflections on the relationship between the trad­ ition­al starting point of theology, ‘On God’, and ‘On the Trinity’).3 It is also a question raised by Hans Urs von Balthasar in what could be regarded as a meth­ odological introduction to his own vast trilogy, published in English as Love Alone: The Way of Revelation.4 Although this essay is primarily about Bulgakov, it is worth setting our reflections against not dissimilar concerns expressed in 1  Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, The Bride of the Lamb (William B. Eerdmans, 2008, 2004, and 2002). 2  Karl Barth, Die Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, vol. 1, Prolegomena (Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1927). 3  See Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel, Théologie 8 (Aubier, 1946), which grew into Henri de Lubac, Augustinisme et théologie moderne, Théologie 63 (Aubier, 1965) and Henri de Lubac, Le mystère de surnaturel, Théologie 64 (Aubier, 1965); Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans Joseph Donceel (Burns & Oates, 1970). 4  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone: the Way of Revelation (Burns & Oates, 1968).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0019

204  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Western theology, contemporary with him. What kind of historical links there might have been, I shall not explore, as it seems unlikely that any of these links are very secure. The problem Bulgakov, Barth, Rahner, and Balthasar all face is how and where to start? Traditionally, in East and West, dogmatic theologies had followed a ba­sic­ally credal order, an order already discernible in St John Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith, and even in some earlier patristic works, which seem to broach what we now would regard as a presentation of Christian dogmatic theology, such as Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration or Augustine’s Enchiridion. As these earlier works are fundamentally catechetical, it is hardly surprising that they reflect, more or less, the order of the baptismal creed in their presentation of the faith. So they begin with God, and then progress through the Trinity, Creation leading to the Fall, Christology and Redemption, the Church and the Sacraments, and finally Eschatology. As the catechetical context of the earliest of these works suggests, the starting point is the believer coming to baptism and initiation in the faith epitomized in the baptismal creeds, which from the beginning seem to have adopted a basically trinitarian structure, itself probably reflecting the liturgical form of baptism in the threefold name. It is not exactly as a catechetical task that the modern theologian understands his role. His task is not just to expound, but to present coherently and critically the Christian faith. Principles of coherence are needed, and these are generally drawn from a broader understanding of the sig­ nificance and meaning of the Faith. It has long been observed, for instance, that Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae adopts from Neoplatonism the idea of procession and return as a structural principle.5 Another issue in modern dogmatics con­ cerns, more precisely, how to start: i.e., what are the prolegomena? What are the steps that take one into the realm of theology? A good deal of Western theology since scholasticism seems to see the prolegomena as philosophical considerations that establish a kind of rational basis—­accessible to any honest thinker—­on which the more detailed account that has been revealed can be based. Another version of this is to explore human experience and show how it is open to the transcendent, which is itself unfolded in the more particular experience of revela­ tion. Barth, famously, is against all this, and the transition from the Christian to the Church Dogmatics took place, because he soon came to see that the Christian Dogmatics was not sufficiently radical. One can get an initial impression of Barth’s concerns by simply looking at the table of contents in each work. Both, after pre­ liminaries (themselves significantly different in detail), see dogmatics as a response to the Word of God, but the Christian Dogmatics has chapters on ‘The Word of God and Man as Preacher’, and ‘The Word of God and Man as Hearer’, both of which Barth came to see compromised his insistence on the sovereignty 5  See  M.-D.  Chenu OP, Introduction à l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin (J.  Vrin /Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1954), 266–76.

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  205 of the Word of God; both inserted man, and man’s innate capacity, into the con­ sideration of the Word of God, so that the Word of God—­its meaning and bearing—­was qualified by man’s capacity to understand and interpret. The point of contact (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and man is not sovereignly created by God, but conditioned by man. The consequences of Barth’s radical under­ standing of the Word of God are a rejection of natural theology and any attempt to explore the human capacity to receive God’s revelation. Another issue—­ explored in §7 of the first chapter of the Church Dogmatics—­concerns the ques­ tion of whether a Christian dogmatics can be a systematic theology, a term introduced by liberal theologians who disliked the associations of ‘dogma’ and ‘dogmatic’.6 Barth argues against ‘systematic’ theology, which he sees as intro­du­ cing a humanly derived systematic principle and thus risks misrepresenting and distorting the Word of God. For our part, the detail of Barth’s considerations here are less important than the kind of issues he is struggling with. Bulgakov came from a very different ecclesial experience, but there are analogies in the concerns of these theologians. There is something analogous, too, in Rahner’s concerns in his essay on the Trinity, namely, that the way into theology may compromise whatever it is one discovers, but the links between Bulgakov and Rahner, and indeed Balthasar, will become clearer after we have looked in more detail at Bulgakov’s response to these issues. One could simply go to the trilogy On Godmanhood, and ask why Bulgakov adopts what seems to be such an untraditional approach—­Son, Spirit, and then Church and eschatology—­but there is a short essay, ‘Dogma and Dogmatic Theology’, published in 1937, that is, just after he had published the first two vol­ umes of his trilogy.7 This is explicitly about the task of dogmatic theology and thus demands our attention. The first part concerns the nature and remit of dog­ matic theology, which he describes as ‘the systematic setting out of dogmas which, taken together, express the fullness of Orthodox teaching.’ He initially makes two points: first, the limited scope of genuine dogmas (there is much that is not dogmatically defined) and second, the close link between lex credendi (rule of belief) and lex orandi (rule of prayer)—dogma is rooted in the prayer of the Church; it is not a freestanding philosophical system. This link between dogma and prayer, both personal and liturgical, is one that he dwells on. He comments, ‘That is why the altar and the theologian’s cell—­his workspace—­must be con­ joined. The deepest origins of the theologian’s inspiration must be nourished from the altar.’ It is in this context that we find Bulgakov echoing Barth’s insist­ ence on the sovereignty of the Word of God: ‘The Word of God is the absolute criterion of theology . . . The Word of God has an unplumbable depth and an 6  Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. I/1, 4th edn (Theologischer Verlag, 1944), 261–310. 7  Translated by Peter Bouteneff in Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time—­Readings from the Eastern Church, ed. Michael Plekon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 67–80.

206  Selected Essays, VOLUME II absolute character for us.’ But it is an insight that will be developed in different ways in the two theologians. Barth means the Word of God as preached, written, and revealed. For Bulgakov, the Word of God is heard within the Church, in a liturgical context, so that he can affirm, ‘The Holy Scriptures must be understood in the light of tradition.’ Bulgakov goes on to consider the role of the Fathers in theology. The Fathers are those who have passed on to us the Apostolic faith. They are not to be identified with the Fathers of the first few centuries, important as these are; he mentions modern Fathers such as Fr John of Kronstadt and Bishop Theophan the Recluse (both now canonized). They constitute a chorus of reflection, a chorus of many voices, but not by any means a unison. There is much that we can learn from listening to them, and we have to study them seriously, establishing the ‘actual views of the Church writers’, and understanding them ‘in their historical context, their concrete circumstances and historical relativity.’ The result of such an approach is that ‘the Fathers’ legacy of the past is a mosaic of different parts of history, produced by different historical circumstances. In no way is it comprehensive.’ He warns against what he calls a patristic ‘rabbinism’. He also remarks that much recent Orthodox theology has taken its categories from the West and become ‘more polemical, more reactive, than positive’. The task of the modern theologian is daunting, for though the Fathers are a great resource, there are many questions they never considered, and which we cannot avoid. These questions ‘one must treat in such a way that does not break with tradition, one should not cower from their “newness.” ’ Bulgakov goes on to envisage mod­ ern Orthodox theology as ecumenical (though he does not use the word): ready to learn from contemporary Catholic and Protestant thinkers, while ‘remain[ing] itself, nourished by the wellspring of truth entrusted to it’. Two further issues occupy Bulgakov in his essay: the question of the development of doctrine and the place of philosophy. Development is not something the Orthodox have gener­ ally found acceptable,8 and while Bulgakov is insistent that the ‘fullness [of the divine life] is given in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus, in whom the whole full­ ness of God dwells bodily, and in the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when the Spirit comes into the world hypostatically in the tongues of fire’, he is equally clear that in the divine-­human conscience of the Church, insofar as it includes temporality and relativity, this fullness enters only successively and partially—­which is why the history of dogma, as we observe it in reality, exists. New dogmas arise, and it is only in this sense that one can speak of the existence of dogmatic development.

8 See Andrew Louth, ‘Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?’, Orthodoxy and Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on his Eightieth Birthday (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 45–63 (also published as Chapter 12 in this volume).

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  207 It is this sense of the Church as existing in culturally specific conditions that determines his attitude to philosophy. Dogmatic theology expresses the dogmatic consciousness of the Church in relation to current human problems, which means that it will utilize prevailing philosophical notions, even to the extent of accepting principles of systematic coherence drawn from philosophy in its setting forth ‘a system of dogmas’. Such an approach to dogmatics explains something of Bulgakov’s approach to theology. Dogmatic theology is open-­ ended, exploring the implications and meaning of the dogmatic tradition of the Church. It is rooted in the life of the Church and finds its confidence there in the daily encounter with Christ in the liturgical life of the Church and in personal prayer. This confidence drives out fear—­fear of the new, fear of the unknown—­so that the Christian theologian can boldly avail himself of the ways of thought of those he is seeking to communicate with. Above all, there is much to do. The theologian is not the keeper of a sacred tradition, but one who seeks to engage with the issues of the day and of its culture. Of course, this is not done uncritically—­everything is to be tested against the word of God heard in the Church—­but neither is there to be fear of engagement with modern ideas and problems. Above all, theology, for Bulgakov, is not a col­ lection of doctrines that you could list and run through, rather it is way of think­ ing, rooted in a way of praying: it is a vision, not a collection of truths, however accurate. It is this last point that is most obviously carried over into Bulgakov’s dogmatic theology. His readers are being encouraged to look at things in a certain way, or perhaps look at things from a certain position—­and that position is standing in the Church before the face of the living God. We have already seen how closely Bulgakov associates the theologian’s task with the prayer of the Church. I don’t think this was merely a commonplace linking of lex credendi with lex orandi, rather it takes us to the heart of Bulgakov’s understanding of the theologian, or at least, of his understanding of himself as a theologian. It is something we need to grasp fully if we are to understand Bulgakov properly. Boris Jakim’s achievement in making Bulgakov known—­or at least ac­cess­ible—­in the English-­speaking world and the acclaim with which this has been received risk obscuring how hard it seems to have been to hear Bulgakov at all in the past. It is only just over thirty-­five years ago that Fr Alexander Schmemann could speak of the ‘tragedy of Fr Sergii’. In an article published to commemorate the centenary of Bulgakov’s birth (in 1871), Schmemann commented that, ‘A hundred years after the birth, and more than twenty years after the death of someone who, whatever one thought of his work, must be recognized as one of the most remarkable men of this tragic half-­century of Russian history, an almost total

208  Selected Essays, VOLUME II silence surrounds his name’.9 Schmemann went on to say that, even if he is to be regarded as an irredeemable heretic, there was something about him that seemed to transcend that: the priest, the spiritual father. Schmemann proceeded to recount ‘three images’ of Bulgakov that remained with him. His first memory was of seeing him at some grand celebration, a priest, dressed simply, lost in thought, which led him to reflect on what he saw as the archetypal quality of Bulgakov as a priest, the descendant of a long ‘levitical’ family. His second memory was of Fr  Sergii at the Vigil Service for Palm Sunday, and seeing his face, just for a moment—‘his eyes radiant with a calm enthusiasm, his tears, and the whole of his person turned towards “the holy place” [the east end of the church], as if he were going to the next village where Christ was preparing the last passover for his dis­ ciples’.10 The eschatology that breathes through the works of Bulgakov, an urgent waiting for the coming of Jesus, was something living and real for him. The third ‘image’ I would like to quote at greater length: My third memory of Fr Sergii, the third image, is not about a brief moment, a short encounter. It is the memory of Fr Sergii before the altar, celebrating the liturgy. In his last years, because of his illness and loss of voice, he celebrated only the morning liturgy. Because of the equipment he had about his throat, he celebrated in very light, white vestments. What memory have I kept of this? Not the ‘beauty’ of his celebration, if by beauty one means the rhythm and freedom of harmonious and solemn gestures, his ‘savoir-­faire’; in this sense Fr Sergii’s way of celebrating was perhaps not beautiful. He never knew how to cense. And there was in his movements some­ thing awkward and jerky, something that had neither rhythm nor harmony . . . But there was in that very awkwardness and in those stiff gestures something that went back to the very source, which connected with the forces of nature, which recalled the sacrificing priest of the ancients or the princely priest of the Old Testament. He was not accomplishing a well-­established rite, traditional in all its details. He delved down to the very depths, and one had the impression that the liturgy was being celebrated for the first time, that it had fallen down from heaven and been set up on the earth at the dawn of time. The Bread and the Chalice on the altar, the flame of the candles, the smoke of the incense, the hands raised to the heavens: all this was not simply an ‘office’. There was accom­ plished here something involving the whole created world, something of the pre-­eternal, the cosmic—­the ‘terrible and the glorious’, in the sense these li­tur­ gic­al words have in Slavonic. It seemed to me that it is not by chance that the writings of Fr Sergii are very often laden—­so it seems—­with liturgical Slavisms, that they themselves so often resonate with liturgical praise. It is not just a 9  Alexander Schmemann, ‘Trois images’, Le Messager Orthodoxe 57 (1972), 2–21, at 2–3. 10  Schmemann, ‘Trois images’, 11.

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  209 matter of style. For the theology of Fr Sergii, at its most profound, is precisely and above all liturgical—­it is the revelation of an experience received in divine worship, the transmission of this mysterious ‘glory’, which penetrates the entire service, of this ‘mystery’, in which it is rooted and of which it is the ‘epiphany’. The manifestation of God, and also of the world as God created it, of the divine roots of creation, destined to be filled with God, as that in which God is ‘all in all’.11

And this from someone who thought of Bulgakov’s works as a ‘ponderous philo­ sophical edifice’! Schmemann’s sense of the centrality of the Divine Liturgy to Bulgakov’s life and thought is something we encounter in many other reminis­ cences of him. It is there in Metropolitan Evlogy’s address at his funeral, which recalls his ordination, and his last celebration of the liturgy, both on the Monday after Pentecost, the ‘Day of the Spirit’.12 It is there in Sister Joanna Reitlinger’s recollections, and it is significant that it is to Bulgakov that Fr Boris Bobrinskoy ascribes what is probably a priestly proverb—‘the whole of his theological vision he had drawn from the bottom of the eucharistic chalice’.13 What all this suggests, it seems to me, is that we need to catch something of the sense of Bulgakov the priest, if we are to hear him properly as Bulgakov the theo­ logian. In a profound sense Bulgakov is a liturgical theologian, not in the sense that he writes about the liturgy, but that he writes out of the liturgy. This can already be found in his earlier writings as a priest. There is an example in the very subjects of his so-­called ‘little trilogy’—The Burning Bush, The Friend of the Bridegroom, Jacob’s Ladder—­on the Mother of God, John the Baptist, and the Angels. The choice of the Mother of God and St John the Baptist is certainly influ­ enced by the iconographic tradition, and especially the icon called the Deisis— ‘Intercession’—in which a seated Christ is flanked by the Mother of God and St John with their hands raised in an attitude of prayer. They are the two who are closest to Christ, and this closeness is manifest in prayer. Such considerations are already liturgical, in that they are concerned with prayer, but the final volume on the Angels focuses these considerations more precisely on the Divine Liturgy, for all these volumes are concerned with the conjunction of the two worlds—­the earthly and the heavenly—­a conjunction manifest in different ways in the Mother of God and St John, but realized most immediately for us in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, when we join together with ‘thousands of Archangels and ten 11  Schmemann, ‘Trois images’, 13–14. 12 Quoted in James Pain’s introduction to A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), xvi–­xvii. 13  See Sister Joanna Reitlinger, ‘The Final Days of Father Sergius Bulgakov: A Memoir’. In Sergius Bulgakov: Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Boris Jakim, Variable Readings in Russian Philosophy, 2 (The Variable Press, 1995), 31–53; Boris Bobrinskoy, La compassion du Père (Éditions du Cerf, 2000), 160, and see also 173; Boris Bobrinskoy, La mystère de la Trinité (Éditions du Cerf, 1986; 1996 imprint), 149. This is presumably a reminiscence, as no reference is given.

210  Selected Essays, VOLUME II thousands of Angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-­winged and many-­ eyed’. But just considering together the Mother of God and the Baptist has a more precisely Eucharistic reference, which Bulgakov himself draws out when he recalls that in the preparation service, the Proskomidi, as the priest cuts fragments of bread to set beside the Lamb, the bread to be consecrated, the first two fragments are in honour of the Mother of God and then of the Baptist. Similarly in the Eucharistic prayer, after the epiclesis, the first to be commemorated is the Mother of God, followed immediately by St John the Baptist.14 The way in which such precise liturgical references feed Bulgakov’s theological reflection is something very striking, and I don’t really know anyone else of whom this is true to the same extent. If we think of Bulgakov as a liturgical theologian in this sense, then I think the structure of the great trilogy begins to make sense. But I want to lead into a dis­ cussion of the structure of the great trilogy by recalling Balthasar’s reflections on the history of theological reflection in the book already referred to, Love Alone: the Way of Revelation. Balthasar, it will be recalled, begins by outlining two his­ torical approaches to theology: the first the cosmological approach, the second the anthropological approach. The cosmological approach presents the faith objectively, as a description of what is the case in the relationship of God to the world. Creation, the fall, the Incarnation, atonement, the Church, the sacraments, the last things: these are presented as a series of facts. It is the way the world is, as a result of God’s activity; so we might well call it cosmological. This has character­ ized, and continues to characterize, traditional presentations of the Faith, espe­ cially in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. The anthropological approach, by contrast, starts from an understanding of what it is to be human, and in particular with the question, how do we humans come to know anything at all about all this? Historically, as Balthasar suggests, this approach takes its starting point from a central feature of the cosmological approach, the understanding of the human as in the image of God, as occupying a kind of frontier position (as a methorion) between God and the world, between the spiritual and material realms.15 But this position has become isolated, and it is from the perspective of the human—­its nature and potentialities, its needs and requirements—­that any human under­ standing, of the world or God, is unfolded. This shift in approach constituted as radical a revolution as the more-­or-­less contemporary ‘Copernican revolution’. Festugière, long ago, suggested that we can see the contrast between the ancient approach (which Balthasar calls ‘cosmological’) and the modern approach (which Balthasar calls ‘anthropological’) by considering Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore I am’. Descartes moves from thought to the one who thinks; the Greeks, Festugière suggests, would more naturally move from thought to those things of 14  Sergii Bulgakov, The Friend of the Bridegroom, trans. by Boris Jakim (Eerdmanns, 2003), 136. 15 Balthasar, Love Alone, 25.

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  211 which one thinks (ta noeta).16 Balthasar suggests that both these approaches are limited: the first, the cosmological, tends to become extrinsicist, presenting a list of objective ‘facts’; the second, the anthropological, tends to an intrinsicism, an exploration of the conditions of being human, ending up in a kind of moralism, concerned above all with what humans ought to do. Balthasar seeks to combine the two approaches in what he calls the way of love, which is equally the way of aesthetics. God is approached neither simply as the Truth, the objectively real, underwriting the true state of affairs through his creative power, nor as the Good, underwriting a proper way of behaving; rather he is to be seen as Beauty, both someone to behold in objective forms that we can trace and describe, but also one who, through his beauty, inspires us with the longing of love, a love that shapes everything we do, so that the objectively true and the morally good are united in the pursuit of the beautiful.17 It is, it seems to me, precisely an attempt to hold together these two approaches that lies behind Bulgakov’s approach to dogmatic theology, especially as we see it in the great trilogy. On the one hand, Bulgakov remains traditional in giving a systematic account of the objective truths of revelation—­the way things are, seen in the light of revelation. On the other hand, he is concerned with the root ques­ tion of the anthropological approach: how do we know any of this? and also: how does this make sense of my human experience? This leads him to be concerned for the place, as it were, from which we behold the revelation of the glory of God: standing before God in prayer, fundamentally in the Divine Liturgy. It is easy to see how this corresponds in a way to Balthasar’s aesthetic approach, for the human being, according to Bulgakov, stands before God in prayer and beholds the revelation of God, participates in it, and is caught up with it—­and, in particu­ lar, for Bulgakov, is drawn towards the fulness of the revelation of God at the end of time (remember the second of Schmemann’s ‘images’, of Bulgakov looking for the coming of the Kingdom with eagerness). What fundamentally distinguishes Bulgakov from the anthropological approach is ultimately his conception of what it is to be human. The West, from Descartes onwards (and maybe earlier), has tended to reduce the human to the individual. Bulgakov inherits from nineteenth-­ century Russian thought, and especially the Slavophils, a sense of the person, as opposed to the individual: the person coming into being, shaped by and contrib­ uting towards community, a togetherness to which the Russians give the term sobornost´.18 So, for Bulgakov, the human being is not primarily an individual 16 See A.-J. Festugière, Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon, 3rd edn (Vrin, 1967), 210–49. 17  There are some very striking parallels here with the approach of the Greek thinker, Christos Yannaras. See, especially, his books recently translated by Norman Russell: Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007) and Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005). This cannot, however, be pursued here. 18  This is such a commonplace of nineteenth-­century Russian thought that it perhaps needs no reference, but see Tomáš Špidlík, Die russische Idee. Eine andere Sicht des Menschen (Die Christliche Osten, 2002), 21–99.

212  Selected Essays, VOLUME II thinking, but rather standing before God in prayer—­not an individual kneeling (though that is an advance on an individual thinking), separate from everyone else, by a person standing, side by side with everyone else. Liturgical knowing comes about through participation in a community standing before God in prayer; it is in this way that we come to know anything about God at all, and as such our knowledge is that of persons, not monads uttering individual cogitos, or even individual credos, but members of a community, formed by traditions that are themselves bearers of wisdom. And who is this God before whom we stand in prayer? Not the divine substance, not some undifferentiated divine monad or God, but God the Father, revealing himself and his love for us through the Son and the Holy Spirit, and drawing from us an answering love, that is the Spirit poured out in our hearts, leading us back to the Father through the Son.19 And so the structure of the great trilogy: two books on the Incarnate Son and the Holy Spirit, passing by means of an appendix on the Father to the third vol­ ume, in which the Church is revealed as the Bride of the Lamb, calling out with the Spirit to the coming Lord, so that the trilogy ends with words from the final chapter of the New Testament: ‘And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come! And let him that heareth say, Come! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’ It is striking how this approach to a ‘systematic setting out of dogmas which, taken together, express the fullness of Orthodox teaching’, as Bulgakov put it in the essay ‘Dogma and Dogmatic Theology’, anticipates some of the concerns of both Balthasar and Rahner. Balthasar actually calls his third way of love a ‘per­ sonalist approach’, though his understanding of personalism is perhaps not as developed as Bulgakov’s Slavophil-­inspired notion; Balthasar’s personalism is more that of Buber’s ‘I–­Thou’ personalism, though this parallels some aspects of Bulgakov’s personalism, not least the sense of the person as transcending nature. It also corresponds to the central assertion of Rahner’s essay on the Trinity, that we do not first engage with an undifferentiated ‘God’, whom we later discern to be trinitarian, but rather encounter ho Theos, who is the Father, manifest through the Son and the Spirit. Bulgakov solves Rahner’s problem much more radically, starting neither with the One God nor with the Trinity, but with the Son Incarnate and the Spirit. I have suggested that Bulgakov’s theology can be seen to be liturgical in a gen­ eral sense, in that it emerges from considering the human being who comes to know as doing this by standing before God in prayer, primarily liturgical prayer.

19  Bulgakov’s understanding of the person as shaped by love might suggest that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum be replaced by amo ergo sum, I love therefore I am. It is striking that this is the title of Nikolai Sakharov’s book on the spiritual teaching of Fr Sophrony, as one of the lessons of that book is the debt Fr Sophrony owed to Fr Bulgakov, whose lectures he briefly attended at the Institut St-­Serge in the 1920s. See Nikolai Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  213 I think, however, the point can be made more precisely, by looking more closely at the Divine Liturgy which Bulgakov celebrated daily. At the heart of the Divine Liturgy is the anaphora, the Eucharistic prayer, which, in the Byzantine Rite (and in the Roman canon missae) is addressed, not to God in general, or to the Trinity, but precisely to the Father. The anaphora most commonly used, that of St John Chrysostom, makes it clear, by the repeated add­ ition of ‘your only-­begotten Son and your Holy Spirit’, that the anaphora is offered to the Father—­together with the Son and the Spirit. The anaphora of St John Chrysostom goes on to make clear that our engagement with the Father takes place through the Son and the Spirit—­the Son, given as the love of God the Father for us, accomplishing the mystery of salvation through the Incarnation, of which the Eucharist is the representation, itself achieved through the invocation, the epiklesis, of the Holy Spirit. As Christ becomes present, heaven and earth are con­ joined, and we find ourselves in the presence of the Saints, pre-­eminently the Mother of God, together with whom we offer intercessions for the Church and the world. We can already see here the structure of Bulgakov’s trilogy. In the anaphora the Father comes first, but is described in entirely apophatic terms— ‘ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing, eternally, the same’—what we know of him, as creator, and restorer of a fallen creation, ‘grant­ ing us [his] Kingdom that is to come’, we know through the Son and the Spirit. So it is in a systematic theology that we start with the Son and the Spirit, who lead us back to the Father, who is God, ho Theos. (It is worth noting that the liturgical poetry of the Orthodox Church preserves this fundamental grammar of referring to God, while at the same time making clear the equality of the persons of the Trinity, in the expressions ho Theos kai Pater, ‘God and Father’, i.e. the God who is Father, and ho Logos kai Theos, ‘the Word and God’, i.e. the Word who is God.) The reference to the ‘kingdom that is to come’ is also significant, for a sense of the coming Kingdom is one of the striking features of Bulgakov’s theology. The eschat­ology is not tagged on, or demythologized so that it only concerns the ‘last things’ in some quixotic way, as often seems to be the case in modern presenta­ tions of theology—­it is integral, determining the movement of the work from the very beginning, right through to the final section, almost a third of the final vol­ ume, explicitly concerned with eschatology.20 But this sense of the coming Kingdom is itself a characteristic of the Byzantine Liturgy from the opening proc­ lamation, ‘Blessed in the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’, through the Beatitudes, prefaced by ‘In your Kingdom, remember us, O Lord’, and the Great Entrance, with the commemoration of the faithful through their 20  This may underestimate the size of the final section, in that there are other sections that clearly belong in this final section that were, for some reason, not included, especially the section called ‘On the Question of the Apocatastasis of the Fallen Spirits’: see Sergius Bulgakov, Apocatastasis and Transfiguration, trans. Boris Jakim, Variable Readings in Russian Philosophy, 2 (The Variable Press, 1995), 7–30.

214  Selected Essays, VOLUME II being remembered ‘in your Kingdom’, to the Communion, prefaced by the Lord’s Prayer, with its petition for the coming of the Kingdom and the allusion of the prayer of the thief—‘Remember me, O Lord, in your kingdom’—in the prayers before communion. The repeated invocation of the kingdom lends to the Divine Liturgy a sense of standing on tip-­toe on the threshold of the Kingdom—­ something that Bulgakov incorporates into his dogmatic theology. It would be possible to go through the great trilogy and illustrate the manifold ways in which Bulgakov appeals to liturgical facts and prayers to ground the teaching that he unfolds in the course of it. One particularly striking example is the way in which different aspects of the cult of the Virgin Mother of God under­ gird his understanding of her significance in the life of the Church. It is in these terms that I would want to present Bulgakov as essentially a liturgical theologian. But there is one matter of substance that I think makes more sense if we relate it to his fundamental sense of the liturgical origins of theology, and that is his sophiology. Sophiology has experienced something of a revival, especially among the movement in modern theology known as ‘radical orthodoxy’.21 Nevertheless, it is still the case that in (authentically) Orthodox circles, sophiology is largely rejected, and even those willing to be sympathetic towards Bulgakov often take the line that everything that Bulgakov wants to say using the notion of divine Sophia could be said just as adequately without invoking the notion of Wisdom or Sophia (and Bulgakov’s late work, The Orthodox Church, in which he gives an account of Orthodox beliefs without using the notion of Sophia, is cited in sup­ port of such an opinion). It may well be true that Sophia can be dispensed with, if one understands doctrine as a string of theological positions. It is rather as one tries to understand their coherence and mutual entailments that Sophia comes into its own for Bulgakov, and that sense of coherence is also conveyed by the fundamentally liturgical inspiration of his theology.22 That might suggest that there is a link between Sophia and the liturgy, and it is that I want to explore in these final paragraphs. The fundamental intuition of sophiology is relatively easy to enunciate; it is that the gulf between the uncreated God and creation, brought into being out of nothing, does not put creation in opposition to God, rather Wisdom constitutes a kind of μεταξύ, ‘between’, between God and us/creation, for Wisdom is that through which God created the universe, and it is equally through wisdom that

21  My awareness of this has been greatly enhanced by the work of Brandon Gallaher, and in conver­ sation with him. See his ‘Graced Creaturiness: Ontological Tension in the Uncreated/Create Distinction in the Sophiologies of Solov’ev, Bulgakov and Milbank’, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christina Studies 47 (2006), 163–90. 22  It is also, of course, the case that all the Russian sophiologists appeal to liturgical evidence—­ especially the Slav Church of the Holy Wisdom whose dedication festival is one of the feasts of the Mother of God—­in support of their ideas.

Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian  215 the human quest for God finds fulfilment.23 Wisdom, one might say, is the face that God turns towards his creation, and the face that creation, in human kind, turns towards God. Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace, for it owes its existence to grace. Rather creation is graced, it is holy; in creation God may be encoun­ tered. Bulgakov’s account of the events that led his own conversion, and his mag­ nificent account of standing beneath the dome of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in January 1923, makes clear how important this intuition was to Bulgakov. It also lay at the heart of what he perceived to be wrong with the Roman Catholicism he encountered in the West as an exile: the idea of an ungraced ‘pure nature’ seemed to him fundamentally false. The relationship between God and the world, constituted by Wisdom, cannot be an arbitrary relationship, nor can it be a necessary one. Uncreated wisdom and created wisdom differ only in being uncreated or created. Why? Because if they differed in any other way, then God would be severed from creation and creation from God. This line of thought indi­ cates a further step involved in sophiology, which raises the issue: what must cre­ ation be, if this is true? What is creation like, if God indeed created it (through wisdom)? As we ask these questions, we find ourselves asking questions that have exercised Christians for centuries, and perhaps most acutely at the beginning, when, in the second century, Christianity faced the manifold challenges of Greek philoso­ phy and gnosticism. Christianity was not consonant with just any view of the universe. Christians agreed with the Platonists over the existence of a tran­scend­ent divine, divine providence and human freewill, and adopted Platonist arguments against other Greek philosophers—­Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans—­who rejected one or other of these positions.24 They completely rejected the view, held by most of those scholars now call ‘Gnostics’, that the universe was the product of a God or gods who were either malevolent or negligent. At one point Irenaeus defends the Christian view of a universe, created out of nothing by a good God who rules it through his providence, by appealing to the Christian liturgy: How . . . can they say that flesh is destined for corruption, the flesh that has been nourished by the body and blood of the Lord? Either they must change their opinion, or cease to offer him what they have said they do. Our opinion is con­ sonant with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms our faith. We offer him what belongs to him, harmoniously proclaiming the communion and union of flesh and spirit. For taking from the earth bread, after the invocation of the Lord 23  For a longer account of my approach to Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia, see ‘Wisdom and the Russians: The Sophiology of Fr Sergei Bulgakov’. In Where shall Wisdom be found?, ed. Stephen C. Barton (T. & T. Clark, 1999), 169–81. 24  See Andrew Louth, ‘Pagans and Christians on Providence’. In Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority and Change, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 279–97 (also published as Chapter 14 in this volume).

216  Selected Essays, VOLUME II it is no longer common bread, but Eucharist, joining together two realities, the earthly and the heavenly, so that our bodies, receiving the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of eternal resurrection. We make an offering to him, not because he needs anything, but to give thanks for his gifts and to sanctify the creation.25

For Irenaeus, to take bread and wine, to offer them to God and invoke the Holy Spirit to transform them into the Body and Blood of Christ, entails a certain view of creation: that it is good, that the one to whom we offer the Eucharist is the Creator. In the same way, for Bulgakov, to celebrate the Eucharist entails that cre­ ation belongs to God, that it is not alien to him, that to be a creature is already to be graced, something that Fr Schmemann’s ‘third image’ seems to suggest: Bulgakov’s celebration of the Divine Mysteries seemed to him something autoch­ thonous, something rooted in the very being of creation. It is this intuition that lay at the heart of his sophiology. It is as we pursue such reflections as these that we find ourselves entering into the arcanum of Bulgakov’s theology. It is a theology that invites the human spirit on a fascinating quest after the nature of things, but it is rooted in the simple turning of the creature towards God, in joy and gratitude.

25 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV. 18. 5–6.

19

Space, Time, and the Liturgy The Divine Liturgy takes place in space and time. Such an assertion seems obvious, but its very obviousness lays open the possibility—­indeed, probability—­of our misconceiving its significance, and consequently misunderstanding the classic Eastern Orthodox interpretation of the Liturgy from St John Chrysostom to Nicolas Kavasilas, by reading back into the liturgy our modern understandings of space and time which are thin and jejune compared with what would have been taken for granted by the Byzantine mind. The danger of such reading back is enhanced by the fact that in many respects the terms in which we understand space and time are apparently similar, so that ancient discussion of whether space is to be understood as a ‘receptacle’—or a container, that in which things are—­or as constituted by relationship is very easily thought to be the same as the modern discussion as found for instance in the famous Clarke-­Leibniz correspondence.1 We then need to begin by exploring the ways in which the Byzantine mind understood space and time.2 The Byzantines were indebted to Plato, and especially to his famous discussion of the nature of the cosmos in the Timaeus. Plato’s ideas had been subject to centuries of reflection, and the form in which the Byzantine fathers received them had been mediated by later thinkers, not least the Neoplatonists, whose ideas inform the influential conceptions of space and time implicit in Dionysios the Areopagite and discussed by St Maximus the Confessor. However, for the purpose of exposing our modern presuppositions about space and time and forming a general impression of classical and late antique conceptions, we can gain a great deal by discussing the twin pillars of virtually all patristic understanding of the cosmos: Plato’s Timaeus and the account of the creation in six days, the Hexaemeron, in the first chapter of Genesis. To begin with, let us sketch in our modern presuppositions. These are that space and time are principally matters of measurement. Space concerns the three dimensions of measurable physical existence, and time the measurement of

1 As Samuel Sambursky does: see his The Concept of Space in Late Neoplatonism (The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1982), 13. There is an English translation of the Clarke-­Leibniz correspondence by H. G. Alexander (Manchester, 1956). 2  I have not had the chance to see Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (Routledge, 2005), but to judge from David Bentley Hart’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 March 2006, p. 31, Oliver pursues somewhat similar ideas to those I have presented here, though with much greater erudition and covering a much broader span of intellectual history.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0020

218  Selected Essays, VOLUME II duration. They are themselves quite inert; they constitute the framework within which measurability takes place. In this sense they can be regarded as mechanistic, as opposed to organic. The changes in our understanding of space and time consequent on theories of relativity and quantum theory do not fundamentally alter the idea of a mechanistic notion of the universe, introduced by modern science from the seventeenth century onwards; they simply reveal some of the complications involved in such measurement. Relativity disposes of any absolute spatial framework, while our notion of the measurement of duration has been refined, so that instead of depending on the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, and the revolution of the earth, or the movement of a pendulum—­all of which have been discovered to be insufficiently precise—­we base our measurement of time on the vibrations of a quartz crystal, for example. If the beginnings of modern science produced mechanistic notions of space and time, the scientific revolutions of the last century have rendered our notions of space and time still more abstract and mathematical.3

Ancient Conceptions of Space and Time The discussions of space and time in Plato’s Timaeus belong to a different, though overlapping, realm of discourse.4 Plato approaches his discussion of space in the Timaeus by way of his discussion of the ‘receptacle, or as it were nurse, of all becoming’ (πάσης . . . γενέσεως ὑποδοχὴν . . . οἷον τιθήνην: Tim. 49a). It is not just that in which things move, but that in which everything becomes. What takes place in the receptacle, which Plato will later identify with space (χώρα: 52a), is much more than the movement of material, physical bodies, it is nothing less than the change and becoming of everything subject to such change and becoming. To be in space is, then, not just to be geometrically located, as it were, but to belong to the realm of change and becoming: the ὑποδοχή is certainly a re­cep­ tacle, but that means more than a container, something to put things in, rather it means that which receives, provides room for, everything that constitutes the cosmos—­the product of reason and necessity. The cosmos for Plato is not something that can be considered in purely material terms. Before he comes to speak 3  I think this should probably be qualified, as the Theory of General Relativity envisages conceptions of space and time that are anything but inert; but these ideas have not percolated very deeply into the modern mind. In so far as they have they confirm something of the intuition of the ancients. 4  Two recently published books, which I read after writing this paper, are relevant here and seem to me to confirm my approach, though with a degree of detail that would not be appropriate here. One is Pascal Mueller-­Jourdan, Typologie spatio-­temporelle de l’Ecclesia byzantine. La Mystagogie de Maxime le Confesseur dans la cutlure philosophique de l’Antiquité tardive, Supplements of Vigiliae Christianae 74 (Brill, 2005). This book reveals the lineaments of Maximus’ debt to late ancient philosophy in his understanding of space and time, and shows how it informs his understanding of the liturgy. The other is Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2005). Despite Moevs’ somewhat advaitist interpretation of late medieval thought, he has some valuable things to say about concepts of time and space: see pp. 132–40, 140–6.

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  219 of the receptacle of becoming, he describes the cosmos as a living being having soul at the centre, with body wrapped round the outside, as it were, of soul (Plato clearly has in mind something like an armillary sphere)—it is for this reason that the cosmos and a human being can be seen as mutually reflecting one another, the human being, in the coinage of the Renaissance, being a microcosm, a little cosmos, μικρὸς κόσμος, an idea frequently found in the Fathers. Even a quick glance at the Timaeus reveals that the cosmos as a living being is not some sort of primaeval being, but is already instinct with principles of reason and proportion. Plato explains at some length how soul contains within itself complex and beautiful mathematical structures, and as he goes on to discuss what it is that is formed within the receptacle of becoming, we find a discussion that embraces everything that comes into being from the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, and how on this foundation we find the principles of pleasure and pain, tastes, odours, sounds, colours, and beyond that the emotional structure of the soul—­its capacity for being aroused, ultimately to anger, and for experiencing desire and longing (its incensive and appetitive powers). The kinds of becoming envisaged within the receptacle of becoming go well beyond the movement of physical particles, and include what is perceived by the senses and the very process of sensation, the experience of pleasure and pain, and the complex reality of the soulful experience (to avoid the debased meaning attached to ‘psychic’ or ‘psychological’) of mortal beings. Another dimension of space for the late antique mind—­one only implicit in Plato—­is bound up with the notion of relationship, and the experience of distance that makes relationship possible. The term used for what I have called distance is διάστημα, ‘interval’ or ‘extension’.5 This again is characteristic of everything that is subject to change and becoming: διάστημα separates one thing from another, but it refers to any distance or extension, including the capacity to move in an argument, say, from premises to a conclusion, or the ‘distance’ implicit in the notion of desire for something. The notion of multitude or the manifold is implicit in the realm of becoming and διάστημα is implicit in this. Everything that belongs to the realm of change and becoming is marked by διάστημα: it makes possible the ‘space’ required for relationship, in every sense, not just a geometrical sense, and so includes the ‘space’ that exists between human beings—­the distance (‘die Weite’) that Rilke says we are to love, ‘to give them the possibility of seeing one another in their complete form and against the greatness of heaven’6— and indeed the space that exists within a human being, giving the possibility of growth and development (as well as denying the realization of perfection).

5  The term seems originally Aristotelian, but it became commonplace in discussion of space, and also time. There is a good discussion in Hans von Balthasar, Présence et pensée. Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (Beauchesne, 1942), 1–10. 6  Rilke’s letter to Emanuel von Bodman, 17 August 1901, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Insel Verlag, 1950), 29.

220  Selected Essays, VOLUME II This notion of διάστημα also characterizes time, but again does so in a ­ ultitude of ways. It certainly includes the time through which the sequence of the m seasons pass, the succession of years, the movement from day to night and night to day, but it includes other experiences of time: the time through which human beings pass from birth, through infancy, and childhood, to maturity, and then on to death; the time through which our ideas, thoughts, feelings, relationships pass. These different modes of time all relate one to another, but the ticking of the clock, as it were, is not the proper meaning of time, in comparison with which psychological time, for example, has only metaphorical significance. And if it is true—­as it is—­that ‘cosmic’ time has some fundamental significance, as em­bra­ cing and including all other experiences of time, then it needs to be remembered that the ‘cosmos’ is more than a merely material reality, but a ‘living being with soul and intelligence’—ζῷον ἔμψυχον ἔννουν (Tim. 30b). The centrality of the notion of διάστημα to ancient understanding of space and time has a further important consequence we should note. It does not mean that space and time are full of ‘gaps’, gulfs of unmeaning, as it were, dooming the world of becoming to ultimate meaninglessness. Even for Plato, for whom there can be no λόγος of anything in the realm of becoming (Tim. 29d), the truth is quite the contrary: the cosmos, existing in space, and time itself are creations of the gods; they have meaning that is revealed in their structures, constituted by relationship. Time is for Plato ‘a moving image of eternity’ (εἰκὼ . . . κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος: Tim. 37d): it is ordered towards eternity; within the realm of becoming it represents eternity as its image. The sequence of time is not meaningless (though for Plato it is cyclic: it is a ‘vulgar error’, though popular among some theologians, that cyclic time spells meaninglessness, in contrast with the purposeful nature of linear time): it is ordered towards eternity. And space, too, has structures, relationships, that give it meaning, primary among which are the ‘divisions of nature’ (to use Eriugena’s term): the distinctions between the spiritual world and the material, between the heavens and the earth—­distinctions in which the lower (material, earth) is ordered towards the higher (spiritual, heaven) and embodies the higher within itself (so the material finds its meaning in relation to the spiritual, while at the same time manifesting the spiritual within the material)—exemplifying a principle expressed by Dionysios the Areopagite, who remarked, ‘truly visible things are manifest images of invisible things’.7 It is with such notions of space and time that the Greek Fathers read the Scriptures. As soon as these notions are transposed into a Christian context, there is a profound shift of meaning that, curiously, introduces into these notions a dramatic clarity. In my account I have been careful not to use the language of cre­ ation (such care is not always found in commentators on the classical philosophers, 7  Dionysios the Areopagite, ep. 10; A. M. Ritter, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum II, Patristische Texte und Studien 36 (De Gruyter, 1991), 208, ll. 9–10.

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  221 not even Cornford, who is well aware of the problem8); instead I have spoken of the ‘realm of becoming’. But for Christians the realm of becoming is identical with the created order. Everything created belongs to the realm of becoming; the very existence of created beings is based on becoming—­on coming to be from nothing, ex nihilo; everything created has a beginning. For St Maximus, everything created is characterized by the triad—­becoming–­movement–­rest.9 Creatures ‘become’, through creation ex nihilo by God; they then exist in a state of movement or motion, in search of ultimate rest in God, to whom they owe their being. This ‘movement’, it hardly needs saying by now, does not simply mean physical movement, though it might involve this. It means the movement of change, a passage ideally from worse to better, the transformation of being (εἶναι) to well being (εὖ εἶναι), which God will finally crown with eternal well being (ἀεὶ εὖ εἶναι), to use the other triad St Maximos is so fond of in expounding his cosmology.10 Διάστημα is, then, characteristic of created being; indeed to be created is to experience διάστημα, which is unknown to the eternal being of God.11 Both space and time, equally characterized by διάστημα, are created realities, the created framework within which created beings exist. With these preconceptions, the Fathers read the account of creation in Genesis 1. The very first words of the Scriptures speak of the creation of space and time: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was upon the abyss; and the Spirit of God was being borne over the water. And God said, Let there be light; and light came to be. And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided between light and darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And evening came to be, and morning, one day.12

The creation of heaven and earth is the creation of space, ordered between higher and lower. Earth, the lower, is without characteristics (‘invisible and unformed’); with the creation of light, heaven becomes apparent to earth, and earth itself begins to receive form that orders it towards heaven. The first step in the forming or fashioning of earth is the creation of light, and the division of light from darkness. With the division between light and darkness, there comes the sequence 8  See Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Routledge, 1937), 34–5, where he criticizes A. E. Taylor, though Cornford uses the terms creature/creation regularly in his translation and commentary. 9  See my Maximus the Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 67 (where there is an unfortunate mistake: the Origenist triad, which Maximus corrects, should be rest–­movement–­becoming). 10  See, for example, Ambigua 10. 3 (PG 91. 1116A–­D). 11  This means that there can be relationship in God without διάστημα, an idea finally expressed by means of the notion of περιχώρησις: see John Damascene, Expositio fidei 8, 223–85, ed. Kotter, Patristische Texte und Studien 12 (De Gruyter, 1973), 28–30. 12  Genesis 1:1–5. My translation from the Septuagint.

222  Selected Essays, VOLUME II from darkness to light, from evening to morning—­which constitutes day. Here we have the creation of time, not the coming into being of duration—­the in­ex­or­ able revolution of the heavens, or the ticking of the clock—­but the sequence from evening to morning, from night to day. It is striking—­and significant—­that the sequence is this way round: from darkness to light, from evening to morning (a sequence that is repeated in this order for each day of creation: see Genesis 1:8, 13, 19, 23, 31). For it means that time is ordered towards the light of the coming day. A day is, then, not just a period of time, of twenty-­four hours, from midnight to midnight; it is a movement from darkness to light, from evening to morning, to daybreak, to the rising of the sun. This fundamental orientation of time is the orientation of life, as a passage from darkness to light, to the confession of the ‘dayspring from on high’, ἀνατολὴ ἐξ ὕψους, oriens ex alto (as the Benedictus has it: Luke 1:78)—Christ, to whom the whole created order is moving. This notion of time as moving from darkness to light is embedded in the liturgical notion of time, where the new day begins with vespers, and looks to the dawning of the new day, ultimately to the ‘day without evening’—ἀνέσπερος ἡμέρα—­of the Kingdom (something still fundamental to the concept of liturgical time in the Orthodox Church, though mostly abandoned in the liturgical office of the Western Church). Space and time, and movement through space and time, are concepts in the patristic tradition that are freighted with meaning. They include the physical space and duration through which we move, but they include very much more. Space and time are ordered, structured, in the way just outlined. Furthermore, space and time are, so to speak, the coordinates of all created existence, not just physical existence, and the understanding of movement is consequently many layered. Physical movement is movement through physical space and duration, but there is cosmic movement concerned with the movement of the heavens, the sequence of the seasons, the passage from evening to morning. This cosmic movement is more than physical movement, for it has significance, meaning, bound up with the quality of time characteristic of the seasons—­spring, summer, autumn, winter (vividly expressed in medieval calendars, not least those found—­ significantly—­in books of hours)—and of the passage from evening, though night, to morning and the day. The creation in six days suggests a sequence of ages, prefigured in the successive days of creation, including the ‘ages of the world’, variously conceived. There are also the stages of human life, often modelled on the ages of the world: from birth, through the ages of man (variously divided, sometimes four—­ childhood, youth, maturity, old age—­ sometimes seven—­as in Jaques’ infant, student, lover, soldier, judge, declining into old age, and finally ‘second childishness and mere oblivion’)13 to death. Furthermore, there is the movement of the soul from its baptismal awakening by repentance, through growth in the image of God by ascetic struggle, and a 13  For Jaques’ speech, see Shakespeare, As You Like It, act II, scene 7. For some sense of the richness of the notion of the ages of man, see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man (Clarendon Press, 1986).

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  223 deepening transfiguration through grace in which the life of God is manifest in the soul, to deification. All these experiences of movement suggest mutual analogies; it is not, as the modern mind is tempted to think, that physical space and duration are the ‘real’ meaning of space and time, the others being merely metaphorical. Rather all these experiences of movement in space and time are experiences of the modalities of creaturely being, characterized by διάστημα. Plato’s conviction of the link, or harmony, between the soul and the cosmos is manifest in the closing paragraphs of the Timaeus, where he speaks of ‘the most sovereign form of soul in us’, which ‘dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens’, and recommends that, because ‘the motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe’, we should follow them, so that by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, [we] should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfilment of the best life set by the gods before mankind both for this present time and for the time to come. (Tim. 90acd; Cornford’s translation)

The Divine Liturgy It is with such a sense of space and time that we can fruitfully approach the understanding of the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox tradition. For the dimensions of space and time are integral to the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. It takes place in a space divided into the sanctuary and the nave (or ‘temple’, ναός), mirroring the division of the cosmos into heaven and earth, so that the whole church building is understood as symbolizing the cosmos. Nowadays this div­ ision is marked by an iconostasis, generally a wall of icons, pierced by the central doors, the ‘holy’ or ‘beautiful’ doors usually bearing icons of the Annunciation and the Evangelists, behind which is a curtain that can be drawn across or left open, as well as by other doors, north and south. The iconostasis is a late development, belonging to the second millennium, but the division that it marks is ancient. The cosmos reflected in the church building is a Christian cosmos: that is, heaven is not so much the place of the heavenly bodies—­the stars and planets, with all the astrological associations that go with them—­but of the heavenly beings, the celestial hierarchy of angelic beings. Dionysios the Areopagite presented the ranks of celestial beings as three ranks of three: on the highest rank—­Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; in the middle—­Dominions, Authorities, and Powers; on the lowest rank—­Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The art historian, Thomas Mathews, has remarked how early this substitution of a pagan cosmos of heavenly bodies with a Christian

224  Selected Essays, VOLUME II cosmos of heavenly beings is found in the decoration of Christian churches.14 But it is not the abandonment of cosmology that we see here, rather its transformation. It is in such a structured space, freighted with symbolism, that the Divine Liturgy takes place. And it is an action. Things take place—­there is movement, there is encounter. It is not possible to understand the Divine Liturgy by treating it primarily as a literary text, as Western scholarship, even the best, has tended to do—­in the last century among Anglicans, from Dom Gregory Dix to Catherine Pickstock—­it is what takes place that matters: which is why Dionysios’ ex­plan­ ation of various liturgical rites, including the Eucharistic liturgy itself, does no more than allude to the prayers that are said. The words of the prayers offered during the Divine Liturgy, not least the prayer of the Anaphora, the equivalent of the Roman canon missae, are important, but they cannot be understand without grasping their place in the Eucharistic action. The Orthodox Church has never lost the sense that the liturgical worship of the Church takes place in a building designed for the purpose by a community of people all of whom have their specific tasks—­and their own books. Fr Alexander Schmemann remarks somewhere that Orthodox worship requires a virtual library of books: a book for the priest, another for the deacon, a Gospel book, the book of the Apostle (containing the liturgical texts from the Acts of the Apostles and the apostolic epistles), a book for the reader, books for the choir, the twelve volumes of the Menaion, the Pentekostarion (containing the liturgical hymns for the season of Pascha and Pentecost), the Triodion (containing those for Lent and Holy Week), and the Paraklitiki (for the rest of the year), not to mention the books containing the rites for the other sacraments than the Eucharist, funeral services and a host of blessings. The Orthodox Church has never followed the way of the West in reducing this library to a few convenient volumes, handy and portable—­the missal or the breviary—­and that is not because we are stuck in some pre-­modern time warp. For the production of the missal and the breviary corresponded to a privatization (and clericalization) of liturgical worship, a sense that liturgical space was secondary (all that was needed was an altar stone and a missal, and a few sacred vessels), with the result that the essentially communal nature of liturgical worship, which could not be reduced to a text (not least, because the different activities of the different ministers often overlap), was precisely reduced to a text, recited by the priest from the one book he required, which could be supplemented by choir, congregation, etc., but did not strictly need them.15 Nothing like this has ever taken place in the Orthodox Church, and this needs to be remembered if Orthodox worship is to be properly understood. 14 Thomas  F.  Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton University Press, 1993), 148 ff. 15  For something of the history of this development in the West, closely bound up with the emergence of the mendicant orders with their inherent individualism, see Stephen J. P. van Dijk OFM and Joan H. Walker, The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy (DLT, 1960).

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  225 Dionysios the Areopagite’s discussion is mostly to be found in his work, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which presents his view of the earthly Church (‘our hierarchy’, as he calls it) through the exposition of a series of liturgical rites: baptism, Eucharist, the consecration of myron, or chrism, priestly ordination, monastic consecration, and the funeral service. He presents us, first of all, with a ceremony, or series of ceremonies. His account of the Eucharistic liturgy begins thus: The hierarch, having finished the sacred prayer at the divine altar, begins the censing from there and comes out, going round the entire area of the sacred place. Having finished, he goes back again to the divine altar and begins the sacred singing of the psalms, while the whole ecclesiastical array joins with him in the sacred psalmody.16

Prayers and psalms are mentioned, but not specified; what is central is the initial act of censing the church and congregation by the bishop. It is therefore the meaning of the act of censing that Dionysios expounds in the next chapter: For the thearchic blessedness that is beyond all, if in its divine goodness it proceeds into the communion of those who sacredly participate in it, does not come to be outside its essentially unmoved stillness and establishment, and irradiates all the God-­formed in an appropriate degree, while remaining essentially in itself and in no way moved from its own identity. Just so the divine rite of synaxis [‘gathering together’: Dionysios’ term of the eucharist], while possessing a unique, simple principle, folded in on itself, yet out of loving kindness is multiplied into the sacred variety of symbols and reaches throughout all hierarchical iconography, but draws all these back into unity within its own inherent singleness and makes one all those sacredly raised up to it. In the same God-­formed way, the divine hierarch, if, formed by goodness, he hands on his unique know­ ledge of hierarchy to those lower down by making use of the multitude of sacred enigmas, but absolutely free and unaffected by anything less than him, he is restored without loss to his own beginning, and making his own intelligible entrance into the One he sees purely the unifying principles of what has been accomplished, making the goal of his loving procession to what is second the more divine return to what is first.17

The movement of the censing—­out from the sanctuary to the furthest reaches of the church and back again—­reflects God’s movement out from himself in love for his creatures, and his return with them to himself: the divine love reaches out and 16  Dionysios the Areopagite, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3. 2; Ritter, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 80, ll. 8–12. 17  Ritter, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 81, l. 17–82, l. 10.

226  Selected Essays, VOLUME II enfolds creation in all its multiplicity, drawing it back into himself. As in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy (especially the much fuller anaphora in the Liturgy of St Basil), God is seen manifesting this divine love for human kind, his φιλανθρωπία, ‘loving kindness’, both in creation, his care for creation, and pre-­eminently in the Incarnation and the Cross: For you did not utterly turn away from your creature, O Good One, nor forget the work of your hands, but you visited us in divers manners through your compassionate mercy. You sent prophets, you performed deeds of power through your saints, who have been well-­pleasing to you in every generation; you spoke to us through the mouth of your servants, the prophets, announcing to us beforehand the salvation that was to come; you gave the law as a help; you appointed angels as guardians. But when the fullness of time had come, you spoke to us through your Son, through whom you had also made the ages . . . He appeared on earth and lived among men; and taking flesh of a holy Virgin, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of the body of our humiliation, so that he might make us in the likeness of the image of his glory.  (Anaphora of St Basil)

What the prayer of the anaphora represents in words, the movement of the liturgy represents in a gesture of embrace. As Plato saw the movements of the heavens restoring the true movement of the intellect, so Dionysios sees the movement of the liturgy drawing us back into a life focused on God, for which we were created. The ceremony, or gesture, described by Dionysios is able to effect this in a more universal way than through words and ideas, even those of a prayer. The place of space and time in the Liturgy can, however, be seen more fully in St Maximus the Confessor’s reflections on the Divine Liturgy, especially in his short work, the Mystagogia.18 This work is a commentary on the Divine Liturgy, presented as supplementary to Dionysios’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, set in the context of reflections on various images of the Church, both as a community and as a building. In these initial chapters, which are recapitulated at the end of the treatise after the exposition of the events of the Liturgy, Maximus presents an understanding of the Church as the central element in a series of ways of understanding the relationship of God to the cosmos and to human kind. He begins by discussing in chapter 1 how the Church is to be seen as ‘an image and type of God’ as it imitates and represents God’s activity (ἐνέργεια). Evoking the idea we have just found in Dionysios of God’s activity reaching out into the created order and

18 For a critical text, see C.  G.  Sotiropoulos, ed., Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, rev. edn (Athens, 1993); English trans. (not always satisfactory) in George C. Berthold, trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (SPCK, 1985), 181–225. And see Mueller-­ Jordan, Typologie spatio-­temporelle.

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  227 enfolding it all in himself, Maximus sees God as the One who ‘contains, ­gathers and limits them and in his providence binds both intelligible and sensible beings to himself and one another’. It is in this way that the holy Church of God will be shown to be active among us in the same way as God, as an image reflects its archetype. For many and of nearly boundless number are the men, women and children who are distinct from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by race and language, by way of life and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and customs, by pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics and habits: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in the Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and bestows one divine form and designation: to be Christ’s and to carry his name. In accordance with faith it gives to all a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition which does not allow us to bring to mind the existence of the myriads of differences among them, even if they do exist, through the universal relationship and union of all things with it. It is through it that absolutely no one at all is in himself separated from the community since everyone converges with all the rest and joins together with them by the one, simple, and indivisible grace and power of faith. ‘For all’, it is said, ‘had but one heart and one mind.’ Thus to be and to appear as one body formed of different members is really worthy of Christ himself, our true head, in whom says the divine Apostle, ‘there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave nor free, but he is all and in all.’ It is he who encloses in himself all beings by the unique, simple and infinitely wise power of his goodness.19

This way of conceiving of God’s activity, ἐνέργεια, as reaching out and drawing all into unity recalls the theme, common to the Fathers, of the cosmic cross, rooted in the creative activity of the Word of God. As St Irenaeus put it: And since He is the Word of God who invisibly pervades the whole creation, and encompasses its length, breadth, height and depth—­for by the Word of God everything is administered—­so too was the Son of God crucified in these fourfold dimensions, having been imprinted in the form of the cross in everything; for it was necessary for him, becoming visible, to make manifest his form of the cross in everything, that He might demonstrate, by His visible form on the cross, His activity which is on the invisible level, for it is He who illumines the ‘heights’, that is, the things in heaven, and holds the ‘deeps’, which is beneath the earth,

19  Mystagogia 1; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 152–4.

228  Selected Essays, VOLUME II and stretches the ‘length’ from the East to the West, and who navigates the ‘breadth’ of the northern and southern regions, inviting the dispersed from all sides to the knowledge of the Father.20

This notion of the cross, through which Christ embraced and reconciled the whole human race, and indeed the whole cosmos, underlies Maximus’ understanding of the Church and the Divine Liturgy.21 This notion of an embracing radiance is further illustrated by the analogy of the radii of a circle converging on the centre applied to both God’s relationship to the created order and the Church’s relationship to its members; Maximus concludes that, in both cases, there is achieved a union that, though profound, does not confuse the beings joined, but preserves their integrity. Maximus goes on in the succeeding chapters to show how the union of differences found in the Church is also reflected throughout the created order. To begin with, in chapter 2, he suggests that the Church may be seen as an image of the cosmos, regarded as made up of visible and invisible beings. From this point on he thinks of the Church as a building, and more precisely as a building divided into two: the area for ‘the priests and ministers alone’, that is, the sanctuary (in Greek: ἱερατεῖον), and the area for the ‘all the faithful people’, which is called the nave (ναός).22 This distinction he finds echoed in the cosmos, in the distinction there between the invisible part of the cosmos and the visible part. These two parts are closely related; indeed, Maximus says, the church is not properly speaking divided by the differences between the two parts, but rather by the relationship between the two parts, so that, ‘the nave is potentially the sanctuary since it  is a holy place by reason of its relationship to the goal of sacred initiation (or mystagogy), and the sanctuary is actually the nave, since it is there that the process of its own sacred initiation begins’.23 So, too, with the cosmos: ‘for the whole intelligible cosmos is imprinted in a hidden way on the whole sensible cosmos through the symbolic forms, while the whole sensible cosmos can be understood to be present to the intelligible cosmos through its principles (λόγοι) that reveal its simplicity to the intellect’.24 We find here what we have already encountered: the notion of distinction as constituting space, an ordered structure. The distinction found in cosmos and Church that is the reason for one being an image of the other 20 Irenaeus, Demonstration 34; in St Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. and ed. John Behr (SVS, 1997), 62. Cf. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 16. 21  For the beginnings of this idea, see Jean Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity (DLT, 1964), 265–92. See also Alois Grillmeier, Der Logos am Kreuz (Max Hueber Verlag, 1956). 22  It is worth noting that, in speaking of the Church, first, Maximus does not use any technical term for the unordained laity (such as the already well-­established term, λαïκός), but instead refers to ‘all the faithful people’; and second, νάος means a temple, that is the whole building (and is still used in that sense), so that the distinction is really between the building as a whole and a special part of it, and analogously for the community. 23  Mystagogia 2; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 156, ll. 16–19. 24  Mystagogia 2; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 158, ll. 8–11.

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  229 is a matter of relationship rather than separation; it is a matter of connection, not division, and it is an ordered connection, the visible pointing to the invisible realm, so that the visible finds its meaning in the invisible, and the invisible finds its expression in the visible, and in this way reflecting the close relationship between sanctuary and nave in the church. The following chapters suggest further images of the church: in the visible world itself, consisting as it does of heaven and earth (chapter 3), and then in the human person, consisting of body and soul (chapter 4), and the soul, consisting of soul and intellect (chapter  5).25 Chapters 4 and 5 develop a fairly detailed understanding of the spiritual life, moving from the level of body, which is the level of ascetic struggle, in which we learn moral wisdom, to the level of soul, which is the level of natural contemplation, that is contemplation of the principles (λόγοι) of the cosmos, which are all summed up in the Logos himself, Christ, and finally to the level of intellect, the level of mystical theology, that is contemplation of God himself (Maximus, while still using the image of the twofold church to interpret the passage from one level to another, also combines them in a threefold image of the church with nave, sanctuary and altar, θυσιαστήριον). Chapter  6 introduces a further image of the Church: just as, in accordance with contemplation that brings about ascent, he [the ‘old man’, or geronta, to whom Maximus attributes his Mystagogia] called the Church a spiritual human being and human kind a mystical Church, so he said that the whole of holy Scripture is, in short, a human being, the Old Testament having the body, and the New Testament soul and spirit and intellect, or again, taking the whole of holy Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, its body is the historical letter, while the meaning of what is written and its purpose, towards which the intellect strives, is the soul.26

After what we have already said about the patristic conception of space, what might otherwise seem a series of rather far-­fetched parallels should seem quite natural. What Maximus is doing is comparing the division of the Church, representing the cosmos, into sanctuary and nave to his biblically and classically derived notion of space as a structured reality between two parts (invisible and visible, heaven and earth, soul and body, intellect and soul). Because the notion of space is manifold, as we have seen, the parallels between the various forms of space characteristic of created reality are intrinsic, not arbitrary. Anything that takes place in one form of space has its counterpart in the rest, so that the

25  This theme of what Eriugena was to call the ‘divisions of nature’ is found elsewhere in Maximus’ writings, notably in Ambiguum 41 (PG 91. 1304D–1316A), where Maximus produces a longer list of such divisions, which overlaps with those found in the Mystagogia. 26  Mystagogia 6; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, ll. 2–9.

230  Selected Essays, VOLUME II meaning of each both borrows from and contributes to the others. There are then profound interconnections between Church, cosmos (understood both as embracing the spiritual and material realm and as embracing the visible heavens and the earth), the inward life of the human person, and even the Scriptures themselves, which again constitute a created cosmos. This means that the significance of what takes place in the church building—­pre-­eminently the Divine Liturgy—­has cosmic dimensions, but also has a meaning that reaches into the heart of each individual Christian and his or her own pilgrimage towards union with God. It also means that the Church, like Scripture, is a place where God has made himself known, and this being made known is not just, or even mainly, a matter of information, but rather a matter of participation in God himself through his activities or energies. Personal asceticism is therefore no mere souci de soi in a Foucaultian sense, but has ecclesial, indeed cosmic, implications, as Maximus makes clear in the following passage: The human is a mystical church, because through the nave which is his body he brightens by virtue the ascetic force of the soul by the observance of the commandments in moral wisdom. Through the sanctuary of his soul he conveys to God in natural contemplation through reason the principles of sense purely in spirit, cut off from matter. Finally, through the altar of the mind he summons the silence abounding in song in the innermost recesses of the unseen and unknown utterance of divinity by another silence, rich in speech and tone. And as far as is possible for humans, he dwells familiarly within mystical theology and becomes such as is fitting for one made worthy of his indwelling and he is marked by dazzling splendour.27

Chapters 8 to 21 of the Mystagogia are devoted to explaining the meaning of the various ceremonies of the Divine Liturgy. These begin with the entrance of the bishop into the church, accompanied by the people (in Maximus’ day, the Sunday liturgy was evidently still preceded by a procession to the church). The entry of the bishop into the church symbolizes Christ’s first coming into the world in the Incarnation; the entry of the people symbolizes conversion—­from unbelief to faith, from vice and ignorance to virtue and knowledge. In the readings, we encounter God’s desires and intentions for us; the singing symbolizes the joy of our turning towards God; the bishop’s acclamations of peace before the readings (‘Peace to all’—‘And to your spirit’) symbolize the help of the angels in our struggle to live a god-­like life. Then comes the Gospel—­and everything that follows it, for chapter 13 discusses not just the meaning of the reading of the Gospel, but continues with a brief account of everything that succeeds it, even though 27  Mystagogia 4; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 162; Berthold, trans., Maximus Confessor, 190.

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  231 Maximus is going to discuss these one by one in the next eight chapters. The ­gospel reading itself ‘proposes to those who are zealous some suffering on behalf of the Word’;28 a true hearing of the Gospel always entails the bearing of the Cross in some practical way—­as St Maximus’ own life exemplified. The purpose of this suffering is to detach us from worldly matters and draw us more closely to participation in the secret wisdom of God. All of this is brought out in the ceremonies that follow the Gospel reading: the closing of the doors, the exchange of the kiss of peace, the recitation of the symbol of faith, the creed, the singing of the thrice-­holy hymn (the sanctus)29 together with the holy angels, the uttering with our lips the words of the Our Father in which we lay claim to communion with God, and then, beyond that, the chant One Is Holy, leading beyond knowledge to the unknowable unity, ‘now that we are deified by grace, and assimilated to him by participation in an indivisible identity, so far as this is possible’.30 However, the bishop’s descent from his throne and dismissal of the catechumens, after the Gospel, symbolize the Second Coming of Christ and the final judgement. Everything that follows, therefore—­the whole of the liturgy of the faithful—­is understood by Maximus to take place after the Second Coming. The closing of the doors means our passing, after the judgement, into the nuptial chamber of Christ; the entrance into the mysteries our being admitted to the final revelation of the divine wisdom. The meaning of the kiss of peace, the recitation of the creed, the singing of the sanctus, the saying of the Our Father, the singing of the One Is Holy, and communion itself in the divine gifts: all this Maximus has already explained, and all his further explanations underline their eschatological significance, with the coming together of heaven and earth, and the deification of the human as the fulfilment of the Incarnation of the Divine. The proclamation of the Gospel is then, for Maximus, indeed the ‘end of history’; to hear the Gospel is truly to pass into the eschata, the last times. This gives Maximus’ understanding of liturgical time a highly distinctive twist. For Maximus, the biblical notion of time in terms of progress from evening to morning, from darkness to light, implicit in the Genesis account, is fulfilled in the proclamation of the Gospel: as we listen to the Gospel, understand the teaching of the Cross, and draw close to Christ in the Eucharistic Liturgy, we pass into the ‘day that knows no evening of your Kingdom’ (τῇ ἀνεσπέρῳ ἡμέρᾳ τῆς βασιλείας σου: to quote from one of the prayers said immediately after communion by the priest in the Byzantine rite). The Byzantine prayer of the anaphora (in both the form attributed to St John Chrysostom and that attributed to St Basil) expresses this sense of passing into the eschata, when it recalls, ‘remembers’ (μεμνημένοι) ‘our Saviour’s command and

28  Mystagogia 13; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 200, ll. 5–6. 29  Berthold (trans., Maximus Confessor, 222, n. 107) is mistaken is asserting that this means the trisagion, which is sung in the Byzantine rite before the readings. 30  Mystagogia 13; Sotiropoulos, Ἡ Μυσταγωγία τοῦ Ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ, 200, ll. 23–5.

232  Selected Essays, VOLUME II all that has been done for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting at the right hand’,—‘and the Second and Glorious coming again’.31 Maximus’ understanding of the celebration of the Divine Liturgy is thoroughly eschatological; the ceremonies after the reading—­ the proclaiming—­of the Gospel all take place in the age to come. The way in which the early Church celebrated the Eucharist on the brink of the age to come (cf. the fragments of the Eucharistic anaphora of the Didache)32 is fully preserved in Maximos’ understanding of the Divine Liturgy. In fact, Maximos does not mention the Eucharistic anaphora; by his time it was probably said silently, and perhaps Maximus only commented on what he, not—­it would seem—­a priest, would have heard. Alain Riou, however, sees a deeper significance in Maximus’ omission of any mention of the Eucharistic anaphora, which is worth mention: ‘The true anaphora (the configuring anamnesis and the eschatological epiclesis) of Christ is only consummated in the martyr himself: in that apophatic anaphora, the Christian and the Church receive in communion and consummate in silence their transparency to the paschal mystery’.33 Riou’s words recall the Eucharistic echoes of St Polycarp’s prayer as the pyre was lit;34 they also remind us that Maximus’ words are the words of one who was to confess the faith to the point of death. Maximus’ understanding of the Eucharist is, then, eschatological. Liturgical time passes beyond any form of created time, and anticipates the fulfilment of life beyond death: the life of the resurrection. The full significance of the words quoted earlier from the first chapter of the Mystagogia, in which the Church was defined as an image of God, now become apparent: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in the Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and bestows one divine form and designation: to be Christ’s and to carry his name. In accordance with faith it gives to all a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition . . .

—which is ultimately that of the martyr, the witness for Christ, the witness to the truth about Christ. And this eschatological ecclesiology has ramifications—­ brought out in the multiple images of the Church drawn out by Maximus in his introductory chapters—­for the cosmos, for the inner life of the soul, even for our understanding of Holy Scripture.

31 The Anaphora of St John Chrysostom; the wording is only slightly different in the Anaphora of St Basil. 32 Cf. Didache 10. 33  Alain Riou, Le monde et l’eglise selon Maxime le Confesseur (Beauchesne, 1973), 165. 34  See J. B. Lightfoot, ed., Martyrdom of Polycarp 14 (London, 1930).

Space, Time, and the Liturgy  233 We can see something of what this means in a series of chapters from the First Century on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation.35 This group of chapters (51‒70) form a series of meditations on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days; Riou suggests, surely rightly, that they are a meditation on the Triduum—­Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. They provide a paschal interpretation of the Christian life, the three stages of which—­ascetic struggle, natural contemplation, and mystical theology or deification—­correspond to the sixth, seventh, and eighth days, represented by the Paschal Triduum.36 This rooting of the stages of the Christian life in the paschal mystery brings out what one might call the ecclesial dimension of asceticism. The cosmic dimension is manifest in the way the transitus through these days leads to, and beyond, knowledge of created things.37 The different chapters illumine different aspects of this mystery, but characteristic is the sixty-­seventh, which reads: All visible realities need the cross, that is, the state in which they are cut off from things acting upon them through the senses. All intelligible realities need burial, that is, the total quiescence of the things which act upon them through the intellect. When all relationship with such things is severed, and their natural activity and stimulus is cut off, then the Logos, who exists alone in himself, appears as if risen from the dead. He encompasses all that comes from him, but nothing enjoys kinship with him by virtue of natural relationship. For the salvation of the saved is by grace and not by nature.38

The Paschal character of this ascetic realization of the life of the resurrection brings out the eschatological and cosmic nature of asceticism. In his understanding of the Divine Liturgy, all the central themes of Maximus’ theology—­cosmic, eschatological, Eucharistic, epicletic—­are drawn together. Central to all this is the Cross: the life-­giving Cross of Christ, conceived of as a sign drawing everything together, the ‘Cosmic Cross’, the significance of which for Maximus we have already noted. But more than a sign: a reality, fulfilled in the death of Christ, set forth in the Eucharist, the meal through which the Lord interpreted his death and asked us to repeat ‘in his memory’ as a sacrifice ‘in all and for all’, and fulfilled again in the death of the martyr, the death that St Maximus himself was to suffer. This, for Maximus, was the axis on which the cosmos 35  Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation I.51–70 (PG 90. 1101C–1109A); translation in G.  E.  H.  Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and K.  Ware, trans. and eds., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4 vols., vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, 1979–95), 124–8. 36  Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Centuries I.  55 (PG 90. 1104BC); Palmer et al., trans. and eds., Philokalia, vol. 2, 125. 37  Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Centuries I.  66 (PG 90. 1108AB); Palmer et al., trans. and eds., Philokalia, vol. 2, 127. 38  Maximus the Confessor, Centuries I. 67 (PG 90. 1108B); Palmer et al., trans. and eds., Philokalia, vol. 2, 127.

234  Selected Essays, VOLUME II turned: something expressed in fine words in the lines with which David Jones closed his great poem, The Anathemata: He does what is done in many places what he does other he does after the mode of what has always been done. What did he do other recumbent at the garnished supper? What did he do yet other riding the Axile Tree?39

39  David Jones, The Anathemata, 2nd edn (Faber & Faber, 1955), 243.

20 Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition This paper is not what I thought it would be when I suggested it two years ago. I had intended a historical paper with some theological reflections, but the whole question of the place of the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine notion of apostolicity seems to me very different from what it is generally taken to be, or at least what I took it to be. So this paper has turned out very differently from what I intended; it is more a piece of constructive ecclesiology than a piece of historical theology. On the face of it, the place of St Andrew in the ecclesiological consciousness of the Orthodox East is straightforward. Just as the Western notion of apostolicity revolves round the Apostle Peter, so the notion of apostolicity in the East is associated with the Apostle Andrew the First—­called, ὁ Πρωτόκλητος. For some years now the œcumenical patriarch has sent a delegation to Rome on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul on 29 June to join in the celebrations of the Apostle Peter; and Rome has reciprocated with a delegation from Rome visiting Constantinople for the feast of the Apostle Andrew on 30 November. There is even an icon, modelled on the icon of the two Coryphaei of the apostles, Peter and Paul, embracing one another, which depicts the Apostles Peter and Andrew embracing each other, symbolizing the hoped-­for union between the Churches of the West and the East. On closer inspection, this pairing of the apostles in such a prominent way seems quite recent, and has probably been helped by the fact that St Andrew has been adopted by three prominent Orthodox countries—­Russia, Greece, and Romania— ­as their patron. The notion of patron saints is itself a curious one, relatively late, and has little directly to do with ecclesiology. The evidence about the developing traditions associated with St Andrew have been set out in exemplary form by Francis Dvornik in his well-­known book, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew,1 as well as in the slightly later work, Byzance et la primauté romaine.2 Dvornik’s presentation of the evidence seems to me impeccable, and the broad lines of his interpretation seem to me also convincing. He tells a story of the development of two notions of 1  Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 4 (Harvard University Press, 1958). 2  Francis Dvornik, Byzance et la primauté romaine, Unam Sanctam 49 (Cerf, 1964).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0021

236  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ecclesiastical authority: one based in Rome which saw ecclesiastical authority in terms of apostolicity of which it more or less claimed a monopoly, and the other based in Constantinople (and the East generally) which saw ecclesiastical authority as reflecting the structures of authority of the Roman Empire. The flashpoint between these two notions of ecclesiastical authority came over the claims of the new imperial capital to an authority parallel to that of Rome. Canon 3 of the Second Œcumenical Synod, held in Constantinople in 381, asserted that ‘because it is new Rome, the bishop of Constantinople is to enjoy privileges of honour after the bishop of Rome’,3 and this was confirmed by canon 28 of the Œcumenical Synod of Chalcedon in 451, which expanded the argument for conferring priv­il­ eges on the see of Constantinople, equal to, though second after, the see of Rome, by saying: The fathers rightly accorded prerogatives to the see of older Rome, since this is an imperial city; and moved by the same purpose the 150 most devout bishops apportioned equal prerogatives to the most holy see of new Rome, reasonably judging that the city which is honoured by the imperial power and senate and enjoying privileges equal to older imperial Rome, should be elevated to her level in ecclesiastical affairs and take second place after her.4

The word translated ‘privileges’ in canon 3 and ‘prerogatives’ in canon 28 is the same—­πρεσβεῖα—­and the omission of the qualification ‘of honour’ at Chalcedon was, in my view, probably deliberate, as some real authority was doubtless intended, as the rest of canon 28 makes clear. But these are details we need not concern ourselves with, nor the considerable discussion over the meaning of this canon in modern Orthodox circles. Rome, as is well known, refused to accept either of these canons, and I am sure that Dvornik is right in maintaining that the reason was not so much that the pope saw his authority challenged or qualified by these canons—­which is the view stated in many Church histories—­but rather because the pope rejected the implication that his authority was simply a reflection of the position of Rome as the traditional capital of the empire. On the contrary, as Leo the Great made abundantly clear, the authority of Rome and its pontiff was based on the claims to apostolicity advanced by the see that by now called itself the apostolic see, sedes apostolica. What was at stake in the claims of these canons from the Synods of Constantinople and Chalcedon was the nature of ecclesiastical authority, and Rome rejected fundamentally any notion that ecclesiastical authority reflected the structures of authority found in the Roman Empire.

3  Norman P. Tanner SJ, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. I (Sheed and Ward, 1990), 32. 4  Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 100.

The Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition  237 It therefore comes as no surprise that, despite the fact that legends about the Apostle Andrew and his preaching of the Gospel in the region between Pontos and Achaea can be shown to have been circulating from maybe the end of the third century, these legends play little or no role in the defence of the authority of Constantinople from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards. Even though relics claimed to be those of St Andrew, along with those of St Luke and St Timothy, had been translated to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople sometime in the middle of the fourth century, no attempt was made to associate the authority of the see of Constantinople with the Apostle Andrew. The reason is simple: the authority of the see of Constantinople was regarded as deriving from its status as New Rome, not from any claims to be apostolic. Dvornik goes on to argue that claims to apostolic authority begin to be made by Constantinople as a result of the iconoclast controversy, and it is certainly the case that reference to the see of Constantinople as ‘catholic and apostolic’ can be found from the ninth century onwards. However, as Dvornik points out, although there is evidence of increased interest in St Andrew’s association with the see of Constantinople—­there are two lives of St Andrew that seem to belong to the ninth century: that by the monk Epiphanios and the Laudatio—­virtually no use seems to be made of the claim that the see of Byzantium was founded by the Apostle Andrew. Dvornik puts this down to the supposition that scholarly hierarchs, such as Photios, doubted the authenticity of the tradition and were thus unwilling to make use of it. In his final chapter, he argues that the notion of the pentarchy came to be developed as an Eastern way of claiming apostolic authority, so that we can see the emergence of an opposition between apostolic Pentarchy in the East and apostolic Primacy in the West. At the beginning of his final chapter, Dvornik asserts, ‘The whole problem should, however, be studied from the Byzantine standpoint, and should be viewed especially in the light of Byzantine ideas on the position of the emperor’.5 However, the very way in which Dvornik puts this seems to me to demonstrate that he has fixed ideas about what is meant by the ‘Byzantine standpoint’; for him, it means fitting into a Eusebian-­Constantinian conception of the relation of the emperor to the Church. This is, of course, important for Byzantium, but it is far from being the whole story. What is also true of Dvornik’s approach is that the Western development of apostolicity is taken for granted as an inevitable and legitimate development. What I want to do in the rest of this paper is call into question what seem to me to be the hidden assumptions behind Dvornik’s otherwise admirable presentation of ideas of apostolicity in East and West. There is a danger in ecclesiastical history that is not always recognized. Because we are telling the story of a community established by Christ himself and

5 Dvornik, Idea, 265.

238  Selected Essays, VOLUME II protected by his promise to St Peter that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (Matt. 16:18), there is a real risk of succumbing to what in English historiographical circles is called the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, that is, an in­ter­pret­ ation of history that sees what happens as, in some way, what had to happen and what ought to have happened (in the immediate English case, democracy as being the goal towards which history is moving). Such a ‘Whig’ interpretation presents itself as a kind of secular version of providence, or a political version of a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’. Fr Georges Florovsky drew attention to this danger in his contribution to the Festschrift for Paul Tillich, ‘The Predicament of the Christian Historian’.6 Towards the end of that essay, Fr Georges remarked: Even in the history of the Church ‘the hand of Providence’ is emphatically hidden, though it would be blasphemous to deny that this hand does exist or that God is truly the Lord of History. Actually, the purpose of a historical understanding is not so much to detect the Divine action in history as to understand the human action, that is, human activities, in the bewildering variety and ­confusion in which they appear to a human observer.7

This leads me to the following reflections. Dvornik demonstrates with ease that a distinctive sense of what is meant by ‘apostolic’ is virtually confined to the West, and indeed to Rome, in the early centuries, that is, up to the fifth century. At least one contingent reason for this is that, in the Latin West, Rome was the only see that could claim to be apostolic; this was, in the Latin-­speaking world, a unique claim, and, one might note, one that Rome made by appealing to a past in which it was not a Latin see at all. For nearly three centuries all the evidence we have for Christianity in Rome is for the Greek-­speaking community, or communities, there. Latin Christianity seems to have been a newcomer in Christian history, and it is Rome’s Greek heritage that, paradoxically, marked it out in the Latin world from the third century onwards! In the East, by contrast, the claim by a church to be apostolic was scarcely distinctive at all: many cities in Palestine and Syria, Asia Minor and Greece could claim to be apostolic, either by foundation or by as­so­ci­ ation. It is very striking that in Dvornik’s account the use of the term ‘apostolic’ is generally made by Rome itself, and even the claim that Antioch and Alexandria are apostolic sees is a claim made by Rome to frustrate the claims of the upstart Constantinople. Dvornik’s account could be seen as about the way in which, eventually, and very cautiously, the East picked up the Roman notion of apostolic and itself found a use for it.

6  I have used the version published in Georges Florovsky, Christianity and Culture, vol. 2: Collected Works of Fr Georges Florovsky (Nordland Publishing Company, 1974), 31–65, nn. 233–6. 7 Florovsky, Christianity and Culture, 65.

The Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition  239 This, of course, does not mean that the term apostolic had no currency in the East, or even that it had no currency in matters ecclesiological. The Church is apostolic because it is the successor of—­or better, is fundamentally identical with—­the group of disciples whom the Lord made his apostles. The Church is apostolic because, fundamentally, it shares the apostolic faith and the apostolic witness. This identity is secured in a diffuse way; there is no one institution or person who secures it, for fundamentally it is secured by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the Holy Spirit for whose coming and presence the Church prays. The Scriptures, the sacramental structure of the Church, the episcopacy standing in the apostolic succession: all these manifest the apostolic character of the Church. To be apostolic is to be sent: ‘As the Father has sent me, even so send I you’, as the Lord said to his disciples on the evening of the first Easter (John 20:21). The last discourses and the great high-­priestly prayer (John 14–17) explore what is meant by being sent, by being apostolic: it is a rich notion, not to be reduced to some claim to ultimate ecclesiastical authority of an institutional kind. In the East, there was no occasion to confine the notion of being apostolic to a single person, to confine apostolicity to the notion of primacy. Rather the reverse: in the East the notion of being an apostle, even in the historical sense, expands, rather than contracts—­as well as the Twelve, led by the Coryphaei, there developed a notion of the Seventy Apostles, for they too were sent. Curiosity about the lives and deeds of the apostles, not least St Andrew, flourished, but it seems to have been more to do with an understandable longing to have direct, local links with the apostolic band, rather than any claim to authority. I had hoped, as I worked on this paper, to have something to say about my own patron saint, the Apostle Andrew the First-­Called, ὁ Πρωτόκλητος. Instead I have found myself led in rather a different direction, which is, perhaps, of more direct ecclesiological interest.

21 Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church In 1971 Peter Brown published his justly famous article, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’.1 It is no exaggeration to say that this article—­ and the host of articles and books that succeeded it2—have transformed the way we think about saints and their cult in late antiquity. This change is part of a wider transformation of the study of the world of early Christianity, a change that has much to do with the changing, not to say declining, place of Christianity in Western society. The very words Peter Brown used in the title of his article are emblematic of this changed perspective: holy, man, late antiquity. Others have noted the change of words from what one might have expected, or from what one would have expected a few decades, even years, earlier. Averil Cameron spoke of Peter Brown ‘rightly avoiding the term “saint”, for in this early period there were no formal processes of sanctification, and no official bestowal of sainthood’.3 Put like that, it seems obvious why Brown talked about the ‘holy man’. I want to suggest that the nature of the change involved is much less easy to track down. At the same time I want to suggest that awareness of the specific suggestions implicit in Brown’s choice of words will enable us both to contemplate the world of late antiquity from the perspective Brown was largely inaugurating and to not losing the other perspectives that were implicit in the language and concepts laid aside. The very title of this paper is intended to point to a range of significance that can easily be narrowed down by the choice of specific words. English, because of its hybrid nature, often has two words where you might have thought one would 1  Peter Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, JRS 61 (1971), 80–101; repr. in Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Faber & Faber, 1982), 103–52. I have referred to the reprint. 2  Several of Peter Brown’s later articles are collected in part II of Brown, Society and the Holy, 81–332; books include Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 1978) and Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Faber & Faber, 1981). The significance of Brown’s original article is manifest from the fact that in March 1997 a conference was held in Berkeley, California, to celebrate the quarter-­centenary of its publication, the proceedings of which were published in JECS 6.3 (Fall, 1998), and from the publication of a symposium inspired by Brown’s article: James Howard-­ Johnston and Paul Anthony Hayward, eds., The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1999). 3  Averil Cameron, ‘On Defining the Holy Man’. In Howard-­Johnson and Hayward, eds., Cult of Saints, 27–43, at 27.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0022

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  241 have done: one of Latinate origin, another of Teutonic descent. And usually the two words have different ranges of meaning, as is the case here. The Teutonic word, holy, is much less clearly defined, and capable of a much wider range of reference. It is first of all an adjective and can be applied to a wide range of nouns: a person, a place, a text, a language, a country, a city, a feeling, an object—­of jewellery, for instance, or an amulet—­and so on. The Latinate word, though derived from an adjective sanctus, is in English a noun, and can scarcely be used save in reference to a person. There is an English adjective, ‘saintly’, but its reference is as limited as the noun from which it is derived, and its meaning rather diminished. There is, I have to admit, a usage of ‘saint’ amongst rather literal-­ minded Orthodox converts, who use it for the Russian, or Slavonic, svyatiy, and end up with expressions such as the ‘saint Trinity’ or the ‘saint Scriptures’, but this is hardly English. There is also another word ‘sacred’, presumably at some level related to ‘saint’, that has its own range of connotation, rather different from either holy or saint, though closer to the former. My point in mentioning these rather obvious facts of the English language is that the availability of such different, but overlapping, words makes it clear that there is a range of reference attached to the notion of the holy or the saintly or the sacred, and that the choice of words can determine a particular way of conceiving of the phenomenon or phenomena of holiness or sanctity. We might illustrate these differences by considering what Peter Brown’s article might have been like, had it been differently worded, and called, let us say, ‘The Rise and Function of the Saint in the early Church [or: in the Patristic Period]’. Peter Brown’s speaking of the ‘holy man’ envisages possibilities excluded, that the use of the word ‘saint’ would not. Holy man: as opposed to holy place, or holy woman—­ both oppositions I think envisaged by Peter Brown, for whom Christianity came to be characterized by holy people rather than the pagan holy places, and by holy men rather than wise women. The first is a commonplace of scholarship on the rise of Christianity, derived perhaps from some Christian perceptions of Christian distinctiveness. Once mentioned, however, one wonders how accurate it is; it certainly did not take Christianity long to develop its own sense of holy places, if, indeed, it had ever abandoned the notion. The term holy men as opposed to wise women opens up areas of gender or sex distinction that have been very much to the fore in the scholarship of the last half-­century; talk of the ‘saint’ glosses over this or perhaps assumes that there is nothing particularly distinctive about the case of the woman saint. Nonetheless, what I want to do in the first part of this paper is to suggest what might have been involved in an article on the rise and function of the saint in early Christianity, by way of contrast, and then by exploring the contrast suggest what the wider field might look like that embraces both holiness and sanctity. The beginnings of the notion of the saint in Christian use goes back to the New Testament, and more specifically to Saint Paul, who regularly in his epistles refers

242  Selected Essays, VOLUME II to the members of the Church in a particular place as the saints, οἱ ἅγιοι.4 This echoes a use of ἅγιος found in the Septuagint, though nothing like as frequently.5 The biblical use of ἅγιος suggests that its primary use is in relation to God, who is the Holy One,6 and that this use is extended to those who are close to God and to the place where God dwells; so the angels are the holy ones, and the sanctuary of the temple is referred to as τὰ ἅγια.7 Holiness is then something bestowed, not acquired, and bestowed by God. Its basic meaning, when applied to those other than God, seems to be dedicated to God, ‘set apart’. St Paul’s use of the term for baptized Christians seems to convey the meaning of those who are ‘in Christ’, set apart from the world and dedicated to God by baptism and their faith in Christ. There is also likely a sense of the ‘holy ones’ derived from the apocalyptic literature, in which the holy ones are constituted by those who, in the final struggle between good and evil, will fight on behalf of God.8 The next step in the evolution of the Christian notion of the saint focuses on the figure of the martyr. The Greek word μάρτυς means ‘witness’, someone who bears testimony to something that he or she knows or has seen. The use of the word for someone who suffers, ultimately to the point of death, for what he or she believes is so common that we overlook the oddness of the word in what is now the normal sense. A century ago there was a good deal of debate as to why the word μάρτυς came to be used in this way. Karl Holl felt that the notion of eyewitness, someone who had seen something, must remain embedded in the word, and pointed to the fact that martyrs are sometimes recorded as having a vision of God at the point of death, the most obvious example being the first martyr Stephen, who dies after exclaiming, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God’ (Acts 7:56).9 Like many of Holl’s ideas, it is attractive, but more for its brilliance than its plausibility. The more generally accepted explanation was that early Christian martyrdom took place in a fundamentally juridical context in which the faithful Christian was bearing witness to his faith before a judge, often under torture, which was used to elicit valid testimony from the lower classes. The μάρτυς fulfils the purpose of the ἅγιος which is implicit in his baptismal confession. Running through the whole of the New Testament is the idea that those who confess Christ can be expected to have that confession tested in the context of persecution.10 This is implicit in what the Apostle Paul says to the Romans: ‘we rejoice in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces endurance, and endurance tests us, and such testing produces

4  E.g., Rom. 8:25; 1 Cor. 1:2; 6.1; Col. 1:2. 5  E.g., Pss. 15:3; 33:10 (LXX). 6  Strikingly, Isa. 43:15; very frequently, ‘the Holy One of Israel’, e.g. Isa. 1:4; 5:24. 7  E.g., Exod. 29:30, and frequently in Heb. 8: 2, 9; 13:11. 8  E.g., Rev. 13:7; 14:12. 9 Karl Holl, ‘Die Vorstellung vom Märtyrer und die Märtyrakte in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung’, New Jahrbücher für dem klassischen Altertum 33 (1914), 521–56, repr. in Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsatz zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Mohr Siebeck, 1928), 68–102. 10  E.g., Luke 21:13–15; 1 Pet. 4:12–14.

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  243 hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us’ (Rom. 5:3‒5). Tribulation (θλῖψις) is very nearly a technical term in the New Testament for persecution: to endure persecution and its threat and use it as a means to refine our hope and open our hearts to God’s love is the aim of every Christian, every ἅγιος, and its fulfilment is seen in the martyr, the one who bears testimony to Christ in the face of death. So the true ἅγιος, the true saint, is seen in the figure of the martyr. The notion of the saint and that of the martyr come to feed off one another, as it were, but in a way that from our historical perspective might seem strange. For example, the idea of the saint or martyr as a kind of role model seems to me to lie rather in the background, contrary to some modern presuppositions about the nature of sanctity. For the notion of the saint, as we have found it in the Apostle Paul, is essentially about a community set apart, dedicated to God. And this community, because it is the Church, the ἐκκλησία, shares the ambiguity implicit in the New Testament notion of the Church: it is both the local community, and also the universal community, and in either sense it is a community incorporate in the risen Christ, and as such not limited to those who are still living this mortal life. The saints are those upheld by the intercession of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:27); they are also upheld by their own prayers one for another, and by more tangible means of support—­for example, St Paul’s ‘collection for the saints’ (1 Cor. 16:1). The martyr becomes pre-­eminently one of the saints who has successfully and finally borne witness to Christ with his death; he achieved this through the prayers of the saints and, in return, his prayers can be sought for those saints who remain on earth. The martyr differs from the saints still on earth in that these saints may still be tested and fail, whereas he or she is victorious and beyond possibility of failing. For these reasons the notion of the saint, or the true saint, comes to be transferred to the martyr, but the martyr is still defined by the community of saints, the Church, and the layers of meaning that attach to that notion in the  early Christian consciousness—­both local and universal, both earthly and heavenly. That early Christian consciousness was deeply affected by eschatological, apoca­lyp­tic ideas: the ‘open heaven’ that the protomartyr Stephen saw as he died was more real for the early Christians than the earthly life that they lived, it was there that their hopes were set, it was there that the martyrs now lived in the presence of God—­in the vision of the Apocalypse, the Apostle John sees under the altar ‘the souls of those slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne’ (Rev. 6:9). But the local layer of the meaning of ἐκκλησία still preserves its power: the martyr, as saint, as he emerges in the second century, is a local figure; he belongs to the local community where, or for which, he had borne witness, and in imitation of the heavenly altar the relics of the martyr were soon to be found beneath the altar of the martyr shrine, the martyrium, and eventually

244  Selected Essays, VOLUME II required for any Christian altar.11 As a local figure he can be expected to care for the local community from which he came; he is their heavenly patron. It seems to me that it is difficult to underestimate the impact on the Church’s self-­understanding of that early experience of martyrdom, which lasted until the beginning of the fourth century, and came to form the bedrock of the church’s memory. It is, of course, possible to exaggerate the threat of martyrdom: nothing the Roman authorities did was comparable with Stalin’s attempt to exterminate Christianity in Russia in the last century. Nonetheless, persecution was an ever-­ present possibility. For that reason, as virtually everyone recognizes, the sudden change in the Church’s fortune from being persecuted by the Roman emperors to being favoured, and eventually adopted as the imperial religion, involved for the Church a crisis of identity. But one of the constants in that crisis of identity was the determination of the Church to remain the Church of the martyrs, and that determination affected the evolution of the notion of sanctity. There were different ways of claiming this heritage, and a good deal of the interest in studying the fourth-­century Church lies in tracing the different strategies that emerged. The most striking was emergence of the monastic order. I use the somewhat ana­ chron­is­tic terminology deliberately, because other ways of putting it—­especially anything suggesting the rise of asceticism—­seem to me to beg even more fundamental questions. I would still endorse what I wrote some years ago, in the Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature: The traditional story of the rise of monasticism as a fourth-­century phe­nom­ enon, associated par excellence with the Egyptian desert, is a Catholic legend, which, unlike many others, was reinforced, rather than questioned, by Protestant scholarship, happy to regard monasticism as a late, and therefore spurious, development. The ‘monastic movement’ should perhaps be seen rather as a reform movement of an already existing, and flourishing, ascetic tradition: a reform inspired by the changes, both within the Church itself, and in the Church’s relation to society, brought about by the gradual Christianization of the Roman empire that began in the fourth century with the conversion of Constantine.12

For Christian asceticism had already incorporated the tradition of martyrdom. The most obvious evidence is found in Clement of Alexandria and his fellow-­ Alexandrian, Origen. Clement, for instance, says 11  See canon 7 of the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Sheed and Ward, 1990), 144–5. 12  Frances Young et al., eds., Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 373–81, at 373. There followed a reference to Richard Price’s elegant discussion of the question, which has not had the impact it deserved, owing to its being hidden away in his introduction to his translation of Theodoret’s Religious History: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. with intro. and notes by R.  M.  Price, Cistercian Studies 88 (Cistercian Publications, 1985), esp. ix–­xxxvii.

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  245 If the confession of God is martyrdom, each soul that has conducted its affairs purely in knowledge of God and has obeyed the commandments is a martyr both in its life and in its speech, no matter how it may be released from the body, by pouring forth the faith like blood, as it were, during its entire life up to its departure. For instance, the Lord says in the Gospel, ‘whoever leaves father or mother or brothers’ and the rest ‘for the sake of the Gospel and of my name’ is blessed, indicating by this not the simple, but the gnostic martyrdom, in which a person, by conducting his affairs according to the Gospel’s rule through love towards the Lord, . . . leaves his worldly family and wealth and possessions for the sake of living without the passions.13

The real—­the gnostic—­martyrdom is the life-­long radical following of Christ, as required in the Gospel. In Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom, we find the same ideal, made more explicit: As to how the measure of bearing witness is filled up, or is not filled up but falls short, the following reflections may show. If during all the time of trial and test we give no place to the devil in our hearts, when he would defile us with evil thoughts of denial, as indecision or some inducement draws us away from martyrdom and perfection; if in addition we do not defile ourselves with any word that is incompatible with bearing witness; if we endure all the taunts of our adversaries, their insults, mockery, obloquy, and their pretended pity when they treat us as fools and madmen and say that we are mere dupes; and if besides we do not permit ourselves to be seduced either by love for our children or their mother or any one of those regarded as dearest to us in life, nor to be lured away to their possession and this kind of life; but if turning from all of these we give ourselves entirely to God and to life with him and near him with a view to sharing union with his only-­begotten Son and those who have a share in him: then we can say that we have filled up the measure of bearing witness. But if we are wanting in as little as one of these points, we have not filled up, but rather defiled, the measure of bearing witness, and have mixed with it some foreign element; and we shall therefore be in need of the same as they who have built of a foundation of wood or hay or stubble.14

For Clement, the true martyrdom is to live ἀπροσπαθῶς (unperturbed by emotion); for Origen it is successfully to resist the attacks of the devil. This latter motif suggests a direct transition from the acts of the martyrs, for in the acta the

13 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 4.4.15.3–5; David Brakke’s translation, modified, is taken from his Demons and the Making of the Monk (Harvard University Press, 2004), 25. 14 Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom 11, trans. J.  J.  O’Meara, Ancient Christian Writers 19 (Newman Press, 1954), 151, quoted by Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 26.

246  Selected Essays, VOLUME II persecuting authorities are often depicted as inspired by the demonic forces of evil. We should notice, too, that to see martyrdom and asceticism as a struggle with demonic forces of evil is to see both in terms of the apocalyptic struggle with evil that characterized early Christianity. The lately popular notion of monasticism as ‘interiorized apocalyptic’, to use the expression of one who is now an Athonite monk,15 belongs to this realm of ideas. In this way the monk inherited the tradition of the martyr, and in inheriting that became a candidate for sanctity in the Church of the empire. The other principal strategy whereby the Church of the empire preserved its continuity with the Church of the martyrs was through fostering the cult of martyrs. The evidence for this is manifold: sermons on the martyrs by the great preachers of the fourth century such as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom, and the promotion of the cult of the martyrs, particularly in Rome and especially by Pope Damasus. These two strategies are brought into juxtaposition by two of Prudentius’ poems: the Psychomachia, which celebrates ascetic struggle; and his Peristephanon, which celebrates the sufferings of the martyrs. In a different way these two strategies are united in Athanasius’ Life of St Antony, which depicts Antony as the ascetic martyr par excellence, while at the same time linking Antony with the martyrs in Alexandria whom he visits, and laying the foundations for the cult of the ascetic saints as continuing that of the martyrs. Claims to define identity are claims to authority—­and power. And so in this case: ascetics, on the way to becoming monks, claim to reinterpret the significance of martyrdom within the Christian Church, building on developments already present in the period of the martyrs; the cult of the martyrs continues the defining theme of the martyrs in a different way and becomes a valuable weapon in the hands of those who want a say in defining the nature of the Church. It is a weapon on which bishops in particular wanted to lay their hands, and were in a good position to do so. I have already mentioned Pope Damasus and Rome; the sermons on the martyrs, preached by bishops, fit into this pattern of claiming and interpreting the martyr heritage, and thereby defining sanctity. Bishops themselves not only seized the chance of defining sanctity through interpreting the martyr cult; they were themselves very soon candidates for sainthood. This process was doubtless assisted by the phenomenon of ascetic bishops in the later fourth century: bishops who themselves belonged to the ascetic movement, such as Ambrose, Augustine, and (in the East) Basil the Great and John Chrysostom. It is not clear how soon bishops themselves became the object of a cult. An early example might be St John Chrysostom, whose life, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom, was written by Palladius shortly after his death, and the return of 15 See Alexander Golitsin, ‘  “Earthly Angels and Heavenly Men”: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Niketas Stethatos, and the Tradition of “Interiorized Apocalyptic” in Eastern Christian Ascetical and Mystical Literature’, DOP 55 (2001), 125–33.

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  247 whose relics to Constantinople in 438 could be said to mark the beginnings of his cult. Chrysostom, however, may not be a good example, as his uncompromising asceticism was perhaps as striking as his episcopal dignity. Another way in which the notion of martyr was adopted by bishops as a way of promoting their own sanctity, or at any rate applied to them, is manifest in the martyr language used to describe the experience of bishops who suffered at the hands of the emperors for their defence of what they regarded as Orthodoxy, pre-­eminently St Athanasius. The variety of ways in which the notion of the martyr was appropriated in the fourth century suggests that we are dealing with an issue of some complexity. We are now well into the area redefined by Peter Brown in his article of 1971. In what way does it look different as a result of the route we have taken to arrive there? It might be said that all I have done is to spell out the background of the traditional Christian notion of sanctity that Peter Brown took for granted, but to have done that is to have shown that there was a traditional Christian notion of sanctity. Brown’s essay leaves the notion of the holy undefined, and moves quickly to the way in which claims to holiness were claims to power, and then explores—­ with his customary skill and insight—­the power relationships that appealed to the notion of the holy. But the notion of holiness in Christianity was not an undefined notion, capable of infinite interpretation; it was rooted in the classical texts of Christianity, notably the New Testament, and had a history that had evolved a notion of holiness that was far from undefined. The Christian notion of holiness or sanctity was already richly textured, and the emerging holy man had to work within the confines of a notion already current. This seems to me to be missing from Peter Brown’s tracing of the lineaments of the holy man. His holy man is presented as emerging on a blank canvas. This is presented very clearly in his final paragraph: The predominance of the holy man, therefore, marked out Late Antiquity as a distinct phase of religious history. The classical period conjures up the image of the great temple; the Middle Ages, of a Gothic cathedral. In between, it is the portraits that strike the imagination, the icons of the holy men, the austere features of the philosophers, the ranks of staring faces in the frescoes and mosaics. For some centuries, the locus of the supernatural was thought of as resting on individual men.16

And Brown goes on to characterize this period in terms of the remote, in­access­ ible God of monotheism mediated to human beings by human institutions that sought to control the supernatural. By the Middle Ages, these are institutions—­he mentions ‘the medieval papacy, the Byzantine lavra, the Russian starec, the Muslim

16  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 151.

248  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Caliphate . . . all, in their various ways, direct results of attempts of men to rule men under a distant high God’17—but the way was prepared for them by the holy man, who alone was God’s man. It is hard not to be bewitched by the suggestiveness of Peter Brown’s prose, but it seems to me that the suggestions that abound in these final pages are highly selective, and selective because of the way in which the notion of holiness has been narrowed down by being focused on the Syrian holy man, as presented by Brown. The general context in which Peter Brown is  thinking is revealed in another sentence: ‘Seen in this way, the victory of Christianity in late Roman society was not the victory of the One God over the many, it was the victory of men over the institutions of the past’.18 The general background against which the phenomenon of the holy man is being placed is the triumph of the Church, the Christianization of Roman society. But too exclusive a  concentration on that important issue can tend to obscure that fact that the Church which triumphed in the fourth and succeeding centuries already had a history, something that tends to be overlooked in Brown’s overarching scenario: Roman—­Late Antiquity—­Christian Middle Ages. The figure of the saint certainly belongs to that scenario, but he also belongs to the more closely defined scenario I have suggested above: the crisis of identity faced by the Church of the martyrs in the fourth and fifth centuries. A crisis of identity entails an already existing identity, itself formed by history. And the Christian notion of holiness and sanctity is part of that identity and history; it is, as I have suggested, richly textured, not something fashioned, as it were ex nihilo, by the holy man of late antiquity. Concentration on the holy man produces a kind of narrowing of our vision. The features of the holy man, discussion of which makes up the body of Brown’s article, include: patronage; wielding of supernatural power; exorcism; and παρρησία (the right to approach and address) before the remote and stern God, conceived on the model of the emperor. The last of these leads into a discussion of four more detailed features of the holy man: his resolving the contradiction between the remoteness and tenderness of God; his professionalism; his role as an allayer of anxiety; and his role as décisionnaire universel (‘universal decision-­ maker’) of his locality. Many of these ideas would have been familiar in another context to the attentive reader of Peter Brown. It was only four years before he published his article on the holy man that he had published Augustine of Hippo.19 The features of the holy man overlap strikingly with the features of the late antique bishop, explored by Brown in that remarkable book. Features not so prominent in that book—­the power of the bishop, his παρρησία with God—­might have found a place had Peter Brown explored more thoroughly the liturgical role of the bishop,

17  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 152. 18  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 152. 19  Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London, 1967).

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  249 as Gerald Bonner had done in a number of important articles.20 In his article, Peter Brown grants that ‘[t]he bishops might wield the mysterium tremendum of the Eucharistic sacrifice. In the hands of a courageous bishop this could be no mean weapon’21 and refers to Ambrose’s confrontation with the Emperor Theodosius over the massacre at Callinicum, but the bishop’s daily presiding over the Eucharist, made explicit as an act of παρρησία in a variety of ways in the different Eucharistic prayers from late antiquity, was no less important. We hear about the extraordinary ways in which the Syrian holy man seized and wielded supernatural power not least because it fascinated Theodoret, but also because another part of the picture of late antiquity was the increasingly important role of the bishop in the local communities they served. But our vision, and understanding, of the holy is further narrowed down by the way Peter Brown presents the holy man as the locus of the holy in late an­tiquity. Let me give two examples. First, Brown suggests that Christianity shifts the focus from the pagan holy place—­the temple, the sacred groves, the oracle—­to the holy man. It is a perception embraced by Christian scholars, too, who want to emphasize how Christianity is a personal religion—­a term more used than analysed. But Christians quickly came to lay store by their own holy places, their churches, their basilicas. Already, within a few years of the so-­called ‘Edict of Milan’, we find Eusebius of Caesarea preaching at the dedication of the new basilica in Tyre a sermon in which he gives a glowing account of the magnificence of the new basilica, itself redolent with symbolism, so that the earthly building symbolizes the Church as a community and the soul as an edifice of virtues in which God’s presence is realized, as well as the cosmos itself, created by the Word of God, as his Temple: This cathedral is a marvel of beauty, utterly breathtaking, especially to those who have eyes only for the appearance of material things. But all marvels pale before the archetypes, the metaphysical prototypes and heavenly patterns of material things—­I mean the re-­establishment of the divined spiritual edifice in our souls. This edifice the Son of God himself created in his own image, and in every way and in every respect he endowed it with the divine likeness, an imperishable nature, a non-­physical spiritual nature, remote from any earthly matter and actively intelligent . . . Building truly in righteousness, he equitably divided the whole people in accordance with their powers. With some, he walled round the outer enclosure—­ that was enough for them—­making unwavering faith the protective barrier . . . To some he entrusted the entrances to the church proper, giving them the task of 20  See especially Gerald Bonner, ‘Vera Lux Illa Est Quae Illuminat: The Christian Humanism of Augustine’, God’s Decree and Man’s Destiny (Variorum Reprints, 1987), item IV; and and Gerald Bonner, ‘The Church and the Eucharist in the Theology of St Augustine’, God’s Decree, item VI. 21  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 140.

250  Selected Essays, VOLUME II waiting at the doors to guide those entering . . . Others he made under-­props to the first outer pillars that form a quadrangle round the court, bringing them for the first time into touch with the letter of the four gospels . . . There are also in this shrine thrones and an infinite number of benches and seats, all the souls, on which rest the Holy Spirit’s gifts, just as in olden time, they appeared to the holy apostles, and others with them, to whom were revealed dividing tongues like flames of fire, fire which rested on each one of them . . . Such is the great cathedral which throughout the whole world under the sun the great Creator of the universe, the Word has built, Himself again fashioning this spiritual image on earth of the vaults beyond the skies, so that by the whole cre­ation and by rational beings on earth His Father might be honoured and worshipped . . .22

This sense of the church building as a microcosm, in which is reflected the human soul and the community of the Church, its creation and its redemption, was to dominate Christian history, and is still a powerful reality. In the Byzantine East, the great church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, built by the Emperor Justinian, became the earthly model for generations of churches. The author who wrote under the title of Dionysios the Areopagite had already provided an elab­or­ ate symbolic structure for the services that took place within the Christian church—­and the title of one of his treatises, the Celestial Hierarchy, reminds us of the holy ones, the angels, whose presence defines the Christian holy place, and links it to the holy place of the divine presence in heaven; Maximus the Confessor (580–662) developed this in his Mystagogia, in which he uses the symbolic structure of the church building to lend the Eucharistic liturgy a meaning, both cosmic in scope and reaching into the hidden places of the human spirit.23 He is followed by the Patriarch Germanos, according to whom The church is the temple of God, a holy place (τέμενος ἅγιον), a house of prayer, the assembly of the people, the body of Christ. It is called the bride of Christ. It is cleansed by the water of his baptism, sprinkled by his blood, clothed in baptismal garments, and sealed with the ointment of the Holy Spirit . . . The church is an earthly heaven, in which God, who is beyond the heavens, dwells and walks about. It represents the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ: it is glorified more than Moses’ tabernacle of witness, in which are the mercy seat and the Holy of Holies. It is prefigured in the patriarchs, foretold by the prophets, founded in the apostles, adorned by the hierarchs, and fulfilled in the martyrs.24 22  Eusebius of Caesarea, History of the Church 10.4.55–6, 63, 66, 69, trans. G. S. Williamson, 2nd edn (Penguin, 1989), 318, 320–1. 23  Ch. G. Sotiropoulos, ed., I Mystagogia tou Agiou Maximou tou Omologitou (Athens, 1993), esp. chs. 1–7. 24  St Germanos of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, 1; ed. and trans. Paul Meyendorff (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 57 (slightly modified).

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  251 Holiness does not just reside in saints, it is found in the holy building of the church, and again the holiness found there is not some incomprehensible supernatural presence, but already the bearer of a richly textured meaning. St Germanos was the patriarch of Constantinople who resigned over Emperor Leo III’s introduction of iconoclasm. Peter Brown has written illuminatingly on the icon, but in his 1971 article it is drawn into the magnetic field created by his conception of the holy man: ‘the icons of the holy men, . . . the ranks of staring faces in frescoes and mosaics’,25 as we have already heard. There seem to me to be two aspects overlooked by such an approach to icons—­aspects that seem to me closely related, and bear directly on the concept of the holy employed and articulated by Peter Brown. For Brown, and I expect for most people, icons are icons of saints; we are struck by the frontal gaze of the figures depicted. It is, however, a striking feature of the iconoclast controversy that the arguments, at least, were rarely about icons of the saints; the arguments were about depicting Christ, the God-­man, and were therefore about icons of Christ—­and just as much about icons of the Virgin Mother of God, who is rarely depicted apart from the figure of Christ. The patristic quotations cited by the iconodules are often broader in reference and refer—­or are taken to refer—­to religious pictures in general, or to depictions of saints, but among the extant arguments I can only think of one place where icons of the saints are envisaged, where St John Damascene affirms that ‘We represent Christ the King and Lord without divesting him of his army. For the saints are the army of the Lord’; he continues: I venerate the image of Christ as God incarnate; of the mistress of all, the Mother of God, as the mother of the Son of God; of the saints, as the friends of God, who, struggling against sin to the point of blood, have both imitated Christ by shedding their blood for him, who shed his blood for them, and lived a life following his footsteps.26

One of the features of Peter Brown’s argument in the holy man article, as we have seen, is his sense of the anxiety created by the transition from the world of the pagan gods, seen as close to human concerns, to the worship of the one, remote Creator God, characteristic of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps it was the consciousness of the way in which Islam partners Christianity as ushering in the new world that succeeded the pagan Roman Empire—­a consciousness spawned by his fascination with the Pirenne thesis, which made the rise of Islam, rather than the barbarian invasions, the decisive event in the fall of the Roman Empire in the West—­that led Peter Brown to see the religious transition in terms of the change from the ever-­present gods of paganism to the remote and transcendent 25  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 151. 26  St John Damascene, Against the Iconoclasts 1.21; cf. 2.15; ET in Andrew Louth, trans., Three Treatises in Defence of Icons (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 34–5.

252  Selected Essays, VOLUME II God of monotheism. I am not sure, however, that assimilating Christianity to Islam is a good way of understanding it. For the Christian God is not remote. He is the creator, and, as uncreated, beyond any human conception, as fourth-­ century Christian theology came to emphasize (in common, it should be said, with contemporary pagan philosophy). But God is also present in creation through his providence, and furthermore he has made himself one with the created order through the Incarnation. To speak of the Christian God as remote, as Peter Brown predominantly does, is a half-­truth that is virtually a falsehood (it is true, to be sure, that at one point Brown does speak of the Christian God as ‘and yet, ideally, the ever-­loving Father’,27 but ‘ideally’ seems to me to take away with one hand what he offers with the other). One of the fears St John Damascene had of imperial iconoclasm was that it would lose hold of the truth of the Incarnation and fall into a dualism in which God was utterly remote from the finite, created, material world. At one point the Damascene exclaims: Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted, but now that God has been seen in the flesh and has associated with human kind, I depict what I have seen of God. I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, though which my salvation was worked . . . Therefore I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which my salvation came, because it is filled with divine energy and grace.

And he goes on to list all those material things that are the object of Christian veneration: the wood of the cross; the holy places associated with Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection; the ‘ink and the holy book of the Gospels’; the Christian altar; the sacred vessels; and ‘before all these things’, the holy body and blood of Christ received in the Eucharist, which is matter.28 For John holiness is instinct in matter because it is created and has been used by God. God is not remote, but ever-­present, and it is this truth that the iconoclasts endanger.

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church In the course of this paper I have tried to reflect on Peter Brown’s article on the rise of the holy man in late antiquity, one of the most influential articles of the last half-­century. That article itself could probably be set in the context of a concern throughout the last century with the notion of the holy, going back, at least, to 27  Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, 143. 28  St John Damascene, Against the Iconoclasts 1.16; Louth, trans., Three Treatises, 29–30.

Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church  253 Rudolf Otto’s remarkable work, Das Heilige.29 I have attempted to set Brown’s reflections in a rather different context: that of the evolving notion of sanctity, or holiness, in the history of the early Church. Nothing I have said detracts from the brilliance and insight of Peter Brown’s fascinating article, but rather it suggests that the notion of holiness was already developed and that the phenomenon of the Syrian holy man, at the heart of Brown’s reflections, did not create the notion of holiness, but had to negotiate, as it were, with an already highly developed and richly textured notion that had evolved through the experience of the early Church. That experience itself was rooted in the experience of Israel, as found in what Christians came to regard as their Old Testament, and can be traced through the New Testament and the early Christian experience of martyrdom, which was determinative for the Christian notion of sanctity. Before we reach Brown’s Syrian holy man, we find various attempts to redeploy the notion of the martyr as saint in the Christian empire of Constantine and his successors. There were several contenders: not simply ascetics, but also bishops, who sought to both embody the notion of sanctity and, just as importantly, to adjudicate on claims to sanctity through control of the cult of the saints. Sanctity and claims to holiness had to fit into an already highly developed matrix of interpretation. Holiness was one of the touchstones of authority in the Christian community, so the claims and counterclaims, and claims to adjudicate, become one of the continuing threads determining the authenticity of Christian experience. The struggle between institutional authority and Christian experience is one that characterizes many periods of Christian history; the notion of holiness, how it is defined and how it is articulated—­and how it is recognized and acknowledged—­is fundamental to our understanding of the dynamics of that conflict, as well as providing insight into the complex nature of Christian experience.

29  Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Trewendt und Granier, 1917).

22

The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World The influence of the Philokalia can be thought of in two rather different ways. On the one hand, we can think of what one might call the reception of the Philokalia: how was it read, who read it, when and how and into what languages was it translated, did the selections translated suggest different ways in which the Philokalia has been received and understood? On the other hand, we could think of the influence of the Philokalia in another way: how has the Philokalia affected the way its readers understand the nature of the Christian life, the nature of the Church, and even, in particular, the nature of theology? If we call the first kind of influence its material reception, we might (to use a word that is perhaps a sign of too great a familiarity with the English translation of the Philokalia!) call the second kind of influence its noetic reception. The material reception of the Philokalia is largely a matter of history—­of dates and facts that can be verified, though we shall find that there are, as with any history, issues that can seem more subjective: actual translation may be fairly clear, but a more diffused influence may be more difficult to be sure about. The noetic reception of the Philokalia is a very much more subjective matter; in exploring what is meant by noetic reception we shall encounter claims that really constitute challenges to what we consider Orthodoxy to be, what we consider theology to be. However, the material reception or influence needs to be considered first, as it provides a kind of bedrock of verifiable claims, to which the grander noetic claims will need to relate. First of all, however, we need to establish what the Philokalia is, what kind of an anthology (which is what the Greek word, Φιλοκαλία, means) it is. This question is treated elsewhere in this symposium, but it is necessary to establish the main outlines here. It is, as Metropolitan Kallistos has put it, ‘[a] vast collection of ascetic and mystical texts by thirty-­six different authors, extending from the fourth to the fifteenth century, . . . arguably the most significant Greek Orthodox book to appear during the whole of the four centuries of the Tourkokratia’.1 It was put together by St Makarios of Corinth and St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain; there are varying accounts as to their respective roles in the production of the 1  Kallistos Ware, ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, in Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake, eds., Mount Athos the Sacred Bridge: The Spirituality of the Holy Mountain (Peter Lang, 2005), 69–121, here 72. I owe a great deal to this immensely valuable article on the context of the Philokalia.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0023

The Influence of the Philokalia  255 work, but it seems clear that, though the initiative and preliminary selection of texts was St Makarios’, St Nikodimos’ role, not least in providing the introductions to the different texts and to the Philokalia as a whole, was significant. The selection of texts seems, however, to have represented an already existing trad­ ition: there are what might be called ‘proto-­philokalias’ that still exist in manuscripts, notably in the library of the Monastery of Vatopedi, and the translation of the Philokalia by St Païssy Velichkovski must have been well under way before the publication of the work in Venice in 1782, which suggests that St Païssy was translating a traditional body of material, rather than a selection from the published Philokalia. We are then dealing with a traditional body of Athonite spiritual writings. Caution is required in understanding what that means, for it is also clear that this tradition was not widespread on the Holy Mountain in the eighteenth century; the tradition of hesychasm had shrunk to a trickle, apparently unknown to many of the Athonite monks, though that trickle was strong enough to nourish the renewal movement among the Kollyvades, to whom St Makarios and St Nikodimos belonged. So, if it was a tradition, then it was tradition as a remnant. The actual selection of texts for the Philokalia betrays elements of contingency. One criterion, judging from St Nikodimos’ remarks in his preface to the work, seems to have been current availability; to realize the significance of that cri­ter­ ion, one needs to know something of the extraordinary productivity of St Nikodimos, who, with almost unbelievable energy, had made available an enormous array of resources from the tradition of Greek Orthodoxy: his editions of the canons, the Pedalion, or Rudder, of the huge ascetic anthology of the eleventh century, known as the Evergetinos, as well as editions of the Gaza ascetics, St Barsanouphios and St John, of St Symeon the New Theologian (with Dionysios Zagoraios), and of St Gregory Palamas (which, alas, perished in Vienna in 1798). St Nikodimos was not alone in this work of ressourcement: an edition of one of the saint’s favourite writers, St Isaac the Syrian, had appeared in 1770, edited by Nikephoros Theotokis, and—­then, as in the last century—­Orthodox patristic ressourcement depended on and was inspired by Western scholarship, which had made available the works of the Cappadocians, St John Chrysostom, St Dionysios the Areopagite, St John of the Ladder, and much of St Maximos the Confessor by the end of the eighteenth century. These saints were all important to St Nikodimos, as we know from his citations of them in his own works, such as a tract, On Frequent Communion, and his Handbook on Spiritual Counsel.2

2 Both available in English translations: Hieromonk Patapios and Archbishop Chrysostomos, Manna from Mount Athos: The Issue of Frequent Communion on the Holy Mountain in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Byzantine and Neohellenic Studies 2 (Peter Lang, 2006), which contains a translation of Concerning Frequent Communion; Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter Chamberas (Paulist Press, 1989). For most of the facts cited in this paragraph, see Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, esp. 85–105.

256  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Omission of authors from the Philokalia, therefore, does not mean that they were overlooked or excluded; it may simply mean that they were readily enough available already. Nonetheless, it was the Philokalia as published that exercised influence, and we need to look at what this immense body of texts represented. In some ways it might seem obvious: it is a collection of texts, presented in what St Nikodimos thought was their chronological order, culminating in works associated with the hesychast controversy of fourteenth-­century Byzantium. That controversy concerned the practice of the Jesus Prayer, and claims made by Athonite monks that through the practice of this prayer they had been granted deification and seen the uncreated light of the Godhead. Barlaam the Calabrian had ridiculed the physical techniques adopted by some of the hesychast monks, and St Gregory Palamas had defended them, though without laying any great stress on such physical techniques. More importantly, Palamas had made much of the distinction in God between his essence, which is unknowable, and his activities (or energies, ἐνέργειαι) in which God makes himself known. St Gregory Palamas is indeed one of the most important theologians drawn on in the Philokalia, and the work does culminate with his writings, and those of his immediate antecedents (Theoliptos, Gregory of Sinai) and supporters (notably the Xanthopoulos br­others, Kallistos and Ignatios). There are two short treatises that expound the phys­ic­al techniques: The Three Methods of Prayer, attributed to St Symeon the New Theologian, and St Nikiphoros the Monk’s On Watchfulness and Guarding of the Heart, and Palamas’ brief defence of physical techniques from his Triads. Palamas’ distinction between God’s essence and his activities is discussed in the 150 Chapters, but other works by Palamas defending this distinction, fundamental for Palamas’ theology, are not, notably the third part of the Triads. While it is clearly not false, then, to see the Philokalia as occupying a standpoint that might be regarded as hesychast, and establishing a hesychast perspective, the hesychast culmination seems a little hesitant, and to regard the Philokalia as a whole as representing what Germans might call the Herkunft3 of Palamism or hesychasm seems unbalanced; it is not until one is two-­thirds of the way through the Philokalia that the hesychast theme of the Jesus Prayer is more than alluded to, and one needs to go still further for the Palamite distinction between essence and activities. It seems, then, that we have to allow St Nikodimos’ scholarly propensities to weigh more heavily than his polemical aims. What we have in the Philokalia is an eclectic selection (eclectic partly for the contingent reasons already mentioned) illustrating the breadth and depth of the Byzantine ascetic and mystical tradition. Works that St Nikodimos says in his introduction ‘have never in earlier times been published, or if they have, lie in obscurity, in darkness, in a corner,

3  There is no real English equivalent to Herkunft: ‘origin’ or ‘heritage’ come close.

The Influence of the Philokalia  257 uncherished and moth-­eaten, and from there dispersed and squandered’.4 Yet, if there is less polemical intent in the selection, and more scholarly delight in bringing to the light of day rare works almost forgotten, the collection can hardly be called random. The inclusion of authors like St Diadochos of Photiki, Nikitas Stithatos, and especially St Maximos the Confessor (to whom more pages are devoted than any other author) points to an understanding of theology in which heart and mind—­devotion and rigorous thought—­are united. How far it is le­git­ im­ate to see such theologians—­to whom one must add St Gregory Palamas—­as constituting an axis defining what one might then call a philokalic sense of the coinherence of theology and spirituality is something that may perhaps emerge as we pursue further the influence of the Philokalia. The Philokalia was published in a period when there was a determined attempt to recover the full breadth of the tradition of Greek Orthodoxy, in which attempt St Nikodimos played a central role. The story of the influence of the Philokalia does not however continue in Greece, which achieved independence from the Ottoman yoke in 1832, except spasmodically (there is some evidence of the continuation of philokalic spirituality inspiring some of the new martyrs in the Aegean islands, for instance, Chios, Paros, Skiathos, and Patmos),5 but rather in the world of the Slavs. As we have already mentioned, while St Makarios and St Nikodimos were compiling the Philokalia, St Païssy Velichkovski was already translating into Slavonic some of the works that came to be included in the Philokalia. When this collection was published in 1793, it was called the Dobrotolubiye, the word being a calque of the Greek φιλοκαλία, with no independent meaning as a Slavonic word (and thus simply suggesting to the Slav ear the meaning ‘love of beauty’), making clear that Païssy thought of it as a rendering of St Makarios and Nikodimos’ collection. St Païssy had come to the Holy Mountain already aware of the tradition of hesychast spirituality. This may ul­tim­ ate­ly be traceable to the hesychast tradition of St Nil Sorsky and the Non-­ possessing monks,6 which may have migrated to the Romanian princedoms of Wallachia and Moldavia during the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More immediately he owed his knowledge of philokalic spirituality to a Romanian elder, St Basil of Poiana Mărului, whom he had met during his period in the monasteries of Moldavia in 1742–6, after his studies at the Moghila Academy in Kiev, and who tonsured him as a monk in 1750 on Mount Athos.7 It used to be thought that St Païssy had simply selected from the Greek Philokalia in making his translation, but it now looks rather as if his selection derived from similar sources; it has remarkable parallels to the Greek anthology (and may, 4  St Nikodimos, ed., Philokalia (Venice, 1782), 6. 5  See Placide Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe et la Philocalie (Bayard Éditions, 1997), 230. 6 On which, see George  A.  Maloney SJ, Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky (Mouton, 1973). 7  Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 104–5; see also Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe, 61–4.

258  Selected Essays, VOLUME II before publication, have been checked against the Greek text); as Metropolitan Kallistos has put it, ‘during 1746–75 Paissy, working independently, translated into Slavonic nearly four-­fifths of the material subsequently included in the Greek Philokalia of 1782’.8 Nonetheless, it is striking what the one-­fifth omitted covers: the whole of St Maximos, all the Makarian material, and the whole of St Gregory Palamas. One can no longer think of St Païssy as deleting this material, but it remains that his selection has a very different feel to the selection represented by the Greek Philokalia: the more theologically complex material is omitted, so that what is left is more straightforwardly ascetical. The Dobrotolubiye in its Slavonic form was destined to have a remarkable influence. One of the intentions of St Nikodimos, as he makes clear in his introduction, was to make the riches of the tradition represented by it available to all Orthodox Christians, married as well as monastics. Many have detected in this a contradiction, for many of the texts included insist on the importance of personal guidance from an experienced spiritual father (or mother), and where, outside a monastery, is such a guide likely to be found?9 St Nikodimos was willing to take the risk of these writings being misinterpreted, for the sake of the benefits they would bring, which he felt would outweigh any such danger.10 St Païssy was more inclined to evade any such contradiction by seeking to have his Dobrotolubiye kept for monastic eyes; it was only at the insistence of Gabriel, Metropolitan of Novgorod and St Petersburg, a friend of the great spiritual master, St Tikhon of Zadonsk, that the Dobrotolubiye was published at all.11 It certainly seems to be the case that the advance of the Dobrotolubiye among the Slavs went hand in hand with an emphasis on the importance of spiritual fatherhood, starchestvo. Disciples of St Païssy brought the Dobrotolubiye and its spirituality to Russia. One of the monks involved, at Metropolitan Gabriel’s behest, in preparing the 1793 edition of the Dobrotolubiye, the monk Nazar, originally from Sarov, and then refounder of the monastery of Valaam on Lake Ladoga, retired to Sarov in 1801, taking a copy of the Dobrotolubiye with him; through him St Seraphim became acquainted with the Dobrotolubiye, though his spirituality was already indebted to the authentic tradition of St Nil Sorsky.12 It was, however, the monastery of Optino, just over 100 miles to the south-­west of Moscow, that rapidly became a centre for this movement of renewal. We catch a glimpse of this in the early chapters of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in the figure of the starets Zossima, given central importance, but viewed with suspicion by many of his fellow monks. Because of its accessibility from Moscow, Optina Pustyn´ attracted many of the intelligentsia, especially among the Slavophils; Ivan Kireevsky’s sense of the

8  Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 101. 9  See, e.g., Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 106–9. 10  See the last two pages of St Nikodimos’ introduction to Philokalia, 7–8. 11  See Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 108; Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe, 64. 12 Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe, 235–6.

The Influence of the Philokalia  259 paramount value of the witness of the Fathers can be seen as reflecting the influence of the Philokalia. For him, ‘The Holy Fathers speak of a country they have been to’; in their writings the Fathers bear ‘testimony as eyewitnesses’.13 This philokalic renewal—­among both monastics and laypeople who sought spiritual succour from the monasteries—­ran parallel with (whether there was any cause and effect, and which way round, I do not know) a programme of translation from the Fathers into Russian in the course of the nineteenth century, focused on the Spiritual Academies, with the result that, as Olivier Clément has put it, ‘at the end of the nineteenth century, Russia had at its disposal, in its own language, the best patristic library in Europe’.14 There are two further markers of the influence of the Philokalia in nineteenth-­ century Russia that could be mentioned. First, St Païssy’s desire to preserve the Dobrotolubiye for monks would have been assisted by the fact that his translation was not into Russian but into Church Slavonic. Later on in the century, between 1877 and 1889, a translation into Russian, made by St Theophan the Recluse, was published in five volumes. This is based on the Greek Philokalia and restores many of the treatises omitted by St Païssy, though not entirely. It includes from St Maximos the Centuries on Love, selections from the Theological and Economical Chapters and the five additional ‘diverse’ centuries, as well as the Ascetic Book, but not (rather surprisingly) his commentary on the Our Father; it includes the cen­ tur­ies by Thalassios, and various smaller writings, two of the works of St Gregory of Sinai, and some of the works of St Gregory Palamas, and his Life, but not the 150 Chapters or the Agioritic Tome. A selection of the Makarian Homilies is included from the standard set of 50 Homilies, not, as in the Greek Philokalia, from the paraphrase by Symeon Metaphrastes. Furthermore, a number of authors not present in the Greek Philokalia are included: notably, Ephrem the Syrian, John of the Ladder, Barsanouphios, John and Dorotheos of Gaza, Isaac the Syrian and, especially, Theodore the Stoudite, to whom the whole of volume 4 is dedicated. In addition, the selections from St Antony the Great, Isaias of Gaza, Evagrios, Cassian, Mark the Hermit, and Nilos of Ancyra are supplemented with works not included in the Greek Philokalia of 1782 (the additions under the name of St Antony are no less spurious than the original item, unless one counts the selections from St Athanasios’ Life of St Antony). The long work by Peter of Damascus is omitted, having been already published in Russian. The desire to add what St Païssy had omitted (as he would presumably have seen it) is clearly one of

13  From Kireevsky’s ‘Fragments’: translation in Boris Jakim and Robert Bird, trans. and ed., On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 248, 243. 14  O. Clément, ‘Les pères de l’Église dans l’Église orthodoxe’, in Connaissance des Pères de l’Église 52 (December 1993), 25–6, quoted by Boris Bobrinskoy in ‘Le renouveau actuel de la patristique dans l’orthodoxie’, Les pères de l’Église au XXe siècle. Histoire–­littérature–­théologie (Cerf, 1997), 437–44, here 440 (though England, as a result of the endeavours of the Fathers of the Oxford Movement, must have run Russia a close second).

260  Selected Essays, VOLUME II St Theophan’s motives. There is not much sign of serious scholarly scruples (though this might account for the substitution of Symeon Metaphrastes’ paraphrase of the Makarian material). Palamas’ 150 Chapters were omitted because they contained ‘a good number of ideas difficult to understand or express’, and the chapters of Kallistos Kataphygiotes, because they are ‘too subtle and largely specu­la­tive and syllogistic’, as Theophan put it in his introductions to these works, and similar reasons would account for the omission of chapters from Maximos, Elias Ekdikos, and Nikitas. The texts dealing with physical techniques by Nikiphoros, Pseudo-­Symeon, and Gregory of Sinai have been drastically curtailed in the sections dealing with the breathing techniques because St Theophan had serious reservations about these techniques, as he makes clear. St Theophan’s own agenda is very clear, and like St Païssy, he shows a preference for the ascetical rather than the theological or mystical. This translation by St Theophan went into second and third editions, which have been reprinted; it is the standard Russian translation of the Philokalia, and has been very influential, not only in Russia, but throughout the Slav-­speaking world. The other marker of the influence of the Philokalia in nineteenth-­century Russia is rather different: it is a small work known in English as The Way of a Pilgrim, in Russian Candid Tales of a Pilgrim to his Spiritual Father. The story is extremely well known (that is a measure of its influence)—about a ‘pilgrim’, perhaps better a wanderer, or strannik, familiar even to English readers from Tolstoy’s novels and stories, who travelled from place to place, as many did in Imperial Russia. This strannik, who did try once to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is presented as anxious to fulfil the Apostle’s command to ‘pray without ceasing’. After several responses that he finds unsatisfactory, he learns about, and then learns to practise, the Jesus Prayer. He also acquires a copy of the Dobrotolubiye—­a worn and battered one, for which he pays 2 roubles—­which he pores over every day and carries in his knapsack. The Jesus Prayer is for him a revelation, and a source of joy: [a]nd when with all this in mind I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, that everything proved the love of God for man, that all things prayed to God and sang his praise.15

This apparently artless work has had a tremendous influence, both within and outside the Orthodox world. It famously appeared as a ‘pea-­green book’ in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Recent research has revealed something of its

15  R. M. French, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way (SPCK, 1954), 31.

The Influence of the Philokalia  261 background.16 The familiar version is a later version—­edited by St Theophan the Recluse—­who made the figure of the spiritual father, the starets, central. It is based on earlier material that has its context in the missionary work of an Orthodox priest, a former Old Believer, Fr Mikhail Kozlov, among the Old Believers with whom the stranniki were popular. It illustrates the paradox of the issue of the accessibility of the Jesus Prayer, for St Theophan’s version, edited to bring the spiritual father into prominence, has introduced the practice of the Jesus Prayer well beyond circles in which a spiritual father could be found—­even beyond the boundaries of Orthodoxy or any traditional form of Christianity. The account of the material influence of the Philokalia throughout the Orthodox world must continue back in the country that can lay claim to its origins: Romania.17 Here the story is not dissimilar to that in Russia. St Païssy’s dis­ ciples carried the tradition of philokalic spirituality from Neamţ to other monasteries in Moldavia and Wallachia; notable figures include St Calinic of Cernica (1787–1867). The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a decline in monasticism, but the philokalic tradition continued, and in the twentieth century the tradition was found in the monastery of Sihăstria, restored by the starets Ioanichie Moroï, amongst whose disciples were counted Fr Païsie (1897–1993) and the renowned Fr Cleopa (1912–98). In Transylvania another monastery, destroyed in the eighteenth century by the Austrians, and restored in 1935 by Metropolitan Nicolae Balan (1882–1955), Sîmbata de Sus, became a centre of philokalic spirituality under its stareţ, Arsenie. In nearby Sibiu, one of the professors in the Orthodox Theological Faculty was Fr Dumitru Stăniloae, one of the first to conduct firsthand research on St Gregory Palamas, working in the 1930s on the manuscripts held in Paris, where he encountered the lay Catholic intellectuals, Maurice Blondel, Gabriel Marcel, and Jacques Maritain. Fr Dumitru’s lifework was to be the Romanian Filocalia, the first four volumes of which appeared in Sibiu between 1946 and 1948. The continuation of the venture was prevented by the Communist régime, which took over in 1948, and was only resumed in 1976, now in Bucharest, to which Stăniloae had moved in 1948, the final eight volumes appearing between 1976 and 1991. Fr Stăniloae’s Filocalia is rather different from either the Greek or Slav versions. Although the authors are much the same, instead of translating the texts as they appeared in the original Greek version of the Philokalia, Fr Dumitru went back to the original works in many cases where only a selection or paraphrase had appeared in the Greek Philokalia. Instead of the ‘Diverse Chapters’ of St Maximos, which are for the most part a selection in the form of chapters from Maximos’ Questions to Thalassium, 16  See the introduction to Aleksei Pentkovsky, trans., The Pilgrim’s Tale (Paulist Press, 1999), and the articles on which it is based in Simvol 27 (Paris, 1992). 17  For this, see Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe, 245–8; and the article by ‘Un moine de l’Église de Roumanie’ (= André Scrima), ‘L’avènement philocalique dans l’Orthodoxie roumaine’, Istina (1958), 295–328, 443–74, which is not so much about the philokalic influence in Romania, but a part of it.

262  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Stăniloae gives the whole of the Questions (and, for good measure, adds the whole of what was then known of the Quaestiones et Dubia). Again, with St Symeon the New Theologian, Stănilaoe gives complete translations from modern critical editions. Like Theophan in his Dobrotolubiye, he adds texts from Barsanouphios, John and Dorotheos of Gaza (using the critical edition in Sources Chrétiennes in the case of Dorotheos), includes the Ladder of Paradise of St John of Sinai, and devotes a whole volume to St Isaac the Syrian (he does not, however, include anything from Theodore of Stoudios), as well as adding a ‘Romanian’ appendix to volume 8 (including texts from the elder Basil of Poiana Mărului, and some ­others). Separately from his Filocalia, Fr Dumitru published many other patristic texts by St Athanasios, St Gregory the Theologian, St Cyril of Alexandria, Dionysios the Areopagite, St Maximos the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, and St Gregory Palamas. Furthermore, in all these translated works, including the volumes of the Filocalia, Fr Dumitru provided succinct commentaries, and not just the introductions St Nikodimos and St Theophan had provided in their versions. These commentaries recognize that publication in print means that there is no way of controlling who will read these texts, so that some guidance, which would ideally be provided by a spiritual father, is necessary. The material influence of the Philokalia in the rest of Europe is still largely a story of the influence in the Orthodox world, though translations into English, French, German, and other languages inevitably—­and designedly—­reached a wider readership. In English, the first volumes of translations from the Philokalia were made by a Russian émigrée, E. Kadloubovsky, and an English philanthropist, G. E. H. Palmer, from St Theophan’s Dobrotolubiye. The first volume was a selection called Writings from the Philokalia on the Prayer of the Heart (1951), which, as the title suggests, is mostly on the Jesus Prayer. The first part of the selection, in fact, consists of the works mentioned to the pilgrim by his spiritual father as what to read first in the Philokalia,18 with a few supplements, followed in parts 2 and 3 with further selections from Hesychios of Jerusalem, Philotheos of Sinai, St Barsanouphios and St John of Gaza, Theoliptos of Philadelphia, and St Philemon the Abba. It focuses on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, and includes two of the treatises on the physical techniques of prayer (in St Theophan’s abbreviated form). It presents very much the devotional aspect of the Philokalia. A further volume, called Early Fathers from the Philokalia (1953), contained passages from ‘St Antony the Great’, St Mark the Monk, Evagrios, St Neilos of Sinai (in fact Evagrios’ On Prayer), St Dorotheos of Gaza, St Isaac the Syrian, St Maximos’ Four Centuries on Love plus a selection from Theophan’s selection from the seven further cen­tur­ies, and a brief selection from Theodore of Edessa, with a couple of brief appendices 18 See French, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim, 38–9. The selection was apparently suggested to Kadloubovsky and Palmer by their spiritual father, Fr Nikon; it is also very similar to the preliminary reading list given by Metropolitan Kallistos in his article, Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 118–19.

The Influence of the Philokalia  263 from St Gregory Palamas and his Life. Again, the emphasis is on the devotional aspect of the Philokalia. Along with these selections from the Dobrotolubiye, Kadloubovsky and Palmer also translated Theophan’s revision of Nikodimos’ Unseen Warfare (published in 1952), based on a couple of works by the Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli, which drew unusual attention to the Western affinities of the two men most associated with the Philokalia, itself a rigorously Orthodox selection of texts, and somewhat later Kadloubovsky (this time with E.  M.  Palmer) translated a work, called in Russian, Mental Art. On the Jesus Prayer, a selection made by Igumen Chariton of Valaam mostly from the writings of St Theophan dealing with the Jesus Prayer (1966). These further underline the practical, devotional aspect of the Philokalia. Still later, G. E. H. Palmer, together with Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, began to bring out an English translation of the Philokalia, based on the original Greek version. This was a rather different venture that strove to pursue a middle course, respecting the integrity of the Philokalia of St Makarios and St Nikodimos, while at the same time observing the canons of philological scholarship. Indeed, it was different, not only from Kadloubovsky and Palmer’s translation of selections from Theophan’s Russian, but from all the versions we have surveyed. For it made no attempt to supplement or select from the text of the original Philokalia of 1782; there were only two kinds of changes: first, critical editions, where available, were used, rather than the text produced in 1782; and second, Nikodimos’ prefaces (even his preface to the whole work) were replaced with their own, reflecting the views of current scholarship with regard to date, authenticity, and so forth. This entailed two significant changes from the original version: the selection from St Antony was relegated to an appendix, since none of it is authentic, or even Christian, and On Prayer, ascribed to St Neilos, is restored to Evagrios. In many cases, too, pseudonymity is acknowledged. This edition, projected to be in five volumes, is still incomplete.19 The story in France is very similar, save for one matter: while the story of the English Philokalia tells of the endeavours of Orthodox scholars and translators (just one assistant translator was Catholic at the time, though no longer), the French story begins with a selection presented by a Catholic, reminding us how much the movement of recourse to the Fathers—­ressourcement—­in France was primarily a Catholic movement, from which the Orthodox benefited (and maybe to some extent inspired).20 This short book, Petite Philocalie de la Prière de Cœur,

19  G.  E.  H.  Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, translated from the Greek and ed., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, vols. 1–4 (Faber & Faber, 1979–95); vol. 5 is still to appear. 20  See my article, ‘French Ressourcement Theology and Orthodoxy: A Living Mutual Relationship’. In Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul Murray (Oxford University Press, 2011).

264  Selected Essays, VOLUME II translated and introduced by Jean Gouillard,21 consists of brief selections from a wide range of writers from the Philokalia—­twenty-­one in all. Right from the beginning we sense a certain freedom, inspired by scholarly considerations: the chapters ascribed to St Antony are replaced by a selection from the Apophthegmata Patrum; Evagrios is represented by a selection from his On Prayer, ascribed in the Greek Philokalia to St Neilos; the selection from the Makarian Homilies abandons the Metaphrastic version reproduced by Nikodimos, and gives a selection from various more authentic collections, including the Coptic cycle, which aligns the saying of the Jesus Prayer to breathing; Barsanouphios and John, Isaac the Syrian, John of the Ladder are also included; and the treatises on the physical techniques are not missing. The title suggests a devotional anthology focusing on the prayer of the heart, and this is made unavoidable by the very brevity of the selections. The complete text of the Philokalia was published by the then dean of  the Institut St. Serge, Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, between 1979 and 1991 and was ­re-­edited in two volumes and presented by Olivier Clément in 1995.22 The story of translations and editions could go on, but let us leave it for now. What we have seen is a more complex story than we might have expected. It is not the story of the translation and edition of some editio princeps, rather it is the story of the spread and influence of a way of prayer and a way of life, represented by a group of texts that take different forms and themselves emerge from various collections about which we are as yet not well informed. There are certain features that characterize the ‘Philokalia’, in all its forms: the practice of the Jesus Prayer as a way of attaining the prayer of the heart is a constant, sometimes exclusively so, at other times as the heart of an approach to God that embraces a much wider range of texts than would be included under the term ‘devotional’; the sense that the hesychast controversy and the Palamite defence of the hesychasts was a determining event for Orthodox prayer, spirituality, and theology; a sense of a continuing tradition that can be traced back to the fourth century, at least, a tradition that one must call ‘patristic’; a sense of this tradition as a living tradition, passed on from generation to generation, and not simply a tradition of texts. What does all this add up to? How is one to characterize what we have called the ‘noetic’ influence of the Philokalia? The difficulty of identifying the ‘philokalic’ collection is not just a perhaps rather complex problem; rather it is intrinsic. The very freedom with which the various anthologies calling themselves the ‘Philokalia’ have been fashioned—­with a still somewhat fluctuating core, with various works added or overlooked for a variety of apparently contingent reasons, with a critical sense that varies from 21  Jean Gouillard, trans. and ed., Petite Philocalie de la Prière du Cœur, Documents spirituels 5 (Cahiers de Sud, 1953; later reissued as livre en poche in Collections Points Sagesse 20, 1979). 22  Père Boris Bobrinskoy, ed., Philocalie des Pères neptiques, 11 fascicules (Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1979–95); Olivier Clément, ed., and Jacques Touraille, trans. and notes, La Philocalie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1995).

The Influence of the Philokalia  265 the  minimal (though never altogether absent: even the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye, though primarily devotional, still has a sense of critical allegiance to the Greek manuscripts on which it is based) to a desire to present texts in the most up-­to-­ date critical form (as in the diaspora, and also with Fr Dumitru’s Romanian version)—points to the fact that the texts are not self-­sufficient but witness to a living (though sometimes only just living) tradition of prayer, understood as an ascetic and mystical exercise (‘the practice and contemplation of ethical philosophy’) by which, in synergy with the grace of the Holy Spirit, ‘the mind [intellect, or νοῦς] is purified, illuminated and brought to perfection’, as it is stated on the title page of the 1782 Greek edition. This tradition of personal prayer and asceticism that both presupposes the sacramental life of the Church (as St Nikodimos’ introduction makes clear) and makes possible a genuine engagement in that sacramental life of grace is what is fundamental. This means that we have to be aware, not just of the material succession of the various editions of the Philokalia, but of the living flow of the tradition of prayer throughout the ages (which the monastic life is intended to foster, but which is not restricted to the monastic order), if we are to appreciate the noetic influence of the Philokalia. We need, therefore, to pay attention, not just to movements of life and thought clearly associated with the textual tradition of the Philokalia, but also to movements anterior to, or even apparently independent of, that textual tradition. We need to pay attention to the movement centred on Optina Pustyn′ in nineteenth-­century Russia, the revival of philokalic piety in mid-­twentieth century Greece, with elders such as Joseph, Païssios, Porphyry, Aimilianos, the philokalic revival in Romania, associated with Fr Stăniloae’s translation, and the revival of monasteries in the early part of the twentieth century that endured persecution under the Communists, and other similarly obvious examples of the influence of the Philokalia. But we need to pay attention, too, to Sarov and St Seraphim, even though the saint’s spiritual roots go back before anything identifiably philokalic, to other movements of monastic renewal in eighteenth- and early-­nineteenth-­century Russia, which prepared the soil, as it were for the seeds of the Philokalia, to the movement of intellectual renewal associated with Solov′ev, Florensky, and Bulgakov—­and even with Dostoevsky—­ partly because of the importance for them of Optino, and partly for the role the tradition of prayer manifest in hermits and elders played in their understanding of the Christian life (think of Fr Florensky’s devotion to his starets, Isidore, or the role of hermits in Fr Bulgakov’s return to the faith). We might also think of St Nektarios of Aegina, even more evidently Fr Justin Popovich of Serbia, whose theology breathes an authentically philokalic spirit; and certainly of St Silouan of Mount Athos, his disciple Fr Sophrony, and his disciples.23

23  I owe some of these insights to Deseille’s La spiritualité orthodoxe.

266  Selected Essays, VOLUME II I want to conclude by suggesting, very tentatively, what might be meant by a philokalic style, or tenor, of theology. It was, it seems to me, likely that it was in response to his encounter with the Dobrotolubiye that the Slavophile, Ivan Kireevsky, came to speak of the Fathers as bearing ‘testimony as eyewitnesses’ and speaking of ‘a country they have been to’.24 A sense of the patristic tradition as our inheritance as Christians seems to me central to the Philokalia, and in several ways: objectively, there is a sense of who the Fathers are, and the inclusion of St Maximos and St Gregory Palamas, in particular, makes it clear that the great patristic witnesses revered by us Orthodox—­the great hierarchs and universal teachers, St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian and St John Chrysostom, St Athanasios and St Cyril of Alexandria, St Gregory of Nyssa, celebrated by the Church, together with St Maximos, in the latter part of January (with St Photios not far away)—are prominent in this their native land, but remembered alongside ascetics and mystics who live out the theology they proclaimed; but subjectively there is the sense of the Fathers as precisely our fathers (and in principle) m­others, those to whom we owe our faith, those who have nurtured us in the Faith. Furthermore, we participate in this tradition not just by learning (though learning is important, as St Nikodimos’ example makes clear), but by praying, by living out the theology we discern and proclaim. The Philokalia—­both as text and life—­ initiates us into a participation in the divine life, the divine energies, by—­as we have just heard—­a process of purification, illumination, and perfection. That terminology, that process, is also applied by the Fathers to the activation and practice of the spiritual senses, the ways in which we perceive by feeling, sensing, the movement of the Holy Spirit, in ourselves, in others, in the world. What we are seeing here is something that goes beyond reading and understanding, and is more like participation and assimilation. In Fr Sophrony’s book on St Silouan, there is a passage that tells of conversations a Roman Catholic priest visiting the Holy Mountain had with a learned monk of St Panteleimon. To his question about what the monks at the monastery read, the reply is a list of ‘philokalic’ fathers, and some modern Russian saints. The priest is astonished: ‘With us it’s only professors who do’. When the conversation is repeated to St Silouan, the saint replies he could have told the priest ‘that our monks not only read these books but could themselves write their like . . . But if these books were somehow or other to disappear, then the monks would write new ones’. St Silouan’s point is that the monks assimilate the books in their lives. Elsewhere, he speaks of the ‘taste’ by which the movements of the Spirit can be discerned, and how necessary it is to have a spiritual father who has acquired this taste: ‘He who has savoured the Holy Spirit recognizes the taste of grace’.25 24  See note 13, above. 25 Archimandite Sophrony (Sakharov), Saint Silouan the Athonite (Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, 1991), 72, 292; cf. 82–3, 301–2. I am grateful to my colleague, Dr Krastu Banev, for finding these references.

The Influence of the Philokalia  267 These thoughts recall the closing paragraph of the introductory letter of Fr Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: The indefinability of Orthodox ecclesiality, I repeat, is the best proof of its vitality . . . There is no concept of ecclesiality, but ecclesiality itself is, and for every living member of the Church, the life of the Church is the most definite and tangible thing that he knows. But the life of the Church is assimilated and known only through life—­not in the abstract, nor in a rational way. If one must nevertheless apply concepts to the life of the Church, the most appropriate concepts would be not juridical and archaeological ones but biological and aesthetic ones. What is ecclesiality? It is a new life, life in the Spirit. What is the criterion of the rightness of this life? Beauty. Yes, there is a special beauty of the spirit, and, ungraspable by logical formulas, it is at the same time the only true path to the definition of what is orthodox and what is not orthodox. The connoisseurs of this beauty are the spiritual elders, the startsy, the m ­ asters of the ‘art of arts’, as the holy fathers call asceticism. The startsy were adept at assessing the quality of the spiritual life. The Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper, is felt but it is not subject of arithmetical calculation. Orthodoxy is shown, not proved. That is why there is only one way to understanding Orthodoxy: through direct orthodox experience . . . [T]o become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way.26

There we find a succinct statement of the true philokalic tenor of theology; it is in tracing that that we trace the noetic influence of the Philokalia.

26  Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton Unversity Press, 1997), 8–9.

23 Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium It is not altogether bizarre that at the symposium this paper has been placed in ‘Experiencing Landscape’, rather than in the final session, ‘Experiencing Faith’, for it is crucial to understanding any experience of the Divine Liturgy to realize that it takes place in space and time: it belongs, in a way, to a landscape—­and also to the sequence of time. That might seem obvious, but a few moments’ reflection reveals, I think, that if obvious, its significance is easily overlooked. For many scholars, the Divine Liturgy is thought of as a text: where can I find the text, where is it published, what is the best edition, translation, and so on? That is despite the advice given long ago by Joan Hussey that to understand the Divine Liturgy you have to go and take part in it. There are further pathways to miscon­ ception. What is experience? For us, it is almost obvious that experience is pri­ marily individual: it is what happens to an individual, and what he or she makes of it. Even a corporate experience tends, I think, to be thought of as the sum of a lot of individual experiences: it is individuals, after all, we think, that have eyes and ears and other sense organs; a community, as such, does not. There are some experiences that seem to be more than the sum of the individual experiences: a football match, for example, or the experience of listening to, or, even better, tak­ ing part in a concert. Or perhaps watching a film, though DVDs and (for con­ certs) CDs seem to offer us the experience in a purely individual form—­and while, as we sometimes recognize, and usually lament, it is not the same thing, nonetheless many of us seem to spend a lot more time listening to CDs and watching DVDs than going to concerts or the cinema. I would go further and suggest that even the ways we think of space and time nowadays encourage an approach to experience as essentially individual. And it is with concepts of space and time that I want to start. This entails an approach to the liturgy that will pay most attention not to what you might have expected from this paper—­an account of the Divine Liturgy and how Byzantine Christians might have been expected to understand it (that has been done before, nowhere so well as by—­ now—­ Metropolitan Kallistos in a paper given to the Twentieth Spring Symposium in 1986)1—but to what one might think of as the frames of reference in terms of which Byzantine Christians interpreted their experience. I make no apology for 1  Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, ‘The Meaning of the Divine Liturgy for the Byzantine Worshipper’. In Church and People in Byzantium, ed. Rosemary Morris (Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 1990), 7–28.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0024

Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium  269 this, since, as I have just suggested, these frames of reference were very different for Byzantine Christians than for modern, even very traditional, Christians, even though the terminology and concepts are often deceptively similar. The question I start with—­how space and time were understood and experi­ enced—­is something that I dealt with at greater length than can be attempted here in a paper contributing to a symposium called ‘Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy’, to which I refer readers for more detail.2 However, quite briefly, I suggested then, and want to suggest now, that, despite the fact that much of the terminology used in classical and late antiquity and modern science and philosophy seems much the same—­space as a receptacle, for instance, or time as interval—­understandings of space and time then and now are very different. Modern notions of space and time are predominantly quantitative: they are ways of measuring. The theories of relativity, both special and general, com­ plicate what we might mean by measurement, but I don’t think they fundamen­ tally alter that aspect of space and time in the classical physics of Newton and Leibniz. Notions of space and time in classical and late antiquity are more to do with ways of being, or more precisely, of becoming. Plato, in the Timaeus, intro­ duces the ‘receptacle, or as it were nurse, of all becoming’.3 It is not just that in which things move, but that in which everything becomes. What takes place in the receptacle, which Plato will later identify with space,4 is much more than the movement of material, physical bodies, it is nothing less than the change and becoming of everything subject to such change and becoming. To be in space is, then, not just to be geometrically located, as it were, but to belong to the realm of change and becoming: the hypodoche is certainly a receptacle, but that means more than a container, something to put things in—­rather, it means that which receives, provides room for, everything that constitutes the cosmos, the product of reason and necessity. Nor is the cosmos something for Plato that can be con­ sidered in purely material terms. Before he comes to speak of the receptacle of becoming, he describes the cosmos as a living being, having soul at the centre, with body wrapped round the outside, as it were, of soul (Plato clearly has in mind something like an armillary sphere)—it is for this reason that the cosmos and a human being can be seen as mutually reflecting one another, humankind being, in the coinage of the Renaissance, a microcosm, a little cosmos, micros kosmos, an idea frequently found in the Fathers. Even a quick glance at the Timaeus reveals that the cosmos as a living being is not some sort of primæval being, but is already instinct with principles of reason and proportion. Plato explains at some

2  A.  Louth, ‘Space, Time and the Liturgy’. In Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009), 215–31 (also published as ‘Space, Time, and the Liturgy’, Chapter 19 in this volume). 3 Plato, Timaeus, 49a, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Penguin, 1965). 4  Chora; Plato, Tim. 52a.

270  Selected Essays, VOLUME II length how soul contains within itself complex and beautiful mathematical structures, and as he goes on to discuss what it is that is formed within the receptacle of becoming, we find a discussion that embraces everything that comes into being from the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, and how on this foundation we find the principles of pleasure and pain, tastes, odours, sounds, colours, and beyond that the emotional structure of the soul—­its capacity for being aroused, ultimately to anger, and for experiencing desire and longing (its incensive or spir­ ited and its desiring or appetitive powers). The kinds of becoming envisaged within the receptacle of becoming go well beyond the movement of physical par­ ticles, and include what is perceived by the senses and the very process of sensa­ tion, the experience of pleasure and pain, and the complex reality of the soulful experience (to avoid the debased meaning attached to ‘psychic’ or ‘psychological’) of mortal beings. Another term Plato uses to characterize space is diastema, interval or distance, but again we find that this means not just measurable distance, but any distance or extension, including the capacity to move in an argument, say, from premises to a conclusion, or the ‘distance’ implicit in the notion of desire for something. The notion of multitude or the manifold is implicit in the realm of becoming and diastema is implicit in this. It is not so much a physical concept, as a metaphysical one. The notion of interval applies to time as well, but again does so in a multi­ tude of ways. It certainly includes the time through which the sequence of the seasons passes, the succession of years, the movement from day to night and night to day, but it includes other experiences of time: the time through which human beings pass from birth, through infancy and childhood, to maturity, and then on to death; the time through which our ideas, thoughts, feelings, relation­ ships pass. These different modes of time all relate one to another, but it would be quite wrong to think that the ticking of the clock, as it were, or the vibration of a quartz crystal, is the proper meaning of time, in comparison with which psycho­ logical time, for example, has only metaphorical significance. And even if it is true—­as it is—­that ‘cosmic’ time has some fundamental significance, as em­bra­ cing and including all other experiences of time, then it needs to be remembered that for Plato the ‘cosmos’ is more than a merely material reality, but a ‘living being with soul and intelligence’—zoon empsychon ennoun.5 The centrality of the notion of diastema to ancient understanding of space and time has a further important consequence we should note. It does not mean that space and time are full of ‘gaps’, gulfs of unmeaning, as it were, dooming the world of becoming to ultimate meaninglessness. Even for Plato, for whom there can be no logos of anything in the realm of becoming,6 the truth is quite the contrary: the cosmos, existing in space, and time itself are creations of the gods; they have 5 Plato, Tim. 30b.

6 Plato, Tim. 29d.

Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium  271 meaning that is revealed in their structures, constituted by relationship. Time is for Plato ‘a moving image of eternity’:7 it is ordered towards eternity; within the realm of becoming it represents eternity as its image. The sequence of time is not meaningless, though for Plato it is cyclic: it is a ‘vulgar error’, though popular among some theologians, that cyclical time spells meaninglessness, in contrast with the purposeful nature of linear time, it is ordered towards eternity. Such an understanding of space and time opens up wholly new dimensions in which to grasp what is meant by experiencing the Liturgy. Let us start with time. The Divine Liturgy—­indeed, all the liturgical services that developed in the early Byzantine period—­takes place in time, indeed takes time, quite a bit of it! However, it does not do this randomly. From as early as we have evidence, the Christian Church adopted the Jewish system of a week of seven days, and rad­ic­ al­ly transformed this by making the first day of the week, the day of the Sun, in the Roman system, the day of the Resurrection: the turning point of the week, the first and eighth day. Again, as early as we have evidence, the Christians adopted the Jewish Passover, or Pascha, and made it into the Christian Pascha, the yearly commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ. Furthermore, the timing of the Christian Pascha—­the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox—­aligns Pascha with the creation of the world, which must have been, the ancients thought, in spring, and with the date on which the Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary the birth of Christ, 25 March. These dates were aligned, calendrically, in different ways, but the aim of aligning creation and the two key points in recreation in Christ—­his conception and his Resurrection—­is clear. Celebrating the Divine Liturgy on the first day of the week—­a practice for which the evidence is as early as we have evidence—­makes the celebration of the Divine Liturgy a kind of echo of creation and recreation in Christ. Time is no meaningless succession of events, but a cyclic recourse to sources of life and new life, a constant journey of hope, a movement towards the fulfilment of the hope founded in the Resurrection of the incarnate Word, the Word of God who created the world. The yearly celebration of Pascha and the weekly celebration of the Day of the Resurrection provide the basis for the Christian Byzantine experience of time. On this basis an elaborate structure came to be built, to which was added a cycle of feasts associated with the celebration of the Birth of Christ: by early in the fifth century, feasts on 25 December and 6 January had been distinguished, in different ways in the East and West, and other feasts related to the infancy of Christ and his mother gradually emerged—­as well as yearly commemorations of a host of saints. Days of fasting became established—­fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays is mentioned in the Didache8—and periods of fasting before various major feasts also were established, beginning with a forty-­day fast (variously 7 Plato, Tim. 37d: eiko . . . kineton tina aionos. 8  Didache 8.1, trans. A. Milavec (Liturgical Press, 2004).

272  Selected Essays, VOLUME II calculated) before Easter. The celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and of the events and people commemorated, lent a shape and a purpose to the sequence of time. There is nothing new in this: many ancient cultures give shape to time by li­tur­ gic­al celebrations, but it was true, too, for Byzantine Christians—­this was how time was shaped for them, how they experienced time. It is not at all an individual experience of time; time has this shape through the liturgical celebration, regard­ less of how individuals relate to it. Individuals do not create it, they simply recog­ nize it, take it into their experience. The Divine Liturgy also takes place in space: in a place. We know very little about what kind of space the early Christians used to celebrate the liturgy together. Romantic suggestions about underground catacombs or large rooms in the houses of the better-­off are little more than that: romantic suggestions. There is little evidence from the period of persecution, though the Christian church at Dura Europos suggests that for Christians the church was created as a special place and care was devoted to its decoration. From the time of the peace of the Church, churches—­basilicas—­came to be built. There is a magnificent early example of the meaning that was invested in such a building in the homily Eusebios, the church historian, gave at the dedication of the basilica at Tyre in about 316, which he included in the tenth book of his Church History.9 Already as early as this—­barely half a decade after the peace of the Church—­the meaning of the church building is freighted with symbolic significance. One element in the construction of such a Christian church was orientation—­literally: Christian churches were built facing east, for Christians had—­again for as long as we have any evidence—­adopted the custom of facing east to pray (it is mentioned in virtu­ ally all the early commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer), in contrast to the Jews, who prayed facing Jerusalem (and later the Muslims who, after following the Jews, eventually adopted the practice of praying facing Mecca). St Basil the Great com­ ments on this practice: For this reason we all look towards the East in our prayers, though there are few who know that it is because we are in search of our ancient fatherland, Paradise, which God planted towards the East. We fulfil our prayers standing upright on the first day of the week, but not all know the reason for this.10

Basil’s comment is striking. We face east to pray, we stand upright for prayer on the first day of the week—­but not everyone knows why we do this! So these ges­ tures are precisely not individual gestures expressing some individual intention, they are corporate gestures that we adopt, whether we understand them or not. 9 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 10. 4. 2–72, trans. G. A. Williamson (Penguin, 1989). 10  Basil the Great, De Spiritu sancto 66, ed. B. Pruche, Sources Chrétiennes 17bis (Éditions de Cerf, 1968), 484.

Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium  273 Or rather, as Basil goes on to suggest: these gestures have a meaning that we discover, into which we enter—­a meaning, moreover, that is in principle indefinable or inexhaustible. These gestures and practices are ways of participating in the meaning the Christian community gives to its relationship to God. It is not just that the symbolic significance is complex and needs to be learnt; it is also that the symbolic significance of our religious acts is capable of development in response to deeper and deeper understanding of what we participate in through our reli­ gious acts and gestures. The church building, the naos, or temple, was the place where the liturgy was experienced. As the centuries passed, the way in which the church fulfilled this role developed. First of all, in the early centuries (and, I would argue, even later, though not so generally), the church building was not where you gathered for the liturgy, but the destination of a procession, which culminated in the liturgy. The experience of Christians was not simply gathering in a place, but taking part in a procession.11 Processions involve lots of people: there is order and structure and a lot of confusion. Somewhere in the procession—­usually at the front—­there is an ordered group, carrying banners, candles, burning incense, and followed by ­singers and the clergy; alongside and behind this procession there are lots of ­people following, and people standing around watching. All of these people are taking part. It is not very likely that such processions took place very often during the period of persecution, but they seem to have become an important feature of liturgical celebration from the fourth century onwards; they are called stational liturgies (the terminology for which goes back to the second century).12 How long these processions continued is difficult to say; liturgical evidence is notori­ ously difficult to evaluate. My impression is that processions continued, though normal Sunday worship perhaps sooner rather than later became a matter of ­people gathering together in a church to worship. Processions are pre-­eminently a corporate experience; but they are also going somewhere, and the immediate sense of going to a particular place with the bishop to celebrate the Divine Liturgy provides a template, as it were, for other experiences: the experience of proceed­ ing through one’s life, the experience of journey with and in the Church to greet Christ when he comes again at the Second Coming, at the Parousia. Fragments of these journeys remain in the Byzantine liturgy as it is still celebrated—­notably the antiphons or psalms at the beginning of the Liturgy. But processions remained an important part of Byzantine religious experience, though how closely associated with the liturgy it is hard to say. One example for which we have abundant evidence is processions: On Ceremonies, the treatise issued under the name of Constantine 11  For a recent discussion of religious processions in Byzantium, see Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.680–850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 620–2. 12  On these stational liturgies, see J. F. Baldovan SJ, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Pontificium institutum studiorum orientalium, 1987).

274  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Porphyrogennitos, gives instructions for various processions that took place in the course of the Church’s year in Constantinople, notably the procession from the Vlachernai Palace to the Church of Hagia Sophia on the first Sunday of Lent, the feast of Orthodoxy, in connection with the celebration of the victory over Iconoclasm;13 there were other processions with the icon of the Mother of God in Constantinople, accompanied by the singing of the Akathist hymn (note that akáthistos means, not simply ‘standing’, but ‘not sitting’—it could well describe people walking in procession).14 Eventually the arrival at the church became, not part of a public procession, but the result of an individual journey. Nonetheless, one entered the church, a building orientated towards the east, the ‘place of our ancient fatherland’, as St Basil put it, but also the place of the rising of the sun, a symbol of the dawning of a new day, which came to be taken up in Christian symbolism as foreshadowing the second coming of Christ, from the east, the rising of the Sun of Righteousness. The church itself came to be interpreted as a microcosm, a little reflection of the cosmos, which was expressed in terms of its representing heaven and earth as God created them, with the suggestion that the celebration of the liturgy within the microcosm of the Church was effective for the life of the oikoumene, the whole inhabited world, or indeed the whole cosmos. We shall come to that later; but first, what happened in church, and how did Byzantine Christians experience this? Within the church there was movement, sound, and light. The movement within the church embraced both the movement of the clergy—­from within the sanctuary out into the nave (naos) and back again—­and also the movement of the flames from the burning lights—­of oil lamps and candles—­as well as the move­ ment upwards of the smoke of the incense. The deacons, who moved most fre­ quently between the sanctuary and the nave, wore (and wear) freely hanging stoles (oraria), a symbol of the freedom with which they move, like the angels, between the people and the presence of God, carrying the people’s petitions to God and bringing to the people God’s blessing, above all, when the deacon brings out to the people the holy gifts.15 The upward movement of the incense recalls the verse of the psalm: ‘Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as incense’,16 which is chanted at Vespers during the censing of the church. These movements create a circular rhythm: proceeding forth from the presence of God among the people, and returning bearing their prayers and hopes and longings. This movement was also interpreted by the singing of the choir or the people, but we know very little 13  Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos, De ceremoniis I. 37 (28), ed. A. Vogt, Collection Byzantine (Société d’édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1935), 144–8. 14  See the icon of the Akathist in Maria Vassilaki, ed., The Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Skira, 2000), reproduced on p. 381, with detail of the procession on p. 384. 15  See Theodore of Mopsuestia, Hom. 15. 23; Raymond Tonneau OP and Robert Devreesse, ed., Les homélies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsuestia, Studi e Testi 145 (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1949), 501. 16  Ps. 140:2.

Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium  275 about this, save that it was unaccompanied by instrumental music of any kind. The singing, however, was interpreted as echoing the eternal song of the heavenly beings. St John Chrysostom tells his congregation at one point: ‘Think beside whom you stand, with whom you are about to call on God—­with the cherubim’;17 the words of Chrysostom and other Fathers eventually fed into the cherubic hymn sung as the holy gifts are brought in procession to the altar.18 We have seen a little of the significance attached to light—­the moving light of the burning flames—­and perhaps we should note that lamps also formed part of the private devotion of the Byzantine Christian. There is, however, another sort of light that was drawn on to express the significance of what took place within the church. As already remarked, Byzantine churches were orientated: they faced east. In this they gave monumental expression to the practice of the early Christians, attested from the beginning of the third century at least, of praying facing east.19 More precisely, churches came to be orientated to face the point on the horizon where the sun would rise on the feast day of the church. Although at the beginning Byzantine churches were places flooded with light (such certainly seems to have been the case with the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, as is evident from Prokopios’ Buildings and Paul the Silentiary’s Ekphrasis), later on churches were much darker places, with few places where light could enter from outside. There were two principal exceptions to this: the windows in the low parapet that supported the central dome of the church, and the great doors at the west of the church that could be opened to let light in. It has been argued,20 that churches in the Byzantine world were constructed to take greatest advantage of these inlets of light. The sills of the windows beneath the dome were angled and polished so that the horizontal light of dawn was reflected up onto the figure of Christ the Ruler of the Universe, Pantokrator, in the dome, creating an impression of the figure of Christ, bathed in light, seeming to hover over the darkened church during the dawn office (orthros, matins) of the feast of the dedication (on other days in the year the effect would still be produced, though less dramatically). On the evening before, at Great Vespers of the feast, the light flooding in through the opened west doors would shine directly onto the holy doors at the entrance to the sanctuary (eventually, the central doors in the iconostasis), as they were opened for the procession of incense and lights at the little entrance, before the singing of the hymn, Phos ilaron, ‘Joyful Light’. This use of 17  John Chrysostom, Hom. 4.408–9, in A.-M. Malingrey, ed., Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu, SC 28bis (Éditions de Cerf, 1970), 260. 18  See Robert F. Taft SJ, The Great Entrance, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200 (Pontifcium institu­ tum studiorum orientalium, 19782), 64–5. 19 See, e.g., Origen, On Prayer 32, ed. and trans. J.  J.  O’Meara, Ancient Christian Writers 19 (Newman Press, 1954), 136–7. 20 Recently, and in great detail, by Iakovos Potamianos in his To Phos sti Byzantini Ekklisia (University Studio Press, 2000), which covers a great deal of ground—­philosophy of light, astronomy, measurement of time, as well as the construction of Byzantine churches.

276  Selected Essays, VOLUME II natural light would have enhanced immensely the symbolism of the church as microcosm. Furthermore, light itself had an enormously developed symbolism drawn both from the Scriptures, in which light is the first creature21 and light symbolism is frequent in relation to the coming into the world of the Incarnate God, and from Neoplatonism, where light symbolism was also important: the light radiating from the sun onto the earth was the principal symbol of the light of God radiating on humans and the cosmos.22 In this way, the church building itself came to be the focus for symbolic imagery, and seen as a little cosmos, its internal structure reflecting the structure of the cosmos. The microcosmic function of the church was interpreted in two (in principle, contradictory) ways. One of these symbolic structures, expounded, for example, in the Mystagogia of St Maximos the Confessor, takes the division between the sanctuary and the nave to reflect the division in the cosmos between heaven and earth: Maximos’ account preserves something of the sense of the church as the destination of a procession (which still evidently took place in his day), ending up within, or on the threshold of, the heavenly courts and the wor­ ship of the angels.23 According to the other symbolic representation, it is a hori­ zontal division with the dome above, with its depiction of Christ Pantokrator, gazing down from heaven, and the nave, the lower part of the building, where the church on earth is assembled; between are depicted ranks of angels, prophets, and saints. In either case there are two ways in which such symbolism can be inter­ preted, associated by liturgical scholars with the great Mediterranean cities of Antioch and Alexandria. Just as in Christology it used to be fashionable to oppose the approaches of Antioch and Alexandria, and also in matters of biblical in­ter­pret­ ation to contrast a literalist Antiochene approach with an allegorical Alexandrian one, so interpretations of liturgical symbolism are dubbed ‘Antiochene’ and ‘Alexandrian’. St Germanos of Constantinople’s vastly influential commentary on the Divine Liturgy (Ekklesiastike historia kai mystike theoria—­best translated, I think, as ‘What happens in church and its hidden meaning’) is said to reflect these two approaches in the first two paragraphs which read: The church is the temple of God, a holy place, a house of prayer, the assembly of the people, the body of Christ [this is meant to be ‘Antiochene’] . . . The church is

21  Genesis 1:3. 22 For some account of the variety of ways in which light symbolism was interpreted in the Byzantine world, see A. Louth, ‘Light, Vision and Religions Experience in Byzantium’. In The Presence of Light. Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85–103. See also Claire Nesbitt, ‘Shaping the Sacred: Light and the Experience of Worship in Middle Byzantine Churches’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 36:2 (2012), 139–60. I am grate­ ful to Dr Nesbitt for sight of this fascinating paper, but it came too late to incorporate into my own article. 23 Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogia 2–3, cf. 8–9; ed. C.  Boudignon, Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca 69 (Brepols, 2011), lines 207–63, 600–40.

Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium  277 an earthly heaven in which the God beyond the heavens dwells and walks about [and this the ‘Alexandrian’] . . .24

A better way of thinking about these two ways of interpreting the liturgical action, I would suggest, is to think of one (the so-­called ‘Antiochene’) as relating the li­tur­ gic­al action to its geographical context in the Jerusalem Temple and the life of Christ, and the other (the so-­called ‘Alexandrian’) as relating the liturgical action directly to the heavenly action that it represents. There is no contradiction between these two approaches to understanding the liturgical action; they reflect more immediately than traditions of interpretation associated with Antioch and Alexandria what one might call a kind of theological triangulation where what happens in any church wherever it may be situated is related, on the one hand, to the events that took place in Jerusalem (and also the worship that took place in the Temple, conceived as archetypal), and on the other, to the worship of the heavenly courts. The two approaches are not at all contradictory, and the various ways in which they might be seen to intersect nourished the experience that the Byzantine Christian had through participation in the services of the Church and especially of the Divine Liturgy. What I have suggested here is only a variety of ways of attempting to enter into the way in which Byzantine Christians experienced the Divine Liturgy. All of them—­their understanding of space and time, that they brought to their in­ter­ pret­ation of their experience, and the ways in which they structured the space of the church and the temporal rhythms of the day, the week, and the year, as well as what took place in the church building itself—­are patient of almost endless reflec­ tion and consideration. I hope this paper has offered some principles that can enable us to enter to some degree into the liturgical experience of Byzantine Christians.

24 St Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, ed. and trans. by Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 56.

24 Theology of the ‘In-­Between’ All religious systems—­and many philosophical systems—­are concerned with relating the world that we know to some other realm—­the realm of the gods, or God himself, or maybe with a state that transcends this world and our experience of it: something like this I take the Buddhist notion of nirvana to be. The nature of this world is easily recognizable: it is characterized by death, corruption or decay, and instability, sometimes in moral terms by sin. The nature of the other world is often just the mirror image of this: it is free from death, corruption and decay, and also from sin and its effects. A famous example of this is found in Plato’s Phaedo, where at one point Socrates says: Would you say then, Cebes, that the result of our whole discussion amounts to this: on the one hand we have that which is divine, immortal, indestructible, of a single form, accessible to thought, even constant and abiding true to itself; and the soul is very like that: on the other hand we have that which is human, mortal, destructible, of many forms, inaccessible to thought, never constant nor abiding true to itself; and the body is very like that?1

This introduces several other elements into the contrast: the One opposed to the many, that which can be understood and that which is too unstable to be understood, the spiritual (soul) opposed to the material (body); furthermore there is the notion, implicit in this, that the human stands on the frontier between these two worlds, belonging to both, and therefore capable of relating them in some way. Once one starts to work with this idea of two realms, one to which we belong, one to which we aspire, one inevitably becomes concerned with what it is that relates these two worlds, with what I call the ‘in-­between’: μεταξύ. Plato indeed uses this very term, τὰ μεταξύ, the things in-­between. Aristotle tells us that τὰ μαθηματικά, the concepts below the Forms in the simile of the divided line in the Republic, were called τὰ μεταξύ by Plato (Met. 987b14–18). In the Symposium, we learn from Diotima that ‘everything daimonic [δαιμόνιον] is between (μεταξύ) the divine and the mortal’ (Symp. 202E). Diotima goes on to explain the power of the daimons as:

1 Plato, Phaedo 80AB; R. Hackforth, trans., Plato’s Phaedo (Cambridge University Press, 1972), 84.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0025

Theology of the ‘ In-Between ’   279 Interpreting and conveying human things to the gods and divine things to humans; petitions and sacrifices from below, commands and responses from above; being in the middle it complements both, so that the whole is bound together. Through [the daimons] all divination passes, and the whole craft of priesthood concerning sacrifice and rites and incantations and all interpretation of oracles and magic. God does not mingle with the human, but through the daimons all conversation and communication from the gods to humans, or from humans to the gods, takes place, whether waking or sleeping. (Symp. 202E–203A)

The mathematicals (numbers, geometrical figures) are ‘between’ the world of the senses and the world of the Forms, because they apply to the sensible world, where we discern numbers and shapes, but partake of the realm of the Forms, because they are concerned with real knowledge, ἐπιστήμη. The daimons are presented as intermediary brings between gods and humans, spiritual but capable of change. Later Platonism—­Philo, Plotinos, and the Neoplatonists—­has a developed interest in the realm ‘in-­between’. It would, however, take us too far from our main interest to pursue that now, at least directly, but it would, I think, be useful to look at some of the analogies used by the Neoplatonists to relate this world to that, the many to the One. For the Neoplatonists, everything proceeds from the One and seeks to return, in a circular process of rest or remaining (μονή)–procession (πρόοδος)–return (ἐπιστροφή). In general terms, this understanding of how everything derives from the One is usually called emanationism. It is often misconceived, and given a rather materialist interpretation, as if it meant that everything derived its being from the one by some kind of flow, that then reverted. In fact the analogy of flowing from a source was not one that the Neoplatonists made much use of, rather they made use of what are fundamentally mathematical analogies. These analogies find an echo in the Christian Fathers, and I want to illustrate these ideas, not from the Neoplatonists themselves, but from the Fathers of the Church, as they are our principal concern. What needs to be illustrated by these analogies is how everything that is is derived from the One, without in any way compromising the oneness of the One. So the One cannot be diminished by emanation (so, for example, we must not think in terms of something flowing from the One, and depleting it, as it were), nor can the One be thought of as one among many. The most popular analogies for rest–­procession–­return are geometrical. There is the analogy of the centre of the circle, from which emerge the radii, which join the centre of the circle to the circumference. It is an analogy we find in Maximos. In the first chapter of the Mystagogia, he had compared the Church to God, as his image, because it embraces and gathers all together. Speaking of Christ, he continues,

280  Selected Essays, VOLUME II It is he who encloses in himself all beings by the one, simple, and infinitely wise power of his goodness. As the centre of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by the one, simple and single cause and power the origins of beings to become disjoined at their limit but rather circumscribes their extension in a circle and leads back to himself the distinctive elements of being brought into being by him.2

Christ, then, is seen as the centre of a circle, with the radii of the circle communicating with the ever-­widening circumference of the circle, and not only doing that, but preserving it as the circumference of a circle and so related to the centre that defines it. Another circular image is found in Dionysios the Areopagite. As he begins his account of the ‘Mystery of the Synaxis, or Communion’, he tells of the hierarch, or bishop, standing at the altar, praying, and then coming out from the altar and going round the church censing it. He interprets this circular movement of censing thus: The thearchic blessedness transcending all goes forth into communion with the sacred beings who participate in him, never coming outside his essentially unmoved stability and establishment, but illuminating in measure all godlike beings around him, while really remaining quite unmoved from his own sameness.3

Dionysios seems to be envisaging a circle, going out from a point and returning, the circle reaching out to manifold reality (though the language sometimes suggests a circle moving out to its circumference). All of these images see the source, at rest in oneness and stillness, relating by some process of movement to the realm of all things, held to the centre, and to their integrity, by the attention of the One. It is a powerful image, and its power resides, not just in its metaphysical adequacy, but also in the ontological significance it lends to the movement of the Divine Liturgy, as well as to the sense of contemplation as being our way of responding to the attention of the One. In this relationship, there is movement across the realm of the ‘in-­between’. In Christian theology, all this is complicated by the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Instead of seeing beings related to their origin by a kind of steady dim­in­ ution of being, being itself is related by creation directly to God the Creator. There is nothing between God and creatures, no intervening being, beneath the Creator 2  Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogia 1; ed. C. Boudignon, Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca 69 (Brepols, 2011) 69, ll. 187–93; translated in Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, trans. G.C. Berthold (SPCK, 1985), 187, modified. 3  Dionysios the Areopagite, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3. 2. 3; ed. Günther Heil, Patristische Texte und Studien 36 (Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 82. 17–21.

Theology of the ‘ In-Between ’   281 but transcending the creatures. It is this perception, it is often maintained, that lies at the heart of the so-­called Arian controversy. Though the historical story may be more complicated, it was recognition of the radical implications of the doctrine of creation out of nothing—­ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων, ex nihilo—­that provoked the Arian crisis, both Arius and Athanasius agreeing on the radical implications of this doctrine, but drawing different conclusions: Arius preserving a hierarchy within the created order, with the Logos at its pinnacle, Athanasius, quite rad­ic­ al­ly, rejecting any notion of hierarchy within the created order, seeing the Logos as uncreated, ὁμοούσιος with the Father. It seems to me, however, that the radical implications of the doctrine of cre­ ation ex nihilo have been interpreted in a variety of ways, and that is because the doctrine of creation out of nothing, while it solves definitively one question, gives rise to others. The problem that it solves concerns the nature of God’s relation to the cosmos. The implication of the doctrine of creation out of nothing is that God and creatures are radically incommensurable. As St Gregory Palamas put it, in the fourteenth century, ‘[God] is not a being, if the others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not beings’.4 There is no ‘great chain of being’ with God at the top and creatures arranged hierarchically beneath him: God is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, as Plato put it, ὑπὲρ τῶν ὄντων, in the expression popularized by Dionysios the Areopagite. Nonetheless, it is hardly the case that Christian theologians, after Arius, see the creatures of the cosmos as radically on a level, in virtue of creation out of nothing. Athanasius may hold to that, but later supporters of Nicaea are not so clear. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, explicitly maintains that ‘the supreme division of all beings is that between what is perceived by the intellect and what is perceived by the senses’:5 the Platonic division between the spiritual or intellectual and the material or sensible is still important for Gregory. Nevertheless, the division between uncreated and created is fundamental for him, indeed Gregory is one who explored more deeply than many what this might entail, so when he calls the division between the intellectual and sensible ‘supreme’, ἀνωτάτω, we should interpret him as meaning that the divide between uncreated and created is not between entities that can be classed together as ‘beings’: it is between ‘beings’ and God, who is beyond being. Nonetheless, Gregory is keen to incorporate the Platonic hierarchy into his Christian metaphysics based on creation out of nothing: the ascent into the intellectual is in some way a drawing nearer to God, though in no unambiguous manner. A more serious apparent consequence of the doctrine of creation out of nothing is that it seems to create an impassable gulf between God and the created order: they have nothing in common, so God is utterly unknowable (it is this that 4  Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, 78; ed. and trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz; Studies and Texts 83 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 173. 5  Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I. 270; ed. W. Jaeger, GNO 1 (Brill, 1960), 105, 19–20.

282  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Gregory explores in his various works). Does this leave the created order bereft of God? And if not, how is God present to it? This problem of the status of the created order was raised in correspondence between Philip Sherrard and Metropolitan John Zizioulas, in response to an article by Metropolitan John in 1982 in Synaxis, and published in later issues of Synaxis. One fundamental issue raised by Sherrard was that Metropolitan John’s exposition of the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing seemed to entail an understanding of creation cut off from God. For Sherrard, as he makes clear in other places, it was precisely this entailment of a creation bereft of God that had led to the ecological crisis we have brought upon ourselves. Metropolitan John’s presentation of the meaning of the doctrine of creation is very much that of his mentor, Fr Georges Florovsky, for whom the doctrine of creation out of nothing is fundamental. He saw it as a perception fundamental to Christian Orthodoxy as it took shape in the fourth and fifth century. He often discusses this doctrine in connection with St Athanasios, for whom the doctrine was indeed fundamental in his opposition to Arianism, as I have already suggested; in one of his later articles—­a paper given at the Third International Patristics Conference in 1959, and published in 1962—he professedly discusses the doctrine of creation out of nothing in relation to the Alexandrian saint. He finds the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in Athanasios at the beginning, even before the Arian controversy, in his work On the Incarnation. Here he finds a vision of an ‘ultimate and radical cleavage or hiatus between the absolute being of God and the contingent existence of the World’: the Being of God eternal and immutable, beyond death and corruption, while the created order is intrinsically mutable, marked by death, change, and corruption. The whole creation is only held in being at all by the Word of God, who binds it together and provides coherence. The Word of God, being truly God, is absolutely transcendent over the world, but it is present to and active in the world by its ‘powers’. So Florovsky summarizes that ‘[t]he world owes its very existence to God’s sovereign will and goodness and stands, over the abyss of its own nothingness and impotence, solely by His quickening “Grace”—as it were, sola gratia. But the Grace abides in the world.’6 What is striking about this mature presentation by Florovsky of his thought on creation is his emphasis on the way in which it is through the Word that creation comes into being and is sustained in being—­the Word being present to and active in the created order by his powers: it is the Word, who became incarnate, who is at the centre of Athanasios’ vision, as Florovsky expounds it. Earlier on, Florovsky had discussed in much greater detail his understanding of creation in an article, ‘Creation and Creaturehood’, originally published in 1928. Early on in the article, he notes that the notion of creation out of nothing 6  G. Florovsky, ‘St Athanasius’ Concept of Creation’, Aspects of Church History (Nordland, 1975), 39–62, 283–5 (nn.); here 51.

Theology of the ‘ In-Between ’   283 was unknown, and indeed incomprehensible, to classical philosophy; it is a doctrine that grew out of reflection on the biblical witness to God and the world (even though the doctrine is hardly expressed explicitly in the Scriptures themselves). It means that the universe, the world, might not have existed: it is contingent, it is not self-­sufficient. It is also radically new: In creation something absolutely new, an extra-­divine reality is posited and built up. It is precisely in this that the supremely great and incomprehensible miracle of creation consists—­that an ‘other’ springs up, that heterogeneous drops of cre­ ation exist side by side with ‘the illimitable and infinite Ocean of being’, as St Gregory of Nazianzus says of God.7

There is then an absolute contrast between the uncreated God and creation out of nothing. Florovsky illustrates this fundamental antinomy of creation in a vivid image drawn from a sermon by St Philaret, the great Metropolitan of Moscow in the nineteenth century: ‘the creative Word is like an adamantine bridge, upon which creatures stand balanced beneath the abyss of divine infinitude, and above that of their own nothingness’.8 This new thing, creation, is manifested in creaturely freedom, which is more than simply the possibility of choice, but as it were enacts the fundamental choice faced by creatures, poised on Philaret’s adamantine bridge, between the infinity of God and the infinity of nothingness. There is, as Florovsky puts it, the ‘possibility of metaphysical suicide’—not self-­annihilation, however, for creation is God’s gift and is indestructible. Creaturely freedom is but a reflection of the Divine freedom with which the world was created, a divine freedom difficult to conceive, and easily compromised, as Florovsky maintains was the case with Origen, for whom God, as Pantokrator, needed the universe, ta panta, over which to rule. Not so, for the Fathers and Florovsky: God creates the world in radical freedom. In his later article, Florovsky quotes with approval a remark of Gilson’s: ‘it is quite true that a Creator is an eminently Christian God, but a God whose very existence it is to be a creator is not a Christian God at all’.9 It is to God that the created order, through the human, who is a little cosmos, a microcosm, has to respond with its own freedom. It is through responding to God’s presence in creation in his energies that creation moves towards its goal, which is deification, union with God. Fr Georges Florovsky—­and following him, Met. John Zizioulas—­sees the ­infinite gulf between Creator and creation bridged by God’s creative Word, and this bridging is manifest in powers, δύναμεις, that abide in the created order. 7  G.  Florovsky, ‘Creation and Creaturehood’, Creation and Redemption (Nordland, 1976), 43–78, 269–79 (nn.); here 46. 8  Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, Izbrannye Trudy Pis´ma Vospominaniya (Moscow, 2003), 268; my own translation. Florovsky quotes it in Florovsky, ‘Creation and Creaturehood’, 45. 9  Florovsky, ‘St Athanasius’ Concept of Creation’, 41.

284  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Florovsky reaches back to Athanasios, and finds there the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and the energies (or activities) through which he is known, which was raised to a dogmatic principle by St Gregory Palamas in the hesychast controversy; the distinction that for Palamas reconciles an experiential knowledge of God with his unknowability serves for them to reach across the gulf that exists between God and creatures drawn into being by his will out of nothing. (It is interesting to note that Zizioulas does not follow his mentor, Florovsky, here, and makes little use of the distinction between essence and energies in God.10) Florovsky insists that this means that ‘Grace abides in the world’. It was precisely this conviction that creation is graced, and not godless, that was the inspiration behind Fr Sergei Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, his sophiology, and it is not difficult to see Florovsky’s movement of thought in both the articles mentioned as directed against Bulgakov. Florovsky does this in a positive vein: by providing the desired reconciliation of God and the cosmos by a route that is, to his mind, perfectly Orthodox, and does not require recourse to the doctrine of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. We need to notice two things about Florovsky’s approach. First of all, his cit­ ation of St Philaret’s comparison of the creative Word to an adamantine bridge on which creatures stand poised between the infinity of God and the infinity of their own nothingness. The Word of God makes possible an ‘in-­between’, poised between two infinities, one infinitely full, the other infinitely empty. It is precisely this sense of an ‘in-­between’, that both separates and unites, that is the central inspiration of Bulgakov’s sophiology. It is, I think, most compellingly expressed in his account of his experience in the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then a mosque, in January 1923, at the very beginning of his exile from Russia. In an account of this experience in his Autobiographical Sketches, he spoke of the sense of light and ‘inner transparency’, in which the soul discovers its freedom, and continues: This is indeed Sophia, the real unity of the world in the Logos, the co-­inherence of all with all, the world of divine ideas, κόσμος νοητός. It is Plato baptized by the Hellenic genius of Byzantium—­it is his world, his lofty realm to which souls ascend for the contemplation of Ideas. The pagan Sophia of Plato beholds herself mirrored in the Christian Sophia, the divine Wisdom. Truly, the church of Hagia Sophia is the artistic, tangible proof and manifestation of Hagia Sophia—­of the Sophianic nature of the world and the cosmic nature of Sophia. It is neither 10  Lack of interest in, or use of, the essence/energies distinction is striking in Metropolitan John, given the way it has been picked up by so many Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century. However, my impression is that his distance from Florovsky over this is not that great, as Florovsky himself seems to me to make little use of the distinction either. I’m tempted by the thought that Florovsky appeals to this Palamite distinction in this context because Bulgakov had referred to it in support of his sophiology.

Theology of the ‘ In-Between ’   285 heaven nor earth, but the vault of heaven above the earth. We perceive here neither God nor man, but divinity, the divine veil thrown over the world. How true was our ancestors’ feeling in this temple, how right they were in saying that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth! Indeed they were neither in heaven nor on earth, they were in Hagia Sophia—­between the two: this is the μεταξύ of Plato’s philosophical intuition.11

Sophia, for Bulgakov, functions like Florovsky’s creative Word, which is hardly surprising, given that the biblical roots of Bulgakov’s sophiology are to be found in Proverbs 8, which speaks of the role of Wisdom in creation, the one ‘who was with him fitting all together’, the one ‘in whom he took delight’ (Prov. 8:30, LXX). The second point to notice is that Bulgakov and Florovsky both appeal to Gregory Palamas. This is explicit in Florovsky’s ‘Creature and Creaturehood’,12 while throughout his major trilogy On Godmanhood and the Divine Sophia, Bulgakov frequently remarks that his sophiology can be justified by reference to Palamas’ doctrine of the divine energies. There are, in fact, a couple of striking passages in Palamas where he refers to the realm of the energies (or activities) of God, or his powers, δύναμεις, as μεταξύ, in-­between: ‘If you take away what is in-­ between the unparticipated and the participants, you distance us from God, and make out of what binds together in the middle a chasm great and unpassable between Him and the generation and arrangement of what has come into being’ (Triads III. 2. 24); ‘There is something in between what has come into being and that imparticipable beyond-­beingness, not one only, but many . . .’ (Triads III. 2. 25). The energies and powers of God, which are many, form an in-­between realm between God and the creatures, for Palamas, and that in-­between relates us to God, brings him close. Florovsky admits something in-­between, but is reluctant to develop it—­we shall come back to that. In Bulgakov, with some justification from Palamas, there is an in-­between realm, constituted for him by the Divine Wisdom, Sophia. Where all agree is in wanting to work out a doctrine of creation that preserves the freedom of both God and the creature—­part of the meaning of creation ex nihilo for Florovsky (and Zizioulas)—without separating them, without depriving the created order of God, of his indwelling presence. To explore this, we need to be able to say something about this in-­between realm. I started by raising the question of the in-­between in general terms, as a concern of any religious way of thinking, and I suggested some of the ways in which the in-­between realm is considered in Plato, in particular, pointing to his doctrine

11  Prot. Sergii Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki (YMCA-­Press, 19912), 94–5; English translation by Natalie Duddington and James Pain, in James Pain and Nicolas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), 13–14. 12  See Florovsky, ‘Creation and Creaturehood’, 67.

286  Selected Essays, VOLUME II of the Forms and of daimons. Let us now look more directly at Christianity and see what sense of the in-­between there is there. There is plenty to consider when we think of such an in-­between realm: angels, saints, Mary, the Mother of God, the very notion of prayer and intercession, grace, the sacraments of the Church, icons—­all these function as an in-­between realm, in terms of which we explore our relationship with God; we might add to this conceptual structures such as the doctrine of analogy, analogia entis, in Thomism, and, of course, the distinction between God’s essence and energies in Palamite theology, and certainly political notions—­both the Byzantine notion of the emperor as imitator of the Creator Word of God, and the Western medieval development of the papacy, are attempts to negotiate the in-­between realm that relates God and human society. Above all there is Christ, who is himself ‘our peace, who has made both one, breaking down the middle wall of partition’ (Eph. 2:14), ‘our great high priest, who has passed into the heavens’ (Heb. 4:14), to take just two images from the New Testament. What strikes me, looking at this list, is how contentious all these issues have been amongst Christians. Grace, ‘which always heals what is weak and fills up what is lacking’, has been a constant cause of division, from the Pelagian controversy in the West in the fifth century, through the later Middle Ages when concepts of ‘created grace’ and ‘uncreated grace’ are alleged to have separated East and West, to the Reformation, where, to the Protestants, the very idea of grace was called into question by what they held to be a very cluttered ‘in-­between’. There seems to be a constant struggle between those who negotiate the in-­between with ease, if not enthusiasm, delighting in the prayers of the saints, the sacraments of the Church, icons, and the protection of the Mother of God, and others who are suspicious of all this and want to identify grace exclusively with Christ and Christ alone. (It is interesting to note how Florovsky reaches for some of the slogans of the Reformation in his opposition to Bulgakov.) I would suggest that one of the strengths of Bulgakov’s sophiology is the way in which it seems to enable him to explore the realm of the in-­between—­the doctrine of the Church, sacraments, Mother of God, icons—­with a freedom which is impressive. There is, however, one point of Fr Florovsky’s I want to recall in conclusion. I  noted that his presentation of the essence-­energies distinction is focused on Christ in a way that is not always the case: the powers through which God is manifest in the world are, according to Florovsky’s interpretation of Athanasios, the powers of the Word who became incarnate. If we follow that up, that suggests that we should see the essence-­energies distinction not primarily as a philo­soph­ ic­al doctrine, as it is usually presented, but as something that flows from the presence of the Creator Logos in his creation, a presence fulfilled in the Incarnation, a presence that is not just a metaphysical immanence, but a presence that restores the disintegration and disharmony we find in the cosmos as a result of humans’ failing in their role as microcosm.

Theology of the ‘ In-Between ’   287 Does not this suggest that the realm of the in-­between is to be seen as something established by Christ in his Incarnation and the Paschal mystery, rather than something independent into which Christ has to be fitted? Put like that, the whole realm of the in-­between is established and can be explored with confidence, so that exploring the role of angels, the intercession of the Mother of God and the saints, the nature of the Sacraments, and especially the Divine Liturgy, icons, and also issues that are not often explicitly thought of in this context, like the role of the intellect in prayer (central for any understanding of prayer in the Byzantine tradition, which owes so much to Evagrios), where, I suspect, the two models we started with—­the spiritual-­material division and the uncreated-­created division—­ grate against each other in some kind of way: all this is not thought of as some sort of alternative to Christ, but rather established by Him. And similarly for philosophical and political ways of negotiating the in-­between. Indeed, one might reflect that, rooted in Christ, the ideas that concern the ‘in-­between’ have concrete and personal reality, and are saved from being merely philosophical theories—­as the essence/energies distinction is often presented—­or mythological tales—­the fate of sophiology in some thinkers, not, in my view, with Bulgakov, but palpably so in Solov′ev. I want to close with a long quotation from Gregory Palamas: Since the Son of God, in his ineffable love for mankind, has not only united His divine hypostasis to our nature, and taking a body with a rational soul, has appeared on earth and lived among men; but, more that this—­O splendid a miracle!—He unites himself to the human hypostases themselves, and mingling Himself with every believer by the communion of his holy body, becomes one body with us and makes us into a temple of his whole Godhead; for the fullness of the Godhead dwells corporeally in him; how then should he not enlighten the souls of those who partake worthily, surrounding them with light through the divine splendour of his body which is in us, just as his light shone on the bodies of the disciples on Thabor? It is true that then the body that possessed the source of the light of grace was not yet mingled with our bodies; it enlightened from outside those who approached worthily and caused the light to enter their souls through the sight of their eyes. But today it is mingled with us, it dwells in us and, naturally, it enlightens our souls from within . . . One alone can see God; that is, Christ. We must be united with Christ—­and how close a union it is!—in order to see God.13

13  Quoted from an unedited text provided by Fr John Meyendorff in C. Mœller and G. Philips, The Theology of Grace and the Œcumenical Movement (Mowbray, 1961), 34–5 (I haven’t tracked it down in Palamas’ works yet).

25

Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity

Fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani—‘Christians are made, not born’, so Tertullian in the course of his defence of Christianity (Tertullian, Apol. 18. 4). He has begun to summarize the beliefs of Christians: how God created the universe, including human beings; how he sent prophets into the world to proclaim that this creator God is the only God, who will eventually judge humankind after a general resurrection, and reward those who have worshipped and served him and condemn to ‘unceasing and perpetual fire’ the ‘profane’. He breaks off to comment: ‘yes, we, too, once laughed at this. We are from among you. Christians are made, not born’. For Tertullian, Christians are those who have left the world of the Roman Empire, to which they once belonged, and embraced the faith and practice of the Church. There is a division between the world and those who have set themselves against the world and its beliefs and standards—­a division that Tertullian would have found in the New Testament, especially in the Johannine writings. The Church is a different kind of community from natural human communities to which we belong by birth; it is a community of those who have chosen to belong—­a voluntary society, we might say. And yet, Christians were never happy with thinking themselves as that, either. The Church was not just a voluntary society, and that is made plain by the rite of baptism, by which one entered the Church. Baptism is a rite of rebirth, or death-­and-­resurrection: Christians are begotten from the font. They form a community that thinks of itself in terms of natural relationships: Christians thought of themselves from the beginning as brothers and sisters. If the interpretation of John 19:26–7 found in Ambrose1 and accepted by modern interpreters such as Hoskyns and Davey reflects the intention of the Evangelist,2 then the notion of the Virgin Mary as the mother of the faithful is very ancient indeed. Another way of seeing the Church as some kind of natural community can be found in the Epistle to Diognetos, which depicts the Church as a different kind of community from the nations of the pagan world or the people of the Jews. 1  Exp. In Luc. 7. 5; cf. 2. 7 (‘The virgin [Church] has conceived us by the Spirit, the Virgin brings us forth without pain’), quoted by Hilda Graef in Mary: a History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. I (Sheed & Ward, 1963), 85. 2 E. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, ed. F. N. Davey, vol. II (Faber & Faber, 1940), 631.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0026

Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity  289 Christians do not differ from the rest of humankind by ‘country, language or dress’ (Epistle to Diognetos 5. 1); they are found everywhere and are equally at home and not at home—‘they are at home in every foreign country, and every homeland is foreign to them’ (5. 5); ‘they obey the prescribed laws, and in their own lives they transcend the laws’ (5. 10). The Epistle sees Christians as the ‘soul of the world’ (6. 1): invisible in the world (6. 4), yet holding the world together (6. 7). There is, then, a tension in the early Church’s understanding of itself: Christians do not constitute a race or a nation, and yet they are not just a voluntary as­so­ci­ ation of like-­minded people. Tertullian’s point remains, however: for him the Christian community consisted of those who had left their natural communities and joined the community of the Church. Eventually, however, the Church would find itself much more like a natural community. Baptism would become a rite de passage, administered to infants, putting a spiritual seal on the natural process of birth. We still talk of ‘cradle Catholics’ or ‘cradle Orthodox’, in contrast to ‘converts’. And this despite the fact that the traditional rite of baptism is a service for adults, who are expected to renounce Satan and confess their faith; the role of the sponsor or godparent has been extended to cover the fact that infants, by def­in­ ition, as it were, cannot speak. The fourth century was the crucial period in which the transition from the Church as Tertullian conceived it to the Church as it was to become took place; it is perhaps the most important transition in the history of the Church, and this paper is devoted to some aspects of this process.

Church Structures and Christian Identity The Church that Tertullian—­and the author of the Epistle to Diognetos—­knew was a Church that faced persecution from the Roman Empire, and the Church evolved structures that enabled it to survive. They were structures that gave the Church a strong sense of identity over against a hostile world. The Church became a society that it was difficult to enter, and that required high standards of behaviour from those who belonged. Entrance to the Church was by baptism, preceded by a lengthy period of instruction or catechesis. Admission as a catechumen, instruction, and baptism itself were, by the end of the second century, under the control of the bishop, as was admission to Eucharistic communion at the assemblies of the Church on Sundays and other days. The bishop therefore defined and controlled the Christian community, the Church. To become a Christian meant accepting the risk of having one’s faith tested in the surrounding world. Given the pervasiveness of religious practices unacceptable to Christians in the Roman world, the risk could be triggered by a variety of factors, some apparently almost trivial. It is true that there were periods and places where attempts were made to seek out Christians; the events surrounding the martyrdom of Polycarp in

290  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Smyrna are an example of such overt persecution. But several of the Acts of the Martyrs begin in the court with a Christian refusing to offer incense to the gods, or the genius of the emperor—­an act of equivalent commitment to taking the oath on the Bible in an English court—­and then finding themselves accused of sedition for their refusal, and thus facing a process that would lead to the choice of renunciation of Christ, implicit in offering incense to the gods, or martyrdom. Renunciation of Christ—­apostasy—­might save one’s life, but left one expelled from the communion of the Church, from this tight-­knit community to which one had belonged and in which one had found one’s identity. In principle, apostasy seems to have been unforgivable, at least until one’s deathbed. Gradually—­by a process that took place probably at different paces in different communities—­ apostasy could be forgiven, and a repentant apostate readmitted to communion, but only after many years’ exclusion; the restored sinner was treated for the rest of his life as ‘walking wounded’, required to adopt an ascetic mode of life to mitigate the temptation to further apostasy. The development of the penitential system, the conflicts over the claim to grant absolution between the sacramental authority of the bishops and the powerful intercession of the confessors who had stood firm under persecution, the effects on the Church of widespread apostasy during the imperial persecutions under the Emperors Decius and, later, Diocletian: all this lies outside our purview. What concerns us is the way the Church evolved a strong sense of identity, centred on the sacramental nature of the Church and the sacramental authority of the bishop. The structures that supported this sense of identity were designed to preserve the Church in a hostile world that could resort to persecution. Nonetheless, these structures in some ways mirrored the society that was opposed to the Church. The basic unit of Roman, or Mediterranean, society—­the city, the pale descendant of the city-­state of classical Greece—­was the basic unit of the Church, so that bishop and city corresponded, and the further wider structures of cities grouped together in a province under a metropolis were also adopted by the Church, even during the period of persecution, as is evident from canon 6 of the first Council of Nicaea, which confirms an existing state of affairs, rather than establishing anything. The fourth century opened with Diocletian’s Great Persecution, an assault on the Church that challenged its defensive structures, but very quickly the situation changed dramatically. Constantine’s conversion in 312, followed by the so-­called Edict of Milan, led to the Church’s being tolerated, and even beginning to experience imperial favour, leading to magnificent basilicas being built at imperial expense. When Constantine become sole emperor in 324, this favour towards the Christian Church extended throughout the whole empire. The ‘world’ no longer persecuted the Church but showered favours on it. Becoming a Christian was no longer a dangerous move but rather one that became increasingly advantageous—­ far from damaging one’s career, becoming a Christian could enhance one’s opportunities for advancement, particularly in the court of the now

Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity  291 Christian emperor. The Church’s sense of identity, as developed in the period of persecution, was based on hostility between the Church and the world. How was the Church to respond to this new situation, to the blurring of the distinction between the world and the Church, or, if one likes, to the invasion of the Church by the world? Ultimately the solution was an accommodation of ecclesial authority and imperial authority, of priestly power, ἱεράτευμα, and imperial power, βασιλεία: the Byzantine ideal of symphonia. Hints of this ideal are found very soon: Constantine expected from the Church, and especially the ‘priesthood’, that is, the bishops, intercession for the empire, in return for which he promised to support the Church.3 The structures of the Church, however—­structures that had enabled the Church to survive persecution—­remained the same: one bishop of one Christian community in each city; a sacramental community, defined by the bishop through baptism, and celebrated by the bishop in the Eucharistic assembly. Baptism was preceded by lengthy catechesis, in which the bishop played a major role; the penitential system developed to deal with other forms of unfaithfulness than direct apostasy. What one can see, I think, is an attempt to preserve the sense of the opposition between the Church and the world, only this time by drama, as the actual opposition between Church and world that had held during the period of persecution was much mitigated, if not dissolved altogether. The sense of initiation, mystagogy, that had always been there in the rite of baptism, with its long period of catechetical preparation, was enhanced by concentration on the drama of the event. Mystagogy, which had been something central to the experience of the early Church, experienced a remarkable flourishing in the fourth and fifth centuries, in the catechetical and mystagogical homilies of such as St Cyril of Jerusalem, St John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and in the West in the equivalent works by St Ambrose and St Augustine. These treatises (both those called mystagogical and those called catechetical) are concerned with mystagogy, initiation into the mystery of Christ, the foundation for which was laid in baptism, in connection with which all these homilies and treatises were prepared. The rite of initiation—­including baptism, with various anointings, the one with myron or chrism later coming to be thought of as separate sacrament (called confirmation in the West), and participation for the first time in the Eucharistic liturgy—­was what these homilies prepared for and meditated on. Baptism brought about a change, a change from being part of fallen humanity, damaged by the heritage of Adam, to being incorporated into Christ, the Second Adam, and finding a renewed humanity. It was thought of, not just as a change of intention, but as a genuine, ontological change, and reached to the roots of our being as human. The baptized Christian regained ways of perception that had been lost to them in their fallen state; they acquired ‘spiritual senses’, by which 3 See, e.g., Constantine’s letter to Alexander of Alexandria and Arius, in Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, trans. A. Cameron and S. G. Hall (Clarendon Press, 1999), 116–19.

292  Selected Essays, VOLUME II was meant not dematerialized senses, but senses that could grasp not just superficial reality, but the inner heart of things. A whole new world opened to the baptized Christian, and much of the effort of the great Fathers of the fourth and fifth ­century already mentioned was trying to retain this sense of entry into a new world, as the distinction between the world and the Church—­so vivid in the times of persecution—­became elided, and the difference between the worldly and the devout became harder and harder to discern. In a whole host of ways, the baptismal and Eucharistic rites of initiation were presented as dramatic, life-­ changing events. The sense of the baptismal change from being at home in the pagan world to running the risk of martyrdom, which had gone for good, was reinterpreted in terms of what the late Fr Edward Yarnold called ‘the Awe-­ Inspiring Rites of Initiation’.4 Dramatic symbolism, the contrast of the darkness of the baptistery and the shining light of the church in which the Eucharist was cele­ brated, the contrast between the exorcisms, being stripped of one’s clothes, and the reviling and spitting on the devil, on the one hand, and the clothing in white robes and being led, bearing candles, into the assembly of the church and the presence of the angels, on the other, together with a sense of secrecy, for the Eucharistic assembly was forbidden to those not initiated, or who had spoilt their initiation—­all of this was built up to replace the sense of loss in becoming a Christian as the Church became the religious organ of the Roman Empire. This, however, seems to have been a transitional stage: as the decades, or maybe centuries, progressed, infant baptism became the norm throughout Christendom—­ baptism became a rite de passage, Christians were born, not made. Although theological reasons have been advanced for this change—­for instance, the doctrine of original sin—­it seems most likely that it took place almost imperceptibly, not as a matter of conscious policy. Augustine, for example, appeals to infant baptism as evidence for original sin, rather than promoting infant baptism on the basis of original sin. Half a century ago, there was a much publicized controversy—­the main protagonists being Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland—­about the origins of the practice of infant baptism.5 It seems to have been a presupposition on both sides that they were discussing the question as to when infant baptism became the policy of the Church: either infant baptism went back to the New Testament (so Jeremias), or it was introduced later (Aland). A much less-­known contribution to this controversy, by Everett Ferguson, sought to shed light on the controversy by looking at the evidence from inscriptions (as it happens, mostly Latin

4  The title of his book on the baptismal homilies of the fourth century, taken, as he says, from these sermons: E. J. Yarnold, The Awe-­Inspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of the Fourth Century (St Paul Publications, 1972), ix. 5  In English translation, the key works are: J. Jeremias, Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries (SCM Press 1960); K. Aland, Did the Early Church baptize Infants? (SCM Press, 1961); J. Jeremias, The Origins of Infant Baptism (SCM Press, 1961).

Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity  293 inscriptions).6 From this it transpired that it was a not infrequent practice for infants to be baptized shortly before their—­sadly premature—­death. This would suggest that, while there was no policy of infant baptism, the baptism of infants and young children—­those who were sickly or actually dying—­was not at all uncommon. Infant baptism simply became more and more common, the more the distinction between the natural community and the baptized—­supernatural—­ community diminished, a distinction that, we have seen, was already somewhat indistinct, given the tendency of Christians to think of themselves as forming a natural community, and not just a voluntary as­so­ci­ation. A further reason for thinking that the way in which infant baptism became policy was not a matter of deliberation is the fact that the rite itself remained a rite of adult baptism, envisaging conversion and confession of faith. Had there been any deliberate policy, it is hard to imagine that the liturgical creativity of the fourth century, for which there is plenty of evidence, would not have risen to the occasion and supplied a suitable rite of infant baptism. As it is, it is not until the Reformation that a rite of baptism specifically for infants was to be devised. I have suggested that the change that took place in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries from a Church of the martyrs, that one entered, at some risk to oneself, by conversion and baptism, to a Church that provided a religious dimension to the Christian empire, was a change that took place almost imperceptibly; that the structures of the Church remained the same, and that the initial reaction of the bishops was to heighten sacramentally the contrast between the Church and the world that had been a stark reality—­political, social, and cultural—­in the days of persecution. Such a policy was short-­lived, for the invasion of the Church by the world was inexorable. The bishops’ attempt to preserve the traditional structures of the Church in the face of the changes in the empire’s attitude to the Church were not the only way in which continuity with the Church of the Martyrs was preserved. For, whatever is the truth about the origins of the monastic movement in the fourth century, there can be little doubt that the monks came to fulfil some of the roles that martyrs and confessors had exercised in the period of persecution.7 That there developed some kind of a struggle as to who could most rightfully claim the mantle of the martyrs—­a struggle between the bishops and the ascetics—­seems undeniable, even though there is a lot of unclarity about the details of the struggle. An early indication of the kind of threat ascetics were thought to pose to the church presided over by the bishops can be seen in the canons and, especially the synodical

6  E. Ferguson, ‘Inscriptions and the Origin of Infant Baptism’, Journal of Theological Studies, ns, 30 (1979), 37–46. 7  For a succinct and penetrating account of reasons advanced for the rise of the monastic movement, see R. M. Price’s introduction to Theodoret of Cyrus, A History of the Monks of Syria, Cistercian Studies 88 (Cistercian Press, 1985), esp. xxiii–­xxvii.

294  Selected Essays, VOLUME II letter, of the synod of Gangra (c.340?):8 the bishops were keen to head off the threat that could be posed by ascetics claiming that there was something in­ad­ equate about a Church with married priests, or by monks whose vocation seemed inspired by contempt for marriage. However, the ideal of the martyr, as it developed in the early Church, was not just, or even primarily, a matter of the martyr as a model, so much as the martyr as one whose steadfastness in the face of persecution ensured that he or she had become an effective advocate in the heavenly courts. The idea that to belong to the Church is to belong to a community that includes those whose closeness to God is manifest in their parrhesia, the right they have to address God directly on behalf of others, is one that is epitomized in the relationship between martyr/ confessor and the rest of the Church, but it had a prehistory and, as it were, a post-­history. We can find the prehistory in Clement of Alexandria’s notion of the ‘gnostic’, γνωστικός, who was the spiritual martyr, one whose faithfulness to God was tested not by a momentary act of confession leading to death, but by a constant act of confession that extended throughout the whole of one’s life: for Clement a much more searching test of one’s faithfulness.9 In his homily Quis dives salvetur, these ‘gnostics’ are a kind of hidden ‘elect’, ‘who . . . haul themselves up out of the surf of the world and retire to a place of safety’; for their sake, ‘both the visible and invisible things of the world have been created . . . ; and all are held together so long as the seed remains on earth, and when it has been gathered in all will speedily be dissolved’.10 Such a ‘gnostic’ is able to intercede on behalf of other, less earnest, Christians (viz., the wealthy, in the context of the homily): ‘let him spend many wakeful nights on your behalf, acting as your ambassador with God . . .’.11 The post-­history we can find in the whole of the Byzantine ascetic trad­ ition, where the term γνωστικός becomes the normal term for one who has reached perfection and the knowledge of God. (It is unfortunate that the term ‘gnostic’ conveys to English ears some link with the so-­called ‘gnosticism’ of the second century; it simply means ‘one who knows [God]’.)12

Making Christians: The Cult of the Martyrs In the Church after persecution ceased, the ascetic came to assume something of the role of the martyr as an intimate of God. But there were other ways of 8 P. Joannou, Discipline Générale Antique (IVe–­IXe s.), I, p. 2. Les canons des Synodes Particuliers, Fonti, Fascicolo IX (S. Nilo, 1962), 83–99. 9  Clement of Alexandria. Stromateis VII. 11. 10  Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur 36; trans. G. W. Butterworth, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1919), 345. 11  Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur 41, 357. 12  See my ‘ “. . . And If You Pray Truly, You Are a Theologian”: Some Reflections on Early Christian Spirituality’, Wisdom of the Byzantine Church, ed. J.  Raitt, Paine Lectures in Religion (University of Missouri-­Columbia, Columbia 1998), 1–11 (also published as ‘Evagrios: The “Noetic” Language of Prayer’, as Chapter 9 in Selected Essays, vol. 1).

Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity  295 preserving the memory of the martyrs, and the one promoted by the bishops was the cult of the martyrs, which begins to develop from the second half of the fourth century onwards. The cult of the martyrs can be traced back into the period of persecution: the earliest surviving Acta of a martyr—­of Polycarp of Smyrna, collected by Eusebius—­already envisages, and defends, the veneration of the martyr’s relics (Mart. Polyc. 17). Interest in the martyrs in the early fourth century is evident in Eusebius’ collection of Acta martyrum which he incorporated into his Church History. The early cult seems to have been local, perhaps limited to the anniversary of the martyr’s ‘heavenly birthday’, and as the cult developed it retained its local character: the martyr venerated was someone from the region who, in the heavenly courts, could be expected to take a special interest in those of his own locality. The cultivation of the cult of the martyrs by bishops in the late fourth century onwards can be seen as an attempt to preserve within the trad­ ition­al structures of the Church the memory of the martyrs, and a sense of the Church as still the Church of the martyrs. There are a large number of homilies from the latter half of the fourth century commemorating the martyrs—­from Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, from John Chrysostom, and others. There are also, as we have noted, authentic acta martyrum, both those collected by Eusebius and others, for instance the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs. The half-­century between the last of the authentic acta and the first of the homilies on the martyrs seems something of a hiatus, and the reason is not far to seek. For the authentic acta are relatively few, and not well distributed; once the fashion for celebrating the martyrs became established, details of martyrdom were required for the martyrs promoted by the more important sees of the Church, not least the metropoleis, where the cult of the local martyr was required to underwrite the authority of the local metropolitan bishop. Rome, which led the way in promoting the cult of the martyrs, was a special case: as well as the place of martyrdom of two apostles, there were memories of many who had died in the Flavian Amphitheatre. Other cities were much less well favoured. Antioch’s local saint was Babylas; Constantinople’s Mokios: nothing much is known of either.13 This lack of information posed little problem to rhetors of the quality of Basil or Chrysostom. There is a striking illustration of this in the homily John Chrysostom preached in Antioch in honour of the martyr Ignatios. For Ignatios is an early martyr about whom we have some authentic information, in the form of the seven letters he wrote during his journey, under arrest, to Rome to face martyrdom (though we have no reliable information about the martyrdom itself).14 Eusebius knew of these letters, and quoted from them; before him Irenaeus and Origen also display knowledge of these letters. Round about the time that Chrysostom preached his sermon on Ignatios, 13  For some insight into the problems that could be posed by the lack of martyrs, or knowledge of them, see A. Thacker, ‘Popes, Patriarchs and Archbishops and the Origins of the Cult of the Martyrs in Northern Italy’, Saints and Sanctity, Studies in Church History 47 (Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 51–79. 14  On the accounts of the martyrdom of Ignatios that have come down to us, see J. B. Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, vol. II, §1 (Macmillan, 1885), 363–536.

296  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the authentic letters were being interpolated by Arians, giving them the form (the so-­called long recension) in which they were mostly known from the late fourth century until the discovery of the authentic Greek text in the seventeenth century. Maybe Chrysostom was suspicious of the provenance in Antioch of these letters. However, in his homily on Ignatios, he betrays no knowledge of the letters or any authentic traditions associated with the martyr; all he knows is that he was a bishop of Antioch (the first, he asserts—­contrary to the evidence of Eusebius), and travelled to Rome to his martyrdom, from which, at some later date his relics, or what remained of them (Ignatios himself had rather hoped that there would be no relics; ad Rom., 4), were translated back to Antioch and buried outside the city gate leading to Daphne (so Jerome informs us; De vir. inl. 16). It is there that Chrysostom preached his homily. He praises Ignatios as bishop, martyr, and apostle, drawing on Scripture and his imagination for material for the homily. He concludes by evoking the translation of the relics back from Rome, and addresses his audience thus: For while she (sc. Rome) received his dripping blood, you were honoured with his relics. You enjoyed his episcopacy; they enjoyed his martyrdom. They saw him competing and winning and being crowned; you have him perpetually . . . My point is that you sent away a bishop, and received a martyr. You sent [him] away with prayers, and received [him] with crowns.  (Hom. on Ignatios, 17)

The tomb of the saint is a treasury, or rather a warehouse, for those who visit it: In consequence for everyone the warehouse is useful, the inn convenient—­for those who have stumbled, so that they may be free from temptations; for those in a happy state, so that the good things may stay secure for them; for those who are sick, so that they may return to health, for those who are healthy, so that they won’t fall sick.  (Hom. on Ignatios, 18)15

The legacy of the martyrs took different forms in the Church after the end of persecution. The monks claimed it, presenting themselves as Christians who con­ tinued to live in accordance with the strenuous ideals that had been universal in the Church of the martyrs. The bishops claimed it by developing the cult of the martyrs, which served to enhance their own authority as bishops of their locality, and also as bishops representing their see in the wider world, as well as providing a sense of belonging to a community that had seen martyrdom and through their ‘own’ martyrs had access to the heavenly courts and the blessings that flowed thence. But the contrast should not be drawn too sharply. Both monks and 15 Translations from: St John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints, trans. Wendy Mayer with Bronwen Neil (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 114–16.

Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity  297 departed martyrs provided succour to those in the Church who were not able to fulfil the strenuous demands of the faith, manifest in the lives of the ascetics and the martyrs: monks as living saints, whose prayers and counsel were sought by those living in the world; martyrs as those to whom access was more mysterious, though more immediate. These two ways of seeking access to the legacy of the martyrs were, moreover, to prove, over the centuries, to be complementary, and made possible a community into which Christians were born, conscious of ideals that they would often enough not fulfil, without ceasing to belong to the community brought into being by the death and resurrection of Christ.

26 Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology In the preface to the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth asserted that ‘I hold the analogia entis as the invention of Anti-­Christ and think that, for this reason, one cannot become Catholic. Equally I allow myself to hold that all other reasons that one might have for not becoming Catholic are short-­sighted and lacking in seriousness’.1 In Orthodox theology of the twentieth century (or any other century), the notion of analogia entis, analogy of being, scarcely occurs. An exception can be found with Fr John Romanidis, who in his first book, Ancestral Sin, rejects categorically analogia entis, together with the notion that Barth came to accept as a substitute, analogia fidei, analogy of faith: ‘The West has a presupposition in its theology of analogia entis and analogia fidei. Everything in the world exists simply as images in time of the eternal archetypes that exist in the being of the One’.2 It might, then, look as if there is a real convergence between Barth and Orthodox theology; the reality, however, is more complicated, not least because both these assertions—­Barth’s and Romanidis’—need to be contextualized in the history of twentieth-­century Christian theology, and in that century the understanding of analogy underwent major and far-­reaching changes.

The Background of the Notion of Analogy Both Plato and Aristotle contributed to the notion of analogy. In the Republic, Plato introduces it, when he has Socrates explaining the nature of the Form of the Good by comparing it to the role the sun plays in the phenomenal world: It was the Sun, then, that I meant when I spoke of that offspring which the Good has created in the visible world, to stand there in the same relation to [ἀναλόγον ἑαυτῷ] vision and visible things as that which the Good itself bears in the intelligible world to intelligence and to intelligible objects.3 1  Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, I/1 (Evangelische Verlag, 41944; first edn, 1932), 7–9. 2 Ioannis S. Romanidis, To Propatorikon Amartima (Pournaras, 32010; first edn, Athens, 1957), 22–3. 3 Plato, Republic VI. 508BC (Cornford’s translation).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0027

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  299 Socrates goes on to explain to Glaucon that You will agree that the Sun not only makes the things we see visible, but also brings them into existence and gives them growth and nourishment; yet he is not the same thing as existence. And so with the objects of knowledge: these derive from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality; and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power [ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυμάμει ὑπερέχοντος]. (Rep. VI. 509B)

There is an analogy between the role of the sun in the visible world and the role of the Form of the Good in the intelligible world: from knowledge of the visible world one can infer knowledge of the intelligible world. Aristotle’s contribution is rather different. In many places, Aristotle discusses the way in which we predicate qualities in different ways. There are cases where we predicate the same quality in the same way—­the predication of colours, for example; there are other cases where we use the same word in quite unrelated ways, for example the bull you might find in a field, and a papal ‘bull’—here we have chance homonymity. A more interesting category is where we ascribe the same quality in different, but related ways. An example Aristotle often gives is health: a man can be healthy, a diet can be healthy, a seaside resort might be healthy, a way of life might be healthy. What makes each of these healthy is different, but the word ‘healthy’ is not being used in quite unrelated ways, for the prime meaning of the health refers to a human being; the other ways of using healthy refer to this prime use, as promoting health, or preserving it, or encouraging it. It is important for Aristotle that fundamental notions, like goodness and being, have this character: there is a prime meaning, and other meanings that relate to this. Aristotle calls it πρὸς ἕν (referring ‘to one’) predication, for all examples refer to the prime example (see, e.g., Metaphysics Γ. 2). It can also be called ‘analogy’, though in Aristotle analogia more commonly refers to the way in which predication of qualities is appropriate to the subjects of which they are predicated (see Nichomachean Ethics I.6.12:1096b28‒9). These two examples demonstrate different ways in which analogy functions: Aristotle is concerned with how we use terms in different, but related, contexts; Plato is concerned with one aspect of that—­how we use terms derived from our everyday experience to refer to the realm of the forms which is dimly reflected in that experience—­but his notion of analogy assumes a further function of helping to articulate a vision of higher and lower degrees of reality. In the term, analogia entis, one might say that analogia is more relevant to what Aristotle is concerned with, whereas the reference to being provided by ens/entis envisages a notion of the structures of being.

300  Selected Essays, VOLUME II

Analogy in Christian Theology These notions of analogy assume more profound significance when one begins to try to understand the nature of the realm of being, in which there are higher and lower beings, and especially when, in the Christian and Jewish traditions, one is trying to understand how God relates to a universe which he has himself created out of nothing, so that there is no ontological continuity between the Creator and the creature, no structures of being that embrace both Creator and creature. Analogy is concerned with how to predicate qualities, or names, in different contexts. In theology, a fundamental problem concerns how we ascribe names to God, names that we have derived from our everyday experience, such as goodness, existence, wisdom, justice, and so forth. One way of dealing with this issue involves the terminology of kataphatic and apophatic theology, the theologies of affirmation and of denial or negation, which, as is well known, Dionysios the Areopagite introduced into Christian theology. Dionysios derived his ter­min­ ology from the great Neoplatonic diadochos (or successor to Plato in the Academy), the fifth-­century philosopher Proklos. The principal place where Proklos discusses the different ways in which we ascribe qualities, or names, to God (or the gods) is in his Platonic Theology, which could well be called by the title of one of Dionysios’ works, Divine Names. In book II, he presents his the­ ology of Divine Names in terms of exegesis of two Platonic passages: the analogy of the Sun from the Republic (Rep. VI. 502C–509C), from which he develops his understanding of how names are affirmed of the One, and the first hypothesis from the second part of Parmenides (Parm. 137C–142A), in which names are denied of the One. These two ways are called the way ‘through analogy’ (διὰ τῆς ἀναλογίας) and the way ‘through denials’ (διὰ τῶν ἀποφάσεωνͅ);4 there are traces of this usage in Dionysios himself. Here is not the place to discuss the history of the notion of analogy, and the related topic of kataphatic and apophatic theology, from Dionysios to Thomas Aquinas. Suffice it to make a couple of closely related points. The grand picture is of Neoplatonic inspiration which sees the whole of reality as cascading down from the One and, through the human, striving to return to its origin. This magnificent picture has taken a whole variety of forms and there is scarcely a thinker in the West (broadly conceived, embracing both Eastern and Western Christendom) not under its spell: it is the idea explored by Arthur Lovejoy in his book, The Great Chain of Being.5 As the notion makes the transition from pagan Neoplatonism to Christianity, there emerges a complication, for what might be

4  See Proclus, Platonic Theology, II. 5, 6–7; in H.D.  Saffrey and L.G.  Westerink, eds., Théologie Platonicienne, vol. II (‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1974), 37. 15–19, 42. 24–43. 1. 5 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Harvard University Press, 1936).

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  301 seen as a seamless diminution or dissipation of being as it proceeds outwards has to cope with the Christian conviction that God created everything other than himself out of nothing, ex nihilo: there is a chasm between God and all else, which can only be crossed by God. The notion of creation ex nihilo radicalizes the sense of God’s transcendence, while at the same time making possible a deeper sense of his immanence, for he is not limited by the conditions of creaturely being; this theocentrism requires a central place for notions like Incarnation and grace, which articulate the priority of God’s activity. Too much emphasis on the ‘Great Chain of Being’ seems to elide the fundamental difference between the Uncreated and the created, while emphasis on Incarnation and grace diminishes the significance of the ‘Great Chain’—seems, indeed, to break it. Eastern and Western Christendom evolved different ways of coping with this fundamental antinomy.6 The notion of analogy played a part—­how great is disputed—­in St Thomas Aquinas’ theology. Put very briefly, Thomas dealt with three types of analogy: analogy of attribution, analogy of proportion, and analogy of proportionality. Analogy of attribution is Aristotle’s pros hen predication; analogy of proportion (not, so far as I can see, much different from analogy of attribution) holds where there is a direct relation between the two subjects to which qualities are being ascribed; analogy of proportionality is analogia in the way Aristotle uses the term—­there is no relation between the various subjects, and the qualities are ascribed in a way appropriate to each. Later Thomists placed the emphasis almost exclusively on analogy of proportionality, on the ground that any relationship between God and the creature, capable of being comprehended, would com­ prom­ise God’s transcendence as uncreated Creator. This understanding of ana­ logy in Thomism assumed all but canonical expression in the late-­fifteenth-­century treatise, De Nominum Analogia, by the great reviver of Thomism at the turn of the fifteenth/sixteenth century, Cardinal Thomas de Vio, called Cajetan(us) from his hometown, Gaeta. This work argued for an understanding of how we address God that emphasizes his transcendence at the expense of making our knowledge of God almost entirely abstract. It is this notion of analogy that became fundamental in much Thomism, especially after the revival of Thomism by Pope Leo XIII in his bull, Aeterni Patris (1879). Analogy became a key term in theology quite generally, not just in epis­ tem­ol­ogy; it is in this connection that the term, analogia entis, became popular: the analogy of being indicated the fundamental character of analogy as an in­ter­ pret­ative category. A good example of the broad application of analogy in Thomist theology (not just philosophy) can be found in Penido’s Le rôle de l’analogie en 6  For an accessible account of the working out of the Dionysian tradition within the West, see Simon Tugwell’s essay in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (Paulist Press, 1988), 39–95, 116–29 (nn.). For a brilliant and profound attempt to explore the different ways in which the Byzantine East and the Latin West understood the relationship between the Uncreated and the created, see Antoine Lévy, Le créé et l’incréé. Maxime the Confesseur et Thomas d’Aquin (J. Vrin, 2006).

302  Selected Essays, VOLUME II théologie dogmatique, in which the centrality of analogy is pursued through the doctrines of the Trinity, creation, Christology, and the sacraments, after its philosophical import has been explored.7 The revival of Thomism in the twentieth century, at least in the form of Gilson and Maritain’s Neo-­Thomism, despite its fundamentally philosophical orientation, made very little of the doctrine of ana­ logy. Gilson was certainly no Cajetanist, and when he mentions analogy he seems to be thinking in terms of analogia proportionis.8 He is mostly concerned with seeing analogy as a way of steering a middle course between univocity (with the danger of anthropomorphism) or equivocity (which would leave one in ac­know­ ledged agnosticism), which is Thomas’ own concern. The understanding of Thomism, however, even among those influenced by Gilson, remained largely traditional.9

The Doctrine of Analogy in the Twentieth Century This is the atmosphere in which Barth came to regard analogia entis as the ‘invention of Anti-­Christ’; it seemed to him a human tool that subjected the understanding of God to the human intellect, reducing God to theoretical categories. There was, however, more to it than that, and indeed more to history of analogia entis as a central notion in Thomism. Let us deal with the latter first, which takes the story of the interpretation of analogy in St Thomas’ thought further into the twentieth century. It was well known that there were some loose ends in the Cajetanist interpretation of analogia entis. For a start the term scarcely ever (if at all) occurs in the Angelic Doctor, and there is little explicit consideration of the doctrine of analogy that one would have expected if the notion of analogia entis was as central to theology as Cajetan and his followers maintained. The question in the Summa Theologiae on the names of God is the nearest one gets to a treatise on analogy in Thomas (S.T. I. 13), and there he seems largely concerned with finding a middle way between univocity and equivocity. A broader appreciation of the place of analogy in the theology of St Thomas was first heralded in the work by the Swedish Lutheran theologian, Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World.10 This book demonstrated the way in which the Cajetanist intepretation of analogy as fundamentally analogia proportionalitatis was not borne out by a careful analysis of the writings of Aquinas: analogia attributionis was more generally what Thomas had in mind, 7 M. T.-L. Penido, Le rôle de l’analogie en théologie dogmatique (J. Vrin, 1931). 8  See Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme (Vrin, 21945), 153–6, 182–3. 9 See the Anglicans, E.  L.  Mascall, Existence and Analogy (Longmans, Green and Co., 1949); Austin Farrer, Finite and Infinite (Dacre Press, 1943). 10  Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use by Thomas of Aquino (Almquist & Wikwells, 1952).

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  303 with the entailment that we can gain some knowledge of God from consideration of the created order. Analogy is a key term in Aquinas’ natural theology, but it is used in a variety of ways, and is not quite the central notion that Cajetan had made of it. A few years after Lyttkens’ book, a more narrowly textual study of Thomas’ notion of analogy was undertaken by the American Jesuit scholar, George P. Klubertanz, which confirmed most of what Lyttkens had maintained.11 Lyttkens’ work, together with his fellow Swede’s Sacra Doctrina,12 can be seen as part of a process that prised Thomism from the fundamentally philosophical categories in which it had been confined at least since the time of Neo-­Thomism, but that is another story. From this perspective, Barth’s outburst seems of a part with his attack on ­nat­ural theology, understood as an attempt to find out about God by bypassing revelation: theology was for him a matter of revelation, or grace alone. The ­developments outlined would not have had much effect on Barth’s rejection of analogia entis.13 It seems, however, though there is little in the Church Dogmatics to make this clear, that Barth’s rejection of analogia entis was directed specifically at a book of that title by the German Jesuit of Czech provenance, Erich Przywara, who was teaching at Munich at the time, and had attended Karl Barth’s seminar in Bonn in the early 1930s. Przywara’s Analogia Entis was published in 1932, just before Barth presumably penned the preface to his newly entitled Church Dogmatics. It was based on lectures Przywara had given in Munich. It is very short (about 150 pages) and is presumably a much condensed version of his lectures.14 The great lay Thomist philosopher, Josef Pieper, had attended these lectures and remarked on how his lectures were ‘quite in contradiction to “school philosophy”, despite his almost pedantically precise disposition that they encountered every morning at table’; nevertheless, his book, Analogia Entis, was ‘scarcely readable’.15

11  George  P.  Klubertanz, SJ, St Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis (Loyola University Press, 1960). 12  Per Erik Persson, Sacra Doctrina: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas, trans. Ross MacKenzie. (Basil Blackwell, 1970; original Swedish edn 1957) 13  There is a short book dedicated to the question of analogy in Barth’s theology: Horst Georg Pöhlmann, Analogia entis oder Analogia fidei? Die Frage des Analogie bei Karl Barth (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1965). It is curiously oblique. 14  Erich Przywara, SJ, Analogia Entis. Metaphysik, vol. I: Prinzip (Verlag Josef Kösel und Friedrich Pustet, 1932). Analogia Entis was republished by Hans Urs von Balthasar by his Johannes-­Verlag as vol. 3 of a projected collected edition, accompanied by other papers (Analogia Entis. Metaphysik. Ur-­ Struktur und All-­Rhythmus, Erich Przywara Schriften, III (Johannes-­Verlag, 31996; original edition 1962). This has been translated by John  R.  Betz and David Bentley Hart as Analogia Entis: Metaphysics—­Original Structure and Universal Rhythm (Eerdmans, 2014), with much needed commentary. I was not able to see it before writing this; but I have given references to it. There is an English translation of something by Przywara (it is not clear of what, but there are some parallels to Analogia Entis) by A. C. Bouquet, Polarity (Oxford University Press, 1935). 15 Josef Pieper, Noch wußte es niemand. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen 1904–1945 (Kösel-­ Verlag, 1976), 76.

304  Selected Essays, VOLUME II It is not clear that Barth read more than the title, though it seems quite likely that it was this work that provoked his rejection of analogia entis.16 In some ways, it was an inappropriate target for Barth’s scorn, for Przywara is leagues away from the ‘school philosophy’ interpretation of analogia entis. His account is, indeed, a quite unique and revolutionary interpretation, making the doctrine of analogia entis a central category of Catholic theology in a way scarcely dreamt of, even by the school-­Thomists. I hardly dare attempt to interpret it—­Pieper is not exaggerating when he said it was ‘kaum lesbar’—but perhaps we can get a handle on it, if we look first at his An Augustine Synthesis, in which Przywara is presented to his English readers by C. C. Martindale, SJ, as ‘synonymous with deep thought and difficult diction’, but in this book simply offering a selection of Augustine’s works that take us to the core of the saint’s thought.17 What is striking, though not surprising as an interpretation of Augustine, about this selection is the way in which the final ascent to knowledge of God is presented by a series of sections entitled: Man–­Abyss, Night of the Heart, Night in Love, Night in Life, Night between Nights, Night and Day, Old and a Child. In this section Przywara draws very heavily on Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos, where the bishop opened his heart to his people. The book ends by exploring the mystery of being human in the light of the mystery of God, and equally, vice versa, finding in the mystery of being human an analogy to the mystery of God. Przywara cites this passage about Job: who ‘knew that whether it were darkness or light, it was night wherein he was sojourning in a far country away from his God. But he had as interior light this God himself, and that interior light made him indifferent, whether it were darkness in this night, or light’.18 This analogy is not some easy likeness, some simple point of contact. On the contrary, this mystery of being human opens out onto the mystery of God in which the mystery of being human is illuminated while the darkness of God’s being draws us more and more deeply into a mystery beyond our comprehension. It seems to me that there are two points to be noticed here. First that knowing God is approached through the mystery of our being; to know God is something that entails the profoundest self-­knowledge. The other is that knowing God is to sense the mystery of God beyond our comprehension. Central to Przywara’s interpretation of analogia entis is the citation from the Fourth Lateran Council that ‘no likeness could be noted between creator and creature without there being discerned a still greater unlikeness’.19 Any point of contact discloses a still deeper 16  See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (SCM Press, 1976), 215. 17  Erich Przywara, SJ, ed., An Augustine Synthesis (Sheed & Ward, 1936). 18  Przywara, ed., Augustine Synthesis, §863, p. 456. 19  H.  Denzinger and A.  Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum, XXXVI edn (Herder, 1976), §806. Quoted in Przywara, Analogia Entis, 97; Eng. trans. in Betz and Bentley Hart, Analogia Entis, 234 (note: Przywara’s quotation from the Lateranum is not identical with that given in the version of Denzinger I have used: similitudo, not tanta similitudo).

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  305 mystery. Barth need not have been worried that with analogia entis Przywara puts in human hands a way of exacting knowledge of God. It is something very different, but not very likely that Barth would have been impressed (Barth was opposed to any Anknüpfungspunkt (point of contact) between God and man). In his book on Barth (published in 1951), Hans Urs von Balthasar demonstrated Barth’s lack of understanding of the Catholic doctrine of analogia entis; thereafter Barth seems to have dropped his opposition to the notion.20 Instead of opposing it, in its place he adopted what he called analogia fidei, or analogia relationis. Barth himself rarely explains what he means by this (Balthasar provides a helpful account21). In one place, at least, Barth articulates a positive use of ana­ logy. He refers to the humanity, the saving work of the man Jesus, in which the relationship between God and human kind stands before our eyes and in which it also alone takes place and is real. So there is, and remains, the relationship between God and human kind already unlike that other and prior: the relationship of the Father to the Son, of the Son to the Father, the relationship of God to himself.

Barth continues: There exists, however—­and this is the positive meaning of the concept ‘image’— besides all unlikeness nonetheless a correspondence and likeness between this second and that first relationship. No correspondence and likeness of being, no analogia entis; for the being of God and that of human kind are and remain beyond comparison, but it is not a matter of this doubled being, but rather of the relationship within the being of God himself, on the one hand, and the relationship between the being of God and human being, on the other. Between these two relationships as such there exists—­and in this sense the second is the image of the first—­correspondence and likeness. There is an analogia relationis.22

Perhaps the most direct way of understanding Barth’s notion of analogia fidei as analogia relationis in opposition to any analogia entis is to think back to his early work, the work that moves beyond his earlier dialectical theology and fore­ shadows the theology of the Church Dogmatics, his book on Anselm, called in German, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, ‘Faith seeking understanding’.23 In that book, Karl Barth explored Anselm’s theological reasoning. Instead of seeing Anselm as the first to seek to establish theology on the basis of reason and thus

20  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (Verlag Jakob Hegner, 21962), 175–81. 21 Balthasar, Barth, 116–23. 22 Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, III/2, 262 (my translation). 23  Originally published by Kaiser Verlag, Munich; English trans. SCM Press, 1960.

306  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the precursor of Scholasticism, Barth focused on the way in which faith is always presumed in Anselm’s theological argument, and reason, ratio, is employed to explore, and understand, the relationship between the various components, or articles, of the Faith. So in Proslogion, the existence of God is set aside, and it is demonstrated how the very notion of God, within the mind of a believing Christian (the treatise is in the form of a prayer, with constant allusions to the psalms), demands his existence. Or in Cur Deus homo, Christ is set aside (remoto Christo) and it is demonstrated how everything else we believe demands the God-­ man. Barth’s notion of analogia fidei justifies the use of reason, argument, within the theological enterprise: it does not usurp the place of faith (as Barth was always concerned that natural theology is bound to do), but explores the realm of faith and the relationships between the various articles of faith. We have now, in a very cursory way, surveyed something of the place of ana­ logy within Western theology, and the way in which analogy still has a place in the theology of Karl Barth, despite his rejection of analogia entis, a rejection which it seems to me continued, though he ceased to rail against it after Balthasar’s explanation of what it entailed in Catholic theology.

Seeking for Analogy in Orthodox Theology We began by citing Fr John Romanidis’ rejection of both analogia entis and analogia fidei: a rejection intended to embrace both Catholic theology and Karl Barth. What we have seen since about the permanent place of analogy in Barth’s thought, though a notion of analogy concerned with relationship rather than with being, and its place in an understanding of theology as fides quaerens intellectum would have cut no ice with Romanidis, who singled out Anselm’s phrase for attack: faith does not seek understanding—­to do so would be to be sidetracked—­it seeks union with God.24 What about other Orthodox theologians? To explore this is difficult, because, so far as I am aware, no other Orthodox theologian than Romanidis makes any direct reference of analogy. If Romanidis rejects it, it seems that other modern Orthodox theologians simply ignore it. This is perhaps because the two strands in modern Orthodox theology—­the route leading out of the Russian engagement with German idealism often dubbed the ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’, and versions of what Florovsky called the ‘Neo-­Patristic Synthesis’—have at least this in common (in fact, they have a great deal in common), that they pay very little attention to the tradition of Western scholastic theology and philosophy. I propose to explore a few possible tracks: first, the theology of Fr Dumitru Stăniloae; 24  See Andrew Sopko’s comments on this in the first chapter of his Prophet of Roman Orthodoxy: The Theology of John Romanides (Synaxis Press, 1998), 1–18.

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  307 second, the discussion of analogy that we find in some parts of Lossky’s work; and third, a suggestion made recently by Fr Maximos of Simonopetra about what he sees as a missed opportunity in Byzantine theology in relation to analogy.

Dumitru Stăniloae In Fr Dumitru’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, called in English The Experience of God, there is, so far as I can see, no mention of analogy. In the chapter entitled ‘The Knowledge of God’, he makes a distinction—­not between kataphatic and apophatic theology, as one would expect—­but between rational and apophatic theology. The first he often calls ‘affirmative theology’, but it includes both af­fi rm­ ation and negation, or denial, and is set over against apophatic theology. Rational theology is what we are engaged in when we seek to explore the relationship between the articles of faith, and in this way come to an understanding of God’s revelation, both through the created order and in revelation: revelation fulfilled in the Incarnation of the Son of God and witnessed to the prophetic and apostolic testimony of the Scriptures. Apophatic theology is, in contrast, direct experience of God, not necessarily unmediated, but a sense of God’s presence within our experience, an experience of ‘the presence of God as person in a more pressing way’.25 Because the experience of the personal presence of God is beyond our understanding, we can only talk about it in negative terms: we have to reject our imperfect attempts to express it; silence seems the best response. Drawing on St Gregory the Theologian, Stăniloae sees rational, affirmative theology in lyrical terms: he speaks of St Gregory finding that God has not made world petrified within a static rationality or an endlessly circular movement. Rather this is a world through which God produces a can­ ticle that advances in its melodical themes. That is to say, God continues to speak to us through the world, and to lead us towards a goal. He is not only the creator of this vast lute but also the one who plays on it a canticle of vast proportions and complexity.26

But this knowledge of God ‘needs completion through a higher knowledge which is an acknowledgment of the very mystery of God, an apophatic knowledge, a superior way of grasping his infinite richness—­one which, precisely because of its infinity, cannot be understood or expressed’.27 To embrace this apophatic know­ ledge means to pass beyond the things of the world. However, ‘to rise above the 25  Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994; in later editions, it is called vol. I), 97. 26 Stăniloae, Experience I. 98. 27 Stăniloae, Experience I. 98.

308  Selected Essays, VOLUME II things of this world does not mean that these disappear; it means, through them, to rise beyond them. And since they remain, the apophatic knowledge of God does not exclude affirmative rational knowledge’.28 (Stăniloae is drawing on Gregory’s Oration 28, the first theological oration.) The reason why Stăniloae does not make use of analogy is, it seems to me, because he interprets the relationship between rational theology and apophatic theology in a quite different way from the Western way of setting the via affirmativa against the via negativa and finding resolution in a via eminentior or via analogiae, that transcends them. He is, it seems to me, much more faithful to Dionysios’ presentation of kataphatic and apophatic theology, where we find an echo of Dionysios’ source, Proklos, for whom the kataphatic way is indeed the way of analogy, as we have seen. In tracing the nature of rational theology, Stăniloae finds something like the complexity of musical composition, which is reminiscent of the way in which the way of analogy is treated in Western the­ology, perhaps especially in someone like Bonaventure.

Vladimir Lossky Something very similar is found in Vladimir Lossky, expressed with concise lucidity. In his postumously published Théologie dogmatique, Lossky makes a contrast ‘entre la γνῶσις (charisme et silence) and l’ἐπιστήμη (science et raisonnement)’29 and states that ‘la γνῶσις—­oraison, contemplation—­est donc supérieure à la pensée théologique, celle-­ci n’étant pas, cependant, une simple ἐπιστήμη’.30 This strikes the right note for understanding Lossky’s sense of the relationship between kataphatic and apophatic theology. Analogy, if it belongs anywhere, is one of the modes of ἐπιστήμη, not a means of resolving positive and negative theology.31 Lossky did, however, address the question of analogy in two places: in the great work he was working on all his life, intended as a doctoral thesis, published postumously as Théologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart,32 and in an article that belongs to the early stages of his research towards his doctorat d’état, ‘La notion des “Analogies” chez Denys le pseudo-­Aréopagite’.33 28 Stăniloae, Experience I. 99. 29  Vladimir Lossky, Théologie dogmatique, ed. Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou (Cerf, 2012), 16. (There is an English translation of much the same text: Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989).) 30 Lossky, Théologie dogmatique, 17. 31  See Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957), 26. 32  Vladimir Lossky, Théologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (Vrin, 1960). There is almost a page of references to ‘analogie’ in the ‘Index des thèmes’: p. 426. 33 Vladimir Lossky, ‘La notion des “Analogies” chez Denys le pseudo-­ Aréopagite’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 5 (1931), 279–309.

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  309 The discussion of analogy in his thesis on Eckhart is only marginally relevant for our purpose: Lossky is discussing Eckhart; he is not engaging in constructive the­ology (there are a few comments that reveal Lossky’s own theological position, but these are quite rare, and do not occur in relation to analogy). Nevertheless, it is clear that Lossky knows a good deal about the role of analogy in Western medi­ eval theology, and sees the concept as central to an understanding of Eckhart. Lossky cannot then be thought to have overlooked the concept of analogy in his own theological writings. The article maybe gives an insight into what he understands the role of analogy to be in theology. The burden of the article is that ana­ logy in Dionysios refers first and foremost to the capacity of the rational creature to receive and apprehend manifestations of the divine. It refers to the Platonic κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, the qualification that refers to our capacity to receive—­in the most famous phrase much quoted by the Fathers: ‘Flight [from the world] is assimilation to God as much as is possible’ (Theaetetus 176B). Dionysios substitutes for the Platonic phrase κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν (e.g., Divine Names 1. 1: 588A) or ἀναλόγως (e.g., Celestial Hierarchy 3. 1: 164D): analogy refers not, as with Aquinas, to a means of predication, but rather to our capacity, aptitude, ἐπιτηδειότης, to respond to God.

Maximos’ ‘Signature Doctrine’ of the Logoi This shift is, I think, significant, and points the way to my final consideration. In a  paper given at a Maximos Symposium in Belgrade in 2012, Fr Maximos Simonopetrites (a.k.a. Nicholas Constas) gave a paper on the reception of St Maximos’ thought in East and West.34 One thread running through this paper is what Fr Maximos calls the Confessor’s ‘signature doctrine of the logoi’. It is puzzling that so many readers of Maximos made little of this doctrine, notably St John Damascene, in other respects deeply indebted to the Confessor. There are exceptions to this history of neglect: Fr Maximos draws attention to the development of the doctrine of the logoi by Isaak the Sebastokrator, a somewhat younger contemporary of Michael Psellos, and older brother of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. St Gregory Palamas is, however, no exception; Fr Maximos speculates that it was Barlaam’s use of the notion of the ‘inner principles (λόγοι) of creation’, grounded in the ‘divine, primal, and creative mind’, images of which were to be found in the soul, that led Palamas to reject the doctrine of the logoi.35 Fr Maximos goes on to comment on Palamas’ ‘seemingly summary dismissal’ of the 34  Fr Maximos Simonopetrites (Nicholas Constas), ‘St Maximos the Confessor: The Reception of his Thought in East and West’, Knowing the Purpose of the Creation through the Resurrection, Proceedings of the Symposium on St Maximos the Confessor, Belgrade, 18–21 October 2012, ed. Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević) (Sebastian Press, 2013), 25–53. 35  Maximos, ‘Reception’, 44–5, based on Gregory Palamas, Triads I. 1. 2–3.

310  Selected Essays, VOLUME II doctrine, pointing out how in later treatments of this problem, he seems to bypass Maximos in favour of Stoic thought. Fr Maximos goes on to comment: It is to be regretted that the scholastic-­humanist assault on Hesychasm prevented Palamas from developing Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi into an Orthodox analogia entis, according to which God and his creatures would not be brought under the same general category of being and which would account fully for their irreducible differences.36

Let it pass that the doctrine of analogia entis, whether in Aquinas, Cajetan, or Przywara, is intended precisely to avoid the danger of including God and creatures under the same general category of being, Fr Maximos’ suggestion that the doctrine of the logoi could fulfil something that the doctrine of analogia entis fulfilled in the West is worth pondering, albeit only briefly here. To begin our reflection, let us recall the conclusion we reached when thinking about Lossky’s understanding of analogy in Dionysios; we suggested that he finds a contrast between a way of thinking about analogy as enabling us to understand what we mean when we predicate qualities, or names, of God and another way of thinking about analogy that is concerned with our capacity to make something of what is revealed of God by these names. The contrast seems to me to be something like the way in which Antoine Lévy characterizes the difference between Maximos’ and Aquinas’ understanding of the uncreated/created divide, when he speaks of Maximos’ ‘ktizocentrisme’ and Aquinas’ ‘ktistocentrisme’: creation-­centrism and creature-­centrism. Maximos’ perspective is that of the act of creation: he looks at the way in which God is related, through his energies/activities, or in another way through the logoi, to his creation; whereas Aquinas looks at the way in which the human strives to understand the created order and God precisely from the perspective of being a creature.37 Lévy comments, ‘The inverse symmetry of the perspectives leads to the difference of conceptualization, of language; but it leads to no doctrinal divergence, because the causal process is strictly identical in the two perspectives.’38 Maybe one could suggest that the doctrine of the logoi of creation and the doctrine of analogia entis are complementary in a similar way. Both are concerned with the relationship of the Creator to his creation; both concerned with the one and the many, and indeed with reconciling the one and the many. The many logoi are one in the one Logos, who is the Logos made flesh in Christ; so Maximos asserts frequently that ‘the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One’ (e.g., Amb. 7: 1081B). The doctrine of analogia entis tries to find a middle way between including God and creature under a general category of being (the way 36  Maximos, ‘Reception’, 46.

37 Lévy, Le créé, 298–304.

38 Lévy, Le créé, 304.

Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology  311 of univocity) and understanding God’s being and our being as utterly different, with no point of comparison between God and creature. Both the doctrine of the logoi and the doctrine of analogia entis, properly understood, seek to interpret the fundamental division between uncreated and created—­a division so radical that Maximos at one point calls it ἄγνοια, ignorance (Amb. 41: 1305A)—not in any way to compromise it. But the perspectives of these doctrines are very different, and lead to concepts and language that might appear incompatible (behind the doctrine of the logoi of creation, though not, I think, identical with it, lies the doctrine, systematized by Palamas, of the essence and energies of God), but, strictly speaking, there is no doctrinal divergence. The doctrine of the logoi leads towards the practice of natural contemplation, and in the Byzantine tradition that is part of the spiritual life: as asceticism cleanses the doors of perception, so in our prayer we come to see the meaning and coherence of the created order, as a step towards contemplation of God. The doctrine of analogia entis is concerned with the conditions under which the created intellect can affirm anything intelligible about God at all. It seems that it must remain an abstract, philosophical doctrine, though it has always seemed to me that Bernard Lonergan’s four transcendental principles: ‘Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible’ emerge in a world of thought undergirded by analogia entis, but trace out a kind of asceticism of knowledge that can be seen as a dimension of the spiritual life.39 We began our reflections, in tune with the central subject of this symposium, by exploring how analogy—­precisely the rejection of analogy—­might indicate some kind of engagement between Barth and Orthodoxy. Our discussion quickly between less a dialogue between two partners, rather a more complex engagement between three: Barth, the Western Catholic tradition, and Orthodoxy. I have a feeling that out of this threefold engagement there has emerged a rather different, and more traditional, engagement between Catholic West and Orthodox East. Where is Karl Barth in all this? I am not sure that any apparent parallels between Barth’s attitude to analogy and the Orthodox neglect, or even rejection, of analogy lead anywhere very significant. If, however, thinking about Barth’s rejection of analogy has led us to some reflection on the place analogy might play in Orthodox theology, or even why it doesn’t, then our thought has, perhaps, not been in vain.

39  Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Method in Theology (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972), 53.

27

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos An Orthodox View

At the first Œcumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 325, it was decreed that Easter, or Pascha, should be observed on the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox.1 At the first Œcumenical Council, held at Nicaea in 325, it was decreed that Easter, or Pascha, should be observed on the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. I say that confidently, but in fact no canon from the first Œcumenical Council survives concerning the date of Easter; the canons we have are all disciplinary canons, the only liturgical one, the last, forbid­ ding kneeling on Sundays and during Pentecost, a ruling largely forgotten now­ adays, though still observed by many (though not all) Orthodox. The only documentary reference to the decision about the date of Easter comes in letters—­ one from the Council itself to the Egyptian Church, the other a long encyclical letter from the Emperor Constantine—­which simply say that Christians are not to keep the feast of Easter with the Jews, which presumably means that they are not to derive the date of Easter from the date on which the Jews keep the Passover, but follow the date determined by the church of Rome and the church of Alexandria. Alexandria was presumably chosen because of the renown in which the city was held for astronomical/astrological knowledge, and the attempts already made there to produce tables giving the date of Easter for successive years (notably by Anatolios (d. c.282), the Alexandrian philosopher who become bishop of Laodicea, whose nineteen-­year cycle for calculating the date of Easter is still the basis of the calendrical systems in use today); Rome because of its unquestioned prominence, at least in the West. It was assumed that they arrived at the same date, though that cannot always have been the case: the Alexandrian method used a nineteen-­year cycle; the Roman an eighty-­four-­year cycle, so they were bound to diverge at some point. Indeed, later in the century, Ambrose intro­ duced the Alexandrian reckoning, because the Roman reckoning was, in his view, faulty.2 Nevertheless, we can, I think, be confident that the decision of the first Council of Nicaea was as I have stated it: Easter, Pascha, the Christian Passover,

1  Constantinople Lecture 2016. 2  See his letter to the bishops of Aemilia and Romagna (ep. 23), determining the date of Easter for the year ad 387, the year, incidentally, in which Augustine was baptized in Milan by Ambrose.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0028

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  313 is to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox (or, if full moon fell on a Sunday, the following Sunday).3 There are several points to be observed about this determination of the date of Pascha. First of all, it has nothing to do with calendars as such; whatever calendar you use, the date of the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox is ascertainable, and nowadays, with our vastly improved astronomical knowledge, the date could be readily determined (it would be necessary to add where we are calculating this for, as the full moon takes place at a particular moment, and could easily be on a different day in Tokyo and London, say, but I think it would be eas­ ily agreed that the date should be calculated for Jerusalem). Calendars come into the question of Pascha, because of the need to determine in advance the date of Pascha, and these calculations were originally (and still are) based on the calen­ dar. Second, and I shall have much more to say about this later, the date of Pascha involves a kind of conjunction of three different cycles: the solar cycle of the year (to which the vernal equinox belongs), the lunar cycle of the month (to which the full moon belongs), and the weekly cycle (to which Sunday belongs). The idea of bringing together these three cycles, and placing Christ at their centre, or con­ junction, seems to me to have profound implications. Let us go back to calendars. Nowadays we take them for granted, but there are many ways of ordering time: the time chosen for the New Year, the length of the months, unless you keep to strictly lunar months—­these are matters on which there can be different decisions, on which there needs to be general agreement. The Jewish calendar and the Muslim calendar keep to lunar months, which are about twenty-­nine and a half days long. Twelve lunar months are shorter than the solar year (by about eleven days); thirteen months too long. The Jews adopted a system of intercalating a month, round about the time of the vernal equinox, every two or three years. The Muslims adopt a lunar ‘year’ of twelve lunar months, which means that the beginning of the year (and feasts celebrated through the year) are about eleven days earlier each year: that is why it is difficult to work out the correspondence between the Muslim reckoning from the year of the Hijra (ah), the departure of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca, and the Christian reckoning from the year of the Lord (ad); the Hijra took place in ad 622, but the year ah cannot be calculated by subtracting 622 from the year ad. Nor is there 3  For bibliography on Easter and determining its date, see the articles in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. E.  A.  Livingstone, 3rd edn (OUP, 1997; revised 2005), s.v. Easter, Paschal Controversies, to which should be added: Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Origins of the Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity (SPCK, 2011), 39–86; Faith Wallis’ introduction to Bede: The Reckoning of Time, trans. etc., Faith Wallis, Translated Texts for Historians 29 (Liverpool University Press, 1999), xv–­ci; Alden  A.  Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (Oxford University Press, 2008). See also the still invaluable work by V.  Grumel, La chronologie (Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). And most recently, C.  Philipp  E.  Nothaft, Scandalous Error: Calendrical Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018).

314  Selected Essays, VOLUME II any correspondence between the months of the Muslim year and the seasons, for all feasts and fasts can occur in any of the seasons. It was, one imagines, for this reason that the Jews adopted the method of correcting their lunar year, so that the month corresponded more or less to the seasons: many of the Jewish feasts are bound up with seasonal activity, sowing and harvesting, as with the Christian year. The Muslim year is, it would appear, deliberately acosmic; while the Jewish and Christian years, again deliberately, retain a link between the calendar and the seasons. Christians, however, made no attempt to create their own religious calendar; when they fashioned their calendar or calendars, they very rarely worked from scratch. They adopted the calendar—­the secular calendar—­of the people among whom they lived, and for most this was the Roman Empire. The calendar that Christians followed was therefore the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 bc (actually it was not quite as simple as that—­in matters calendrical things rarely are—­and for further detail you should consult that wonderful book, The Oxford Companion to the Year, by Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-­ Strevens).4 Unlike the Jews or the Muslims, for instance, no attempt was made to create a thoroughly religious calendar. There may lie behind this a theological intuition that the calendar belongs first and foremost to the order of creation; it has to do with time, which was created by God along with creation, and the revo­ lution of the heavenly bodies. Creation may be in need of redemption, but that is a transformation of what is, not its destruction. So it is appropriate that whatever ways Christians have of celebrating the redemption of the world through the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ should be fitted into a calendar based primarily on the movements of the created order. If an Orthodox may be permitted to quote Thomas Aquinas: gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit—­grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. We shall have to come back to calendars, but I want first to take you on a long digression. I have already said that we tend to take calendars for granted, but we might go a step further and say that we tend to treat calendars as just a way of measuring time—­like clocks and watches, or even a vibrating quartz crystal—­ only on a larger scale. I want to suggest that the Christian calendar is about more than measuring time, it is about shaping time, and experiencing time, and it may be that the Orthodox calendar preserves this sense more robustly than the Western calendar does, or rather, the way the calendar is used in the West nowadays. If we are going to understand this, as a way towards appreciating what the Christians of late antiquity were doing when they fashioned the calendar, we need to consider how they understood time (and also space, though that is less 4  For more detail on the introduction of the Julian calendar and the Roman calendar in general, and as a first resource for all matters calendrical, see Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-­ Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford University Press, 1999), 669–76.

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  315 immediately relevant for our purposes). This not just a matter of dusty history, for—­I repeat—­the calendar fashioned in late antiquity is the basis of the calen­ dars used by all Christians, not least the Orthodox. Modern notions of space and time are predominantly quantitative: they are ways of measuring, and the modern use of calendars is much the same. The the­ or­ies of relativity, both special and general, complicate what we might mean by measurement, but I don’t think they fundamentally alter that aspect of space and time in the classical physics of Newton and Leibniz. In contrast, notions of space and time in classical and late antiquity are more to do with ways of being, or more precisely, of becoming. Notions of space and time in late antiquity became quite complicated, but we can simplify, by simply taking a look at Plato’s Timaeus, far and away the most potent influence on the cosmology of late antiquity. There Plato introduces the ‘receptacle, or as it were nurse, of all becoming’ (Tim. 49a). It is not just that in which things move, but that in which everything becomes. What takes place in the receptacle, which Plato will later identify with space (χώρα: 52a), is much more than the movement of material, physical bodies, it is nothing less than the change and becoming of everything subject to such change and becoming. To be in space is, then, not just to be geometrically located, as it were, but to belong to the realm of change and becoming: the ὑποδοχή is certainly a receptacle, but that means more than a container, something to put things in, rather it means that which receives, provides room for, everything that constitutes the cosmos—­the product of reason and necessity. Nor is the cosmos something for Plato that can be considered in purely material terms. Before he comes to speak of the receptacle of becoming, he describes the cosmos as a living being having soul at the centre, with body wrapped round the outside, as it were, of soul (Plato clearly has in mind something like an armillary sphere, often found as an illustration in editions and translations of the Timaeus)—it is for this reason that the cosmos and a human being can be seen as mutually reflecting one another, human kind being, in the coinage of the Renaissance, a microcosm, a little cos­ mos, μικρὸς κόσμος, an idea frequently found in the Fathers. Even a quick glance at the Timaeus reveals that the cosmos as a living being is not some sort of primæval being, but is already instinct with principles of reason and proportion. Plato explains at some length how soul contains within itself complex and beauti­ ful mathematical structures, and as he goes on to discuss what it is that is formed within the receptacle of becoming, we find a discussion that embraces everything that comes into being from the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, and how on this foundation we find the principles of pleasure and pain, tastes, smells, sounds, colours, and beyond that the emotional structure of the soul—­its capacity for being aroused, ultimately to anger, and for experiencing desire and longing (its incensive or spirited and its desiring or appetitive powers). The kinds of becoming envisaged within the receptacle of becoming go well beyond the move­ ment of physical particles, and include what is perceived by the senses and the

316  Selected Essays, VOLUME II very process of sensation, the experience of pleasure and pain, and the complex reality of the soulful experience of mortal beings (to avoid the debased meaning attached to ‘psychic’ or ‘psychological’ in English). Another term Plato uses to characterize space is διάστημα, interval or distance, but again we find that this means not just measurable distance, but any distance or extension, including moving in an argument, say, from premisses to a conclu­ sion, or the ‘distance’ implicit in the notion of desire for something. The notion of multitude or the manifold is implicit in the realm of becoming and διάστημα is implicit in this. It is not so much a physical concept, as a metaphysical one. The notion of interval applies to time as well, but again does so in a multitude of ways. Perhaps most important is the sense of time as bound up with cosmic movement, the movement of the heavens: the sequence of the seasons, the passage from evening to morning. This cosmic movement is more than physical movement, for it has significance, meaning, bound up with the quality of time characteristic of the seasons—­spring, summer, autumn, winter (vividly expressed in medieval cal­ endars, not least those found—­significantly—­in books of hours)—and of the pas­ sage from evening, through night, to morning and the day. The creation in six days suggests a sequence of ages, prefigured in the successive days of creation, including the ‘ages of the world’, variously conceived. There are also the stages of human life, often modelled on the ages of the world: from birth to death, through the ages of man (variously divided, sometimes four—­childhood, youth, maturity, old age—­sometimes seven—­as in Jaques’ infant, student, lover, soldier, judge, declining into old age, and finally ‘second childishness and mere oblivion’).5 Furthermore, there is the movement of the soul from its baptismal awakening by repentance, through growth in the image of God by ascetic struggle, and a deep­ ening transfiguration through grace in which the life of God is manifest in the soul, to deification. All these experiences of movement suggest mutual analogies; it is not, as the modern mind is tempted to think, that physical space and dur­ ation are the ‘real’ meaning of space and time, the others being merely meta­phor­ ic­al. Rather all these experiences of movement in space and time are experiences of the modalities of creaturely being, characterized by διάστημα. Plato’s convic­ tion of the link, or harmony, between the soul and the cosmos is manifest in the closing paragraphs of the Timaeus, where he speaks of ‘the most sovereign form of soul in us’, which ‘dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens’, and recommends that, because ‘the motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe’, we should follow them, so that

5  For Jaques’ speech, see Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7. For some sense of the richness of the notion of the ages of man, see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man (Clarendon Press, 1986).

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  317 by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, [we] should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfilment of the best life set by the gods before mankind both for this present time and for the time to come. (Tim. 90acd)6

The centrality of the notion of διάστημα to ancient understanding of space and time has a further important consequence we should note. It does not mean that space and time are full of ‘gaps’, gulfs of unmeaning, as it were, dooming the world of becoming to ultimate meaninglessness. Even for Plato, for whom there can be no logos of anything in the realm of becoming (Tim. 29d), the truth is quite the contrary: the cosmos, existing in space, and time itself are creations of the gods; they have meaning that is revealed in their structures, constituted by relationship. Time is for Plato ‘a moving image of eternity’ (εἰκὼ . . . κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος: Tim. 37d): it is ordered towards eternity; within the realm of becoming it represents eternity as its image. The sequence of time is not meaningless: it discloses eternity. The Christian calendar is a way of bringing into conjunction these different cycles of cosmic time, and thus bringing together human time—­the time of the microcosm—­with the time of the cosmos, or the universe. It is often said that there are two conceptions of time—­one cyclical and the other linear; one con­ ceives of time either as consisting of recurring cycles or as something that moves in a kind of linear way from the past to the future. It was popular, among theolo­ gians of the last century, to oppose these two notions of time and see the cyclical as in some sense Greek or pagan, in contrast to a sense of time as linear, moving into the future, which was regarded as biblical. This seems to me an oversimplifi­ cation, for cyclical ways of understanding time are as much a part of the biblical understanding as the sense of a linear movement from creation to consumma­ tion. For it is through various cycles, that repeat themselves, that we grasp the passage of time. The day, the month, the year: these are cycles related to the circu­ lar movement of the earth, the moon, and the sun, or, as the ancients would have thought of it, the sun, the moon, and the sphere of the fixed stars, for it was the movement of the sun round the earth that was thought to determine the day, the sequence of the phases of the moon that determined the month (much as we still conceive it) and the movement through the zodiac of the sphere of the fixed stars that determined the year. There are other cycles associated with these fundamen­ tal cycles. The year, for instance, is broken down in the sequence of the seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The Jewish tradition, as we find it in the Scriptures, adds another cycle: the cycle of the week, consisting of seven days from Sunday to Saturday. As we have seen, these various cycles do not fit into 6  Translation in F.  M.  Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937; reprint 1971), 353–4.

318  Selected Essays, VOLUME II each other in any tidy way: the month is a bit more than four weeks; the year a bit more than twelve lunar months. It is this that makes the calendar a complicated business; even by the time of late antiquity centuries of human ingenuity had gone into bringing these cycles into some sort of conjunction. There are two ways of doing this, and the Christian calendar incorporates both of them. The Julian calendar, adopted, as we have seen, by the Christians of the Roman Empire, is one way of bringing the solar year and the lunar year into con­ junction (I am going to use our modern way of referring to these, though I sup­ pose, historically, I should say the sidereal year): the twelve months of the lunar year are extended by two or three days (except for February) so that the twelve months encompass 365 days. This means that the months are no longer lunar; the full moon shifts about each month, and one can even have two moons in a single calendar month; lunar time is, if you like, subordinated to solar time. The Christian Church, however, remained attached to the lunar year, for one reason: the celebration of Easter, or Pascha, the Christian Passover. As the name ‘Pascha’ makes clear, the Christian feast is based on the Jewish Passover, Pesach, or Pasch; or rather it is the Christian Pascha or Passover. The way the Hebrews worked out the date of Passover involved bringing lunar and solar time into some kind of conjunction. For the Jews, as we have seen, every so often an extra lunar month is intercalated, so that the Jewish year corresponds roughly to the solar year, and the months relate to the seasons of the year. Passover was held on 14 Nisan, the date of the full moon after, or around, the spring equinox. Based on that, Christians by the end of the second century were determining Easter as the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (as the equinox was judged to be 20/21 March, Easter could occur on any date between 22 March and 25 April). This brings into conjunction three of the cycles mentioned: the week, the (lunar) month, and the (solar) year. Easter is the first day of the week (Sunday), occurring in the middle of the lunar month, after the full moon, in Spring, the season in which the earth comes to life. The revolution of these cycles—­ their conjunction and disjunction—­ gives shape to the sequence of time, which would otherwise be—­as it has perhaps largely become in the secular West—­a sequence of otherwise indistinguishable days. Let us start with the day: in the Orthodox calendar (as in the Western calen­ dar on feast days; after the Vatican II reforms only on Sundays and Solemnities) the day starts in the evening with the setting of the sun—­in Genesis each day is described as ‘evening and morning’, not ‘morning and evening’—and moves towards the light of the morning; the day moves from darkness to light, ultimately towards the ‘day without evening’ of the Kingdom of Heaven. Then the week, which starts with Sunday, the Day of the Resurrection; in Russian it is called Воскресение, ‘Resurrection’, in Greek, Κυριακή, the Lord’s Day, as it has also been called in England—­the Day, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection. Moreover, the week also ends with Sunday, the eighth day, coming full cycle on that day

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  319 (the  Orthodox lectionary of scriptural readings, for example, is organized in terms of weeks that end on Sunday): again pointing to the eighth day, the symbol of the ‘day without evening of the Kingdom’ (ἀνέσπερος ἡμέρα τῆς βασιλείας). The sequence of the moons also begins with the paschal full moon, and the various seasons of the year are reflected in the festivals of the Church Year. Easter is the central turning point in the Christian Year. It is preceded by the great forty-­day fast of Lent. There developed different ways of interpreting this forty-­day fast: in the West the forty days are counted back from Holy Saturday, omitting Sundays, so that Lent begins on Ash Wednesday; in the East the forty-­ day period begins on Clean Monday (two days before Ash Wednesday, when Easters coincide) and ends on the weekend before Easter—­with Lazarus Saturday (commemorating the rising of Lazarus) and the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday ushering in Great and Holy Week. Easter is followed by the fifty days leading up to Pentecost (which means ‘fiftieth [day]’), by way of the Feast of the Ascension, forty days after Easter. So there is a period of nearly three months in the Christian calendar determined by the paschal full moon, and the dates connected with it are detached, as it were, from the solar year of twelve months. For most of the year, the feasts and fasts of the Church are determined by the solar year, but for the three months from the beginning of Lent until the end of the Paschal season, they are accompanied by a long period of fast and feast, based on the lunar year which determines Easter. The solar year itself, beginning in January and ending in December, is marked by various celebrations: first of all, the celebrations of the feasts of the martyrs, generally on the date of their martyrdom, their ‘heavenly birthday’, and later other saints. The Orthodox understanding of the Church Year is more closely linked to the Roman Year than in the West, where the Church Year begins with the first Sunday of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas. Although the year begins on 1 January, the Feast of Christ’s circumcision and also of St Basil the Great, properly speaking the Church Year is considered to begin on 1 September, the beginning of the Indiction (the Byzantine tax year!), a day now dedicated to prayer for the environment, and also the Feast of the great saint of the fifth century, St Symeon the Stylite, or Pillar Saint. Within this solar year, other cycles can be discerned: a cycle bound up with the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Christmas, stretching from the Feast of the Annunciation to the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple, in the West the Purification, and another cycle, associated with the life of the Mother of God, drawn not from the canonical Gospels, but from apocryphal writings, the so-­ called Protevangelium of James and the accounts of the Dormition and Assumption of the Mother of God. The Protevangelium is a second-­century account of the life of the Virgin up to the massacre of the Innocents. It is a remark­ able text, full of symbolism. It is here we find the story that, at the Annunciation, the Virgin was spinning the scarlet and purple thread for the veil of the Temple,

320  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the veil that will be rent asunder at the Crucifixion, and the account of Joseph, going in search of a midwife, leaving the Virgin in a cave, and as Christ is born, finding that time stands still: But I, Joseph, was walking, and I was not walking. I looked up to the vault of heaven, and saw it standing still . . . I looked down at the torrential stream, and I saw some goats whose mouths were over the water, but they were not drinking. Then suddenly everything returned to its normal course.  (Prot. 18.2)

The Protevangelium yields the feasts of her Nativity on 8 September, her Entry into the Temple on 21 November, after which the Marian cycle merges with the cycle based on the Nativity of Christ. The Marian cycle ends with the feast of the Dormition on 15 August, drawn too from apocryphal accounts, which was decreed a feast of the Byzantine Empire by the Emperor Maurice at the end of the sixth century. The Marian cycle more or less embraces the Church Year, moving from September to August. In passing, Joseph’s experience of the stillness of cre­ ation at the birth of the Saviour seems to me to find an echo in the belief that animals can talk on Christmas Eve—­to the fury of the cat Simpkin in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester! In the Church Year, therefore, we have a conjunction of various cycles, that shape the year and enable us to move through the various elements that consti­ tute the events that add up to the engagement between God and humanity that culminated in the Incarnation. The notion of time as cyclical can be regarded from different perspectives, as I have suggested already. Plato saw time, χρόνος, as a ‘moving image of eternity’ (Timaeus 37d), manifest in the circular movement of the heavens. The circular movement gave shape to the movement that characterizes the life of finite beings, focusing that movement on the stillness that lies at the heart of reality and reflected in the calm circlings of the stars. The English, or Welsh, poet, Henry Vaughan, caught something of this in his poem, ‘The World’: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,     All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years     Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world     And all her train were hurl’d;

The rest of the poem is mostly concerned with those who cannot see eternity, this ‘ring of pure and endless light’, but are trapped in dark cycles that draw them

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  321 down away from the light: the statesman, the miser, the epicure. For the notion of the cyclical is ambivalent: we can use the image of cyclical movement to capture a sense of meaninglessness, or a vortex that sucks us down, overpowering us. T. S. Eliot called April the ‘cruellest month’, because it is a month of fresh begin­ nings, new shoots that spring up full of hope, a hope that will be exhausted come winter. It ushers in a cycle of meaninglessness, a cycle in which signs of hope are mocked. This sense of a cycle of meaninglessness is very powerful; the sense that we are caught in revolutions that entrap us and bring us round and round to the same thing, making no kind of advance—­all of this is very familiar. The cycles of the liturgical celebration of the Church—­daily, weekly, monthly, yearly—­are ways in which the cycles of meaninglessness in which we find ourselves too often trapped can be redeemed and find meaning. But how? The cycle goes round and retraces its course; it is all the same. ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher . . . there is no new thing under the sun’ (Proverbs 1.2, 9). There seem to me to be two ways in which the cycles of time encapsulated in the calendar lead us out of this cycle of meaninglessness. We have noticed the way in which the day begins as the light fades and moves towards the rising of the sun, and also the way in which the week of seven days ends in an eighth day. Both these symbolize a movement upwards, a movement beyond the cycle, a move­ ment towards the ‘day without evening of the Kingdom’. And we take that route by denying the cycles of meaninglessness that are a consequence of the fall; every movement of love, every refusal of despair, lifts us towards the ‘ring of pure and endless light’. It is not just a matter of chance that the phrase, ‘the day without evening of the kingdom’, comes from the Easter Canon, for it is the Resurrection of Christ that sealed the triumph of love. But closely linked to this there is another way in which the cycles of time become cycles of meaning rather than despair. This turns on its head the despairing sense of everything being the same. The same what? we might ask? As the cycle of the year turns, we celebrate the feasts of the Church: the feasts of the determining moments of redemption—­ the Incarnation, the Death and Resurrection of Christ, and all the events associated with them—­as well as the feasts of the saints, their ‘heavenly birthdays’ on which they were born into the ‘day without evening of the Kingdom’. We remember, but more than that we remember as being present, we remember as being there: we make ἀνάμνησις, to use the Greek word, as we do every time we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, or the Eucharist—‘Remembering therefore this our Saviour’s command and all that has been done for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Second and Glorious Coming again, Your own of your own we offer you, in all and for all . . .’. We do not remem­ ber the past (we actually remember the ‘Second and Glorious Coming again’ which is to come!), we are present at the mysteries we celebrate. So it is that at each of the feasts, we are present there, ‘today’:

322  Selected Essays, VOLUME II At the Entry of the Mother of God: ‘Today is the prelude of the good pleasure of God . . . In the Temple of God the Virgin is revealed . . .’; At Christmas: ‘Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being, and the earth offers a cave to him whom no one can approach . . .’; At Theophany (in the West, Epiphany): ‘Today you have appeared to the in­habit­ed world . . . You have come, you have appeared, the unapproachable Light’ At the Annunciation: ‘Today is the crowning moment of our salvation, and the unfolding of the eternal mystery: the Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin . . .’ The cycle is the same, the very same, but we are not trapped in it, it is a source of the life, the life that flows from the Paschal mystery that is at the very heart of the calendar of the Church. There are two other points I want to touch on: one mundane, the other funda­ mental. First, why the Orthodox calendar now differs from the Christian calendar observed in the West, and what prospect there might be of celebrating Easter together; second, the way in which the Orthodox calendar inserts the drama of salvation into the history of creation. First, the difference between Orthodox and Western Christian calendars. As we have seen, Christians in the Roman Empire accepted the calendar of the empire, the Julian calendar. This is an attempt to stop the solar year from slipping away from its alignment with the seasons. The solar year is about 365 and a quar­ ter days long; a year of 365 days will be always slipping back, starting a quarter of a day earlier each year. The Julian calendar created a leap year every four years; in that year February had an extra day, making twenty-­nine days. In this way the awkward quarter day in the solar year is compensated for. However, this is an overcorrection. Over the centuries the year gets ahead of itself. In the sixteenth century, in the wake of the changes brought about by the Council of Trent, the Gregorian calendar was devised, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582. This differs from the Julian calendar by having slightly fewer leap years: if the year ends in two zeros, and so would normally be a leap year, it is only a leap year if it is divisible by 400 (instead of the normal rule of being divisible by 4). The decree also ordained that in 1582, October 4 would be followed by October 15, ten days being dropped so as to restore the equinoxes and solstices to their trad­ ition­al dates. The Catholic countries of Europe followed this decree, and rather later the Protestant ones. The Orthodox, except in Russia, were under the Ottoman yoke; their calendar had become purely religious, and they stuck to it, as did Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an attempt was made to reform the calendar in the Orthodox countries, most of which had only recently gained independence. This produced the revised Julian calendar, which jumped thirteen days and brought it into line with the Gregorian calendar, but which dif­ fered from the Gregorian calendar having a different way of determining leap

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  323 years in the years ending with two zeros (two leap years in the final year of the century every 900 years, instead of two every 800); this slight correction is meant to keep the calendrical year in more accurate alignment with the astronomical solar year. The difference is slight, and won’t, in any case, become apparent until the year ad 2800! A congress of many Orthodox Churches in Constantinople, held in 1923, endorsed this calendar, but only some Churches put it into practice, including, incidentally, Russia (or at least Moscow), though it added so much to the confusion of the times that the decision, by Patriarch Tikhon, was quickly rescinded.7 Because of this disagreement, it was decided that all Orthodox Churches would keep Easter together, according to the old Julian calendar. So all Orthodox Churches (except the Orthodox Church of Finland) follow the old cal­ endar for Easter, which explains the discrepancy over the date of Easter between the Orthodox and the West—­our Easters can coincide (as next year), or Orthodox Easter can be a week later (more often than not), four weeks later (rarely), or five weeks later (as it does this year). The differences occur because the spring equi­ nox is still regarded as 20/21 March, even though this corresponds to 2/3 April on the Gregorian calendar. If the paschal full moon, predicted according a table involving Golden Numbers for each year (as in the tables after the calendar in the Book of Common Prayer), falls between 21 March and 2 April, it can’t count for the Orthodox calculation and we have to wait until the next one. Only certain Churches, mostly those associated with the œcumenical patriarchate, accepted the revised Julian calendar; in the end, Russia didn’t, nor did Serbia, Bulgaria, the patriarchate of Jerusalem, or the monastic communities on Mount Athos. So far as Christmas is concerned, those Churches that observe the revised Julian calen­ dar keep Christmas on the same day as the West; those that stick to the old Julian calendar keep it thirteen days later—­for them 25 December, but according to the civil calendar 7 January. From time to time, it has been suggested that a solution might be to keep Easter according to an astronomical calculation: the first Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox, calculated according to some agreed place, most prob­ ably Jerusalem. That is the date that those computing Easter are trying to arrive at (not completely successfully with either the Gregorian or the Julian calendar, though the Gregorian is much more successful). This suggestion was originally on the agenda for the Great and Holy Synod held in Crete this summer. In the event, other matters took precedence and there was no discussion of the date of Easter. Such a decision, however, could provide a means towards Orthodox and 7  See Vladimir Khulap, ‘Pastoral Problems of a Reform of the Liturgical Calendar in Russia’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60;1–2 (2016) , 65–77, at 69–70 (an issue devoted to the question of the (then) approaching Council of the Orthodox Church, eventually held in Crete); an article which makes clear that, though there is much resistance to the idea of changing to the New Julian calendar, it is not inconceivable: see the statement by Metropolitan Hilarion quoted by Khulap, ‘Pastoral Problems’, 74.

324  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the West, at least the Catholic West, agreeing on a common date for Easter. But it seems difficult to conceive how we would ever get to this point. Such a suggestion is quite different from yet another suggestion: that there should be a fixed date for Easter, for instance, the second Sunday of April.8 I cannot believe that this would ever be acceptable to the Orthodox, for it would break completely with the trad­ ition, decreed at Nicaea I, that sees the Christian Pascha as uniting the three cos­ mic cycles: the solar, the lunar, the weekly. A date, traditionally decided in accordance with the movement of the cosmos—­and placing Christ at the centre or conjunction of these cosmic cycles—­would be decided according to the con­ venience of modern Western society—­to fit in with the spring school holiday! It would, in Eamon Duffy’s phrase, be an ultimate ‘ “bourgeoisification” of time’.9 All I have said so far, about the Christian calendar as an attempt to accommo­ date the cycles of the cosmos, and the importance of these cycles for our under­ standing of who we are in relation to the cosmos, and also as a means of giving the drama of redemption cosmic and not merely human significance: all this, I hope, shows what is at stake in considering severing the link between Pascha and the cosmic cycles, symbolized in the way determining the date of Easter engages with the cycles of the sun, the moon, and the week, the cycle closest to our human life. I want to illustrate this by what might at first sight seem an erudite matter, but in the light of what I have said so far, is of direct, though symbolic, significance. Byzantine Chronicles began with creation, and went through the six days in which God created heaven and earth, before embarking on human history. The chroniclers were perfectly clear that the days of creation were not ordinary days, but symbolic of the seven days of the week, ending with God’s day of rest. Nevertheless they were keen to identify these days at the beginning of the Chronicle. They followed certain principles, which is all we need concern our­ selves with, as in details the chroniclers differed among themselves (and the most accessible, The Chronography of George Synkellos, is confessedly unusual in taking a line of its own).10 Creation must have been at the spring equinox: the creation of

8 Nonetheless, the notion of a fixed Easter (probably the second Sunday of April), breaking c­ ompletely with the way in which Easter has been for two millennia aimed at bringing the solar and lunar cycles into some kind of conjunction, has been raised at the highest hierarchical levels: the Anglican primates accepted such an idea and gained the support of the Coptic patriarch, Tawadros II, in January 2016 (see http://anglicannews.org/news/2016/01/primates-support-ecumenical-movesover-easter.aspx); the notion has been raised by Pope Francis (see http://www.catholicnewsagency. com/news/will-pope-francis-change-the-date-of-easter-87684). The latest from the World Council of Churches has only got as far as calculating the date of Easter in an ecumenical way by astronomical means, the method that was to have been put to the Synod of Crete in 2016 (the URL is far too long to give here). All this information from the most recent book on calculating the date of Easter: C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Scandalous Error: Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2018), 303. 9  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London, 1992), 51. 10 See The Chronography of George Synkellos, trans. with intro. and notes by William Adler and Paul Tuffin (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos  325 plants and trees on the third day would only make sense in springtime. On the fourth day sun and moon were created; the moon must have been created full (it could hardly be created only partial!), so the fourth day of creation must have been on the middle of a lunar month, the month the Jews called Nisan, and there­ fore on 14 Nisan. 14 Nisan is the date of the Jewish Passover, which already aligns the redemption of the Jewish people at the Exodus with the creation of the world. If the first day of creation was the spring equinox, 20 March, then the creation of man would have been on the 25 March. It is this date—25 March—­that becomes the key date in Christian aligning of creation and redemption. It is likely for this reason, I think (following Louis Duchesne’s conjecture11), that 25 March was ­chosen to celebrate the Annunciation, the feast of the Lord’s conception, and 25 December depended on it, rather than vice versa. In the East it was generally held that the day of the Resurrection was 25 March (in the West it was Good Friday that was allotted that date). The 25 March becomes the axis of creation and redemption: the date of the creation of man and the two crucial days of his redemption—­ the conception and the resurrection of Christ. Cosmic time enshrines the time of redemption, and the microcosm lies at the heart of the cos­ mos of the heavens. Very serious attempts were made to effect this alignment; but its meaning is symbolic—­the same symbolism that David Jones invokes in the last lines of The Anathemata, which also allude to the notion of anamnesis we have already discussed: He does what is done in many places what he does other he does after the mode of what has always been done. What did he do other recumbent at the garnished supper? What did he do yet other riding the Axile Tree?

11 See L. Duchesne, Christian Worship: its Origin and Evolution, ET, 5th edn (SPCK, 1919), 263–4. Duchesne’s conjecture (as he recognized, there was no literary evidence to support him) has since been confirmed by a discovered literary text: see Thomas J. Tallis, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Pueblo Publishing Company, 1986), 91–9.

28 Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity Some Reflections on the Development of Mariology

Pseudonymous writings—­texts ascribed to someone other than the real author—­ litter Christian literature. There are many of them, throughout the centuries. Scholarly attention to them has, too often, simply been concerned to expose pseudonymity—­to reveal forgery—­and then dispose of the writings in some kind of academic wastepaper basket. If such pseudonymous writings retain the attention of scholarship, it is chiefly to work out who the real author was. If that can be done, the writings, newly labelled and thus restored to respectability, can then be subjected to scholarly analysis. A good example might be the case of Evagrios: well before his condemnation at the Fifth Œcumenical Council, he had been a controversial figure among the monks, though also very much valued for his practical teaching. He was, in fact, so much valued that, even smeared with the brush of heresy, works ascribed to Evagrios himself survive in the manuscript tradition; many however were found a safe haven under the name of St Neilos, an ascetic of the next generation, notably Evagrios’ treatise On Prayer; others failed altogether to survive in the Greek tradition but were preserved in the Syriac and Armenian traditions, where the writ of Constantinople II did not run; indeed in the Armenian tradition Evagrios is regarded as a saint. Scholarship over the last century has restored the Evagrian corpus, and the pseudonymity under which they survived has been more or less forgotten. The Church Father who has been host to the greatest number of pseudonymous writings is apparently St John Chrysostom. An enormously popular preacher, the sermons of many others, some unknown, have found shelter under his name. Sometimes, I expect, this was quite innocent: a copyist, having transcribed a series of genuine sermons of Chrysostom into a codex, has some pages left; rather than waste them he adds some other sermons to hand—­soon added to the œuvre of Chrysostom himself and eventually, one day, re-­classified as ‘Pseudo-­Chrysostom’, though probably no one ever intended to deceive. With some of the texts ascribed to Chrysostom, and therefore bequeathed to posterity, the motivation may have been different: three Paschal homilies have been ascribed to Apollinaris of Laodicea; the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum seems to be a series of sermons, delivered in Latin, by an

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0029

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  327 Arian bishop of the fifth or even sixth century. Such works would never have been copied had they not found shelter under Chrysostom’s name. Sometimes again pseudonymity is more serious, and my reflections on pseudo­ nym­ity were initially aroused by one such case: the so-­called Pseudo-­Dionysios the Areopagite. There is, as is well known, a collection of four treatises and ten epistles that claim to have been written by Dionysios the Areopagite, the judge of the Areopagos court, converted by the Apostle Paul, as recorded in Acts 17. They emerge in the sixth century, occasioning some surprise, but not much more; within a century they are regarded as authentic works of Paul’s Athenian convert, and come to exercise a powerful influence on Christian theology in both Greek East and Latin West (and indeed more widely: the translations into Armenian and Georgian were important events in their respective theological traditions). Doubts were raised about the authenticity of these writings at the Renaissance; at the end of the nineteenth century, two scholars, Koch and Stiglmayr, in­de­pend­ ent­ ly demonstrated the dependence of the Areopagite on the fifth-­ century Neoplatonist, Proklos. Since then scholars have sought to crack the Areopagite’s pseudonymity: around twenty-­five suggestions have been made, few of which have convinced anyone other than the proponent. As Hans Urs von Balthasar remarked, with characteristic bombast: With Denys we have a unique case in theology, indeed in all intellectual history. A man of the foremost rank and of prodigious power hid his identity not only from centuries of credulity but also from the critical acumen of the modern period, and precisely through that concealment exercised his influence. That for our modern, and above all German, scholarship is unforgiveable. After their tank-­formations have laid waste his garden, there is for them not a blade of grass left: all that remains is PSEUDO-, written in bold letters, and underlined with many marks of contempt.1

Dionysios cannot be ignored; his influence on subsequent theology has been too great. The struggle to pin him down will doubtless continue, but is there not a more profitable way of approaching his pseudonymity? What did he think he was doing, a Syrian monk, most likely, in the early sixth century, composing the remnants of the œuvre of a more-­or-­less unknown first-­century Christian convert (for he gives the impression that the Corpus Areopagiticum, as we have it, are simply what survives from a more extensive corpus)? And how did he do it? How did he create a place for himself in the late first century, create a network of friends and correspondents? There is no question that he did this with some care: his

1  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. II (T. & T. Clark, 1984), 144.

328  Selected Essays, VOLUME II correspondents, or the dedicatees of his treatises (much the same thing, as his longest letters are longer than his shortest treatises) include the apostolic disciples of Paul, Timothy, and Titus, the great bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, the disciple of Ignatios of Antioch (whom the Areopagite quotes), as well as the Apostle John himself, to whom he composes a letter sent during his exile on Patmos. I have argued elsewhere that he created his alibi, and the place in history where he wanted to be found, by assiduous use of Eusebius’ Church History.2 More interestingly, Charles Stang has shown, in his recent book, that many of the Areopagite’s most characteristic doctrines, centrally his teaching on love, can be seen as an attempt to interpret the Apostle Paul, viewing him, as is hardly surprising, with presuppositions drawn from his Neoplatonic affinities.3 Such an investment in pseudonymity is worth trying to understand. I want to make a step in that direction by considering what kind of pseudonymity we have to do with here. Such pseudonymity is not unparalleled, but the parallel is not often invoked, for what we have with Dionysios the Areopagite is a kind of pseudonymity that is rather different from the widespread phenomenon we are familiar with from the Fathers; it recalls rather the pseudonymity of the writings known as the apoc­ ryph­al literature of the New Testament. Gospels, Acts, and letters, ascribed to one or other or several of the apostles form a kind of hinterland to the familiar New Testament writings. It is not that there is a body of pseudonymous writings that parallel the authentic writings of the New Testament, for pseudonymity invades the New Testament itself. Very few New Testament scholars would accept that the writers of the canonical Gospels were the named evangelists to whom they are assigned, though the idea that the named evangelists, not all apostles, belong to an identifiable, or conjecturable, apostolic tradition (Mark being linked up with Peter, and Luke with Paul) is often heard, and has ancient precedent.4 So far as the epistles are concerned: some, at least, of the epistles ascribed to Paul are regarded as authentic, beyond that there is general scepticism (which, with regard to some of the epistles, is ancient, too).5 Although we cannot think in terms of an unambiguously authentic Canonical New Testament and a pseudonymous Apocryphal New Testament, there is some sort of a divide between the canonical New Testament and the apocryphal, and it is bound up with the notion of what I’ve called ‘secret tradition’, though I might well have used Guy Stroumsa’s term ‘hidden wisdom’. Pseudonymity in the apocryphal New Testament tradition generally serves, either explicitly or implicitly, to support a claim that here we have preserved a 2  See my ‘Constructing the Apostolic Past: The Case of Dionysius the Areopagite’. In The Church on its Past, Studies in Church History 49, ed. Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (The Boydell Press, 2013), 42–51. 3  Charles Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford University Press, 2012). 4  On Mark’s link with Peter (and Rome), see Eusebius, Church History 2.15. 5 Eusebius asserts that the epistles of James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John are ‘disputed’ (ἀντιλεγόμενα): Church History 3.25.

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  329 secret apostolic tradition: a tradition that goes back to the Lord, but is not ­contained in the canonical New Testament. In these writings, it is claimed, we can find apostolic teaching that has not been made known generally, but is confined to a select group. This reflects one of the features of the teaching of the Lord as presented in the canonical Gospels: for there the Lord is depicted as teaching in parables, dark sayings, puzzling discourses, whose inner meaning he on occasion expounds to the inner circle of disciples. We are told in St Mark’s Gospel: And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be forgiven’.  (Mark 4:10–12)

Furthermore, we read in Luke’s account of the risen Christ that, first on the way to  Emmaus with Cleopas and another disciple, ‘beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself ’ (Luke 24:27), and then, with the eleven apostles, that ‘he opened their minds to understand the scriptures’ (Luke 24:45): twice the Risen Lord is seen giving privileged teaching to his disciples. It is not surprising that some of the apocryphal writings claiming apostolic authority seek to give some intimations of the teaching of the Risen Christ that was reserved for the apostles. In his book, Hidden Wisdom, Guy Stroumsa sought to pursue the place of esoteric traditions in early Christianity. His main overall point is that these esoteric traditions form the roots of Christian mysticism; he traces a development, with plenty of fascinating digressions, the main stages of which can be summed up thus: esoteric doctrines can be detected in the earliest stages of Christianity and throughout the earliest centuries; their origin is to be found in the immediate background of Christianity, that is, in first-­century Judaism; such doctrines were adopted and developed by various groups, known to modern scholars as ‘gnostics’; already by the end of the second century, such esoteric doctrines were played down, blurred, and denied by the Church Fathers, and eventually disappeared; after the disappearance of these early esoteric traditions, their vocabulary served as building blocks for the emerging mystical traditions with Christianity, first in the East and then in the West.6 In relation to the Gnostic phase, Stroumsa remarks, There are two sides to esoteric doctrines. The first side is of course the secret itself, the hidden knowledge about the divinity, which is revealed only to a few.  In a sense, we can speak of ‘objective’ esotericism when this aspect is 6  See Guy G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Brill, 2005), 3–7.

330  Selected Essays, VOLUME II emphasized. The other side relates to the people who share the secrets. Here the emphasis is put not on the secrets themselves, but rather on those who are ­priv­il­eged to know them, on the community of the elect.7

He goes on to remark that he is not going to say much about the sociological dimensions of esotericism, but comments that, as attention is directed to the  sociology of the elect groups, the objective significance of the ‘secret’ diminishes, and eventually fades away altogether; concern is limited to who the elect are. This seems to provide a further argument for the main thrust of Stroumsa’s thesis. It seems to me, however, that what is meant by the ‘esoteric’ could be thought of in another way, and this way provides a more fruitful approach to what I want to talk about in this lecture, for I have no intention of making a foray into the labyrinths of modern scholarship on second-­century Gnosticism, probably even more labyrinthine than the varieties of Gnosticism itself, with which I am not anything like adequately familiar, and where I should certainly get lost. ‘Esoteric’ need not mean specific doctrines reserved for an elite, and that elite itself is not necessarily helpfully conceived of as a predetermined group, who only need to be identified; esoteric might simply mean the hidden significance that lies behind public doctrine and public scriptures, and the ‘elite’ those who are interested enough to want to explore this. Understood like this, there is no discontinuity between public teaching and its deeper meaning, nor any discontinuity between the ordinary faithful, who simply accept the truth of the faith, and those who want to explore more deeply. These distinctions I am not making up: these are the distinctions, made by Clement of Alexandria, for example, between πίστις and γνῶσις, on the one hand, and on the other between all the faithful . . . [who] are noble and godlike, and worthy of their title, which they wear as a diadem . . . [and] some who are even more elect than the elect, and more elect in proportion as they are less conspicuous . . . who in a manner haul themselves up out of the troubled waters of the world and retire to a place of safety . . . who hide in the depth of their mind the unutterable mysteries, and scorn to let their own nobility of nature be seen by the world8

—the πιστοί and those whom elsewhere Clement calls the γνωστικοί. To penetrate more deeply into the teaching of the Gospel in order to follow it more closely: that is the aim of the γνωστικοί, and it is an aim fulfilled in various ways. In a lecture I gave in Oxford some years ago on the Mariology of John Damascene, I suggested that it might be useful to think of the sources of Byzantine Mariology on analogy with the distinction between aggadah and halakah in the 7 Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom, 5.

8  Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur, 36.

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  331 Jewish exegetical tradition.9 Whereas halakah is concerned with deriving from the Torah practical precepts for the fulfilment of the Mosaic law, aggadah is concerned with embellishing the biblical account with stories: halakah is important, aggadah is more concerned with providing an imaginative sense of belonging to the world of the narrative of biblical, and more broadly, Jewish history. On ana­ logy with that, I suggested that Mariology in the Byzantine tradition finds its equivalent for halakah, not, as you might expect from my analogy, in the tradition of the Holy Canons, which performs much the same purpose of Jewish halakah, but in the doctrinal tradition, as expressed in the decisions of the Councils: this is important, and cannot be overruled. The analogy for aggadah is to be found in the apocryphal tradition, which seeks to embellish what is found in the Scriptures, with the same purpose of finding an imaginative sense of belonging to the world of the Gospel history, and indeed beyond that, in the lives of the saints. This secondary tradition is much less mandatory—­I suggested that John Damascene, though he knows it, treats it with care, and derives his doctrinal understanding of the Mother of God from what I have called the Christian equivalent of halakah, which is quite reserved about Mary—­but, though not demanding to be taken with utter seriousness, this secondary tradition of Christian aggadah nonetheless has had a pervasive influence on Byzantine devotion to the Mother of God. I would remind you, too, that the group Clement called γνωστικοί should not be regarded as intellectuals: he speaks of ‘an army of God-­fearing old men, of God-­ beloved orphans, of widows armed with gentleness, of men adorned with love’— there are several ways of entering more deeply into the γνῶσις that lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel. One dimension of the incarnate life of Christ that attracted attention from early on was his childhood, his family, his mother. All the Gospels, especially those according to Matthew, Luke, and John, explore this interest in varying ways—­ particularly Luke’s. As Nicholas Constas, now Father Maximos of Simonopetra, has put it: The Gospel of Luke subsequently became the site of massive literary and ­theological excavations, and none of its lexical or conceptual stones was left unturned. ‘For just as miners seek veins of gold, and there focus all of their efforts’, a sermon attributed to Proclus reasoned, ‘those who seek to understand the virgin birth must take in hand the Gospel of Luke and systematically search out its contents’.10 9  See my ‘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, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Mary  B.  Cunningham, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies (Ashgate, 2011), 153–61, esp. 155–6 (also printed as Chapter  33 in Selected Essays, volume I). And see Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford University Press, 1995), 16, 210–12. 10  Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Brill, 2003), 275, referring to a sermon attributed, by scholars, to Proclus, archbishop of Constantinople 434–446/7 (though in the MSS to St Athanasius), In descriptione deiparae (PG 28:944A).

332  Selected Essays, VOLUME II I want to take just one example from Luke’s Infancy Narrative—­the ptarmigan, related to the grouse, is quite a small bird, and this is just one lecture—­the remark, which is repeated, ‘But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart’, ‘and his mother kept all these things in her heart’ (Luke 2:19, 51). Mary is, I suggest, being presented by Luke not just as participant in the astonishing events of Christ’s birth and early years, but also as one who, ‘keeping these things in her heart’, seeks to enter more deeply into their significance. Luke provides a narrative of the conception of the Lord in the womb of Mary, through her response of faith to the words of God brought by the archangel, paralleling this with an earlier annunciation of the birth of his cousin, John the Baptist, and taking the story through to Christ’s manifestation of his wisdom in the Temple when 12 years old. Matthew supplements this by a rather different narrative, easily dovetailed into Luke’s account, which makes more of the role of Joseph and includes the terrible story of the massacre of the infants. Both accounts beg for a reading that will attend to the deeper significance of these events; both, in different ways, set the infancy narrative in the context of the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, Matthew with pedantic literalism, Luke more by evoking in his prose the Old Testament world into which Jesus entered. These infancy narratives were soon—­ within a century—­ supplemented by another, quite short, text, known nowadays as the Protevangelium of James.11 The title is that of its early modern editor, protevangelium meaning something like the ‘Gospel before the Gospels’, but its pseudonym is ancient, and it seems to me that the pseudonym gives the key to the work. It is ascribed to James, the Lord’s brother, ἀδελφόθεος, ‘brother of God’, as he soon comes to be known in the Greek tradition. The text makes clear—­what can plausibly be deduced from the New Testament itself12—that Joseph was a widower at the time of his betrothal to the Virgin Mary, with children from his former marriage; James, not mentioned in the Protevangelium, was one of these children, and therefore stepbrother of the Lord. For this reason, although there was an ancient Latin translation (the ori­ gin­al Greek Protevangelium is probably mid-­second century, known to both Clement of Alexandria and Origen), this Latin version has not survived (though many of the traditions contained in it are preserved in other works such as the Latin Gospel of Pseudo-­Matthew), as Jerome denounced this belief in his controversy with Helvidius, and his authority consigned the Protevangelium to oblivion in the West. Why James? The most obvious reason is that James, the (eldest?) son of Joseph, might well be expected to know further details about the woman who became his stepmother. The most important reason, however, seems to me to lie 11  I have used the text and translation given in Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, texts and trans., The Apocryphal Gospels (Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–71. 12  Let me simply refer you to J. B. Lightfoot’s magisterial discussion on ‘The Brethren of the Lord’, one of the dissertations appended to his commentary, St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Macmillan and Co., 71881), 252–91.

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  333 in what else we know about James. After the Resurrection, he seems to have become the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem, a community of Jews who had accepted the risen Jesus as the Messiah. In the Acts of the Apostles, he can already be discerned as the leader of the Church in Jerusalem (Eusebius states that he was the first to be elected to the ‘episcopal throne of Jerusalem’: HE 2.1), and it was he that needed to be convinced about the legitimacy of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. The apostolic community in Jerusalem continued to worship in the Temple (Acts 2:46). Early Christian tradition, recorded by Hegesippos and preserved in Eusebius’ Church History, presents him as a devout Jew, a Nazirite, who ‘alone was permitted to enter the Holy Place, for his garments were not of wool but of linen’; according to another passage in Hegesippos, this time preserved by Epiphanios, not in Eusebios, he wore the πέταλον, the priestly plate of gold-­leaf, a word that occurs in the Protevangelium in connection with Joachim’s sacrifice in thanksgiving for the child, conceived in Anna’s womb (Prot. 5.1). James, ‘the Just’, as he was known, frequented the Sanctuary, and was so often on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, ‘that his knees grew hard like a camel’s’. Josephos tells us that James, the Lord’s brother, was martyred by being stoned;13 Hegesippos’ more detailed account records that this took place in the Temple, James kneeling and praying for those who killed him.14 It is this association with the Temple that I would argue is the key to the ascription of the Protevangelium to James, for the life of the Virgin is presented as being closely bound up with the Temple. On hearing that she is to conceive a child, Anna, the barren wife of Joachim, promises the child as a gift to the Lord, on analogy with the story of Hannah and Samuel. At the age of 6 months, the girl, Mary, takes seven steps, and Anna lifts her up, promising that she will no longer walk on the ground until she has been taken to the Temple. At the age of 3, Mary is taken to the Temple; the priest receives her and ‘he set her on the third step of the altar, and the Lord God cast his grace down upon her. She danced on her feet, and the entire house of Israel loved her’ (Prot. 7.3). Her parents depart; ‘Mary was in the Temple of the Lord, cared for like a dove, receiving her food from the hand of the angel’ (Prot. 8.1). At the age of 12, the priests realize that Mary cannot remain in the Temple any longer, for she will soon defile the Temple. Zacharias, the priest we know from Luke’s Gospel, the husband of Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, is told by an angel to gather together the widowers, give each of them a rod, and await a sign from God. Joseph is among the widowers: as he takes the rod, a dove flies out from it and rests on Joseph’s head, signifying that Joseph is to be the guardian of Mary the virgin. Joseph leaves her at home, as he is off to construct some buildings (he is clearly more than a simple carpenter, just as Mary is no poor virgin, but the daughter of Joachim, a wealthy and generous man). The priests 13 Josephus, Antiquities 20.9.1.

14 Eusebius, HE 2.23.

334  Selected Essays, VOLUME II then decide that the veil of the Temple needs to be replaced, and choose the ­virgins who are to spin the various coloured threads for the Temple veil: Mary is chosen to spin the scarlet and the purple thread; it is as she is drawing the purple thread that the angel of the Annunciation appears to her. The association of the veil and the flesh here recalled Hebrews, where we read of ‘the new and living way through the veil, that is, his flesh’, διὰ τοῦ καταπετάσματος, τοῦτ’ ἔστιν τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ (Heb. 10:20); as Mary draws out the purple thread from the spindle, at that very moment the flesh of Christ begins to be fashioned in her womb. The story continues through Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph’s discovery and confusion: we’ll pick up the story later. What the Protevangelium does is to tell us about Mary as the New Temple, only in narrative form. Moreover, it is the Temple that provides the imagery for Mariology as it begins to emerge in the fifth century. In his first homily, preached not much less than three centuries after the composition of the Protevangelium, Proklos, patriarch of Constantinople speaks of Holy Mary, the untarnished vessel of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the ­second Adam, the workshop of the union of natures, the market-­place of the contract of salvation, the bridal chamber in which the Word took the flesh in marriage, the living bush of human nature, which the fire of a divine birth-­pang did not consume, the veritably swift cloud who carried in her body the one who rides upon the cherubim, the purest fleece drenched with the rain which came down from heaven, whereby the shepherd clothed himself with the sheep, handmaid and mother, virgin and heaven, the only bridge for God to mankind, the awesome loom of the divine economy upon which the robe of union was in­effably woven.15

Almost all these images relate in one way or another to the Temple, the place where God manifests himself, where he is to be encountered, or to events in the Old Testament that themselves refer to the Temple (the burning bush, the swift cloud, the fleece, the ladder or bridge to heaven). What is expressed in the Protevangelium in the form of a narrative is expressed by Proklos, not in the form of dogmas (that was not to be the way of the Orthodox East), but in the rich imagery of poetry. The other dominant theme in the Protevangelium is that of Mary’s purity, but that purity is the sine qua non of her fulfilling the role of the Temple by bearing God in her womb. There are several other points to make with regard to the Protevangelium. First, it is largely incredible, quite fabulous: it has very little notion of the actual Jewish Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in the first Jewish revolt in ad 70 probably no more than a century before the Protevangelium was written. For

15 Proklos, Hom. 1.1: translation from Constas, Proclus, 137.

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  335 all the importance of the Temple and temple imagery in the Protevangelium, we would be mistaken in locating the work in what is known as Jewish Christianity. The Jewish background, so carefully crafted, is imaginative and minted from the accounts of the Temple and the worship of Israel that we find in the Scriptures, in the Septuagint. This seems to me to be generally true of Christian use of Temple imagery; early Christians seem to have known nothing of actual living traditions associated with Jewish Temple worship: to recreate their sense of the Temple, such an important source for their development of, and understanding of, their own, from the fourth century increasingly elaborate, worship, they went back to the Septuagint and what they read there.16 It is striking how Hebrews, the book in the New Testament that goes into most detail about Temple worship (along with the Apocalypse), seems studiously to ignore the Second Temple; in the Holy of Holies, we are told, were the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all side with gold, which contained a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant; above it . . . the cherubim of glory over­ shadow­ing the mercy seat.  (Heb. 9:4–5)

—none of these was to be found in the Second Temple: they had vanished at the exile and never been replaced. Second, its use of traditional themes is, at least on one occasion, quite original. The theme of the barren woman who gave birth to a child, who was to be of importance for Israel—­Sarah giving birth to Isaac, Hannah to Samuel—­is a theme that Luke drew on in his account of the virgin birth of Christ. In all these cases, however, the longed-­for child is a son. The Protevangelium uses the same matrix of associations, leading to the same wonder at the birth of the child—‘she [Anna] asked the midwife, “What is it?”, the midwife replied, “θήλειαν—­a girl” ’. What a shock! And yet Anna goes on, without hesitation, ‘My soul is magnified this day!’ (Prot. 5.2). Later preachers will sometimes make something of the fact that God could and did become incarnate without man’s help, but he needed a woman; the Protevangelium makes this point in the economy of a narrative. Which leads to my third point about the Protevangelium: it is an extraordinarily dense and suggestive text. Almost every paragraph makes you wonder: what does that mean? Nothing is explained. One might think that the symbolism of the scarlet and purple thread, with Mary drawing the purple thread at the moment when she conceives, obvious; but nothing is said. Nor of Mary’s first seven steps, so unforgettably depicted in the narthex of the Chora Church in Constantinople; nor of her dancing of the third step of the altar. And yet they clearly mean

16  Pace the, in other ways illuminating, works of Margaret Barker.

336  Selected Essays, VOLUME II something—­which begins to draw me back to my theme. This is a text written to be read by those who understand, or at least by those to whom it can be explained. As it stands, it gives nothing away. It is in this sense that I want to see it as an esoteric text. An esoteric text—­not a text containing some secret teaching not to be found in the canonical Scriptures, but a text that, in this case, takes one more deeply into understanding the mystery of Mary: the mystery of the woman who accepted to become Theotokos, Mother of God. How does it do this? One can only speculate; I have already remarked that it is not a text that explains itself, but gestures towards some deeper meaning. In what ways? Let me go back to the distinction I suggested based on the distinction in Jewish reflection on the Torah between halakah and aggadah. The Christian equivalent of halakah, in this context, is the doctrinal tradition, which is, and remains, very reticent concerning Mary: the conciliar decisions that were to emerge from the fourth to the eighth centuries have nothing directly to say about the Virgin Mary. The principal conciliar declaration concerning the Virgin is that she is Theotokos, Mother of God, or more literally, the One who gave birth to God, affirmed at Ephesos in 431 and repeated thereafter. It is upheld, not to say anything directly about Mary, but to affirm something about Christ: that he is God and so the one who gave birth to a human child gave birth to one who was God and is therefore to be called Theotokos. Already by that time the title Theotokos had been used, though only occasionally—­so far as our evidence goes—­but most strikingly, it is found in a prayer, preserved in a papyrus, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, written in a third-­century hand: Under your mercy, we take refuge, Theotokos, do not overlook our petitions in adversity, but rescue us from dangers, only holy, only blessed one.

This is the only example of Mary being addressed in prayer before the fourth century; but then, much has been lost from the pre-­Nicene period: we should not sniff at this precious survival. Nonetheless, the prevailing impression from virtually all the little evidence we have about this title for the Virgin Mary is that its purpose was to say something about Christ, not something about Mary. Not until the mid-­fifth century do we find the beginnings of concern for Mary herself: belief in her virginity as entailing her purity and sinlessness, and recourse to Mary as a powerful protector and intercessor (though the Rylands papyrus advocates such recourse). Mary’s virginity was to inspire the ascetic movement, even in the fourth century, but not her virginity only: the virginity of St Thekla was as powerful an inspiration as Mary’s, if not more so. Nevertheless, the ‘beliefs’ about Mary eventually reflected in conciliar decrees—­Theotokos, her perpetual virginity, her sinlessness—­belong to what I have called our Christian halakah, and are again never a prime consideration of the conciliar decrees, rather something to be deduced from the way Mary is referred to; one might however argue that the very

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  337 casualness with which titles like ever-­virgin (ἀειπάρθενος) and sinless or immaculate (ἄχραντος) appear in conciliar decrees indicates how uncontroversial they were.17 The conciliar tradition, our halakah, is quite clear: Mary is Theotokos, ever-­ virgin, and immaculate (ἄχραντος)—very clear, but very dry, let us say, with no particular emphasis on the status of the Virgin Mary herself. It is, however, precisely these affirmations that are made in the narrative of the Protevangelium: Mary is presented as the vessel of God, prepared for this role by her purity, and—­a specific point is made of this—­ever-­virgin. It is however presented in a narrative, full of hidden significance, into which those who read and ponder on this are to enter. Her perpetual virginity is underlined in a narrative in which doubt is overthrown. After the birth of Christ, the midwife (who arrived after the birth: compare the Egyptian midwives of Exodus 1) meets a woman calls Salome, and tells her of the child born to a virgin. Salome expresses incredulity and says that she will not believe unless she puts her finger into Mary’s vagina. Salome’s words are exactly those of the Apostle Thomas after the Resurrection of Christ (βάλω τὸν δακτυλόν μου: John 20:25/Prot. 19.3). She pokes her finger in, and her finger is consumed by fire (she is quickly cured by an angel). It is striking that it is precisely Thomas’ not meeting such a fate that is the constant wonder of the verses sung on Thomas Sunday in the Orthodox Church—‘O, the astonishing wonder! Grass touches fire and is preserved; Thomas puts his hand in the fiery side of Jesus Christ the God, and it is not burnt up by the touching’18 (the verses for this Sunday cannot be ancient, as the celebration of Thomas Sunday replaced an earl­ ier feast of Antipascha, held on the Sunday after Easter19). Mary’s virginity is not just purity: it is transparence to the very presence of God. What I am suggesting is that what we find in the Protevangelium is an anticipation of what will be the settled halakic dogma about Mary, cast in the mode of a narrative aggadah.20 I suggested that the purpose of (Christian) aggadah is to find an imaginative sense of belonging to the world of the Gospel history, and indeed beyond that, in the lives of the saints. The embellishments of the Protevangelium are partly narrative, providing a story to follow and ponder on, sometimes more significant. Let me give you two examples. In the account of the Annunciation, Mary is depicted as having gone out from her room to fetch some water. She hears a voice, greeting her as full of grace, is alarmed and goes back into her house, 17  Ἀειπάρθενος is used from the Fifth Œcumenical Council onwards, ἄχραντος from the Seventh (at the latter a reference to Mary the Mother of God is, quite casually, expanded to ‘τῆς ἀχράντου θεοτόκου καὶ ἀειπαρθένου Μαρίας’, possibly under the influence of the Byzantine Liturgy?). 18  Second sticheron for the Aposticha at vespers on Thomas Sunday. 19  See Vitaly Permiakov, ‘Historical Origins of the Feast of Antipascha’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 47 (2003), 155–82. 20  Seeing the Protevangelium as aggadah is not a new observation, though it is usually expressed by saying that the Protevangelium is a ‘midrash’ of the canonical infancy narratives, a usage that seems to me muddling, as midrash (meaning something like enquiry) has a much broader significance than a narrative embellishment (see Jacobs, The Jewish Religion, 345–7).

338  Selected Essays, VOLUME II taking up the purple thread, and sitting ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου: Ehrman translates ‘chair’,21 but I think it means more than that, though ‘throne’ may overtranslate. Here we are to see something of the dignity ascribed to Mary. Another embellishment occurs at the moment of the birth of Christ: Mary and Joseph stop, as Mary feels the imminent arrival of her baby, and they find a cave (there are other second-­century witnesses to the idea that Christ was born in a cave, e.g. Justin Martyr, Dial. 78.5). Joseph goes off to find a midwife. But I, Joseph, was walking, and I was not walking. I looked up to the vault of the sky, and I saw it standing still, and into the air, and I saw that it was greatly disturbed, and the birds of the sky were at rest . . . Everyone was looking up. I saw a flock of sheep being herded, but they were standing still . . . I looked down at the torrential stream, and I saw some goats whose mouths were over the water, but they were not drinking. Then suddenly everything returned to its normal course.  (Prot. 18.2)

It is an extraordinary, almost eerie, passage. As Christ is born, the creation stands still. The idea that periodically the cycle of nature stands still to behold God’s presence is very ancient, and in a Christian context manifests the conviction that the cosmos is God’s creation and bears witness to him, making possible assimilation with astrology and solar religion. In a characteristically elegant contribution to the Festschrift for Jean Cardinal Daniélou,22 Henry Chadwick drew attention to  the way in which prayer at midnight is enjoined in the Apostolic Tradition, ascribed to Hippolytus: in this hour every creature hushes for a brief moment to praise the Lord; stars and plants and water stand still at that instant; all the hosts of the angels ministering unto Him together with the souls of the righteous praise God.  (Ap. Trad. 36.12)23

The same idea is found in the Testament of Adam. But I can hardly believe that all that the Protevangelium is saying is that as Joseph walked in search of a midwife it passed midnight. The text seems to envisage something altogether extraordinary, not the daily point in the turning of the cycle of the sidereal sphere at midnight. I had initially thought that there must be other moments than midnight when we come to the ‘still point of the turning world’: what about the other revolutions, of the moon or the sun? But that, I fancy, betrays my thoroughly post-­Copernican imagination. From the point of view of a geocentric understanding of the

21  Ehrman and Pleše, texts and trans., The Apocryphal Gospels, 53. 22 Henry Chadwick, ‘Prayer at Midnight’. In Épektasis, ed. Jacques Fontaine and Charles Kannengiesser (Beauchesne, 1972), 47–9. 23  Gregory Dix, ed., The Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus of Rome (SPCK, 1937), 66–7.

Reflections on the Development of Mariology  339 universe, there is only one fundamental cycle, that of the sphere of the stars; ­everything else is carried with it. The strangely regular movements of the moon and the sun are movements within the sidereal sphere, not separate cyclical movements as we think of them. There is, however, a reference to the Word of God entering the world while it was in stillness: in Wisdom 18:14–15 we read, referring to the killing of the first-­born in Egypt that makes possible the escape of Israel under Moses: For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thine all-­powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land what was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of thine authentic command, and stood and filled all things with death, and touched heaven while standing on the earth.

Nevertheless, the turning of the year at the winter solstice—25 December, according to the Julian calendar—­if not reflected clearly in the heavens, is a passage through the stillness of death to the beginnings of new life. One wonders if the passage in the Protevangelium had anything to do with the eventual assimilation of the celebration of the Nativity of Christ with the winter solstice. There is a very distant echo of such ideas in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester—­on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we are told, animals recover the power of speech; as Simpkin the cat wanders through the streets of Gloucester he hears the mice chattering to one another, but to his chagrin they will not welcome him in. What am I suggesting? In the Protevangelium of James we have a remarkable piece of esoteric teaching which fits very neatly into the structure that devotion to Mary was to take in the later Church. Its understanding of Mary rests on the beliefs that come to be, not exactly affirmed, rather confirmed in the official doctrine of the Church, but it develops this in a narrative that enables one to enter into the life of the Virgin. The principal way in which this at last came about was in the cycle of feasts dedicated to the Mother of God that accompany, and overlap with, the cycle of feasts dedicated to Christ: the Christological sequence running from the Annunciation, leaping to the Nativity of Christ, and then following through the Baptism (Epiphany/Theophany), to the feasts of the Paschal cycle—­ Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Pascha itself, and the Ascension and Pentecost—­that Dominical Cycle is embraced by the feasts of the Nativity of the Mother of God, her Entry into the Temple, the Nativity of Christ and his Meeting with Symeon in the Temple, through the events of Pascha, the Ascension and Pentecost (in icons of the Ascension the Mother of God always appears, and often in icons of Pentecost), to the feast of her Dormition. The cycles intermesh and overlap in a confusing way—­like much else in the Liturgy—­but these cycles have come to shape the year for Christians who follow the feasts.

340  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Take away the Protevangelium and the cycle collapses. What is the link? May we suggest, though there is no evidence, that there was a group of Christians, who took Luke’s figure of Mary, ‘pondering these things in her heart’, as their example, for whom the Protevangelium provided an imaginative sense of belonging to the history of the Incarnation. A final thought. What has happened to Dionysios? We seem to have left him behind. Not entirely, for Dionysios is part of the evidence for the Dormition of the Mother of God, the final event in her life found in the apocryphal material relating to her. The texts that tell of this, and soon led to the establishment of the feast of the Dormition celebrated throughout the Byzantine Empire (instigated by the Emperor Maurice: we are not told when, but at the end of the sixth century, presumably), belong to the fifth/sixth centuries, and among them Dionysios himself should be counted, for in chapter 3 of the Divine Names he gives an account of the gathering together of the apostles (together with his teacher, Hierotheos and himself) to celebrate the ‘ζωαρχικοῦ καὶ θεοδόχου σώματος’ of the Mother of God—­a body both a source of life and God-­receiving—­the body of the One who is, to borrow the words of the kontakion for the feast, ‘unsleeping in her prayers, unfailing hope in intercession . . . [and] as Mother of Life [was] taken over into life by him who dwelt in her ever-­virgin womb’. However, apocryphal texts, even though widely read and influential, always remained somewhat suspect. From the moment of the establishment of the feast of the Dormition, doubting voices warned against basing such a feast on apocryphal texts. As the feast became a settled part of the Byzantine Church year, one observes an irony. At the beginning of the eighth century, St Andrew of Crete, preaching on the Dormition, faces the question of the silence of tradition on the dormition of the Mother of God. He passes over the apocryphal material, and instead lights on a ‘man learned in sacred doctrine’, to whom the Apostle Paul vouchsafed ‘indescribable revelations’:24 none other than Dionysios the Areopagite, taken at his word as a disciple of the Apostle Paul. Here St Andrew finds irrefragable evidence of the Dormition, rendering appeal to the doubtful apocryphal material unnecessary. Further confirmation of the importance of Dionysios for the understanding of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the Byzantine tradition can be found in the icon of the feast, which depicts the scene as related by Dionysios in Divine Names 3, and normally includes depictions, behind the apostles, of two or three bishops, identified by their omophoria, among whom we are meant to include Dionysios and his mentor Hierotheos.

24  Andrew of Crete, Homily on the Dormition 2. 9–14; in Brian E. Daley, SJ, On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 127–32. I owe this reference to Mary Cunningham.

29 The Recovery of the Icon Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015

The Orthodox talking about icons often quote the saying, ‘Beauty will save the world’, ascribing it to Dostoevsky, or sometimes to Prince Myshkin in the novel, The Idiot. It is a mistake, of course, at several levels: the words do occur in the novel, but that doesn’t mean they are Dostoevsky’s; Dostoevsky creates a conversation, several conversations, in his novels, but the authorial voice is difficult to discern, deliberately. It is still less correct to ascribe the words to Prince Myshkin. It is Ippolit (Terentyev) who says, towards the end of a confused conversation: ‘ “Is it true, Prince”—addressing Myshkin—“that you once said ‘beauty’ will save the world! Gentlemen,” he cried loudly to them all, “the prince insists that beauty will save the world.” ’1 Ippolit goes on to say that the prince says it because he is in love, and then addresses the prince directly, saying that he is said to be a Christian. The prince doesn’t reply directly, and the conversation moves on. So no one says, ‘Beauty will save the world’, though the notion is introduced, and might have something to do with Prince Myshkin’s profession of Christianity (or his being in love). Nevertheless, elsewhere in the novel, there is interest in artistic beauty—­ and its opposite. Earlier on, in a room in Rogozhin’s house, the prince sees a copy of Holbein’s painting, ‘Christ Taken Down from the Cross’, called in the novel, ‘The Dead Christ’: the corpse of Christ is lying on its back, its extremities already green with decay. Dostoevsky himself had seen the painting in Basel in summer 1867; according to his wife, it made an overwhelming impression on him, and he stood before it dumbstruck.2 In the novel, the prince’s reaction is that ‘A man could even lose his faith from that painting!’3 The world of art and the world of faith intersect: here negatively. Still earlier on in the novel, another painting by Holbein is mentioned—­his ‘Madonna’ in Dresden: the context here is the prince’s judgements of the differently beautiful faces of the Epanchin girls. Of Alexandra Ivanovna, he says, ‘yours . . . is a beautiful and very sweet face, but you may have some secret sorrow; your soul is no doubt very kind, but you are not joyful. There is some special nuance of your face that reminds me of Holbein’s Madonna in Dresden’ (the picture in Dresden, which Dostoevsky had seen, is in fact a copy; 1 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, trans., The Idiot, pt 3, ch. 5 (Everyman’s Library, 2002), 382. 2  Introduction to Pevear and Volkhonsky, trans., The Idiot, xiii. 3  Pevear and Volkhonsky, trans., The Idiot, pt 2, ch. 4, 218. Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0030

342  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the original is in Darmstadt).4 In Dresden, of course, there is also Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which Dostoevsky had also seen on his European travels; according to his wife, he considered it ‘the highest manifestation of human genius’. She remarks on her seeing him, on later occasions, standing for hours at a time in front of this strikingly beautiful work, deeply touched and moved. I must say that I was stunned by my first impression of the Sistine Madonna: it seemed to me that the Virgin with the Infant in her arms was floating in the air toward the passersby.5

When Dostoevsky himself wrote about it, however, he was much more likely to mock the tourists who flocked to see it: in Demons, he mentions it among the things Russian tourists in Berlin talk about: ‘the idea of eternal beauty, the Sistine Madonna, a light shot through with darkness . . .’.6 He can be even more scathing: in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, he talks of the Russian tourists who ‘dash to the Sistine Madonna and stand before her in blank expectation: something will happen any second, someone will slip out from under the floor and dispel their meaningless melancholy and weariness. And they leave amazed that nothing happened’.7 Dostoevsky is not, however, mocking his fellow Russians for abandoning their own tradition of religious art, icons, in their breathless enthusiasm for Western art: he sincerely admired Western art, and icons scarcely ever figure in his novels. Interestingly, his admiration for the Sistine Madonna was shared by Sergei Bulgakov, who saw it in the Zwinger Gallery, when he was staying in Dresden, while still an atheist Marxist: The eyes of the Heavenly Queen, the Mother who holds in her arms the Eternal Infant, pierced my soul. I cried joyful and yet bitter tears, and with them the ice melted from my soul, and some of my psychological knots were loosened. This was not an aesthetic emotion, no it was an encounter, new knowledge, a mir­ acle . . . I was then still a Marxist, but I was obliged to call my contemplation of the Madonna by the name of prayer. I went to the Zwinger Gallery early in the mornings in order to be there before others arrived. I ran there every day to ‘pray’ and weep in front of the Virgin, and few experiences in my life were more blessed than those unexpected tears.8 4  Pevear and Volkhonsky, trans., The Idiot, pt 1, ch. 6, 76, and see 620, n. 26. 5  Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, trans. Beatrice Stillman (Wildwood House,1976), 117. 6 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, trans., Demons, pt 1, ch. 1, §7 (Everyman’s Library, 2000), 26). 7  David Patterson, trans., Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Northwestern University Press, 1988), 26. 8 From Protopresbyter Sergii Bulgakov, Автобиографические Заметки, ed. Lev Zander (YMCA Press, 1991; 1st edn, 1944), 64 (also 104–5); rather free translation (somewhat modified here) in ‘Autobiographical Notes’. In A Bulgakov Anthology, ed. James Paine and Nicolas Zernov (SPCK, 1976), 11 (italics, or spacing, in the original Russian). The passage is taken from the autobiographical

The Recovery of the Icon  343 This could well have been an example of how the icon functions as a focus of devotion, rather than as a work of art to be admired; but what touched Bulgakov’s heart, and proved to be a step on his way back to the faith, was a supreme example of Western art, not an ancient Russian icon.9 What I am suggesting, so far, is that the Russian intellectual tradition to which Dostoevsky and Bulgakov belonged had no sense of the value and role of the icon: the icon was waiting to be recovered, or rediscovered. It is not, however, a matter of the neglect of icons simply by the intelligentsia: St Seraphim of Sarov was said to have an icon of the Mother of God in his cell but, according to Fedotov, this icon, before which he prayed, ‘was not one of the classical Byzantine-­Russian madonnas representing the Divine Mother but one of the Western type representing a Holy Virgin of “Tenderness” ’.10 So, there was much to recover within the Russian Orthodox tradition, so far as the icon was concerned. The loss of the icon can be traced back ultimately to the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon (patriarch: 1652–67) in the seven­teenth century. Convinced that the Slavonic service books had become corrupted over the centuries, Nikon introduced a set of liturgical changes based on the latest Greek service books and current Greek practice, including changing the way of making the sign of the cross from using two fingers to using three. In fact, Nikon was mistaken: the Russian books and practice preserved older traditions than those found in the Greek service books on which he based his reforms.11 Further changes followed with the policy of Tsar Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, which envisaged a more thorough Westernization of Russian society and culture, including religious culture. Although Nikon’s reforms did not envisage any direct changes in the icons (though icons were repainted with the three-­fingered, rather than the two-­fingered, sign of the cross), they introduced a state of mind that encouraged wholesale change: change that was resisted by the Old Believers, or Old Ritualists, who faced persecution, at times very fierce, memorialized in Vasily Surikov’s paintings, especially Morning after the Execution of the Streltsi and Boyarina Morozova.12 The Old Believers’ tenacious embrace of old ways—­old service books, old ceremonial, old icons—­must have had the effect ‘interlude’ inserted by Bulgakov in the introduction to his Unfading Light (1917), called ‘Calls and Encounters’ (a clear allusion to Solov´ev’s poem, ‘Three Encounters’): Thomas Allan Smith, trans., Unfading Light (Eerdmans, 2012), 7–12. 9 In a later passage (not dated) included by Lev Zander in Автобиографические Заметки, Bulgakov reflects on his experience of the Sistine Madonna, and now is quite clear that Raphael’s picture cannot be regarded as an icon: pp. 105–13. 10 G. P. Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality (Sheed and Ward, 1952), 244. This is borne out by the illustrations of icons in Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin Milner-­Gulland (Reaktion Books, 2002), 75–84. It is pointed out by Charles Lock in his article, ‘The Space of Hospitality: On the Icon of the Trinity Ascribed to Andrei Rublev’, Sobornost/ECR 30:1 (2008), 21–53, at 25, n. 7. I am much indebted to this article. 11  See Paul Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the 17th Century (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991). 12  On whom, see Roy  R.  Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 1995).

344  Selected Essays, VOLUME II of curbing conservative tendencies among those loyal to the official line (as we have seen in the last half-­century with the Lefebvrists in relation to the liturgical reforms of Vatican II). Even among the Old Believers, however, the practice of icon painting had more or less died out by the middle of the nineteenth century, if we can credit the account given by Nikolai Leskov in his short stories, especially ‘The Sealed Angel’. There he gives a touching account of a nomadic community of Old Believers, artisan builders, who travelled around with a shed in which they set up their iconostasis and icons, and prayed: we prayed our fill: put in our hours of work and then gathered in the room, and there the holy icons shone so much from all the lamps that your heart even got to glowing. Luka Kirilovich [the leader of the group] would begin by pro­noun­ cing the blessing, and then we’d all join in and sing praises so that sometimes, in calm weather, it could be heard far beyond our settlement.13

However, we have already been told by Leskov’s storyteller that ‘nowadays such icons aren’t painted anywhere, not in Moscow, not in Petersburg, not in Palekh’— Palekh, the renowned centre for Old Believer icon painting—­although later on in the story an icon painter called Sevastian comes to play an important role, only, however, as a skilful copier of icons; perhaps Leskov meant, too, that icon painters had become rare and isolated (Sevastian is presented as a wanderer, a strannik).14 An icon of the Mother of God is described—‘our most holy Lady praying in the garden, with all the cypress and olive trees bowing to the ground before her’15— which suggests that, even among the Old Believers, the ancient tradition had experienced some development! So, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the traditional icon had all but vanished in Russia, to be replaced by religious pictures, more in the style of Western art: an example of this, now carefully restored, can be found in the vast church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The story is much the same in other Orthodox countries—­Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia—­though the precise historical narrative takes different forms (generally a more direct Western influence, owing to political circumstances).

Stages in the Recovery of the Icon: Scholars and Attempts to Clean Icons How was the icon recovered? There are several elements in this story. Certainly, so far as Russia is concerned, it seems to be a tangled story of scholarship and 13  Nikolai Leskov, ‘The Sealed Angel’. In The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (Vintage Books, 2013), 45–106, at 51. 14  Leskov, ‘The Sealed Angel’, 82 ff. 15  Leskov, ‘The Sealed Angel’, 51.

The Recovery of the Icon  345 connoisseurship. The scholarly element—­which is by no means a purely Russian story—­can be seen as a series of often disparate (and indeed mutually contra­dict­ ory) attempts to reach beyond the Gibbonian narrative of decline and fall, in which the decay of the icon could be made to fit all too conveniently. This is associated with names such as Alois Riegl, Nikodim Kondakov, Dimitri Ainalov, Josef Strzygowski.16 The name of Nikodim Kondakov is particularly important to us, as he will come up again later. Kondakov was an art historian, who taught from 1888 in St Petersburg. As part of an attempt to reach back behind Gibbon’s narrative, Kondakov realized the importance of the Byzantine icon for Russian culture, something he explored in the book he wrote with Salomon Reinach, best known, perhaps, in its French translation: Antiquités de la Russie méridionale.17 After the Revolution, he moved, as many of the future émigrés did, to Ukraine, first to Odessa, then to Yalta in the Crimea. Anticipating the ‘ship of the philosophers’, he settled first in Bulgaria in 1920, then in Czechoslovakia, where he became professor of art history in Prague. One of his students there was Julia Reitlinger, whom we shall meet later. This renewed appreciation of the icon as the art form of Byzantine civilization, passed on to the Russians, led to a realization that the icon in this form had been quite literally lost: lost as the coat of olive oil (olifa), applied at final stage of icon painting, darkened over the years, in addition to which there was an accumulation of grime and soot, from the candles and the incense with which they were honoured, to which had been added the practice of ‘reviving’ icons by repainting them (when they were not actually destroyed and replaced by entirely new icons, in a style that had little continuity with the older tradition). By the middle of the nineteenth century, ways for the cleaning of icons were discovered, to begin with a crude and hazardous process that often destroyed as much as it revealed; nevertheless, in many cases something was revealed of the original glory of icons. The first of these icon ‘restorers’ was a painter, Podkliutshnikov, who in 1852 cleaned the icons of the thirteenth-­century iconostasis in the Uspensky Cathedral in Moscow, and a little later the early-­ fifteenth-­century icons in the cathedral in Vladimir: icons understood to be by Andrey Rublev. It was only in the first decade of the twentieth century that the cleaning of icons really got under way, a process that actually accelerated after the Revolution.18

16  A story told (really for other purposes) with characteristic economy by Garth Fowden in his Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton University Press, 2014), 23–37. 17  N. Kondakov, J. Tolstoï, and S. Reinach, Antiquités de la Russie méridionale (Ernst Leroux, 1891). 18  For this information, I rely on the article by Olga Lelekova, ‘Icon Restoration and Research in Russia’, in the catalogue of the 1998 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London: The Art of Holy Russia: Icons from Moscow 1400–1660 (Royal Academy of Arts, 1998), 87–92.

346  Selected Essays, VOLUME II

. . . and Connoisseurs The other element is the role of the connoisseurs of art. This is a complicated story that is only gradually being understood. These connoisseurs included famous names: Pavel Tretyakov, Sergei Shchukin, Ivan Morosov, whose art collections, including icons, are now to be found, mostly at least, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. These were men of inherited wealth who invested in art works. They were also, if not themselves Old Believers, at least scions of Old Believer families, who over the centuries had acquired great wealth as merchants and bankers. All of them eventually acquired ancient Russian icons, though what drew them to such icons is not, I think, at all clear. One is tempted to think that their familiarity with traditional icons, derived their Old Believer background, inspired their collections of icons, and maybe, even, their much more famous collections of modernist art—­from the Impressionists to the modernism of Matisse, Picasso, and others; it is not difficult to conceive that appreciating the artistic form of the icon opened their eyes to the questioning of the traditional norms of Western art that begins with the impressionists, but whether that is so or not is speculative. It could be the reverse: that appreciation of the Impressionists opened their eyes to the artistic value of ancient iconography; the French scholar, Gabriel Millet, made just such an argument at the beginning of the twentieth century, arguing that the ‘divided tones of impressionist painting’ had enabled ap­pre­ci­ ation of the frescoes at Mistra.19 Tretyakov began to collect icons in the last decade of his life (he died in 1898), but is much more famous for his collection of Russian art, much of which he commissioned.20 It looks very much as if Tretyakov was, quite late on, making his collection of Russian art representative by adding examples of Russian iconography. As Wendy Salmond comments, ‘Just what the “patron of the Peredvizhniki [that is, the Wanderers]” was looking for in his icons remains a matter for speculation and even controversy’.21 Nevertheless, Wendy Salmond asserts that ‘ Tretiakov was discriminating. His acquisitions had all the hallmarks of a top Old Believer collection. Age was, of course, prized . . .’.22 Nevertheless, this meant not the icons we now associate with Rublev (for all the reverence in which the Old Believers held him), for these were still hidden beneath the grime of ages, but icons, in particular, of the Stroganov school. Shchukin and Morosov were also collectors of icons, but even more so of

19  An example cited by Wendy Salmond in her article ‘Pavel Tretiakov’s Icons’. In From Realism to the Silver Age: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, ed. Rosalind  P.  Blakesley and Margaret Samu (NIU Press, 2014), 123–40, at 136. 20  There was an exhibition of Russian portraits, including many collected, and indeed commissioned, by Tretyakov, at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2016; see the catalogue, Rosalind P. Blakesley, ed., Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (National Portrait Gallery, 2016). 21  Salmond, ‘Pavel Tretiakov’s Icons’, 126. 22  Salmond, ‘Pavel Tretiakov’s Icons’, 126.

The Recovery of the Icon  347 modernist art, which both of them commissioned from artists such as Matisse and Picasso.23

The Icon Revealed But we must return to the icon. As we have seen, the real rediscovery of the icon was a result of the programme of cleaning, that began to take off in the early years of the twentieth century. An exhibition, ‘Old Russian Art’, which opened on 13  February 1913 in Moscow on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, was, as Oleg Tarasov has put it, ‘a genuine revelation not just for specialists, icon lovers and artists, but also for the general public’; the ‘high aesthetic quality of early Russian art and the liveliness of its colouring were essentially displayed here for the first time’.24 Tarasov says this in the context of the impact of the newly revealed icon on the modernism of artists such as Malevich, Goncharovo, and Kandinsky: another story that is entwined with the rediscovery of the icon. The process of cleaning, and preserving, the ancient icons was not halted by the Bolshevik Revolution. Certainly many icons were destroyed in the fury unleashed (or fostered) against the Church, but it is equally true that many ancient icons were preserved,25 and found their way to art galleries such as the Tretyakov or into the hands of private collectors such as the Swedish financier, Olof Aschberg, a supporter of the Bolsheviks, who expressed their gratitude by providing him with hundreds of amazing icons (almost the whole of an immense iconostasis, for example), now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, though only a few are normally on display.26

Evgeny Trubetskoy The first published reaction to the recovery of the ancient icon we shall look at consists of three short essays by Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy, published in 1916 and 1917. The first is called Умозрение в красках—‘Contemplation in colours’. Trubetskoy belonged to the intellectual circles of Moscow, and would have ended up in the emigration had he not died of typhus in 1920 in Novorossiysk, just as he 23  On Shchukin, see Rosamund Bartlett, ‘The Revolutionary Collector Who Changed the Course of Russian Art’: http://www.apollo-­magazine.com/the-­revolutionary-­collector-­who-­changed-­the-­ course-­of-­russian-­art/ and the catalogue of the exhibition that occasioned her article: Anne Baldassari, Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection, Fondation Louis Vuitton (Gallimard, 2016). 24  See Oleg Tarasov, ‘Russian Icons and the Avant-­Garde: Tradition and Change’, in The Art of Holy Russia, 93–9, at 97; see also Jefferson J. A. Gatrall in his introduction to Alter Icons: the Russian Icon and Modernity (Penn State University, 2010), 4–5. 25  As Lock points out in ‘The Space of Hospitality’, 22. 26  See the catalogue by Ulf Abel, Yury Bobrov, and Vera Moore, Icons (Nationalmuseum, 2004).

348  Selected Essays, VOLUME II was about to leave Russia with the remnants of the White Army. His three essays are really a celebration of the Holy Russia that was disappearing before his eyes, as the First World War plunged an already turbulent Russia into the abyss. For him, the icon is the heart of Holy Russia, itself understood to be a society that opened up onto the other world of eternity. He talks with warmth about the golden onion domes of the Russian churches which combine the sense of the ‘firmament that covers the earth’ produced by the domes of Byzantine churches with the upward yearning of prayer of the Gothic spire, so that ‘our national onion dome makes concrete the idea of the ardent impulse of prayer directed to the heavens, thanks to which the world obtains participation in riches beyond the earthly’.27 He goes on to remark that It is not just the golden onion domes that express the idea of the yearning of prayer. When one looks at a Russian monastery from a distance, or a town and its numerous churches in the light of the sun, they seem ablaze with many-­coloured flames. And when the flames sparkle from afar in the vast expanses of snow, they present a distant vision, transcending the earth, of the City of God.28

Trubetskoy relates this vision of Russia to the Trinitarian spirituality of St Sergii of Radonezh: ‘his ideal was the transfiguration of the world in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity, that is to say, the inner union of all beings with God’.29 He continues, ‘the whole piety of ancient Russia is inspired by this ideal; here the art of the icon takes its origin’.30 Without suggesting (as Florovsky did, picking up this theme from Trubetskoy on the very first page of his Ways of Russian Theology31) that Russia had no intellectual culture, he is quite clear that the art of the icon is at the centre of Russian Orthodox sensibility, but that only in his time has this perception been recovered: The painting of icons, without any doubt, expresses what is most profound in  the culture of ancient Russia. Furthermore, these icons are among the greatest treasures of religious art as a whole. Now, until very recently, they were incomprehensible to a cultivated Russian. He scarcely gave them a distracted glance. He simply could not see the icon under the deposit of years of soot. The extraordinary beauty and the brilliance of its colours have only been revealed to us quite recently. Only in our days, and thanks to the remarkable progress of the techniques of cleaning, have we been able to see the colours of 27  Eugène Troubetzkoi, Trois Études sur l’icône (YMCA-­Press/O.E.I.L., 1986) [the French translation of Умозрение в красках, referred to above], 18. 28 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 19. 29 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 22. 30 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 22. 31 G. Florovsky, Пути Пусского богословия (YMCA-­Press, 1937; reprint, 1981), 1.

The Recovery of the Icon  349 past centuries; thus there has been definitively destroyed the myth of the gloomy character of the icon.32

For Trubetskoy, the recovery of the icon is a result of the cleaning programme at the beginning of the twentieth century, which revealed a world of colour. The icon reveals how ‘contemplation in colours’ lay at the heart of Russian spirituality. Trubetskoy develops this insight with enormous sensitivity, and finds in it abundant riches. We cannot pause over that now, save to remark that his insights, expressed with great economy, will echo and re-­echo in the decades that follow, as Russians (and others) reflect on the icon. One thing, however, we cannot pass over. For Trubetskoy, the whole of Russian iconography is a response to the infinite sorrow of our existence . . . So it was that it needed a world war for us to perceive all the horror of this grief and sorrow. So too, we can better understand today the striking drama the world of the icon presents to us.33

He goes on to refer to the world in which the greatest of the Russian icons were painted—­the times of the Tatar raids, and the wholesale destruction of churches and communities. Reading Trubetskoy, we are reminded of the juxtaposition of the inhuman violence of the times and the serene beauty of the icon that we find in Tarkovsky’s film, Andrei Rublev. Just as the icon was created in the crucible of horror, violence, and the profoundest sorrow, so the world of the icon was rediscovered at the beginning of a century in which the civilized world found itself tumbling into an abyss of suffering and destruction. Trubetskoy could have had no idea how prophetic his words would prove: he was responding only to the beginning of the First World War, with no idea of what was to follow. He comments: It was in such a spiritual climate that the architecture of the temple of ancient Russia took shape. It was in this climate that the icons were nourished and it is to this climate that they respond. The symbolic language of the icons is incomprehensible to flesh that is replete; it is inaccessible to a heart entirely occupied with its material well-­being. But this language comes alive, when dreams collapse and an abyss opens before our feet. Then we have need of a place of se­cur­ ity on the edge of the abyss; we need to feel, beyond our tribulations, the still serenity of the icon; the joyful vision of the gathering together (sobor) of the whole of creation, beyond the bloody chaos of our existence, becomes for us as necessary as our daily bread. We need to be sure that the Beast is not all in all

32 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 22–3.

33 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 45.

350  Selected Essays, VOLUME II here below, that beyond the realm of the Beast, there is another law of life, and that it will prevail.34

For Trubetskoy, the recovery of the icon was the recovery to the true nature of Holy Russia, a recovery not at all sentimental, instead rather bringing with it an awareness of terrible times the Russian people—­and not the Russians alone—­ were approaching. Trubetskoy’s rediscovery of the icon is the celebration of the spiritual heart of Russia that had been hidden for so long—­like the icons, under a layer of soot, the soot of all the ideas, half-­digested, that Russia had been imbibing from the West for nearly two centuries. Trubetskoy simply celebrates the vision revealed by the icon, fully aware that to discern this demands an intellectual metanoia on the part of his fellow cultivated Russians. Trubetskoy’s three essays were published (or at least the first two of them) in Moscow in 1916,35 and so were known among his fellow Russians, including those who later found themselves in the Diaspora. Others, too, in Russia in the later 1910s became interested in the icon, notably Fr Pavel Florensky.

Fr Pavel Florensky After the Communist Revolution, Fr Pavel served on the Commission for the Preservation of Art and Antiquities of the Trinity-­St Sergii Lavra. This led to his reflecting on the nature of Russian iconography. Two essays, in particular, are important—‘Reverse Perspective’ (1919) and Iconostasis (1922):36 the dates are the dates of their completion; neither was published until long after Florensky’s death—‘Reverse Perspective’ in 1967; Iconostasis in 1977 in an incomplete form, then finally in 1994—so it is not clear how much influence they could have had on the twentieth-­century rediscovery of the icon. As the title of the first of these essays suggests, part of Florensky’s intention was to overcome the prejudice against icons, derived from the fact that they do not use the linear perspective that has been characteristic of Western art since the Renaissance. The term ‘reverse perspective’ was coined by the German art his­tor­ ian, Oskar Wulff, with whose work Florensky was clearly familiar.37 Florensky’s justification is not so much of ‘reverse perspective’ over against ‘linear perspective’, but rather an attack on the pretensions of ‘linear perspective’ to hegemony,

34 Troubetzkoi, Trois Études, 46. 35  See Nicholas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance, 81 n. 36  The year of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as Trotsky’s decree that expelled non-­Marxist intellectuals from Russia on the ‘Ship of the Philosophers’, as Lock remarks, ‘The Space of Hospitality’, 35, though Iconostasis was not published in that year. 37  See Charles Lock, ‘What Is Reverse Perspective and Who Was Oskar Wulff?’, Sobornost 33:1 (2011), 60–89.

The Recovery of the Icon  351 as  being the ‘right way’ of depicting objects in a painting or drawing, together with an appreciation of what icon painters who ignored the principles of linear perspective were trying to achieve. This attack operates at two levels. On the one hand, there is an explanation of the unreality of linear perspective: unreal because it achieves an illusion, the illusion that the frame of the painting is a window through which one is looking onto the scene depicted, and unreal because what is achieved is something ultimately inhuman, unrelated to the way in which human beings actually see things. Florensky shows how the pursuit of linear perspective can lead to a mechanical way of seeing and painting, as if the world was being surveyed from one single point. His argument can be illustrated by an example he doesn’t use, taken from photography. Something one quickly learns, when one starts to take photographs, is that the camera is very limited in what it can focus on: it focuses either on what is close up, and the background is blurred, or on the distance, and the foreground is blurred. The reason is simple: there is only one lens and it works mechanically. Human beings don’t see like that: for one thing, we have two eyes and, for another, we don’t stay still; moreover, what we observe is a combination of what we see and what we know, while our eyes focus and refocus with amazing rapidity, and the brain lets us know what we know is there, not just what we see. (All that is reversed when you paint: if you want to depict in a realistic way, you have to forget what you know, and only paint what you see: a process which is quite unnatural, as is evident from children’s pictures, who, untutored, depict what they know, not what they see—­so painting a face in profile, they depict two eyes, because they know a face has two eyes.) The icon painter is not painting the way he does because he is ignorant of linear perspective (and, indeed, there are occasions when linear perspective is used in icons, as Florensky points out), but because he is not interested in an illusion of reality, but something else entirely, what one might call the presence of the real.38 Furthermore, the desire to achieve an illusion of reality, characteristic of Western art since the Renaissance, is really quite unusual in terms of human culture as a whole; hardly any cultures have wanted to do it, not because they didn’t know how to, but because they had no desire to. Florensky takes this cultural criticism into the heart of what he regards as the enemies’ territory: the way in which the Renaissance world view underlies Kant’s understanding of reality—­he speaks of the ‘connexion between the sweet Renaissance roots and their bitter Kantian fruits’.39 According to Florensky, Kant worked with highly simplified notions of space and time; the space that he ‘transcendentally deduces’ is—­lo and behold!— space as described by Euclid! Not many of Florensky’s contemporaries were aware

38  On this, see the quite remarkable book by C. A. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image (Ashgate, 2013). 39  From ‘Reverse Perspective’, in Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (Reaktion Books, 2002), 201–72, at 216.

352  Selected Essays, VOLUME II of the developments in geometry at the turn of the century, associated with the names of Riemann and Lobachevsky. Linear perspective is based on Euclidean space in which parallel lines never meet, but by the beginning of the twentieth century other geometries had been devised: Riemann’s in which all ‘straight’ lines meet twice, and Lobachevsky’s in which no ‘straight’ lines meet at all, whether parallel or not. Kantian-­ Euclidean space is not something ‘transcendentally deduced’, but a cultural convention, favouring a naïve realism. As Avril Pyman remarks in her wonderful biography of Florensky: But Florensky, of course, did know his geometry and was indeed a step ahead of all those who had not made a special study of non-­Euclidean space, which give his arguments a persuasiveness that thrilled his first auditors in 1919 as it did his first readers in 1967. It was essentially liberating to be presented with reasoned proof that naturalistic representation of form (as imposed by socialist no less than nineteenth-­ century realism) is, in fact, a geometrical nonsense, and Florensky’s debunking of a single viewpoint, in spite of its thorny technicalities, was welcomed as a riotously subversive reductio ad absurdum.40

Traditional forms of art, of which the icon is one, are not inadequate attempts to achieve what Western art has done since the Renaissance, but attempts to achieve something quite different. Their depictions of reality are not naïve or unsophisticated. On the contrary, they are deeply considered and show an awareness of the complexity of reality that the Western artist had relinquished, but was beginning to rediscover, particularly in the art of Cézanne and Picasso. In Iconostasis, Florensky has more to say about what the icon is seeking to achieve. The work begins with a fascinating meditation on the world of dreams, on the strange disjunction between space and time in the dream and how it appears in our waking life. He notices the odd way in which dream time and waking time meet: often enough in the sound of the alarm clock, which certainly belongs to the normal time of waking life, but in the dream-­world is the point towards which the dream seems to be moving. It is as if time in the dream is measured backwards, from when we wake up. Space, too, in dreams seems to belong to two worlds: we seem to be in familiar places, places familiar from our waking life, but unfamiliar too, often manifesting strange proximities. But space and time in the dream world are ruled by meaning: the dream is wholly teleological, saturated with the meanings of the invisible world, meanings that are invisible, immaterial, eternal yet nevertheless visibly manifest and (as it were) vividly material. A dream is therefore pure meaning

40  Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius (Continuum, 2010), 133.

The Recovery of the Icon  353 wrapped in the thinnest membrane of materiality; it is almost wholly a phenomenon of the other world . . . A dream then is a sign of a movement between two realms—­and also a symbol: of what? From the heavenly point of view, the dream symbolizes earth; from the earthly perspective, it symbolizes heaven . . .41

From this beginning Florensky develops the idea of the icon as similarly existing on the boundary between heaven and earth, belonging to one, disclosing the other. Central to the way this happens is the face, the central feature of the icon, that draws the beholder into a relationship with someone—­Christ, the Mother of God, one of the saints—­belonging to the heavenly realm. When the icon is beheld in the right spiritual state, its impact on the beholder is ‘equally physical and spiritual’: Like light pouring forth light, the icon stands revealed. And no matter where the icon is physically located in the space we encounter it, we can only describe our experience of seeing it as a beholding that ascends.42

Although the works in which these ideas were expressed remained unpublished until well after the period we are considering, memories of the impressions left by the talks on which they were based must have circulated, and notions of ‘reverse perspective’ and the central role of the face in the icon are encountered in those who furthered the recovery of the icon.

Recreating the Tradition of Icon Painting: Leonid Uspensky Trubetskoy and Florensky recovered the icon in the sense of rediscovering its religious significance and defending it against ideas of religious art, deriving from the Western Renaissance, that had led to the comprehensive neglect of the icon that we have already outlined. Neither of them took the next step: that of rediscovering how to paint icons (though when I visited Fr Florensky’s house in Sergei Posad a few years ago, I was given a picture called Сад Флоренского, ‘Florensky’s Garden’, depicting Florensky in his study, with an easel and some paint, apparently, at least, contemplating painting an icon). This next step was problematic, for the tradition of icon painting had more or less died out; there may have been a trickle of the tradition among the Old Believers, but there is, so far as I can see, no evidence that the re-­discoverers of icon painting we shall look at now had any access to a living tradition. The re-­creation of tradition is almost an oxymoron, a

41  Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 43. 42 Florensky, Iconostasis, 72.

354  Selected Essays, VOLUME II contradiction in terms, and it seems to me that our re-­discoverers of the icon were conscious of this. Let us start with the Russian émigré who was to prove the most influential in Western Europe in restoring the tradition of icon painting: Leonid Uspensky (1902–87).43 Among the Russian émigrés he was unusual: during the Revolution, still in his mid-­teens, he had been an enthusiastic Bolshevik, taking part with enthusiasm in the destruction of the icons he was later to venerate. He joined the Red Army, was captured by the White Army, and condemned to death by firing squad. By a miracle he was spared at the last moment, and put to work in the White Army. His experience of war left him with a profound repulsion to the killing of any living creatures. With the defeat of the White Army, he went into exile, and spent years engaged in various kinds of manual work, often dangerous and ill-­paid; he knew starvation. He ended up in Paris working in a bicycle factory. In 1929, Uspensky enrolled in an academy of Arts that had been set up in Paris, where many well-­known artists taught. Hitherto, Uspensky’s love of painting had found expression in meticulous copying of flowers on postcards. The academy soon foundered, and Uspensky found himself continuing his studies under the leadership of N. D. Millioti, along with the woman who became his first wife and Georgii Ivanovich Krug, the future icon painter and monk, Gregory. Uspensky supported himself, as did his fellow students, by designing and making painted scarves for clothing stores in Paris. His introduction to icon painting came as the result of a bet: that he could paint an icon, which he did, though he destroyed the result, realizing that he had done something inappropriate, even wrong. Gradually, his interest in icons grew; his faith revived and he returned to the Church. In time, he and Gregory Krug came to devote themselves entirely to icons. Krug already knew something about icon painting, learnt in his native Estonia (from Old Believers? no one says). Uspensky began by taking lessons from a Russian icon painter, Fyodorov. These lessons soon ceased for lack of money to pay for them, and he continued his efforts to learn by careful study of old icons, then readily available in antique shops in Paris. He used to say that ‘these ancient icons had been his real teachers’.44 Later, together with Gregory Krug, he joined the Brotherhood of St Photius, through which he came to know the theologian Vladimir Lossky. The Brotherhood saw its role as remaining faithful to the Moscow patriarchate, after most of the Russian Exarchate had left the omophorion of Moscow for that of the œcumenical patriarchate, while at the same time making Orthodoxy known in the France that had become their home as Russian émigrés.

43  I am indebted to Patrick Doolan, Recovering the Icon: The Life and Work of Leonid Ouspensky (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008). 44 Doolan, Recovering the Icon, 13.

The Recovery of the Icon  355 Uspensky’s icons came to adorn the churches of Paris—­especially the churches of the Three Hierarchs and of Notre-­Dame, Joie des Affligés, et Ste Geneviève, both congregations faithful to Moscow—­as well as the ‘beautiful corners’ in the houses and rooms of the émigrés. His icons are distinctive, and yet also, if not traditional, familiar from the tradition. They are not copies—­the methods that had evolved of copying icons by a combination of tracing and then painting in (as if ‘by numbers’) were abhorrent to Uspensky.45 As he explains in the book he wrote with Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (published in German and English editions in 1952): Iconography therefore is not copying. It is far from being impersonal for to follow Tradition never shackles the creative powers of the iconographer, whose individuality expresses itself in the composition as well as in colour and line . . . The absence of identical icons has been noted long ago. Indeed, among icons on the same subject, although they are sometimes remarkably alike, we never find two identical icons (except in cases of deliberate copying in more modern times). Icons are not copied, but are painted from, which means their free creative transposition.46

The Meaning of Icons is a remarkable book, which has had an enormous influence (there was an earlier book, or rather pamphlet, by Uspensky, L’Icône. Quelques mots sur son sens dogmatique, 1948, which I have only seen in Kontoglou’s Greek translation).47 It consists of three introductory essays—­ Lossky’s well-­ known ‘Tradition and Traditions’, and two by Uspensky: ‘The Meaning and Language of Icons’ and ‘The Technique of Iconography’—followed by a series of essays on the different types of icon, shared between Lossky and Uspensky. The introductory essay by Lossky, though not explicitly, seems to me to address the problem that lies at the heart of the recovery of the icon, that is, the recovery of the tradition of icon painting: namely that this tradition had been all but broken. I said, ‘not explicitly’, and indeed not: the essay starts by addressing the question of the relationship between Scripture and Tradition; one might indeed wonder to begin what it is doing in this volume on icons at all. As the essay develops, however, we encounter an exploration of the nature of tradition: Lossky introduces the idea that ‘Tradition is Silence’,48 quoting from St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘He who possesses in truth the word of Jesus can hear even its stillness’ (ad Ephes. 15. 2). To stand in

45 For methods of copying icons in Imperial Russia, see Tarasov, Icon and Devotion, esp. 37–57, 301–51. 46  Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (Boston Book & Art Shop, 1969), 43 (quoted in Doolan, Recovering the Icon, 96). 47 Leonid Ouspensky, Ἡ Εἰκόνα, Λίγα λόγια γιὰ τὴ δογματικὴ ἔννοιά της, 3rd edn (Ekdoseis Papadimitriou/Astir, 1991); originally published, Ekdoseis ‘Kivotou’, 1952). 48  Ouspensky and Lossky, Meaning, 17.

356  Selected Essays, VOLUME II the Tradition is to inhabit the ‘margin of silence’, within which we can hear the revelation to which the Scriptures bear witness. To stand in the Tradition is to stand in prayer (Metropolitan Anthony, in his foreword to Fr Patrick Doolan’s book on Uspensky, gives a moving account of his own coming to know Uspensky: for nearly twenty years, they stood side by side in the church of Notre-­Dame, Joie des Affligés, et Ste Geneviève, without ever speaking to each other—­but the knowledge gained by standing beside him in prayer was more profound than any mere acquaintance). In that sense, the tradition cannot be broken: from the depths of prayer the tradition, even the tradition of icon painting, can be re­covered. That seems to be the point of Lossky’s essay, at least on my reading. Of the fifty-­nine icons illustrated and discussed in the book, virtually all of them are Russian icons of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries; there are three Greek icons, one ancient Coptic icon, and five modern Russian icons. The commentary is not art historical, but liturgical, illustrating the meaning of the icons considered from liturgical texts, and sometimes providing historical details about the feast celebrated in the icon: the icon is presented as essentially li­tur­gic­al, the events depicted not so much historical events, as liturgical feasts. It is evident from the icons reproduced, that the book is about the meaning of Russian icons (though it is assumed that the meaning is the same for all of the Orthodox), that the Russian icon reached its apogee in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Andrei Rublev being the central figure, and furthermore that the Russian icon has been recovered, so that modern Russian icons can be placed alongside the icons of the classical period. Uspensky’s most famous work is his Theology of the Icon, first published in 1960, then in a much expanded form in 1980 (the first edition is called Essai sur la théologie de l’icône dans l’Église orthodoxe, echoing the title of Lossky’s famous Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient49). There is no time to consider this work in detail here, however.

. . . and Fotis Kontoglou Leonid Uspensky began his recovery of the icon in the 1930s. Already by that time in Greece, the recovery of the icon had begun. As Uspensky’s recovery of the icon had been an individual quest, accompanied by Gregory Krug, but owing nothing to any initiative from the Orthodox hierarchy, so in Greece: here the story is the story of one man, Photios (or Fotis) Kontoglou.50 Born in Aivali in 49  Many years later, in 2003, Vladimir’s son, Nicolas (now Archpriest Nicolas) completed what Uspensky had intended as a triptych with his Essai sur une théologie de la musique liturgique. Perspective orthodoxe (Cerf, 2003). 50  There is not much available on Kontoglou. I was not able to consult Nikos Zias, Fotis Kontoglou (1991), and have relied on Kari Kotkavaara, Progeny of the Icon: Émigré Russian Revivalism and the

The Recovery of the Icon  357 what is now Turkey in 1895, he was brought up by his mother and uncle, and the surname he is known by is theirs; his father’s name was Apostolelis. Kontoglou trained as a painter, studying at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, though in fact spending most of the years 1914–19 in Paris (only a few years before Fr Sophrony Sakharov arrived in Paris as a young art student),51 studying contemporary art, and supporting himself as a book illustrator. He was thus thoroughly acquainted at first hand with the trends of Western art, and this is reflected in his own early work. The catastrophe of 1922, with the slaughter of tens of thousands of Greeks in Smyrna and the expulsion of the Greek communities from Asia Minor to Greece had a profound effect on Kontoglou. He was henceforth in exile from his homeland; his identity as an Anatolian Greek had been taken from him and, along with many others, he found himself in search of some other way of conceiving of his identity as Greek. To this end, he turned to the art of the Byzantine and Post-­Byzantine period, and spent three months on Mount Athos studying the frescos of Michael Panselinos, Theophanes the Cretan, and others. His range of sources went beyond this: like Florensky a little earlier, Kontoglou became interested in the Hellenistic funerary portraits, discovered in Fayum in the late nineteenth century: these amazing faces, with their large, gazing eyes, seemed to foreshadow something of the later iconographic tradition. At this stage, in the late 1920s and 1930s, it seems that it was his search for a sense of Greek identity that was driving Kontoglou; the realization that this Greek identity was a Christian identity, an Orthodox identity, came later. He drew on his deep knowledge of visual aesthetics and the leading trends of the time, learnt and honed in Athens and Paris. Kotkavaara comments on how Kontoglou equated the features of an ancient icon of the Mother of God—­her almond-­shaped eyes, arched forehead, slender chin, and rounded cheeks—­with the marble heads of Greek goddesses. He quotes from Kontoglou: ‘This image has been created by the same ancient soil that gave birth to Aphrodite, Artemis, Athene, and later Demeter’, adding that ‘this figure which stands on our altars [is] ageless and unchanged’, and receives hymns and prayers that are rooted in an age-­old cult which ‘the race has germinated’.52 In the 1930s, he began to paint more and more icons. After the Greek Church in 1938 issued a law forbidding the production of Italianate frescos and icons, Kontoglou found himself more and more in demand, and produced a large number of icons Vicissitudes of the Eastern Orthodox Sacred Image (Åbo Akademi University Press, 1999), and Constantine Cavarnos’ selection of Kontoglou’s writings on art: Byzantine Sacred Art, 2nd edn (Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985). I have also learnt a lot from conversations with my friend, Fr Andreas Andreopoulos. 51  On which, see the triad of books on St Sophrony by Sister Gabriela of the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, and his disciple in iconography: Seeking Perfection in the World of Art: the Artistic Path of Father Sophrony, ‘Being’: The Art and Life of Father Sophrony, Painting as Prayer: The Art of A. Sophrony Sakharov, 2nd enlarged edn (Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, 2014, 2016, 2017). 52 Kotkavaara, Progeny, 336.

358  Selected Essays, VOLUME II and frescos in the suburbs of Athens and in other towns. After the war and the civil war, Kontoglou found his works in demand overseas, in America and elsewhere. Kontoglou wrote a great deal on icons and Byzantine art, much of which is very negative about Western art, despite his earlier attraction to it (or maybe because of his earlier attraction). Much of his writing was occasional, but his thoughts on the icon are summed up in his major work, Ekphrasis—‘Expression’, or better, ‘Image interpretation’—in two volumes, intended as a replacement for Dionysios of Fourna’s Ermeneia, or Painter’s Guide, for which Kontoglou had little time;53 Ekphrasis could also be regarded as the Greek equivalent of Uspensky’s The Meaning of the Icon and The Theology of the Icon rolled into one.54 It was only after the war that Kontoglou came across Uspensky, when Uspensky, having heard of his work, wrote to him in 1949, enclosing a copy of his pamphlet, L’icône. Quelques mots sur son sens dogmatique (1948), which, as we have seen, Kontoglou translated into Greek. There followed some correspondence between them. There was mutual acknowledgement, though Kontoglou’s appreciation of Uspensky cooled (he was too Russian and did not concede the primacy of Byzantine art). Both Uspensky and Kontoglou sought to recover a lost tradition. In both cases they achieved this by learning from the icons themselves. The differences between them seem to me at least partly due to their difference over what constituted the classical form of the icon. Neither of them went back to the beginning of the trad­ ition in the first centuries (this may be partly because the majority of ancient icons that survive are mosaics, a medium neither wanted to work in); both went back to periods of the developed tradition: fifteenth-­century Russian icons in the case of Uspensky; in the case of Kontoglou, icons of much the same period that can be found on Mount Athos, not least the icons of the Cretan school (which seem to my untutored eye the models on which Kontoglou based his conception of the icon), though Kontoglou, as we have seen, flirts with older models—­the art of ancient Greece, the Hellenistic art of Fayum, and some strands of Byzantine iconography. Even this difference between them can be seen to rest on a deeper commonality: for they could both be seen as going back to where the tradition had broken off: the traditions preserved by the Old Believers, with their reverence for Rublev, in the case of Uspensky, the post-­Byzantine tradition of Crete and indeed still later folk art, in the case of Kontoglou. What is remarkable is the way in which the recovery of the icon was a matter of individual initiative, and the extraordinary synchronicity of their trajectories. Perhaps one can go further, for both of them survived a national catastrophe, both left their homeland and drew on a wider cultural milieu as they sought to rediscover the meaning of their

53  Dionysios of Fourna’s Ermeneia has been translated in Englsih by Paul Hetherington, trans., The ‘Painter’s Manual’ of Dionysios of Fourna, revised edn (Oakwood Publications, 1981; originally published by Sagittarus Press, 1974). 54  Fotios Kontoglou, Ἔκφφασις, 2 vols., 3rd edn (Astir, 1993; 1st edn, Astir/Papadimitriou, 1960).

The Recovery of the Icon  359 ethnic identity; they both turned to their ‘classical’ prototypes, but they did so armed with the intellectual and aesthetic arsenal of the West they were trying to emancipate themselves from.

St Maria of Paris and Sister Joanna Reitlinger I want to close by looking very briefly at two artists rarely considered in the context of the recovery of the icon, and in both cases because the iconic style re­covered seems perhaps too distinctively twentieth century, in a way not so evident in the case of Uspensky and Kontoglou. I have in mind two women, both Russians, who came to know each other in Paris between the wars: Mother Maria Skobtsova (St Maria of Paris) and Sister Joanna Reitlinger (Julia Reitlinger). Once or twice I have remarked that the recovery of the icon, the re-­appreciation of non-­naturalist painting, took place at just the same time as Western art was calling in question the tradition of naturalism. I have suggested that it must be more than coincidence that it was art connoisseurs of Old Believer stock, acquainted with the ancient icon tradition, who had eyes that were able to appreciate the emerging modernism in the arts, in Picasso, say, or Matisse, and before them, in the Impressionists. Even Bulgakov, who found Picasso’s art so repellent, remarked that ‘there is, strangely enough, something of the icon about it’.55 The links between modernism in the arts and Orthodox theology are evident if one cares to look. Just to give a single example: Hugo Ball, the theorist of Dadaism, was the author of a book, Byzantinisches Christentum, the bulk of which is devoted to Dionysios the Areopagite (he is said to have derived Dada, from the initials of Dionysios Areopagita, repeated).56 The Romanian Nichifor Crainic went to Vienna in the 1920s to learn about Dada from Hugo Ball, and there learned from him, as he put it, his own tradition of Orthodoxy, which he came to embrace with enthusiasm, going back to his native Romania and holding chairs in theology and spirituality, on his own insistence. It is a pity that the recovery of the icon has not opened many Orthodox eyes to what modernism in the arts was seeking: Evdokimov’s summary of modern art in his L’art de l’icône is uniformly negative, and he is not untypical.57 With our two Russian nuns, we see something that can only be understood if we open our eyes both to the icon and, at least, to some strands in modern art and culture. But we must be brief. Mother Maria was brought up in St Petersburg, and 55  Paine and Zernov, eds., Bulgakov Anthology, 67 (original Russian in Тихие Думы (YMCA Press, 1976; reprint of 1918 Moscow edn), 34: нечто иконографическое, хотя в совершенно особенном смысле: ‘something iconographic, though in a perfectly peculiar sense’). 56 See Bernd Wacker, ed., Dionysius DADA Areopagita: Hugo Ball und die Kritik der Moderne (Schöningh, 1996). 57  Paul Evdokimov, L’art de l’icône. Théologie de la beauté (Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), 67–84.

360  Selected Essays, VOLUME II mixed in intellectual and artistic circles, a friend of Aleksandr Blok, and through her first husband related to Anna Akhmatova.58 As a young girl, she learnt drawing and painting, as well as embroidery; she also wrote poetry: all the accomplishments of a well-­brought-­up upper-­class girl. Once she arrived in Paris, her main concern was for the sufferings of the Russians who had found themselves there, and later, in the 1930s and during the German occupation of Paris, for the Jews, many of whom were of Russian origin. She died, as is well known, a martyr in the camp at Ravensbrück. In Paris, the centre of her activities was a community in Rue Lourmel, where she lived her monastic life—­in a way unusual among the Orthodox—­through caring for others. Alongside all that, she continued to write poetry and engage in various forms of art: painting and embroidery. In the churches she set up, she painted the walls and produced a number of icons. They are not very conventional, but what I find interesting is that there are influences from outside the iconographic tradition: traces of Douanier Rousseau, Chagall, or even Edward Lear! There is something similar with Sister Joanna Reitlinger, though she stands much more closely to the tradition of the icon. She did in fact study in Prague under Nikodim Kondakov, one of the scholars who played a central role in the rediscovery of the iconographic tradition.59 It was there that she met Fr Sergii Bulgakov, who remained a friend and supporter during their time in Paris. Her iconographic work is much more extensive than St Maria’s; one of her commissions was to provide icons for the chapel of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius in St Basil’s House in London. Her work has attracted varying responses, but for our purposes her importance lies in that in her work we find an attempt, not, I think, deliberate or systematic, to introduce into the iconographic tradition elements of modern art. There is certainly something of ‘magic realism’ about some of her icons, especially her famous and much reproduced icon of the Nativity—­an icon I would find easier to accept as an icon were it called ‘The Angel of the Nativity’, rather than just ‘The Nativity’. It is interesting to note that Kontoglou’s biographer, Nikos Zias, finds parallels with Kontoglou in Giorgio de Chirico and German Neue Sachlichkeit, and Kari Kotkavaara suggests that in a broader way, we can see Kontoglou as inheriting the background and concerns of magic realism, something I think even more manifest in his stories.60

Conclusion This is perhaps an unsatisfactory note on which to close, but maybe it is on an unsatisfactory note that we should close. The recovery of the icon opens up a way, 58  On Mother Maria, see Xenia Krivochéine, La beauté salvatrice. Mère Marie [Skobtsova] (Cerf, 2012); Paul Ladouceur, ‘The Saint as Artist: The Art of Saint Maria of Paris (Mother Maria Skobtsova). The Making of a Poet-­Artist’, Sobornost 36:1 (2014), 48–72. 59  On Sister Joanna, see Художественное наследие сестры Иоанны (YMCA Press, 2006). 60 Kotkavaara, Progeny, 332–3.

The Recovery of the Icon  361 a way that has still to be trodden. Too much modern iconography barely escapes from the debased tradition of copying that Uspensky rejected. It is an easy way, and a way very much encouraged by the immense facility with which icons can be reproduced nowadays. I have a block-­mounted, high-­quality copy of Rublev’s Trinity icon in my icon corner at home, but it has nothing like the life of the few genuine icons I possess, painted by living iconographers. If iconography becomes completely separated from the modern practice of art, then it is difficult to see how it will avoid ossification. We have recovered the icon: can it remain a living tradition?61 61  After this lecture was given in 2015, I showed it to various friends; this revision owes a great deal to their generous responses and, not least, to suggestions about bibliography, especially to Rosamund Bartlett and Sister Gabriela of the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights.

30 Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology Some Orthodox Reflections

Introduction In the last century, it often seemed as if Orthodox ecclesiology could be summed up under the term, ‘Eucharistic ecclesiology’. While there is no doubt that Eucharistic ecclesiology provided a way of reflecting about the institutional nature of the Church in the wake of the collapse of Holy Russia, rendering an institutional ecclesiology bound up with the political notion of symphonia between Church and State unviable either for the Russians or for the œcumenical patriarchate itself, to regard the concept of Eucharistic ecclesiology as exhausting Orthodox reflection on the Church is to miss much that is most vital in Orthodox theology of the last century. One way of opening up deeper dimensions of Orthodox ecclesiology is, I would argue, to consider the relationship between Mary and the Church.

Mary and the Church as Virgin Mother The earliest reflection about Mary, the Mother of God, occurred in the second century and developed the Apostle Paul’s notion of Christ as the second Adam, supplementing it with the doctrine of Mary as the second Eve. Paul expressed the victory of Christ over death, a victory that extends in principle to the whole human race, by drawing a parallel between the first Adam of Genesis 2–3 and Christ as the second Adam. So, for example, in I Corinthians: Now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-­fruits of them that slept. For since death came through the human, so through the human came the resurrection of the dead. For just as in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive.  (I Cor. 15:20–2)

Paul went on to contrast the ‘first man Adam’ and the ‘last Adam’, Christ (I  Cor.  15:45). In the second century we find this parallel between the first Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0031

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  363 Adam and Christ the second Adam extended to embrace the first Eve and Mary the second Eve. So, in the Dialogue with Trypho, Justin Martyr says that the Son of God became man through the Virgin, so that just as disobedience took its beginning from the serpent, so in the same way it might be brought to an end. For Eve, being a virgin and incorrupt, conceiving through the word, gave birth to dis­ obedi­ence and death; Mary taking faith and joy at the glad tidings of the angel Gabriel, because the spirit of the Lord was to come upon her and the power of the most high to overshadow her, and thus the one born of her is the holy Son of God, answered, ‘Be it to me according to your word’. And so, this one was born of her, about whom we have shown so many of the Scriptures to speak, through whom God destroyed the serpent and those humans and angels who had become like him.1

This expresses the parallel between the virgin Eve, whose disobedience brought death, which was overthrown by the obedience of the virgin Mary. The passage also dwells on Mary’s response of faith and joy to the message of the angel as the cause of this reversal of fortune. The same notion is found in other second-­ century writers, such as Melito of Sardis, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. Irenaeus, however, adds a further aspect: Just as [Eve] was led astray by an angelic word, so that she fled from God, having betrayed his word, so [Mary] received the good news through an angelic word that she might bear God, obedient to his word. For if [Eve] was disobedient to God, [Mary] was persuaded to obey God, so that the virgin Mary became advocate for the virgin Eve. And just as the human race was bound to death by a virgin, so it was saved by a virgin, virginal disobedience being equally balanced by virginal obedience.2

The idea of Mary as advocate for Eve is found again in Irenaeus’ On the Apostolic Preaching: And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck and, falling, died, so also by means of a virgin, who obeyed the word of God, man, being revivified, received life . . . For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ, that ‘mortality might be swallowed up in immortality’; and Eve in Mary, that a

1 Justin Martyr, Dial. Trypho, 100; Justin Martyr, Opera, ed. J.  C.  T.  Otto, vol. 2 (F.  Mauke, 1842), 336–8. 2 Irenaeus, Adv. Haereses V. 19. 2; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, ed. W. W. Harvey, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1857), 376.

364  Selected Essays, VOLUME II virgin, become an advocate for a virgin, might undo and destroy the virginal disobedience by virginal obedience.3

This makes clear that, for Irenaeus, Mary shares with Christ in the work of re­cap­ itu­la­tion. She does this as ‘Virgin Mother’, reflecting her foremother Eve who, in a different way, could also be thought of as Virgin and Mother: created a Virgin, and destined to be the ‘mother of all living’ (Gen. 3:20). The notion of ‘Virgin Mother’ is an oxymoron—­virgins don’t give birth as virgins, and mothers have ceased to be virgins—­but in the case of the Mother of God, she is precisely ‘Virgin Mother’, conceiving and giving birth as a virgin, a conviction of the Church that is first found in the second century, to which the mysterious Protevangelium of James bears witness: a witness quickly accepted throughout the Church. The notion of ‘virgin mother’ is also what one might call an ‘in-­between’ notion: between virgin and mother, because both virgin and mother, a unique position, holding together two realms of existence, as it were—­the virgin embracing a purity that renders her transparent to God; the mother, inexorably, caught up in the manifold concerns of human living. The notion of ‘virgin mother’ is also found in the second century, only this time not explicitly associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus. And not just ‘found’, but prevalent. For we find in the second century reflection about the Church as Virgin Mother which, though it makes no explicit reference to Mary, can hardly be regarded as without any such reference at all. The beginnings of such reflection can be traced back to Paul who, just after his only, oblique reference to Mary, when he speaks of God’s Son as ‘born of a woman, born under the Law’ (Gal. 4:4), goes on, in his parable of Abraham’s two sons, to identify the heavenly Jerusalem as the ‘barren one’ of Isaiah’s song of the Suffering Servant, who is to break forth into song, because of the abundance of sons she has born: those who have been born through baptism into Christ’s death, the fruits of his passion (cf. Gal. 4:26–31). This notion of the Church as Virgin Mother, the barren woman who as a result of Christ’s passion conceives children of God is picked up by several second-­century writers. The Church appears to Hermas as an old woman, old because ‘created the first of all things, . . . for whose sake the world was established’4 and then in successive visions as a younger and younger woman, finally ‘ “adorned as if coming forth from the bridal chamber”, all in white and with white sandals, veiled to her forehead, and a turban for a headdress, but her hair was white’5—picking up another Pauline theme of the Church as a spotless virgin whom the apostle says he will present to Christ (I Cor. 11:2–4). A similar theme is 3 Irenaeus, Apos. Preaching, 33; Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. John Behr (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 61. 4 Hermas, Vision 2.4.1 [2.8.1]; Hermas, Der Hirt, ed. Molly Whittaker, GCS 48 (Akademie-­Verlag, 1956), 7. 5 Hermas, Vision 4.2.1 [4.23.1]; Whittaker, ed. Der Hirt, 20.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  365 found in II Clement, where the assertion in Genesis that God made human kind in his image, making him male and female (Gen. 1:27), has been interpreted of Christ and the church: I do not think that you should be ignorant that the church is the living body of Christ, for Scripture says, “God made human kind male and female”; the male is Christ, the female is the Church. Moreover the books and the apostles declare that the Church is not just now, but from the beginning.6

This theme is picked up again in Tertullian, who asserts that As Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam’s sleep was a figure of the death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, that from the wound inflicted in his side might be figured the true Mother of the living, the Church.7

One of the most striking illustrations of the theme of the Church as the Virgin Mother is to be found in the account of the martyrdom of the Christians in Lyons and Vienne, preserved in Eusebius’ Church History. The central figure is Blandina, a young slave girl, an epitome of weakness for the ancient world. After countless tortures, Blandina was spread-­eagled on a post and exposed to the wild animals; she hanged there ‘in the form of a cross’, and by her fervent prayer she encouraged other fellow Christians who were undergoing persecution. In her suffering with Christ, Christ is manifest to all in Blandina. A day or so later, Blandina is again brought into the arena to be tortured for confessing her faith in Christ. The letter comments that her sufferings and those of her fellow Christians were neither idle nor fruitless; for through their perseverance the infinite mercy of Christ was revealed. The dead were restored to life through the living; the martyrs brought favour to those who bore no witness, and the virgin Mother experienced much joy in recovering alive those whom she had cast forth stillborn. For through the martyrs those who had denied the faith for the most part went through the same process and were conceived and quickened again in the womb and learned to confess Christ . . .8

Further torments followed to the final stage when those who remained faithful to Christ were to be dispatched by the sword: 6  II Clem. 14.2; Karl Bihlmeyer and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, eds., Die Apostolichen Väter (J. C. B. Mohr, 1970), 77. 7 Tertullian, On the Soul 43.10; Tertulliani De Anima, ed. J.  H.  Waszink, (J.  M.  Meulenhoff, 1947), 60. 8  Mart. Lyon 45; The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. Herbert Musurillo (Clarendon Press, 1972), 77.

366  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The blessed Blandina was last of all: like a noble (εὐγενής: well born—­and she a slave!) mother encouraging her children, she sent them all before her in triumph to the King, and then, after duplicating in her own body all her children’s sufferings, she hastened to rejoin them, rejoicing and glorying in her death as though she had been invited to a bridal banquet . . .9

In Blandina, the slave-­girl, there is seen Christ, whose suffering she was sharing, but as a noble mother, encouraging her children, she represents the Church, as Virgin Mother, giving birth to those who had earlier been still-­born in their apostasy. These evocations of the Church as Virgin Mother are silent as to the Virgin Mary, and yet the parallel with her whose soul was pierced with a sword, according to Symeon’s prophecy, is all but tangible. Not only that: the episode in the fourth Gospel in which Christ gives his mother to the beloved disciple to be her mother, and the beloved disciple to Mary as her son, seems redolent with ec­cle­ sio­logic­al suggestions, though these are rarely made explicit in the early Church. Such suggestions seemed, however, to Sir Edwyn Hoskyns to be the evident meaning of the episode, for he remarks: The Church proceeds from the sacrifice of the Son of God, and the union of the Beloved Disciple and the Mother of the Lord prefigures and foreshadows the charity of the Ecclesia of God. Mary, the Mother of the Lord, becomes the mother of the faithful . . ., and the Beloved Disciple here seems to denote the ideal Christian convert.10

Mary as virgin mother, the Church as virgin mother: these are to be seen as different aspects of the same truth. Oddly, though, it takes some time for the dual meaning of the Virgin Mother to be realized, at least explicitly, in the Church. In an immensely rich paper, that sheds much light on the celebration of the Mother of God throughout the Byzantine period, Krastu Banev points to a significant transition that took place at the turning of the fourth century into the fifth.11 Around this time, there occurred a change in the way in which the images of daughter and queen in Ps 44: 10–11 were interpreted (‘Daughters of kings are in your honour; the queen is present at your right-­hand, clothed in many colours, shot through with gold. Hear, daughter, behold and incline your ear, forget your people and the house of your father’). Daughter and queen are regularly throughout the fourth century interpreted of the Church (Athanasios, in his Letter of Marcellinus, is an exception); 9  Mart. Lyon 55; Musurillo, 79. 10 E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, ed. F. N. Davey, vol. 2 (Faber and Faber, 1940), 631. 11  Banev, Krastu, ‘ “Myriad of Names to Represent Her Nobleness”: The Church and the Virgin Mary in the Psalms and Hymns of Byzantium’. In A Celebration of Living Theology, ed. Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea (Bloomsbury, 2014), 75–103.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  367 from the fifth century these images are applied to Mary. I would interpret this, less as a radical change, and more as the way in which the imagery of the Virgin Mother who gives birth to Christians through the passion of Christ begins to be seen in a synoptic way: what had previously looked like two traditions of understanding the image of the Virgin Mother, though each silently invoking the other, are now held together. Banev quotes from Proklos, ‘the entire miracle of the Virgin birth is hidden in the shadows’:12 it is as if the shadows no longer obscure and divide, but hold together different aspects of the ­mystery/miracle.

Sergii Bulgakov When we turn from the patristic period to modern Orthodox theology, we find that the imagery we have already discussed in the patristic period forms the essential background to reflection on Mary and the Church. This is especially true in the theology of Sergii Bulgakov; indeed, one might say that reflection on Mary and the Church is central to Bulgakov’s theological vision. This is because both Mary and the Church are deeply entwined in Bulgakov’s reflection on Sophia, the Wisdom of God: his sophiology. Sophiology had a long tradition in Russian thought, drawing on several traditions—­esoteric mystical traditions, associated with names such as Boehme and Angelus Silesius, which constitute one of the sources of German Idealism (or were thought to by Russian thinkers such as Nicolas Berdyaev), strands of the German idealist tradition, especially Schelling, and traditions, peculiar to Russia, that associate the Wisdom of God with the Virgin Mary, both liturgical (Russian Churches dedicated to Holy Wisdom, that observe their dedication on feasts of the Mother of God, her Nativity or her Dormition) and iconographical (in which Wisdom is represented by the Mother of God herself). For Bulgakov the association of sophiology and Mariology is bound up with his concern for what we have already called the ‘in-­between’, the region between God and the created cosmos. Rather than keeping them radically apart, as the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo can be conceived as entailing, Bulgakov is concerned to explore the frontier between the uncreated God and the created cosmos, a frontier conceived of equally in terms of Sophia and of the Mother of God. Whatever the immediate roots of sophiology in Western esoteric thought (of which Bulgakov was well aware and made no attempt to disguise; it is interesting to note, while still in parenthesis, that there are scholars today who argue that we cannot go on ignoring the esotericism of such as Boehme, the ‘hidden tradition’

12  Proklos of Constantinople, Hom. 2.9: quoted Banev, ‘ “Myriad of Names” ’, 93.

368  Selected Essays, VOLUME II in Western thought since the Renaissance: I thinking especially of Michael Martin13), God’s Wisdom, Sophia, as forming the frontier between God and the cosmos is an idea rooted in the Old Testament Scriptures, especially the books of Wisdom: Proverbs, the Wisdom of Ben Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon. In these books Wisdom manifests herself as God’s co-­worker in the task of creation, as well as the route by which human seekers of God find their way back to God by following holy Wisdom. This biblical Wisdom is in-­between God and the created order; as uncreated Wisdom she manifests God’s face to the world, as created Wisdom she leads human kind to God. It is in this context that Bulgakov develops his reflection on the Mother of God. Indeed, sophiology and Mariology are so bound together in his thought that in his late work, The Orthodox Church (1935), in which he made a determined attempt to avoid the controversial theses of sophiology, when he came to the Mother of God, he could not but express his thinking in sophiological terms: In her is realized the idea of Divine Wisdom in the creation of the world, she is Divine Wisdom in the created world. It is in her that Divine Wisdom is justified, and thus the veneration of the Virgin blends with that of the Holy Wisdom. In the Virgin there are united Holy Wisdom and the Wisdom of the created world, the Holy Spirit and the human hypostasis. Her body is completely spiritual and transfigured. She is the justification, the end and the meaning of creation. She is, in this sense, the glory of the world. In her God is already ‘all in all’.14

Often quoted in this context, by Bulgakov and other Orthodox theologians, is a phrase from St Gregory Palamas’ homily on the Dormition, where, towards the end, he speaks of Mary as being alone μεθόριον . . . κτιστῆς καὶ ἀκτίστου φύσεως, ‘frontier between created and uncreated nature’:15 precisely the role allotted to Sophia by Bulgakov. It is also the role allotted by St Gregory Palamas himself to the divine activities (ἐνέργειαι), or, as he sometimes calls them, powers (δύναμεις). For Bulgakov Sophia fulfils this role of in-­between, μεταξύ: as he put it in his account of his experience of entering the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in January 1923, Truly, the church of Hagia Sophia is the artistic, tangible proof and mani­fest­ ation of Hagia Sophia—­of the Sophianic nature of the world and the cosmic 13 See Michael Martin, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-­ Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014); Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Angelico Press, 2015), and his anthology of sources: Michael Martin, The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Sources, Poetry, and Critical Essays on Sophiology (Angelico Press/ Sophia Perennis, 2016). 14  Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (The Centenary Press, 1935), 139. 15 Gregory Palamas, Or. 37. 15; Gregory Palamas, Συγγραματα, vol. VI: Ὁμιλίαι, ed. B.  St. Pseutogkas (Ekdotikos Oikos Kyromanos, 2015), 407.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  369 nature of Sophia. It is neither heaven nor earth, but the vault of heaven above the earth . . . this is the μεταξύ of Plato’s philosophical intuition.16

Sophia, therefore, corresponds to the realm of the uncreated activities of God, and Bulgakov is happy to quote in support of his own intuitions, Gregory Palamas’ assertions: If you take away what is in between (μεταξύ) the unparticipated and the ­participants, you distance us from God, and make out of what binds together in the middle a chasm great and unpassable between (μεταξύ) Him and the generation and arrangement of what has come into being.  (Triads III. 2. 24) There is something in between (μεταξύ) what has come into being and that imparticipable beyond-­beingness, not one only, but many . . . .  (Triads III. 2. 25)17

Whatever complaints may be made about Bulgakov’s departure from the trad­ ition of the Church in his sophiology, here he is on firm ground: the ‘uncreated energies’ of God, Sophia, the Mother of God, the Church—­all these embody in some way the in-­between, μεταξύ, between the uncreated God and the created cosmos, holding them together, bringing them into contact (the whole question of the ‘in-­between’, the Christianization of a Platonic theme is something that demands further discussion: apart from the divine activities, Sophia, the Mother of God, the Church, there are several other candidates for inclusion in the in-­ between, for example, angels and saints, or as symbols of the in-­between: icons and, an especially potent symbol, incense, rising like prayer before God).18 The assimilation of Sophia to the Mother of God has another important dimension, with profound consequences for ecclesiology, for Sophia stands in relation to God as female to male, as does the Mother of God to her Son (cf. ‘Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio’).19 We have already quoted the passage in II Clement where the statement in Genesis 1:26 that God made the human ‘male and female’ is interpreted of Christ and the Church, both having existed ἄνωθεν ‘from the beginning’.20 Bulgakov sees the fulness of the image of God, manifest in both male and female, as realized in Christ and his Mother. Male and female, Bulgakov

16  Prot. Sergii Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie Zametki (YMCA-­Press, 21991), 94–5. Partial translation in: Natalie Duddington and James Pain, trans., James Pain and Nicolas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), 13–14. 17 Grégoire Palamas, Défense des saints hésychastes, ed. Jean Meyendorff, vol. 2 (Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–1, 21973), 686 (both citations). 18 I have made some attempt to discuss this in an article (probably published prematurely): ‘Theology of the “In-­Between” ’, Communio Viatorum 55 (2013), 223–36 (also published as Chapter 24 in this volume). 19 Dante, La divina commedia. Paradiso, Canto 33, ll. 1–2; Dante Alighiere, Opere, ed. E. Moore, revised Paget Toynbee (Clarendon Press, 41963). 20  II Clem. 14. 2; Bihlmeyer and Schneemelcher, eds., Die Apostolichen Väter, 77.

370  Selected Essays, VOLUME II argues, are not simply sex; they are primarily spiritual principles: ‘the male is truth in beauty, the female beauty in truth’. He concludes: Hence the Lord Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect human, truly became human and assumed all human nature; in the image of his humanity He is joined inseparably with His Most Pure Mother and is Son not only thanks to His divinity, as the Only-­Begotten of the Father, but also thanks to His humanity as Son of the Mother, born of her by the Holy Spirit.21

In her relationship to Christ, Mary in some way echoes the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Christ (who, in the formula often evoked by Bulgakov, proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son: an expression that goes back to St John Damascene): as Christ is God Incarnate, born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, so Mary is pneumatophore, bearer of the Spirit. The dyad Christ–­Mary is related to, and indeed founded on, the dyad Son–­Spirit. What is distinctive about Mary’s role in the dyad she forms with her Son is manifest in her feminine qual­ ities: ‘This warmth natural to the cult of the Virgin comes from her humanity and her feminine nature’ (Bulgakov goes on to comment on the ‘coldness of atmosphere of some Protestant churches’, which he puts down to a lack of sensitivity to Mary’s warmth, and which he associates with Protestant ‘forgetfulness’ of the Mother of God).22 Prayer and song addressed to Mary form a large part of Orthodox devotion, both public and private; this Bulgakov sees as a response to her maternal and feminine nature. Bulgakov delights in the image of Mary holding her protecting veil over the world, an image celebrated liturgically on 1 October, the Feast of the Protection/Veil of the Mother of God (the Slavonic pokrov meaning both ‘protection’ and ‘veil’). In late Russian iconography, this veil is often depicted as an omophorion, the broad stole with crosses worn by a bishop (probably a confusion of maphorion, veil, and omophorion); this leads Bulgakov, and others in the Russian tradition, to entertain some sort of participation by Mary in her Son’s priesthood (expressed, however, in very guarded tones). Another dimension of Bulgakov’s reflection on the Mother of God focuses on way in which she is not always depicted in relation to her Son (though, in truth, this is quite rare, late, and likely owing to Western influence). She is called Ἡ Θεόπαις, the ‘daughter of God’, and in much Orthodox Marian devotion Mary is seen in relation to God as bride, the ‘Eternal Bride’, as Bulgakov puts it: the refrain of the Akathist Hymn is precisely: Χαῖρε, Νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε, ‘Hail, Bride unwedded’. In this way, the Song of Songs is applied to Mary: ‘The Song of Songs is also a song about Mary and the Logos, as about every soul seeking its heavenly Groom and joining with Him. The Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Bride of God, is the 21 Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, tr. Thomas Allan Smith (William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 82. 22 Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, 140.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  371 image of every soul in its relation to the Logos, in its ecclesialization’.23 Bulgakov goes on to comment that ‘this Old Testament Song contains the most New Testament part of the whole canon’, and in a footnote comments that the Song of Songs ‘is never read at the Divine Liturgy . . . At the same time the church’s liturgy is saturated with it, its images became the most intimate and usual in ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al use’ (the same is true of the Apocalypse, never read, and yet its imagery is all pervasive, and especially important for Bulgakov).24 One aspect of Mary’s relationship to God is the way in which Bulgakov, along with other Orthodox theologians, sees Mary as in some sense the person of the Church, the person the Church is in its relationship to God: ‘The Mother of God, as the personal revelation of the Holy Spirit, is the heart of the Church, its so to say personal expression . . .’.25 The dyad of Christ and his Mother plays an important role in Bulgakov’s eschat­ology. In his discussion of the Parousia, he is concerned to stress the role of Mary: she is not judged, but pleads with her Son for mercy for the human race—­ mercy, not forgiveness.26 Part of the justification of this is, Bulgakov maintains, the iconographic tradition (as at several points in both his sophiology and his Mariology). Another aspect of this is that, if Mary does not await the Parousia as one awaiting judgement, what is her role at the Parousia? Bulgakov suggests that she has her own Parousia, related to, but independent of her Son’s. This Parousia (or these parousiai?) occurs ‘not later than the Parousia of Christ’;27 that is, before: Bulgakov seems to relate Mary’s parousiai with her appearances throughout Christian history. These parousiai point to the personal relationship Mary develops with those who turn to her, those, like St Sergii of Radonezh and St Serafim of Sarov, who are ‘one of her race’. In these parousiai and in her pleading with her Son at the Final Judgement, she manifests the role she has achieved as ‘Spirit-­bearer’: The heart of the Mother of God, the Spirit Bearer, is pierced by the sword of hell because of her compassionate love; and her maternal intercession is effected starting with the Dread Judgment, which is the beginning, not the end of the judgment. And the ‘Mother of God’s way of sorrow’, revealed to the vision of the Russian people, continues.28

Bulgakov’s last work, The Bride of the Lamb, left incomplete, ends with the words: She, the Spirit-­Bearer, is Spirit and Bride, manifesting in Her very being the image of the hypostatic Spirit of God. And about Her it is said in the final words of the New Testament:

23 Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, 103–4. 24 Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, 105, and n. 39. 25 Bulgakov, The Burning Bush, 109. 26 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, tr. Boris Jakim (William B. Eerdmans/T. & T. Clark, 2002), 488. 27 Bulgakov, The Bride, 412. 28 Bulgakov, The Bride, 515.

372  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ‘And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’29

Bulgakov’s sophiology was, as we have iterated, controversial. It is therefore very striking that among Orthodox theologians who opposed Bulgakov over Sophia (notably, Vladimir Lossky, who composed the indictment of Bulgakov that formed the basis of the ukaz of the Moscow patriarchate) as well as those whose attitude to Bulgakov’s sophiology was, at best, ambivalent (e.g., Paul Evdokimov), we find strong parallels to Bulgakov’s understanding of Mary and the Church, even more surprising when we recall how deeply entwined Bulgakov’s Mariology was with his sophiology.

Vladimir Lossky Vladimir Lossky’s theological œuvre is much smaller than Bulgakov’s, and even so what he has to say about the Mother of God is quite slender. Nevertheless, despite his opposition to Bulgakov we shall find that they have many themes in common, woven however into a much less rich tapestry. Many Orthodox discussing Mariology mention the silence of the dogmatic tradition about Mary. Only one title can claim direct conciliar authority, and that is Θεοτόκος, ‘Birth-­giver of God’, popularly in English ‘Mother of God’ (though the claim that the Council of Ephesos of 431 explicitly conferred this title has met recently with scholarly doubt). Other titles, Παναγία, Ἄχραντος, are used in conciliar statements, but rather taken for granted than directly affirmed. This conciliar reticence is taken as acknowledging the mystery surrounding the Mother of God, to be preserved in silence. Almost all Orthodox theologians considering Mary quote (usually in a truncated form) a sentence from St John Damascene’s chapter on Mary in his On the Orthodox Faith: Whence rightly and truly we name the holy Mary Theotokos; for this name expresses the whole mystery of the economy.30

The succinct conciliar title, then, yields a rich crop: the ‘whole mystery of the economy’. This is the first patristic quotation in Lossky’s essay, ‘Panagia’,31 coming after a meditative recounting of the evidence, largely silent, of the Gospels, 29 Bulgakov, The Bride, 526. 30  John Damascene, exp. fidei 56 [Latin enumeration: III. 12], ll. 37–8; John Damascene, Expositio Fidei [On the Orthodox Faith]. In Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, II, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, OSB (Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 135. 31 Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 195–210.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  373 in which he brings out the relationship between the person of the Mother of God and the tradition of the Church, and through this attempts ‘to see the glory of the Mother of God beneath the veil of silence of the Scriptures’.32 For the Damascene, the title Theotokos expresses the whole mystery of redemption, because that mystery requires that God be born of a woman, who is, therefore, truly Theotokos, the one to gives birth to God. Lossky’s development of John’s quotation is somewhat different. For him, the divine economy, which enables the human to participate in the Incarnation, cannot be ‘unilateral’: ‘it is not a matter of the divine will making a tabula rasa of the history of humanity’. In this saving economy, the Wisdom of God is adapted to the fluctuations of human wills, to the different responses of men to the divine challenge. It is thus that, through the generations of the Old Testament righteous men, Wisdom ‘has built her house’: the all-­pure nature of the Holy Virgin, whereby the Word of God will become connatural with us. The answer of Mary to the archangel’s annunciation . . . resolves the tragedy of fallen humanity.33

Lossky makes more of Mary’s willing acceptance of God’s request than we find in the Damascene; he emphasizes her role as co-­worker with God. (It is striking that, for all his rejection of Bulgakov’s sophiology, Lossky himself brings the Wisdom of God into his account of Mary’s role in the divine economy.) Lossky goes on to emphasize how deeply Mary belongs to her heritage in the Old Testament, and notes the way in which Orthodox liturgical texts speak of David as ‘the ancestor of God’ and Joachim and Anna as the ‘holy and righteous ancestors of God’.34 In common with all Orthodox theologians, Lossky deplores the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary as separating Mary from her Jewish heritage. All of this is directly relevant to the theme of Mary and ec­cle­si­ ology, for both the insistence on Mary’s personal role at the Annunciation, and the emphasis on seeing her as in continuity with the Church of the Old Testament, as the ‘beauty of Jacob’ (ἡ καλλονὴ ᾽Ιακώβ),35 are freighted with ecclesiological entailments, Mary’s fiat at the Annunciation embodying the response to God that lies at the heart of what is meant by the Church, while to see her as part of the Old Testament Church, its fulfilment, as it were, underlines the notion of the Church as (at least) coeval with humanity, as we have found in the earliest Christian reflection on the Church as Virgin Mother. Lossky makes much, too, of the Eve-­Mary parallel (‘Eva-­Ave’) that we have seen goes back to St Justin Martyr and St Irenaeus; Mary can only be understood in relation to the history of humanity, and especially the history of Israel. Lossky also finds a parallel between the Holy Spirit and the Mother of God. He draws 32 Lossky, In the Image, 199. 33 Lossky, In the Image, 202. 34 Lossky, In the Image, 203. 35 J. Ledit, Marie dans la Liturgie de Byzance (Éditions Beauchesne, 1976), 32–3, n. 5.

374  Selected Essays, VOLUME II attention to the presence of the Mother of God with the disciples after the Ascension, and her presence with the apostles at Pentecost (often, though not invariably, depicted in the icon of Pentecost): of this he says, ‘She who by the power of the Holy Spirit received the divine Person of the Son of God in her womb, now receives the Holy Spirit, sent by the Son’.36 Mary has a representative role in relation to the Church: ‘only the Mother of God, through whom the Word was made flesh, will be able to receive the plenitude of grace and to attain unlimited glory, by realizing in her person all the holiness of which the Church is capable’.37 Mary is all-­holy, Panagia. In his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky discusses what might be called the ‘person of the Church’. For him, the Church as the bride of Christ, perfected as one in the Spirit, belongs to the age to come. And he reflects: Thus, it would seem that until the consummation of the ages . . . . the Church will have no hypostasis of her own . . . And yet, to say this would be to fail to perceive the very heart of the Church, one of her most sacred mysteries, her mystical centre, her perfection already realized in a human person fully united to God, finding herself beyond the resurrection and the judgment. This person is Mary, the Mother of God.38

Who is the Church? Lossky’s answer is: Mary, the Mother of God. This leads us on to another aspect of his Mariology, in which he draws on Palamas’ homily on the Dormition: Just as when God wished to make an image of all beauty, and to demonstrate his power in this matter purely to angels and humans, he thus made [Mary] all beautiful, and gathering together all the ways in which he had embellished cre­ ation, he made her a common world of everything good, both visible and in­vis­ ible, or rather he revealed her as uniting in herself all loveliness, divine, angelic, and human, as a nobler beauty to embellish both worlds, rooted in the earth, reaching up to heaven and beyond, through her assumption now from the tomb into heaven, uniting things below with things above, embracing the whole of creation with the wonders surrounding her.39

Mary, the all-­beautiful, unites the divine, angelic, and human realms, constituting, as Palamas says later on in the homily (also quoted by Lossky), ‘the boundary of created and uncreated nature’.40 36 Lossky, In the Image, 206. 37 Lossky, In the Image, 207. 38 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (John Clarke and Co. Ltd, 1957), 193. 39  St Gregory Palamas, Or. 35.10; Pseutogkas, ed., Συγγραματα, 404; quoted Lossky, The Mystical Theoogy, 194. 40  St Gregory Palamas, Or. 35.15; Pseutogkas, ed., Συγγραματα, 407.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  375

Paul Evdokimov Paul Evdokimov, though a little older than Vladimir Lossky, can reasonably be considered after him, as most of his theological œuvre was published after Lossky’s early death in 1958. In his L’orthodoxie (1959), Mary is treated in one of the sections on ecclesiology, ‘L’aspect mariologique de l’Église’, though there is reflection on the Mother of God in many other sections; there is a further discussion of Mary in his late essay, ‘Panagion and Panagia: The Holy Spirit and the Mother of God’ (originally published in 1970, from an incomplete draft on which he was working before his death).41 The section in L’orthodoxie begins with the quotation from John Damascene we have already encountered and follows that with a host of patristic references to the Eve-­Mary parallel, ecclesiological references to the Church as Virgin Mother in parallel to Mary, and further references in which a parallel is drawn between paternity and maternity, including Cyprian’s ‘You cannot have God for your Father if you no longer have the Church for your mother’.42 He caps this with a liturgical verse: ‘How can we not wonder at your theandric giving-­birth, All-­ August One? For without having experience of a man, All-­Spotless One, you bore in the flesh the Son without a father, him who from before the ages was begotten from the Father without a mother . . .’.43 ‘To the paternity of the Father in the divine corresponds the maternity of the Theotokos in the human, a figure of the maternal virginity of the Church’.44 Along with this goes a parallelism between the Holy Spirit and Mary—­evident in the title of the essay—­the All-­Holy Spirit and the All-­Holy Virgin, Panagion and Panagia. Evdokimov is keen to draw lessons about gender from these parallelisms—­Holy Spirit and Mother of God, Mary’s virginal motherhood and the Father’s divine fatherhood, and draws attention to the parallelism of the divine fiat of creation and Mary’s fiat that enables re-­ creation—­though these parallels are somewhat vitiated by his stereotypical attitudes to gender. Like most other Orthodox theologians, he lays stress on the place of silence in considering the Mother of God, remarking that ‘[t]he dogmatic precision of the subject of Mary shares in a certain silence the same mystery with the Holy Spirit. Both are relatively late and belong to nearly the same period’ (by which he means, I think, the fourth/fifth century).45 He suggests a difference between ‘dogma’ and ‘dogmatic fact’, the latter ‘truth experienced liturgically’.46

41  ‘Panagion and Panagia’: available in English translation in Paul Evdokimov, In the World, Of the Church: an Evdokimov Reader, ed. and trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 155–73. 42 Cyprian, De Unitate, 6; Cyprian, De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, ed. and trans. Maurice Bévenot, SJ (Clarendon Press, 1971), 66–7. 43  Dogmatikon for Saturday vespers in tone 3; Paraklitiki, 251 (Apostoliki Diakonia, 1994). 44  Paul Evdokimov, L’orthodoxie (Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959), 149. 45 Evdokimov, In the World, 165. 46 Evdokimov, In the World, 166.

376  Selected Essays, VOLUME II In  the last words of this essay, reconstructed after his death from his notes, Evdokimov declared: It is in this sense—­which itself rests upon a hidden revelation—­that Mary is the mysterious icon of the Father. The iconographic canons forbid any representation of the Father, who is the Inconceivable and Indescribable One. The Theotokos receives the breath of the Spirit, and her maternity enables us to contemplate in silence the divine Paternity, the face of the Father. A Marian hymn exalts her as the human being who, as the deified new creature, fully participates in the divine being according to grace: ‘Let us the faithful sing the Glory of the universe, the door of heaven, the Virgin Mary, Flower of the human race and Theotokos, she who has become heaven and the temple of the divine.’47

Evdokimov’s reflection on the Mother of God has a lyrical character and moves through a forest of symbols. Without the precision of Lossky, he seems to me to affirm in a similar way that Mary is the person of the Church: from her fiat to God’s word through the archangel onwards she embodies the response to God, which is lies at the heart of the Church. He quotes one of the stichera for Christmas: What shall we offer you, Christ, because you have appeared on earth as a human for us? Each of the creatures made by you makes you a thank-­offering: the angels a hymn; the heavens the Star; the Magi gifts; the Shepherds their wonder; the earth a cave; the desert a manger; we offer the Virgin Mother. O God before the ages, have mercy on us.48

Mary is our offering—­the offering of the human race—­to Christ. In the chapter in L’orthodoxie, Evdokimov asserts: It is her humanity, her flesh, that becomes that of Christ, the Mother becomes ‘consanguineous’ with him, and she is the first to realize the final end for which the world has been created: ‘the boundary of the created and the uncreated’ (St Gregory Palamas), and through her ‘the Trinity is glorified’ (St Cyril of Alexandria). In giving birth to Christ, as the universal Eve, she gives birth for all, and thus give birth to him also in every soul: that is why the whole Church ‘rejoices in the blessed Virgin’ (St Ephrem). The Church, therefore, in her function as mystic matrix, is the type of the continual giving birth, of the perpetual Theotokos.49 47 Evdokimov, In the World, 173. 48  Last sticheron, Vespers, 26 December; Menaion [December] (Apostoliki Diakonia, 1993), 524. 49 Evdokimov, L’orthodoxie, 151.

Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology  377 And elsewhere Evdokimov remarks that ‘The breath of giving birth, in the expression of Fr Sergius Bulgakov, is the Spirit’s “hypostatic maternity”. This is why the virginal maternity of the Theotokos, according to tradition, is a figure of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate’.50 Equally, then, in some sense, Mary can be seen as the hypostasis of the Church, the person the Church is, as Lossky maintained.

Conclusion We have seen enough in the few theologians of the Russian Orthodox tradition that we have discussed, to assert that there is great deal more to Orthodox ec­cle­si­ ology than ‘Eucharistic ecclesiology’. Not only that, the few theologians through whom we have explored the relationship between Mary the Mother of God and the doctrine of the Church were contemporary with those who promoted of the notion of ‘Eucharistic ecclesiology’ within Orthodox theology: something that makes all the more surprising the amnesia under which their ecclesiological notions seem to have fallen.

50 Evdokimov, In the World, 161.

31

What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’? Vladimir Lossky’s book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church is without question his most famous book, indeed it is the only book of his published in his lifetime.1 It was originally published in French as Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’orient in 1944, based on some lectures he had given in the immediately preceding months.2 It was translated into English in 1957, just before his untimely death in the following year. For many of us, this was our first introduction to Orthodox theology; over the years since it has been published—­seventy years now—­it has been much criticized, but it seems to me that these criticisms are like the bites of midges, a bit irritating, but not making much impact on the work itself. The secondary literature on Lossky has been pretty slight. Rowan Williams wrote a brilliant doctoral thesis on Lossky in the early 1970s; it has not appeared in English, save for a chapter published as an article,3 though it has come out in a Russian translation. Olivier Clément wrote a distinguished essay on him, but otherwise there has been very little.4 It seems to me that the first question we might ask is what Lossky might have expected his, mostly Western, readers to have understood by the reference to ‘théologie mystique’ in the title of his book; what would the term suggest to a reader of the book in 1944, when it was published? Then I suggest two strategies: the first, to look at how he understands the term ‘théologie mystique’ in his great doctoral thesis on Eckhart, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart,5 a work that preoccupied him, alongside other matters, for most of his 1  Vladimir Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient: Reprint with the pagination of the original edn (Aubier, Édition Montaigne, 1944) with a preface by Saulias Rumšas OP (Éditions du Cerf, 2005); ET The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957). 2 Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique, ii. 3  Rowan Williams, ‘Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology’. In Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (SCM Press, 2007), 1–24; reprinted from Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes, ed., New Studies in Theology, vol. 1 (the only volume to appear) (Duckworth, 1979), 95–117. 4  Olivier Clément, Orient–­Occident. Deux passeurs. Vladimir Lossky and Paul Evdokimov (Labor et Fides, 1985), 17–103; but see Michel Stavrou, ‘La démarche néopatristique de Myrrha Lot-­Borodine et Vladimir Lossky’. In Les pères de l’Église aux sources de l’Europe, ed. Dominique Gonnet and Michel Stavrou (Éditions de Cerf, 2014), 200–25, and Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (SPCK, 2015), 94–110. 5  Vladimir Lossky, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1960).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0032

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  379 life; and then, in the light of all this, to look directly at his Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient.

Mysticism in the Air Mysticism was very much in the air when Lossky gave his lectures in Paris towards the end of the Second World War, and had been since the beginning of the century. This was a European (and North American) phenomenon. In England in the first part of the twentieth century works on mysticism were published by, for instance, Baron von Hügel and Evelyn Underhill, for some time his spiritual daughter. The baron’s most famous work was his The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends.6 The case of Evelyn Underhill is particularly significant for our purposes, for in the course of her life (she died at the beginning of the war, in 1941) she moved from a rather undogmatic interest in mysticism, taking mystical states and phenomena as more or less the same in all religions, to a strong sense of the Church, and the place of the mystical within the institution of the Church and its sacraments, which involved an appreciation of dogma. The first phase is represented by her early book, Mysticism, a remarkable book in its own way for its sympathetic understanding of a wide variety of traditions, though all these traditions are arranged as if they were all concerned with a common mystical path; the final phase by her book, Worship, which roots the mystical much more firmly in the sacramental worship and life of the Church (it also is strikingly ecumenical in its approach, equally sensitive to the worship of the Orthodox and the Quakers).7 It was indeed the baron who helped her to see the point, indeed indispensability, of the Church and belonging to the Church, so that in the 1920s she moved from a kind of un­attached Catholicism (she was very keen on the service of Benediction, but was not a communicant) to firm commitment to the Church of England. A sense of the importance of worship and the mystical is also to be found in the heart of academic Germany in the famous work of the Marburg professor, Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, which had immense influence.8 His intellectual career was rather almost the reverse of Underhill’s: a later major work of his was West-­Östliche Mystik, in which he tended to assimilate Christian mysticism to the traditions of India.9 Another learned German who belongs to this world was Friedrich Heiler,

6  Baron Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911). 7 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (Methuen, 1911); Evelyn Underhill, Worship (Nisbet and Co., Ltd., 1936). 8 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Trewendt und Granier, 1917); ET The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1923). 9  Rudolf Otto, West-­Östliche Mystik (Klotz, 1926); ET Mysticism: East and West (Macmillan, 1932).

380  Selected Essays, VOLUME II whose first major book was Das Gebet.10 His path was somewhat similar to Underhill’s: from being a Protestant, his ecclesial sense led him to become a Roman Catholic, and his last work, Urkirche und Ostkirche,11 on which he continued working for the rest of his life (he died in 1967); the fruits of nearly thirty years’ revision were published posthumously by his widow under the title, Die Ostkirchen,12 bears witness to a prolonged interest in the Eastern Orthodox churches. This indicates the wider world within which Lossky was writing: there was an interest in ‘mysticism’, which was, however, coming to mean less strange, paranormal experiences of visions and levitations, and more a sense of an experienced religion, that experience not being isolated from the sacramental life of the Church. Coming closer home, as it were, something similar can be found in Catholic France, with the difference that the sacramental had always been appreciated, in some way. There was, however, something of a shift in the understanding of mysticism, partly, I expect, as a reaction against a non-­dogmatic interest in mysticism that had become universal in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth/ twentieth century. France, too, had a long tradition of ‘mysticism’, which Henri Bremond had expounded, elegantly and at length, in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France.13 Mention of Bremond reminds one of the importance of the so-­called Catholic modernists in setting the scene for many of the theo­ logic­al concerns of the twentieth century; Baron von Hügel belonged to their number, too. An issue that came to the fore in twentieth-­century France was whether the ‘higher’ forms of prayer—­beyond the Dark Night of the Soul and into the Spiritual Marriage, to use the terminology, of largely Carmelite inspiration, that was current—­were to be regarded as a normal blossoming of a serious Christian life, or whether they were a rare gift for specially devout souls. That issue could be put: is ‘mysticism’ for all? One can see a clear move in writers such as Saudreau and Poulain towards seeing ‘mystical union’ with God as the normal goal of the Christian life, however uncommon.14 If ‘mysticism’ is for all, then the sacramental life, which is certainly for all, need not be hived off from the higher flights of prayer, but can be seen as integral to the attaining of such a state of union with God. Another important book, which focused the notion of mysticism in another way, was Jean Baruzi’s Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de

10  Friedrich Heiler, Das Gebet (Ernst Reinhardt, 1919); abridged ET, Prayer (Oxford University Press, 1932). 11 Friedrich Heiler, Urkirche und Ostkirche [Early Church and Eastern Church] (Ernst Reinhardt, 1937). 12  Friedrich Heiler, Die Ostkirchen [The Eastern Churches] (Ernst Reinhardt, 1971). 13  Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 11 vols. (Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1916–33). 14  Auguste Saudreau, La vie d’union à Dieu, 3rd edn (Amat, 1921); Augustine-­François Poulain, Des grâces d’oraison, 11th edn (Beauchesne, 1931 [1921]).

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  381 l’expérience mystique.15 This was the first book to approach St John of the Cross from a purely scholarly point of view, and focused, as the title makes clear, on the question of mystical experience. Mysticism was, then, much in the air, especially in France, when Lossky was giving his lectures, despite the concerns of the war and the occupation, in which Lossky was himself involved, playing his part in the Resistance.

Contemporary Mystical Writings There are two other things I want to mention. First, some books published around the time that Lossky published his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Just before the war, Dom Anselm Stolz had given a retreat to the Benedictines of Amay at Chevetogne; the lectures were published postumously as Théologie de la Mystique (Dom Anselm died in 1942).16 The title is significant, as were the contents: the lectures are largely patristic, regarding the life of prayer as the return to paradise, a return that cannot be simply individual, but involves the whole Church. Also in 1944, the same year as the publication of Lossky’s book (and from the same press), there was published a work by a young Jesuit scholar, Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique:17 the major work in the mid-­twentieth century on St Gregory of Nyssa, marking (together with works of his then fellow Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar18) a new approach to the Fathers, drawn to the work of the individual Fathers as a whole, and not just as witnesses to the developing conciliar tradition. In these works we find a more defined sense of what is better called the ‘mystical’: better than ‘mysticism’, and certainly closer to the French, ‘la mystique’, which Lossky also uses, for it really has little to do with ‘mysticism’, in its still common sense of something unusual and esoteric, but with the deepening of a life of prayer within the sacramental life of the Church. Another book we might mention is one by Lossky’s mentor, Étienne Gilson, La théologie mystique de saint Bernard, on which Gilson was likely to have been working as his academic disciple was writing the lectures that became the book.19 15  Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique, 2nd, revised, and augmented edn (Librairie Félix Alcain, 1931; the 1st edn must have been 1924 or 1925 to judge by the intense interest manifest in reviews and articles in 1925). 16 Anselm Stolz, Théologie de la Mystique, 2nd edn (Éditions des Bénédictines d’Amay, 1947 [1939]). 17 Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique (Aubier Éditions Montaigne, 1944; revised edn, 1954). 18  This included Hans Urs von Balthasar, Présence et pensée. Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (Beauchesne, 1942), though probably more influential was Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie. Maximus der Bekenner. Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbilds (Herder, 1941), which subsequently appeared in an entirely revised edition: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie. Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners (Johannes-­Verlag, 1961), of which there is an ET by Brian Daley (Ignatius Press, 2003), which, however, omits most of part II: Texte und Studien. 19  Étienne Gilson, La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1947).

382  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Finally, something published too late to be considered as background to Lossky, but significant. In 1949, in the journal La Vie Spirituelle, there appeared an article by Louis Bouyer, published in English as ‘ “Mysticism”: An Essay on the History of a Word’.20 In this article, Bouyer traces the use of μυστικός in Greek patristic use (not ‘mysticism’, as in the uncomprehending English translation). Its origin is without question in the Greek mysteries, but Bouyer maintains that this has had no substantial influence of the Christian use of the term, simply because when Christians start to think of the mysteries, immediately it is the mystery of Christ that they are concerned with: a mystery hidden from before the ages, but manifest in the Incarnate Christ; which, even manifest, still remains hidden, because it is beyond human comprehension. The sense of the hiddenness of the mystery of Christ is the primary reference for the word μυστικός. How do we know the mystery of Christ? How is it declared? Primarily in the Scriptures: the mystery of Christ is the key to the Scriptures, the hidden meaning of both the Old and New Testaments. Overwhelmingly, the use of the word μυστικός in the Fathers refers to the hidden meaning of the Scriptures, the deeper meaning, μυστικὸς νοῦς. Closely related to that meaning, we find throughout the early centuries, a use that refers to what it is that is revealed by the Scriptures: the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, are regularly referred to as μυστικός, μυστικώτερος, for these mysterious doctrines remain hidden, because beyond human comprehension. It is these mysteries, which the Scriptures unfold, that we participate in through the sacraments, called in Greek τὰ μυστήρια: in the Eucharist, as we are united body and soul to Christ’s body, we participate in his divinity, we share in the divine life of love of the Trinity. A further meaning, derived from the first two, refers to the hidden, inner life of the baptized Christian, the life ‘hid with Christ in God’, as the Apostle Paul put it in his epistle to the Colossians (3:3). This third meaning is not, however, separate from these two primary uses: the inner meaning of the Scriptures and the Sacrament. The hidden life of the Christian is nourished by pondering on the Scriptures and by participation in the Divine Mysteries. Bouyer insists that there is here a hierarchy of meaning: first of all, μυστικός referring to the mystery of Christ ‘hidden in God from the ages’ (cf. Eph. 3:9) and now manifest in Christ; second, μυστικός referring to the means by which we participate in Christ—­through the Scriptures and the Eucharist; and finally, the hidden, inner life of the Christian, nourished on pondering on the Scriptures and their deeper meaning, and by participation in the

20 Louis Bouyer, ‘ “Mystique”. Essai sur l’histoire d’un mot’, Supplément de la Vie Spirituelle, 9 (1949), 3–23; ET ‘ “Mysticism”: An Essay on the History of a Word’, in Mystery and Mysticism (Blackfriars Publications, 1956), 119–37. This article, and others, were eventually expanded into a book (Mysterion. Du mystère à la mystique (O.E.I.L., 1986)), the first part of his final trilogy in which he explored an encounter with Eastern and Orthodox themes, to be completed in Gnôsis. La connaissance de Dieu dans l’Écriture (Éditions du Cerf, 1988) and Sophia ou le Monde en Dieu (Éditions du Cerf, 1994).

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  383 sacraments, is called μυστικός. Most talk of ‘mysticism’, Bouyer implies, isolates this last use, severing it from its roots, and turns the mystical into an exploration of an individual search for union with God. Bouyer’s paper can hardly have influenced Lossky, but I mention it, for I think we shall find that it represents the final point of a trajectory on which Lossky had himself embarked.

Meister Eckhart From about the end of the 1920s until the end of his life, Lossky was engaged in a major study of the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. His study is important for the history of Eckhart studies, as he is the first modern scholar to concentrate on the Latin works, the only ones about which there is little or no controversy as to their authenticity. The title, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu, suggests links with what Lossky is perhaps most famous for: negative or apophatic the­ ology. Lossky does indeed begin his enormous work on Eckhart by considering what meaning the ‘apophatic’ has for ‘the Dominican from Thuringia’, le dominicain thuringien, as he frequently calls him. This depends, he says, on the different ways in which God can be understood to be ineffable: beyond thought or language. The discussion invokes Augustine, Plotinus, Dionysios the Areopagite, Thomas Aquinas, and reaches a point where he compares Aquinas, many of whose metaphysical principles Eckhart shares (they were both disciples of Albert the Great), with Eckhart himself. For Thomas, God is unknowable, un­name­ able, because a created intellect, whether angelic or human, can only know by its natural ­ owers the esse determined by an essence . . . But the pure act of existing, ‘whose p very essence is to exist’, the puritas essendi, the ipsum esse subsistens, not being distinct from but identical with its essence, remains indeterminable and cannot be named from what He is. That is why the name that is best fitted to designate God is Qui est [He who is]: it names, without determining, That which is its own existence . . . Separated from all beings whose act of existing is determined by an essence which distinguishes it, God then remains ineffable so far as his own existence is concerned. That is the reason why Saint Thomas . . . has transformed the ‘unnameable’ of Denys into Esse innominabile [unnameable Being].21

But for Eckhart God is Deus absconditus, the God who hides himself (Isa. 45:15), Esse absconditum, Being that hides itself: hiding itself in the inner recesses of the mind or heart, for as Augustine affirmed, addressing God in his Confessions:

21 Lossky, Théologie negative, 25.

384  Selected Essays, VOLUME II tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (You were more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest) (Conf. III.6.11). With a movement of thought characteristic of the Western Middle Ages, Dionysios is read with Augustinian eyes, so that Eckhart ‘enters into himself to search for the Esse absconditum in the innermost depths of the soul’: ‘Is not this—­Lossky asks—­to try to transform into the mystical [transformer en mystique] the natural theology of Saint Thomas?’22 Lossky concludes: When he searches for the God Esse of Saint Thomas in the abditum mentis [hidden place of the mind] of Saint Augustine, Eckhart draws on the two theo­lo­gians, uniting them on a mystical level [sur le plan d’une mystique] which he is able to express in terms of a speculative theology.23

We are not concerned here with Eckhart, but this brief exposition shows that Lossky has a clear sense of what is meant by la mystique, the mystical. The mys­ tic­al Lossky takes to be the inward, something beyond conceptualization, grasped by experience. Eckhart’s speculative theology is presented by Lossky as a kind of conceptual transcript of this inward experience, la mystique.

The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church Nevertheless, what about The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church itself? How does Lossky explain himself in the book? In his introduction he has a few pages in which he discusses ‘the mystical’: The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between the mystical and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church . . . To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically . . . For the Christian, therefore, the mystical cannot exist without theology, but, above all, there is no theology without the mystical . . . The mystical is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence.24

22 Lossky, Théologie negative, 30–1. 23 Lossky, Théologie negative, 32. 24 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 8–9; Lossky, Essai sure la théologie mystique, 6–7); I have modified the translation since ‘[la] mystique’ in the original French is rendered in English as ‘mysticism’, which, as we have seen, is not perhaps quite the same thing.

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  385 The mystical and theology relate as experience and theory, but experience of what? Ultimately of God, but that is not where Lossky begins: he begins by speaking of ‘personal experience of the divine mysteries’, the term ‘mysteries’ being—­ not exactly ambiguous, but with at least two connotations—­meaning both the sacraments of the Church and also mysterious truths about the Godhead. That double meaning is no chance homonymity; the two meanings seem to me to be closely related for Lossky, and for the Orthodox Church, because the mysterious truths about God—­his existence as a Trinity of love, his creation of the world, his care for the world, and his redemption of it, pre-­eminently in the Incarnation—­ are truths that we experience and celebrate in the Divine Mysteries, or the Sacraments, of the Church. The sacramental aspect remains largely implicit in Lossky’s book, and we can see why, I think, from the understanding of the mys­ tic­al we find in his treatise on Eckhart: for there the mystical is a matter of union with God in the depths of the soul. It is an experience, not necessarily experiences of a strange and unusual kind, but an experience involving, as he puts it in the quotation just given, ‘a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit’. It is, too, an experience that is apophatic, ineffable, in ways that we have yet to explore. Lossky goes on to show how this experience lies at the heart of the dogmas expounded and defended by the Church: [t]he main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself, . . . is always the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages.25

This relates the mystical to the emergence of dogmas in the history of the Church: dogmas are concerned to safeguard ‘the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God’. Later on, Lossky will say that [i]n the Church and through the sacraments our nature enters into union with the divine nature in the hypostasis of the Son, the Head of the mystical body. Our humanity becomes consubstantial with the deified humanity, united with the Person of Christ . . .26

The mysteries, in both senses of the term, are concerned with an experienced union with God in Christ, mediated by the sacraments, or mysteries, and felt in the heart. Note, however, that this experienced union is founded on ‘[o]ur humanity becom[ing] consubstantial with the deified humanity . . . of Christ’: it is 25 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 10.

26 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 181.

386  Selected Essays, VOLUME II not experience that gives a conviction of reality, but experience of a—­dogmatically defined—­union, in this case expressed by the assertion found in the Chalcedonian Definition that Christ is ὁμοούσιος ἡμῖν, consubstantial with us, just as he is ὁμοούσιος τῷ πατρί, consubstantial with the Father. It is this that gives Lossky’s presentation such a different orientation from what is too frequently associated with mysticism in the West: it is not detached from dogma, but founded on the dogmatic truths of the Christian tradition; it is not indifferent to Church or­gan­ iza­tion, hierarchy, and sacraments, but rooted in the structured life of the Church; it is not individualistic, but grows out of the experience of the Eucharistic community.

The Divine Darkness The mystical, for Lossky, is bound up with the apophatic. The second chapter of his Mystical Theology is entitled ‘The Divine Darkness’: the darkness Moses entered as he ascended Mount Sinai to receive God’s revelation—­a darkness, the meaning of which was explored by the Fathers of the Church: Clement of Alexandria, the two Cappadocian Gregories, and epitomized by Dionysios the Areopagite in his short treatise, The Mystical Theology. In the darkness, we can no longer see: what is revealed is beyond conceptual understanding, but it can be felt, it is a presence. Lossky introduces Dionysios’ distinction between kataphatic and apophatic theology: the theology of affirmation and the theology of denial. He is insistent (both in The Mystical Theology and in his book on Eckhart) that these theologies are not to be understood as equal (as he argues they are understood in the West), as if affirmative theology is simply to be corrected by negative the­ ology—­a kind of tacking, as in sailing, to keep one’s thought about God on course—­rather apophatic theology is more fundamental: it does not so much correct affirmative theology as actually undergird it, for the deepest truth is that God is ineffable, beyond name and concept. Lossky comments: Indeed, not only does he [the theologian, the one who seeks God] go forth from his own self . . . but he belongs wholly to the Unknowable, being deified in this union with the uncreated. Here union means deification. At the same time, while intimately united with God he knows Him only as Unknowable, in other words as infinitely set apart by His nature, remaining even in union, inaccessible in that which He is in His essential being.27

Lossky raises the question as to whether in speaking of union thus we are envisaging an ecstatic experience, and responds:

27 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 38.

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  387 Apophaticism is not necessarily a theology of ecstasy. It is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thought. It is an existential attitude which involves the whole man: there is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man. To know God one must draw near to Him. No one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian . . . Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth. In this sense all true theology is fundamentally apophatic.28

This apophatic approach has manifold implications for the pursuit of theology. An apophatic theology is tentative; as Lossky put it in a famous essay, ‘Tradition and Traditions’: [a]ny theological doctrine which pretends to be a perfect explanation of the revealed mystery will inevitably appear to be false: by the very fact of pretending to the fulness of knowledge it will set itself in opposition to the fulness in which the Truth is known in part.29

This does not at all mean that Lossky sets light to dogma: dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the divine mysteries, but rather as a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before whom we stand in awe. One might say that it is impossible to understand God and his ways; nevertheless it is very easy to misunderstand God and his ways, and the dogmas are there to help prevent such misunderstanding. As Olivier Clément put it, summarizing the lectures he heard Lossky give in the 1950s: The whole purpose of the Church, in defining [dogma], is to preserve the possibility, for each Christian, of participating with all his being in the whole of revelation, that is to say, of sharing in the very life of Him who reveals himself. That is why, said Vladimir Lossky, Orthodoxy refuses to multiply dogmatic definitions. The definition, when it can no longer be avoided, is there to cor­res­pond to a precise, practical necessity, is there as evidence to bar the route to erroneous interpretations.30 28 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 38–9. 29  The essay ‘Tradition and Traditions’ is included in the collection of essays by Vladimir Lossky, entitled, In the Image and Likeness of God (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141–68, at 161–2. ET of À l’image et à la resemblance de Dieu (Aubier–­Montaigne, 1967; now reprinted with original pa­gin­ ation and foreword, bibliography, and index by Saulias Rumšas, OP (Éditions du Cerf, 2010)). 30 Clément, Orient–­Occident, 25.

388  Selected Essays, VOLUME II In interpreting and exploring the meaning of dogma this sense of reserve remains. Lossky cites a remark of St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘He who possesses the word of Jesus can even hear his silence’ (Ad Ephes. 15. 2). Lossky comments: ‘The words of Revelation have then a margin of silence which cannot be picked up by the ears of those who are outside’.31 There is a margin of silence that surrounds any mani­fest­ ation of mystery.32 One is reminded of a remark of Mallarmé’s: ‘Toute chose sacrée et qui veut demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère’ (‘Everything sacred, that wishes to remain sacred, clothes itself in mystery’).33 If we are to understand what is revealed, we need to be attuned to the margin of silence that surrounds it. That margin of silence is only discerned in prayer. The kind of dogmatic attitude, if we can call it that, which is necessary if we are to engage with the mysteries of the Church, the mystery of God, is, in many ways, a quite ‘undogmatic’ attitude, using the word in its commonly accepted sense. It reminds me very much of what the English poet Keats called ‘negative capability’: ‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.34

Lossky’s Mystical Theology What, then, did Vladimir Lossky mean by ‘mystical theology’? I have suggested that, though he may start from an understanding of the mystical as bound up with some kind of inward, personal experience, as he develops his ideas—­mostly, I would suggest, because of his constant recourse to the Fathers—­this experience becomes identical with participating in the sacramental life of the Church. This does not exclude ecstatic experience, but it is more to do with our minds and hearts being conformed to God and his revelation of love through the Son and the Spirit. There is experience, there is inner transformation, but the experience is an experience of a reality independent of us, and reality we seek to be assimilated to: the reality of the love of God, which binds the Trinity in Unity, is the motive for the creation of the world out of nothing, and is manifest in the self-­emptying of the Son in the Incarnation. The transformation that is to take place in us as we respond to the love of God in Christ is first and foremost grounded in repentance. Towards the end of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky repeated this insight in memorable words, with which I’ll close this lecture:

31 Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 150–1. 32  See Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence: the Holy Spirit in Russian Orthodox Theology / Une marge de silence. L’Esprit Saint dans la théologie orthodoxe russe (Éditions du Lys Vert, 2008). 33 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G.  Jean-­Aubry (Gallimard, 1945), 257. 34  John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. M.  B.  Forman, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1935), 72.

What did Lossky Mean by ‘ Mystical Theology ’ ?  389 We have had again and again, in the course of our study of the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, to refer to the apophatic attitude which is characteristic of its religious thought. As we have seen, the negations which draw attention to the divine incomprehensibility are not prohibitions upon knowledge: apophaticism, so far from being a limitation, enables us to transcend all concepts, every sphere of philosophical speculation. It is a tendency towards an ever-­greater plenitude, in which knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries. It is, moreover, an existential theology involving man’s entire being, which sets him upon the way of union, which obliges him to be changed, to transform his nature that he may attain the true gnosis which is the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Now, this ‘change of heart’, this μετάνοια, means repentance. The apophatic way of Eastern theology is the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God.35

35 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 238–9.

32 The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim ‘The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim’; the title is more deliberate than might be presumed, and perhaps I should explain. This paper is not just about the role the Slav Philokalia, or the Dobrotolyubie, plays in The Way of a Pilgrim, for each component of the title is interesting in its own right. Furthermore, both the Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim are more complex than they sound; for each constitutes, in a way, a watershed, and indeed in both cases what exactly it is that we mean when we speak of the Dobrotolyubie or what is known in English as The Way of a Pilgrim is more than meets the eye. These designations need unravelling; neither simply designates nothing more than a book but points to whole episodes of spiritual history that need exploration and clarification, if we are to understand them properly. So, that said, let us start with the Slav Philokalia, or the Dobrotolyubie. Its beginnings take us back to Moldavia, in what is now Romania, and the beginning of the eighteenth century, to an elder (now glorified), St Vasile, or Basil, of Poiana Mărului. St Basil had from his youth, we are told, sought to pursue a life of prayer in solitary and deserted places, and about 1713 settled with some other monks in the Skete of Dalhautsi, in a forest on the borders of Wallachia and Moldavia. About twenty years later, he founded a skete in a remote place at Poiana Mărului (the Glade of the Apple Tree) in the Buzau mountains, nowadays in the county of Vrancea. There he followed a monastic life based on Athonite principles. One task he pursued with his monks was translation into Romanian of Holy Fathers, such as St Isaac the Syrian, St John Climacus, St Gregory of Sinai, St Hesychios of Jerusalem, and St Philotheos the Sinaite, with the purpose of deepening their understanding of what was involved in the use of the Jesus Prayer. St Basil wrote introductions to these translations. It is evident from his introductions that he sought to combine solitary practice of the Jesus Prayer with the monastic li­tur­gic­al office, ‘celebrated in conformity with the Typikon but measured in its duration’, thereby achieving an ‘alliance between hesychast tradition and coenobitic life’, as Fr Makarios of Simonopetra puts it in his entry on St Basil in the appendix to his Synaxarion.1 The importance of St Basil for the Slav Philokalia lies primarily his relationship with St Païssy Velichkovsky, though the translation work that he supervised at 1  Fr Makarios, Synaxarion VII, tr. Mother Maria (Rule) (Indiktos, 2008), 168. Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0033

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  391 Poiana Mărului could well be regarded as paving the way for the Philokalia, since the texts he had translated, and the reason for translating them—­deepening the hesychast life and the use of the Jesus Prayer—­ bear comparison with the Philokalia of St Nikodimos the Hagiorite and St Makarios of Corinth—­and anticipate that enterprise by about half a century. St Païssy, as is well known, had studied at the Spiritual Academy in Kiev, with little satisfaction, and then left in pursuit of a life of prayer, which led him first of all to the sketes of Moldavia and Wallachia. There he became a rasophor, taking the name of Plato, presumably following the pattern of monastic prayer St Basil of Poiana Mărului had instituted. He remained for some years, but then left and made his way to the Holy Mountain, partly to escape from what he regarded as premature ordination and partly in search of authentic texts of the works of the Fathers. The reputation of the Holy Mountain far exceeded its reality, and Plato found himself living on his own with little or no guidance. After four years, in 1750, he encountered Basil of Poiana Mărului, on the last of his visits to the Holy Mountain; Basil tonsured him under the name of Païssy, and advised him to find companions and thus avoid the dangers of the strictly eremitical life. Soon he was joined by a Romanian, Bessarion, and later by others, both Slav and Romanian. Païssy was reluctant to become the leader of this community that had gathered about him, but in 1758 he finally accepted ordination as a priest and became confessor to the community. The community continued to grow, moving first to the Skete of the Prophet Elias; later he attempted to revive the Monastery of Simonos Petra, but constant harassment by the Turkish authorities finally led Païssy and his monks to leave Mount Athos in 1763 and return to Romania. There Païssy and his sixty-­four disciples were welcomed by both the Metropolitan and the Voivode of Moldavia, who gave them the little Monastery of the Holy Spirit at Dragomirna. The monastery followed the Athonite pattern of practice of the Jesus Prayer combined with the liturgical worship of a coenobitic community: much the same pattern as St Basil had followed in the monastery of Poiana Mărului thirty years earlier. During his time on the Holy Mountain, Païssy had collected, or copied, texts of the ascetic fathers that had been hitherto available in the Slav world only in inadequate—­ often incomprehensible—­versions. Back in Romania, at Dragomirna, he and his monks worked hard to establish correct versions of the Greek texts and provide adequate translations into Slavonic. In 1774, the loss of Northern Moldavia to Austria meant that Païssy had to leave with his community to the Monastery of Secu; by 1779 his community had grown to such an extent that he had to divide his community, himself going with the larger group to the Monastery of Neamţ. There Païssy remained for the rest of his life, dying on 15 November 1794.2 A year earl­ier, 2  The information about St Païssy I have culled, for speed and convenience, but with confidence, from Fr Makarios’ Synaxarion II, tr. Christopher Hookway (Holy Convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady, Ormylia, 1999), 149–54.

392  Selected Essays, Volume II a collection of the translations from the Holy Fathers he had made or supervised was published under the title of Dobrotolyubie, a Slav calque of the title of the Greek Philokalia of St Nikodimos and St Makarios, published eleven years before that in 1782. You may have found this way of telling the story of the origins of the Slav Philokalia strange, for only at the very end have I mentioned the Greek Philokalia, normally regarded as the original, of which the Slav Dobrotolyubie is regarded a translation. This perception is encouraged by the title—­Dobrotolyubie, a calque of the Greek word philokalia. The Greek word means anthology, whereas the Slav word is simply composed of the two components of the Greek word—­love, philia, lyubov, and good, kalos, dobry, or as a noun, dobrota—­but meaning, as a word, nothing in itself, though suggesting to the Slav ear ‘love of beauty/goodness’.3 But that, you might say, makes it even clearer that the Slav Dobrotolyubie was conceived as a Slav equivalent of the Greek Philokalia, published a decade earlier. That, I believe, is tied up with something else, which we shall now look at. It seems to be clear that Païssy’s labour of translation was not intended for publication, at least not publication in printed form, for publication in print makes a text available to anyone who comes across it. Texts copied by hand can be much more easily controlled and prevented from circulating outside the circle of those for whom they are intended. It is, I think, difficult for us to imagine, used as we are to print, what was meant by publication in the days before the printing press, though as print is now becoming a relatively elite means of publication we are perhaps gaining something of the wisdom of Minerva—­remember Hegel’s remark about the owl of Minerva only spreading its wings as dusk falls! But the step from print to the media is comparatively slight compared with the step from manuscripts to the printed page. To gain access to a text before the days of the printing press you needed either to borrow it or to obtain a copy of it. In particular, to obtain your own copy, by getting a scribe to copy it, was an expensive business, which restricted the circulation of books to the well-­off, either as individuals or as communities. Païssy was not at all keen on his collection of translations of the Fathers becoming available to anyone who could buy a copy of the printed book. As a digression—­and also as a pointer to what we shall encounter later—­let us note that Païssy’s attitude is not unparalleled in early modern times, that is, after the advent of the printing press. After the Reformation in England, communities of Catholic religious—­monks and nuns—­settled, temporarily, they hoped (as proved finally to be the case) in Catholic Europe. St Thomas More’s great-­great-­ granddaughter, Helen More, in religion Dame Gertrude, founded a community 3  Oddly, although φιλοκαλία is the word for an anthology, the only anthology so called before our Philokalia is the Philokalia composed from the works of Origen by St Basil the Great and St Gregory the Theologian, as Marguerite Harl remarks in her introduction to Origène, Philocalie, 1–20, etc., Sources Chrétiennes 302 (Cerf, 1983), 34 (though Harl seems to think that the eighteenth-­century Philokalia is ‘russe’!)

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  393 of Benedictine nuns at Cambrai. One of their chaplains was the Benedictine monk, Dom Augustine Baker, who had them copying the mystical writings of the last centuries of Catholic England, such as the works of Julian of Norwich, of Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, and other treatises by The Cloud author. Copying, not preparing them to be printed: The Cloud was not to be published until the nineteenth century, although Julian was published towards the end of the seventeenth. For these treatises were a precious legacy from a lost Catholic England; Baker had no desire for them to be read by those who had usurped the medieval heritage: they were to circulate in written form among his nuns, to help them in the practice of inner prayer that he taught them on the basis of these texts. Païssy may have felt much the same: he had no wish for the works of ascetic and mystical wisdom that he had translated into Church Slavonic to circulate in the Russian society of the autocrats, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who like Henry VIII in sixteenth-­century England suppressed the monasteries as ­relics of a past they were keen to disown. This was an issue that St Nikodimos had faced, though his attitude was very different, for one of his intentions in publishing the Philokalia, as he makes clear in his introduction, was to make the riches of the Orthodox ascetical and mystical tradition available to all Orthodox Christians, married as well as monastic. Some have detected in this a contradiction, for many of the texts included insist on the importance of personal guidance from an experienced spiritual father (we might add ‘or mother’, but I don’t think many would have done so then), and where, outside a monastery, is such a guide likely to be found?4 St Nikodimos was willing to take the risk of these writings being misinterpreted, for the sake of the benefits they would bring, which he was convinced would outweigh any such danger.5 St Païssy was more inclined to evade any such contradiction by seeking to have his Dobrotolyubie kept for monastic eyes alone; it was only at the insistence of Gabriel, Metropolitan of Novgorod and St Petersburg, a friend of the great spiritual master, St Tikhon of Zadonsk, that the Dobrotolyubie was published at all, and the title it was given suggests that the example of the Greeks was a significant ­factor.6 It certainly seems to be the case that the advance of the Dobrotolyubie among the Slavs went hand in hand with an emphasis on the importance of spiritual fatherhood, starchestvo. Disciples of St Païssy brought the Dobrotolyubie and its spirituality to Russia. One of the monks involved, at Metropolitan Gabriel’s behest, in preparing the 1793 edition of the Dobrotolyubie, the monk Nazar,

4  See, e.g., Kallistos Ware, ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, ed. Dimitri Conomos and Graham Speake (Peter Lang, 2005), 106–9. For an expanded version of this article, see: ‘St Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–35. 5  See the last two pages of St Nikodimos’ introduction: Philokalia (Venice, 1782), 7–8. 6  See Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 108; Placide Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe et la Philokalia (Bayard, 1997; Albin Michel, 2003), 64.

394  Selected Essays, Volume II ori­gin­al­ly from Sarov and then refounder of the monastery of Valaam on Lake Ladoga, retired to Sarov in 1801, taking with him a copy of the Dobrotolyubie; it was through him St Seraphim of Sarov became acquainted with the Dobrotolyubie, though it was not at all foreign to his spirituality, indebted, as it was, to the authentic tradition of St Nil Sorsky.7 It was, however, the monastery of Optino, just over 100 miles to the south-­west of Moscow, that rapidly became a centre for this movement of renewal. The mention of Optina Pustyn′ could lead us directly to the second part of this paper, concerned with The Way of a Pilgrim, but I want to stay with the Slav Philokalia for a little longer. The Slav Philokalia is not, I am suggesting, to be regarded as a Slav translation of the Greek Philokalia, rather I would suggest that we see it as part of a parallel project: the project of recovering and making available (at least, to those who would benefit from it) the wisdom of the Byzantine ascetic and mystical tradition—­νηπτικός, neptic, ‘watchful’, is the word Nikodimos uses, of the Fathers who embraced this wisdom. And they—­the Slav Dobrotolyubie and the Greek Philokalia—­are rather different. As Metropolitan Kallistos has put it, ‘during 1746–75 Paisy, working independently, translated into Slavonic nearly four-­fifths of the material [I think that must mean authors] subsequently included in the Greek Philokalia of 1782’.8 Nonetheless, it is striking what the one-­fifth omitted covers: the whole of St Maximos, all the Makarian material, and the whole of St Gregory Palamas. One can no longer think of St Païssy as deleting this material, but it remains that his selection has a very different feel to the selection represented by the Greek Philokalia: the more theologically complex material of the Greek Philokalia is not included, so that the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie is more straightforwardly ascetical, or, if you like, more practical and devotional, more concerned with hesychast prayer and, in particular, the Jesus Prayer. Païssy’s Dobrotolyubie is not the end of the story of the Slav Philokalia, though it was the volume that the pilgrim acquired and valued so highly. St Païssy’s desire to preserve the Dobrotolyubie for monks would have been assisted by the fact that his translation was not into Russian but into Church Slavonic, which must have added greatly to the labours of the pilgrim. Later on in the century, between 1877 and 1889, a translation into Russian, made by St Theophan the Recluse, was ­published in five volumes. This is based on the Greek Philokalia and ‘restores’ many of the treatises ‘omitted’ by St Païssy, though not entirely. It includes from St Maximos the Centuries on Love, selections from the Theological and Economical Chapters and the five additional ‘diverse’ centuries, as well as the Ascetic Book, but not (rather surprisingly) his commentary on the Our Father; it includes the centuries by Thalassios, and various smaller writings, two of the works of St Gregory of Sinai, and some of the works of St Gregory Palamas, and his Life, but not the

7 Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe, 235–6.

8  Ware, ‘St Nikodimos’, 101.

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  395 150 Chapters or the Agioritic Tome. A selection of the Makarian Homilies is included from the standard set of 50 Homilies, not, as in the Greek Philokalia, from the paraphrase by Symeon Metaphrastes. Furthermore, a number of authors not present in the Greek Philokalia are included: notably, Ephrem the Syrian, John of the Ladder, Barsanouphios, John and Dorotheos of Gaza, Isaac the Syrian and, especially, Theodore the Stoudite, to whom the whole of volume 4 is dedicated. In addition, the selections from St Antony the Great, Isaias of Gaza, Evagrios, Cassian, Mark the Hermit, and Nilos of Ancyra are supplemented with works not included in the Greek Philokalia of 1782 (the additions under the name of St Antony are no less spurious than the original item, unless one counts the selections from St Athanasios’ Life of St Antony). The long work by Peter of Damascus is omitted, having been already published in Russian. The desire to add what St Païssy had omitted (as St Theophan would presumably have seen it) is clearly one of the Recluse’s motives. There is not much sign of serious scholarly scruples (though this might account for the substitution of the authentic homilies for Symeon Metaphrastes’ paraphrase of the Makarian material). Palamas’ 150 Chapters were omitted because they contained ‘a good number of ideas difficult to understand or express’ and the chapters of Kallistos Kataphygiotes, because they are ‘too subtle and largely speculative and syllogistic’, as Theophan put it in his introductions to these works; similar reasons would account for the omission of chapters from Maximos, Elias Ekdikos, and Nikitas. The texts dealing with phys­ ic­al techniques by Nikiphoros, Pseudo-­Symeon, and Gregory of Sinai have been drastically curtailed in the sections dealing with the breathing techniques, because St Theophan had serious reservations about these techniques, as he makes clear. Theophan’s own agenda is very clear, and like St Païssy, he shows a preference for the ascetical, rather than the theological or mystical. This translation by St Theophan went into second and third editions, which have been reprinted; it is the standard Russian translation of the Philokalia, and has been very influential, not only in Russia, but throughout the Slav-­speaking world. In getting to St Theophan, we might seem to have overtaken ourselves, for it was the Philokalia of Païssy that was the treasured possession of the pilgrim. But no: for the edition of The Way of a Pilgrim that has been translated into so many languages and become a classic is the version in which St Theophan himself played an editorial role. This edition has had such worldwide influence, that the Jesus Prayer is now practised by many, many more people than ever before: not just monks, nor even just Orthodox lay people, but by Christians of every stripe, and indeed by those who would hardly regard themselves as Christians (though to pray to Jesus can hardly make sense without some Christian motivation, however inchoate). The edition in which St Theophan had a hand was published in 1883, and with some amendments in 1884: it is the 1884 edition that has been the basis for all the translations (until very recently). It consists of four stories related by a strannik, a pilgrim or wanderer, to his spiritual father. It was translated into

396  Selected Essays, Volume II English by R. M. French, and published in 1930.9 Shortly after publishing these four tales, French came across an additional volume in Russian, a kind of appendix to the four tales, consisting, this time, of three texts, not exactly three further tales, for only the first is a tale told to his starets, the other two are dialogues the pilgrim has with others: a professor, the pilgrim’s starets, and a schema-­monk (skhimnik). Incidentally, these dialogues are reminiscent of the dialogue genre found in Russian religious literature, such as the three conversations written by Solov′ev, published in English translation with titles like War and Christianity,10 or the dialogue composed by Bulgakov in the wake of the aborted Synod of Moscow, called Beneath the Ramparts of Cherson.11 These three further tales were published in 1911 by Bishop Nikon (Rozhdestvenskii) of Vologda and Tot′ma, and were based on a manuscript copy discovered in the papers of Elder, now St, Amvrosii of Optino. French published his translations of these as The Pilgrim Continues His Way in 1943.12 Most readers notice very soon that these latter three texts seem somewhat different from the earlier four. In a couple of his works, Sergei Bol′shakov reported that he had read MS versions of The Way of a Pilgrim in the library of the (Russian) Monastery of St Panteleimon on Mount Athos, and noted that the manuscript he read was ‘longer than the printed text’.13 In the conclusion to his book, Russian Mystics, he remarked that ‘There is not even a critical edition of the Tales of a Russian Pilgrim. The manuscripts which I found at St Panteleimon’s still await publication . . .’.14 About a decade after Bol′shakov wrote these words, there appeared a series of studies by the hieromonk Vasilii Grolimund (a German monk, belonging to the Serbian Church) which revealed the existence of further texts, and also brought to light the fact that Fr Pavel Florensky had written in his copy of the 1884 edition that the author of these texts was the superior of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Selenginsk, one Archimandrite Mikhail (Kozlov). Soon after Fr Grolimund’s discoveries, the whole tale began to unravel, owing to the researches of Aleksei Pentkovsky which were published in the journal, Simvol, in 1992, and are accessible in English in his edition of The Pilgrim’s Tale, published in the Classics of Western Spirituality.15

9  R. M. French, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim (Philip Allan, 1930). 10  Vladimir Solovyof, War and Christianity: From the Russian Point of View, Three Conversations, ed. Stephen Graham (Constable and Company, Ltd.: 1915); Vladimir Soloviev, War, Progress, and the End of History, trans. Alexander Bakshy (University of London Press, 1915). 11  Serge Boulgakov, Sous les Remparts de Chersonèse, trans. Bernard Marchadier (Ad Solem, 1999). 12  R. M. French, trans., The Pilgrim Continues His Way (SPCK, 1943). The two volumes of French’s translation were published together by SPCK in 1954. All three volumes could be described as a ‘small pea-­green clothbound book’ of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (Penguin, 1964), 23; which Salinger has in mind seems undecidable (copyright of the first story is 1955, when it was published in the New Yorker). 13  Sergius Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics (Cistercian Publications, 1976), 235. 14 Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics, 274–5. 15  Aleksei Pentkovsky, ed. with intro., The Pilgrim’s Tale, trans. T. Allan Smith, foreword by Jaroslav Pelikan, Classics of Western Spirituality (The Paulist Press, 1999).

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  397 Aleksei Pentkovsky tells a complicated, deeply tangled tale about the origin and fate of the text known in English as The Way of a Pilgrim, in Russian, Окровенные рассказы странника духовному своемы отцу, ‘Candid tales of a pilgrim to his spiritual father’. These tales have a history, let us say; they are based on earlier texts, some of which survive, some of which are (at least, at present) lost. The primary source of the first four tales is a work, which exists in manuscripts, by Archimandrite Mikhail Kozlov, called The Tale of a Pilgrim, a Seeker of Prayer; this, however, has been supplemented by another work, The Recollection of a Life of Prayer of Elder Vasilisk, a monk and hermit in the Siberian Forests, which discusses the effects of practice of the Jesus Prayer experienced by Elder Vasilisk, as well as containing a summary of the ‘results of interior prayer’, derived from the Slavonic text of the Philokalia, that is, Païssy’s. This text, based on Elder Vasilisk’s experiences, had been composed by one Arsenii Troepol′skii, who seems to have been responsible for combining Fr Mikhail Kozlov’s text with the Recollection. Furthermore, it seems that even Mikhail Kozlov’s text was the redaction of an earlier text, now lost. The last three tales derive from Troepol′skii, though, as noted, only the first of these (that is, the fifth) really continues the pilgrim’s narrative. Also derived from Troepol′skii is a section, not included in any translation of The Way of a Pilgrim that I know of, called ‘Three Keys to the Treasure House of Inner Prayer’, followed by a series of extracts from the Slav Philokalia; it is quite a substantial section, sixty-­three pages in Fr Kiprian Kern’s edition of The Way of a Pilgrim.16 Pentkovsky’s text has been published as the ‘original text’ (explicitly in the French version: ‘le vrai texte du pèlerin russe’).17 It is certainly worthwhile to have this text available, both in Russian and in translation, but the ‘classic text’ is not thereby set aside. Why not? I think for several reasons. First of all, it is not clear that Fr Mikhail Kozlov’s text (the one published in the ‘Classics of Western Spirituality’ version and in the French version) can be called the ‘original’: it seems to be a reworking of another text now lost. Second, if one is interested in the Jesus Prayer, then Troepol′skii’s interpolations, which largely concern this, are hardly irrelevant. Third, the ‘classic edition’ is the 1884 version edited by St Theophan the Recluse, which must give it a certain authority. Furthermore, St Theophan’s redaction was not without point. As early as the first edition in 1881, in which Theophan may have had no hand, the tales become tales told by a pilgrim to his spiritual father. We might recall what was said earlier about the interdependence of the Philokalia and spiritual fatherhood: use of the Philokalia and the restoration of the institution of

16  Окровенные рассказы странника духовному своемы отцу, 4th edn (YMCA-­Press, 1973; identical to 3rd edn, 1948), 119–81. The Three Keys (though not the extracts from the Philokalia) are included, as an appendix, in Andrew Louth, ed., and Anna Zaranko, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim: Candid Tales of a Wanderer to his Spiritual Father (Penguin, 2017), 179–83. 17 Archimandrite Michel Kozlov, Récit d’un pèlerin à la recherche de la prière, trans. Chantal Crespel-­Houlon (Cerf, 2013): on the cover and p. 7.

398  Selected Essays, Volume II starchestvo seem to go hand in hand. Incorporating the place of the spiritual father into the tales of The Way of a Pilgrim was something entirely characteristic of St Theophan, himself a great spiritual father, exercised not least through his correspondence. Furthermore, the place of the Jesus Prayer, seen as inner prayer, внутренныя молитва, is much more pronounced in the version that left St Theophan’s hand than in the text ascribed to Mikhail Kozlov. And finally it is the classic edition: if one thinks of the immense influence of The Way of a Pilgrim, one is thinking of the influence of this edition, not the tangled web of texts that lie behind this classic edition. (And one might add that, on any reckoning, the text published in the ‘Classics of Western Spirituality’, by including the last three ‘tales’, is muddying the waters, which is presumably why the French edition includes only the four tales that can be ascribed to Fr Mikhail Kozlov.) Nevertheless, the researches of Pentkovsky and others are not of simply scholarly, philological, interest, for in opening up the background of The Way of a Pilgrim they illuminate several aspects of the history of Russian Christianity in the nineteenth century, and, maybe, reveal interesting facets of the ‘Russian soul’. One thing that emerges from Pentkovsky’s research is the place of Optina Pustyn′ in all this: and I mean all this. Bound up with the influence of Païssy’s Dobrotolyubie was the revival of spiritual fatherhood, as we have seen, which was particularly associated with the Monastery of Optino. It was this monastery, just over 100 miles to the south-­west of Moscow, that rapidly became a centre for this movement of renewal—­renewal both of the practice of inner prayer, or hesychastic prayer, and the institution of spiritual fatherhood. We catch a glimpse of this in the early chapters of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in the figure of the starets Zossima, given central importance, but viewed with suspicion by many of his fellow monks. Because of its accessibility to Moscow, Optina Pustyn′ attracted many of the intelligentsia, especially among the Slavophils; Ivan Kireevsky’s sense of the paramount value of the witness of the Fathers can be seen as reflecting the influence of the Philokalia. For him, ‘The Holy Fathers speak of a country they have been to’; in their writings the Fathers bear ‘testimony as eyewitnesses’.18 This philokalic renewal—­among both monks and laypeople who sought spiritual succour from the monasteries—­ran in parallel with (whether there was any cause and effect, and which way round, I do not know) a programme of translation from the Fathers into Russian in the course of the nineteenth century, shared out among the Spiritual Academies, with the result that, as Olivier Clément has put it, ‘at the end of the nineteenth century, Russia had at its disposal, in its own language, the best patristic library in Europe’.19 18  From Kireevsky’s ‘Fragments’: translation in Boris Jakim and Robert Bird, trans. and ed., On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 248, 243. 19  O. Clément, ‘Les pères de l’Église dans l’Église orthodoxe’, Connaissance des Pères de l’Église 52 (December 1993), 25–6; quoted by Boris Bobrinskoy in ‘Le renouveau actuel de la patristique dans l’orthodoxie’, Les pères de l’Église au XXe siècle. Histoire–­littérature–­théologie (Cerf, 1997), 437–44, here

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  399 But Optina Pustyn′ also plays a role in the textual background of The Way of a Pilgrim: the text of the four tales, published by Pentkovsky, and translated now into English and French, at least, is the manuscript found among the papers of St Amvrosii. There is more that emerges from consideration of the background of the Pilgrim. We might start with the description of the protagonist: strannik, pilgrim, wanderer. Such a figure is familiar to readers of nineteenth-­century Russian literature—­think of Tolstoy, or Leskov—­wanderers, going from place to place, given hospitality by the devout in the houses of the local gentry in the country. Sometimes these wanderers were pilgrims, in the sense it has in English, that is, pilgrims to holy places, Jerusalem, for instance; this was the case, at least for a time, though quickly frustrated, with our pilgrim. Often, as is clear in the stories of Leskov, these wanderers were Old Believers: those who had refused to accept the changes, mostly liturgical, introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. They became schismatics, raskolniki, separated from the official Orthodox Church: persecuted by the State, even more so after the accession to the imperial throne of Peter the Great, with his plans to bring Russia up to date—­ precisely what the liturgical reforms had purported to do just before the reign of Peter. Persecuted, the Old Believers gathered in various areas where they could survive; others wandered from place to place, as stranniki, wanderers. Father Mikhail Kozlov had been such an Old Believer, who later became reconciled with the official Orthodox Church and, with his contacts in the world of Old Believers, sought in turn to reconcile them to the Orthodox Church. It seems likely that these tales of a wanderer had a kind of missionary purpose: tales that integrated wanderers, who were archetypically Old Believers, with the Church. Aleksei Pentkovsky also relates The Way of a Pilgrim to a genre of Russian spiritual literature, typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which, he suggests, originates in the literature of medieval Rus′. He mentions Daniil’s Journey to the Holy Land and the journey to Jerusalem undertaken by the Siberian peasant Iakov Lanshakov, six centuries later, at the beginning of the 1850s, whose mystical visions were copied down by Alimpii, a hieromonk of the Kievan Caves Monastery in 1853. Also from around the same time Pentkovsky mentions the monk Parfenii’s Stories about my Journey and Travels around Russia, Moldavia, Turkey and the Holy Land. Like Father Mikhail Kozlov, the monk Parfenii was a convert from the Old Believers and included in his narratives accounts of (others’) experiences of the Jesus Prayer. There are striking parallels between Parfenii’s account and The Way of a Pilgrim: Pentkovsky comments that ‘it is a question of using common traditional themes and not the influence of one text on the other

440 (though England, as a result of the endeavours of the Fathers of the Oxford Movement, must have run Russia a close second.)

400  Selected Essays, Volume II or borrowings’.20 What Pentkovsky has to say is of great interest, though it should be noticed that this is not just a matter of an ‘essentially medieval [and, though not made explicit, Slav] literary tradition’, as he puts it.21 From the seventeenth century, there is a diary of the travels of Makarios, patriarch of Antioch, composed by his son Paul, archdeacon of Aleppo, covering the years 1652–60. He travelled to Moscow, via ‘Little Russia’, and on the journey back took in what is now Romania.22 It is a tradition that can be traced back to the patristic period: the Lausiac History and the History of the Monks in Egypt are examples, as also is Egeria’s Itinerarium. The Way of a Pilgrim, however, differs from these, in that all these other ex­amples at least purport to be historical truth. There is no trace of this in The Way: it is edifying fiction. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting that it is not always possible, or even necessary, to draw a clear line between truth and historical accuracy. To give a very early example, I have grave doubts over the historical accuracy of the Protevangelium of St James, despite its massive influence on liturgical celebration of the Mother of God, but the truth that it seeks to express, revolving round Mary as the True Temple, seems to me profoundly true. And there are examples closer to our time in the Russian tradition. The accounts of Father Arseny, for example, express profound truths, but doubts remain about who, or even whether, he was.23 Another popular, apparently veridical work, is the book, called in English, Everyday Saints; it has not passed without comment that the author of this compelling work had a reputation as a film script writer before becoming a monk.24 With The Way of a Pilgrim things are clearer, for no attempt is made to claim other than fictional truth, and the story of the evolution of the work only underlines this fact. But let us at last emerge from the thickets of scholarly conjecture and reconstruction and come to the pilgrim himself, for all the scholarly consideration, both of the Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim, however interesting, and indeed absorbing, it is, seems at something of a remove from the story we read in the pages of The Way of a Pilgrim. The pilgrim himself is striking, captivating. He has a certain simplicity and directness; he is keen to get to the truth in a practical, tangible way. Rhetoric about ‘unceasing prayer’ leaves him profoundly unsatisfied: it is something he wants to get to the bottom of, and his being directed to the Dobrotolyubie is, for him, one of the great events of his life. He struggles with 20 Pentkovsky, The Pilgrim’s Tale, 33 (my information here is based on pp. 32–5). 21 Pentkovsky, Pilgrim’s Tale, 32. 22 See the abridged edition selected and arranged by Lady Laura Ridding, ed., The Travels of Macarius (Oxford University Press, 1936). 23  Vera Bouteneff, trans., Father Arseny 1893–1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father and Father Arseny. A Cloud of Witnesses (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999–2001). See Katya Tolstaya and Peter Versteeg, ‘Inventing a Saint: Religious Fiction in Post-­Communist Russia’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82 (2014), 70–119. 24  Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), Everyday Saints and other Stories (Pokrov Publications, 2011).

The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim  401 the  Dobrotolyubie; Old Church Slavonic, the language of the liturgy and the Dobrotolyubie is a long way from modern, or even nineteenth-­century, Russian. But he perseveres. His story is not presented as ‘typical’, and I do not imagine that many of his readers have tried to attain 12,000 repetitions of the Jesus Prayer a day, but that does not mean that they have got nothing from it. Indeed the concern with reciting the Jesus Prayer large numbers of times a day could very easily become a block to grasping what the practice of the Jesus Prayer is really about. In the later parts of The Way of a Pilgrim, and also in the ‘Three Keys’—one might say: in the parts that seem to reveal the hand of Arsenii Troepol′skii—­there seems to be a fixation with quantity, to the extent that quantity overshadows what one might call quality, that is, a concern that the Jesus Prayer remain a prayer, addressed to Jesus Christ, as Son of God, and beseeching his mercy. It is striking that in his teaching on the Jesus Prayer, St Theophan underlines far more the meaning of the prayer, and presents it as a way of making possible the descent of the mind into the heart. Indeed in some of his letters, his teaching seems to be that the practice of the Jesus Prayer leads to the prayer of the heart, rather than being identical with it. It is when we pray with the heart that we fulfil the apostle’s command to ‘pray without ceasing’, not by achieving a tally of thousands of repetitions of the Jesus Prayer each day. It seems to me important to realize the significance of St Theophan’s involvement in the redaction of The Way of a Pilgrim, and particularly the way in which he introduces another character, alongside the ­pilgrim and his treasured copy of the Dobrotolyubie: namely the spiritual father. For this enabled St Theophan to introduce into The Way a warning—­against embarking on the practice of the Jesus Prayer on one’s own without the guidance of a spiritual father. The aim of The Way of a Pilgrim is the acquisition of prayer without ceasing, something that is life-­transforming, but the reverse of this is that, practised in the wrong way, it can become destructive. There are lessons about this woven into The Way of a Pilgrim, maybe not all from the hand of St Theophan, but very much in line with his presumed editorial intention in taking a very popu­lar account of the search for prayer and, at the very least, leaving trails that lead to the role of the spiritual father and the necessity of spiritual guidance. And the ‘pilgrim’ has a wonderful eye, or ear. Let me read you a passage—­a very well-­known passage—­from the Second Tale. Fifty versts along the main road, I decided to turn on to a country lane to be alone and read more easily. I travelled a long way through forests and only rarely came upon small villages. Sometimes I would spend whole days sitting under the trees, reading the Philokalia attentively and I found much wonderful know­ ledge in it. My heart burned with desire for union with God through inner prayer, and I made every effort to learn it, guided by the Philokalia and testing myself against it, and lamenting all the while that I had not yet found a dwelling where I could all spend my time reading in peace.

402  Selected Essays, Volume II I read my Bible too throughout this time and felt that I was beginning to understand it more clearly, not like before, when so much of it was puzzling and incomprehensible to me. The Holy Fathers rightly say that the Philokalia is the key to unlocking the mysteries of holy Scripture. With its guidance, I began to understand a little of the hidden meaning of the Word of God. The meanings of various sayings were revealed to me: such as what was meant by ‘the inner secret person of the heart’; ‘true prayer’; ‘worship in the spirit’; ‘the Kingdom of God is within you’; ‘the Spirit intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings’; ‘abide in me’; ‘give me your heart’; ‘to put on Christ’; ‘the betrothal of the Spirit in our hearts’; the cry of the heart: ‘Abba! Father!’ and so on. As I began to pray in my heart everything around seemed entrancing to me: trees, grass, birds, the earth, the air, light. Everything seemed to say that it existed for man, that it bore witness to the love of God for mankind. All creation was praying and praising God. And I saw from this what the Philokalia meant by ‘knowledge of the speech of all creatures’ and how it was possible to communicate with God’s creation.25

The Way of a Pilgrim is about a journey, a journey that takes the pilgrim across vast tracks of Russia, all undertaken on foot: from Irkutsk in the south-­east of Siberia, to Tobolsk—­ about 1,500 miles—­ then on to Odessa—­ another 1,700 miles—­from there to Kiev—­a mere 300 miles—­and we leave him setting off for the White Sea, something over 1,000 miles to the north. On the way, he meets all sorts of people, is mocked, misunderstood, robbed, but also given warm hospitality, and towards the end he finds a kindred spirit in ‘the professor’; he also spends long periods on his own, reading the Philokalia and the Bible, and praying the Jesus Prayer. All this is told to us in a style that recalls a fable or a folk tale (I have already suggested that The Way is fictional, though nonetheless real for all that). Let me close by quoting the final paragraph of the introduction written by Anna Zaranko, the translator, and me (the editor!) for the new translation of The Way of a Pilgrim, soon to appear in the Penguin Classics series: Our own popular culture, in a high-­speed age, continues to tell stories of people who go off into the wilds, specifically on foot, often covering incredible distances, in every area of the globe. We are fascinated today, but so they were in the nineteenth century—­when Tsar Alexander I himself was rumoured not to have died but to have disappeared to live incognito as a hermit in the depths of Russia! The gentle Pilgrim is no fiery John the Baptist (another, grander, member of this tribe), but if you meet him once, you will not forget him. Indeed, on some level, you know you will meet him again and when that day comes you may just reach for your own walking stick, and . . . 25  Откровенные рассказы (Fr Kiprian Kern’s edition of The Way of a Pilgrim), 42–3; translated for the new edition by Anna Zaranko: Louth, ed., and Zaranko, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim, 26–7.

33 Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am Kreuz In 1956, Aloys Grillmeier published a small book called Der Logos am Kreuz.1 It stands apart from his other publications in several ways. First of all—what perhaps first caught my eye when I found a second-hand copy in (I think) Thornton’s now-defunct bookshop in Oxford—the dust cover is striking: the design is reminiscent of Piet Mondrian, one of the squares containing a reproduction of the fresco of the Crucifixion in the church of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome. It is also on a subject somewhat different from Grillmeier’s usual academic preoccupation—the patristic doctrine of Christ—in that it is about how Christ’s crucifixion was depicted in the patristic period. Just five years earlier, Grillmeier had published in the first volume of the three-volume Das Konzil von Chalkedon a long article— nearly 200 pages in length—‘Die theologische und sprachliche Vorbereitung der christologischen Formel von Chalkedon’, that is the germ from which his Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, in its many forms, grew. This small book, not 150 pages long, is an intensely learned miniature, and consists of theological reflection on an art-historical topic, the early depiction of Christ’s crucifixion, which might seem unusual, when set against the whole history of depictions of Crucifixion, in that Christ is depicted as clothed in a chiton with claves, the centurion Longinus having just pierced his side, from which is flowing blood and water; and especially, Christ is depicted with his eyes wide open. The wall painting in S. Maria Antiqua, found on the dustcover and as the frontispiece to the book, dates from the eighth century, but depictions of Christ crucified, clothed in a chiton with his eyes open, at the moment when his side is pierced, are typical of early depictions of the Crucifixion, the earliest being the painting of the Crucifixion in the Rabula Codex of the Gospels, now in Florence, which is dated to 586. These two Crucifixions are reproduced in Grillmeier’s book, along with a Crucifixion on a wooden casket from the Sancta Sanctorum chapel, now in the Vatican (also sixth century), and the Crucifixion from a manuscript now in the Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, which is much later—eleventh century—depicting Christ naked, save for a loincloth, with blood and water flowing, or rather spurting, from his side, flanked by the Mother of God and the Beloved Disciple, but with no soldiers 1 Aloys Grillmeier, SJ, Der Logos am Kreuz: Zur christologischen Symbolik der älteren Kreuzigungsdarstellung (Max Hueber, 1956).

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0034

404  Selected Essays, Volume II present. Also reproduced in Der Logos am Kreuz is Christ as a lion on the title page of the Gospel of Matthew from the Codex Aureus, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, to which we shall return later. There are several features of these early depictions of Christ Crucified that seem especially to have attracted Grillmeier’s attention: Christ’s open eyes in conjunction with the piercing of his side, leading to the question: do the open eyes suggest that Christ is alive at the moment depicted, despite the piercing of his side? And, more and more important as the book proceeds, the question: what understanding of Christ, what Christology, lies behind such a depiction of the Crucifixion? Grillmeier begins by looking at a textual question that had already in earlier scholarship been invoked in connection with these early depictions of Christ crucified. The scene of the piercing of Christ’s side with a lance only occurs in the Fourth Gospel and there it is clearly linked with Christ’s death: after telling us that the soldiers had broken the legs of those crucified with Christ, to ensure their death, so that they could be taken down in time for the holy day, the Evangelist continues: ‘coming to Jesus, as they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear and immediately there came out blood and water’ (John 19:33–4). The synoptic Gospels know nothing of the piercing of Christ’s side with a spear, however in several New Testament manuscripts—including two ancient texts: the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus—part of the two Johannine verses just quoted have migrated into the Matthaean text, producing the following reading: ‘And the rest of them said, Let us see if Elias will come to save him. Another, taking a lance, pierced his side, and there came out blood and water. Jesus then again cried with a loud voice and gave up the spirit’ (Matt. 27:49–50, with the interpolation found in ‫ א‬and B). This produces a curious result: whereas the Johannine text clearly asserts that Christ was dead when his side was pierced, the Matthaean composite text as clearly asserts that Christ was alive when his side was pierced, and died immediately afterwards.2 The idea that this has anything to do with the depiction of Christ in the Rabula Gospels is far-fetched, and Grillmeier points out, after discussing the idea at some length, that in fact the text of Matthew in the Rabula Gospels does not follow the interpolated text anyway.3 The discussion is, however, important for Grillmeier in that it introduces the question whether Christ is depicted as dead or alive in these early Crucifixions. This raises a further question

2  In a long and detailed article, Lorenzo Perrone demonstrates how Origen, in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, draws together the Matthaean and Johannine accounts of the Crucifixion (without fusing them, as in the Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) in his reflection on the details of the Crucifixion: L. Perrone, La morte in croce di Gesù. Epifania divina del mistero del Logos fatto carne (Origene, Commentariorum Series in Matthaeum, 138–40), Adamantius 16 (2010): 286–307. I am grateful to Professor Perrone for drawing my attention to this article. 3 Grillmeier, Logos, 9.

Reflections on Grillmeier ’ s Der Logos am Kreuz  405 as to whether we are to think of these early depictions of Christ as realistic or symbolic. Swiftly, Grillmeier relates these considerations to the question of what Christology might be supposed to be expressed in these early depictions of Christ, which belong to the period after Chalcedon, in which the inseparability of Christ’s divine and human natures was emphasized, and reaches this provisional assessment: Just because the union of Godhead and manhood of Christ is affirmed even in death, so this must be presupposed in grasping the depiction of Christ in the Rabula-codex. This is the starting point for our interpretation. And it must apply also to the iconographic expression of the divinity of Christ. The crucified one of the Rabula-type is depicted as a dead man, and what is manifest through the open eyes as living, even though he must be thought of as bodily dead, because of what is expressed by Christ’s being pierced by the lance, is nothing other than his inseparable Godhead. Thus this ancient image of Christ crucified must be acknowledged as a conjunction of symbolism and realism: a symbolism that, to the living faith, expresses the Logos inseparable even in his suffering, and a realism, that is not afraid to depict Christ as dead.4

The next chapter, entitled ‘Faith in Christ, Symbol and Picture’, develops further the way in which symbolism and realism are mutually present in Christian attempts to depict God’s dealings with the world, and in particular in the Incarnation. I shall pass over this chapter very quickly, as, in the light of the enormous amount of reflection on the history of Christian iconography that has appeared over the last half-century, the way Grillmeier discusses it seems nowadays rather dated. The next chapter on ‘Christological Symbolism in the Faith-Consciousness of Early Christianity’, which deals in more detail with symbolic ways of expressing Christian understanding of Christ, expresses in a concise form some of the developments we find if we compare Grillmeier’s 1951 article with the much-expanded early chapters of volume 1 of Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche: notably, the attention he pays to the symbolism employed in Jewish-Christian, Gnostic, and apocalyptic writings of the pre-Nicene period. Discussion of such material is  developed further in the fourth chapter of the book, which is entitled 4 Grillmeier, Logos, 15: ‘Eben weil man um die Vereinigung von Gottheit und Menschheit Christi auch im Tode wußte, so konnte sich nichts leichter ergeben als die Darstellung, wie sie uns im Rabulas-Codex entgegentritt. Hier ist nun der Ansatzpunkt für unsere Deutung gegeben. Denn es geht gerade um die ikonographische Ausprägung der Gottheit Christi. Der Gekreuzigte des RabulasTyps ist als Toter dargestellt, und was durch die geöffneten Augen dieses als lebendig erscheinenden, und dennoch als körperlich tot gedachten, weil von der Lanze durchbohrten Christus ausgedrückt werden soll, ist nichts anderes als seine untrennbare Gottheit. Damit kennzeichnet sich die ältere Imago Christi crucifixi als eine Verbindung von Symbolismus und Realismus: eines Symbolismus, der vom lebendigen Glauben an den auch im Leiden nicht getrennten Logos getragen war, und eines Realismus, der sich vor der Darstellung des toten Christus nicht zu fürchten brauchte.’

406  Selected Essays, Volume II ‘The  Theological Symbolism of the Cross and the Earliest Depictions of the Crucifixion’, which explore what Grillmeier calls ὁ τεταμένος Λόγος: the Logos stretched out, that is, the crucified Logos. Of particular importance is the way in which the τεταμένος Λόγος is the cosmic Logos, with the cross as a symbol of his presence and activity throughout the whole cosmos, picking up the Apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 3:18–19, in which he speaks of the ‘power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge’. Also striking in this chapter is the attention Grillmeier gives to the liturgical hymnography of the Church, both West and East, including not just the Greek East, but Syriac, too. He draws attention, too, to the way in which the Cross becomes a partner, companion, even, in Christ’s saving work. Grillmeier remarks, The Coming again of the Lord and the sign of the Cross become [for these early Christians] an inseparable unity. In the Cross the descending Christ already fights to achieve his victory over the underworld. It appears with him as glorious in the Resurrection and accompanies the exalted one into heaven.5

Indeed, in the depictions of the Crucifixion Grillmeier is concerned with there appears almost a fusion between the figure of the Crucified and the figure of the Cross, which becomes even more striking when one notices that the figure of the  Crucified Christ could also be regarded as a figure in the orans position (especially as described by Tertullian: nos vero non attollimus tantum sed etiam expandimus, et dominica passione modulantes, et orantes confitemur Christo; De  Oratione 14): upright with the arms outstretched, in prayer, but also in embrace of all those who behold it—which is very much the theme of the Cosmic Cross. It reminds me of one of the earliest of English poems, ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (‘rood’ being an old English word for the cross), in which the poet has a dream of the rood, who tells how he shared with Christ in the redemption of human kind: ‘I was reared up, a rood. / I raised the great King, / liege lord of the heavens . . . / How they mocked us both! / I was all moist with blood / sprung from the Man’s side / after He sent forth His soul’.6 There is a brief, but rewarding, meditation on the Rotas-Sator square (pp. 75–8); associated with that, Grillmeier mentions the imagery in the Acts of John of Christ as the sower with his cross as the plough (p. 77). The cross, with its vertical stake and horizontal beam fastened together with a nail, is a symbol of the union

5 Grillmeier, Logos, 69: ‘Wiederkunft des Herrn und Kreuzeszeichen werden für sie [die frühen Christen] eine untrennbare Einheit. Im Kreuze erringt schon der absteigende Christus seinen Sieg über die Unterwelt. Es erscheint mit ihm glorreich bei der Auferstehung und fährt mit dem Erhöhten in den Himmel auf.’ 6  Translation by Michael Alexander in The Earliest English Poems, 3rd edn (Penguin, 1991), 87–8.

Reflections on Grillmeier ’ s Der Logos am Kreuz  407 of Christ’s natures. Grillmeier detects a threefold symbolism (Word–voice–human being) in a prayer from one of the apocryphal Acts: Word and echo, or word and voice, indicate the double nature of Christ. Christ is the eternal Word become a human ‘voice’. As Logos he belongs to the world beyond the senses and cannot be perceived by bodily senses; insofar as the Word becomes a voice, he partakes in materiality, in spatiality and temporality; for the voice is moved in a physical way and can be heard.7

And this can be applied to the Cross: the upright beam is the Logos, the crosspiece the voice, through which a nail is fastened to the beam. Grillmeier then looks at the symbolic content of the depiction of the One crucified. For this he explores the symbolism found in the Physiologus, symbolism found in natural things and animals. It is a text that at times attracted censure as heretical (for example in the Decretum Gelasianum), but is nonetheless important for grasping the significance of the symbolism through which the crucified figure on the Cross is interpreted. In the Physiologus, the lion provides a set of three analogies with Christ. It is introduced by seeing the lion as the king of beasts, an analogy already applied by the patriarch Jacob to his son Judah (Gen. 49:9), which in Christian tradition is seen as fulfilled in Christ as the Lion of Judah. The first of the three analogies between the lion and Christ is the way in which the lion by swishing his tail removes any trace of his footprints, so that hunters cannot track him to his lair and overpower him; so with Christ who, as he descends from heaven to become incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary, is unrecognized: a tradition alluded to in Ignatios’ letter to the Ephesians, which speaks of ‘the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing, likewise the death of the Lord’ as hidden from the ruler of this age—‘three mysteries of a cry, wrought in the silence of God’ (Ad Ephes. 19). The second analogy is the sleep of the lion, for when he sleeps in his lair, his eyes are awake, open: to which Solomon bears witness in the Song of Songs when he says, ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ (Cant. 5:2). One of the versions of the Physiologus cited by Grillmeier comments: ‘So indeed the body of my Lord slept on the cross, but his Godhead was awake at the right hand of the Father: “for he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 120:4).’ The third analogy concerns the birth of a lion: when the lioness gives birth, the offspring is born dead, until the third day, when the Father comes, and blows in  his face and he wakes up.8 It is the second analogy with which Grillmeier 7 Grillmeier, Logos, 79: ‘Wort und Schall, oder Wort und Stimme, bezeichnen wohl das Doppelwesen Christi. Christus ist das zur menschlichen ‚Stimme’ gewordene ewige Wort. Als Logos gehört er der übersinnlichen Welt an und kann mit leiblichen Sinnen nicht wahrgenommen werden; sofern das Wort sich zur Stimme gestaltet, nimmt es dagegen teil an der Materialität, Räumlichkeit und Zeitlichkeit; denn die Stimme wird auf physische Weise bewegt und hörbar gemacht.’ 8  For all these examples, see Grillmeier, Logos, 83–4.

408  Selected Essays, Volume II concerns himself. Here we find the solution to the puzzle posed by the Crucifixion of the Rabula type: That Christ is depicted with open eyes, where again according to the Gospel account the piercing with the lance and the opened side must be taken as a witness to his death, is for the reader of the Physiologus nothing strange or contradictory. He knows how to unite both, because Christ is for him the ‘mystical lion’. The king of beasts can unite sleep with wakefulness. While he gives himself in a bodily manner to rest and sleep, he can through his opened eyes deceive the enemy and keep him at bay. What is this mystical sleep for Christ? It is his bodily death on the Cross. But equally he is awake—and this in his Godhead. This wakefulness is expressed through the openness of his bodily eyes, as also by the upright posture of the One pierced by the lance. The dilemma of the Rabula-Crucifixion is thus solved, if seen from the perspective of the Physiologus. He says to us clearly: his Christ ‘sleeps’, that is, he is held in the sleep of bodily death; his side is therefore pierced. We stand before the picture of a dead man . . . The openness of the eyes is therefore not an expression of the state of the body, but a symbolic emphasis on the Godhead of the crucified One and of his victoriousness over the enemies of the Godman, who believe themselves to have triumphed over his body.9

Grillmeier continues to illustrate the way in which the symbolism expresses a fundamentally Orthodox Christology of the union and inseparability of the two natures of Christ. Another illustration is the Christian symbol of the fish, for the fish always has his eyes open (p. 87). He comes back to the lion with some remarks on the lion depicted on the title page of the Gospel of Matthew in the Codex Aureus (instead of the man one would normally have expected, though the four corners depict a man, a lion, a bull, and an eagle): the lion’s eyes are clearly open, and this is picked up in the verse that runs round the depiction:

9 Grillmeier, Logos, 85–6: ‘Daß Christus mit offenen Augen dargestellt wird, wo doch der Lanzenstoß und die geöffnete Seite gemäß dem evangelischen Bericht als Zeugnis des Todes genommen werden müssen, ist für den Leser des Physiologus nichts Sonderbares und Widersprüchliches. Er weiß beides zu vereinen, weil für ihn Christus der ‘mystische Löwe’ ist. Der König der Tiere aber kann Schlaf mit Wachsamkeit vereinen. Während er körperlich sich der Ruhe und dem Schlafe hingibt, kann er durch seine geöffneten Augen die Feinde täuschen und fernhalten. Was ist dieser mystische Schlaf für Christus? Es ist sein leiblicher Tod am Kreuz. Aber zugleich wacht er—und dies in seiner Gottheit. Dieses Wachsein aber wird symbolisch durch das Offensein der leiblichen Augen ausgedrückt, wie auch durch die aufrechte Haltung des von der Lanze Durchbohrten. Das Dilemma der Rabula-Kreuzigung löst sich auf, wenn es vom Physiologus her gesehen wird. Er sagt es uns deutlich: dieser Christus ‚schläft’, d.h. er ist im leiblichen Todesschlaf befangen; seine Seite ist ja durchbohrt. Wir stehen vor dem Bild eines Toten . . . . Das Offensein der Augen ist also keine Aussage über einen Zustand des Leibes, sondern eine symbolische Hervorhebung der Gottheit des Gekreuzigten und ihrer Sieghaftigkeit gegenüber den Feinden des Gottmenschen, die über seinen Leib triumphiert zu haben glauben.’

Reflections on Grillmeier ’ s Der Logos am Kreuz  409 Hic leo surgendo portas confregit auerni Qui numquam dormit nusquam dormitat in aeuum. (This, as a lion arising, shattered the gates of hades Who never sleeps nor is anywhere ever asleep.)

Grillmeier concludes this chapter thus: Cross and the Crucified grow together in this meditation into a unity. All is governed by symbolism, without in any way the historical reality of the event on Calvary being cancelled. From this point of view, Christians did not need to have any anxiety in depicting a dead man on the Cross. For they knew: He is the crucified Logos.10

Chapter 5 is concerned with the image of Christ in Greek theology of the fourth and fifth century and the depiction of the Cross. I shall skip this for now, coming back later to a particular point Grillmeier makes towards the end. It ventures into the post-Chalcedonian history of Christology, an area then little studied; much of what he has to say is unnuanced compared with what he was to develop in the decades to follow in volume 2 of Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche. Chapter 6 delves a little into later Byzantine Christology, and is concerned with the mosaic of the Crucifixion that Justinian had had made for the Church of the Apostles, which replaced the church built by Constantine. The church was, of course, demolished by the Turks and replaced with a mosque; nothing survives of the mosaic. There survive, however, two literary accounts, two ekphraseis, of this Crucifixion, one from the twelfth century from Nikolaos Mesaritis, the other from the tenth century by Constantine Rhodios. From these ekphraseis, Grillmeier convincingly demonstrates that here, too, we have a Crucifixion of the Rabula type, though neither Mesaritis nor Rhodios any longer understands the symbolism of the open eyes. A final chapter summarizes Grillmeier’s conclusions and provides a catalogue of early depictions of the Crucifixion, both of the ‘real-symbolic (Rabula-)type’ and the ‘predominantly realistic type’; the earliest of the latter listed is from the late tenth century, in the Ottonian Gospel Book. I suppose I have given some reflections on the book in summarizing it, but I think I should do more than that. For all its shortness, Grillmeier packed a great deal into the book, and laid many trails that others could follow. Whether anyone

10 Grillmeier, Logos, 96: ‘Kreuz und Gekreuzigter wachsen in dieser Betrachtung zu einer Einheit zusammen. Alles ist von Symbolik beherrscht, ohne daß doch die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit des Geschehens auf Kalvaria aufgehoben wird. In dieser Sicht brauchten die Christen keine Angst zu haben, einen Toten am Kreuz darzustellen. Denn sie wußten: Er ist der gekreuzigte Logos.’

410  Selected Essays, Volume II ever did, I have no notion; only very rarely have I found references to it. There are several points about the book that I would like to pick up, and then move on from these to some more general remarks about the history that Grillmeier opens up in Der Logos am Kreuz. First, a criticism, that partly reflects the fact that I am writing now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, whereas Grillmeier was writing in the middle of the twentieth. Grillmeier explores a lot of material, especially Jewish-Christian, Gnostic, and apocalyptic, that he was going to develop further in the later recensions of his 1951 article that came to form the book Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche. He generally characterizes this material as ‘vulgär’. Perhaps the first time is on page 37 where he refers to the ‘vulgar(-gnostic) understanding [of] the descent and ascent of the invisible Logos into the structure of the Cosmos formed of spheres’. It was, I suppose, twenty years later that this handy distinction between vulgar and ‘learned’—popular and élite—in matters of religion and more generally human understanding of the world, Weltanschauung, was called in question by such scholars as Peter Brown. Grillmeier can hardly be expected to have anticipated criticisms not yet made, but I notice that even in the 1979 edition (I haven’t seen the 1991 edition) of Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, this categorization is employed.11 The second century is not an area I have explored much, but when I have I have been struck by the sophistication of works, such as the Protevangelium Jacobi, for instance, rather than their vulgar or popular nature. A great deal of Der Logos am Kreuz is naturally concerned with the development of iconography. One thing that struck me on rereading it—something especially relevant to the title of our colloquy: Jesus der Christus im Glauben der einen Kirche— is the use Grillmeier makes of a work that had then only just been published: Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky’s book, published in 1952 in German and in English (though originally written, I suppose, in French), Der Sinn der Ikonen, The Meaning of Icons, a work on icons that is quite remarkable in that Ouspensky was an icon painter and Lossky a theologian—neither of them art historians. There are seven references to this work in the course of Grillmeier’s book (more, for comparison, than references to Henri de Lubac). What did Grillmeier make of this book? (Indeed, what drew him to it in the first place?) The first substantial engagement with The Meaning of Icons occurs in the connection with some remarks about the value and place of imagery and icons in the Christian tradition. Grillmeier notes that Lossky makes claims for iconography that go beyond anything asserted in the Western tradition, setting icons alongside the dogmatic definitions and the Scriptural witness, and quotes from the closing words of Lossky’s essay, ‘Tradition and traditions’:

11  See the heading to pt I, ch. 2, I:3: ‘Mythos, Legende und Glaube: Zur vulgären Theologie des Mysterien des Lebens Jesu’, Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, band 1 (Herder, 1979), 168.

Reflections on Grillmeier ’ s Der Logos am Kreuz  411 If the intelligibility, which penetrates these sensible images, is identical with that  of the dogmas of the Church, it is that the two ‘traditions’—dogmatic and iconographic—coincide in so far as they express, each by its proper means, the same revealed reality.12

Grillmeier comments that ‘the Latin Church here makes a clear distinction, in so far as infallibility is attributed to the Teaching Office, inspiration to the Scriptures, and to icons a relatively kerygmatic function, which rests entirely on the teaching tradition’.13 The next reference is simply that: a reference to Lossky’s article on the particular symbolism of the Russian icons of the Crucifixion.14 Then on page 108 we come across something more interesting. In the chapter on the development of the image of Christ in Greek theology, Grillmeier discerns a development in Eastern iconography that goes beyond anything we find in the West. The reason he gives is the more ready embrace of Neo-Chalcedonianism in the East, compared with the more restrained Christology of the West, which never strayed far from the Tome of Leo, with its clear emphasis on the distinction of the natures in Christ (the reference to Leo’s Tome is my gloss on Grillmeier, who is not so specific). He remarks that Certainly the Eastern theology had as a whole much better spiritual presuppositions than the West, to enable it to understand more inwardly an exposition of the Crucifixion so rich in tension. Such was also widespread and understood in the West—we think here of Sancta Maria Antiqua in Rome—, although there a Christology reigned that seemed as a whole more sober and less open to the ardour of mystical experiences.15

In the East, Grillmeier suggests, this made possible the ‘development of the Christ-icon that was inspired by a heightened Christology of glory’ which found its ‘highpoint in so-called Palamism’: ‘the transparence of the divine is manifest in  the prevailing gold background of the icon’. And he goes on to quote from Ouspensky’s essay, ‘The Meaning and Language of Icons’ in The Meaning of the Icon, 12  L. Ouspensky and V. Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (Boston, MA, 1969), 24; quoted by Grillmeier, Logos, 31, n. 24. 13 Grillmeier, Logos, 31, n. 24: ‘Die lateinische Kirche macht hier einen deutlichen Unterschied, insofern dem Lehramt die Unfehlbarkeit, der Schrift die Inspiration, den Bildern eine relative kerygmatische Funktion zugeschrieben wird, die ganz auf der Lehrtradition aufruht.’ 14 Grillmeier, Logos, 96, n. 74, referring to Lossky’s article in Meaning, 183–6 (helpfully, the pagination of the German edition used by Grillmeier and the English edition I have used is very much the same). 15 Grillmeier, Logos, 107–8: ‘Gewiß hatte die östliche Theologie als ganze bessere geistige Voraussetzungen als die westliche, um gerade diese innerlich so spannungsreiche Kreuzigungsdarstellung zu verstehen. Sie wurde aber auch im Westen verbreitet und verstanden—denken wir nur an Sancta Maria Antiqua in Rom—, obwohl dort eine Christologie herrschte, die als ganze nüchterner und weniger für die Glut mystischer Erlebnisse aufgeschlossen zu sein schien.’

412  Selected Essays, Volume II In other words [after citing Matt. 17:2], the whole body of the Lord was ­transfigured, becoming as it were a radiant raiment of the Deity. ‘As regards the character of the Transfiguration’, say the Fathers of the VIIth Œcumenical Council, referring to St Athanasius the Great, ‘it was not that the Word laid aside His human form, but rather that the latter was illumined by His glory’. Thus in the Transfiguration ‘on Mount Thabor not only does the Deity appear to men, but manhood appears in the divine glory’.16

Grillmeier continues to paraphrase Ouspensky: what radiates from the image of Christ becomes through the grace of the Holy Spirit available to all the faithful. One who receives the grace of the Holy Spirit partakes in the ‘uncreated and divine radiance’, as St Gregory Palamas called the light of Thabor. In other words, ‘the one thus graced is united with the Deity, illumined by His uncreated light, in that he reveals in himself the likeness with the transfigured body of Christ.’17 Grillmeier is not happy with this development: here we ‘reach the furthest limit. The Godhead threatens to swallow up the human, and religious experience is over-valued. The state of the beyond is projected all too much into the here and now. This is certainly not what we find in the scene of the Crucifixion of the Rabula Codex’.18 I don’t want to adjudicate over that, rather I want to go back and make some observations about the development in Greek theology that Grillmeier sketches out in the chapter from which this comes. It seems to me that what was happening in Greek theology in the sixth and seventh centuries—something that was not happening, at least in the same way, in the West—was a refinement of the language of Christology, not least the terms central to the Chalcedonian Definition, terms such as πρόσωπον, ὑπόστασις, φύσις, οὐσία. Critically what was at stake was what was meant by person, represented by πρόσωπον and/or ὑπόστασις. The Greek theology of the sixth and seventh centuries was slowly trying to develop an adequate understanding of person, so as to understand more deeply who the Person of Christ is. Interpretation of the event of the Transfiguration is central to this, as is suggested by the passage from Ouspensky discussed by Grillmeier, which we have just looked at. In several places Maximos expounds his understanding of the Transfiguration. In one of the so-called Quaestiones et Dubia (191), he says that ‘the face of the Logos, which shone like the sun, is the characteristic hiddenness of his being’: 16  Ouspensky and Lossky, Meaning, 36; quoted by Grillmeier, Logos, 108. 17  Ouspensky and Lossky, Meaning, 36; quoted by Grillmeier, Logos, 108 (as Grillmeier is quoting the German text of Sinn der Ikonen, to which I have no access, I have translated what Grillmeier quotes, rather than the rendering in the English edition). 18 Grillmeier, Logos, 108–9: ‘Hier ist freilich—gemessen an einer ausgeglichenen chalkedonischen Christologie—die äußerste Grenze erreicht. Die Gottheit droht die Menschheit zu verschlingen, und die religiöse Erfahrung wird überbewertet. Der Zustand des Jenseitigen wird allzu sehr ins Diesseits hereinprojiziert. Solcher Art war schließlich die Kreuzigungsszene des Rabulas nicht.’

Reflections on Grillmeier ’ s Der Logos am Kreuz  413 the  πρόσωπον . . . τοῦ Λόγου is the χαρακτηριστικὴ τῆς οὐσίας αὐτοῦ κρυφιότης. Prosopon here is deliberately ambiguous: face and person. The face of Christ is the revelation of the person who he is, the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, ‘hidden’ because, being divine, his nature is unfathomable. A year or so later (probably), Maximos returned to the Transfiguration in his tenth Ambiguum. Again, there seems to be a play on the different meanings of prosopon: face and person. The disciples, he says, ‘were taught, in a hidden way, that the wholly blessed radiance that shone with dazzling rays of light from the Lord’s face [προσώπου] . . . was a symbol of his divinity’ (Amb. 10: PG 91, 1128B). The face reveals the inner essence of who one is: in the case of Christ, the face (prosopon) reveals the divine person (prosopon or hypostasis). Something similar is found in St John Damascene’s sermon on the Transfiguration, and the face as a revelation of the Person is matched by the Damascene’s development of his logical terminology in the two editions of the Dialectica, more clearly in the shorter, though complete, version, which culminates with a chapter on the notion of the hypostatic union, drawing on the terminology already discussed and clarified.19 These reflections have two purposes. First, they clarify and sharpen our understanding of the development of Greek theology and Christology in the wake of Chalcedon: at the heart of this development is clarification of what is meant by personhood, or what Smilen Markov calls, with reference to the Damascene, ‘hypostatic selfhood’ (‘hypostatische Selbstheit’). Second, this focus on understanding the meaning of the person also bears on the development of iconography in the Byzantine world, for it focuses more and more on the face, and the face as a revelation of the person. Maximos remarks, later on in his meditation on the Transfiguration, For it was necessary,20 without any change in himself, to be created like us, accepting through his immeasurable love for humankind to become the type and symbol of himself, and from himself symbolically to represent himself, and through the manifestation of himself to lead to himself in his complete and secret hiddenness the whole creation . . . .  (Amb. 10: 1165D)21

This passage was the subject of discussion in later Byzantine theology, during both the iconoclastic crisis and the hesychast controversy; for Theodore the Studite it seems to lie behind his argument that making and venerating icons is 19 See  A.  Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford, 2002), 38–53; and with far greater detail and insight, S.  Markov, Die metaphysische Synthese des Johannes von Damaskus. Historische Zusammenhänge und Strukturtransformationen (Brill, 2015), who argues that the notion of ‘hypostatic selfhood’ lies at the heart of the Damascene’s metaphysical synthesis (see esp. 120–32). 20  Amending (on the suggestion of my former pupil Adam Cooper) eidei to edei. 21 PG 91, 1165D: my translation (modified) from A.  Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London, 1996), 132 (italics added).

414  Selected Essays, Volume II necessary, not just possible; in the hesychast controversy, there was much argument over what Maximos meant by symbol in this connection. It seems to me a crucial step in what I have argued elsewhere (in the Festschrift for Brian Daley) might be thought of as a transition from doctrine of Christ to icon of Christ, that I think is manifest in Byzantine theology—a development, needless to say, which does not abandon the doctrinal tradition, but builds on it.22 Grillmeier’s understanding of the development of Greek theology, at least as manifest in Der Logos am Kreuz, does not get much further than noting a deplorable tendency towards a kind of monophysitism in Byzantine theology; in the decades to follow, he would have very much more to say. But there is another feature of his discussion of the early depictions of the Crucifixion such as we find in the Rabula Codex that I still find surprising. Grillmeier discusses at length the significance of the open eyes of the crucified Christ, but seems to me to miss something that is quite obvious. Whatever the meaning of the open eyes, it is obvious that they are open. If you stand before such a depiction of the Crucifixion, you are drawn to the eyes, to the face, of Christ; you are drawn into a relationship, of prayer, repentance, longing for Christ in response to his love: the Crucifixion, thus depicted, functions as a true icon. ‘God loved the world in this way—Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον’, as John says (John 3:16), repeated at every celebration of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: God loved the world in this way— and the Rabula-type Crucifixion seems a depiction of that, of the way God loved us. Such a picture is more than a depiction; it is an invitation to respond, an icon.

22  See  A.  Louth, ‘From Doctrine of Christ to Icon of Christ: St. Maximus 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. P.  W.  Martens (Notre Dame, IN, 2008), 260–75 (also printed as ‘From the Doctrine of Christ to the Person of Christ: St Maximos the Confessor on the Transfiguration of Christ’, Chapter 21 in Selected Essays, volume I).

34

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology About a century and a half ago, a young and precocious Russian intellectual, Vladimir Solov′ev, came to London, to study Indian and Gnostic philosophy.1 There, under the great dome of the Reading Room of the British Museum (what a lot that Reading Room has to answer for!), he had a vision of Wisdom, Sophia, as a young woman. This was his second such vision. The first had taken place some twelve years earlier, when he was 9, in Church of the Ascension in Moscow: standing there, he felt himself penetrated by the colour azure, and began to discern before him a figure standing there, also suffused with golden azure—­Sophia, as a young girl, holding a flower from unearthly lands, who smiled and nodded . . . and vanished! On this second occasion, in the Reading Room, Sophia appeared again, suffused once more with golden azure; this time he saw her face and she told him to go to Egypt. Obediently he set off, without delay, not even stopping in Paris. Once in Egypt he went out into the desert, where, wandering around in his black greatcoat and top hat, he was taken for a demon by some Bedouins, who attacked him and tied him up, and then later, realizing their mistake, released him. But by this time it was night, and alone in the desert, Solov′ev had his third and final vision of Sophia. Again, there was the azure and the sense of being absorbed by eternity: I saw it all, and all I saw was one. A single image of all female beauty . . . The immeasurable encompassing its sum. You stand alone before me, and within me.2

All this we learn from a poem called Три Свидания, ‘Three Meetings’, which Solov′ev wrote over twenty years later; but, as Avril Pyman observes, the poem relates the story in a deliberately bathetic way: bathos used to deflect rationalist analysis (and dismissal) of his account, so that it would be recognized that ‘his

1  Temenos Academy Lecture, 15 May 2020. 2  From Solov′ev’s poem, Три Свидания, which recounts his encounters with Sophia: text with translation by Boris Jakim and Laury Magnus, Vladimir Solovyov’s Poems of Sophia (The Variable Press, 1996), 22–39; translation from Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Wisdom: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Cornell University Press, 2009), 264–72, at 271.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0035

416  Selected Essays, VOLUME II chivalrous cult of Sophia the Divine Wisdom was based on some kind of real experience, which had had real consequences for him; that he was, as it were, consecrated by his love of Sophia to the salvation of the world’.3 It was a poem, the influence of which can be traced in Aleksandr Blok’s Стихи о Прекраснои Даме, ‘Verses about a Beautiful Woman’, as well as—­as we shall see—­in Sergei Bulgakov’s own account of his discovery, or rather the disclosure, of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. Vladimir Solov′ev is a commanding figure in the Russian intellectual tradition in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He embodies—­and foreshadows—­the turning back to their traditional Russian Orthodox faith of members of the Russian intelligentsia that took place in the first decade of the twentieth century. Reading the Russians of the nineteenth century one sometimes gets the impression that they are thinkers in a hurry: in a hurry to catch up with the intellectual traditions of the West that had passed Russia by. Whereas the West, since the turn of the millennium, had passed through a series of changes in the intellectual Weltanschauung—­the rise of scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and alongside all this the swirls of thought, resistant to or even opposed to, though influenced by, the mainstream: traditions of mysticism and esotericism, late medieval vernacular mysticism which continued into the early modern period—­Russia had missed all this, until the reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had rather abruptly opened Russia to the West. What had taken several centuries to assimilate in the West burst upon Russian intellectuals in the course of a mere matter of decades. Russian thought in the nineteenth century is nothing if not exciting, but it bounces from extreme to extreme, from a fierce sense of the peculiarity of the Russian experience to an equally fierce sense of its inadequacy. The Slavophils are an example of this: on the one hand, passionately devoted to what they see as special to Russia—­its sense of community as opposed to Western individualism, an intimate blend of public liturgy and personal mysticism and asceticism—­though exploring this in terms of current German Idealist philosophy, perhaps leaning more towards Schelling than Hegel. It is in this matrix that Solov′ev fits, his strong sense of Russian exceptionalism combining with an embrace of philosophical ideas current in the nineteenth-­ century West, especially German. He adds more to the mix, however, for he was unusual in having pursued not only a secular education in the university system set up by Peter the Great, but also the study of theology at the Spiritual Academy in Moscow: hitherto, the universities and the spiritual academies had lived in almost total isolation from each other, the clergy virtually forming a separate caste within Russian society, though Solov′ev’s grandfather had in fact been a priest. Solov′ev not only studied German philosophy, but also German theology

3  Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 228–9.

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  417 to which some of his central notions can be traced, not least his idea of the Godman, derived from Dorner’s lectures on Christology, where he spoke of Christ as the Gottmensch.4 Central to his philosophical/theological thought—­and central to our interest in him in this lecture—­is his notion of the Wisdom of God, Sophia. This betrays all the potentially contradictory influences on his thought: Wisdom features primarily in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament—­Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Job, as well as Ecclesiasticus (often called Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon—­and these ideas are picked up in the New Testament, where Christ is often called the Wisdom of God. Here Wisdom features as being alongside God in his work of creation: in Proverbs 8, Wisdom herself declares that ‘the Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works’ (8:22), and goes on to speak of her role in creation: When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him, and when he marked out his own throne on the winds . . . when he made strong the foundations of the earth, I was beside him, fitting together; it is I who was the one in whom he took delight. And each day I was glad in his presence . . . .  (8:27, 29–30)

But wisdom is also presented as one who inspires the human quest for understanding, a quest that leads ultimately to God: this is expressed very beautifully in the long hymn to Wisdom in Job 28, which turns on the exclamation: But where shall wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding? Man does not know the way to it, and it is not found in the land of the living . . . It is hid from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air . . . God understands the way to it, and he knows its place.  (Job. 28: 12–13, 21, 23)

In Job wisdom is the secret that lies behind creation, known to God alone, not—­or not yet—­personified, as in Proverbs. But as a person Wisdom is feminine: both the Hebrew, Hokhmah, and the Greek, Sophia, are feminine, suggesting some sort of male-­female polarity between God and his Wisdom. It is a polarity picked up in an early Christian writing, the so-­called Second Letter of Clement (so-­called because it is neither a letter—­it is a sermon—­nor by Clement of Rome), where we read: ‘I do not think you are ignorant, that the church is the body of Christ; for the Scripture says, “God made man male and female” (Gen. 1:27): the male is Christ, the female is the Church’ (II Clem. 14.2).

4 Solov′ev’s debt to German theology, rather than simply philosophy, has been illuminated in a recent book by Jeremy Pilch, ‘Breathing the Spirit with both Lungs’: Deification in the work of Vladimir Solov´ev (Peeters, 2018).

418  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Such reflection on Wisdom continues through the Fathers, not least in the Greek tradition: in the Fathers of the Church—­notably the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysios the Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor—­there is much reflection on Sophia, which can probably be traced back to the third-­century Christian scholar, Origen, who sees Wisdom in relation to the Word, complementing the outward movement of the Word with an inward movement of Wisdom: whereas the Word is made flesh, Wisdom is ‘hidden in a mystery’.5 But for the most part the sophiology of the Fathers is not very amenable to Solov′ev for one reason in particular: almost invariably Wisdom is identified with Christ; wisdom ceases to be ‘Lady Wisdom’, she loses her feminine gender, and becomes an aspect of an attribute of Christ the Word of God. There is, however, some evidence—­not clear, and much disputed—­that in the Russian adoption of Byzantine Christianity, Wisdom once again assumed her identity as gendered (in doing this, it may be that Slav Christianity is articulating more clearly traditions that were muted in the Christianity of the Byzantine Empire, especially traditions about the Mother of God found in the apocryphal writings, such as the Protevangelium of James: that is certainly what Solov′ev wanted to think). ‘Holy Wisdom’—Ἁγία Σοφία—­was the dedication of the Great Cathedral Church in Constantinople, the capital of Constantine’s Christian empire. It is, however, clear that that Great Church was dedicated to Christ, the Wisdom of God: for though the mosaic in the narthex that greets one as one approaches the nave of the church—­of the Mother of God seated holding Christ, her son—­is open to either interpretation, it is clearer in the feast of the dedication of the Church, which is close to the feast of the Nativity of Christ (Justinian’s rebuilt church was dedicated on 27 December; the feast of the dedication is now kept on 23rd). Churches dedicated to Holy Wisdom became very popular in Slav countries. However, and this is something Solov′ev draws attention to himself,6 the dedication of these churches—­in Kiev, Vladimir, and several other cities, eventually in Moscow too—­is clearly to the Mother of God, not Christ, as their feasts of dedication are either the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God (8 September) or the feast of her Dormition (15 August). Holy Wisdom is, in some way, being associated with the Mother of God, rather than Christ, and this is eventually found in the Slav iconographic tradition. This restoration of femininity to the figure of Holy Wisdom Solov′ev saw as a rediscovery, or maybe a revelation, vouchsafed to the Slav soul. In this context, Judith Kornblatt quotes a striking passage from George Fedotov’s The Russian Religious Mind: In Mother Earth, who remains the core of Russian religion, converge the most secret and deep religious feelings of the folk. Beneath the beautiful veil of grass 5 Origen, Homily on Exodus 12. 4. 6  See, e.g., Vladimir Solov′ev, Russia and the Universal Church (Geoffrey Bles, 1948), 177–8.

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  419 and flowers, the people venerate with awe the black moist depths, the source of all fertilizing powers, the nourishing breast of nature, and their own last resting place. The very epithet of the earth in the folk songs, ‘Mother Earth, the Humid’, known also in the Iranian mythology, alludes to the womb rather than to the face of the Earth. It means that not beauty but fertility is the supreme virtue of the earth, although the Russian is by no means insensible to the loveliness of its surface. Earth is the Russian ‘eternal womanhood’, not the celestial image of it: mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian soil is black.7

There is an evident echo of this in Dostoevsky’ portrayal of the Elder Zossima, whose teaching includes: Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.8

But, alongside this biblical and religious aspect, there is a philosophical dimension to Solov′ev’s reflection on Wisdom—­which draws on what one might think of as the underside to the history of philosophy as seen by the Enlightenment, a tradition that ran, in the West, parallel with the Enlightenment and the advance of modern science, but in reaction against it. In this tradition, the intellectual advances of Western culture were mistrusted; there was a sense that the West had taken a wrong turn, leading to a belief, or a hope, that it was to the East that the West needed to look for a solution to its problems: Ex oriente lux! Although such ideas grew apace during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—­the names of Emanuel Swedenborg and, for the English, at least, William Blake, come to mind—­this tradition has a long prehistory, stretching at least back to the Renaissance and the rediscovery of Neoplatonism and Hermetic philosophy (taken at face value, as derived from Egyptian learning), and attempts to discover a pristina theologia, hidden behind the increasingly fragmented theologies of Western Christendom, that were justifying the divisions that lay behind the wars of religion and the terrible human suffering that they caused.9 Out of these concerns, one can trace a tradition, associated with names like Jakob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, John Pordage, Thomas Taylor (the ‘English Platonist’), Franz von Baader—­and Meister Eckhart (who occurs at this point in the list, quite unfairly, as it was only in the nineteenth century that his German works were discovered, causing him to burst upon the German intellectual scene with all the 7  Quoted Kornblatt, Divine Wisdom, 53, quoting from G. P. Feodotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1 (Nordland Publishing Company, 1975), 12–13. 8  The Brothers Karamazov, book 6, ch. 3 (h) (tr. Richard Pevear and Lara Volokhonsky, Everyman’s Library, 1997, 322). 9 See D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (Duckworth, 1972).

420  Selected Essays, VOLUME II meretricious splendour of a condemned heretic): a tradition that influenced more respectable (or at least more mainstream) names like Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. This is a tradition marked by a resistance to the analytic fragmentation of the sciences, together with a longing for a sense of ultimate unity, and a sense that ultimately all is—­or may be—­gathered up in the One—­the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, the ‘One and the All’. Furthermore, in this tradition, the idea, even the figure, of Wisdom, or Sophia, comes to play a role. It represents the idea of something deeper than mere knowledge, in which the increasingly alienated specialized branches of the sciences might coinhere to form a unified whole. Wisdom also represents an approach that secures the human person—­increasingly excluded from a mechanically conceived universe—­a central role, for Wisdom is conceived in terms inseparable from the person, in whom she dwells. Eternal Wisdom builds: I shall the palace be When I in wisdom rest and wisdom rests in me.10

Our concern is, however, Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology, though without some understanding of Solov′ev, it is impossible to make sense of Bulgakov. Bulgakov, like most of those we might think of as ‘Silver Age’ theologians, parallel to—­and often friends, or intellectual partners with—­the poets of the Silver Age, such as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Blok, and Andrey Bely—­was indebted to Solov′ev, perhaps not so much directly, as through his friend and mentor (though a younger man), Fr Pavel Florensky, whom we must pass by with barely a mention. Sergei Bulgakov was born in 1871, so was barely 30 when Solov′ev died. There are many parallels between their ideas about Sophia, but many differences, not least the differences in their own quests for Wisdom. Solov′ev’s quest was evidently for some personification as a woman of heavenly Sophia; Bulgakov’s was rather a quest for beauty, not least the beauty of the natural world. Bulgakov came from a family of priests—­he could trace his ‘levitical heritage’ back over many generations—­but, attracted by radical political ideas in the last decades of the nineteenth century, he had abandoned the education traditional for a priest’s son—­ through seminary and spiritual academy—­ and enrolled in Moscow University, where he studied economics, becoming a Marxist. By the end of the century, he was pursuing his own ideas, becoming first a very unorthodox Marxist, and then taking part in the turn back to the faith on the part of many of  the intelligentsia in the early years of the twentieth century, contributing to

10  Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer I. 178, trans. from the selection by Willard R. Trask (Pantheon Books, 1953), 27.

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  421 the  symposium published in 1909, Вехи (‘Landmarks’), in which a group of intellectuals made clear their dissatisfaction with Marxism and its neglect of spiritual and metaphysical questions. The first place, I think, where Bulgakov talks about Sophia is in his work, Philosophy of Economy, published in 1912. By this time, he had already returned to his ancestral faith, though he was still searching, and indeed his search con­ tinued. Philosophy of Economy is a final repudiation of Marxist economics, and is indeed, as Rowan Williams has said, ‘emphatically not an essay in orthodox ­economics’.11 Nevertheless it still engages with economics. The Russian word for economics, хозяиство, is directly related to the word for a proprietor (хозяин, in fact derived from the German Hausherr, which is probably why this group of  words seems rather isolated in Russian), with cognate words such as хозяйничать (managing a household), thus suggesting an activity, a process, somewhat more than the Greek word on which it, and our word, economics, is based—­οἰκονομία—­which is derived from words for house and law. It is this aspect of home-­making, or making oneself at home, in a potentially inhospitable world, that leads Bulgakov to think in terms of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. Although in the chapter on the ‘Sophic Economy’, he rehearses all the more usual antecedents of sophiology—­ Western esoteric mysticism (he quotes Angelus Silesius a couple of times), Schelling, Solov′ev (specifically mentioning his Три Свидания)—what is important, it seems to me, is the way in which Sophia is involved in the process that follows on from, or rather complements, creation: the shaping or moulding of creation, the making of creation a world in to live—­ establishing, if you like, within the world, the κόσμος, a place to live in, an οἰκουμένη. He remarks: The purpose of economic activity is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in Truth. Sophia acts through the medium of historical humanity, and it is Sophia that determines the teleology of the historical process. The world as Sophia, though it has fallen into a false and hence mortal condition, must regain being in Truth through labour, or through the economic process. If selfness in man could only be vanquished through self-­improvement or religious dedication, selfness in nature is vanquished through labour and in the historical process. Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal—­outside of economics proper—­is to return the world to life in Sophia.12

11 Rowan Williams, Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology (T.&T.  Clark, 1999), 23, n. 1. 12  Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans, Catherine Evtuhov (Yale University Press, 2000), 153.

422  Selected Essays, VOLUME II The roots of this notion of Sophia are ultimately biblical: The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for the sake of this works . . . Before the present age he founded me, in the beginning. Before he made the earth and before he made the depths . . . When he prepared the sky, I was present to him . . . I was beside him, fitting together, it is I who was the one in whom he took delight. And each day I was glad in his presence at every moment, When he rejoiced after he had completed the world, and rejoiced among the sons of men.13

Wisdom, Sophia, is God’s companion in the work of creation, fitting it together, completing it, and so the human task of making in the world a place in which human beings can be at home is the work of Sophia. The realm of Sophia is therefore the realm of arts and crafts, from basic activities such as cooking and making clothes, building houses and towns, to more developed forms of art—­poetry, music-­making, painting, sculpting. It is doing something with something; it is not creative in the way that God is creative, when he calls beings into existence from nothing; but it is a kind of making or fashioning. It re-­creates the created order, making it a home for man: it is, as Bulgakov puts it, a ‘re-­creative’ activity. Although I do not think that Bulgakov makes this point, Sophia, in his understanding, is not strictly creative, as God is creative, but what one might call demiurgic, from the Greek word δημιουργεῖν, which means etymologically, to work, or make something, for the people (δῆμος): making, not as a private activity on the part of the artist, but as a public activity, a skill or craft for public benefit. There is, however, a danger here, for this refashioning of creation, making it something in which we human beings are at home, could disguise creation, make it all too much an ‘environment’ for men; it can also exploit the natural order, as we have become very well aware today. Bulgakov had felt this danger, and it was his sense of this danger that gradually led him from the Marxism he had espoused as a young man, back to the faith of his fathers. Marxist economics could not see nature as God’s creation, but rather regarded nature as material for human consumption and use. Bulgakov’s sense of the fundamental wrongness of such an attitude to nature came to him as result of a series of experiences, recorded in his diary (parts of which were published after his death as Autobiographical Sketches), passages which he—­significantly, I think—­included in the early pages of his first work of explicitly Christian theology, Свет Неберчний, Unfading Light, with the subtitle, ‘Calls and Encounters’ (Совы и встречи)—a clear, though also distanced, 13  Proverbs 8:22–4, 27, 30–1.

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  423 allusion to Solov′ev’s ‘Three Meetings’ (Три Свидания)—which give the three key stages of his own discovery of Wisdom. Let me quote a few passages—­from the first, referring to something that took place in 1895: Evening was falling. We were travelling across the southern steppe, covered with the fragrance of honey-­coloured grass and hay, gilded with the crimson of a sublime sunset. In the distance the fast-­approaching Caucasus Mountains appeared blue. I was seeing them for the first time . . . My soul had become accustomed long ago to see with a dull silent pain only a dead wasteland in nature beneath the veil of beauty, as under a deceptive mask; without being aware of it, my soul was not reconciled with a nature without God. And suddenly in that hour my soul became agitated, started to rejoice and began to shiver: but what if . . . if it is not wasteland, not a lie, not a mask, not death but him, the blessed and loving Father, his raiment, his love? . . . God was knocking quietly in my heart and it heard that knocking, it wavered but did not open . . . And God departed.14

But it didn’t end there, Bulgakov went on to speak of renewed experiences: [b]efore me the first day of creation blazed. All was clear, all became reconciled, replete with ringing joy . . . And that moment of meeting did not die in my soul; this was her apocalypse, her wedding feast, the first encounter with Sophia . . .15

In the light of these experiences, Bulgakov realized he, his soul, could not be reconciled with ‘nature without God’. A few years later, during his studies in Germany, he encountered the Sistine Madonna in the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden. It touched him to the heart, and he found himself drawn there every morning: I was beside myself . . . tears at once joyful and bitter flowed from my eyes, the ice in my heart melted and a kind of knot in my life came undone. This was not an aesthetic emotion, no; it was an encounter, a new knowledge, a miracle . . . I was still a Marxist then and I involuntarily called this contemplation a prayer, and every morning, aiming to find myself in the Zwinger before anyone else, I ran there, to ‘pray’ and to weep before the face of the Madonna . . . .16

The third encounter was not for another ten years, in 1908, took place in a ‘lonely, forgotten hermitage in the woods’. He had come ‘in the secret hope of encountering God’, but all his preparations led nowhere: he felt nothing and fled the church . . . his 14  Thomas Allen Smith, trans., Unfading Light (Eerdmans, 2012), 8. 15  Allen Smith, trans., Unfading Light, 9. 16  Allen Smith, trans., Unfading Light, 10.

424  Selected Essays, VOLUME II steps leading him to the cell of an elder, who told him that ‘all human sins are like a droplet before the ocean of divine mercy’. The revelation of Sophia in the beauty and wildness of nature led him to belief in God and thereby enabled him to accept the transcendent beauty of nature, rather than seeing it as a utilitarian wasteland. There is, it seems to me, something parallel to the way in which Bulgakov comes to grasp the significance of nature in the distinction Heidegger makes, for instance in his essay, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’,17 between Welt and Erde, ‘world’ and ‘earth’. The world is what man has made of his environment, and it is the purpose of art to recall to man that this world is made from the earth, that it is not simply there to be treated as a human environment (it is, it seems to me, in many respects the difference in Greek between οἰκουμένη and κόσμος, mentioned above). Heidegger’s fear was that technology has enabled men to fashion a ‘hergestellte Welt’, a world confected for human purposes; the way the earth erupted into the world through the work of art had the result of preventing man from being deluded by his techno­ logic­al power.18 I am suggesting that Bulgakov’s sophiology, whatever its intellectual ante­ cedents, grew out of his pondering on what man achieves through his re-­creative activity, and his realization that he could only make sense of his experience of the beauty of nature by accepting its sophianic foundation, which entailed accepting the reality of God. From this realization, we can, I think, begin to understand the fundamental role of sophiology in Bulgakov’s theology. It is, and this is not incidental, related to the way his theology is rooted in the Liturgy. This was something that Fr Alexander Schmemann saw, even though he was quite averse to the style and tenor of Bulgakov’s theology. In an article called ‘Trois images’,19 he speaks of Bulgakov celebrating the Divine Liturgy: My third memory of Fr Sergii, the third image, is . . . of Fr Sergii before the altar, celebrating the liturgy . . . He was not accomplishing a well-­established rite, trad­ ition­al in all its details. He delved down to the very depths, and one had the impression that the liturgy was being celebrated for the first time, that it had fallen down from heaven and been set up on the earth at the dawn of time. The Bread and the Chalice on the altar, the flame of the candles, the smoke of the incense, the hands raised to the heavens: all this was not simply an ‘office’. There was accomplished here something involving the whole created world, something of the pre-­eternal, the cosmic—­the ‘terrible and the glorious’ [страшное и славное],

17  In Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 7–68. 18  There is a wonderful evocation of Heidegger’s notion of Erde in Michel Haar, Le chant de la terre (L’Herne, 1985). 19  Alexander Schmemann, ‘Trois images’, Le Messager Orthodoxe 57 (1972), 2–21.

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  425 in the sense these liturgical words have in Slavonic. It seemed to me that it is not by chance that the writings of Fr Sergii are very often laden—­so it seems—­with liturgical Slavisms, that they themselves so often resonate with liturgical praise. It is not just a matter of style. For the theology of Fr Sergii, at its most profound, is precisely and above all liturgical.20

For the liturgy, like Sophia, negotiates an ‘in-­between’, relating man to God. The fundamental intuition of sophiology is relatively easy to enunciate; it is that the gulf between the uncreated God and creation, brought into being out of nothing, does not put creation in opposition to God, rather Wisdom constitutes a kind of μεταξύ, ‘between’, between God and man/creation, for Wisdom is that through which God created the universe, and it is equally through wisdom that the human quest for God finds fulfilment. Wisdom, one might say, is the face that God turns towards his creation, and equally the face that creation, in human kind, turns towards God. Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace, for it owes its existence to grace. Rather creation is graced, it is holy; in creation God may be encountered. Bulgakov’s account of the events that led to his own conversion, which we have already looked at, taking them from his book Unfading Light, published while he was still in Russia in 1917, finds later confirmation in his magnificent account of standing beneath the dome of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in January 1923, after his expulsion from Russia in the steamer that left Odessa earl­ ier that month. There he spoke of being aware of the artistic and tangible proof and manifestation of holy Sophia—­ of the Sophianic nature of the world and the cosmic nature of Sophia . . . neither heaven nor earth, but the vault of heaven above the earth . . . neither God nor man, but divinity, the divine veil thrown over the world. How true was our ancestors’ feeling in this temple, how right they were in saying that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth! [Here Bulgakov makes allusion to the report in the Russian Primary Chronicle of the ambassadors sent from Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev] Indeed they were neither in heaven nor on earth, they were in Hagia Sophia—­between the two: this is the μεταξύ of Plato’s philosophical in­tu­ ition. Hagia Sophia is the last silent testimony to future ages of the Greek genius: a revelation in stone.21

His experience in Hagia Sophia was the beginning of what turned out to be a life in exile. Two years later he was in Paris, dean of the newly established Russian 20  Schmemann, ‘Trois images’, 13–14. 21  Sergius Bulgakov, Автобиографические Заметки (YMCA Press, 21991), 95 (much of this is translated in A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), here at 14).

426  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Orthodox theological institute, the Institut St-­Serge. He was a public and very distinguished figure in the diaspora. There he began his properly theological work (even Unfading Light was more a work of (theistic) philosophy) in the twenty years that were left to him. His intuitions about sophiology stood at the centre of his theological reflections. There in Paris, in the more intense world of the Russian émigrés, his intuitions about sophiology became controversial. His ideas about Sophia were held to blur the distinction between God and the world, to amount to some form of pantheism (Bulgakov himself used the term panentheism). His later years were dogged by controversy; some of the Russians in the divided diaspora (a division largely church-­political, as was in part the inspiration for the attacks on Bulgakov) sought an official condemnation of his teaching, which duly came from the Moscow patriarchate and the synod of the Russian Church in Exile, then based in Sremski Karlovci in Serbia: the two jurisdictions to which Bulgakov himself did not belong. Bulgakov’s legacy has been further over­ shadowed by two factors: first, the way in which his thought is firmly based in a style of philosophy that was becoming increasingly superseded by the second quarter of the twentieth century; and second, by what became the predominant mode of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century, the so-­called Neo-­Patristic synthesis associated with the names of Fr Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, both contemporaries of Bulgakov in Paris (though more careful reading has revealed that Bulgakov’s opponents owed more to his tradition of Russian religious thought than they imagined). More recently, with the availability in English translation of the works of Bulgakov (and his mentor, Fr Pavel Florensky), there has been increasing interest in Bulgakov’s theology, not least among non-­ Orthodox theologians, and much of this interest lies in the way in which Bulgakov, with his understanding of Wisdom, Sophia, enables one to speak about the ‘in-­ between’, the μεταξύ, rather than so emphasizing the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as to put the uncreated and the created—­God and the world—­in opposition one to another, facing each other over an infinite abyss. For Bulgakov, the relationship between God and the world, constituted by Wisdom, cannot be an arbitrary relationship, nor can it be a necessary one. Uncreated wisdom and created wisdom differ only in their being uncreated or created. Why? Because if they differed in any other way, then God would be ­severed from creation and creation from God. This line of thought indicates a further step involved in sophiology, which raises the issue: what must creation be, if this is true? What is creation like, if God indeed created it (through wisdom)? As we ask these questions, we find ourselves asking questions that have exercised Christians for centuries, even perhaps most acutely at the beginning, when, in the second century, Christianity faced the manifold challenges of Greek philosophy and what scholars now call gnosticism. Christianity was not consonant with just any view of the universe. Christians agreed with the Platonists over the existence of a transcendent divine, divine providence and human freewill, and adopted

Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology  427 Platonist arguments against other Greek philosophers—­Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans—­who rejected one or other of these positions.22 They completely rejected the view, held by most of those whom scholars now call ‘Gnostics’, that the universe was the product of a God or gods who were either malevolent or negligent. At one point Irenaeus defends the Christian view of a universe, created out of nothing by a good God who rules it through his providence, by appealing to the Christian liturgy: How . . . can they say that flesh is destined for corruption, the flesh that has been nourished by the body and blood of the Lord? Either they must change their opinion, or cease to offer him what they have said they do. Our opinion is consonant with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms our faith. We offer him what belongs to him, harmoniously proclaiming the communion and union of flesh and spirit. For taking from the earth bread, after the invocation of the Lord it is no longer common bread, but Eucharist, joining together two realities, the earthly and the heavenly, so that our bodies, receiving the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of eternal resurrection. We make an offering to him, not because he needs anything, but to give thanks for his gifts and to sanctify the creation.23

For Irenaeus, to take bread and wine, to offer them to God and invoke the Holy Spirit to transform them into the body and blood of Christ, entails a certain view of creation: that it is good, that the one to whom we offer the Eucharist is the Creator. In the same way, for Bulgakov, to celebrate the Eucharist entails that cre­ ation belongs to God, that it is not alien to him, that to be a creature is already to be graced, something that Fr Schmemann’s ‘third image’ insists on: Bulgakov’s celebration of the Divine Mysteries seemed to him something autochthonous, something rooted in the very being of creation. It is this intuition that lay at the heart of his sophiology. It is as we pursue such reflections as these that we find ourselves entering into the arcanum of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’s theology. It is a theology that invites the human spirit on a fascinating quest after the nature of things, but it is rooted in the simple turning of the creature towards God in joy and gratitude.

22  See my ‘Pagans and Christians on Providence’. In Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority and Change, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 279–97 (also published as Chapter 14 in this volume). 23 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV. 18. 5–6.

35 Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′ The Experience of the Russian Émigrés

In his essay, ‘Two Cities’, the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski makes a distinction between what he calls the settled, the emigrants, and the homeless. He explains the difference between these three categories thus: Settled people die where they were born; sometimes one sees country homes in which multiple generations of the same family lived. Emigrants make their homes abroad and thus make sure that at least their children will once again belong to the category of settled people (who speak another language). An emigrant, therefore, is a temporary link, a guide who takes future generations by the hand and leads them to another, safe place, or so it appears to him. A homeless person, on the other hand, is someone who, by accident, caprice of fate, his own fault, or the fault of his temperament did not want—­or was in­cap­able in his childhood or early youth of forging—­close and affectionate bonds with the surroundings in which he grew and matured. To be homeless, therefore, does not mean that one lives under a bridge or on the platform of a less frequented Metro station (as for instance, nomen omen, the station Europe on the line Pont de Levallois—­Gallieni); it means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities, or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland.1

I quote this to open up the notion of exile or diaspora that forms one pole of the subject of this paper: the diaspora created in the 1920s by the expulsion of the non-­Communist intellectuals from the Bolshevik republic. I suppose most of them are to be classified as emigrants, who became settled in the country of their reception and whose children grew up and settled there. My little experience of people in this category suggests that it is not as tidy as Zagajewski suggests. Although ‘settled’, the children (and grandchildren and great-­grandchildren) of these emigrants often preserve a sense of dual belonging; they have not become settled in anything like the sense of those whose families have the roots of

1  Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities (University of Georgia Press, 2002), 3–4.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0036

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   429 long-­established settlement. They hanker after their origins, and those origins form part of their sense of who they are.2 The third category, to which Zagajewski assigns himself—­the homeless—­is a very broad category and might be thought to characterize much modern society in the West. Even I, who could not be more English, could be categorized as homeless in Zagajewski’s sense: like many children born in the middle of the last century, my parents moved about, so that I cannot indicate streets or a community that belong to my ‘miniature homeland’. And this category embraces many of the emigrants, too, especially if they emigrated as children, for even if they turn out to be real emigrants in Zagajewski’s sense, whose children have settled, they are unable to point to the streets, the neighbourhood, that unequivocally constitute their ‘home’. The point of these preparatory remarks is to suggest that in looking at the experience of exile or diaspora and its impact on the thought of the Russian émigrés, especially in Paris, we are not looking at a tiny, limited phenomenon, but one that has resonances in many who do not think of themselves as exiles, but whose experience embraces something of that condition, so far as their own sense of their place in the world is concerned. The other pole of this paper is the notion of sobornost´, which has become a key term in the understanding of human community, and in particular, ecclesial community—­the sense of being a Church—­in modern Orthodox theology, and which was profoundly influenced by the thought of the Russian émigrés who made their home in Paris in the middle years of the last century. The notion of sobornost´ was one that the émigrés brought with them from their homeland: it is one of the key terms of Slavophil thought, so we must begin by showing how the notion emerged in the nineteenth century.3 Aleksei Khomiakov, along with Ivan Kireevsky, one of the first Slavophils, sometimes argued that, while Western Christianity was heir to three traditions—­of Hebrew religion, Greek philosophy, and Roman law—­Slav Christianity, or Orthodox Christianity, was heir to only two of these traditions—­Hebrew religion and Greek philosophy (a very questionable position, given the importance of law in the Emperor Justinian’s reforms). This meant, in particular, that the Slavs had no real grasp of the notion of an individual, something Khomiakov regarded as embedded in Roman law. For him it was the notion of the individual, cut off from the organic community to which human beings should properly belong, that was the root cause of the problems of the West—­problems that had been introduced into Russian society by the reforms of Peter the Great and made worse during the 2  To take one example out of hundreds, see the book by Fr Alexander Schmemann’s son, Serge, Echoes of a Native Land (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 3  As a matter of fact, the term sobornost´ (as well as the term ‘integral knowledge’, tsel´noe znanie) is not actually found in the writings of the Slavophils, Khomiakov and Kireevsky. See Robert Bird in On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 8 and n.

430  Selected Essays, Volume II reign of Catherine the Great. In truth, it seems to me that Khomiakov and his Slavophilism were not as uniquely Slav as he thought. Many thinkers throughout the Western world were alarmed at the corrosive effects on human society of industrialization and urbanization, which they felt destroyed natural communities, and reduced human beings to interchangeable units—­individuals identified by a factory number or by their place of residence in some faceless flat. Andrzej Walicki calls Slavophilism ‘an interesting variant of European conservative romanticism’,4 which was something to be found throughout Europe in the nineteenth century; an English example would be Coleridge, with whom it would be profitable, I think, to compare Khomiakov. Khomiakov looked back to the Russian village, with its church, the great house, and its lands, ruled by a village council in which all members of the village participated. Such a society was an organic community; it was not made up of independent individuals but was rather a society in which its members found their identity by belonging. It was an example of the ‘one and the many’: the one and the many balancing each other, neither reducible to the other. There was a good deal of romanticism about the village life of the Russian peasants, summed up by such romantics in the folk proverb: ‘Doing anything in common is good, even dying’.5 The ‘one and the many’—the hen kai pan—­was a central issue in the movements in German philosophy that followed in wake of Kant and sought to restore the sense of organic unity of knower and known that Kant had severed: movements characterized as ‘Idealism’. For all the anti-­Westernism implicit in Slavophil thought, it was, in truth, deeply in debt to the currents of German Idealist phil­ oso­phy, especially the thought of Schelling. What was important for Slavophils like Khomiakov and Kireevsky was that for them the reconciliation of the one and the many was rooted in God the Holy Trinity, in which unity and the manifold are already united, and that this complementarity of the one and the many was characteristic of the cosmos created by God, and in particular of the Church, at least in its Eastern Orthodox manifestation. Khomiakov used the Slavonic word that translated the Greek katholikos in the creed—­soborny—­to characterize the way in which the Church held together the one and the many. The word soborny is derived from the verb sobrat´, to gather together, and I suggest it was a careful attempt to render the root meaning of katholikos, which is derived from the expression καθ’ ὅλον, meaning something like ‘to take as a whole’. For what is characteristic of the Orthodox Church, according to Khomiakov, is precisely that the whole body of believers is gathered into a single whole; together they form a unity without having their freedom suppressed. Reconciling freedom and unity was a problem that Schelling had wrestled with, as part of the problem of the One 4  Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Clarendon Press, 1975), 160. 5  Quoted by Donald Nicholl in the chapter ‘The Holy Folk’ in his Triumphs of the Spirit in Russia (DLT, 1997), 195.

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   431 and the Many, which is perhaps why Schelling—­of all the German Idealists—­came to be so attractive to the Slavophils. The soborny nature of the Orthodox Church, which later Russian thinkers came to call by the abstract noun sobornost´, was something that Khomiakov contrasted with what he found in the Western Churches: in his view, Catholicism achieved unity at the price of freedom, whereas the Protestant Church sacrificed unity in the interests of freedom. Only in the Orthodox Church and her sobornost´ could be found both unity and freedom: a union freely embraced and a freedom that did not itch to tear apart unity. This sense of an organic unity, rooted in Christ and his body the Church, in which believers found their identity through faith in the One Christ and through belonging to the One Church—­a belonging expressed in the sacramental life of the Church and the mutual concern of all members, living and departed, human and angelic, for one another—­reaches back behind the clash of authority and freedom that marked the Reformation to an understanding of the Church more characteristic of patristic thought. Much of Khomiakov’s thought was brought to expression through his acquaintance with William Palmer, an Englishman and an Anglican deacon, who made his way to Russia in his quest to promote the unity of the Church. Palmer and Khomiakov exchanged letters, and Khomiakov wrote for him a short ecclesiological treatise, The Church Is One.6 In that treatise he expresses very beautifully the meaning of sobornost´, the way in which the individual finds his true reality in union with others in the Church, in contrast to the destructive solitude that characterizes reliance on one’s self: We know that when any one of us falls, he falls alone; but no one is saved alone. He who is saved is saved in the Church, as a member of her, and in unity with all her other members . . . Wherefore no one can rest his hope on his own prayers, and every one who prays asks the whole Church for intercession, not as if he had any doubts of the intercession of Christ, the one Advocate, but in the assurance that the whole Church ever prays for all her members. All the angels pray for us, the apostles, martyrs, and patriarchs, and above all, the Mother of our Lord, and this holy unity is the true life of the Church . . .7

Khomiakov’s notion of sobornost´ has philosophical, political, or sociological roots; he is thinking of (his idealized view of) the Russian village; nothing much is added to the notion in its application to the Church.

6 W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the Universal Church, vol. 1 (the only volume published) (Rivington, Percival, and Co., 1895) contains Khomiakov’s correspondence with Palmer and includes, as the final chapter, Khomiakov’s treatise The Church is One, which is more easily obtainable elsewhere (see next footnote). 7 Alexey Stepanovich Khomiakov, The Church is One, with an intro. by Nicolas Zernov (The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1968), 38–9 (there is also a translation of this treatise in Bird, On Spiritual Unity, 31–53).

432  Selected Essays, Volume II Let us now turn to the other pole of the title: the experience of exile, or ­ iaspora, in particular the theological reflection of the Russian émigrés in Paris d between the two world wars. Much water had flowed under the bridge of history between Slavophils and our émigrés, not least the Communist revolution, and preceding that the long period of talk about reform of the Church that cul­min­ ated in the Moscow Synod or Sobor of 1917/18. This aimed to bring an end to the long period of ecclesiological distortion that had been created by Peter the Great’s promulgation of the Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721 and the suppression of the patriarchate. In the view of many of the émigrés, this sobor had been a lost opportunity, but it had provided a forum for some serious thought about how the Church should be organized and consequently provoked some ecclesiological reflection (distilled in dialogue form in Bulgakov’s Beneath the Ramparts of Cherson8).9 The Moscow Sobor had taken place under the shadow of the flight of Minerva’s owl; even as it restored the patriarchate to its position in the imperial symphonia model, the Communist Revolution was embarking on a process that would lead to persecution intended to exterminate the Church altogether. In the diaspora, the Russian émigrés found themselves among Western Christians who were often very welcoming. This forced them to articulate their sense of identity as Russian Orthodox Christians. Some, certainly, did this in a spirit of nostalgia, with an evocation of Holy Russia, now lost, but for many of them something much deeper was involved. They found themselves discovering a sense of the unique spirit of Orthodox—­and especially Russian Orthodox—­theology and life. This was an enormously contentious issue: there were those who wanted to continue the tradition of theological-­cum-­philosophical reflection that had marked the later years of the nineteenth century—­Fr Sergii Bulgakov was the leading figure among these. Others, notably Fr Georges Florovsky, were convinced that this tradition was bankrupt and that a radically fresh start was needed, which Florovsky called ‘Christian Hellenism’ or the ‘Neo-­Patristic synthesis’. There also emerged a sense—­uniting in some ways those otherwise opposed—­that the fundamental issues between Orthodox and Western theology could be found in the hesychast controversy of fourteenth-­century Byzantium, with St Gregory Palamas as the champion of Orthodoxy, a sense that in some way built on the tradition of what one might call ‘Philokalic’ theology that had emerged in the nineteenth century. In another way there was a widespread sense that the heart of Orthodoxy could be found Russian culture, as depicted in the nineteenth-­century literature, not least the novels of Dostoevsky; one could place alongside this the ‘Philokalic’

8 Serge Boulgakov, Sous les ramparts de Chersonèse, trans. Bernard Marchadier (Editions ad Solem, 1999). 9  See the discussion in Hyacinthe Destivelle, Le concile de Moscou (1917–1918), Cogitatio Fidei 246 (Cerf, 2006), 263–78.

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   433 theology of the popular work then (in the 1920s) soon to be translated into English as The Way of a Pilgrim.10 What concerns us is the more specifically ecclesiological reflection we find in the Russian diaspora. There is a sense—­made more acute by the perceived failure of the Moscow Sobor—­that the Constantinian, or Eusebian, tradition of symphonia between Church and State was bankrupt, that its understanding of the Church was fundamentally flawed, that Orthodox theology needed to dig more deeply for an authentic ecclesiology. In articulating their sense of what was wrong with Eusebian ecclesiology, the Russians drew on ideas that were becoming the conventional wisdom in the rapidly developing field of New Testament and early Church scholarship. This (largely Protestant) scholarship also enabled the Russian émigrés to articulate their difference from Catholicism—­differences that had been elided by the theology of the so-­called Symbolic Books of the seventeenth century that had formed the basis of seminary theology in nineteenth-­century Russia, all dismissed by Florovsky as a ‘pseudo-­morphosis’ characteristic of the ‘Babylonian captivity of [Orthodox] theology’.11 In this search for an ecclesiology more deeply rooted in early Christian experience before the compromises of the post-­Constantinian period, the Russians—­ pre-­eminent among whom was Fr Nicholas Afanasiev, professor of church history at the Institut St-­Serge in Paris—­turned to the New Testament and the earliest Christian Fathers, especially St Ignatios of Antioch.12 Here, in contrast with the relatively fixed structures of the post-­Constantinian Church, they found a situ­ ation that was fluid, with traditions still establishing themselves, and still varying from place to place, from local church to local church. Patterns of ministry and ideas of the Church were still evolving. The first point Afanasiev emphasizes is that it is the whole people of God, the whole λαός, that is priestly, sharing in the royal priesthood; priesthood does not refer to a ministerial elite, but to the whole people of God. In the post-­Constantinian Church, seen as an imperial-­wide structure, there rapidly developed a tendency to focus on the structures of ministry, especially on what was (much later) to be called the episcopal ‘hierarchy’— using, or misusing, a word coined by the author of the Corpus Areopagiticum in the sixth century. On the contrary, in the New Testament and early Christian 10  R. M. French, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim (Philip Allan, 1930). Later expanded with The Pilgrim Continues His Way (SPCK, 1954). Walter Frere, in his preface, remarks, ‘They suggest a comparison with the matchless folk tales of Leo Tolstoi; and they do not suffer by such a comparison.’ But see now Andrew Louth, ed. (with intro. and notes), Anna Zaranko, trans., The Way of a Pilgrim (Penguin Books Random House, Penguin Classics, 2017; reissued in the ‘black’ format, 2019). 11  See Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, trans. Robert  L.  Nichols (Nordland, 1979), 85 (‘pseudomorphosis’), 121 (‘Babylonian Captivity’). I owe these references to Sr Seraphima (Dr Julia Konstantinovsky). 12  Expressed most fully, and rather later on, in his The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. Vitaly Permiakov (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). His most influential work was an article, ‘The Church which preside in Love’, The Primacy of Peter in the Orthodox Church (Faith Press, 1963), 57–110 (French original: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1960), 7–64.

434  Selected Essays, Volume II writings, it is the local community of the baptized that is the Church. This applies even to the expression ‘the Catholic Church’, ἡ καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία. The Eusebian model had more or less taken it for granted that this meant the ‘universal Church’, the whole institution of which ‘local churches’ were parts or members or branches. But this is not—­so contemporary scholarship (then—­as well as now) maintained13— what the New Testament meant by the Church, nor St Ignatios, in whose epistles the expression ‘Catholic Church’ is first found. There the word ‘church’ designates the local church, but not the local church apart from other local churches; rather it is the case that the whole Church, the ‘Catholic Church’, the Body of Christ, is found in every local church. Local churches are not members or constituents of the universal Church, they are manifestations of the whole Church, found whole and entire in every church, in every place. With Ignatios, this sense of the Catholic Church existing whole and entire in each place is articulated as the community gathered together with its bishop to celebrate the Eucharist, to form a Eucharistic assembly: ‘wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; just as wherever in Christ Jesus, there is the Catholic Church’ (Ad Smyrn. 8.2). So emerged what was to be called ‘Eucharistic ecclesiology’ that has come to characterize most twentieth-­century Orthodox theology and been widely influential—­on both the decree Lumen Gentium of the second Vatican Council and on ecclesiological reflection within the World Council of Churches. A top-­down model with local churches seen as branches of the universal Church has been replaced by a model in which the local community articulates the reality of being the Church, being in Christ, something realized in all local Christian communities, gathered together under their ­bishops. The unity among the local churches is not a matter of agreement; it is constituted by the fact that each of them is the whole Church, and manifest in a sense of solidarity, articulated, when necessary, by the gathering together, a synodos, of the bishops. What Afanasiev is doing here is reconceiving the notion of sobornost´ in a more strictly ecclesiological context, rather than in the philosophical, sociological context of the Slavophil notion. The most striking difference is the role of the Eucharist, all but absent from Khomiakov’s understanding of sobornost´. There is something else, too. As a matter of history, actual reflection among Russian émigrés on the Ignatian model of ecclesiology over against the Eusebian was the consequence of the experience of diaspora or exile. It seems to me, however, that most Orthodox in practice regard the Ignatian model as a temporary ecclesiology for the diaspora: eventually there are to be ‘local’ Churches in the countries of Western Europe that will return to the Eusebian model as the Orthodox communities settle down in the West.

13  See, for instance, the article on ἐκκλησία by Karl Schmidt in the Theologische Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. G. Kittel, III (Kohlhammer, 1938), 502–39.

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   435 The New Testament, however, gives little support to this idea of settling down, with the Church becoming part of the political structures of the world, as it came to be with the Eusebian and Justinianic ideal of symphonia. When the Apostle Paul says to the Ephesians that they are no longer ‘strangers and foreigners’ (ξένοι καὶ πάροικοι), he means that this is precisely what they are in this world, but that the hidden reality of their existence is that they are ‘fellow-­citizens of the saints and members of God’s household’ (Eph. 2:19). Similarly, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, those who live by faith are ‘strangers and pilgrims on earth’ who are in search of their ‘homeland’ (Heb. 11:13, 14), while ‘here we have no abiding city, but seek one to come’ (Heb. 13:14). The author of the second-­century Epistle to Diognetus reaffirms this, saying of Christians that ‘they live in their own countries, but as foreigners; they share in everything as citizens, but dwell everywhere as strangers; every foreign country is theirs and every country foreign’ (Diog. 5.5). Christians have, over the centuries, settled down and made towns and countries their homes, but these words remind us that at a deeper level, we can never settle down in this world. Perhaps there is some fundamental betrayal involved in the Church accepting a place in this world, as if here it had found its ‘ancient homeland’, that ‘ancient homeland’ towards which we look from afar, according to St Basil, when we turn east to pray.14 Maybe Christians are meant to be ‘homeless’, in Zagajewski’s sense. Let us now come to hospitality. In some ways, this can be seen as a counterpart of exile: as we have seen, the Russian émigrés in Paris experienced hospitality on the part of the Catholic (and Protestant) theologians and philosophers who welcomed them. An example, to which we shall return, is the so-­called ‘Berdyaev Colloquy’, which must have been the context in which some of the ideas just discussed about what it meant to be Russian Orthodox in Paris were developed. In trying to explore the experience of hospitality, some caution is needed. What we know most about is a small number of intellectuals—­the kind of people who frequented the Berdyaev Colloquy—­but these were hardly typical. They constituted a tiny elite, members of the educated upper class who were fluent in other languages than Russian, especially French, which had been almost as familiar to many upper-­ class Russians as their native tongue, if not more so. This group of intellectuals, expelled from Russia by Lenin and Trotsky’s decree at the end of 1922, amounted to no more that 220 (the number of non-­Marxist intellectuals on Lenin’s list), of whom about seventy were dispatched on the ‘Philosophers’ Steamship’ (actually two ships which left Petrograd in the autumn of 1922; others, including Sergii Bulgakov, were deported from Odessa later).15 However, the total number of Russians who found themselves in Paris and its environs—­expelled from Russia 14  Basil the Great, De Spiritu Sancto 27.66 (PG 32:192A). 15 See Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamship: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (Atlantic Books, 2006), 13–170.

436  Selected Essays, Volume II or in flight—­was much, much larger, probably amounting to around 200,000. Many of these Russians found the experience of diaspora totally dis­orien­tat­ing. When Mother Maria in the 1920s and early 1930s visited the mental asylums of northern France seeking out Russian émigrés, she discovered many Russians whose total disorientation, bereft of their native land, had led them to be classified as mentally ill and confined to asylums. There was nothing wrong with them, she discovered, save that, unable to communicate, they had withdrawn into themselves and had been taken to be mentally ill. Many others coped only a little better. Let me give you two examples. In her obituary notice for Vladyka Vitaly (Ustinov), later the Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, the Russian historian, Nadieszda Kizenko, comparing Vladyka Vitaly’s experience of Paris with that of his predecessors, the Metropolitans Antonii Khrapovitskii, Anastasii Gribanovskii, and Philaret Voznesenskii, remarked: Vladyka Vitaly’s predecessors had all known more security than he had, and received a more solid theological education. This foundation gave them a sense of the inherent strength of their position, and a certain generosity and largeness of vision. To Vladyka Vitaly, by contrast, Russia, and Orthodox Christianity, were not huge, millennium-­old, stable entities that could be taken for granted; they were instead under both overt and covert attack on every front, by the Bolsheviks first and foremost. It was the Bolsheviks and all who worked with them who had destroyed what had been the Russia of his ancestors. Economically straitened France in the 1920s and 1930s, moreover, was hardly a haven of friendliness or opportunity to outsiders, even to those who had learned the language as children and had done military service. (The contemporary phrase sale étranger—­dirty foreigner—­is emblematic.) People who were even slightly older than Vladyka Vitaly might dream nostalgically of their earlier homes as they sought new ones. He, by contrast, went from military service to working for an English company to the St Serge Theological Institute in Paris—­with some success, but with little inner fulfilment. To him, the only home left, and the only body he could serve with all his heart, was the closest exemplar of his family’s ideals and the best living link to the Russia he remembered—­the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.16

My other example is Metropolitan Antony Bloom’s father. Before the Revolution he had been a diplomat. The Revolution and the collapse of the imperial system called into question his whole life and impressed on him the responsibility his class bore in all this; he refused to make a new life and eventually, in Paris,

16  Sobornost 30.1 (2008), 72–84, at 75.

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   437 he sought only the lowliest of jobs and lived as a virtual recluse an ‘austere and impoverished life . . . for the peace of his own mind . . . whatever financial hardship his wife and son had to endure’.17 For the intellectual elite, or at least some of them, things were much better; many spoke French, and indeed other European languages, though most of them were happier writing in their native tongue. Quickly journals were established, in which they could publish, notably Put´, ‘The Way’, founded by Nicolas Berdyaev, and also Russian language publishers, especially the YMCA Press.18 Other ways of communicating among themselves, and potentially with others, were set up, notably the ‘Colloque’, usually associated with Berdyaev’s name, though established by him and his on-­ off friend, the Catholic lay philosopher, Jacques Maritain, where thinkers, both Russian Orthodox and Catholic (and also, to begin with, until the Vatican expressed its disapproval, Protestants), met together, gave papers, and discussed philosophical and theological issues. The Catholics, at such meetings, one may imagine (I do not know of any source of real evidence), were interested in expressing their own ideas and finding out more about the philosophical and theological ideas of the Russians; for the Russians themselves, it must have been more a matter of expressing, in a novel context, what they thought was philosophically and theologically important, and in this they were talking as much to themselves as to their Western European interlocutors. Exploring reminiscences of this colloque might seem a profitable way to discover something of the experience of hospitality on the part of its Catholic members, but, though it is often referred to, very little evidence of what happened seems to have survived. There seems to have been no minutes taken, and even in Jean-­Luc Barré’s long biography, Jean et Raïssa Maritain, the colloque gets barely a mention.19 The only example of hospitality that bore much fruit, and that we know of, seems to be the foundation of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. As the title of the fellowship suggests—­for St Alban is the proto-­martyr of Britain—­the fellowship was concerned with relationships between the British, in fact mostly English, and to be precise, Anglicans (members of the Church of England) and the Russian émigrés. The leading spirit behind this fellowship was Nicolas Zernov and his wife Militsa. Nicolas himself was a writer, though mostly a writer about others and a popularizer. He was a deeply humble man, and was content to be thought of—­as he presented himself—­as one who had moved among the great figures of the Russian emigration, people such as Fr Sergii Bulgakov, to whom he 17  Gillian Crow, ‘This Man of God’: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony (DLT, 2005), 24. It was not only Boris Eduardovich who experienced such alienation; it was the experience of the young Andrei Bloom and his mother: see Avril Pyman, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: A Life (Lutterworth Press, 2016), 8–15. 18 For Put´, see Antoine Arjakovsky, La génération des penseurs religieux de l’émigration russe (L’Esprit et la Lettre, 2002). 19  Jean-­Luc Barré, Jean et Raïssa Maritain (Perrin, 2012; first printed Fayard, 2009), 258–9, 380: these are all the (unrevealing) references that I could find.

438  Selected Essays, Volume II was close, and others such as Fr Georges Florovsky, as well as the musician and composer, Nikolai Medtner, to whom he was also close. His own theological work he played down, though he was a contributor to Put´, and—­as is evident from Arjakovsky’s study—­one of the early advocates of Eucharistic ecclesiology. The work he is known by concerns the Russian tradition to which he belonged, which he made known in the West, mostly in English, for he settled in England after the Second World War, when he was appointed to the Spalding Lecturership in Eastern Orthodox Culture at the University of Oxford, where he remained until his death in 1980. His works are generally regarded as works of popularization, and therefore tend to be neglected; nevertheless we should remember that the widely used expression, the ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’, is drawn from the title of one of the most valuable of his books, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century.20 Our concern with Nicolas is with his involvement in the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. Involved with it from the beginning, though not actually the founder, he became secretary of the fellowship in 1934, and by the time he relinquished the position in 1947 on his appointment to the lecturership in Oxford, the membership had grown from less than 350 to over 1,250. Also, under his leadership, the journal of the fellowship had become more established and adopted the name by which it is still known: Sobornost (originally Sobornost´, it lost its soft sign with number 3 of series 7 in summer 1976).21 The fellowship was in some ways an anomalous body. The first encounter between the Russia émigrés and the West had been with Catholic theologians and philosophers through the Berdyaev–­Maritain colloquy. So far as I know, the only Anglican who ever attended the colloquy was the theologian and, as he liked to call himself, ‘Christian sociologist’ V. A. Demant, but he had, to my knowledge, little or nothing to do with the fellowship.22 The fellowship was essentially a mani­ fest­ation of ecumenism. The Orthodox Church had adopted a positive attitude to ecumenism from the time of Patriarch Joachim’s call for engagement between the Churches in the early 1920s—­one of the events that contributed to the ecu­men­ ic­al movement and the eventual establishment of the World Council of Churches. Similarly, the Anglican Church was open to, indeed for the most part enthusiastic about, the movement towards unity between the Churches, regarding itself as ideal­ly placed to facilitate such an ecumenical endeavour. In contrast, the Vatican was very wary about ecumenism from the beginning until Vatican II and the decree, Unitatis redintegratio; it was this anxiety about ecumenism that led to 20  Nicolas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (DLT, 1963). 21  On the journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, see now Aidan Nichols, OP, Alban and Sergius: The Story of a Journal (Gracewing, 2018). 22  Not quite: Demant reviewed Berdyaev’s Spirit and Reality in Sobornost: see Nichols, Alban and Sergius, 141. Now almost forgotten, there has been a recent revival of interest in V.  A.  Demant in Poland, where a collection of sermons by Demant himself has been published: Vigo Auguste Demant, Not One World, but Two: A Miscellany of Preachments, ed. Sławomir Nowosad (Learned Society of KUL, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, 2017).

Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost′   439 the final extinction of the colloquy Berdyaev and Maritain had promoted. Furthermore, Nicolas had spent time in England, in the end working for an Oxford DPhil, which he gained in 1932, so he was already aware of the Church of England, and especially of the more Anglo-­Catholic side of the Church (his initial links had been with the monastic Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, which had been pioneering exploring relationships with the Orthodox Churches). So it was that there blossomed a movement, a fellowship, that sought to engage primarily between the Church of England and the Orthodox émigrés in Paris. The annual conference of the fellowship—­originally a leisurely affair, lasting three weeks—­was a venue where Orthodox thinkers could meet a group of mostly interested Western Christians. In the early days, Fr Sergii Bulgakov gave lectures, later on Fr Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, even once, I think, Myrrha Lot-­ Borodine. Friendships developed between those who attended these conferences—­ especially between the Lossky family and, first, with the Anglican Donald Allchin, and later with Timothy Ware (now Metropolitan Kallistos). It was from members of the fellowship that the official Anglican-­Orthodox Conversations were to emerge. What are we to make of this expression of hospitality? To begin with it was immensely fruitful, not least for expanding the horizons of the Anglican Communion. In the long term, I am not sure. As the ecumenical climate has become more chilly, the fellowship has found itself looking for a role. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that from the 1930s to the 1960s, it provided a place where Orthodox and Western Christians could meet, listen to each other, and share, without compromising their identity. To close, I want to return to more critical reflections on how the Russians responded to the challenge of exile. Just how far did the experience of exile lead them to embrace an ecclesiology that transcended the Justinianic notion of symbiosis between Church and State? It seems to me that, on closer inspection, Russians found it difficult to think through the changes demanded by accepting diaspora as the normal and desirable state of Christians: in the world, though not of it, so that, in the words of the second-­century Epistle to Diognetus already quoted, ‘they live in their own countries, but as foreigners; they share in everything as citizens, but dwell everywhere as strangers; every foreign country is theirs and every country foreign’.23 Let us take the case of Bulgakov. Several times in his sermons, preached during the last period of his life, when he was dean of the Institut St-­Serge in Paris, he reflected on the condition of Russians living in exile. In a sermon preached shortly after his arrival in 1925 on 1 October, the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God (Pokrov means both protection and veil in Russian), Bulgakov considered the importance of this feast for the Russians (for, although the historical origin of the feast belongs in Constantinople, it is in Russia that the feast became popular). 23  Epistle to Diognetus 5.5.

440  Selected Essays, Volume II The Russian land has come to love the day of the Protection of the Mother of God, manifested to a Slav in distant Constantinople. However, not there but in the faraway midnight land did people come to sing joyously and glorify the veiling of the world by the Mother of God . . . Now in their great sorrow, the Russian Orthodox people cover themselves with the veil of Protection. She manifests her love to the chosen of this people. She has revealed to them her face . . .24

A few years later in 1933, on the centenary of the death of St Seraphim of Sarov, Bulgakov reflected on the destruction of the saint’s shrine by the Bolsheviks, and especially the laying waste of the community of nuns St Seraphim had established at Diveevo, the place where ‘the feet of the Mother of God had stepped’. How can this be, he asks? How is it that the ‘promises of the saint appear not to have been fulfilled’? Bulgakov responds by affirming that the promises refer ‘not to the vis­ ible and palpable indestructibility of the place of the Mother of God, but to a spiritual, transcendent, and transhistorical reality’. Even though everything tangible is destroyed, ‘nevertheless there will remain in the world that light of Tabor from the Holy Spirit which was manifested through him in the Russian land’.25 In a deeply moving way, Bulgakov retained a vision of the Russian land and the Russian people, which was only intensified by the experience of exile.26

24  Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy, trans. Boris Jakim (Eerdmans, 2008; Russian original, 1938), 12 (translation slightly modified). 25 Bulgakov, Churchly Joy, 50. 26  Some of the material in this essay has already appeared in print in two articles of mine: ‘The Experience of Exile and the Discovery of Sobornost´, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56:1–2 (2015), 277–87; and ‘Experience of and Reflection on Hospitality among Russian Exiles’, Communio Viatorum 58 (2016), 136–45.

36 Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion I think I have taken the subject of our colloquy, Mapping the Una Sancta, in perhaps a slightly different way from most of us here. I understood Sotiris’ suggestion to be that we think ahead and begin to consider what the next steps might be if Catholics and Orthodox reached the conviction that there are no doctrinal differences between us. Judging from the abstracts, several have taken this to mean, looking at the last major issue—­the papacy, which is why Edward Siecienski’s book on the papacy has been suggested as preliminary reading—­and wondering if we are approaching this issue in the right way. I took Sotiris’ suggestion in a different way: if we were agreed on doctrinal issues, are there other issues that might distinguish or even divide us? Issues where, although there is no real doctrinal disagreement, there are still differences, of ethos, or of devotion: what might these differences entail? My proposal is to consider this in relation to the Eucharist, for although there are doubtless some (mostly Orthodox) who would disagree, it seems safe to say that, so far as the doctrine of the Eucharist is concerned, there is broad agreement between Orthodox and Catholics, that is, we both affirm that that in the Eucharist Christ becomes present, in his full humanity and full divinity, as the Body and Blood of Christ, into which the elements of bread and wine have been changed by the Eucharistic prayer (whether we understood the words of institution as words of consecration, as in the West, or see the change as the result of invocation, ἐπίκλησις, of the Holy Spirit, as in the East); furthermore, this presence is not fleeting: the Holy Gifts are reserved and given as the Body and Blood of Christ; in addition, both Orthodox and Catholic are agreed on the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. But what about devotion to Christ present in the Eucharist? More specifically, what about devotion to Christ’s consecrated Body and Blood outside the Eucharist, which is called in the West ‘extra-­liturgical’ devotion? Differences over the Eucharist between East and West have a long history, almost as long as any concern for the division between us has been felt. Traditionally, the main difference that focuses on the Eucharist has concerned the kind of bread used in the Eucharist, leavened or unleavened—­the question of the ἄζυμα—­and I have argued elsewhere that the difference involves more than the kind of bread used, but rather the symbolic associations of leavened or unleavened

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0037

442  Selected Essays, Volume II bread.1 The bread used in the Eucharist and consecrated enters into a symbolic universe, and the presence or absence of yeast gives rise to different symbolic associations. Maurice de la Taille, a Jesuit theologian of a century ago—­who is certainly worth revisiting—­ spoke of Christ, in his own person, wishing ‘to become a sacrament, in order to be the efficacious sign’ of the union between himself and all Christians. To that end, ‘He placed himself in the order of signs, in the order of symbols, to have the joy of symbolizing and, by symbolizing it, of building up the mystical body of which we are members.’2 On the question of leavened vs unleavened bread and the symbolism involved, I remarked: Once unleavened bread was introduced, a powerful symbolism attached to it, and Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians found a new resonance: ‘Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole dough? Purge out the old leaven, that you may become new dough, just as you are unleavened. For Christ our Pascha is sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not in the old leaven, nor in the leaven of evil and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’ (1 Cor. 5: 6–8)—especially as the Latin text reads: ‘Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the whole dough? . . .’ Two systems of symbolism, focused on the same liturgical act, developed, but they took their inspiration from the stark contradiction of leavened or unleavened bread.3 The refusal, on either side, to enter one symbolic world or another could be presented as a fundamental apostasy. To the Greeks, the Latins, with their unleavened bread, were Judaizing, or shrinking from acknowledging the full humanity of Christ (an objection that worked better against the Monophysite Armenians, with whom the question of unleavened bread was first raised); to the Latins, the Greeks, with their leavened bread, were virtual Marcionites, discarding the Old Covenant, and rejecting Christ’s fulfilment of the Old Covenant in celebrating the Passover with his disciples.4

It is not this issue, however, that I want to pursue now, but a rather different manifestation of difference, connected with the attitude, the devotional attitude, adopted towards the already consecrated Holy Gifts, a difference that also involves matters of symbolism (or so it seems to me). For although both the Catholic and the Orthodox affirm clearly the Real and Enduring Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, this is expressed, devotionally, 1  See my Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071 (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 306–18. 2  Maurice de la Taille, SJ, The Mystery of Faith and Human Opinion Contrasted and Defined (Sheed and Ward, 1934), 212. For a recent discussion of his theology, see Michon M. Matthiesen, Sacrifice as Gift: Eucharist, Grace, and Contemplative Prayer in Maurice de la Taille (CUA Press, 2013). 3  On the importance of symbolism in the dispute of the azyma, see John Erickson, ‘Leavened and Unleavened: Some Theological Implications of the Schism of 1054’, The Challenge of our Past (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 133–55. 4 Louth, Greek East and Latin West, 314 (slightly modified for the new context).

Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion  443 in markedly different ways in the Catholic Church (and many Anglican churches of an Anglo-­Catholic bent) and in the Orthodox Church—­by which I mean, in the way the Holy Gifts are reserved, in the way they are venerated, which, among Catholics involves visiting the Blessed Sacrament and praying before it, and in particular Solemn Exposition of the Host and the service of Benediction. Several converts to Orthodoxy from the Catholic West (including Anglo-­Catholicism) have commented to me that it is this that, at least to begin with, they miss on becoming Orthodox (indeed, I found that myself). In Orthodox churches, although the Holy Gifts are reserved in a pyx, or artophorion, on the holy table, there is no specific veneration of the Holy Gifts, reserved on the Holy Table: the perpetually burning light is a mark of the sanctuary, within the sanctuary the holy table itself is venerated, the gospel book, the cross, the icons . . . but not, spe­cif­ic­ al­ly the reserved Holy Gifts. Except as part of one liturgical action: the celebration of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, which takes place two (occasionally, three) times a week during Lent. It might seem to be some kind of parallel to, or equivalent of, the Western service of Benediction: throughout the service the already consecrated Holy Gifts are venerated, both with prostrations and with incense. It is also a deeply meditative service, a quiet service; this is noticed more, I suppose, by the celebrating priest, as, in contrast with the Divine Liturgy, he is not given lots of prayers to say quietly—­he censes and venerates in silence. The structure of the service is a kind of extended Vespers, with small litanies after the three staseis of the kathisma of the psalter that is read as normal at Vespers. During each of these litanies, the priest, behind the iconostasis, prepares the paten with the Holy Gifts, solemnly censes the Holy Gifts on the holy table, takes it solemnly to the table of preparation, and completes the preparation there by filling the chalice with wine and water. Vespers continues with prayers of supplication, during which the holy table and the Holy Gifts are venerated, and then, after the readings and the usual litanies after the readings, there takes place the Great Entrance, as at a normal Liturgy, only this time, it is the Holy Gifts themselves that are carried in procession, and all prostrate themselves, while the choir sings, instead of the Cherubic hymn, this hymn: Now the powers of heaven worship with us invisibly. For behold, the King of glory enters. Behold the sacrifice, mystical and fully accomplished, is escorted in. With faith and longing let us draw near, that we may become partakers of life eternal. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

There are two things that seem to me striking about these ceremonies. First, the clear and emphatic sense of the presence of Christ in the Holy Gifts, but more than that the sense not just of the presence of Christ, but the sense of the completion of the Eucharistic sacrifice: Christ is present, the lamb sacrificed from the foundation of the world. In the celebration of the Eucharist or Divine Liturgy we

444  Selected Essays, Volume II join in, we take part in, Christ’s sacrifice; at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, we are present at the Eucharistic sacrifice, ‘mystical and fully accomplished’. The lack of prayers for the priest underlines this sense that there is really nothing more to do: it is all done, both Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and the recalling, the re-­presentation, of this in the Eucharist. Christ is present, but not just as a presence, he is present as the fully accomplished sacrifice. Second, the veneration of Christ in the Holy Gifts takes place liturgically—­as part of the liturgical action, both behind the iconostasis in the first part of the service and then as the Holy Gifts are carried from the altar, through the body of the Church, and back to the holy table within the altar, whence they will be brought out as the Holy Gifts, offered to the Holy People of God: ‘The presanctified holy things for the holy: Τὰ προηγιασμένα ἅγια τοῖς ἁγίοις’. The real presence is celebrated, not as just there, but as the presence of One who is coming to us, coming to encounter us, and give himself to us: Christ is the one who is coming, ὁ ἐρχόμενος—­a term that is repeated throughout Liturgy: in the creed, the ‘one who is coming to judge the living and the dead’, in the Sanctus, Εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος, ‘Blessed is he who is coming . . .’ And then, as in the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Gifts are brought by the deacon, or the priest, through the holy doors to the people, with the exclamation: ‘With fear of God, in faith and love draw near!’ To which the response is: ‘Blessed is He who is coming—­ὁ ἐρχόμενος—­in the name of the Lord.’ Christ is the one who comes to us in the Holy Gifts, and at this point in the Liturgy all prostrate themselves before Christ who has come among us. In the Liturgy, we encounter Christ, as he comes to us in the Holy Gifts and we receive them in Holy Communion: this is an encounter that enables us, as we go out into the world (the true ‘liturgy after the liturgy’), to encounter Christ in those we encounter, especially those in need. The Catholic service of Solemn Exposition of the Host, Adoration, and Benediction has both points of similarity, and points of difference, with the Liturgy of the Presanctified. The service of Benediction is one aspect of the sense of the enduring presence of Christ in the Host that is acknowledged all the time, through habitual veneration. The perpetually burning light in the Church is understood in the West to be burning before the Blessed Sacrament, reserved in a tabernacle or aumbry: it is a mark of the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. It is venerated, when you enter the church, when you pass before it, by genuflecting. There is often a custom of visiting Christ in the sacrament: going into the Church to spend some time in silent prayer before Christ’s sacramental presence. The service of solemn exposition and benediction is quite simple: after a few prayers, the priest takes the Host from the tabernacle and places it in a monstrance, where the Host can be seen (which is why the sacred vessel is called a monstrance), which is then placed on the altar; there follows a time of silence, which may be quite extended—­several hours in some cases—­at the end of which there are prayers, including a set prayer of praise, the so-­called ‘Divine Praises’,

Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion  445 and the singing of a hymn (in my memory the last two verses of a long and beautiful hymn, composed by St Thomas Aquinas, beginning Tantum ergo ­sacramentum,/ veneremur cernui—‘Therefore we, before thee bending,/ this great sacrament revere’. Aquinas wrote other hymns in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, including the sequence, the long hymn sung after the Epistle on the Feast of Corpus Christi, Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem—‘Praise, Sion, your Saviour’). During the singing of Tantum ergo, the priest blessed those present with host (hence, I suppose, the title of the service); then the monstrance is taken down from the altar, and the Host returned to the tabernacle. This service is usually described as an ‘extra-­liturgical’ devotion. It has no particular place in the li­tur­ gic­al cycle of the Church, though mention just now of the Feast of Corpus Christi reminds one that, at least with this feast, room is made for devotion to the Body (and Blood) of Christ within the liturgical year of the West, for the Feast of Corpus Christi is a kind of displaced Holy Thursday celebration—­on the first Thursday after the conclusion of the Paschal cycle, therefore, according to the old Western liturgical Calendar, on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (the Sunday after Pentecost, rather than, at least among the Slavs, another name for Pentecost itself). However, much of the traditional celebration on the Feast of Corpus Christi was extra-­liturgical, with a procession throughout the town or village of the Host in a monstrance at the head of the procession. Extra-­liturgical: that is the first of a number of contrasts one notices when one compares the Orthodox Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts with the Catholic rite of Exposition of the Host and Benediction, for the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is thoroughly integrated into the liturgical year. It is essentially a Lenten service, for during Orthodox Lent, weekdays from Monday to Friday are days on which the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated (in contrast with the West, where Lent is a period of special Eucharistic devotion, with readings from the Epistles and Gospels provided for all the days of the week, in contrast with the rest of the year, when the Eucharistic lectionary only provided for Sundays: a distinction ob­lit­er­ ated now, with a lectionary covering all the days of the year). The Liturgy of the Presanctified is to make up for the lack of Eucharistic celebrations during Lent: nowadays in most weeks only on Wednesdays and Fridays (which has the odd effect in many parishes of making Lent a period of more frequent encounter with the sacrament than outside the aliturgical days of Lent; in particular the requirements of canon 66 of the Synod in Trullo that people should attend the Liturgy every day between Pascha and New (or Thomas) Sunday is now a completely dead letter). There are plenty of other contrasts. Benediction essentially provides an op­por­ tun­ity for gazing contemplatively on the Host; in contrast, in the Liturgy of the Presanctified the Holy Gifts are never seen by the people—­they are always veiled, furthermore, during the Great Entrance, where, though the procession goes round the church in the midst of the people, they are all meant to be prostrate

446  Selected Essays, Volume II before the presence of the ‘Sacrifice, mystical and fully accomplished’, and not to see anything at all. This contrast is part of a broader contrast between Eastern and Western Liturgical practice: in the East, the altar, or sanctuary, is visually sep­ar­ ated from the nave by an iconostasis, whereas, in the West, the sanctuary is open to the people, a difference made more marked when the priest faces the people over the holy table, rather than standing with the people and facing East. There is movement in the rite of Benediction, but it is purely functional (though not, I suppose, the processions that traditionally take place on the Feast of Corpus Christi); in the Liturgy of the Presanctified, movement, whether hidden away in the altar, with the curtains drawn, or through the church at the Great Entrance, is at the heart of what is taking place. I have already remarked that Christ is present in the Holy Gifts as ὁ ἐρχόμενος, the one who is coming, whereas Benediction seems to focus on the bare presence of Christ in the Host: a presence that calls forth contemplative attention. There seems to me a similar contrast in the words with which the priest presents the sacrament to the people for communion: in the West, it is with the words, Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi. Beati qui ad cenam Agni vocati sunt—‘Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb’; whereas in the Orthodox Liturgy the words are more direct: ‘With fear of God, with faith and love, draw near’, to which the response is, as I have already remarked, ‘Blessed is He who is coming in the Name of the Lord’. On the one hand, look, ecce; on the other, draw near to the One who is coming. One might argue, too, that the notion of the Eucharistic sacrifice is more evident in the Liturgy of the Presanctified, though the very term, host, hostia, connotes sacrifice, sacrificial victim, and Latin devotion to the Host is to the Host as sacrificed. Nevertheless, in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Christ is perceived not just as present but as sacrificed: we are asked to behold, not just the presence of Christ, but the ‘sacrifice, mystical and fully accomplished’—Ἰδοὺ θυσία μυστικὴ τετελειωμένη. And finally, the Liturgy of the Presanctified ends with Holy Communion; the Christ whose presence we have celebrated as the accomplished mystical sacrifice is given and received in communion. I don’t think Benediction ever ends with communion from the reserved sacrament: the Host is exposed for the contemplative gaze of the people, and then returned to the tabernacle. (I haven’t mentioned that the Host is just the consecrated unleavened bread, while in the Liturgy of the Presanctified the Lamb, which has been reserved, is present in both kinds, consecrated bread intincted with the holy blood.) What kind of a contrast have we here? Is it a contrast of incompatible ways of devotion that could hardly be combined, and perhaps not even co-­exist? There is certainly a contrast, and the emphasis on the contemplative gaze that lies at the heart of Benediction is something that relates more widely to ways of prayer within the Western tradition; what lies at the heart of the Liturgy of the

Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion  447 Presanctified I find more difficult to capture, for the Presanctified Liturgy has its place in the liturgical experience of the Orthodox Church, and does not, I think, open out onto anything else. Both, however, could be said to present an op­por­ tun­ity to dwell on the completeness of Christ’s work of love on the Cross and in the Resurrection—­giving space and time to absorb what all this means. Rather than coming to any conclusion, I would rather hope my thoughts might lead to some discussion, dialogue, one with another.

37 Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology

Our God himself, glorified in triad and in monad, made the heaven and the earth and everything therein, bringing from non-­being into being the whole of everything (τὰ σύμπαντα).1 Thus, quite unself-­consciously as he introduces his long section on the visible created order in his Exposition of the Faith, St John of Damascus refers to God as τριάς and μονάς, and not only that, but glorified as trias and monas. To speak of God as monad and triad had, by John’s time, a long pedigree, and celebrating God as monad and triad is a feature of the Byzantine hymnological tradition, an early example to be found in several of the doxastika (a liturgical verse following ‘Glory to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit’) of the Great Penitential Canon of St Andrew of Crete, a contemporary with John’s: for instance the doxastikon to the third ode: Monad, simple, uncreated nature without beginning, hymned in a Triad of hypostases, save us, who in faith worship your might.

Nevertheless this confession of God as μονὰς καὶ τριάς is often overlooked, and this partly because the Byzantine theology of such as St Maximos the Confessor and John Damascene is regarded as derivative to the achievement of the Cappadocian Fathers, whose own thinking about the Godhead tends to be narrowed down to the refining of the terms of οὐσία/φύσις and ὑπόστασις, the germs of which can certainly be found in their writings, but is not the only way in which they expressed their doctrine of the Trinity. If we limit the Cappadocian theological legacy in this way, we stand, first of all, to misunderstand Maximos and John and their theological method; but second, to overlook other sources of mid-­Byzantine theology, in particular, Evagrios of  Pontos and Dionysios the Areopagite, as well as the edict of the Emperor Justinian, the Edictum rectae fidei—­rarely mentioned in theological circles—­ which, as an imperial edict, had, like the decisions of the œcumenical synods, the 1  John of Damascus, expos. fid. 19; Bonifatius Kotter, ed., Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos II: Expositio Fidei, PTS 12 (Walter de Gruyter, 1973), II, 50.

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0038

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  449 force of law. Evagrios and Dionysios are overlooked, so far as Trinitarian theology is concerned, because neither of them is regarded as genuinely Trinitarian; they are thought to be so much in hock to the prevailing Neoplatonism of their day, that the doctrine of the Trinity gets swallowed up in their overwhelming sense of the unity of the ultimate. If any influence at all is suspected, it is treated with suspicion.2 Justinian is neglected because—­well—­he was Justinian, and we don’t take kindly to an emperor-­theologian.

Evagrios and the Trinity There is more to both Evagrios and Dionysios than this estimate recognizes. So far as Evagrios is concerned, I shall draw very heavily on the Swiss hermit and theologian (now Archimandrite) Gabriel Bunge, who has over the years made Evagrios the centre of his scholarly interests, to the illumination of us all.3 The generally accepted view of Evagrios—­as put forward over the decades by Antoine Guillaumont in a host of editions, articles, and books, though more recently increasingly questioned—­ is that Evagrios was the fashioner of the ‘Origenism’ condemned at the Fifth Œcumenical Council of 553 (Constantinople II). This is supported by appeal to the Kephalaia Gnostica, which survives only in Syriac, but in two versions, S1 and S2, the first of which is regarded as modified in the interests of sixth-­century Orthodoxy, the latter, which contains many of the passages condemned at the Council, regarded as being the original.4 The Evagrios who emerges from this text is, on the face of it, scarcely Trinitarian; his thought is dominated by unity, and his mysticism regarded as a mysticism of union, or even absorption, in primal unity. There is more to be said about such an interpretation of the Kephalaia Gnostica, but I shall not go into it here, rather, following Gabriel Bunge, focus on a work, now ascribed to Evagrios, preserved as ep. 8 in the correspondence of St Basil the Great.5 (Bunge maintains that the Trinitarian doctrine found in this letter can also be found in KG, if read properly; that is another matter, 2  There is no mention that I can find of Evagrios in the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Giles Emery OP and Matthew Levering (Oxford University Press, 2011) and just one page on Dionysios (141–2). See, however, Brian E. Daley, SJ, ‘Evagrius and Cappadocian Orthodoxy’. In Evagrius and his Legacy, ed. Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 14–48. 3  See especially G. Bunge, ‘Hénade ou monade? Au sujet de deux notions centrales de la terminologie évagrienne’, Le Muséon 102 (1989), 69–91. 4  Les Six Centuries des “Kephalaia Gnostica” d’ Évagre le Pontique, critical edition of S1 and S2 with French translation by Antoine Guillaumont, Patrologia Orientalis, tom. XXVIII—­fasc. 1—No 134 (Brepols, 1985) (abbrev.: KG). See now, the translation and commentary of S2 by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostica: A New Translation of the Unreformed Text from the Syriac, Writings from the Greco-­Roman World, 38 (SBL Press, 2015). I am not sure that S1 and S2 are to be distinguished so simply as that. 5  Critical edn by J. Gribomont, with Italian trans. and commentary by Marcella Forlin Patrucco, Basilio de Cesarea, Le lettere, vol. 1, Corona Patrum, 11 (Società Editrice Internazionale, 1983), 84–113, 296–7 (comm.).

450  Selected Essays, VOLUME II though I find his argument very persuasive.) This letter, often called the ‘Letter of Faith’, Epistula Fidei, is traditionally dated to 381, written by Evagrios from Constantinople to friends back home in Pontos, but has recently been redated to 383, still written by Evagrios, but by then in Jerusalem or Egypt, and sent by him to Constantinople.6 In any case, it was written to defend the Cappadocian Fathers against the accusation of tritheism. Against this charge, Evagrios maintains that ‘we confess one God, [one] not in number, but by nature’ (ἡμεῖς ἕνα θεόν, οὐ τῷ ἀριθμῷ, ἀλλὰ τῇ φύσει ὁμολογοῦμεν; ep. 8. 2. 18)—making a distinction between numerical unity and being one and simple (for examples of numerical unity he gives the cosmos, man, and angel, none of which are simple by nature); numerical unity, being a matter of quantity, only applies to bodily entities (which includes angels) and therefore not to God. In contrast to nu­mer­able, material reality, ἡ δὲ μονὰς καὶ ἑνὰς τῆς ἁπλῆς καὶ ἀπεριλήπτου οὐσίας σημαντική—‘the monad and henad [are] indicative of a simple and incomprehensible being’ (ep. 8. 2. 37–8). Evagrios’ argument here is reminiscent of what we find in Basil the Great’s On the Holy Spirit where he maintained that the Trinity cannot be numerated, making a distinction between ἀριθμεῖν, to count, and συναριθμεῖν, literally, ‘to co-­count’, usually translated as ‘to include’: we do not count the persons of the Trinity, ‘one, two, three’ or ‘first, second, third’, since God himself declares, ‘For I am the first, and I am after these’ (Isa. 44: 6 LXX; a Greek attempt to represent the Hebrew: ‘I am first and I am last’; cf. Apoc. 1: 8, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’), for ‘worshipping God from God, we confess the distinguishing characters of the hypostaseis, and rest upon the monarchy’.7 It is to make this point, of the non-­numerability of God, that Evagrios refers to God as μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς. In this he may be alluding to Origen, who used both terms in De Principiis,8 but, whereas Origen seems to be using the two terms in apposition—‘μονάς or, if I may say, ἑνάς’—Bunge argues that Evagrios is distinguishing between the two terms, henas designating ‘the Trinity as the absolute and non-­numerical unity of its essence’,9 while monas refers to the relation of each of the three persons to that unity, in which they are held. Elsewhere in ep. fid. Evagrios uses the term monas on its own, an example being his interpretation of Jesus’ prayer for unity among his disciples, ‘as I am in you and you, Father, in me’ (John 17: 21): ‘For God, being one, when he comes into each of us, unites all and number perishes at the presence of the monas (ἀπόλλυται ὁ ἀριθμὸς τῇ τῆς μονάδος ἐπιδημίᾳ)’ (ep. 8. 7. 54–6). In other words, the indwelling of God effects in creatures a suppression of number, bringing 6  See Ramelli, Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostica, xxvi. 7  Basil the Great, Spir. 44. 22–45. 7; B. Pruche, ed., Sources Chrétiennes 17bis (Paris, 1968) (partly summarized). 8 Origen, princ. I. 1. 6, ed. John Behr , vol. 1 (Oxford, 2017), 30. 9  Bunge, ‘Hénade ou monade?’, 82–3.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  451 about a non-­numerical unity, analogous to that which exists eternally in the monad, understood as the non-­numerical unity of the three Divine Persons. To quote Bunge, ‘That which unites the creatures among themselves and with God and thus creates that state of non-­numerical unicity that Evagrios calls μονάς is nothing other than God himself, in virtue of his own non-­numerical unity that holds between the three divine Persons’.10 We have then a fully Trinitarian unity in which our final unity with God is effected by, and analogous to, the unity that holds between the three Persons of the Godhead. Thus we find in Evagrios’ designation of God as μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς a way understanding the Trinity (which is, of course, the subject of this part of the letter, defending the Cappadocian Fathers against the accusation of tritheism): μονάς indicating the holding in that unity which is designated by ἑνάς; the coupling, μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς, indicating the permanent state of union of the three divine persons that constitutes the One God existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The term, μονάς, is also used, as we have seen, to express the unity of the human intellect with the divine unity, ἑνάς, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the union of the intellect with God is analogous with the union of the three divine persons in the One God. Analogy entails difference, as well as sameness. The union of the three persons in God and the union of the intellect with God partakes of a certain sameness—­both are designated by μονάς—­but the union of the three divine persons in God is permanent, from eternity to eternity, while the union between the intellect and God is something that takes place, that comes about: it may continue into eternity, but is not from eternity. How it is that the intellect comes to receive the ‘presence of the monad’ is the purpose of Evagrios’ ascetical and mystical the­ ology: the intellect needs to be purified from attachment to what is transient, by freeing itself through πρακτική from the irrational parts of the tripartite soul, and then through φυσικὴ θεωρία learning to exercise the state of contemplative attention that is essential to its nature, finally attaining a state of θεολογία. As Brian Daley puts it: this contemplative study of things in nature around us, which Evagrios calls ‘natural contemplation’, ‘cannot bring us beyond the level of causal explanation, an awareness of the created world’s intellectual structure or “formal cause” ’, and goes on to quote Evagrios himself: Analysis makes us ascend to [know] the beginnings of objects, and science appropriate to them makes us aware of the wisdom of the Creator. But it is not according to these signs that we see the holy Trinity. In fact, it has no beginning, and we also do not say that the wisdom found in these objects is God—­if these beginnings agree, in the contemplation of nature, with the things of which they

10  Bunge, ‘Hénade ou monade?’, 81.

452  Selected Essays, VOLUME II are the beginnings. In fact such wisdom is unsubstantial knowledge, which appears only in objects.11

Beyond this—­that is, beyond what can be achieved by the exercise, however pure, of the intellect—­lies the Holy Trinity, and so The Trinity is not to be associated with the contemplation of sensible and i­ ntelligible things, and it is also not counted among objects; for the former is a mixed reality, and the latter are creatures. But the holy Trinity is alone essential knowledge.12

Knowledge of the Holy Trinity is not acquired, but granted to an intellect able to bear it by the indwelling of God the Trinity, the presence of the monas, as we have seen him putting it in the Letter on Faith. Knowledge of the Trinity is not the highest reach of the intellect, but beyond that reach altogether.

From μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς to μονάς καὶ τριάς This understanding of the spiritual life as preparing the intellect to receive a γνῶσις (of the Trinity) that lies beyond our knowing is fundamental to classical Byzantine Trinitarian theology as we find it in Maximos and the Damascene, but the language in which it is expressed has changed: the coupling of μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς has been dropped in subsequent Christian tradition, and replaced by the coup­ ling, μονὰς καὶ τριάς. This can be illustrated from St Maximos the Confessor. The second century of his Chapters on Theology and the Economy begins thus: There is one God, because there is one godhead; a monad without beginning and simple and beyond being, and without parts, and indivisible; the same monad and triad; the same wholly monad, and the same wholly triad; the same wholly monad according to being, the same wholly triad according to the hypostases . . .13 (Εἷς Θεός, ὅτι μία θεότης, ἄναρχος καὶ ἁπλῆ καὶ ὑπερούσιος καὶ ἀμερὴς καὶ ἀδιαίρετος· ἡ αὐτὴ μονὰς καὶ τριάς, ὅλη μονὰς ἡ αὐτὴ καὶ ὅλη τριὰς ἡ αὐτή· μονὰς ὅλη κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν ἡ αὐτὴ καὶ τριὰς ὅλη κατὰ τὰς ὑποστάσεις ἡ αὐτή . . .) 11  KG V. 63 S2 (Daley’s translation (which is close to Guillaumont’s Patrologia Orientalis): ‘Evagrius and Cappadocian Orthodoxy’, 25; cf. Ramelli, Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostica, 302). 12  KG II. 47 S2 (Daley’s trans., ‘Evagrius and Cappadocian Orthodoxy’, 25). 13 Maximos, cap. theol. II. 1, ed. K.  Hadjú, trans. and comm. A.  Wollbold, Fontes Christiani 66 (Herder, 2016), 160. Note: I translate μονάς monad (or transliterate monas), rather than unity, as often done, and τριάς triad (or trias) instead of trinity, and ἑνάς henad (or henas), (a) to keep a distinction between monad and henad; and (b) because ‘trinity’ in English is almost entirely restricted to the ‘Holy Trinity’ and (by false etymology) conveys the sense of three-­in-­oneness, whereas the Greek words have entirely secular meanings, as well as being used in Christian theology of the Trinity.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  453 Compare that with two later chapters, 8 and 16. One who is healed of the breach caused by the Fall, is saved first from the ­passions, and then from impassioned thoughts. Next it is severed from nature and the logoi of nature, then from conceptual images (νοημάτων) and the knowledge relating to them. Finally, when it has passed through the manifold principles relating to divine providence, it arrives unknowingly at the very logos concerning (or around) the monad (εἰς αὐτὸν ἀγνώστως καταντᾷ τὸν περὶ μονάδος λόγον). Then the intellect contemplates its own immutability, and rejoices with un­speak­able joy, because it has received the ‘peace of God which transcends all intellect’ . . .14

And, He who has to some degree been initiated into the logos of the monad in­vari­ably discovers the logoi of providence and judgment.15

With these chapters we are en plein Évagre: attaining the monad is beyond what can be achieved by ascetic struggle (that is, πρακτική) and natural contemplation, but once we have been initiated into the logos of the monad, we come to understand the logoi of providence and judgement (of which Maximos gives a painstakingly Orthodox interpretation in Amb. 10).16 But Cap. theol. II.8 makes clear that monad has much the same meaning for Maximos as for Evagrios: in unknowing the nous comes to discover the meaning of monad by experience, the experience of its own deification, signalled by the divine attribute of ἀτρεψία, immutability. Furthermore this is received (εἰληφῶς). Cap. theol. II.1 presents us with the μονάς, identical with the τριάς—­a one-­in-­ threeness and three-­in-­oneness where number is evidently transcended—­though here Maximos does not explicitly mention number.17 The difference between Maximos and Evagrios is that where Evagrios uses μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς, Maximos uses μονὰς καὶ τριάς. It seems to me, however, that there is a precise equivalence between what Evagrios means by μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς and what Maximos means by μονὰς καὶ τριάς, and that in both cases μονάς functions to indicate the bond of unity within the Godhead, by means of which creatures participate in the final state of μονή, rest in God. Maximos, you will recall, replaced 14 Maximos, cap. theol. II. 8, ed. K. Hadjú, trans. and comm. A. Wollbold, 166–8; the last words—­ τὴν ὑπερέχουσαν πάντα νοῦν—­cite Phil. 4:7, usually translated ‘which passes all understanding’, which is implied here, too. 15 Maximos, cap. theol. II. 16, ed. K. Hadjú, trans. and comm. A. Wollbold, 172. 16 Maximos, amb. 10. 19; PG 91: 1133C–1136A; 10. 42; 1188C–1193C; N. Constas, ed. and tr., On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28–9 (Harvard University Press, 2014); I. 204–6, 308–20. 17  Not here, but he does elsewhere, e.g., Ambigua 10. 41; 1184D–1188C; Constas, ed. and tr., On Difficulties, I. 302–8.

454  Selected Essays, VOLUME II (in fact, reversed) the Origenist triad of rest–­movement–­becoming (μονή–­κίνησις–­ γένεσις) with the triad of coming to be–­movement–­rest (γένεσις–­κίνησις–­μονή) to describe the course of the rational creature.18 It is μονάς, understood as the bond of union with God, which, once attained, brings the rational intellect to its final state of rest, μονή. It is not difficult to see why Maximos has substituted μονὰς καὶ τριάς for Evagrios’ μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς. First of all, it is a clearer way of indicating one-­in-­ threeness of the Trinity, in which both oneness and threeness are transcended, than Evagrios’ μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς, which works in the explicit context of a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against the charge of tritheism (as in ep. fid.), but on its  own disguises rather than clarifies the Trinity which it is meant to signify. Furthermore by Maximos’ time μονὰς καὶ τριάς had become a traditional phrase for the Christian Trinity, found most significantly in Gregory of Nazianzus and Dionysios the Areopagite, as well as, a source not often noted in this context, the opening paragraph of the Emperor Justinian’s Edictum rectae fidei, and for the sake of completeness, Synesius of Cyrene’s hymns.

Μονάς and τριάς in Christian Theology A brief survey of the terms μονάς and τριάς in Christian theology reveals that the Christian use of τριάς for God could have had its origin in reaction against the Pythagorean use of μονάς for God; this, at least, is what we are told by Athenagoras in his Legatio: κατὰ τοὺς Πυθαγοπικοὺς . . . μονάς ἐστιν ὁ θεός, τοῦτ’ ἔστιν εἷς (‘according to the Pythagoreans . . . God is monad, that is, one’).19 It is Theophilos of Antioch, roughly a contemporary of Athenagoras, who seems to be the first to use τριάς for God: a triad consisting of θεός, λόγος, σοφία—­God, word, wisdom.20 Μονάς continues to be used by Christians, however: an interesting example, which foreshadows, it seems to me, the way μονάς is used by Dionysios, can be found in Clement’s Stromateis: We shall understand the method of purification by confession, and the visionary method by analysis, attaining to the primary intelligence by analysis, beginning at its basic principles. We take away from the body its natural qualities, removing the dimension of height, and then that of breadth and then that of length. The point that remains is a unit (μονὰς), as it were, having position; if we take away position, we have the concept of Monad (νοεῖται μονάς). If we then take 18 Note that there is an egregious mistake in my account of this in Maximus the Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 67, where I unaccountably characterized the Origenist position as becoming–­rest–­ movement. This is simply a mistake. 19 Athenagoras, leg. 6. 1, ed. W. R. Schoedel (OECT, 1972), 12. 20 Theophilos, Autol. II. 15, ed. R. M. Grant (OECT, 1970), 52.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  455 away everything concerned with bodies and the things called incorporeal, and cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ (εἰς τὸ μέγεθος τοῦ Χριστοῦ), and so advance into the immeasurable by holiness, we might perhaps attain to the conception of the Almighty, since we know not what he is, but what he is not.21

Monad here, means, not just unit, but rather something more like that in which we attain union—­not unlike the use of monad found in Evagrios and Maximos, which, we shall see, is also how monad will be used by the Areopagite. It is not until Gregory the Theologian that we find μονάς and τριάς used together of the Godhead, though, as we shall see, what Gregory does is to couple the terms μονὰς and τριάς, rather than using the expression, μονὰς καὶ τριάς. As well as use of μονὰς καὶ τριάς as a distinct way of referring to the Christian Godhead (perhaps not as frequent as one might imagine), there is plenty of evidence of playing off μονάς against τριάς, and tantalizing evidence of ascribing to God μονάς and τριάς, in which the δυάς is passed over: a couple of examples occur in Gregory the Theologian, in his Or. 23 (the second on Peace) and Or. 29 (the third ‘Theological’ oration), though in neither case does Gregory explain what he means (nor is any real attempt made by modern editors, at least the editors of Nazianzen’s homilies in Sources Chrétiennes; 270 and 250). There is something similar in St John Damascene’s treatise on the Trisagion, which makes clear its Neo-­Pythagorean provenance, but little else.22 We find something somewhat similar in Dionysios: as with Maximos it seems that μονὰς καὶ τριάς represented what Evagrios had meant by μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς. Dionysios’ doctrine of the Godhead is Trinitarian, though expressed in his own largely unique vocabulary (maybe to avoid the ‘anachronism’ of a first-­century writer making use of post-­Nicene terminology). In chapter 2 of the Divine Names, Dionysios expounds his understanding of the Trinity with a combination of technical terminology and vivid imagery. He introduces a contrast between ‘unions’ (ἑνώσεις) and ‘distinctions’ (διακρίσεις) among the names applied to God, and furthermore argues that these names can be applied either as unified or as distinct (or distinguished). Unified unions are names that are attributed to the Godhead itself, and equally to all the persons of the Trinity—­names such as being, godhead, goodness (though in attribution to God they become ὑπερούσιος ὕπαρξις (‘existence beyond being’), ὑπέρθεος θεότης (‘godhead beyond godhead’), etc.)—he also calls them ‘common names’, echoing Cappadocian usage; distinct

21  Clement of Alexandria, Strom. V. 11. 71. 2–3; translated by Henry Chadwick in Contra Celsum (Cambridge University Press, 1965), 429–30, n. 4; correcting ‘what He is and what He is not’; the Greek is: οὐχ ὃ ἐστιν, ὃ δὲ μή ἐστι γνωρίσαντες (Greek text in GCS 15 (Clemens Alexandrinus, 2) (Leipzig, 1906), 374). 22 This raises questions about the relationship between Christian Trinitarian speculation and numerology, of probably Pythagorean provenance, popular in late antiquity, and in some of the Fathers, probably under the influence of Philo: see the Appendix.

456  Selected Essays, VOLUME II unions refer to the distinct persons of the Trinity, names such as Father, Son, and  Holy Spirit; unified distinctions apply to the Incarnation; and distinct ­distinctions to the divine ‘processions and manifestations’ (640D), or the works of providence.23 He also speaks of the Trinity in terms of imagery: three lamps ­giving a single radiance,24 or, ‘the Father is the originating Source of the Godhead, and the Son and the Spirit are divine shoots, and, as it were, flowers and transcendent lights of the divinely fruitful divinity’.25 Although there are evident reminiscences here of Prokline Neoplatonism and its source in the Chaldaean Oracles, what is being expressed in this terminology seems recognizably Cappadocian. Also, it is reminiscent of Evagrios, in this sense: this doctrine of divine names expressing union and distinction, unified and distinguished—­thus forming four interrelated categories—­entails an understanding of these divine names that reach from the being of the Trinity—‘unified and distinct unions’—to the union of creatures with God, their deification, through the ‘distinct distinctions’, by means of ‘unified distinction’. The heart of the Christian life is not separate from our apprehension of the Trinity, but that apprehension defeats conceptualization, it is found ‘in unknowing’. Elsewhere Dionysios affirms that the thearchy is hymned as μονάς and τριάς, sometimes expanding what he means by the terms, as in Divine Names 1.4—‘as monad and henad through the simplicity and unity of an undividedness that transcends nature . . . and as triad through the trihypostatic manifestation of a fertility beyond being . . .’.26 The same language of monad and triad occurs in his account of the Trinity at the end of Divine Names: The deity beyond all, hymned as both monad and triad, is not discerned by us or any other of the beings as either monad or triad but, in order that we might truly praise his transcendence of any kind of union and divine generation, we name him as beyond any name by calling him God in a triadic and unique way (τῇ τριαδικῇ καὶ ἑνιαίᾳ θεωνυμίᾳ), acknowledged by beings as beyond being. But nothing of this, whether monad or triad, number or union, or fertility, nor any other thing from among beings, nor anything from beings are that are known, leads us to the hiddenness of the transcendent deity that, in a way beyond being, transcends the being of all, which is beyond any reason or intuition; neither has it a name or definition, but is raised up in the ineffable.27

23 Dionysios, d.n. 2: PG 3: 636C–652A; in Beate Regina Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I.  De Divinis Nominibus, PTS 33 (Walter de Gruyter, 1990), 122–37. The above is very much an oversimplification of Dionysios’ tangled and intricate exposition; for more detail, see Ysabel de Andia, Henosis. L’union à Dieu chez Denys l’Aréopagite (Brill, 1996), 69–75. 24 Dionysios, d.n. 2. 4: 641B–­C; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 127, l. 13–128, l. 2. 25  d.n. 2. 7: 645B; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 132, ll. 1–3. 26  d.n. 1. 4: 589D; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 112, l. 11–113, l. 1. 27  d.n. 13. 3: 980D–981A; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 229, ll. 6–14.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  457 There seems to be no other use of monad and triad together, though Dionysios sometimes talks about monad and triad separately. Once, famously, he addresses God as Τριάς, in the first word of the Mystical Theology,28 and refers to God as triad—­triad beyond being,29 triad as sole source (ἑναρχικὴ τριάς),30 triad beyond goodness.31 It is also striking that the last two chapters of Mystical Theology, which list what is to be denied of ‘the source of all’, do not include either μονάς or τριάς.32 If we compare this with Divine Names 13. 3 (just quoted), it would seem that the title μονὰς καὶ τριάς is the only—­paradoxical—­title that Dionysios permits, even Godhead, or deity, θεοτής, being excluded, along with titles such as the One, Unity, and Goodness: οὔτε ἕν οὔτε ἑνότης, οὔτε θεότης ἤ ἀγαθότης.33 Triad is also used of the triads of like-­ranked beings in the hierarchies. Nevertheless, as Balthasar observed, any theology of an imago trinitatis in the creature is strictly rejected: whether an Origenist ‘sub-­division’ of the ‘realms’ of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit within the created order (Father–­being, Son–­life, Spirit–­reason, or Father­–­ being, Son–­reason, and Spirit–­holiness), or a Tertullianist–­Joachimite partition of saving history amongst the three persons, or an Augustinian indication of vestigia and imagines in the structure of the individual creature. And this rejection is the work of a pupil of Proclus for whom the whole structure of being and the world has a triadic structure.34

Μονάς, on its own, is used more interestingly. Several times Dionysios relates the monad to number. ‘Nothing dual [no dyad] is beginning or ἀρχή, but the monad will be the ἀρχή of every dyad’;35 ‘For every number pre-­exists in a unified way in the monad, and the monad has every number in itself uniquely, and every number is united in the monad, as far as it proceeds from the monad, so far it can be discriminated and multiplied’.36 Another way Dionysios uses the term μονάς is to characterize the state of the deified being:37 something that confirms our impression of Evagrian echoes in Dionysios use of the term.

28  Τριὰς ὑπερούσιε καὶ ὑπέρθεε καὶ ὑπεράγαθε: myst. 1. 1: 997A, in Günther Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd edn, PTS 67 (Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 141, l. 3. 29  d.n. 5. 8: 821C; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 186, l. 5. 30  d.n. 2. 4: 641A; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 126, l. 15. 31  d.n. 3. 1: 680B; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 138, l. 3. 32  myst. 4–5: 1040D–1048B (ed. Ritter, 148–50). 33  myst. 5: 1048A (ed. Ritter, 149, ll. 8–9). 34  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), 184–5. 35  d.n. 4. 21: 721D; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 168, l. 22. 36  d.n. 5. 6: 820D–821A; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 184, l. 21–185, l. 3; there is something similar in d.n. 10. 2: 937C; Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 215, l. 19–216, l. 1. 37 cf. e.h. 3.Θ.3, Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 83, l. 2; 6. 3: 533A, Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 116, ll. 18–19, about the monk being led ‘through the sacred foldings of what is divided into the deiform monad and the perfection loved by God’.

458  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Dionysios, then, makes use of μονὰς καὶ τριάς in relation to God, but it is not his customary expression: θεαρχία or ‘the source of all’ is much more common. He, also, reflects on the two terms, monad and triad, and in his occasional reflections on monad, in particular, we can detect echoes of Pythagorean notions of the monad, as reflected in Plotinos and Proklos. Not to be overlooked in exploring the antecedents of μονὰς καὶ τριάς as applied to God, moreover, is Justinian’s Edictum rectae fidei, to be dated to 551, which begins, as we have seen, with a confession of faith in God the Trinity: We confess therefore that we believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit, glorifying Triad one in being, one Godhead, whether nature, being, power, authority, in three hypostaseis or persons, in whom we are baptized, in whom we have believed, and by which we rank together, separating the properties, and uniting the Godhead.

Then follows a passage based on confessing God as monad and triad, beginning with a quotation from Gregory the Theologian: For we worship monad in triad and triad in monad, holding in paradox the ­distinction and the union,38 the monad in accordance with the principle of being or the godhead, the triad in accordance with the distinguishing ­characteristics, or hypostases or persons (for it is divided without division, so to speak, and united in separation; for the godhead is one in three and the three in which the godhead is, or rather to speak more precisely, which the godhead is, are one),39 each one God, yet only beheld by the intellect which separates what is inseparable, God conceived of as three together with one another by identity of movement and being, since it is necessary to confess the one God and proclaim the three hypostases, or three persons, each with its distinguishing characteristic.40 (μονάδα γὰρ ἐν τριάδι καὶ τριάδα ἐν μονάδι προσκυνοῦμεν παράδοξον ἔχουσαν καὶ τὴν διαίρεσιν καὶ τὴν ἕνωσιν, μονάδα μὲν κατὰ τὸν τῆς οὐσίας ἢ γοῦν θεότητος λόγον, τριάδα δὲ κατὰ τὰς ἰδιότητας ἢ γοῦν ὑποστάσεις ἤτοι πρόσωπα (διαιρεῖται γὰρ ἀδιαιρέτως, ἵν᾽ οὕτως εἴπωμεν, καὶ συνάπτεται διῃρημένως· ἓν γὰρ ἐν τρισὶν ἡ θεότης καὶ τὰ τρία ἓν τὰ ἐν οἷς ἡ θεότης, ἢ το γε ἀκριβέστερον εἰπεῖν, ἃ ἡ θεότης), θεὸν ἕκαστον, ἂν θεωρῆται μόνον τοῦ νοῦ χωρίζοντος τὰ ἀχώριστα, θεὸν τὰ τρία μετ᾽ ἀλλήλων νοούμενα τῷ ταυτῷ τῆς κινήσεως καὶ τῆς φύσεως, ἐπειδὴ χρὴ καὶ τὸν ἕνα θεὸν ὁμολογεῖν καὶ τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις κηρύττειν ἢ γοῦν τρία πρόσωπα καὶ μετὰ τῆς ἰδιότητος.) 38  Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 25. 17, ll. 3–5, ed. J. Mossay, SC 284 (1981), 198. 39 The section enclosed in brackets is also from Gregory Nazianzen, or. 39. 11. 18–21, ed. C. Moreschini, SC 358 (1990), 172. 40 Justinian, Edictum rectae fidei; E Schwartz, ed., Drei dogmatische Schriften Iustinians (Abhandlungen des Bayerischen Akademie des Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Abteilung, Neue Folge. Heft 18, Munich, 1939), 72, ll. 13–23.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  459 The importance of this passage from Justinian’s Edictum Rectae Fidei is that, in contrast with the theologoumena we have already discussed, as an imperial edict, it had the force of law throughout the Byzantine Empire, lending therefore official approval of the highest degree to this use of ‘monad and triad’ in relation to God.41 Moreover such a conception of God emphasizes the apophatic aspect of our apprehension of God, though at the same time it is rooted in the baptismal confession. There are two points to notice about the use of μονὰς καὶ τριάς in relation to God: first, and most obviously, the paradox implicit in this coupling of oneness and threeness—­a paradox, even more precisely an antinomy, that represents a kind of insurmountable roadblock to reason’s search to understand God. The other point to notice is the way in which the affirmation of God as μονὰς καὶ τριάς seems invariably to introduce, or be part of, a celebration of God’s being in long, rhythmic clauses, often reminiscent of liturgical language. Hans Urs von Balthasar noticed this union of the apophatic and the liturgical in Byzantine Trinitarian theology, tracing it back to Dionysios the Areopagite, who, in truth, only makes explicit what can be found in fourth-­century theologians such as the Cappadocian Fathers and St John Chrysostom,42 saying in his discussion of Dionysios the Areopagite in Herrlichkeit, that ‘the three-­ in-­ oneness of God  .  .  .  is clearly expressed in dogmatic-­liturgical form, but as a whole is consigned to the darkness of the unsearchable mysterium’.43 Something Vladimir Lossky had already asserted: ‘the revelation of the Holy Trinity, which is the summit of cataphatic theology, belongs also to apophatic theology’.44

The Trinitarian Theology of Maximos the Confessor . . . Bearing all this in mind, we can approach the central topic of this paper: the Trinitarian theology of St Maximos the Confessor and St John Damascene.45 So far as Maximos is concerned, we need, too, to note the unsystematic nature of much of his theology, marked more by allusion than by developed argument. This is something he shares, to some degree, with Evagrius: a point repeated by Daley

41  For a more nuanced discussion of the status of the edictum, see Richard Price, in The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, Translated Texts for Historians 51 (Liverpool, 2009), 122–3. 42  One of the most influential considerations of the incomprehensibility of God among the fourth-­ century Fathers is to be found in John Chrysostom, in his homilies on the Incomprehensibility of God, ed. A.-M. Malingrey, SC 28bis (1970). 43 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord II, 184. 44 Vladimir Lossky, ‘La notion des “analogies” chez le Pseudo-­ Denys l’Aréopagite’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930), 279–309, at 283. 45  On which, see also Brian E. Daley, SJ, ‘Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus on the Trinity’. In The Holy Trinity in the Life of the Church, ed. Khaled Anatolios (Baker Academic, 2014), 79–99.

460  Selected Essays, VOLUME II in the context of Evagrius’ relation to the Cappadocians, that ‘Evagrius writes largely . . . either in aphorism or in commentaries or brief, learned scholia on scripture—­not in polemical treatises, pastoral sermons, or artistic rhetorical composition’ (Maximos does, of course, engage in polemical treatises, but only as a last resort).46 Nevertheless there are several places where Maximos initiates a sequence of thought that leads into the doctrine of the Trinity: at the beginning of his second Century on Theology and the Economy, sometimes thought to constitute his ‘revision’ of an Origenism he found in many respects sympathetic, and at the beginning of his treatise known as the Fifteen Chapters, which introduces the five centuries ascribed to him in the eighteenth-­century Philokalia that follow the two Centuries on Theology and the Economy (these other centuries are now thought to consist mostly of extracts from other works of the Confessor gathered together by disciples to provide a more accessible account of the thought of the master). In both passages we seem to find a rare spurt of systematic exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. The passage from the second Century we have already looked at in connection with exploring the resonances of Evagrian Trinitarianism in his theology: There is one God, because there is one godhead; a monad without beginning and simple and beyond being, and without parts, and indivisible; the same monad and triad; the same wholly monad, and the same wholly triad; the same wholly monad according to being, the same wholly triad according to the hypostases . . .

There follows a long passage in which this wholeness in wholeness is spelt out in detail: detail that rather puts the Athanasian Creed in the shade! What is striking is the clear distinction between the ontological status of the unity of the Trinity (the μονάς), and that of the hypostaseis (the τριάς). That ontological distinction, which sometimes takes the form of distinguishing between being, εἶναι, and existing, ὑφεστήναι (used particularly in the Ambiguum 1 ad Thomam),47 is not extended explicitly by Maximos to the unity and distinction of human persons (though many who appeal to Maximos do just that). Maximos does, however, use another, related distinction—­between λόγος τῆς οὐσίας/φύσεως and τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως, principle of being/nature and mode of existence—­which he does apply to created reality, though even then that is not his primary concern.48 Also striking, at least to ears attuned to the Byzantine Liturgy (especially to the anaphoras), 46  Daley, ‘Evagrios and Cappadocian Orthodoxy’, 38, cf. 15. 47  Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum ad Thomam una cum Epistula Secunda ad eundem, ed. Bart Janssens, CCSG 48 (Leuven, 2002), 6–7. 48  See my ‘St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγος and τρόπος and the Ontology of the Person’. In Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher, ed. S.  Mitralexis et al. (Cascade Books, 2017), 157–65 (also printed as Chapter 28 in Selected Essays, volume I).

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  461 are the liturgical echoes of the passage. Balthasar, of course, notes this, but does not pick it up in his subsequent reflections in Cosmic Liturgy. In his later Herrlichkeit, however, he comments on the literary style of Dionysios’ ­the­ology thus: If the manner of theology is ‘holy measure’, its sound is ‘holy celebration’. Because God is in all things and above all things, being and knowing can only be a festival and a ‘dance’, a continuous ‘celebration’ of the glory that communicates itself and holds sway in all things and above all things, a ‘hymn’, a ‘song of praise’, which has its own laws which must be followed in everything from its basic ­conception, the choice of point of view, right down to the least form of expression . . . The style strides along so consciously loaded, draped with so many sacred garments, that it makes any haste impossible and compels us not only to follow him in his train of thought but also to join with him in his mood of celebration.49

Maximos is clearly indebted to Dionysios, not just in the way he picks up and develops the Dionysian understanding of the Trinity in terms of monad and triad, but also in his sense of theology, especially in relation to the Trinity, as primarily doxological, and thus expressed in a style that avoids all ‘haste’, so that his train of thought is never distanced from a ‘mood of celebration’. Similar to this passage from the second Century is the first chapter of Capita XV: The Good that is beyond being and beyond the unoriginated is one, the holy trihypostatic monad, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; an infinite conjunction of infinites; having a principle (λόγος) of being, together with how it is, what it is, and of what kind it is, altogether inaccessible to beings. It evades every intellection of intellective beings, in no way issuing from its natural hiddenness, and infinitely transcending any knowledge of any kind (πάσης πασῶν γνώσεων . . . γνώσεως).50

This bristles with the technical language, developed in relation to the Trinity and Christology in the wake of Chalcedon, while at the same time denying that there is any way in which ordinary beings can penetrate the hiddenness of the Triune Godhead (exactly Balthasar’s contrast between ‘dogmatic-­liturgical form’ and ‘the darkness of the unsearchable mysterium’). And yet, this is not just apophatic the­ ology conceived of as negative theology in a logical mode; the reference to God’s κατὰ φύσιν κρυφία, his natural, or essential, hiddenness seems to me to express an  attitude of awe before the mystery of God, rather than a human theological ­programme of logical denial. This seems to me even more evident in two other 49 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord II, 172.

50  Cap. XV 1 (PG 90: 1177A).

462  Selected Essays, VOLUME II not­able passages about the Trinity in Maximos’s works, in On the Lord’s Prayer and in the Mystagogia, passages that are clearly related: both seeming to be a painstaking expansion of the way the doctrine of the Trinity is expressed at the beginning of the Emperor Justinian’s Edictum rectae fidei.51 The latter, from the Mystagogia, states that the Word leads the soul: to the knowledge of theology made manifest after its journey through all things, granting it an understanding equal to the angels as far as is possible. He will teach it with such wisdom that it will know God to be one, one nature and three hypostaseis, a trihypostatic monad of being and a consubstantial triad of hypostaseis; monad in triad and triad in monad; neither one and another, nor one beside another, nor one through another, nor one in another, nor one from another, but the same in itself and by itself and next to itself, and with itself, both monad and triad, having union uncomposed and unconfused, and distinction undivided and indivisible, monad according to the principle of essence and being, but not according to composition or coalescence or any kind of confusion; triad according to the principle of how it exists and subsists, and not according to division or alienation or any kind of separation—­for the monad is not divided into hypostaseis, nor does it admit of relationships that are beheld within it, nor are the hypostaseis put together into the monad nor do they find fulfilment by coalescence, but the same is identical with itself, in different ways—­for the holy triad of hypostaseis is a monad unconfused by its single principle according to nature and by essence, while the holy monad is triad in its hypostaseis and by its mode of existence—­the same understood as a whole as one and another, differently in accordance with one or another principle, as has been said: the godhead, one and only, undivided and unconfused and simple, incapable of diminution or deviation, existing as wholly monad in accordance with its essence, and the same wholly triad by its hypostaseis, a sole ray shining in the single form of one triple-­splendoured light. In this light the soul now equal in dignity with the holy angels, having received the luminous principles which are accessible to creation concerning the godhead and having learned harmoniously with them to praise the one godhead ­triadically without keeping silent, is brought to the adoption by grace through a corresponding likeness . . .52

The context here is the epitome of the argument of the Mystagogia, summarizing how, through a life of ascetic struggle and participation in the Holy Mysteries, the 51 Justinian, Edictum Rectae Fidei, 72. Noted by C. Boudignon (ed.) in his edition of Mystagogia, CCSG 69 (Turnhout, 2011), 52–3. 52  Mystagogia 23; Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 836–45, 862–8. The parallel passage in On the Lord’s Prayer is Expos. Or. Dom. 438–65, ed. P. Van Deun, CCSG 23 (Turnhout, 1991).

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  463 soul is led by the Word to a contemplative awareness of God, whose nature is expressed in the austere terms of conciliar Orthodoxy. The terminology is to prevent any misunderstanding that would frustrate true encounter with God, but what is granted, which brings the soul to equal dignity with the angels, is not exactly understanding in any human sense, as it is beyond any conceptualization. This formulation bristles with technical logical and metaphysical terminology, but solely to an apophatic end, that is, the denial of a host of ways of misapplying these carefully defined concepts. In the form found in On the Lord’s Prayer, ‘mystical theology’, as Maximos calls it, teaches us to know one nature and power of the godhead, that is, one God, contemplated in Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, as it were a single uncaused Intellect (νοῦς), subsisting essentially, the begetter according to being of a single Word/Logos without beginning, and the source of a single eternal Life, subsisting essentially as the Holy Spirit: triad in monad and monad in triad; not one in another, for the triad is not in the monad, as accident in substance, nor vice versa, for God is without qualities; nor as one and another, for the monad does not differ from the triad by otherness of nature, for the nature is simple and single; nor as one beside another, for the triad is not distinguished from the monad, nor the monad from the triad, by diminution of power; nor is the monad distinguished from the triad as something common and general is perceived different in thought only from the particulars that make it up: it is properly self-­existent being and absolutely mighty power; nor as one through another, for there is no mediating relationship such as cause and effect, for it is absolutely self-­identical and without relationship; nor as one out of another, for the triad is not from the  monad either by derivation or by promotion, being ingenerate and self-­ revealed—­but the same is said to be and understood to be, truly monad and triad, both by the principle (λόγῷ) of its being and the mode (τροπῷ) of its existence, the same wholly monad, not divided into hypostases, nor confused by the monad, lest polytheism be introduced by division, or atheism by confusion.53

Compared with the passage from the Mystagogia, this passage, based like the other on Justinian’s Edictum rectae fidei, expounds the doctrine of the Trinity in much the same way, albeit more concisely. Again, technical logical/metaphysical terminology is used in an apophatic way, to avoid any misunderstanding of the notion of God as monad and triad, but expressed in measured passages that echo the rhythm of the Byzantine anaphoras, and convey a sense of passing into the Trinitarian mystery. 53  Expos. Or. Dom. 438–65, ed. Van Deun.

464  Selected Essays, VOLUME II

. . . and John Damascene There is something very similar in St John of Damascus, a theologian indebted to the Confessor in many respects, though in other respects seemingly deaf to the Confessor, not least in completely passing over Maximos’ signature doctrine, his theory of the logoi. It is only recently that the extent of the Damascene’s contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity has become clear, for large swathes of the Exposition of the Faith have long been attributed to a work ascribed of Cyril of Alexandria, On the Most-­Holy Trinity. It has, however, been conclusively demonstrated by Vassa Kontouma that this work belongs to the fourteenth century and itself heavily plagiarizes John’s Exposition of the Faith,54 thus restoring to the Damascene much of his text and revealing his originality as a theologian. The first fourteen chapters of his Expositio Fidei, or On the Orthodox Faith, are concerned with the Trinity.55 He begins with an uncompromising assertion of God’s unknowability; we only know God through revelation, in the economy from cre­ ation to Incarnation, and even in this revelation, God remains hidden.56 He then goes on the discuss the interplay of knowing and unknowing in relation to God.57 When he turns to the Trinity itself, he bases himself on the early chapters of Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration, in which the doctrine of the Trinity is developed from considering the triad of God, his Word, and his Spirit. This manifestation of God through his Word and Spirit belongs to the divine economy (John has already introduced the distinction between θεολογία and οἰκονομία: expos. fid. 2, ll. 3–4). Nevertheless, what is revealed in the divine economy is: God without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting [αἰώνιός τε καὶ ἀίδιος], uncreated, unchangeable, unalterable, simple, uncomposed, bodiless, invisible, untouchable, uncircumscribed, infinite, ungraspable (ἀπερίληπτος), incomprehensible, inconceivable,58 good,59 just, almighty, creator of all creatures, ruling over all, all-­seeing, caring for all,60 exercising authority, judge. And that

54  See Vassa Kontouma, ‘Pseudo-­Cyril’s De SS. Trinitate: a compilation of Joseph the Philosopher’, John of Damascus: New Studies on His Life and Works (Ashgate, 2015), § IV (= Orientalia Christiana Periodica 61 (1995), 117–29). 55  For more detail, see Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford University Press, 2002), 89–116. 56  John Damascene, expos. fid. 1; in Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 7–8. 57  Expos. fid. 2; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 8–10. 58  Note this series of adjectives, all beginning with alpha, almost invariably an alpha-­privative (only αἰώνιος and ἁπλοῦς not properly so), underlining the apophatic nature of God; note also how similar it is to the way God is addressed at the beginning of the anaphora in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: ‘for you are God, ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing, eternally the same’. 59 Good, ἀγαθός, also begins with an alpha, though not an alpha-­privative. 60  Note that in the Greek, from ‘almighty’ to ‘caring for all’, these are either adjectives with the prefix παντ-, ‘all’, or an adjectival expression beginning πάντων, genitive of ‘all’.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  465 he is one God, or rather a single being, and that he is acknowledged and is in three hypostases, Father, that is, and Son and Holy Spirit.61

This passage has a strikingly liturgical ring, which is present even more clearly when he comes to sum up his understanding of God specifically as Trinity later on: We believe consequently in one God, one principle without beginning [μίαν ἀρχὴν ἄναρχον], uncreated, unbegotten, indestructible and immortal, eternal, infinite, uncircumscribed, without definition, infinitely powerful, simple, uncomposed, bodiless, without flux [ἄρρευστον], beyond suffering [ἀπαθῆ], unchangeable, unalterable, invisible, the source of goodness and justice, intelligible light, unapproachable, power recognizing no measure, measured only by its own will [βουλήματι]—for all that he wills, he can do—­maker of all creatures, visible and invisible, constituting and preserving everything, exercising providential care over everything, controlling and ruling and reigning over everything in his unending and immortal reign, having nothing opposed [to him], filling all things, contained by nothing, but rather itself containing the whole of all that is [τὰ σύμπαντα], constituting and directing it, purely penetrating through all beings [ἀχράντως . . . ἐπιβατεύουσαν], and beyond all, transcending every being as beyond being and being above all beings, beyond God, beyond goodness, beyond fulness, determining [ἀφορίζουσαν] every principle and rank, established above every principle and rank, beyond being and life and reason [λόγον] and concept [ἔννοιαν], light itself, goodness itself, life itself, being itself,62 as not having its being from another, nor being one of such things as are, being itself the source of being to everything that is, of life to everything that lives, of logos to everything that participates in logos, the cause of everything good to everything, knowing everything before it comes to pass, one being, one godhead, one power, one will, one activity, one principle, one authority, one lordship, one reign, in three perfect hypostases acknowledged and venerated with a single veneration, believed in and worshipped by every rational creation, united without confusion and distinguished with no separation—­which is a paradox. One Father and Son and Holy Spirit, in which we are baptized. For so the Lord commanded the apostles to baptize, saying ‘Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’.63

This remarkable passage makes an epitome of the whole development of patristic Trinitarian theology (and alluding very clearly to the wealth of intellectual 61  Exp. fid. 2. 10–17; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 8–9. 62  All these four nouns are prefixed by αὐτο-. 63  Exp. fid. 8, ll. 1–29; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 18–19.

466  Selected Essays, VOLUME II traditions that constitute its tributaries), full of technical terminology and ­profoundly apophatic, which at last comes to rest on the final words of the Risen Lord to his disciples as he sends them out to preach the gospel and baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:17–20). However, for all the technical precision of the language, the Damascene is quite clear that we are only gesturing towards a mystery beyond our understanding, and in particular he makes a point of asserting the complete lack of continuity between the uncreated Godhead and everything created. God the Trinity is μονὰς καὶ τριάς: a unity admitting of distinction, but there is no analogy between the unity of the persons of the Godhead and the unity of persons represented by the human race. About this John is quite categorical. He introduces, with a phrase he repeated uses to signal a premiss, important in this exposition, demanding careful attention—­χρὴ δὲ εἰδέναι, ‘it is necessary to know’—‘that it is one thing to be beheld in reality and another to be beheld in thought and concept’: there is a sharp contrast between being known πράγματι, ‘in reality’ and being known λόγῳ καὶ ἐπινοίᾳ, ‘in thought and concept’. Using this distinction, John affirms that in the Godhead the oneness is real and the distinction between the persons simply something discerned, whereas in the case of creatures the opposite is the case: the distinction between persons is real, and their unity only discerned, if at all.64 Whatever he means by this (he is picking up a distinction first used by Cyril of Alexandria in Christology, but later applied it in relation to the Trinity, and now by John contrasted with what holds within the created order),65 it is clear that though both the uncreated and the created can be seen to combine unity and distinction, they do this in radically opposed ways. The intellectual lineage of this way of distinguishing the unity of the Trinity from any kind of unity in the created order is different from the lineage of the distinction between numerical unity (found among bodily beings) and the ‘absolute and non-­numerical unity’ of the divine essence, that we earlier traced from St Basil and Evagrios through to Maximos; nevertheless these two approaches converge quite precisely. This distinction between the uncreated and the created finds further con­firm­ ation later on, in Exp. fid. 14, where John discusses, briefly, his notion of the coinherence, περιχώρησις, of the persons of the Trinity (already introduced in exp. fid. 8. 263), a notion that, in a Trinitarian context, is his own contribution to the theological tradition. There he says: There is rest and abiding of the hypostaseis in one another: for they are not distant from nor emanate from each other, having an unconfused coinherence 64  Exp. fid. 8, ll. 223–37; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 28. 65  See the discussion in Louth, St John Damascene, 111; as well as in M.-O. Boulnois, Le paradoxe trinitaire chez Cyrille d’Alexandrie (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1994), 176, which suggests, after Kontouma’s disposal of ‘Pseudo-­Cyril’ (Kontouma, John of Damascus, IV), that the distinction was developed by John himself from some glimmerings in earlier Fathers.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  467 (περιχώρησιν) in one another, not eliding one another nor compounded one with another, but as possessing one another. For Son is in Father and Spirit, and Spirit in Father and Son, and Father in Son and Spirit, there being no running together, or commixture, or confusion. And one and the same in movement, for there is one emergence and one movement of the three hypostases, which it is impossible to behold in created nature.66

The last phrase refers us back to the discussion in exp. fid. 8, ll. 223–37, mentioned above, which underlines the ontological difference between uncreated and created being, and sees the perichoresis of the persons as belonging to divine, uncreated reality, in contrast to created reality where hypostases are separate from each other.

Maximos and John Compared Maximos and John Damascene are together in affirming the fundamental ­distinction between the uncreated and the created—­a distinction that imposes an apophaticism on any creaturely understanding of the Godhead. However, they seem to be divided over one point. For Maximos, the austerely defined doctrine of God as monad and triad is presented—­both in On the Our Father and the Mystagogia—­as the mystery of the God to whom, through the process of mystagogia, pre-­eminently in the Divine Liturgy, we are being assimilated by deification, θέωσις. There is really nothing of this in the Damascene: God as monad and triad is the one we glorify and worship; θέωσις has little place in the Damascene’s the­ ology. When he mentions deification—­and it is rare—­it is more likely to be in connection with the deification of Christ’s human nature as a result of the hypostatic union.67 Deification seems to be, like the doctrine of the logoi, a central doctrine of the Confessor to which the Damascene turns a deaf ear. Nevertheless, for both of them, the technical conceptual terms that enshrine the doctrine of the Trinity serve primarily to bring out the incomprehensibility of  the Trinitarian mystery, recalling the way in which monad and triad are drawn into the language of worship: ‘hymned as both monad and triad’ (Dionysios), ‘we worship monad in triad and triad in monad’ (Justinian, quoting Gregory the  Theologian), God ‘glorified in triad and in monad’ (John of Damascus).

66  Exp. fid. 14; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 42, ll. 11–18. 67 See exp. fid. 61; 56, ll. 59–61; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 155–7, 136, for the deification of Christ’s human nature; for human deification: exp. fid. 88. 18; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 203. There is also the notion in the Damascene, not mentioned in expos. fid., that in virtue of being bodily, the human image is superior to the angelic image, and in particular through the Eucharist participates in the divine nature, whereas the angels participate only in the divine activity and grace: see imag. III. 26; Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, III. 133.

468  Selected Essays, VOLUME II Our  speculations limp and finally come to nothing as we approach the divine mystery, to which our response can only be one of awe and wonder: Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός, ἅγιος ἰσχυρός, ἅγιος ἀθάνατος, ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς—‘Holy God, holy strong, holy immortal, have mercy on us’. For both there is a firm conviction that reason—­purified reason, that is, freed from the irrational urges of the lower parts of the soul—­may take us towards the mystery of the Trinity, but cannot conceptualize it; reason remains on the threshold of the mystery. Maximos has more to say about the way in which ‘[the intellect] arrives unknowingly at the very logos concerning (or around) the monad (εἰς αὐτὸν ἀγνώστως καταντᾷ τὸν περὶ μονάδος λόγον)’;68 nevertheless, both Maximos and John find themselves brought to the threshold of an unknowing knowledge by participation in the Divine Liturgy, alluded to in the liturgical echoes in the language which traces the lineaments of the austere Orthodoxy of the Councils. Here we find ourselves at the heart of the Trinitarian theology—­or better the Trinitarian mystery—­of the Byzantine Fathers, expressed at its clearest and perhaps most uncompromisingly in the theology of St Maximos the Confessor and St John Damascene.

Appendix: Numerology and the Trinity There are two passages in Gregory the Theologian that bring monad and triad into conjunction, suggesting some kind of movement from monad to triad, in this way achieving perfection. The two passages are, first, from the Third Theological Oration; and, second, from the third (often called the ‘second’) oration on Peace: Διὰ τοῦτο μονὰς ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, εἰς δυάδα κινηθεῖσα, μέχρι τριάδος ἔστη. (Or. 29.2: 76B; SC 250: 180, ll. 13–14) (Therefore, the monad was moved from the beginning towards the dyad until it came to a halt at the triad) (Τριάδα τελείαν ἐκ τελείων τριῶν,] μονάδος μὲν κινηθείσης διὰ τὸ πλούσιον, δυάδος δὲ ὑπερβαθείσης—­ὑπὲρ γὰρ τὴν ὕλην καὶ τὸ εἶδος, ἐξ ὧν τὰ σώματα—, τριάδος δὲ ὁρισθείσης διὰ τὸ τέλειον . . . (Or. 23.8: 1160C; SC 270: 298, ll. 9–11) ([Perfect triad from three perfect realities,] the monad moved through abundance, passing beyond the dyad—­for beyond matter and form, out of which are bodies—­defined as triad because of its perfection)

68  Cap. theol. II. 8, ed. K. Hadjú, trans. and comm. A. Wollbold, 168, lines 1–2.. Cf., for example, Maximos’ discussion in Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60, where he makes clear that reasoning about God ceases with the experience (πεῖρα) of God.

The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology  469 It seems to me that behind both these passages lies some numerological speculation of most likely Pythagorean provenance. Both passages exercised Maximos the Confessor, not, however, in relation to any numerological significance they might evoke (Maximos discusses both passages in various places: Amb. 10. 43 quotes or. 23, and probably alludes to or. 29; Amb. 23 is on the passage from or. 29; while the passage from or. 23 had already been discussed in qu. dub. 105, CCSG 10: 79–80);69 what concerned Maximos was the suggestion—­in moving from monad to triad—­of movement in God, a suggestion he was anxious to resist, which he did by interpreting the movement as taking place in our intellects as we seek to catch a glimpse of what is involved in saying that God is monad and triad. One might have expected some discussion of this in Michael Psellos, but the only ­discussion of this that I can find is similarly preoccupied by the impropriety of thinking of movement in relation to the divine.70 The first passage continues with Gregory exclaiming, ‘And therefore for us this is Father, and Son, and the Holy Spirit’ (Καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν ἡμῖν ὁ Πατήρ, καὶ ὁ Υἱός, καί τὸ ἅγιον Πνεῦμα). The word ‘for us’ (a single word in Greek) seems to indicate that the phrase is in fact a quotation from one of ‘the outside philosophers’ (οἱ θύραθεν φιλόσοφοι): quite whom, I am not sure, as I have not been able to find anything exactly corresponding—­something about which we should not be surprised, as we are largely in the dark about fourth-­century Athenian Platonism. Plotinus says something reminiscent, but there is no mention of triad: ‘when a dyad comes to be, the monad before the dyad exists, neither each of the two units in the dyad nor one of them is the monad in the dyad’.71 Wherever it is from, Gregory seizes on it and interprets it of the Trinity. It is not difficult to speculate on what it might have meant. Ideas of number, based on Pythagorean notions, commonly assert that neither one nor two is properly a number: one is prior to number (monad as the source of number), while the dyad signifies division—­ necessary for there to be something to be numbered, but not itself a number. Three, following on from these, is the first number. Gregory seems to be suggesting that the passage from monad to triad is, in some way, suggestive of the Trinity. It is likely that such numerological ideas were current in Christian thought of the Byzantine period. For instance, St John Damascene has this to say in his treatise on the Trisagion hymn: The monad is without quantity, the dyad is the beginning of number, and the triad a complete number. [Μονὰς γὰρ ἄποσος, δυὰς δὲ ἀρχὴ ἀριθμοῦ, τριὰς δὲ 69  See the brief discussion in Constas, ed. and tr., On Difficulties, I. 473. 70  Opusc. theol. 20; Theologica, I, ed. Paul Gautier, Teubner, 1989, 76. 71  Enn. V. 5. 4. 23–6; tr. A. H. Armstrong [Loeb Classical Library, 1984, 169]. Armstrong’s translation distinguishes between μονάς as unit, and μονάς as something higher, perceived by the intellect—­μονάς, that is, as the source of number, not the first number; cf. Chadwick’s translation (Contra Celsum) of Clement of Alexandria, above.

470  Selected Essays, VOLUME II ἀριθμὸς τέλειος] But it is not because of number that the Godhead is in a triad, but because the Godhead is in a triad that three is a perfect (or complete: τέλειος) number. For ‘the monad was moved from the beginning towards the dyad until it came to a halt at the triad’.  (Trisag. 28. 11–14)

The Damascene caps his argument with the familiar quotation from Gregory’s third theological oration. He seems, too, to know of numerological speculation, either behind Gregory’s remark or caused by it, and is concerned to insist that God is not Trinity because of number theory, rather number theory itself reflects the truth of the Trinitarian God. Incidentally, the idea of three as a perfect (or complete) number might seem odd—­though the Damascene’s reasoning makes perfect sense—­for the normal meaning of a ‘perfect number’ is a number whereby the sum of the factors of which equals the number itself—­in contrast to a ‘super-­ abundant’ (ὑπερτέλειος) or ‘deficient’ (ἐλλιπής) number where the sum of its factors exceeds or falls short of the number itself (e.g., 6 is a perfect number because 1 + 2 + 3 = 6; 12 super-­abundant because 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 6 = 16; 8 deficient because 1 + 2 + 4 = 7). However, a fragment from Iamblichus’ On Pythagoreanism, preserved in Psellos’ On Ethical and Theological Arithmetic, refers to 3 and 6 as ‘two perfect numbers’, so there is independent support for the idea that 3, too, is a perfect number, as John Damascene asserts.72

72 See Dominic  J.  O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Clarendon Press, 1989); On Ethical and Theological Arithmetic is found in appendix I (pp. 222–9); the passage referred to is found at ll. 44–6 (on p. 225).

Details of Original Publication 1. ‘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. 2. ‘The Greatest Fantasy’, Review Article of Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism in PNReview 17 (1980), 36–8. 3. ‘The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in The Analogy of Beauty, ed. J. Riches (T. & T. Clark, 1986), 147–63. 4. ‘Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, in Jung and the Monotheisms, ed. Joel Ryce-Menuhin (Routledge, 1993), 241–54. 5. ‘The Image of Heloise in English Literature’, Downside Review 111, (1993), 45–64. 6. ‘Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾿ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage’, in Χριστιανικὴ Θεσσαλονική, Ὁ Ἱερὸς Νάος τοῦ Ἁγίου Δημητρίου, Προσκύνημα Ἀνατολῆς καὶ Δύσεως (University Studio Press, 2001 (sic: actually 2003)), 97–102. 7. ‘The Theology of the Philokalia’, in Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West, ed. John Behr, Andrew Louth, and Dimitri Conomos (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 351–61. 8. ‘Theology, Contemplation and the University’, Studies in Christian Ethics 17 (2004), 69–79. 9. ‘Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49 (2005), 145–64. 10. ‘The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov’, Sobornost 27:2 (2005), 36–56. 11. ‘La preghiera di Gesù e la teologia della divinizzazione’, in La preghiera di Gesù, ed. I. Alfeev, V.A. Kotel´nikov, A. Louth, and M. Van Parys, e AA. VV. (Edizione Qiqajon, 2005), 277–91 (‘Prière de Jésus et déification chez Florensky et Boulgakov’, Contacts 57.211 (2005), 203–15). 12. ‘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, Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005, 45–63. 13. ‘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, ed. Archimandrite Job Getcha and Michel Stavrou, Analecta Sergiana 3 (Presses Saint-Serge, 2005), 169–76. 14. ‘Pagans and Christians on Providence’, in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority and Change, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 279–97. 15. ‘What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51 (2007), 435–44. 16. ‘The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J.  Christensen, and Jeffery  A.  Wittung (Fairleigh Dickinson Unversity Press, 2007), 32–44. 17. ‘Inspiration of the Scriptures’, Sobornost 31:1 (2009), 29–44.

472  Details of Original Publication 18. ‘Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian’, Irish Theological Quarterly 74 (2009), 243–57. 19. ‘Space, Time and the Liturgy’, in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009), 215–31. 20. ‘Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition’, in Heiligkeit und Apostolizität der Kirche, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, and Gregor Emmenegger, Wiener Patristische Tagungen V (Tyrolia-Verlag, 2010), 235–9. 21. ‘Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church’, in Saints and Sanctity, Studies of Church History 47 (2011), 1–18 22. ‘The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World’, The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (Oxford University Press, 2012), 50–60, 286–7 (notes). 23. ‘Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium’, in Experiencing Byzantium, ed. Claire Nesbitt and Mark Johnson, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, Publications 18 (Ashgate, 2013), 79–88. 24. ‘Theology of the “In-Between” ’, Communio Viatorum 55 (2013), 223–36. 25. ‘Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity’, in Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark, ed. Carol Harrison, Caroline Humfress, and Isabella Sandwell (Oxford University Press, 2014), 109–19. 26. ‘Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology’, in Correlating Sobornost. Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition, ed. Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, and John C. McDowell (Fortress Press, 2016), 189–210. 27. ‘Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View’, Koinonia. The Journal of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, New Series 68 (Christmastide 2017), 9–26 (Constantinople Lecture 2016] [with a little updating]). 28. ‘Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some Reflections on the Development of Mariology’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60 (2016), 431–51. 29. ‘The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015’, Sobornost 39:1 (2017), 7–35. 30. ‘Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox Reflections’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18.2–3 (2018), 132–45 (‘Reflecting a Catholic Mind’: In Memory of The Right Revd Dr Geoffrey Rowell, MA, DPhil, DD (Oxon)). 31. ‘What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by “mystical Theology”?’, in Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice, ed. Chris Cook (Routledge, 2018), 22–33. 32. ‘The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim’, in Mount Athos and Russia: 1016–2016, ed. Nicholas Fennell and Graham Speake (Peter Lang, 2018), 99–116. 33. ‘Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am Kreuz’, in Jesus der Christus im Glauben der einen Kirche: Christologie—­Kirchen des Ostens—­Ökumenische Dialoge, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, Dirk Ansorge, and Ansgar Wucherpfennig (Herder, 2019), 387–99. 34. ‘Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology’, in Temenos Academy Review 23 (2020), 86–100. 35. ‘Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the Russian Émigrés’, in Analogia 8 (2020), 109–21. 36. ‘Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion’, in Analogia 9 (2020), 71–7. 37. ‘Μόνας καὶ τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology’, contribution to Festschrift for Rowan Williams.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abelard, Peter  50–66 academic  44–5, 86–8, 91, 150, 171, 174, 176, 199–201 Achaea 237 activity/ἐνέργεια [of God]  210–11, 226–8, 256, 300–1, 310, 368, 405–6, 465 Acts of John 406–7 Adam  99, 125–6, 181, 290–2, 362–5 admirabile commercium  33, 123–4, 180 adoption [as children of God]  123–4 Afanasiev, Nikolai  433–4 affirmative theology, see kataphatic theology ages of man  222 aggadah and halakah  330–1, 336 Aimilianos of Simonopetra  72, 264–5 Ainalov, Dimitri  344–5 Aland, Kurt  292–3 Albert the Great  383 Alcinous on fate  160–1, 166–70 Alexander I, Tsar  402 Alexander of Aphrodisias  160–2 Alexandria 312–13 Alexios I, emperor  309–10 al-Hallaj 36 Allchin, A. M. (Donald)  438–9 allegory  11–16, 37–8, 48–9 Ambrose  13–14, 27–8, 246–9, 288–92 Ammonius Saccas  42–3 amour courtois 58–60 Amvrosii of Optino, St  395–6, 399 analogia entis  285–6, 298–9, 301–6, 309–11 analogy  298–311, and see analogia entis anamnesis/ἀνάμνησις  232, 321, 324–5 Anastasios of Sinai  138–9, 154–6 Anatolios, bp of Laodicea  312–13 Andreas Capellanus  60 Andrew, the first-called apostle  235–9 Andrew of Crete  340 angels  274–5, 285–7 Angelus Silesius  18–19, 367, 419–21 Anglicans/Anglicanism 8 Anknüpfungspunkt  204–5, 304–5 Anna 333–5 Annunciation, Feast of  319–20

Anthony of Sourozh, Met.  356, 436–7 antinomy  111, 114, 119–20, 283, 300–1 Antony the Great  246 Apocalypse/Revelation, book of  193, 243–4 apocalyptic  243–6, 405–6, 410 apocatastasis 104 Apocryphal New Testament  328–9 Apollinaris of Laodicea  326–7 apophatic theology  175–6, 187–90, 300, 307–8, 386–7, 461–6, and see kataphatic Apophthegmata Patrum 263–4 apostasy 289–92 apostolicity 235–9 Apostolic Tradition 338 apostles 239 Aquinas, St Thomas  110–12, 204–5, 300–3, 308–10, 314, 383–4, 444–5 archetypes 298 ‘arcs/arches of theology’  123–4, 181–2 Argenteuil 50–1 Aristotelians  158–9, 214–15, 426–7 Aristotle  82–4, 88, 112–13, 278, 298–9, 301 on providence/fate  157–8 Arius  140, 280–1 Armenian literature  326–7 Arthur, King  116, 118–20 asceticism  183–4, 229–33, 244–8, 267, 310–11, 316 ascetics  293–4, 296–7 Ascension  110–17, 415 Aschberg, Olof  347 Assumption, Feast of  319–20 Astralabe, or Peter Astralabe  51–2, 55 Athanasios of Alexandria  10–11, 74–5, 123–4, 140, 155–6, 180, 198–9, 246–7, 280–4 Athenagoras [second-century apologist]  161–2, 454 Athenagoras, Archbishop (Kokkinakis)  131–2 Athos, Mount  72, 358–9, 390–2 Augsburg Confession  8–9 Augustine  10–11, 13–14, 27–8, 81–2, 96–7, 127–8, 204–5, 246–7, 290–2, 304, 383–4 authority  12–13, 74–5, 135–40, 145–53, 168–70, 191, 198–201, 235–9, 246–7, 289–92, 294–7

474 Index Autoreianos, John  67–9 Ayres, Lewis  6 azure 415 azymes/ἄζυμα, see bread Baader, Franz von  419–20 Babylas, St  294–6 ‘Babylonian Captivity’  145–6, 172–3, 433 Baker, Augustine, see English Mystics Ball, Hugo  359 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  4, 24–35, 148–9, 203–4, 210–12, 305, 327, 381, 457, 459–61 Banev, Krăstu (now, Deacon Nikita)  266n.25, 366–7 baptism  11–12, 288–93, 316 baptismal creed  204–5 Barlaam the Calabrian  256, 309–10 Barth, Karl  33–4, 172, 203–6, 298, 302–6, 311 Bartos, Emil  178 Baruzi, Jean  380–1 Basil of Caesarea (‘the Great’)  16, 44–5, 74–5, 132, 246, 272–3, 449–50, 466 Basil of Poiana Mărului, St  257–8, 261–2, 390–2 beauty  267, 341–2, 420–1 Bede 81 Behr, John  6, 150, 171 being/οὐσία  125–6, 156, 188–9, 280–5, 298–311, 448–70 being–well being–eternal being  221 Bely, Andrey  420 Beloved Disciple  366, 403–4 Benediction [service of]  111–12, 442–7 Berdyaev, Nikolai  185–6, 367, 435–9 Bernanos, Georges  27, 98–9 Bernard of Clairvaux  10–11, 63–4 between/μεταξύ  214–15, 278–87, 367–9, 425–7 human, frontier between  278 biblical criticism  191–2 bishop  174, 248–9, 273–4, 289–97 Blackburn, Bonnie  314 Blake, William  80, 419–20 Blandina 365–6 Blok, Aleksandr  415–16, 420 Blondel, Maurice  261–2 blood and water  115–17, 403–5 Bobrinskoy, Boris  108–9, 147–53, 173–4, 209, 263–4 Boehme, Jakob  365, 367–8 Bol′shakov, Sergei  395–6 Bonaventure 308 Bonner, Gerald  248–9 Bouyer, Louis  382–3 Bramhall, John  9 Bremond, Henri  380–1

bread used in Eucharist, leavened or unleavened  441–2, and see Eucharist Bride of God  103–5 Brown, Peter  240–1, 247–53, 409–10 Buber, Martin  212 Buddhism 278 Bulgakov, Sergii  4, 33, 91–130, 147–8, 172–3, 181–2, 186–7, 203–16, 264–5, 283–7, 342–3, 359–60, 367–72, 415–27, 432–3, 435–9 Bulgaria 72 Bunge, Gabriel  150, 184, 449–51 Cajetan(us), Thomas de Vio  301–3 calendars 313–25 Calinic of Cernica  261–2 Callinicum 248–9 Cameron, Averil  240 canon, of Scripture  201 canon 3 of Constantinople I  235–6 canon 28 of Chalcedon  235–6 Cappadocian Fathers/theology  125–6, 138–9, 151–2, 418, 448–51, 455–6 Carroll, Lewis  124–5 catechesis/catechumen 290–2 cathedral  247, 249–51 Catherine the Great  416, 429–30 Catholic/Catholicism  131, 191–2 Cavafy, Constantine  4–5, 71 censing the church  225–6 Cézanne, Paul  352 Chadwick, Henry  3–4, 338 Chadwick, Owen  135 Chagall, Marc  359–60 Chalcedon (451)  404–5, 413 Chaldaean Oracles  455–6 change, see transformation, transmutation Charlemagne 133–4 Charrier, Charlotte  50 Cherubic Hymn  442–3 Chora, church (now mosque) of the  335–6 Christ  12–16, 30, 32–3, 74–5, 84–5, 114–15, 198, 212–14, 242–3, 271–2, 274–5, 279–80, 431 ‘Christian Hellenism’  145–6, 172–3, 432–3 Christian Year  317–20, 339–40 Christology  404–5, 413–14 Church  110, 226–7, 243–6, 289–92, 430–1, 433–4 Clement of Alexandria  161–2, 244–6, 330–3, 454–5 Clement of Rome  161–2 Clement, Second Epistle of  364–5, 369–70, 417 Clément, Olivier  4, 72, 147–8, 150–1, 258–9, 264, 378, 387, 398 Cleopa (Ilie) of Sihăstria  72, 89, 261–2 Climacus, St John, see John of the Ladder

Index  475 Codex Aureus  403–4, 408 Codex Sinaiticus  404–5 Codex Vaticanus  404–5 Coleridge, S. T.  133–4, 137, 429–30 colloquy led by Berdyaev and Maritain  435–6, 438–9 communion/κοινωνία  110, 113–15, 129, 213–14, 225, 231–2, 254–5, 280, 289–90, 427, 443–6 communism [Soviet]  18 community [Christian]  288–97 connoisseurship 344–7 consecration of Eucharist elements  441, 443–6 Constantine the Great  244, 409 Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos  273–4 Constantine X Doukas  67–9 Constantine/Cyril and Methodios, SS  69 Constantine Rhodios  409 Constantinople  67, 73–4, 94, 194–5, 214–15, 235–8, 246–7, 250, 273–4, 284, 322–3, 335–6, 368, 418, 425, 439–40 consubstantial/homoousios/ὁμοούσιος 141, 385–6, 462 contemplation, natural/physike/φυσικὴ θεωρία  41–2, 451, 453 contemplation/contemplative stillness  12–14, 45–6, 77–9, 81–90, 310–11 conversion 288–97 Cornford, F. M.  220–1 Corpus Areopagiticum  327–8, and see Dionysios the Areopagite Corpus Christi, Feast of  444–5 cosmism 111–12 cosmos/cosmic  17, 100–1, 180–6, 218–23, 312–25, 430–1 councils/synods 174 Crainic, Nichifor  359 creation  177, 271–2, 278–87, 300–1, 310–11, 324–5, 367–8, 421–7, and see uncreated Cretan school of iconography  358–9 Cross  177, 403–4, 409 Cross, cosmic  177, 227–8, 233–4, 406 crucifixion 403–14 Cyprian 375–6 Cyril of Alexandria  10–11, 74–5, 140 Cyril of Jerusalem  196–7, 290–2 Dadaism 359 daimon  278–9, 285–6 Daley, Brian  451 Damasus, Pope  246 Daniélou, Jean  148–9, 338, 381 Dante 369–70 darkness (gnophos) 46–8 Darwin, Charles/Darwinism  128–9, 135

Davies, Brian  2 day 317–18 Day of the Spirit  209 deacons 274–5 death of the Lord  407–8 de Chirico, Giorgio  359–60 Decius, emperor  289–90 Decretum Gelasianum 407–8 deification  74–5, 77, 122–30, 148–9, 178–90, 256, 386 Deisis  96, 108–9, 209–10 de la Taille, Maurice  441–2 Demant, V. A.  438–9 Demetrios, St  67–70 Descartes, René  129–30, 210–11 Desert Fathers  150–1 destiny, human  181, see fate Deus absconditus 383–4 devil/demonic forces  245–6 diaspora [Orthodox]  145–53, 428–9, 434 diastema/διάστημα [interval, distance]  219–23, 270–1, 316–17 Diocletian, emperor  289–90 Diognetos, Epistle to  288–9, 435 Dionysios/Denys the Areopagite  2, 122–3, 128–9, 142, 176–7, 187–9, 217, 220, 223–6, 250, 300, 308–10, 327–8, 383–4, 386, 418, 448–9, 454–8, 460–1 Dionysios of Fourna  358 Diotima 278–9 divine darkness  386–8 divine ideas  284–5 Divine Liturgy  74–5, 111, 174, 188, 209–12, 223–34, 268–77, 287, see also Eucharist Divine Mysteries  385, and see Divine Liturgy divisions of nature/being  220, 228–9 Dix, Dom Gregory  223–4 Dobrotolyubie  74, 122–3, 258–60, 390–402, see Philokalia doctrine, development of  131–44 Dodds, E. R.  154–5, 168–70 dogma  36, 141, 205–6 Dormition of the Mother of God  101–3, 319–20, 340, 368, see also Assumption Dorner, I. A.  416–17 Dostoevsky, Fedor  72, 91, 98–9, 264–5, 341–2 Douanier Rousseau  359–60 Dream of the Rood 406 dreams, world of  352 Drewery, Ben  179 Dronke, Peter  50–1 Duchesne, Louis  324–5 Dura Europos  272 Dvornik, Francis  235–7 dyad 370–1

476 Index Early Church  240–53 Earth, Mother  418–19 Easter  34, 81, 312–25, and see Pascha Ecclesiastes 417 ecclesiology 362–77 Eckhart, Meister  18–19, 36, 308–9, 378–9, 383–4 economics 420–1 Elchaninov, Alexander  107–8 elect  294, 329–30 elite, see elect elements, four  219 Eliot, T. S.  23, 71, 140, 320–1 Elytis, Odysseus  4–5 emanationism 279 emperor, Byzantine notion of  285–6 émigrés, Russian  428–40 Engels, F.  20–1 English mystics  392–3 ἕν καὶ πᾶν [hen kai pan] 419–20 Enlightenment, the  133, 191–2, 416, 419–20 Epicureans  159–60, 426–7 Epiphanios 332–3 equinox, spring (or vernal)  271–2, 312–14, 318, 323–5 equivocity  299, 301–2 eros /ἔρως 36–49 eschatology  231–3, 371–2 esoteric/esotericism  329–32, 336–40, 416 essence/energies (or activities) [οὐσία/ἐνέργειαι], distinction between  132, 284, 286–7 see activity eternity  30, 46–7, 220, 270–1, 317, 320, 348, 415, 451 Eucharist  106–21, 289–93, 441–7, see Divine Liturgy eucharistic ecclesiology  362, 377 Euclid 351–2 Eudokia Makrembolitissa, Empress  67–9 Eusebius of Caesarea  193–4, 249, 294–6, 327–8, 332–3 Eva-Ave  362–4, 373–4 Evagrios  41–2, 73–4, 143, 146–7, 150, 171–2, 174, 286, 326–7, 449–56, 466 Evdokimov, Paul II.  72, 359, 375–7 Eve 362–4 event, as opposed to doctrine  180 Evlogii (Georgievskii), Metropolitan  106 evolution, theory of  135 exile  428–40, and see diaspora experience  10, 18–19, 34, 47–8, 80, 91–2, 125–9, 174–5, 179, 189–90, 204–5, 219, 252–3, 267–77, 315–16, 384–9, 424–5, 428–40, 446–7 extra-liturgical devotion  441, 444–5, and see Eucharist, devotion to

eyes 414 Ezekiel  38, 193 face [of God/Christ]  412–13 face-to-face encounter  181, 187 Fall, the  98–9, 181 fate (εἰμαρμένη)  161–2, and see Plato, Stoics, Alcinous fatherhood, spiritual  147–8, 393–4, 397–8 Fathers of the [early] Church  7, 10–11, 112–13, 143, 145–53 Fayum 356–9 Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius  360–1, 437–9 Fedotov, George  418 Feofan the Recluse, see Theophan the Recluse Ferguson, Everett II.  292–3 Festugière, A.-J.  2, 4, 78–9 Feuerbach, L. A.  19–20 Feuillet, A.  33 fiat [God’s in creation; Mary’s in re-creation]  373, 375–6 fides quaerens intellectum 305–6 Finland, Orthodox Church of  322–3 fish 408 Florensky, Pavel  4, 122–30, 150–1, 264–5, 267, 350–4, 395–6, 420 Florovsky, Georges  132, 145–6, 150–1, 172, 176, 237–8, 282–6, 348, 425–6, 432–3, 438–9 forgery  326–7, and see pseudonymity Fouracre, Paul  5 freedom 430–1 Gabriel, Metropolitan of Novgorod and St Petersburg  258–9, 393–4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  4 Georgian literature  327 German [theology]  7–8, 19, 327 Germanos, Patriarch  250–1, 276–7 gift  176–7, 192 Gill, Eric  37 Gilson, Étienne  50–1, 65n.30, 116, 301–2, 381 Giosanu, Joachim  178 Girard, René  33 gnostic/gnostics  17–18, 162–3, 294, 329–31, 409–10 God  171, 247–9, 251–2, 281, 300–1, 430–1 godparent 289 Golgotha  33–4, 118 Goncharova, Natalia  347 good 298–9 Good Friday  26, 30, 233, 324–5 Gospel  112–13, 192–4 Gospel Book  192 Gouillard, Jean  263–4

Index  477 grace  300–1, 303 Grail, Holy  115–20 Greece  72, 87–8, 235 Greek (classical) philosophy  429–30 Gregory of Nazianzus (‘the Theologian’)  44–5, 74–5, 141, 143, 171–2, 283, 307–8, 386, 455, 458 Gregory of Nyssa  38–9, 44–9, 140, 204–5, 281, 294–6, 386, 464 Gregory of Sinai  256, 259–60, 390 Grillmeier, Aloys  403–14 Grolimund, Vasilii  395–6 Guillaumont, Antoine  449–50 hades  33–4, 409 Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), Great Church of  94, 250, 273–4, 284–5, 368–9, 418, 425 Other churches dedicated to  418 Hanson, Richard  142 Hardy, G. H.  2 Harnack, Adolf von  148–9 Harrison, Carol  2 heart  79–80, 127–30, 183–4 Hebrew religion  429–30 Hebrews, epistle to  435 Hegel, G. W. F.  18–20, 133, 392–3, 416–17 Hegesippos 332–3 Heidegger, Martin  83–4, 88–9, 424 Heidelberg Catechism  8–9 Heloise 50–66 hell 104 Helvidius 332–3 henad/ἑνάς  449–54, 456 in distinction from monad 450–1 Herder, Johann Gottfried  125–6 hermeneutics 9–10 Hermetic philosophy  419–20 Hesychios of Jerusalem  262–3, 390 hesychasm  256–8, 264–7 physical techniques of  259–60 Hexaemeron  198, 217, 221–3 Hexapla 199–201 hidden wisdom  328–30 hierarchy  223, 225, 280–2, 385–6, 433–4, and see beauty Hierocles 168–70 Hierotheos, bp of Athens  340 Hijra 313–14 Hilary of Poitiers  27–8 Hippolytus  38, 161–2, 338 Holbein’s ‘The Dead Christ’ and ‘Madonna’  341–2 Holford-Strevens, Leofranc  314 holiness  240–53, and see sanctity Holl, Karl  242–3 Holy Fathers  138–9, and see Fathers of the Church

Holy Land  67 holy man  240–53 vs wise woman  241 Holy Mountain, see Athos, Mount Holy Saturday  26, 29–31 Homer 71 Homeric Questions 12–13 homoiōsis theou 123–4 homoousios, see consubstantial Hosea 38 hospitality 428–40 Hoskyns, Sir Edwyn  288–9, 366 human, as ‘little cosmos’  159–60 see image of God Humboldt, Wilhelm von  125–6 humility 103 Hussey, Joan  268–9 hymnography, liturgical  405–6 hypostasis [ὑπόστασις/ipostas]  99, 125–6, 172, 412–13, 448, 458, 460–2, 465–7 icon/iconography  67–9, 132, 145–6, 251, 287, 341–61, 410 iconoclasm 251–2 idealism  416, 430–1 Ignatios of Antioch  12, 76–7, 294–6, 327–8, 355–6, 388, 407–8, 433–4 Ignaty of Smolensk  69 image  305, 370, and see icon image of God, human in/κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ θεοῦ  27–8, 43–4, 78, 88, 101, 123–6, 188–9, 210–11, 369–70 Immaculate Conception  97–8, 100, 373 Impressionists 346–7 Incarnation  7, 16, 104, 110, 124, 180–6, 300–1 incense  274–5, 289–90 indiction 319 individual/individualism  98–9, 211–12, 429–30 inspiration, Scriptural  191–203 Institut St-Serge, Paris  91, 151–2, 425–6, 439 intellect  77, 80, 82–3, see nous inward[ness]/vnutrennij  95, 127–9 Irenaeus, St  180, 214–16, 227–8, 363–4, 426–7 Isaac the Syrian  254–5 Isaak the Sebastokrator  309–10 Isaiah  13–14, 187 Islam 251–2 Ivanov, Vyacheslav  420 Jacob’s Well  76 Jaeger, Werner  164–5 Jakim, Boris  203–4, 207–8 James the Just, God’s brother  332–3 Jean Paul (Richter)  30

478 Index Jeremias, Joachim  292–3 Jerome  294–6, 332–3 Jerusalem  277, 332–3 Jesus Christ, see Christ Jesus der Christus in Glauben der Kirche [Eng. trans. Christ in Christian Tradition]  405–6, 409–10 Jesus Prayer  72–4, 122–30, 256, 260–4, 390–2, 394, 400–2 Jewish-Christian  405–6, 409–10 Jews  288–9, 312–13 Joachim 333–4 Joachim, Ecumenical Patriarch  438–9 Joanna Reitlinger  359–60 Job  304, 417 John XXIII, Pope  9 John the Apostle  243–4, 327–8 John the Baptist  332, 402 John Chrysostom  74–5, 213–14, 246–7, 274–5, 290–2, 294–6, 326–7, 414 John of the Cross  36, 38, 123, 381 John Damascene  2, 73–4, 154–5, 164–5, 204–5, 251–2, 309–10, 330–1, 372, 375–6, 412–13, 455, 464–7 John of Kronstadt, St  107–8 John of the Ladder (‘Climacus’), St  150–1, 174–5, 390 John Rylands Library  336 John (Zizioulas), Metropolitan  281–4 Jones, David  119–21, 233–4, 324–5 Joseph, husband of Mary  333–4, 338 Joseph, Elder  264–5 Joseph of Arimatheia  115–17 Joseph Bryennios  154–5 Josephos 332–3 joy 41 Julia Mamaea  38–9 justification by faith  7 Justin Martyr  338, 362–3 Justinian, emperor  409, 448–9, 454, 458–9, 461–3, 467–8 Kallistos, author of Fourteen Chapters on Prayer 76–7 Kallistos (Ware), Metropolitan  72, 132, 149–51, 254–5, 263, 438–9 Kandinsky, Wassily  347 Kant, Immanuel  73–4, 85–6, 111, 351–2, 430–1 kataphatic theology  300, 307–8, 386, and see affirmative theology Kelly, J. N. D.  11–12, 141 kenosis/κένωσις [self-emptying]  185 Kern, Kiprian  397 Khomiakov, Aleksei  72, 137, 140, 191–2, 429–31 Kiev/Kyiv  91, 418

Kingdom of God  213–14 Kireevsky, Ivan  75–6, 147–8, 258–9, 266, 398, 429–31 Klimoff, Alexis  106 Klubertanz, George P.  302–3 Koch, H.  327 Kołakowski, Leszek  17–23 Kondakov, Nikodim  344–5, 359–60 Kontoglou, Fotis  145–6, 355–9 Kontouma, Vassa  464 Kornblatt, Judith  418 κόσμος νοητός/intelligible cosmos  168–70 κόσμος vs οἰκουμένη  421, 424 Kotkavaara, Kari  356–60, 356n.50 Kozlov, Mikhail  260–1, 395–400 Krivochéine, Basile  149 Krug, Gregory Monk [Georgii Ivanovich]  354, 356–8 Kyros and John, SS  67 language  124–6, and see apophatic theology Lash, Archimandrite Ephrem  197–8 Lateran IV  304–5 Laud, William  9–10 Laudatio s. Andreae 237 Law and Gospel  7 Lear, Edward  359–60 Leibniz, G. W.  269–70, 315–16 leisure/σχολή 84 Lenin V.  18, 21–2, 435–6 Lent II.  44–5, 70–1, 319 Leo the Great, Pope  236, 411 Leo III, emperor  251 Leo XIII, Pope  301–2 Le Pallet  51–2 Le Paraclet, abbey of  50–1, 53–5, 58–9, 64–5 Leskov, Nikolai  343–4, 399 Lévy, Antoine  301n.6, 310 lex orandi/lex credendi 205–7 light  46, 273–6 lion  403–4, 407–9 liturgical movement  443–4, 446 liturgical echoes of Byzantine theology  459, 461–2 liturgical ‘today’  322 liturgy 97–8, see Divine Liturgy Lobachevsky, Nikolai  351–2 logos/Logos  36, 48–9, 94–5, 156, 168–72, 185, 197–8, 284–5, 310–11, 403–14 logoi/λόγοι [of being, creation]  228–9, 309–11, 460–1 distinction from mode of existence/τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως 460–1 of providence and judgment  453 Longinus [centurion at the Cross]  403–4

Index  479 Lorentzatos, Zisimos  4–5 Lossky, Vladimir  4, 116, 118–19, 132, 145–6, 150–2, 172–6, 189–90, 197–8, 308–9, 354–6, 372–5, 378–89, 410–11, 425–6, 438–9, 459 Lot-Borodine, Myrrha  116, 148–9, 438–9 love  16, 38–9, 48–9, 77, 81–2, 225–6, 321, 327–8, and see eros Lovejoy, Arthur O.  300–1 Lubac, Henri de  4, 24, 93, 148–9, 410 Luke, Gospel according to  331 Lumen Gentium 433–4 Lutheran theology  7 lyre-player 76 Lyttkens, Hampus  302–3 Mabinogion 116 MacKinnon, Donald  3–4 magic realism  359–60 Makarios, of Corinth, St  72–5, 146–7, 183–4, 254–8, 390–2 Makarios of Simonopetra  390 Malevich, Kazimir  347 Mallarmé, Stéphane  388 Malory, Sir Thomas  116, 118–19 Manichaean[ism] 13–14 Marcel, Gabriel  151–2, 261–2 Marcionism 12–13 Maria of Paris, St (Skobtsova)  359–60, 435–6 Maritain, Jacques  261–2, 301–2, 437 Marrou, Henri-Irénée  60 Martin, Michael  367–8 Martindale, C. C.  304 martyr/martyrdom  242–7, 290–7 martyrium 243–4 Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne 365–6 Marx/Marxism  17–24, 85–7, 91, 422–3 Mary of Bethany  16 Mary Magdalene  34, 174–5 Mary, the Mother of God  25–6, 67–9, 91–105, 113, 197–8, 285–7, 332–40, 362–77, 403–4, 407–8 Mathews, Thomas  223–4 matter  77, 230, 249, 252, 458 Maximos the Confessor, St  2, 27–8, 74–5, 151–2, 164–5, 175–6, 183–5, 188, 194–5, 217, 220–1, 226–34, 250, 276, 279–80, 412–14, 418, 448, 452–6, 459–64, 467–8 On the Lord’s Prayer 461–3 Mystagogia 461–3 Maximos of Simonopetra (Nicholas Constas)  309–10, 331 Maurice, Emperor  154–5, 320 Medtner, Nikolai  437–8 Melito of Sardis  363

memory/μνημή  77, 119–20, 135, 143–4, 207–8, 233–4, 244, 294–6 Menas, St  67 metanoia/μετάνοια, change of heart  189–90, 389 metempsychosis 164 Meun, Jean de  60 Meyendorff, John  132, 149–51, 173–4 microcosm, the human as  219, 269–70, 315–16, 324–5 Michael Psellos  67–9, 154–5, 309–10, 469–70 Milan, ‘Edict’ of  249, 290–2 Millet, Gabriel  346–7 Millioti, N. D.  354 modernists/modernism  346–7, 359 Mokios, St  294–6 Moldavia 390 Moltmann, Jürgen  33 monad/μονάς  448, 450–63, 466–70 monasticism 244–6 monastic schools  81–2 Mondésert, Claude  148–9 Mondrian, Piet  403–4 monks 296–7, see ascetics, monasticism monotheism  247–8, 251–2 month 317–18 Moore, George  50, 55, 58–62 More, Dame Gertrude, see English mystics Morris, William  21 Moscow  69, 91, 258–9, 322–3, 344–8, 350, 354–5, 393–4, 398–400, 415–18, 420–1, 425–6 Moscow Sobor [1917–18]  395–6, 432–3 Moses  186–7, 386 Mother of God [Theotokos, Bogoroditsa], see Mary, the Mother of God movement 222–3 Muslim  272, 313–14 myron  67–9, 225, 290–2 mystagogy  228–9, 290–2 mystery  10–12, 15–16, 25–6, 28–32, 35, 40, 48–9, 65–6, 100–1, 108–10, 114, 139, 143, 152–3, 174–5, 177, 181–3, 187–8, 201–2, 208–9, 213–14, 232–3, 287, 290–2, 304–8, 322, 336, 366–7, 372–3, 375–6, 382–4, 387–8, 418, 461–3, 466–8 mystical/mystical theology  378–89 mystical union, see union with God mysticism  36–49, 379–83, 416 nail [of Cross]  406–7 naos [church building]  273–4 symbolism of division into sanctuary/nave, dome/nave 276 natura pura  96–8, 214–15

480 Index nature/φύσις  23, 40, 62, 84–6, 96–7, 217, 233, 368–9, 374, 421, 425, 448 nature/natural  84–5, 93–7, 185–6, 320, 418–19, 423–4 name  63–4, 124–7, 142, 204–5, 245, 372, 383, 386, 429, 431 Neamţu, Mihai  139, 142–3 negative capability (Keats)  388 Neilos 262–3 Nektarios of Aegina, St  264–5 Nemesios of Emesa  155–6, 161–2, 164–8 Neo-Chalcedonianism 411 Neo-Patristic synthesis  145–6, 150–2, 172–3, 177, 306–7, 425–6 Neoplatonism  13–14, 154–6, 168–70, 204–5, 217, 275–6, 279, 300–1, 419–20, 448–9, 455–6 Neo-Thomism 301–2 Nestor and Louros, SS  67–9 Neue Sachlichkeit 359–60 Newman, John Henry  1–2, 11–12, 131–7, 191–2 Newton, Isaac  269–70, 315–16 Nicaea I (325)  289–90, 312–13 Nicholas of Methone  154–5 Nicholas Mystikos, Patriarch  154–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich  185–6 Niketas Stethatos  154–5 Nikephoros Blemmydes  154–5 Nikodimos, of the Holy Mountain, St  72–5, 146–7, 183–4, 254–9, 263–6, 390–2 Heortodromion  74–5, 146–7 Pedalion 74–5 Nikolaos Mesaritis  409 Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow  343–4, 399 Nikon (Rozhdestvenskii), Bp  344 Nil Sorsky, St  257–8, 393–4 nirvana 278 Nock, A. D.  4 nous [intellect]  78, 82–3, 264–5 number and numerology  449–51, 457, 468–70 oikonomia/οἰκονομία [divine economy/ dispensation]  114, 181, 183 oneness 279–80 Old Believers/Ritualists  343–4, 346–7, 353–4, 399 Old Russian Art Exhibition (Moscow, 1913) 347 Old Testament  193, 373, see Septuagint Olympia 44–5 open heaven  242–4 Optina Pustyn´  147–8, 258–9, 264–5, 398–9 orans [position]  406

orientation [for pray]  272 Origen  13–16, 38–45, 47–9, 139, 150, 161–4, 199–201, 244–6, 283, 294–6, 332–3, 418, 449–50 original sin  98–9, 292–3 Orthodoxy 246–7 Otto, Rudolf  252–3, 379–80 ousia, see being/οὐσία Ouspensky, see Uspensky Oxford Companion to the Year 314 Païsie, Elder  261–2 Païssios, St  264–5 Paissy Velichkovsky, St  74, 147–8, 257–60, 390–5 Palamas, St Gregory/Palamism  73–5, 132, 146–7, 149, 152–3, 171–2, 256–62, 283–7, 296–7, 411–12 Palladius 246–7 Palmer, G. E. H.  149, 262–3 Palmer, William [of Magdalen College, Oxford]  191–2, 431 Pannenberg, Wolfhart  33 panentheism 424 pantheism 424 papacy  285–6, 428 Papadiamandis, Alexandros  4–5 Paradise  96–7, 272, 381 Paris School [Institut St-Serge]  72, 425–6, 429, 433–4 Parousia [Second Coming]  273–4, 371, see eschatology parrhesia [freedom to speak, boldness]  10–11, 248–9, 294 Pascal, Blaise  13 Paschal Triduum  174–5, 233 Pascha, date of  312–13 Passover  312–13, 324–5 Patmos 327–8 patriarchate of Moscow  432–3 patristics 148–9 Paul the Apostle  13, 123–4, 241–3, 327–8, 435 Pelikan, Jaroslav  131–2, 138, 144 penance/penitential system  289–92 Penido, M. T.-L.  301–2 pentarchy 237 Pentecost  104, 139, 319 Pentkovsky, Aleksei  395–7 perichoresis/περιχώρησις/coinherence 466–7 peredvizhniki [‘wanderers’]  346–7 persecution  244, 432–3 personalism  151–2, 211–12, 412–13 Persson, Per Erik  302–3 Peter, St  135–6, 187, 235, 237–8

Index  481 Peter of Cluny  51–2, 55, 63 Peter of Damascus  73–4 Peter the Great  416, 429–30, 432–3 Philaret of Moscow, St  283–4 Philo 279 Philokalia (1782)  72–80, 122–3, 146–51, 183–4, 254–67, 390–2 ‘Philosophers’ Steamship’  435–6 Philotheos the Sinaite  390 Photios, Patriarch  154–5 phronema tōn paterōn/patristic phronema 150, 152–3, 172–3 physike, see contemplation/natural Physiologus 407–8 Picasso  346–7, 352, 359 Pickstock, Catherine  223–4 Pieper, Josef  303–4 pilgrimage 67–71 Pinamonti, G.  77–8 Pirenne thesis  251–2 Plato/Platonism  2–3, 42–5, 47–8, 82–3, 87–90, 94–5, 124, 138–9, 155–9, 164, 166–8, 171–2, 218–23, 269–72, 278–9, 281, 284–5, 298–9, 308–9 Plotinos  42–3, 168–70, 188–9, 279, 383, 458 Plutarch 160–1 poetry  175–6, 188, 334 Polycarp of Smyrna  289–90, 294–6, 327–8 Pontos 237 Pope, Alexander  50, 55–9 Popović, St Justin  173–4, 264–5 Pordage, John  419–20 Porphyry, St  264–5 Potter, Beatrix  320 Poulain, A.-F.  380–1 power 246–7 powers/δύναμεις  283–4, 368 practical/theoretical  78–9, 82–3, see praktike Prague 344–5 praktike/πρακτική  41–2, 451, 453 prayer  1–3, 13–14, 94, 166–7, 192–3, 207, 209–10, 285–7, 342 Presanctified Gifts, Liturgy of  442–7 pristina theologia 419–20 processions [religious, liturgical]  273–6 Proclus/Proklos, Patriarch of Constantinople  331, 333–4, 366–7 Proclus/Proklos, Platonic diadochos  28, 168–70, 300, 308, 327, 454–5 Protestantism 110 Protevangelium of James  319–20, 332–40, 364, 400, 409–10, 418 proto-philokalia 254–5 Proverbs  285, 367–8, 417

providence/πρόνοια  154–70, 251–2 Prudentius 246 Przywara, Erich  301–5 Psalms  79, 193 Psellos, Michael, see Michael Psellos Pseudo-Chrysostom 326–7 Pseudo-Dionysios, see Dionysios the Areopagite pseudo-morphosis  132, 145–6, 150–1, 433 pseudonymity 326–33 ptarmigan 332 purification  48–9, 129 purity [of Mary]  334 Put´ [The Way, émigré journal edited by Berdyaev] 437 Pyman, Avril  4, 351–2, 415–16 Pythagoras/Pythagorean  454, 458, 469–70 Quinisext Synod  192–3, 430–1 Rabula Gospel Codex  403–4, 407–8, 412 Rahner, Karl  27–8, 32, 47–8, 111–12, 138, 203–5, 212 rational theology, see kataphatic theology Reading Room of British Museum (later: Library) 415 receptacle/ὑποδοχή  218–19, 269–70, 315–16 Reformation  8–9, 191, 285–6, 416 refrigerium 84 Régnon, Th. de  151–2 Reinach, Salomon  344–5 Reitlinger, Sr Joanna  107–8, 345, 359–60 Relativity 217–18 relics [of martyr, saint]  243–4, 294–6 religious feast days  89–90, and see Sundays Renaissance  8–9, 199–201, 218–19, 269–70, 315–16, 327, 350–4, 416, 419–20 ressourcement  203–4, 254–5, 263–4 rest/monē/μονή 453–4 rest/remaining–procession–return 279–80 circle, geometrical image of  279–80 Resurrection  113, 201–2, 271–2, 321 revelation 303 ‘reverse perspective’  350–3 Riegl, Alois  344–5 Riemann, Bernhard  351–2 Rilke, Rainer Maria  219 rite de passage  289, 292–3 Rome  235, 246, 294–6, 312–13 as sedes apostolica 236 Roman de la Rose 60 Romania  72, 235 Romanides, John  133–4, 298, 306–7 Roman law  429–30 Romantic/Romanticism  133, 136–7

482 Index Rotas-Sator square  406–7 Rublev, Andrey  345–7, 349, 355–6, 358–61 rule of Faith  11 Rupp, Gordon  179 Russell, Norman  4–5, 178 Russia  72, 118, 235 Holy  347–8, 350, 362, 432–3, 440 ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’  306–7, 437–8 Russian village  430–1 Russian traditions associating Mother of God and Sophia  367 sacrament  109–10, 113, 287, 290–3 sacrifice, completeness of Christ’s  446–7, and see Eucharist St Denis, abbey of  53–4 St Gildas, Abbey of  50–1, 53–4, 58–9 saints 285–7 Salmond, Wendy  346–7 Salome [midwife at birth of Mary], compared to Thomas 337 Samaritan Woman (by tradition: Photeini)  76 Sancta Sanctorum, chapel of  403–4 sanctity 240–53 S. Maria Antiqua, church of  403–4 Saudreau, A.  380–1 Schelling, F. W. J.  367, 416, 419–20 Schleiermacher, F. D. E.  203–4 Schmemann, Alexander  106, 132–4, 173–4, 207–9, 224, 424–5, 427 scholarship (esp. German)  326–7, 344–5 of NT and Early Church  433 Scholasticism  305–6, 416 Scots Confession  8–9 Scripture(s)  9–14, 191–202 ‘shape’ of  193–5 ‘Jewish’ shape of  195 centre of the Scriptures  197–8 Scupoli, Lorenzo  262–3 Second Coming [of Christ]  110 secret tradition  328–30, and see hidden wisdom Seferis, George  4–5 Seleucia 67 Septuagint (LXX)  199–201 Seraphim of Sarov, St  102–3, 264–5, 343, 440 Serbia 72 Sergii of Radonezh  348, 371 Severus of Antioch  140 Shchukin, Sergei  346–7 Sherrard, Philip  4–5, 149, 263, 281–2 Sikelianos, Angelos  4–5 silence  97–8, 189, 372–3, 407–8 and tradition  355–6 margin of  355–6

Silesius, Angelos  419–20 Silouan, St, of the Holy Mountain  72, 89, 264–6 sinlessness (of Mother of God)  97–8 Sistine Madonna (Raphael’s)  92–3, 341–2, 421–3 Slav Philokalia, see Dobrotolyubie Slavophile 429–31 sleep 407–9, see lion, sleep of sobornost´  137–8, 140, 207, 428–40 Sobornost [the journal]  437–8 sola gratia 282 sola scriptura 191 Solomon, King  36–7 Solov´ev, Vladimir  4, 72, 150–1, 264–5, 287, 415–23 Song of Songs  14, 36–49, 370–1, 407–8, 417 Sophia  91–2, 94–5, 99, 101–2, 104–5, 145–6, 283–5, 367–72, 415 sophiology  214–16, 415–27, and see Sophia relationship to Mariology  367–71 Sophrony (Sakharov), St, of Essex  4, 72, 264–5 Sources Chrétiennes 148–9 Southern, Richard  57–8 Soviet Union  22–3, 72, 86–7, 173–4 space and time  217–34, 268–75, 315–18, and see time Spengler, Oswald  132, 145–6 Speyr, Adrienne von  24–6, 34 Spirit, Holy  12, 101–4, 110, 427 Spiritual Academy [of Moscow]  416–17 spiritual senses  43–4, 266, 290–2 sponsor, see godparent Stalin J.  18, 22, 244 Stang, Charles  327–8 Stăniloae, Dumitru  72, 149–51, 173–6, 178, 261–2, 306–8 starchestvo, see fatherhood, spiritual Stephen, protomartyr  242–3 Stiglmayr, J.  327 stillness  280, and see hesychasm Stoics 426–7 Stolz, Dom Anselm  381 strannik  344, 395–6 399 Stroganov, school of iconography  346–7 Stroumsa, Guy  328–30 Strzygowski, Josef  344–5 Stuttgart, Landesbibliothek  403–4 substitution 33 sun 298–9 Sunday and religious feast days  89–90 Surikov, Vasily  343–4 Swedenborg, Emanuel  419–20 Symeon, priest in the Temple  366 Symeon the New Theologian  146–7, 149, 171–2

Index  483 Symeon Stylites  67–9, 319 symphonia [of Church and Empire]  290–2, 362, 433, 439 Synagoge of Paul Evergetis  73–4 Synesios of Cyrene/Kyrene  454 Synod in Trullo, see Quinisext synod Syria 247–8 Syriac literature  326–7, 404–5 tantum-quantum formula  123–4 Taoism 85–6 Tarasov, Oleg  347 Tarkovsky, Andrei [film: Andrei Rublev]  349 Taylor, Jeremy  77–8 Taylor, Thomas  419–20 tears, gift of  79 Tempier, Stephen, bishop of Paris  60 Temple  125–6, 277, 333–5 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  116 Tertullian  288–9, 363, 365, 406 thanksgiving  177, and see eucharist thearchy/θεαρχία 458 Thekla, St  67 Thekla (Sharf), Mother  5 Theognostos 154–5 Theodora St, of Thessaloniki  67–9 Theodore Metochites  155–6 Theodore of Mopsuestia  37–8, 290–2 Theodore the Studite  201–2, 413–14 Theodosius, Emperor  44–5 theologia/θεολογία  41–2, 451 theologos [‘theologian’]  143, 147–8, 171–2 theology, nature of  171–2, 203–16, 254 distinct from οἰκονομία [divine economy/ dispensation] 464 Theophan the Recluse, St  127, 394–8, 400–1 Theophanes of Medeia  154–5 Theophylact Simocates  154–5 theoretical, see practical/theoretical theosis/θέωσις, see deification Thessaloniki 67–9 Thérèse of Lisieux  34 thickening [παχύνειν] of intellect, see nous Thomas, Sunday of  337 Thomism  285–6, 301–2 ‘Three Keys to the Treasure House of Inner Prayer’  397, 400–1 Three Methods of Prayer 79 Tikhon of Zadonsk, St  258–9, 393–4 Tillich, Paul  176, 237–8 time  217–34, 268–76, 314–22, see day, week, month, year Timothy 327–8 Titus 327–8 Tolstoy, Lev  399

Torrance, T. F.  3–4 Tourkokratia 254–5 tradition 205–7 transformation/transfiguration  183, 186–7 Transfiguration of the Lord  187, 412 transmutation [eucharistic]  111–13 transubstantiation 111–12 Tretyakov, Pavel  346–7 triad/τριάς  448, 452–64, 466–70 tribulation/θλῖψις 242–3 trihypostatic/τριυπόστατος, complementing consubstantial/ὁμοούσιος (q.v.)  456, 461–2 Trinity  7, 16, 25–9, 48–9, 101, 124, 141–3, 152–3, 301–2, 448–70 Troepol´skii, Arsenii  397–8, 400–1 Trubetskoy, Evgeny  347–50 truth 13–14 twofold/ness  128–9, 209–10, 228–9, 278, 284–5, 352–3, 364, 427 Tyutchev, Fedor  117 uncreated  251–2, 256, 287, 466 Underhill, Evelyn  379–80 union with God  385 unions and distinctions in the Trinity  453 Unitatis redintegratio 438–9 unity 430–1 univocity  302–3, 310–11 ὑπόστασις, see hypostasis Uspensky, Leonid II.  353–6, 358, 360–1, 410–11 Vargish, Thomas  1–2 Vatican II (1962–5)  96–7, 111–12, 318–19, 343–4, 433–4, 438–9 Vaughan, Henry, the Silurist  320 Vergil  58–62, 118–19 Vespers 193–5 Virgin Mother (as Church and Mary)  362–7 Vitaly (Ustinov), Met.  436 Vlachernai Palace  273–4 Vladimir 418 Vladimir/Volodymer, Grand Prince of Kiev  95 Vladimir [icon] of the Mother of God  101–2 von Hügel, Baron Friedrich  379–81 Wainwright, Geoffrey  2 Waddell, Helen  50, 55–6, 62–6 Wales 119–20 Walicki, Andrzej  429–30 Ware, Kallistos (Timothy), see Kallistos, Met. Way of a Pilgrim, The  122–3, 260–1, 390, 395–402, 432–3

484 Index week 317–18 Welt/Erde, see κόσμος Wiles, Maurice  3–4, 140 Williams, Rowan  173–4, 282–3, 378 Wisdom, see Sophia Word of God, see Logos world II.  103, and see cosmos World Council of Churches  433–4, 438–9 Wulff, Oskar  350–1 XXXIX Articles  8–9

Yannaras, Christos  4–5, 72, 173–6, 187–8 Zacharias 333–4 Zagajewski, Adam  428–9 Zernov, Nicolas  4, 437–8 Zernov, Militza  437–8 Zias, Nikos  359–60 Zizioulas, John, see John (Zizioulas), Metropolitan of Pergamon Zossima, Elder [in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov]  258–9, 398, 419