"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your
mattress,/
And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).


Saturday, June 28, 2014

100 Years Ago Today....

As you've no doubt heard by now, today is the centenary of the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his consort in Sarajevo, the event that, through twists and turns, led to the greatest catastrophe of the last century, World War I. I write only to draw your interest to the many books I discussed nearly a year ago now, in anticipation of this sad centenary. I've had a chance to read many of the new ones mentioned last year, and commend them to your interest, especially McMeekin's book, which really turns on its head a lot of the received mythology about the causes of the outbreak of the war. In addition, as you would expect from so fine an historian, Philip Jenkins new book, noted here, is an outstanding and near-singular work, wholly welcome to Eastern Christians especially.

I'm working my way through another book right now, from the Cambridge historian David Reynolds: The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (Norton, 2014), 544pp.

This is a fascinating study of the differing perceptions of the war in different countries. Reynolds notes that the Anglo-American view differs considerably from, of course, the Austrian, German, and Russian views, inter alia, to say nothing of the French. It is a finely detailed study offering a wide survey of views from around the world.

Reynolds, of course, is the author of numerous other studies, including his immensely interesting and enjoyable book In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War which was a study of how Churchill wrote his six-volume history-cum-memoir-cum-political-manifesto about the Second World War. In lesser hands a book about the writing of another book (six of them actually) could be a leaden and deadly thing to read, but this is a wonderfully written tale and, surprisingly (given the vast and endless stream of books about Churchill) one of the few studies (until recently) of The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor--as well, of course, as Noble-prize winning historian manqué 

Friday, June 27, 2014

Orthodox Paradoxes

The Russian Orthodox Church, by virtue of being the largest Orthodox church in the world (as they ceaselessly remind everyone, especially in Constantinople...), already commands considerable attention both popular and scholarly, but the events in Russia and Ukraine under Putin have only magnified the attention. A book just released explores the nature of Orthodoxy in Russia, at once "traditional" and yet (pace certain fatuous apologists) capable of adapting to new situations:  Katya Tolstaya, Orthodox Paradoxes: Heterogeneities and Complexities in Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy (Brill, 2014), 406pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Nationalism in the 19th Century

Nobody who has any interest in or understanding of Christianity in the East can avoid for very long the sorry task of contending with ethno-nationalism in its various forms. I have a paper coming out later this year in Pro Ecclesia on the ecclesiological problems created by nationalism as it emerges in post-revolutionary France and then spreads to various places under French influence (the Levant, Syria), to Russia (through Joseph de Maistre's long ambassadorship there), and then especially to newly created nation-states emerging in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire in southern Europe and the Balkans. I am keen therefore to read this newly published book under Lucian Leustean's editorship, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe (Fordham UP, 2014), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:
Nation-building processes in the Orthodox commonwealth brought together political institutions and religious communities in their shared aims of achieving national sovereignty. Chronicling how the churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia acquired independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's decline, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe examines the role of Orthodox churches in the construction of national identities. Drawing on archival material available after the fall of communism in southeastern Europe and Russia, as well as material published in Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Russian,Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe analyzes the challenges posed by nationalism to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the ways in which Orthodox churches engaged in the nationalist ideology.

Monday, June 23, 2014

A Short History of the Byzantine Empire

As I have often noted on here, interest in all things "Byzantine" (whatever the problems with that term) remains high, and new books are constantly appearing in English especially. Just released at the end of May is another book by Dionysios Stathakopoulos, A Short History of the Byzantine Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2014), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Byzantine Empire was one of the most impressive imperial adventures in history. It ruled much of Europe and Anatolia for a remarkable eleven hundred years. From Constantine I's establishment of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) as his capital in 324 CE, until the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453, the Byzantine domain became a powerhouse of literature, art, theology, law and learning. Dionysios Stathakopoulos here tells a compelling story of military conquest, alliance and reversal, including the terrifying secret of Greek fire: of a state constantly at war, but not warlike, resorting wherever possible to a sophisticated diplomacy with its neighbours and enemies. Breaking with outdated notions of Byzantium as an unchanging, theocratic state, Stathakopoulos uses the most recent research to explore its political, economic, social and cultural history. He evokes the dynamism of a people whose story is one of astonishing resilience and adaptability; and whose legacy, whether it be the bronze horses of the Hippodrome, or the very term 'Byzantine', everywhere endures.
His new short history embraces individuals like Justinian I, the powerful ruler who defeated the Ostrogoths in Italy and oversaw construction of Hagia Sofia (completed in 537); his notorious queen Theodora, a courtesan who rose improbably to the highest office of imperial first lady; the charismatic but cuckolded general Belisarios; and the religious leaders Arius and Athanasios, whose conflicting ideas about Christ and doctrine shook the Empire to its core.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Taking the Fathers Back

Whenever I heard self-appointed Orthodox apologists bashing people over the head with references to "the Fathers" or "the Holy Fathers said....X" I long for someone to write a bracing polemic subjecting such claims to the same treatment as Stanley Hauerwas did more than twenty years ago now in challenging people who make the same claims, substituting only "the Bible" or "the Holy Bible says....X." In his Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, Hauerwas begins by arguing thus:
Most North American Christians assume they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important for the church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to every child when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked….Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.

.....North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their ‘common sense’ is sufficient for ‘understanding’ the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead, they assume they have all the ‘religious experience’ necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church.
Could not every word of that be applied to self-styled "traditionalists" quoting from Maximus the Confessor here, Gregory Palamas there, and Athonite elders everywhere? These types fail to realize that not anybody can pick up and read patristic literature, and read it intelligently and profitably. Their readings almost always do hermeneutic violence to the texts, and fail to realize that their own readings reflect not these ancient texts so much as their own late-modern "democratic" belief in their abilities to read and understand, seemingly above ideology and politics when, of course, they are steeped in it. (Come to think of it, someone has written an attack on these abuses--Christos Yannaras.)

Over the past half-century, intelligent people have offered some wise reflections on how to read the Fathers, and how to avoid the pitfalls in doing so. Georges Florovsky, in an article over fifty years old but still very much worth paying attention to, offered such wisdom.  So did Alexander Schmemann. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in the lovely and elegant introduction to his Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa also offered perceptive reflections on what we can, and cannot, take from the Fathers, and how they can, and cannot, be used today--something he also wrote about in an important article from 1939, "Patristik, Scholastik und wir."

Now Augustine Casiday has come along to help us with these issues in his splendid new book, Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage. This is a very accessible, wonderfully useful book for those who want to learn more about the nature of reading and interpreting, about Christian historiography, and the place of the Fathers in the Church and in Christian history generally. It is cogently written and its crisp, clear prose makes difficult issues accessible, so this would be an ideal book for a parish study or for use in an undergraduate classroom. It should also be on reading lists for catecheumens coming in to the Orthodox Church so that they do not fall into the traps, and commit the errors, of too many zealots and apologists one finds online.

Casiday, whom I interviewed earlier this week about his book on Evagrius, has here written a short book of four chapters, beginning with the question "What is the Patristic Heritage?" Almost immediately he offers important cautions about what could be called the problem of "genre" in patristic literature. We have to watch out for certain aspects--e.g., technical vocabulary, say, or caustic personal attacks or vindictive rhetoric--that  mark certain texts, and we have to be aware, moreover, of the context in which these texts were written. Perhaps their disputatious context is too far removed from our own day to be entirely profitable for contemporary readers. It is not enough to blindly yank a fourth-century Cappadocian father into 21st-century North America and expect that everything will "fit" and the meaning and application will become clear. Here Casiday rightly avers to one of the classic treatments of hermeneutics, H.G. Gadamer's Truth and Method. Here I would also note an apt comment by another landmark work in hermeneutics, Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,where Lonergan pours scorn on the idea that knowing and understanding consist simply in "taking a good look." It involves time and effort, and the patience for both. Merely picking up a collection of patristic sayings, or a volume of The Philokalia and flinging a paragraph around in a Facebook debate does very little, and may in fact be little more than obscurantism in a high-tech medium and thus totally counter-productive. As Casiday nicely puts it:
the reputation that we as Orthodox enjoy (and sometimes cultivate) [is] for unrivalled continuity with the Christian past. On the basis of that reputation, one could assert that being Orthodox leads to a privileged understanding of the ancient church and that this understanding is preferable to the results of academic study. This option has the satisfying outcome of securing the theological study of patristic sources. But it does so at a cost. The security it provides is the security of a ghetto. It also increases the likelihood of confusing prejudices with insights. Above all, it betrays our responsibility to bear witness to Christ (35).
Much of the rest of this chapter is spent dealing with the not entirely satisfactory ways others in the past century tried to deal with the patristic heritage. Casiday singles out Florovsky and Paul Valliere for extended discussion. He ends the chapter with a reminder of the limitations of human knowing, and the importance of being mindful of those limitations.

Chapter 2 asks the question "How is it Transmitted?" How do we transmit the heritage of the Fathers of the Church? How is it received? Again, those who have attended to the processes of hermeneutics will recognize that these are deceptively simple questions hiding a rather involved process of transmission and reception, of translation, interpretation, and application. This chapter makes use of a tried and true scholarly method, which I often profitably use with undergraduates, namely case-studies. He begins with Vincent of Lerins and his treatment of Origen and Augustine, showing how one father grappled with other fathers before moving on to St. Maximus the Confessor, particularly his Ambigua

Casiday's final case study concerns the filioque,which is treated with great sensitivity and intelligence as the author notes, rightly, that "it is a fact of history that the theological literature of antiquity provides evidence which can be taken to support either the dual procession of the Holy Spirit (called 'filioquism') or the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone (called 'patrimonism'). The origins of this difference are obscure" (81). In the debates, within East and West and between them, over this issue, there was sometimes the tendency to regard "the Fathers" as having infallible authority here as elsewhere. But as Casiday repeatedly notes, one can be held up and respected as a father while having made errors and been wrong about one or more matters. This is an important point to underscore to some who seem to act as though the Fathers were immune to error and we must unquestioningly accept everything they wrote.

His next chapter focuses on symbols and creeds, and later in the chapter Casiday returns to the filioque again, asking why it is some focus on this as a sign of apparently insurmountable East-West difference while we ignore other discrepancies in other versions of the creeds. Drawing on the classical and pioneering anthropology of Mary Douglas in her Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, he notes that "something odd is going on in this particular case" because "there survive not only the Latin and Greek received texts, but also Armenian and Syriac texts. No two are completely identical, even allowing for the exigencies of translation. The Syriac and Armenian versions are not without interest--we have already noted that a Syriac version of the creed says that the Spirit is 'from the Father and the Son'" (129).

Casiday sharpens the point by referring to Tia Kolbaba's recent and important historical works Inventing Latin Heretics: Byzantines and the Filioque in the Ninth Century and The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Why is it, both ask, that of all the controversies the Byzantines generated and of all the charges they threw at the West, the filioque is about the only one anybody still talks about today? (Can we not, as I asked yesterday, finally declare this discussion over and move on?)

The last chapter is appropriately titled "Forward with the Fathers," and spends no little time on the work of John Zizioulas, particularly his landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Zizioulas claims that book is based on patristic, and especially Cappadocian, theology, and it is, but it is also in dialogue with modern philosophy and theology. Sharp critical responses (notably from Lucian Turcescu) have suggested that Zizioulas tends to read back into his patristic sources distinctions and conceptions that are not found there, but only found in modern philosophy. And yet, this in itself is not objectionable if one is clear about it. (The problem is that Zizioulas rather flatly and not very convincingly asserts he is merely allowing the Fathers to speak through his work, without adding anything to that process.) It is, indeed, the same method the Fathers themselves used, as Casiday demonstrated earlier in the book. Casiday does not adjudicate these disputes, but once again uses them as a sort of case-study on the process of reading and reception of the Fathers, arguing that they--and we--have "the Christian freedom...in the business of articulating their good news in the idiom of their contemporaries" (149). Thus we must resist those who would insist that the Fathers and only the Fathers are entirely and absolutely normative for Eastern theology and nothing and nobody can challenge or go beyond them--something that Aristotle Papanikolaou has called "patristic fundamentalism."

How then to proceed? Clearly Orthodox theology cannot jettison the Fathers, but neither must it treat them as adamantine objects to be imposed on an unruly and wicked age. Instead, turning once again to the Fathers themselves--especially Origen and Augustine--Casiday uses their own tried and true method of "despoiling the Egyptians." We take what is good and useful for the glory of God, and use that, regardless of its provenance--a form, to use another old expression, of "baptizing paganism" if you will. This is precisely what the Fathers themselves did, and would tell us to do today. So scorning all of modern "Western" culture, philosophy, literature, and, yes, theology, is a deeply un-patristic thing to do. We cannot all sit around snorting incense and endlessly quoting from John of Damascus or Augustine of Hippo as though that would--as von Balthasar put it--absolve us of our responsibilities to and for our own age. As Casiday nicely puts it, "If we want to join the early fathers in 'despoiling the Egyptians' and imitate them in making the best of the world in which we find ourselves as Christians, we will find fairly quickly that there is more to living patristically than carefully articulating theological doctrines to rejoice the angels and refute the heretics" (172). Casiday then concludes by offering several suggestions for what the Fathers would say to us today, not least in challenging us to a greater service of the poor as seen, e.g., in St. Basil the Great.

In sum, Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage is an extremely useful and deeply compelling book, written with great clarity, insight, and restraint, and it very much deserves a wide audience, not merely among other academics, but especially in parish study groups, catechetical classes, and similar venues. The Fathers would applaud.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Can We All Declare the Filioque Debate Over and Move On?

After the 2003 statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic dialogue (preceded by the 1995 statement from Rome, both available here), after the superlative work of A. Edward Siecienski (whom I interviewed here), The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, and after the recognition and admission, by leading Catholic and Orthodox scholars alike, that the filioque is no longer a church-dividing issue, can we not all agree to just move on to something else? Of course, a few fanatics on the fringes of Catholicism and Orthodoxy want to keep parading this issue about to justify their own bigotry and division, but we need not detain ourselves with them.

If there is much else to be said on the topic, a book coming out in August may well do so: Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 272pp.

About this collection we are told:
The volume presents a range of theological standpoints regarding the filioque. With some contributors arguing for its retention and others for its removal, still others contest that its presence or otherwise in the Creed is not what is of central concern, but rather that how it should be understood is of ultimate importance. What contributors share is a commitment to interrogating and developing the central theological issues at stake in a consideration of the filioque, thus advancing ecumenical theology and inter-communal dialogue without diluting the discussion. Contributors span the Christian traditions: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Pentecostal. Each of these traditions has its own set of theological assumptions, methods, and politics, many of which are on display in the essays which follow. Nonetheless it is only when we bring the wealth of learning and commitments from our own theological traditions to ecumenical dialogue that true progress can be made. It is in this spirit that the present essays have been conceived and are now presented in this form.
The publisher also helpfully gives us the table of contents:

Contents
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments

Foreword: Ecumenical Reception of Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque. Steven R. Harmon

List of Contributors

1. Introduction: Ecumenical Perspectives and the Unity of the Spirit. Myk Habets
Part 1: The Filioque in Context: Historical and Theological

2. The Filioque: A Brief History. A. Edward Siecienski
 3. Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque. Paul D. Molnar
 4. The Filioque: Reviewing the State of the Question, with some Free Church Contributions. David Guretzki

Part 2: Developments in the Various Traditions
5. The Eternal Manifestation of the Spirit ‘Through the Son’ According to Nikephoros Blemmydes and Gregory of Cyprus. Theodoros Alexopoulos
6. The Spirit from the Father, of himself God: A Calvinian Approach to the Filioque Debate.
Brannon Ellis
7. Calvin and the Threefold Office of Christ: Suggestive Teaching Regarding the Nature of the Intra-Divine Life? Christopher R.J. Holmes
8. The Baptists ‘And The Son’: The Filioque Clause In Noncreedal Theology. David E. Wilhite
9. Baptized in the Spirit: A Pentecostal Reflection on the Filioque. Frank D. Macchia

Part 3: Opening New Possibilities: Origin, Action, & Intersubjectivity
10. Lutheranism and the Filioque. Robert W. Jenson
11. On Not Being Spirited Away: Pneumatology and Critical Presence. John C. McDowell
12. The Filioque: Beyond Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas: An Ecumenical Proposal. Thomas Weinandy
13. Beyond the East/West Divide. Kathryn Tanner
14. Getting Beyond the Filioque with Third Article Theology. Myk Habets
Contents
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Ecumenical Reception of Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque. Steven R. Harmon
List of Contributors
1. Introduction: Ecumenical Perspectives and the Unity of the Spirit. Myk Habets
Part 1: The Filioque in Context: Historical & Theological
2. The Filioque: A Brief History. A. Edward Siecienski
3. Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque. Paul D. Molnar
4. The Filioque: Reviewing the State of the Question, with some Free Church Contributions. David Guretzki
Part 2: Developments in the Various Traditions
5. The Eternal Manifestation of the Spirit ‘Through the Son’ According to Nikephoros Blemmydes and Gregory of Cyprus. Theodoros Alexopoulos
6. The Spirit from the Father, of himself God: A Calvinian Approach to the Filioque Debate.
Brannon Ellis
7. Calvin and the Threefold Office of Christ: Suggestive Teaching Regarding the Nature of the Intra-Divine Life? Christopher R.J. Holmes
8. The Baptists ‘And The Son’: The Filioque Clause In Noncreedal Theology. David E. Wilhite
9. Baptized in the Spirit: A Pentecostal Reflection on the Filioque. Frank D. Macchia
Part 3: Opening New Possibilities: Origin, Action, & Intersubjectivity
10. Lutheranism and the Filioque. Robert W. Jenson
11. On Not Being Spirited Away: Pneumatology and Critical Presence. John C. McDowell
12. The Filioque: Beyond Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas: An Ecumenical Proposal. Thomas Weinandy
13. Beyond the East/West Divide. Kathryn Tanner
14. Getting Beyond the Filioque with Third Article Theology. Myk Habets
Index - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ecumenical-perspectives-on-the-filioque-for-the-21st-century-9780567500724/#sthash.uO67yTJQ.dpuf

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Georgian Christian Thought in Context

Brill just sent me a fascinating collection of essays about a small Orthodox country whose patriarch-catholicos has long impressed me, viz., Georgia. The book, a collection of scholarly essays, is Georgian Christian Thought and Its' Cultural Context: Memorial Volume for the 125th Anniversary of Shalva Nutsubidze (1888-1969) (Brill, 2014), 387pp.

Edited by Tamar Nutsubidze, Cornelia B. Horn, and Basil Lourié, with the Collaboration of Alexey Ostrovsky, this book, the publisher tells us,

Monday, June 16, 2014

Augustine Casiday on Evagrius of Pontus

I have been fascinated by the figure of Evagrius of Pontus for more than a decade now since I first encountered him in a doctoral class that was focusing on his treatment of the logismoi or disordered thoughts or passions (eventually, in a round-about way, to be better known in the West as the seven deadly/capital/cardinal sins). Equally interesting is Evagrius's rather controverted reputation, which has been debated off and on for centuries: was he an "Origenist" (and if so, what does that mean, and is it fair first to Origen and then to Evagrius to be so tarred)? Was he therefore a heretic? Did he fall under the apparent condemnations of the fifth ecumenical council?

To answer some of these questions and others, we turn to a fantastic new book by Augustine Casiday, whom I interviewed last year about his other recent work, The Orthodox Christian World.
 
AD: What led you to write Reconstructing the Theology of Evagrius Ponticus: Beyond Heresy

Augustine Casiday: My first major project was about the theme tradition in John Cassian’s writing and his theology. The first thing anyone notices upon reading Cassian’s monastic works is how garrulous the monks are whose conversations and teachings he relates in his Institutes and Conferences– so much so that it is sometimes difficult to comment satisfactorily about a coherent underlying position that can be attributed to Cassian himself. Now in Conferences 9 and 10, Cassian relates Abba Isaac’s teachings on prayer and these teachings are strikingly similar to positions advanced by Origen and his followers. Taking those points of correspondence for a start, Salvatore Marsili worked up a full analysis of Cassian’s dependence upon Evagrius Ponticus’ teachings and published the results in 1936 as Giovanni Cassiano ed Evagrio Pontico: Dottrina sulla carità e contemplazione. Since then, Evagrius’ writings have been an essential reference for anyone working seriously on Cassian. So I started reading Evagrius’ works and I started reading secondary literature about him, the better to understand John Cassian.

There was a fairly narrow consensus about Evagrius’ significance, stretching back at least to the seventeenth century with the great Tillemont’s Mémoires. This consensus identifies Evagrius as the continuator and synthesiser of Origen’s thought, under whose influence that tradition became unquestionably heretical. Hans Urs von Balthasar accused Evagrius of reducing the fluid beauty of Origen’s theology to a severe, mathematical precision; a French philologist named Antoine Guillaumont argued that the condemnations of Origen at the Fifth Ecumenical Council were quoted from a version of a text by Evagrius that he discovered; Elizabeth Clark took these ideas and ran with them, sacrificing the finesse and precision of the continental scholarship. These accounts didn’t resonate with what I was reading from Evagrius himself. They rested on the presumption that Evagrius had rightly been condemned in the sixth century, with scholars like Guillaumont going so far as to assert that the condemnations disclosed the inner significance of Evagrius’ teaching. An assortment of works by Evagrius appeared in English translation from a distinguished scholar of later Byzantine monastic literature, which was that scholar’s first major contribution to the study of Evagrius and which was wholly dependent upon Guillaumont’s work for its theoretical orientation, thus further popularising that perspective. 

On the other hand, someone – almost certainly my supervisor, Fr Andrew Louth – put me on to a series of booklets about various themes in Evagrius’ works that the German monk, Gabriel Bunge, had written. These publications opened up another perspective on Evagrius, one that attempted to evaluate Evagrius with reference to antecedent texts and ideas (rather than with reference to the subsequent condemnations) and that, as such, was fresher. It was also a more theological project. There was conspicuously little interest in the other publications to anything that could be remotely construed as theology. Exceptions to my statement come in the form of attention dedicated to controversies about theological topics. For all the difference it made to the publications, though, those controversies could have been about imperial succession or the price of grain. In 2004, I published a review essay in which I analysed these two trends at some length. That same year, a dossier of text by Evagrius in my own translation appeared in the Routledge Early Church Fathers series as Evagrius Ponticus.

I’ve lost track of how many pieces I have published in the decade since then about themes in the writing of Evagrius and about trends in the study of Evagrius’ writings. Despite the increased prominence of the research project I identified in that review essay as the “Benedictine Perspective,” it was disappointing to notice that publications in English continued to pop up that were splendidly oblivious to the principled alternative to research in the mode of Antoine Guillaumont. People persisted (and still persist) in interpreting Evagrius in terms of a mystical Neoplatonic synthesis with Christian monastic practices, and in these interpretations they betray scant familiarity with advances in scholarship about Neoplatonism, about late ancient philosophy and religion, about monasticism, about changes in Eastern Roman society from the fourth to the sixth centuries, about the transmission and reception of Christian texts, about the formation of orthodoxy, about the thematization of heresy…. I could go on, but I think you understand my point. 

All of these advances directly bear on any responsible reconstruction of Evagrius’ thought, and several specialist pieces about Evagrius have been published that simply fail to recognise that the terms for scholarly assessment have changed. Of the three books published in English since 2009 that mention Evagrius in their title or subtitle, two of them are hopelessly isolated from the scholarly conversations where the action is happening. (In fact, one of those books made some pretty snotty comments about a fine book that appeared in 2005, Luke Dysinger’s Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus, and in doing so betrays that its author seriously misjudged the state of the research.) Those monographs, along with many articles and shorter pieces, have kept indefatigably to the path worn smooth by three centuries of study, contributing to the discussion not much more than a dash of modern terminology. My assessment is that, in doing so, they have attempted to explain the obscure by means of the ambiguous. What was needed was an English-language book that would introduce Evagrius’ life and his writings and attempt a theological interpretation of those writings that was fully engaged with the research. I wanted to present Evagrius as a theologian – whether an orthodox theologian or a heretical theologian matters less to me than simply as a theologian – in the round and to familiarize a broad audience with the advances that have been made over the past decades and that inform how scholars interpret Evagrius’ works. I tried to write so as to be comprehensible to a general readership. The book in hand is the result. It was written from 2005-2007, and revised episodically during the intervening years as my work shifted from being driven primarily by research to being driven primarily by teaching.  

AD: For those not overly familiar with him, give us a brief sketch of who Evagrius was and why he was and is a significant figure. 

Evagius’ likely dates were 345 to 399. He was from a town near the Black Sea. His family were Christian, were well-to-do, and were on friendly terms with the family of Basil the Great. Basil himself seems to have had a hand in Evagrius’ early moral and intellectual formation, as did Gregory the Theologian. When Gregory became archbishop of Constantinople, Evagrius was with him as his deacon. Although there is still work to be done on this subject, readers familiar with Gregory’s celebrated Theological Orations and the writings by Evagrius have sometimes commented on the likelihood that Evagrius helped to draft the former. In any case, Evagrius left Constantinople shortly after Gregory did. He made his way to Palestine, where he was received by Melania the Elder and Rufinus at their monastery on Mt Olivet. Eventually he continued on to the deserts of Lower Egypt, where he was inducted further into monastic life by Macarius the Egyptian and Macarius the Alexandrian. He lived the rest of his life in the company of monks who were in the second generation (roughly speaking) after Anthony the Great “made the desert a city.”

Evagrius was highly educated and articulate. In due course, people sought him out for guidance. He wrote dozens of letters as well as brief notes on books from the Bible, treatises on specific topics, and kephalaia – pithy sayings often arranged into complex structures. These works were circulating in Greek, but also in translation: we know that, within the first half of the fifth century, at least some of his writings were available in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian. By that time, they were being read in Constantinople and in Marseilles. Scraps dating to a later period have been found along the Silk Road translated into Sogdian, and in Ethiopia translated into Ge‘ez. There are countless reasons to read Evagrius’ works, but I’m sure I am not alone in finding his integration of morality, understanding and prayer to be compelling. Even after his name became controversial in the sixth century (it is unanimously agreed by scholars that there is no evidence his reputation was contested before then, but not all of us agree about why that matters), writings like his Praktikos, Gnostikos, and Kephalaia Gnostika – a trilogy of kephalaia about asceticism, exegesis and theology – and his On prayer continued to be read and copied. That latter text was re-attributed to preserve it and eventually it came to be included in the Philokalia. Evagrius was the leading theoretician of early Christian monasticism, and also a theologian of remarkable insight and subtlety. 

AD: To the extent that people may be familiar with Evagrius, it is often because he is tarred by association with Origen (who is himself held in suspicion by some). Is the skepticism surrounding Evagrius justified--or is that a question likely to be debated endlessly in view of the fact (as you note—p. 59) that we “lack the primary material…to evaluate…the claims made by the anti-Origenists”? 

I think some justification can be had for scepticism because, as you rightly say, typically Evagrius’ name is initially presented in a negative light. Disavowing him has for centuries been some kind of badge of orthodoxy. However, the case of Evagrius’ reputation is a goad to further thinking because, no matter how negative that initial presentation, it remains the case that Evagrius wrote one of the golden verses of Eastern Christianity: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.’ I accept that the text in which that kephalaion was found was attributed to Nilus, not to Evagrius, for hundreds of years. But equally I accept that scholarship has decisively overturned the traditional attribution. Anyone who insists (for whatever reason) that Evagrius didn’t write that line is plain wrong. Anyone who mounts an argument against the attribution to Evagrius is probably also intellectually perverse. Evagrius’ reputation prompts us to consider how pristine we think the Christian heritage must have been. Vladimir Lossky warned against a “monophysite ecclesiology” which “manifests itself in a desire to see the Church as essentially a divine being whose every detail is sacred” – a vivid extension of Christological terminology; I’m sure a similar attitude is at work in some church histories, so with a nod to Lossky maybe we should be on guard against “monophysite ecclesiastical histories.”

I think I’m straying from your question. The point I’d like to make is that an initial suspicion is justified, but there is mounting evidence that Evagrius has been systematically misinterpreted. In the early sixth century, Cyril of Scythopolis related suspicions that have no real foundation in Evagrius’ texts but linked those suspicions to Evagrius’ name. A perspective attributed to some saintly and authoritative figure doesn’t have to be repeated too frequently before people begin to think they know what Evagrius taught despite never having read a word by him. There is also mounting evidence from around the same period that people were translating, and in some cases tampering with, earlier texts. I’ve argued that the Syriac version of Evagrius’ Kephalaia Gnostika discovered by Guillaumont attests to a version that was reworked in the sixth century, and subsequent to the publication of my book I’ve further argued that a Greek translation of writings by John Cassian also belongs to the same milieu. We also have some evidence of teachings by a nearly contemporary mystic, Stephen bar Sudaili, who resided in Palestine and whose teachings correspond at some points to the condemnations of Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius. There is not adequate evidence for my interpretation to be compelling, but there are certainly good reasons to think that what has generally been called “Origenism” (and that Guillaumont identified as “Evagrian Origenism”) is in fact a product of the sixth century and, pace Guillaumont, is not the true teaching of Evagrius. 

AD: You note that while some Greeks may have been ambivalent about Evagrius, “Syriac Christians were undisguised in their enthusiasm” (p. 62). Why is that—why the enthusiasm? 

I’ll be honest: my limited grasp of Syriac is in service to my study of Evagrius. So what I know about the Syriac tradition washes on the shores of the Evagrius’ writings. Probably that isn’t so unusual. My sense is that lots of people learn Syriac to study a particular author. I never moved very far beyond that practical use. All this is to say I can only speculate in answer to your question. Here goes: Even though we have evidence of some Syriac Christian debates about Evagrius (most notably, in Babai the Great’s commentary to the Kephalaia Gnostika), I am aware of no evidence that there were Syriac developments parallel to the Second Origenist Controversy; that is to say, so far as I know, Evagrius was never at the heart of a far-reaching Syriac controversy. Evagrius was never the polarizing figure for them that he became for the Greeks, to the best of my knowledge. So what I speculate is that no sense of propriety ever acted as a barrier to the widespread appropriation of his writings. Evagrius’ writings that are available in Syriac, some of which are unavailable in Greek, are lively and appealing. I have to resort to contrasts here because I am by no specialist in Syriac Christianity, but it seems to me that the Greek tradition is uniquely paranoid when it comes to Evagrius – unlike the Latins, who never really internalised Evagrius and primarily got his influence as mediated by Cassian; and unlike the Syrians, who didn’t have debates about Hellenism and Christianity that sheared over Evagrius. Let me try to answer with an analogy. The Greeks fought amongst themselves fiercely about iconography. The Romans didn’t, the Carolingians didn’t, the Syrians didn’t. I can’t think of any reason to suppose all other Christians should be obliged to defer to debates that were internal to Greek Christendom and to structure their positions with reference to the Greek debates and the resolutions to those debates. 

AD: You note that pace von Balthasar and others, Evagrius did not have a rigid system of concepts. Is such a lack of systematic conceptualization part of the reason that Evagrius has been subject to misunderstanding? 

There must be a system that underlies Evagrius’ teachings. Jeremy Driscoll showed beyond any possible doubt in his work Evagrius Ponticus: Ad Monachos that structures can be identified linking and interlinking the kephalaia that make up that text. And Fr Jeremy was motivated to seek out those connections by noting that Evagrius suggests his readers should diligently seek out patterns in his writings. The most conspicuous example is the trilogy that I mentioned earlier, which recapitulates the three themes of Christianity that Evagrius identifies in the first kephalaion of the first work of that trilogy: “Christianity is the teaching of our Saviour Christ, composed of [1.] ascetical practice, and [2.] natural contemplation, and [3.] theological encounter.” Those three terms, I expanded for the sake of English grammar, are πρακτικῆς και φυσικῆς καὶ θεολογικῆς; they correspond to the central themes of the Praktikos, the Gnostikos, and the Kephalaia Gnostika respectively. In consideration of these indicators of structure, I’m not prepared to write off the possibility that Evagrius’ teachings are informed by a systematic conceptualization. 

Even so, I’m convinced that many earlier students of Evagrius were looking in the wrong places for his system. Balthasar said some pretty silly things, the silliest of which was to claim that Evagrius’ spirituality was more Buddhist than Trinitarian; Hausherr flatly contradicted the obvious meaning of a kephalaion in Evagrius’ On prayer in his own commentary to it, expressly preferring to maintain his own system instead of acknowledging Evagrius’ plain teaching that the Holy Spirit is not bound to act in accordance with our formulation of the spiritual life; numerous lesser scholars have also been too enthralled to the claim (stated by no one more clearly than by Guillaumont) that the anathemas from the sixth century and Evagrius’ Great Letter, sometimes wrongly called the letter “to Melania,” provide a key that unlocks the mysteries of Evagrius’ thought. That grand old tradition seems to me no longer plausible, since it privileges debates that occurred roughly 150 years after Evagrius’ death – debates, lest we pass over this point too quickly, that specialists unanimously agree were importantly different to the debates current around the time of Evagrius’ death – as disclosing the inner meaning of Evagrius’ theology. I don’t know a single person who has studied the evidence and who seriously thinks that the Second Origenist Controversy is a direct continuation of the First Origenist Controversy. So it baffles me that some people, including a few self-professed experts, work on the assumption that Second Origenist Controversy was the moment when Evagrius’ system was revealed at long last. At very long last indeed, actually. 

To make better sense of Evagrius’ system, my inclination is to follow the example set by Bunge, by Driscoll, and by Dysinger amongst others. An interrogation of Evagrius’ writings conducted with knowledge of the Bible (especially the Psalter), with knowledge of theological trends contemporary to Evagrius, and with knowledge of the ascetical and ethical practices that he observed is, I suspect, more likely to disclose substantial patterns – even a conceptual system – than is reference to condemnations that were meaningful within circumstances that evolved in the decades after Evagrius had died, but not meaningful before then.

AD: You reflect at length on the role of the emotions in prayer, and note that for Evagrius prayer should be understood as “joy surpassing every other.” Am I wrong in thinking that too often we do not think of strict ascetics like Evagrius as being terribly joyful? 

No, you are quite right that too often we don’t think of Evagrius and others in those terms. The reason, I think, is that Greek monastic literature (including Evagrius’) stresses ἀπάθεια, freedom from the passions or, as I translated that term for the collection of Evagriana, imperturbability. But in advocating freedom from the passions, they weren’t calling for emotionlessness. There are scattered traces through Evagrius’ works of evidence that he recognised how useful emotions could be if they are disciplined to serve the Christian life. There is a nice little passage in the Causes for monastic observances in which Evagrius makes clear that monks should aim to be happy and that happiness is not incompatible with seeking freedom from perturbations or seeking stillness (ἡσυχία): 
Do you wish, then, beloved, to take up the monastic life as it is, and hurry toward the trophies of stillness? Then abandon the cares of this world and the principalities and powers set over them! That is, be free from material things and from perturbations, set apart from every desire. If you thus become a stranger to all that concerns them, you will be able to be still in happiness; yet if one does not withdraw from them, he will never be able to follow this way of life rightly. 
I seem to recall that there are also some nice examples in Evagrius’ Antirrhetikos – a fascinating book, translated by David Brakke fairly recently as Evagrius Of Pontus: Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons, in which Evagrius identifies verses from the Bible that are particularly suitable for recitation under specific circumstances and arranges them according to the eight generic thoughts – but no precise quotations occur to me. What I think I remember is that, nestled along the common suggestions about passages to say in response to demonic temptation, there are a few joyful psalms that he encourages people to recite when things go well. 

AD: In this book, in some of your earlier work (I think, e.g., of your very insightful and helpful 2012 article on Evagrius and heresy in the Heythrop Journal), and in your newest book from SVS Press Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage, there are clear and overlapping themes about Christian historiography and its methods. Can you distill out for the Christian of the twenty-first century any general guidelines on how to look at Christian history, the Church Fathers, and texts from vastly different contexts and eras than our own? (I ask this because I too often see Christians doing hermeneutic violence to texts, and using, say, an ancient canon, or obscure passage from a Cappadocian or an Alexandrian to condemn or promote this idea or that.) 

One theme dear to Evagrius that applies here is the need for humility, which is a great place to start. And not that noxious vice of corporate pride that presents itself as humility, either – but the real thing: humility before God. I reckon one of the quickest ways to distinguish theological engagement with historical sources, on the one hand, from faddish studies of themes from late ancient Christianity, on the other, is by putting publications that have anything whatever to do with God in one pile and the rest in another. If the reader’s attention is directed to a community and its practices and members, and if its beliefs are referenced to the group’s identity, then whatever else that writing might be it is probably Christian only in a superficial or nominal sense. After orientating the project toward God, get whatever technical skills are needed for the task at hand. Then set to work.

AD: To those who would condemn Evagrius as a heretic, what would you say?  

Probably not much. I might ask them to explain what they are condemning and to relate that back to Evagrius’ writings.

But since you put the question to me that way, I want to state my position in a matter that has generated some misunderstanding. The historical events that resulted in Evagrius’ condemnation can be disentangled and evaluated on their merits. Since my research is historical in its methodology, sorting out the evidence and assessing it is my major preoccupation. That work has reached a stage such that I am confident in saying that several of the claims about Evagrius are bogus and should be understood in terms of factors that are isolable from his theology (even if they can be seen to derive from it). The assertion that Christ’s resurrection body was a sphere is a clear example. There are other claims whose merits I have not evaluated to my satisfaction: it’s entirely possible that Evagrius believed in universal salvation, for instance. Anyway, the point of my work isn’t to vindicate Evagrius. It’s to study his theology using the best resources and methods available to me. I’m following the evidence and the methods where they lead. If the conclusion is that Evagrius’s theology was heretical, so be it. 

AD: Sum up what you hope for this book and who should read it

I’d really like for the scholarly conversations about Evagrius to move beyond terms inherited from the Second Origenist Controversy. It’d be most welcome for Anglophone scholarship to come out from the shadow of Francophone scholarship. Further study of Evagrius’ theology is urgently needed, and here I’d make a contrast to some of the recent publications that have focused on themes in Evagrius’ work that are only tangentially related to theology, such as hermeneutics or anthropology or gnosis. You mentioned my article in the Heythrop Journal. One of the reasons I wrote it was to argue that imprecise or inaccurate theology has far-reaching consequences for research into those other themes. Getting Evagrius’ theology right is basic to further applications of his writings. Those observations are chiefly relevant to patristics. I’d like to think, though, that the book will be read by people who are interested in other historical eras (one of the great missed opportunities is when specialists in Byzantine theology appeal to dilapidated old ideas about Evagrius for their research), or who simply want to know more about the theology of a fascinating and influential monk.

AD: What projects are you next at work on?

So far, my big books have been biographical. The next one I’m planning is a comprehensive study of Boethius. In the slightly longer range, I’m reading books by Leszek Kołakowski, Karl Mannheim, R. G. Collingwood, Michael Polanyi and Maurice Halbwachs. At present, it isn’t clear where these readings will take me. But they are proving helpful in a preliminary way as I think about the contemporary reception of ancient Christian sources and about trends in modern theology.

Friday, June 13, 2014

The Trinity in the Life of the Church

This coming Sunday is, for most Western Christians, celebrated as Trinity Sunday, often the bane of preachers who must try to make sense of what the human mind can only dimly grasp. Too often, I suspect, most of us are like Dorothy Sayers: "The Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible, the whole damned thing is incomprehensible." But next year those preachers will surely have some help in a new book to be released this fall under the editorship of Khaled Anatolios, whom I interviewed here about his last, and justly celebrated, book Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine. 

This new book is a collection of articles by leading and well-known scholars: The Holy Trinity in the Life of the Church (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History) (Baker Academic, 2014), 272pp.

About this book we are told:
In this volume, a noted theologian brings together an ecumenical roster of leading scholars to explore trinitarian faith as it is concretely experienced in the life of the church. Drawing upon and fostering renewed interest in trinitarian theology, the contributors--including Brian E. Daley, John Behr, and Kathleen McVey--clarify the centrality of trinitarian doctrine in salvation, worship, and life. This is the third volume in Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History, a partnership between Baker Academic and the Pappas Patristic Institute of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. The series is a deliberate outreach by the Orthodox community to Protestant and Catholic seminarians, pastors, and theologians.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Orthodoxy in Estonia

Overshadowed as it is by its hulking and often hegemonic neighbor to the East, and more recently by the conflict in Ukraine, the country of Estonia rarely captures the attention of the world, or even of most of the world's scholars. And yet there is a significant Orthodox population there which has been little studied, at least recently and in English. In particular, Orthodoxy in Estonia, to the extent it is known at all, is likely known through its most famous musical spokesman, Avro Part (on whom see this collaborative initiative between him and St. Vladimir's Seminary, organized by Peter Bouteneff). But in December some of that will change with a new study, Jeffers Engelhardt, Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia (Oxford UP, 2014), 304pp.

About this book we are told:
Singing the Right Way enters the world of Orthodox Christianity in Estonia to explore musical style in worship, cultural identity, and social imagination. Through both ethnographic and historical chapters, author Jeffers Engelhardt reveals how Orthodox Estonians give voice to the religious absolute in secular society. Based on a decade of fieldwork, Singing the Right Way traces the sounds of Orthodoxy in Estonia through the Russian Empire, interwar national independence, the Soviet-era, and post-Soviet integration into the European Union. Approaching Orthodoxy through local understandings of correct practice and correct belief, Engelhardt shows how religious knowledge, national identity, and social transformation illuminate how to "sing the right way" and thereby realize the fullness of Estonians' Orthodox Christian faith in context of everyday, secular surroundings. Singing the Right Way is an innovative model of how the musical poetics of contemporary religious forms are rooted in both consistent sacred tradition and contingent secular experience. This landmark study is sure to be an essential text for scholars studying the ethnomusicology of religion.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Byzantium and the Crusades

Of the writing of books about the Crusades there is no end, it seems, and justly so at least right now when they remain so massively, and often deliberately, misunderstood and misrepresented. Set for release this fall is the second edition of Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and The Crusades: Second Edition (Bloomsbury Academic, November 2014), 288pp.

About this book we are told: 
This new edition of Byzantium and the Crusades provides a fully-revised and updated version of Jonathan Harris's landmark text in the field of Byzantine and crusader history.

The book offers a chronological exploration of Byzantium and the outlook of its rulers during the time of the Crusades. It argues that one of the main keys to Byzantine interaction with Western Europe, the Crusades and the crusader states can be found in the nature of the Byzantine Empire and the ideology which underpinned it, rather than in any generalised hostility between the peoples.

Taking recent scholarship into account, this new edition includes an updated notes section and bibliography, as well as significant new additions to the text:

- New material on the role of religious differences after 1100
- A detailed discussion of economic, social and religious changes that took place in 12th-century Byzantine relations with the west
- In-depth coverage of Byzantium and the Crusades during the 13th century
- New maps, illustrations, genealogical tables and a timeline of key dates

Byzantium and the Crusades is an important contribution to the historiography by a major scholar in the field that should be read by anyone interested in Byzantine and crusader history.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Turks and the Byzantines at the Sunset of Empire

Forever looming large, it seems, in the minds of some Eastern Christians is the loss of the empire, and in particular the loss of Constantinople to the Turks, including, of course, the loss of Hagia Sophia. These events have been studied by others for centuries, but we are still learning, and re-learning, a great deal about those hugely important decades. A new book, set for release in November of this year, in the prestigious series Oxford Studies in Byzantium, will shed further light: Dimitri Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford UP, November 2014), 432pp.

About this book we are told:
At the beginning of the thirteenth century Byzantium was still one of the most influential states in the eastern Mediterranean, possessing two-thirds of the Balkans and almost half of Asia Minor. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the most prominent and successful of the Greek rump states was the Empire of Nicaea, which managed to re-capture the city in 1261 and restore Byzantium. The Nicaean Empire, like Byzantium of the Komnenoi and Angeloi of the twelfth century, went on to gain dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rum in the 1250s. However, the decline of the Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia, allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304, the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium's eastern defences; the Empire lost its Asian territories forever, and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Empire was a tiny, second-ranking Balkan state, whose lands were often disputed between the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and the Franks.

Using Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman sources, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century presents a new interpretation of the Nicaean Empire and highlights the evidence for its wealth and power. It explains the importance of the relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks and the Mongols, revealing how the Byzantines adapted to the new and complex situation that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Finally, it turns to the Empire's Anatolian frontiers and the emergence of the Turkish confederations, the biggest challenge that the Byzantines faced in the thirteenth century.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Armenian Assassination Squads

Last summer, I noted even then the forthcoming flood of books on the centenary of the Great War, which we will observe this August. I have since had a chance to read several of them, and another one arrived in the mail only last night to my delight; I will write about it in due course.

But there are anniversaries within anniversaries, and so next year we will commemorate the centenary of the Armenian genocide, about which, as noted earlier, numerous solid studies have been published in the last decade. To start off the centenary year, Transaction Publishers will, in January 2015, publish a related study on a little-known aspect of the aftermath of the genocide: Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis (Transaction, 2015), 363pp.

About this book we are told:
Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their murdered families, friends, and compatriots.
This book includes a large collection of previously unpublished letters that show the strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian, who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis; Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved with Nemesis.
The author tells a story that has been either hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims’ narratives. This is the story of those who attempted to seek justice for the victims and the effect this effort had on them and on their families. Little has been written about Operation Nemesis. As we approach the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it is time.
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