Demonic Bodies in the Christian East

The Coptic tradition, and the venerable city of Alexandria, are both well represented in this forthcoming book from Oxford early next year: Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture by Travis W. Proctor (Oxford UP, February 2022), 280pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture analyzes how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Through case studies of New Testament texts, Gnostic treatises, and early Christian church fathers (e.g., Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage), Travis W. Proctor notes that early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, “fattened” and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound.

Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functioned as personifications of “deviant” bodily practices such as “magical” rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and pagan religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. The tandem construction of demonic and human corporeality demonstrates how Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos--human, demon, and otherwise--as part of overlapping networks or “ecosystems” of humanity and nonhumanity. Through this approach, Proctor provides not only a more accurate representation of the bodies of ancient Christians, but also new resources for reimagining the enlivened ecosystems that surround and intersect with our modern ideas of “self.”

Clement of Alexandria

Originally published more than twenty years ago, just last month an electronic version of this book was released: Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy by Denise Kimber Buell (Princeton University Press, 2020), 224pp.

Clement remains, as I noted on here some time back, a very intriguing figure who sits ambivalently in many Christian traditions and calendars. About him and this book the publisher tells us this:

How did second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity? In this innovative book, Denise Buell argues that many early Christians deployed the metaphors of procreation and kinship in the struggle over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practice, and doctrine. In particular, she examines the intriguing works of the influential theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-210 c.e.), for whom cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship played an important role in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic.

Buell argues that metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve to make power differentials appear natural. She shows that early Christian authors recognized this and often turned to such metaphors to mark their own positions as legitimate and marginalize others as false. Attention to the functions of this language offers a way out of the trap of reconstructing the development of early Christianity along the axes of “heresy” and “orthodoxy,” while not denying that early Christians employed this binary. Ultimately, Buell argues, strategic use of kinship language encouraged conformity over diversity and had a long lasting effect both on Christian thought and on the historiography of early Christianity.

Aperceptive and closely argued contribution to early Christian studies, Making Christians also branches out to the areas of kinship studies and the social construction of gender.

Bp. Seraphim Sigrist on the Tapestries of Life

In this blog's infancy, I hit upon the idea of interviewing authors when talking with Bishop Seraphim Sigrist more than five years ago, when I sent him some questions about his then-new book A Life Together: Wisdom of Community from the Christian East.

He has a new book out, Tapestry, and I sent him some questions for an interview about it. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background.

Vladyka Seraphim: By way of introducing myself I would say that I studied at St Vladimir's Seminary and then served in the Orthodox Church in Japan for 19 years as teacher, as deacon, and priest in a village church and finally as Bishop of northern Japan. Returning to the United States I have taught at Drew University, and, becoming involved with movements in Russia for Christian renewal, traveled to Russia many times. I live in the lower Hudson Valley and have written five books, including one Japanese translation.

AD: When we spoke on here several years ago now, it was about your book A Life Together: Wisdom of Community from the Christian East. What, if anything, links that book and your newest one, Tapestry? In other words, give us a bit of chronology and background over the past few years leading up to this newest book.

I am not a prolific writer but Tapestry perhaps fits to a set of three that  begins with Theology of Wonder in 1999 and then as you mention A Life Together in 2010 and now Tapestry. The theologian Antoine Arjakowsky has described the Church as a network of friendships and this is a theme which runs through all my writing and is central in A Life Together. For its part, Tapestry approaches from many angles in its sections perhaps more the theme of the way of knowledge of God for the individual within the Christian community.
 
AD: You start off by referring to Fr. Alexander Schememann, whose love of poetry is well known, and who reflected in his celebrated Journals that there was more theology in the poetry of an E.E. Cummings than in many theology books as such. Is that your view also? How do you see the relationship between poetry and theology?

It seems that poetry can represent more the intuitive side of life and then there is a way of doing theology which is more careful , could we say, and analytic. But these surely can at least ideally fit together. A scholastic analysis with its back and forth of mind opens into ,the reader may suddenly realize, a sort of dance. The dense expression of Dun Scotus "haecceity" or "thisness," becomes the inscape of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

AD: I heard it said once—I forget by whom—that Christianity has produced two outstanding poets—Dante and Ephraim the Syrian. But you draw on others, including those not necessarily identified as Christian. How do you see those works and authors as part of God’s creation?

Now first of all there are more Christian writers, even in our own time, than is sometimes recognized. We are right to love Chesterton or the Inklings but there are so many others. And beyond these are there not those with gifts of wisdom and spiritual ardor such as Rainer Maria Rilke who did not also have the gift of a clearly defined theology?
 
AD: Your references and sources range very widely—Cardinal Newman, Clement of Alexandria, the Jungian analyst John Perkins, C.S. Lewis, Fr. Alexander Men, Wittgenstein, and others. Are there any common threads in this very diverse tapestry of characters?

Well I cite those who have inspired and interested me and whose themes resonate to me and which I share. All these whom you mention certainly have a shared quality of being alert and open in their thinking and also a godwardness, an orientation towards God as the end of their thought. You know Josef Pieper in his admirable book about St.Thomas Aquinas The Silence of St.Thomas says that new territory awaiting use by Christians is "of virtually immeasurable scope" including depth psychology, advances in physics and biology and the wisdom traditions of the East. Perhaps I have a little attempted to at least look into the new territories of our time and the time that is coming.

AD: Tell us what your hopes were and are for this book, Tapestry. Who should read it, and why?

Tapestry is a collection of at first sight quite diverse materials ranging from the personal to the more formal in style and from the straight forward to the possibly somewhat poetic. But the life we have is also like that isn't it? A great diversity of feelings with the warm and the cold, the fast and busy and the slow and meditative, coexisting at once like levels of the sea as Thomas Merton said. The theme then, implicit at every point, is that this whole life in every moment is our knowledge of God. It is the medium through which and in which we encounter the Lord. It is life itself, in all its impermanence and change, which is or is seen to be what in the Eastern Church is called Theosis, or I would like to render it Becoming-as-Divine.

Does not realizing this bring Theosis into focus a little more than when it is held out there as simply a future destiny? Similarly there is the via negativa, the way of negation of all images and there is the positive affirmative theology. But these are not first of all abstractions rather they are grounded in the rhythm of the blood and of life, exhaling and inhaling, the arterial and the veinous blood, the light and shadow of all our moments. Tapestry is a personal expression, which I think will resonate to readers, that in realizing the depth of this life we have, we may live in, or into, eternity's sunrise.


AD: Having finished Tapestry, what are you at work on next?

Perhaps more than another book just now, I would wish to take to heart the words of Angelus Silesius which are for reader and for writer alike, "Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence."

Clement of Alexandria's Moral Psychology

What is it about the great city of Alexandria that so many of its leading Christian intellectuals seem to have never shaken off a certain soupçon of heterodoxy? Whether we're talking Origen, Cyril, or Clement (inter alia--to say nothing of the infamous Arius of course) there remains in the minds of some just a bit of doubt, a bit of unease, as to how sound these men are.

Among them, Clement of Alexandria occupies a pivotal if at times controverted position within early Christianity, as I noted here. Some traditions have canonized him and recognize him as a patristic figure of great authority; others have done neither; still others view him as guilty of  heresy. A new book, set for September release, may shed more light on him: Kathleen Gibbons, The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria: Mosaic Philosophy (Routledge, 2016), 208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement’s moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity’s relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement’s work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other.

While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement’s use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement’s discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of “free will” in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

We are also given the table of contents:

Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Mosaic Law in early Christianity
Chapter 2: Miming Moses: Clement’s Self-Presentation and the Dependency Theme
Chapter 3: Moses, Statesman and Philosopher
Chapter 4: The Logos of God, the Problem of Evil, and Clement’s Transformation of Providence
Chapter 5: Right Reason and the Gnostic’s Grasp of the Mosaic Law
Chapter 6: Clement’s Idiosyncratic Concept of Autonomy in the Context of Ancient Thought
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Screw the Rich?

In the late 90s, I had a lot of fun writing a short article on Evelyn Waugh's famously incorrect views about money, wealth, and social class. (I did this mischievously, I admit, in part because I had a lot of leftist friends whose pieties I wished to tweak. One in particular was left fulminating incoherently after reading my article, which was of course enormously amusing.) I tried, inter alia, to draw attention to the oft-ignored verse that comes immediately after the gospel's famous warning that the rich will find getting to heaven as easy as camels going through needles' eyes: "but with God all things are possible." Waugh showed, especially in his wonderful historical novel Helena, that it was possible for the rich and powerful not only to make it to heaven, but to do so after having lived saintly lives on earth. That may be the exception, but it is at least possible--with God.

If the dowager empress of the Roman Empire, the richest and most powerful woman of her time, could become a saint, there was hope for everyone, the rich included, which is precisely the oft-overlooked conclusion to the famous gospel passage above. (As Waugh said in one of his letters to his friends about his treatment of the upper classes in both Helena and the even more famous Brideshead Revisited, "it's not true that Catholics think the poor go to a servants' hall in heaven.")

Anyway, a new book has recently been published giving us Clement of Alexandria's treatment of the question of whether the rich will be saved: Quel riche sera sauvé ? (Texte grec d'O. Stählin et L. Früchtel [GCS 17²] — Introduction, notes et index par Carlo Nadi, Professeur à la Faculté de théologie de Florence et Patrick Descourtieux, Professeur à l'Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum — Traduction par Patrick Descourtieux; Éditions du Cerf, 2011, 264pp).

About this book the publisher tells us:

En déclarant qu'il était plus difficile à un riche d'entrer dans le Royaume des cieux qu'à un chameau de passer par le trou d'une aiguille (cf. Mc 10, 25), Jésus n'a-t-il pas voué à la perdition tout détenteur de capitaux ? L'effroi de ses auditeurs n'a pas échappé à Clément d'Alexandrie, ni la détresse spirituelle qui guettait les riches de la ville, quand ils voyaient la distance existant entre leur mode de vie et les exigences de l'Évangile.

Mais la parole du Christ avait-elle été bien comprise ? L'auteur des « Stromates » se révèle ici tour à tour exégète, dogmaticien, moraliste et directeur spirituel. Dans l'Alexandrie bigarrée de la fin du IIe siècle, sa pensée de fin lettré allait ouvrir à ses auditeurs et à ses lecteurs des perspectives insoupçonnées sur les richesses de la parole divine. Cette première homélie sur un sujet difficile et controversé devait connaître un grand succès.

Après une entrée en matière qui invite chacun à l'espérance, Clément analyse soigneusement le texte évangélique. Il s'élève ensuite à de profondes considérations sur l'amour de Dieu et du prochain, avant de conclure à nouveau par un vibrant appel à l'espérance. Le « Quis dives salvetur » est la première tentative de réflexion chrétienne sur les rapports de la foi et de l'argent. Le « Mamon de l'injustice » y devient un moyen d'accéder aux « tentes éternelles ».

Alexandria

Alexandria, of course, has long been recognized as one of the world's great cities, famed for its vast bibliographic holdings, its schools of learning, its orators, heretics, bishops, theologians, and much else besides. It is also a city that has been at the forefront of intra-Christian and Muslim-Christian conflicts. A recent book narrates that history for us: Bojana Mojsov, Alexandria Lost: from the Advent of Christianity to the Arab Conquest (London: Duckworth, 2010), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the fourth century AD Christian zealots destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria and killed Hypatia, the last director of the Platonic Academy. Over the next two centuries they systematically erased the entire ‘pagan’ heritage of that great city, previously renowned as a centre of learning. Later, war between the Byzantine and Egyptian Churches only added to Alexandria’s decline. The inquisition unleashed by the Byzantine Patriarch Cyrus against the Egyptian Copts drove them into the arms of the invading Arabs, whose tolerance ensured both the survival of the Coptic Church of Egypt and the ready conversion of many Egyptians to Islam. But when, after conquering Alexandria by force, the Arabs demolished the surrounding walls, an entire civilisation perished.

This book tells the extraordinary story of the destruction of classical Alexandria, exposing disturbing facts long erased from our collective historical memory. In charting the origins of the loss of dialogue between Europe and the Middle East, Bojana Mojsov reflects on the power and dangers of ignorance driven by faith.

Early Christian Thought

Routledge has brought out a number of helpful collections recently, including one I've used in several classes, The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church. Like all such collections, the quality of the articles is uneven, but there are some really excellent ones in it and it makes for a good textbook in survey courses on ecclesiology.

More recently, another collection has just been sent to me with much in it of interest to Eastern Christians: D. Jeffrey Bingham, ed., The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought (Routledge, 2010), 360pp.

About this book the publisher says:

The shape and course which Christian thought has taken over its history is largely due to the contributions of individuals and communities in the second and third centuries. Bringing together a remarkable team of distinguished scholars, The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought is the ideal companion for those seeking to understand the way in which Early Christian thought developed within its broader cultural milieu and was communicated through its literature, especially as it was directed toward theological concerns.
Divided into three parts, the Companion:

• asks how Christianity's development was impacted by its interaction with cultural, philosophical, and religious elements within the broader context of the second and third centuries.
• examines the way in which Early Christian thought was manifest in key individuals and literature in these centuries.
• analyses Early Christian thought as it was directed toward theological concerns such as God, Christ, Redemption, Scripture, and the community and its worship.

There are numerous chapters in here of particular interest to Eastern Christians, including:

6) Ignatius and the Apostolic Fathers (Clayton Jefford)
7) Justin and the Apologists (Oskar Skarsaune)
8) Irenaeus of Lyons (D. Jeffrey Bingham)
10) Clement and Alexandrian Christianity (H. Fiska Hägg)
11) Origen (Ronald Heine)
14) God (M.C. Steenberg)
15) Christ: the Apostolic Fathers to the Third Century (John McGuckin)

Clement of Alexandria: Heretic?

It is a fascinating time in the world of early Christian studies, especially concerning figures once reprobated as suspect or heterodox. Our views of figures such as Evagrius have been undergoing considerable revision in recent scholarship. Now it seems it is Clement of Alexandria's turn.

Five years ago, in his Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford Early Christian Studies), Henny Fiska Hagg recognized--as I noted in my review in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies--that Clement occupies a very uneasy for most Christians today, who, thinking him vaguely suspect, usually prefer to ignore him.

But the time has now come to attempt to understand what, if anything, was the problem in the first place that led Clement to be placed under a cloud of suspicion. Part of the difficult with either "clearing" or "condemning" Clement has to do--as it does in similar cases with Origen and Evagrius--with the question of the sources, the agenda of those sources, and the availability of those sources to us today: many have been lost or corrupted, but the condemnation perdures. Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski, author of a previous work on Clement, has attempted to grapple with these source questions in a new book from Brill: Clement of Alexandria on Trial: the Evidence of 'Heresy' from Photius' Bibliotheca (Vigiliae Christianae) (Brill, 2010), 186pp.

About this book, Brill tells us:

Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215 CE) is one of the most significant theologians of the second-century, and his work is still the subject of intense academic debate. This book provides a new perspective on Clement’s thought, through a critical examination of the work of one of his critics, Photios (c.820–893 CE). Photios, the Patriarch of Constantinople, based his critique on Clement’s (now lost) treatise ‘Hypotyposeis’, claiming the work contained eight ‘heresies’. The book examines each ‘error’ listed in the 109th codex of Photios’ ‘Bibliotheca’ in depth, using evidence from Clement’s existing work to consider the likely accuracy of Photios’ critique. Focusing on these eight ‘heresies’ offers a unique opportunity to illuminate what in terms of post-Nicene orthodoxy are Clement’s most problematic opinions, setting them in the context of their original philosophical and theological frame.