The Dogmatic Consciousness

St Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)

I have been taking a long, disjointed journey through St. Sophrony of Essex’s St. Silouan the Athonite. One of the ideals/ideas that St. Sophrony expresses, one of St. Silouan’s teachings, is the idea of “dogmatic consciousness.” He writes:

The dogmatic consciousness I have here in mind is the fruit of spiritual experience, independent of the logical brain’s activity. The writings in which the Saints reported their experience were not cast in the form of scholastic dissertations. They were revelations of the soul. Discourse on God and on life in God comes about simply, without cogitation, born spontaneously in the soul.

…

Dogmatic knowledge, understood as spiritual knowledge, is a gift of God, like all forms of real life in God, granted by God and only possible through His coming…

St. Sophrony, St. Silouan the Athonite, pp. 186-87

I do not think that St. Sophrony is here criticising the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and structured argumentation in our thought about God. He himself uses logic in his writings, after all, as do the great fathers of the Greek church, including mystical theologians such St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Gregory Palamas.

Rather, he describing something else — something that may even be superior (without disparaging the dialectical pursuit of theological truth). He is saying that you can, by grace, come into a consciousness, a cognizance, a true knowledge, of real theologia without reasoning yourself into it. This would be the kind of noetic knowledge that, when people try to make distinctions, is the deeper knowing, more intimate, less distanced than modern conceptions of “intellectual” knowledge.

And before anyone starts going off on or for scholastics in light of this, it is worth noting that two of the biggest and best scholastics, Sts Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, both had mystical experiences and, I would put forward, experienced this kind of dogmatic consciousness — famously, St. Thomas stopped writing because of a mystical experience (which may actually be an indictment of his works…).

Anyway, a couple of pages later, St Sophrony says:

It is clear from the Staretz’ writings that without any inconsistency he lived the One God in Three Persons. In his prayers he applied the same names — Father, Lord, Master, King, Creator, Saviour, and so on — to each separate Person of the Holy Trinity, as also to the Three in One.

The Staretz testified categorically that the Divinity of Jesus Christ is made known in the Holy Spirit. The knowledge of Christ’s Divinity thus acquired through spiritual experience enables man to comprehend in Christ the unfused union of two natures and two wills. The uncreated nature of Divine Light and the other dogmas of our faith are likewise made known through inner experience in the Holy Spirit. …

Ideal — abstract — conceptions may correspond to the facts of existence but, separated from positive experience of grace, they are not that knowledge of God which is actual life eternal. Yet they, too, are precious for at any moment they may afford help to a man in his spiritual life.

St Sophrony, St Silouoan the Athonite, p. 189

That last section of the quote is just to show you that St Sophrony is not opposed to theological writing such as what I do.

The earlier sections, on the Trinity and Christology, hit at an idea that I first found articulated by Fr. Andrew Louth, either in Discerning the Mystery or Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology. The idea is this: Although the doctrine of the Trinity was not articulated until the fourth century, and the homoousion was not a major term (indeed, even Athanasius is no big user of it at the beginning of his career), it corresponded to the experience of the church at prayer and at Holy Communion through the ages, and so when Arius challenged it, people rose up. And when the likes of Athanasius and the Cappadocians started articulating it, they were putting the formal logical/philosophical shape and articulation to what the church, the Body of Christ, had always known to be true.

And so, while I am a huge fan of theological study (come study Augustine’s preaching with me this autumn through Davenant Hall!), we need to invest ourselves in seeking God Himself and not just our ideas of Him.

Reformed catholic? (Part two)

In my last post, I talked a bit about my slow development to a willingness to use the term “Reformed” — but what about catholic? How is a person both? Well, this has sort of a broad, historical answer, and a narrow, personal answer.

Broad, historical answer

The broad, historical answer is that the Reformers and others in the early Protestant movement considered themselves “catholic”. And a lot of them would have considered those whom we commonly call “Catholics” today Romish or Popish or Papist or at least members of the Roman Church. Now, we don’t need to get into the latter part. It is enough to note that the early Protestant movement saw itself as catholic.

Catholic, as you may know, means universal. The magisterial Reformation (Lutherans, the Reformed, Anglicans), tended to see themselves as the continuing life of the apostolic church. That strand in the Church of England that would come to define Anglicanism (and, thus, for self-definition, something that matters more for me than would the ideas of Luther or Melanchthon or Calvin or Knox) frequently saw itself as restoring the Church of England to an existence prior to the abuses of the later Middle Ages.

Matthew Parker (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1559-1575) was really into this vision of the Church of England. For example, he argued that what the reforms were doing was bringing the church back to how it was in 597 under St Augustine of Canterbury. This, sadly, is not true. But it’s a lovely idea, and it shows the ideals of the English Reformation. He also, notably, printed the sermon of Aelfric of Eynsham (d. 1010) on the Holy Communion to argue that transubstantiation was a later addition to the dogma of the church, and that the C of E was just restoring the ancient doctrine of the church on this matter. In this way, the Reformational, or even Reformed, Church of England was very catholic, seeking to stand in continuity with the universal church in history.

Similarly, Richard Hooker, who is often cited as being the progenitor of real “Anglican” theology, litters The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity with references to the Fathers. His treatment of the Eucharist, for example, cites many of the early fathers in support of his position. That said, you could just as easily deploy a different set of fathers against Hooker’s position, so his catholicity is not as cut-and-dried as all that.

Finally, it is worth remembering that the catholic church of medieval Latin Christendom was deeply and thoroughly Augustinian. Sts Augustine and Gregory the Great are the two most cited and read fathers throughout the entire Middle Ages. Whatever else went on in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, both movements were a reinvestment in the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo in the church’s approach to questions of justification, grace, merit, etc. Both sides are Augustinian, they just read him differently.

There’s more that could be said about the relationship of the early Protestants to Scholasticism and to the Eastern Churches and to more recent things like St Thomas a Kempis and the Devotio Moderna, but I’ll just leave it there, simply noting that a vast quantity of medieval theology and medieval piety was part of the inheritance of the Reformers and the Protestant Scholastics.

Narrow, personal answer

As I said in the last post, when I was going through a bit of a spiritual crisis during my year in Durham, my brother called me a “catholic Anglican”, and a friend sent me a copy of Alexander de Hale’s commentary on Peter Lombard about grace. Moreover, I had coffee with Father Andrew Louth at his home in Darlington. Father Andrew is a great man — he writes good, important books full of big thoughts, but is also ready to sit with a cup of coffee in his study with a young man searching for help and answers.

Anyway, those three facts about the hard year in Durham are indicative of my personal, spiritual trajectory for many years. I read books by desert monks and modern Athonite elders. I pray the Jesus Prayer. I sometimes (less than I’d like) pray Morning and Evening Prayer. I read medieval mystics. I sometimes attend Orthodox Vespers, maybe even the divine liturgy.

Add to this my embrace of the patristic heritage, including the spiritual sense of Scripture, not to mention the wonders of St Maximus the Confessor as he draws deeply from the Cappadocian well, bringing forth the beautiful synthesis of the trajectories of both Athanasius and Evagrius, and you start to see how I am pretty … catholic.

Nevertheless, I affirm the Articles of Religion, which excludes me from being Roman Catholic. I believe in justification by faith in a Luther kind of way. I also hold to a historically Anglican understanding of the relationship between Scripture and tradition. Some days, I admit that I’m not wholly certain about the Eucharist — but not because Baptist memorialists sway me to be “more ‘Protestant'”, but because St Cyril sways me to be less. Or, maybe, to be more Luther.

So, yes. Catholic. Most assuredly.

“to glorify God and enjoy him forever”

One of my favourite things to come out of Reformed Christianity (right up there with Scottish a cappella Psalm-singing) is the first question of the Shorter Westminster Catechism:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

For some reason, the Lutheran artist FLAME seems to think that this statement has something to do with affections, as in his song “Used to Think” on the album Extra Nos:

They say that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever (That’s cool)
You know what that sound like to me on a practical level is coming to together (Bridge)
Serving your neighbor, enjoying creation
To me Luther said it better (He did)
Instead of focused on affections
No diss to Jonathan Edwards
If our faith justifies us
And God saved and baptized us
We set our gaze outside of us
Extra nos, but

Now, my expertise is neither Lutheranism nor Reformed Christianity. I am an Anglican who spends a lot of time reading ancient and medieval stuff. And Malcolm Guite.

Nonetheless, this is, in fact, extra nos, outside of us, which is FLAME’s big thing in the album Extra Nos. As FLAME puts it, “If our faith justifies us / And God saved and baptized us / We set our gaze outside of us.” First, the Westminster divines did their seventeenth-century duty and piled up Bible verse upon Bible verse for both “glorify God” and “enjoy him forever”; whether you think they used Scripture wisely, I’ll leave up to you. You can read the whole catechism here.

Clearly, though, it’s the use of “enjoy him forever” that is troubling to FLAME.

This is too bad, because the dude has a Master’s in theology, and he seems pretty down on a whole lot of stuff. So I would have thought that St Augustine of Hippo’s De Doctrina Christiana would be under his belt. In St Augustine’s scheme of how the universe and the human heart operate, there are res (“things”, if you will) that we use (utor) and res that we enjoy (fruor). Ultimately, every res that is not God exists to be used, and the purpose of its use is for us to enjoy God.

God is the only res we are meant to enjoy in the Augustinian understanding of enjoyment.

The enjoyment of God and God alone, in fact, sets our gaze outside of ourselves automatically. It drives us from merely enjoying a sunrise to enjoying God through a sunrise. It drives us from merely enjoying ice cream to enjoying the God who gave us taste buds. We do not simply enjoy music, we enjoy God through the music. And St Augustine, from comments in Confessions, seems to have been a music fan who struggled with this.

The point of the Augustinian concept of enjoyment is not seeking some sort of emotional or affective experience. It is about seeking him of whom St Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” It is not about, “Am I enjoying God? What can I do to enjoy God more?” It is about realising that God is the only proper res for us to enjoy.

So that’s just one point.

Another point is FLAME’s highly significant choice of words here: “We set our gaze outside of us.” In the Christian-Platonist framework of Augustinian theology, the final end of man, the telos of the human race, is the beatific vision of God Himself. We gaze outside ourselves upon the glory of God (sometimes now in a foretaste, but most likely not until the eschaton).

According to ancient physics (Platonic, Epicurean, and others), when we gaze upon something, we actually make contact with it. This is why, as explained by Father Andrew Louth in an excellent article called “Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium,” so many late antique liturgical objects are silver — the shining light hits the eye in a particularly powerful way, drawing your gaze to the liturgy and thus to God. (I recommend St Maximus the Confessor if you’re interested in Byzantine conceptualisations of how we meet God in the liturgy.)

And so, when we set our gaze outside ourselves and on God, instead, this is driving towards the Beatific Vision, something we’ll never fully encounter this side of glory according to St Augustine. But this vision is not a static thing the way we think of vision today. It is immersive and an encounter. A crude analogy is that the vision of God is more like when I saw Dune on the weekend in an AVX cinema than it is like when I looked at a portrait of Henry VIII in Rome. I was drawn into Arrakis through sight, sound, and touch, as my chair itself rumbled with the story on-screen.

This gazing outside ourselves which itself is a means of entering into intimate communion of God is, I would argue, precisely what St Augustine means when he talks about us enjoying God. If you are truly, truly enjoying something, you are not thinking about the affective experience. The experience has swallowed you up.

Setting aside the question of proper and improper enjoyment, I know I have had moments of sitting at, say, a choral eucharist or other musical event where I was completely lost to myself. It was sublime in the truest sense of the word. That, only more so, is what Augustine means. And it can only be found extra nos. Outside ourselves.

I say this not as some sort of anti-FLAME or anti-Lutheran or pro-Reformed statement. I say it because most of us Latins, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, are hopelessly Augustinian. Deeply, deeply Augustinian. Indeed, I joke sometimes how remarkable it is that when Martin Luther rejected the tradition and went back to read the Scriptures for themselves, his interpretation was astonishingly like St Augustine of Hippo’s.

I say this because this statement from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, from my limited vantage point as an Anglican scholar of late antiquity, has a lot of St Augustine lurking behind it, and I think it’s precisely the sort of thing a Lutheran should support.

Living tradition

A Gathering of the Holy Fathers

I am reading Gabriel Bunge’s book Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition, and he is discussing what tradition is and how it works in the first chapter. Tradition is much-contested ground ever since the days of the Reformation when everyone, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic (for want of better words), was trying to sift through the mass of the deposit as it stood in the midst of Renaissance decadence, late mediaeval scholasticism, corruption amongst clerics and princes alike, and true devotion.

Which parts were true devotion? And which true devotion was rightly placed? Which parts of this deposit are either apostolic by antiquity or at least Spirit-driven consequences of apostolic tradition, which are man-made things to be abandoned, and which are adiaphora?

These debates are often framed in terms of pitting Scripture and tradition against each other. In Browne’s very capable Victorian book about the 39 Articles, he makes a good case against there being an oral tradition of things not in Scripture that must, nevertheless, be believed. In good Anglican form, he is careful to state that the tradition of exegesis and liturgy, especially of the Fathers, is important for devotion and the right interpretation of Scripture, but nothing independent of Scripture is to enjoined upon Christian souls as essential for salvation.

In these terms, tradition seems fairly dead, doesn’t it?

But, as the Eastern Orthodox apologists like to point out, we are all part of traditions, even Baptists at Bible study.

Bunge’s idea of tradition is something different:

The meaning and purpose of preserving the “tradition” is, then, for the Fathers, just as it was for the first “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word”, not an unthinking adherence to what has been handed down, but the preservation of a living fellowship. (p. 24, emphasis original)

Two years ago, the book I read on the bus to visit my wife and son at hospital after he was born was Archimandrite Zacharias’ book Remember Thy First Love: The Three Stages of the Spiritual Life in the Theology of Elder Sophrony. I was given this book by Father Raphael, from whom I have received much spiritual insight. The main source for Archimandrite Zacharias’ teaching is actually sacred Scripture, but the second-most popular citation in the notes is Elder Sophrony, followed by St Silouan the Athonite. Elder Sophrony was Archimandrite Zacharias’ spiritual father, and St Silouan was Sophrony’s.

As I read the book, I felt like I was encountering a living tradition, not simply a bunch of facts handed down, but an entire way of life, from Athos to Essex. In fact (now that I write it), Archimandrite Zacharias is Father Raphael’s spiritual father (after the falling asleep of Father John [memory eternal!]), and if I were Orthodox, I would hope Father Raphael would be humble enough to accept the challenge of being my spiritual father.

Tradition is the encounter and fellowship with those who have gone before, seeking to live and apply their encounter with Jesus to our circumstances now.

One of the richest loci for the tradition is, of course, the liturgy. As Father Andrew Louth points out in Discerning the Mystery, when St Basil the Great discusses the unwritten tradition of the church in On the Holy Spirit, the things he talks about are all liturgical.

Given that I am now reading Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, this point takes on a new kind of resonance. The Prayer Book was a way in which Christians of Cranmer’s world were able to accept that fellowship with what has gone before, but also sift through it, seeking what had gone awry (a task Rome was also doing; let’s not fight that fight today). I have written on the catholicity of the Prayer Book before, but it is worth repeating. When we pray with the Book of Common Prayer in spirit and in truth, we truly join in fellowship with the Christians of the centuries who have also used so many of those forms, from (at the latest) the Apostolic Tradition (modern attribution: Hippolytus of Rome, mid-200s), whether in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Old Church Slavonic, Elizabethan English.

We also, with greater specificity, join with the Anglicans around the world and through the centuries (until the liturgical movement of the later 20th century), whether in Australia or Kenya or Canada or Canterbury. We enter into that fellowship of faith, a Reformational liturgy rooted in the catholic tradition (note the lower-case c).

Arguably (and here perhaps I  become controversial), inasmuch as the Prayer Book’s theology is an attempt to restore to prominence certain apostolic and Augustinian themes obscured in England at the time of the Reformation, we could also argue that in using it we find ourselves in the august company of St Paul and St Augustine.

At prayer, we seek God. And God comes to us. We find ourselves in communion, in fellowship with Him, and through Him, with the Christians through the centuries who have also sought Him. And if we choose to submit ourselves to them in our own seeking of God, to fellowship with them — then that is living tradition.

Theology and mysticism

St. Gregory of Nyssa

I have found, drifting around the Internet, that sometimes an opposition can appear between something called ‘theology’ and something called ‘mysticism’ or ‘contemplation’. This opposition is a false dichotomy, for, as Andrew Louth notes in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, theology and mysticism and inescapably bound together. I think we need both approaches to the Holy if we are to be healthy.

That is, this is a modern take on Evagrius in the Chapters on Prayer — If you truly pray, you are a theologian. If you are a theologian, you truly pray.

His concept of theologos is not ours, but the idea has merit even today.

Let us take theology as the attempt of the rational mind to articulate in some logical manner the truths about God and the world in relation to God that have been apprehended through revelation, reason, and experience. Seems a safe definition.

Let us take mysticism as the attempt of the human soul to sit in silence and quiet and thereby encounter God. Or, even better, to encounter Him even when not in silence and quiet but, rather, live an existence shot through with an awareness of Him. This usually involves time set aside for silence and quiet.

These need each other. (They also need community.)

The first without the second can easily become dry intellectualism, or being rigidly doctrinaire, or mere pedantry. The danger of doing theology is that you will mistake your doctrine of God for God Himselves.

The second without the first can easily become emotive experientialism, or, as Thomas Merton calls it, illuminism, questing after special experiences or imagining that whatever you feel or imagine or find evocative is a true window into the divine. The danger of doing mysticism is that you will mistake your experiences about God for God Themself.

These two worlds are, in fact, not dichotomies, as I like to point out. A recent reminder of this (besides St Anselm) was Sarah Coakley’s lecture at the Vancouver School of Theology this Autumn, where St Gregory of Nyssa was one of the great mystical theologians driven by the Holy Spirit. He is also, as it turns out, what, in technical terms, one might call a dogmatic or systematic theologian. His encounter with the Holy Spirit in prayer and Scripture helps inform his reasoning, but his catechetical works are still theology as I defined it above.

When we find ourselves in the mood to pooh-pooh those ‘airy-fairy’ charismatics and contemplatives (as I sometimes do) or to reject theology as ‘dry and rigid’, let us find humility and seek the Giver of both types of gift.

Anglo-Patristics

I’m sure someone has beat me to it, but I recently coined the term ‘Anglo-Patristic’ while thinking about what I would do if I ended up a theologian (instead of a philologist). Basically, as I imagined my work on dogmatic theology (not systematic, I don’t do academic systematics [whew!]), it was, in some ways, inspired by the Neo-Patristic works discussed by Andrew Louth’s Modern Orthodox Thinkers, or the Ressourcement and evangelical ressourcement stuff I’ve read — but the BCP, John Donne, and Lancelot Andrews kept invading.

So –Anglo-Patristic.

That is, it would be theology drawing deep from the resources of the Great Tradition, producing a synthesis of the Fathers on the important matters of the faith, yet bringing in resources of the Anglican tradition.

Why would anyone want this, you may ask?

Well, no matter how I go about things, I turn up Anglican. Perhaps a bit East-leaning. But Anglican, nonetheless. And when I consider the  triple schism of North American Anglicans and the impending one in England, I see the value of patristic wisdom not only for a rebirth of orthodoxy (as discussed by Thomas C. Oden) but also for a deepening of the faith within the evangelical and charismatic wings.

And, thus, maybe a way for liberals, catholics, evangelicals, and charismatics to find a richness in the Christian tradition without tearing each other apart and without jumping ship to the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Baptists, or Pentecostals, as many are tempted to do. As many have done.

I guess because it appeals to me, I figure it would appeal to other people. To those who pray with Anglican liturgies, read Anglican lectionaries, revel in George Herbert or John Donne, who are also cognizant of being part of a rich theological tradition running from Ignatius and Clement through Athanasius and Augustine on to Anselm and Aquinas up through Hooker and Andrews to O’Donovan and Williams. For those whose spirituality includes John Mason Neale hymns and maybe also Steve Bell. For those of us who read Malcolm Guite and realise that Anglican spirituality can drink from the well of the Fathers as well as of the metaphysical poets.

An Anglo-Patristic synthesis is eminently Anglican. Nay, English, even — from Aldhelm, from Bede’s patristic commentaries, through Lanfranc and Anselm, Alexander de Hales, Robert Grosseteste, Alexander Neckham, let alone the actual Anglicans who have been immersed in the Fathers, whether Cranmer or Andrews or Jewel or Hooker or Parker, not to mention the turncoat John Wesley, on to young Anglican theologians and scholars I am glad to call my friends who study Augustine, Eustathius of Antioch, Athanasius.

If philology doesn’t work out, I know what I’ll do.

Philokalic Friday: My Goodreads review of The Philokalia, Vol. 1

The Philokalia, Volume 1: The Complete Text by G.E.H. Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first of a massive, five-volume anthology of texts running from the fourth through fifteenth centuries, compiled on Mount Athos in the eighteenth century by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth. Of the five, only the first four have been translated into English; Kallistos Ware says he needs to start refusing speaking engagements so they can finish the fifth. This volume begins in the fourth century and includes texts into the seventh; therefore, this volume (and the next, at least) is part of the common heritage of both western and eastern Christians.

Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware have done an inestimable service to the English-speaking world in providing us with this rich collection of documents, that represent a core of the Eastern Orthodox tradition that has exerted a powerful influence since its publication in 1782 (on which see Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present Day). The translation is clear and lucid, and the editorial material provides many aids to the reader. These aids are, in my opinion, essential to understanding texts so far removed from us in time, space, and situation. We are not desert hermits or monks. Many of the readers of this volume are, rather, urban laity with little or no monastic context. Many of us, moreover, are not even Orthodox.

In fact, the Introduction and the Glossary are themselves an education in hesychastic spirituality (on which, more below). The main themes of the text and its function are introduced in the former, and the ancient Greek Christian understanding of a variety of important, specific terms is provided in the latter. Moreover, we are reminded that these texts alone are not the entirety of the path to holiness these authors themselves were on: many of them lived in communities, they celebrated the liturgy, they practised acts of mercy, they read Scripture, and so on. And many of them wrote texts on other topics not included because they are not the focus of The Philokalia.

The specific focus of The Philokalia is the prayer of the heart, or inner prayer, which is cultivated and practised as essential on the road to hesychia — peace, calmness, stillness, silence. Practical considerations are here, such as Evagrios the Solitary counselling against the eight wicked thoughts (later, seven deadly sins in the western tradition) in his treatise ‘On Prayer’. Elsewhere, Hesychios the Priest gives an extended series of chapters on ‘watchfulness’.

Watchfulness, in fact, may be the watchword for attaining hesychia in Philokalic spirituality. We are called to watch our thoughts, guards our hearts, be on the lookout for temptation. We are counselled to bring to mind the stories of Scripture, both the examples of the saints therein and the life and deeds of Christ. We are reminded to meditate on the grace of God as we have experienced it in our own lives. We are called to focus on and pray the Name of Jesus.

All of these, arguably, are forms of watchfulness. Either they are the mind itself watching for danger and fleeing from danger, or they are the mind occupying itself with things above, and thus being prepared for temptation or a wicked thought when it comes.

Many of these texts are difficult. Well, maybe all of them are. This is not an easy book. It took my two years to read it, after a first failed attempt 12 years ago. Much of the content is either not applicable to us or hard to apply. Discernment of what is wisdom for the urban layman is required. Watchful, attentive reading and prayer must come here alongside humility. I suspect that many will give up, either judging the authors of these writings for not being their own breed of Christian or just finding it too hard. I understand. I also counsel you: Keep going.

One difficulty you will face is simply a matter of genre. Many of these are collections of short sayings, from a sentence to a paragraph. They are not always arranged in a visibly logical way. It can be hard to read many of them at once. I recommend reading only as many as you can take at once and meditating on them. I also, on my third reading of Evagrios ‘On Prayer’, took notes and tried to find structure and meaning within the texts. These are, for the most part, not extended discussions or discursive essays properly united with a theme and an argument. Simply be ready for that.

This volume includes selections from: St Isaiah the Solitary, Evagrios the Solitary (aka Pontikos), St John Cassian (the only Latin in the whole five volumes), St Mark the Ascetic (aka Mark the Monk), St Hesychios the Priest, St Neilos the Ascetic (of Ancyra), St Diadochos of Photiki, and St John of Karpathos, as well a barely Christianised Neoplatonic text attributed to St Antony the Great.

The only thing I wish were here is the original introduction by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain.

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First thoughts upon finishing Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy

I recently finished the Celestial Hierarchy of (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite. This is the first work of the Dionysian corpus I’ve spent any time with, although I’ve read about him before (e.g. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition). A few thoughts.

First things first, for readers of this blog: Ps-Dionysius is the author of a corpus of mystical-theological works, pretending to by the Dionysius of the Areopagus converted by St Paul in Acts 17:34. Despite the attempts of the translator of the version I read (Rev. John Parker), Dionysius did not write any of these. St Ignatius does not quote him — he quotes St Ignatius. And most of the other internal evidence is precisely what you’d do if you were writing a forgery. Anyway, that’s largely neither here nor there for my purposes; it’s just worth noting.

These treatises of spiritual theology appeared around the year 500 and were instantly successful in the eastern Church, on both (all three?) sides of the Chalcedonian divide. I am unsure, but I do not know of any Latin translation until Eriugena in the 800s. Enough introduction.

First and foremost, before discussing the idea of hierarchy itself, Dionysius is a good place to go to get embroiled in the philosophy of God and apophatic theology. Apophatic theology is discussing God by negation — God is infinite, immortal, invisible, etc. He is encountered in the cloud of Mt Sinai (Ex 24:18).

Writes the Areopagite:

And so Divine things are honoured by negations which teach the truth, and by comparisons with the lowest things which are diverse from their proper representation. For the reasons assigned, there is nothing absurd if they depict even the celestial Beings under dissimilar similitudes with misrepresent them. (ch. 2, p. 21 in Parker)

I really, really like the idea of ‘dissimilar similitudes’. God is the final cause of all that is. He is the unmoved mover. He is the Being that is ultimately beyond Being. Anything we can say about God we say through analogy, and all of our analogies break down — thus, dissimilar similitudes.

Later, when discussing what the Seraphim taught Isaiah, Dionysius writes:

The Theologian [Isaiah] then learned, from the things seen, that as compared with every superessential pre-eminence, the Divine was seated above every visible and invisible power, and that He is exalted above all, as Absolute — not even comparable to the first of created Beings. Further also, that He is the very Being of all, and Cause of all cause, and unalterable centre of the undissolved continuance of all, from Whom is both the being and the well-being of the most exalted Powers themselves. (ch. 13, p. 41 in Parker)

I imagine some people’s minds may be aching. Some may be crying out with Abba Serapion, when forbidden to imagine God anthropomorphically, ‘They have taken away my God, and I do not know where to find him!’ (A story from Cassian.) But I hope you will give the philosophy of God and Being and causation some thought.

Here is a reason, if you need one. I was once attempting to explain to a friend that not only do I find God as Final Cause a logical necessity, I also, nevertheless, believe that God can be considered personal, or, at least, not less than the personal. Now, most people who are unacquainted with the theology of personhood of, say, Met. John Zizioulas (Being As Communion) can only imagine person = humanoid. My friend thus proclaimed that by calling God ‘person’, it is the same as pigeons imagining a god who is simply just a big superpigeon.

I had to leave, but not having read Zizioulas, let alone any other philosophy of God, at that point, I am not sure how I would have answered him back then.

Apophatic theology and dissimilar similitude assert that God is beyond being, but that He is somehow like Being as we think of it. God is personal, but (to cite a chapter title of C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity) beyond personality.

Briefly on hierarchy. Andrew Louth tells me that this is the first instance of the word. And it is not what we mean. We see hierarchy as a chain of command, of those with authority commanding and controlling those underneath them, from the Field Marshal to the Private.

For Dionysius — and here we get a bit Neoplatonist — the hierarchy is about communicating knowledge of and grace from God from those higher to those lower. Each order of celestial beings has its own place in the hierarchy, and each position has its own capacity to know God and role to play in the economy of God’s universe. The celestial hierarchy is the means by which God manifests Himself to His creation in the way most perfect and most suited to each rank of the celestial beings.

This is not hierarchy as we know it, and we should think on that when we consider our role in the institutional hierarchies we inhabit. How are we helping those below us fulfil their own role? How do we relate to those above us? What is our role? Maybe a more grace-filled, Dionysian approach to our work and life would be beneficial.

Georges Florovsky on the Christian view of History

Fr Georges Florovsky (d. 1979) has the following to say on the meaning of history:

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. Above all, the Christian historian will regard history at once as a mystery and as a tragedy — a mystery of salvation and a tragedy of sin. (Quoted in Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 91; italics original)

This resonates with St Augustine in City of God and clashes with Orosius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But I believe it is the right approach, speaking as a Christian and as a historian.

 

Christology: Life and dogma

Council of Chalcedon

Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Volume 2, Part One:

The formula and teaching of Chalcedon absorbed the attention of the old imperial Church, whether we look at Emperors, Popes, bishops, the monks or the theologians, or finally the mass of Church people. Yet, both before and after the Council [of 451], there was a life inspired by faith in Christ which neither needed the formula of Chalcedon for its existence, nor was directly enriched by it. This was because the Church possessed and lived the content or the matter of this teaching, namely, faith in the one Christ, true God and true man, even though it was not expressed in more advanced philosophical terms. Such faith drew its vitality from a picture of Christ which could not be fully comprehended in the formula of 451 about the person of Christ. This is shown by the fact that the content, though not the formula, of Chalcedonian faith was actually the common property of the opposed parties in the post-Chalcedonian era. (p. 4)

This sort of statement is always of interest to me. The idea is that in the proclamation, the kerygma, and the living of the Christian faith, there is a latent, inherent orthodoxy that does not always find expression in the conciliar and dogmatic formulae, and it can be found in the lived faith of the Church before any council has drawn up any document.

It is related to the argument that I’ve heard from numerous Eastern Orthodox sources, such as Andrew Louth, that the church’s prayer life and liturgical encounter with the mystery of God was ultimately Trinitarian from the outset, and what was lacking was the formal articulation of Trinity in dogma. I’m willing to accept this thesis; I am interested in seeing it proven in scholarship, however. Any suggestions?

Back to Christology. Is Grillmeier correct? I suspect that is the point of the book I am about to read. So I’ll see. But Paul Parvis, when I took his Byzantine Theology course in Edinburgh, argues that people don’t fight over nothing. So pro- and anti-Chalcedonian forces, despite Grillmeier or Lebon or other modern(ist) readers, actually did disagree, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI would disagree with the late Pope Shenouda III, if they ever crossed dogmatic swords of monothelitism (Shenouda was a clear-cut monothelite).

So my questions, as I start thinking more theologically than whatever it is I’ve been recently are:

• Did the Mia/Monophysites and Chalcedonians actually agree? Is there harmony between Severus of Antioch and Leo the Great?
• Is the lived faith of the church implicitly Trinitarian and Chalcedonian, even if it does not always articulate said faith in the same way? What is the scholarship on this question?