Matthew Briel on Greek Thomists

I think I first met our author, Matthew Briel, at a lovely conference at the University of Saint Thomas in the Twin Cities in July 2017, devoted to questions of reception history in theology. I gave a paper on the usefulness of forgetting, drawing on numerous books I have discussed on here since 2016. My paper had a lovely and thrilling response from Sarah Coakley.

Since then, Matthew has finished his doctoral work, found a job, and published his dissertation as A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios. Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about his background and new book. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background

MB: I am a Catholic layman originally from Minnesota but now an Assistant Professor of Theology at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. My undergraduate degree in philosophy and an MTS in theology are from Notre Dame and it was there that my basic view of the world through a Thomistic and Newmanian lens was confirmed. John Henry Newman, in particular, has affected my view of history and epistemology.

After a year of teaching in a Catholic high school I did a three-year MA in Classics at the University of Minnesota which strengthened my Latin, gave me my Greek, and provided a broad introduction to classical literature. It also prepared me for the academy by exposing me to critical theory. I then entered Fordham’s doctoral program to study with George Demacopoulos. This was my introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy and Byzantine theology.

AD: What led to the writing of A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios?

MB: As an MA student I read Aristotle in Greek for the first time and found myself again attracted to his basic worldview with its primacy of the particular and his, to me, mostly convincing metaphysics and ethics. I was reminded of my basically Thomistic orientation and wondered if there was a way that I could incorporate Thomas into my studies but at the same time had begun the MA in order to learn Greek to work in the Greek Orthodox theological tradition. When I learned about Greek Thomism I was committed.

I began my doctoral work by writing a seminar paper on Demetrios Kydones, the first Orthodox thinker to read Thomas with care. I came to the conclusion that Kydones wasn’t a genius and looked to so if there might be someone else. I then stumbled across Scholarios, became convinced of his towering intellect, and began working on him.

My beginning in Scholarios was a tutorial with a Thomist, Franklin Harkins, at Fordham. I would come with translations of Scholarios to our meetings and we would discuss them, identifying Thomas’ influence. After that I worked carefully with George Demacopoulos to develop a framework and to place Scholarios in the Orthodox theological tradition.

AD: Tell us a bit about your titular character and why he’s important

MB: Born around 1400 in Constantinople, Scholarios became a teacher of philosophy in his 20s. He learned Latin well early in his life and read voraciously in Latin and Greek philosophy and theology. Really the breadth of his knowledge of both theological traditions is breathtaking. By his late 20s Scholarios became convinced that Latin scholasticism, and Aquinas in particular, not only had developed and refined classical Greek philosophy, especially in logic, but that Aquinas had profound insight into the Greek Fathers, surpassing even Byzantine understanding of the Greek fathers.

Scholarios remained an unmarried lay scholar (a bachelor-don) and developed a reputation for his profound learning. As a result, he was brought to the Council of Florence in 1438 as one of three lay theological advisors to the Orthodox delegation. At this point Scholarios was very much in favor of reunion with Rome. At the same time, Scholarios was committed to a reunion established on dogmatic grounds rather than a political compromise. Returning to Constantinople in 1439, Scholarios, under the influence of his teacher Mark of Ephesus (the hero who resisted reunion on the grounds of compromised dogma), grew increasingly anti-union. Scholarios took monastic vows in his late 40s and grew increasingly frustrated with the imperial uniate position. He became the leader of the anti-union party.

After the fall of the City in 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror chose Scholarios to be patriarch in large part due to his resistance to Rome. Scholarios remained in this position for two years until he retired first to Mt. Athos and then to the manuscript- rich Monastery of the Forerunner outside of Serres in Northern Greece.

As the first patriarch of Constantinople after its fall in 1453, Scholarios laid the groundwork for the relationship of Orthodox Christians with their Muslim conquerors for the next several centuries. Serving as both ecclesial and secular ruler of the Rum Millet (Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire), Scholarios provided sophisticated defenses of Christianity to his new Muslim rulers, worked to provide places of worship for Christians, and helped to establish a place for Christians in Ottoman society.

Scholarios is perhaps more remarkable as a theologian. Among other things, he offered the first Orthodox account of transubstantiation. This was to have a long afterlife in the Orthodox theological tradition. Then there’s his reconciliation of the Palamite distinction between the divine essence and energies with the Catholic understanding of divine simplicity. His pastoral work and application of economy is a forerunner to contemporary Orthodox practice. Finally, of course, there is his account of divine providence, the subject of the book, which had a profound effect on later Orthodox theology.

AD: Your book is, as we say today, at the intersection of several phenomena: Greek Orthodox thought and Thomism, Aristotelian philosophy and theology, a Turkish Islamic context at the end of the East-Roman Empire, inter alia. What were some of the surprises you found in examining these intersections?

MB: I was surprised by the fierce debate about providence between fifteenth-century Greek theologians (including the pagan Pletho) and its parallel in discussion on the ground, so to say. There are reports of popular opinions in contemporary historians as well as a cache of letters written in simple Greek that evince a great concern with providence. Novel accounts of fate/determinism and a conception of a random universe were also circulating. It was in this context that Scholarios worked. He attempted to respond both to a popular decline in belief in providence (in part influenced indirectly by higher levels of discourse and the fall of the Byzantine Empire) and the ideas of scholars.

Pletho, too, was a surprise to me. Perhaps the greatest mind of the later Byzantine Empire, Pletho was a convinced pagan (and possibly theurgist) who was highly critical of Aristotle, whose language and concepts undergird traditional Byzantine theology, and instead preferred Plato. Pletho’s pamphlet, On the Differences between Plato and Aristotle, caused quite a stir in the mid-15th century in both Italy and the Byzantine Empire. Scholarios responded to this pamphlet with a text that presents Aristotle, without change, as compatible with Christianity. In his response, Pletho easily demolished Scholarios’ arguments and pressed him to reconsider Aristotle’s compatibility with the Christian understanding of God and the universe. Scholarios realized that Aristotle had to be transformed if he was to be used in Christian dogmatics and he did just that, largely, but not simply, following the path established by Aquinas. Scholarios’ teaching on providence became the consensus position among later Orthodox theologians and it is in part due to Pletho’s intervention. In this way a revival of paganism at the end of the Byzantine Empire led to an important development in Orthodox doctrine.

AD: Marcus Plested (interviewed here), who has endorsed your book and is the author of an earlier and similar work on Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, has helped to break down some of the assumptions and stereotypes about Latin scholasticism and Greek patristics. Does your book continue that process, differ from it, or add to it?

Plested’s book draws attention for the first time to the massive influence, both negative and positive, that Aquinas has had on Orthodox theology. There was a good sized body of literature on the Byzantine reception of Aquinas in various languages since the turn of the twentieth century. Plested brings that literature together into a coherent narrative, arguing that Orthodoxy has in the past and continues today to have something to learn from Aquinas.

At the same time this engagement with Aquinas has been and must be a critical reception. This is an important challenge to Orthodox theology which has, since the middle of the twentieth century, tended to rest content with eschewing Latin theology by reducing it to a caricature and proceeding to reject it. Plested demonstrates that this approach is in fact not the historical road of Orthodoxy and shouldn’t be the approach today.

Plested’s book gives a fair amount of attention to Scholarios and holds him up as a model for rapprochement with Aquinas in particular and with Western theology in general. Scholarios knew Aquinas deeply, recognized his genius and his mastery of the Greek patristic tradition and learned from him. Indeed, Scholarios drew upon Aquinas in his own theology. But this was not a passive reception. Instead Scholarios drew attention to Aquinas’ errors while praising him.

I focused on Scholarios because, like Plested, I am convinced that he is a model of Orthodox engagement with Aquinas. My book furthers Plested’s argument about Aquinas and Orthodox doctrine. Like Plested, I also engage the Greek patristic tradition that formed Scholarios and present Aquinas as a valid interpreter of that tradition. Because Plested’s book covers so much territory, he didn’t have the space to develop why Scholarios is a model for Orthodox theology. By focusing on him, my book is able to do this.

AD: As we learn more about the previously unknown or ignored connections between Latin and Greek Christian thought in this period, you are very clear in your introduction that the result of such an encounter does not necessarily entail “captivity” (Florovsky) or the creation of a tertium quid, but can result in “a healthy development of the Orthodox theological tradition” (p.4), referencing Newman. But I thought “development” was an impermissible category in Orthodox thought—certainly I recall Andrew Louth and others saying that as recently as 2006? Tell us more about how you understand development in the context of Scholarios.


MB: Yes, I should have clarified this in the book. My sense of Louth’s chapter in Jaroslav Pelikan’s Festschrift is that his criticism of the idea of the development of doctrine is a criticism of it as it is conceived of by modern western theologians, and not as it was understood by Newman. Although Louth presents an analysis of Newman in this chapter, he simply gets him wrong. Louth’s concern is: “if development means that there is an historical advance in Christian understanding of the faith deeper or more profound than that of the Fathers, at least in principle, then such a notion of development cannot be accepted as a category of Orthodox theology” (55).

Newman wholeheartedly agrees with Louth and I would argue that such a conception of development cannot be accepted as a category of Catholic theology either. For Newman it is not a question of the depth of understanding but rather a question of making precise and making implicit knowledge (which is real and more fundamental knowledge) explicit.

In the case of Scholarios’ understanding of providence, there existed a tension between strains of theology in the Orthodox tradition. Some fathers tended towards emphasizing human freedom and muting divine agency and predetermination, while others stressed the predetermination of events and only falteringly accounted for human freedom. The sense of the Church was that both must be true. Scholarios provided the vocabulary and framework for giving an account of this mystery but it was a mystery that was already understood, if only implicitly. Scholarios does not reflect on his achievement in his Tracts on Providence but he is aware that it is a new solution. He might not even go so far as to call his theology a development, as Palamas calls the essence-energy distinction, and he certainly wouldn’t be so bold as to describe it as knowledge disclosed by the Holy Spirit after the time of the Apostles, as Gregory Nazianzen does when reflecting on the doctrine of the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

AD: I had an “ah-ha!” moment as soon as you mentioned (p.5) the name of the rather infamous Martin Jugie, who seems to be an expert in prejudicing the reception and ruining the reputations of several figures between East and West, including Scholarios. Tell us about Jugie’s role here.

Jugie is a fascinating and important figure and we are all indebted to him. Without him we’d only have a tenth of the works of Scholarios in print instead of nearly the whole corpus. His mastery of Byzantine and modern Orthodox theology (in both Greek and Russian) was unparalleled and his body of work is lasting, if problematic.

Jugie understood himself to be a faithful son of the Church, and the approach of the Catholic Church towards ecumenism in the early twentieth century was, in large part, to bring Protestants and Orthodox into submission to Rome. The Catholic Church was not to learn from her separated brothers, but rather to make clear their errors and convince them of the truth. In addition to the lack of charity and the naïve epistemology that this entails (if I simply provide cogent arguments, you will be converted), this led, I think, Jugie to exaggerate what he considered to be errors of Eastern Orthodoxy. Thus, the essence-energies distinction was not simply a misconstrual of the divine simplicity, but it was even close to polytheism. The approach was not fraternal engagement, but more of a debate such as we see in news programs today in which you try to score points rather than actually communicate. This, of course, was almost completely ineffective in bringing Orthodox Christians to the Catholic Church.

By exaggerating the theological positions of Byzantine theologians, Jugie prompted a distancing of Orthodox and Catholic theologians. Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky responded to Jugie’s articles by accepting the dichotomy presented but arguing for the Orthodox position. Thus, it seems to me, Jugie was a catalyst for many Orthodox theologians in the 20th century to think that the Palamite essence-energies distinction was simply incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine.

AD: You use a helpful Russian architectural metaphor to explain what Scholarios did, saying it’s more akin to the building of the Kremlin Church of the Dormition than that of St. Petersburgh’s Cathedral of St. Isaac. Unpack that a bit for those not familiar with the history of those buildings.

I’m glad to hear that you found it helpful. In the fifteenth century Grand Duke Ivan III of Moscow decided to build the largest church in his realm in the Kremlin. He first hired local architects but their building collapsed after two years of construction. Frustrated by undaunted, Ivan hired an Italian, Aristotle Fioravanti to build his Church of the Dormition. Fioravanti introduced several internal structural modifications that had been recently developed in Italy. In addition to laying a much deeper foundation and driving oaks into that foundation for stability, he also designed lightweight but hardened bricks for construction and employed iron tie-rods for the vaults. Finally, he used groin vaults and transverse arches to support the massive dome, giving the interior a light and airy feel. While the church’s bones were derived from Italian Renaissance technology, the appearance of the church was fully in the Russian Orthodox Tradition. It still stands today.

Three hundred years later the French architect August Montferrand was hired to build the largest Orthodox church in the world, St. Isaacs in St. Petersburg. When standing in St. Isaacs the worshipper today might think that he is in St. Peter’s in Rome. The form is entirely western.

I think that these two churches embody two different ways for Orthodox to make use of western forms. In the Church of the Dormition, western technology is used to serve an Orthodox form and remains subservient to Orthodox traditions. In St. Isaac’s the western form takes over. Instead of playing a subsidiary role, Latin traditions replace Orthodox traditions.

I used this to illustrate two different ways for Orthodox to encounter and profit from Latin traditions. I argue in the course of the book that although Scholarios uses Aquinas to great advantage, he ultimately brings Aquinas in as a servant of the Orthodox theological tradition.

AD: One of my undergraduate professors in moral theology used to insist that “there is no more abused phrase in modern Catholicism than ‘Divine Providence wills that…’.” Tell us how you understand Providence, and what Scholarios brings to that discussion, and why that discussion was so central, as you say in your second chapter, after 1458.

MB: I wonder if your professor was especially concerned with attempts to make sense of particular events?

AD: Yes, exactly!

MB: At any rate, that statement seems on the surface to ignore human interaction with providence and our ability to participate in or reject God’s actions in our life and the world. We learn from the book of Job that any attempt to explain tragedy is a mistake. Really, we don’t know.

I think that God is involved in and foreknows everything that happens in this world. But God doesn’t will everything that happens. With the Greek patristic tradition, starting with Origen and culminating in John of Damascus, I believe that we can, and often do, refuse to participate in God’s plan for our lives. This has real consequences and, in a sense, frustrates God’s plan. In a mysterious way God foreknows all of our actions and their ramifications because he lives outside of time: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8, cf. Psalm 90:4).

Scholarios, following Aquinas, provides a metaphysical account of this absolute divine providence and full human freedom with his use of the analogy of being. The foundation of this metaphysics is the conception of God as perfectly simple, in which his essence is his existence, while creatures’ essences are not their existence and so derive their existence from being itself, God. In this metaphysics, God, as being (but beyond being) is the primary agent in any action, including existence. Creatures, however, can determine the direction of those actions as true secondary agents. Human beings can choose by free will how to participate in God as being.

An immediate problem arises for Palamites (and Scholarios considered the Palamite distinction between divine essence and energies to be settled Orthodox doctrine after the fourteenth century councils). Scholarios understands the distinction to be neither a mere notional one (and therefore not grounded in reality) nor a real distinction. Instead, drawing on and changing Duns Scotus’ understanding of a notional distinction with a basis in reality, Scholarios provides a Palamite account of divine simplicity that can be the ground of an analogy of being. Furthermore, Scholarios uses the language of Maximus Confessor to see how this relationship of God and creation is played out, especially in the area of providence. In doing so, I am convinced that Scholarios uses Latin theologies in order to grow the Orthodox tradition in an organic way. The tree remains faithful to the Orthodox tradition, but it uses Catholic fertilizer.

Byzantium experienced nearly every conceivable disaster in its last century. Plagues, besieged cities, loss of life and territory, betrayal of the Latins and the collapse of churches led many Orthodox to wonder if God had abandoned him. At the same time, old pagan conceptions of the lack of intelligibility in the universe as well as the predetermination of all events to the exclusion of free will surfaced. With the collapse of their 2100-year-old republic (going back to ancient Rome) and 1100 years as a Christian people, many Christians started to wonder if God weren’t actually favoring their Muslim conquerors. Could Islam be the true religion? Many did convert, including some philosophers (George Amiroutzes, for instance) and those who remained Christian began to have doubts about how God could be acting in their world. Scholarios began to see that while his tradition clearly maintained the two poles of divine omnipotence and human freedom, a more convincing account of these antinomies must be found.

AD: You note that Origen, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus are all significant figures in the Greek and Byzantine tradition of thought on Providence. You note later in your book that the Damascene is especially important as an interlocutor for Aquinas in the latter’s modification of a theology of providence. This modification, you say, comes to be pivotal for both East and West. This sounds like Aquinas can no longer be ostracized by the East to some cordon sanitaire of scholasticism but stands as an integral figure in Eastern thought itself and its development?

MB: I think that you’re right. Many Orthodox theologians in the centuries after Scholarios accepted his account of providence and his interpretation of John of Damascus. By the nineteenth century the Athenian dogmaticians took this position as well, especially the last great Athenian dogmatician, Panagiotis Trembelas. Now, this school has been largely abandoned (although the Volos academy has recently put together a fine volume on Trembelas), nevertheless it seems to be a settled issue that God has full foreknowledge of all creaturely events, is active in those events, and that human beings are free.

John of Damascus was a slight scandal to Andrew Louth in his excellent book on him because he limits God’s participation to good actions and excludes them from bad actions. John seems to be on to something in that God abhors sin and cannot participate in it. But John misses that God, as being (or beyond being) must underly every creaturely action.  It seems to me, then, that the Aquinas’ conclusion has been accepted as a given by the Orthodox tradition, but his interpretation of the Damascene has been forgotten. I think that remembering this intervention of Aquinas’ in the Orthodox theological tradition is just what you say: Aquinas is integral to the development of Eastern Christian thought. Here too, I should have been more explicit in my book. But I hope that it’s a conclusion that the reader will draw. I’m glad that you saw this.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially would benefit from reading it.

My audience includes a number of groups. I think that Thomists with wide visions would be interested in it, but more importantly I hope that Orthodox theologians will read it. My goal in writing it was that by understanding the important and lasting contribution that Aquinas made to their tradition, they will both be open to engaging Aquinas and to other contributions from the West. The important thing about this story is that Scholarios integrates Aquinas into the Greek theological tradition.

In the worst way this can be understood as spoiling the Egyptians, but in a better light it might be thought of as a cooperative, fraternal search for the truth. This would be rejected if Scholarios simply allowed Aquinas’ framework and categories to determine his thought, but his critical reception of Aquinas and use in developing the Orthodox tradition, I hope, would be of interest to Orthodox theologians. It may even provide a model for how to think about engaging Catholic theology while remaining faithfully Orthodox. In this way, the main goal of the book is ecumenical.

A final group is Byzantinists. This book may be of interest to them for a few reasons. The first couple of chapters provide a window into the late Byzantine experience that has not been given before. Byzantinists interested in intellectual history might also be interested in the cultural and intellectual exchanges at the end of the Empire. Finally, I give a new account of an aspect of Pletho’s activities and account of Aristotle.

My hope is that some MA courses and several PhD seminars might use the book. The first review of the book was by Jude Dougherty, an emeritus professor from CUA and was written for a broader audience. It is probably wishful thinking but perhaps some educated general readers will come across it and find it of interest.

AD: Having finished A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios, what are you at work on now?

You know I’ve been searching for a few years on what to work on next. I’ve given a few papers on Photios and on method in Catholic historical theology. I’ve not gotten around to publishing them but hope to. My first false start was a project on Byzantine scriptural exegesis. After working in that area for a couple of years I realized that I simply didn’t find Byzantine exegesis gripping in any way and so cut of my research after writing on Photios.

One of the great needs of the field is translation, really into any western language but especially English. With that in mind I am directing my energies to two book-length projects. The first is the translation with heavy annotation of Scholarios’ five tracts on providence. This would be a nice pair to my book and would indeed go beyond it in that my book only addresses the first tract.

The second project would be a presentation and study of the metaphysical theological tradition in Byzantium. Much attention has been paid to ascetic and mystical texts in Byzantium, but few have engaged the rich (and rather difficult) philosophical theology of Byzantium. I intend to begin this volume with Dionysios and end with Scholarios, with a chapter devoted to each figure. I would hope to cover ten figures, about one per century. The first three figures are Dionysios, Maximos Confessor and John of Damascus. Those waters are familiar but after that the seas are largely unchartered. I would hope to conclude each chapter with a translation of 2,000-3,000 words as well as, perhaps, an annotated bibliography. I would hope to create an argument in the course of the book for scholars to engage while also writing a book that would be helpful and interesting to MA students. The translations and bibliography could be especially helpful to students.

Christiaan Kappes on the Epiclesis Debate at Florence

The author of this most impressive new book is, indeed, an impressive fellow, both in writing and in person, where he wears his considerable learning lightly and cheerfully.

His is the kind of book you buy not just to support good scholarship and not just because you are interested in history, ecumenism, and theology, but also because you are, naturellement, the sort of person who luxuriates in the kind of rich footnotes this volume has aplenty, and the kind of even richer historical narratives it sets forth while simultaneously challenging, untwisting, and revising earlier narratives which were often entangled with and corrupted by apologetic agendas. Meet the priest and scholar Christiaan Kappes, author of the fascinating new book The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence, just released from the University of Notre Dame Press (2019), xxii + 418pp.

Following my usual practice, I sent him some questions about the book, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

CK: I've been a priest since 2002 and have had the fortune of serving in a variety of different apostolates, both pastoral and academic. My bishops have assigned me to work in Ecuador, Mexico, the Vatican, and Greece. These last several years I've spent my time as the academic dean of Ss Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary, which is a theological graduate school offering two kinds of Master degrees in theology to about 35 students who are mainly Eastern Christians, though we do have other denominations and ritual churches represented.

AD: When we were last met together on here, it was to discuss your book on the Immaculate Conception. Are there connections between that book and your new one? 

Hmmm...On the thematic level there is practically no overlap.

While (surprisingly) the conception by the Theotokos of Jesus in utero is the major analogy among pre-Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers of both Greekdom and Latindom for talking about the manner or process to analogize Eucharistic change, this analogy is based upon the Holy Spirit changing the substance of an ovum (in today’s language) into an hypostasis or new personal-substance. So, as the Spirit changed ovum-into-person miraculously, Greek and Latin Fathers explained that the Spirit changed an item from a bread-substance or wine-substance into an hypostasis (without getting to detailed into the classification and modality of this change), Jesus Christ. So, the process of Mary's conception within the womb of Anna is fairly irrelevant to these kinds of analogies.

On the other hand, the historical timing of the epiclesis debate between Greeks and Latins (1390s-1439) nearly coincides with the first known Greek awareness of the question of Mary's status in grace at her conception (c. 1343), where Dominicans were notable in the East for trying to convince Orthodox, just as other Latins, that Aquinas was correct so that Mary was born with some sort of lack of grace, or taint, otherwise referred to as original sin. Even so, there is no reason or occasion in the present monograph to go into the Immaculate Conception at Florence, even if it was the talk of the town since the rebellious and contemporary Latin Council of Basil (opposing Florence) declared about this time that Mary was immaculately conceived, which annoyed not a few Dominicans present and representing Pope Eugene IV at his council (which sat successively at the cities of Ferrara and Florence, Italy).
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AD: More generally, can you tell us what led to the writing of The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence?

CK: Two young scholars Charles Yost and Nicholas Kamas (both of whom have recently graduated from Notre Dame) were kind enough to extend an invite to me to participate in a Notre-Dame (IN) sponsored session at the Congress of Medieval Studies (held every year in Kalamazoo, MI). The theme of that particular session was on Eucharistic controversies of the period. As such, I took some odds and ends that I had begun to notice in Mark of Ephesus's works and compiled them into a paper. Afterwards, I was so impressed by what I found that I was excited to keep researching in order to share with a wider audience my findings.

AD: Not all of our readers will know what your title refers to. Could you give us a one-sentence summary of what the "epiclesis debate" was about, and a summary of the significance of Florence, too? 

CK: The title refers to a long-standing disagreement between churches of the Eastern Orthodox communion with the Roman Catholic Church over the moment of the Eucharistic prayer when the bread is changed into the body and wine is changed into the blood of Christ. Secondly, in a sentence, the Council of Florence was the last bilateral attempt of the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic church to overcome major areas of doctrinal differences that kept them out of Eucharistic communion with one another.

AD: Immediately in your introduction we're off to the races in which we find the conventional narratives seriously complicated if not overturned. Thus we hear, e.g., of radical differences within and among Greek and Dominican scholars, not least over the roles played by Palamas and Palamite thought, whose influence, you say, has been overlooked. Why the neglect, and why is it important to bring this to the surface? 

CK: First of all, all the documents of the Council of Florence were only completely published in 1976 with the publishing of the Slavonic Acts of the Council. What is more the documents and records of Palamism had only begun to be investigated with a certain degree of scientific accuracy starting in the 1910s and a complete edition of all the actors from Palamas until Florence is still yet to be published (though we are getting much much closer!). Finally, in addition to the important lack of documentation, there was the problem of the methodological divide between traditional Roman Catholic theologians (systematicians/dogmaticians) and historical theologians (also medievalists); the former naturally feel the onus to believe that past polemical narrative of past scholars and churchmen somehow carry on the correct spirit of looking at history and theology that requires no or very little nuance for a contemporary church, while the latter began to spend their time mythbusting the Neo-Thomistic (late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century) narrative of a purported dominance, unity, and internal coherence of Thomistic and Dominican thought during the whole of the middle ages and renaissance until modernity. These narratives –even if the best Neo-Scholastics were always aware of the intramural debates among their own for centuries – were only beginning to fall apart in the 1960s (as far as the publication of academic challenges to such commonplace meta-narratives goes).

AD: Your book, noting the "grossly skewed portrait" that has been common among Catholics considering Mark of Ephesus, gives us a very different picture of him, especially in chs. 2 and 3. Give us a thumb-nail sketch of how you see him and how he has been used and abused by modern Catholics and Orthodox apologists. 

CK: Given the stakes and the perspectives of the time, it would have been quite unusual, perhaps just short of impossible, for popes, cardinals, and theologians to objectively engage Mark when so much of what the papalists were doing at Florence was vested in opposing anti-papal Conciliarists in nearby Basel, who were contesting the pope's claims to supreme jurisdiction and his claims to a rather vague doctrinal immunity in contrast to that any other clergyman in the church.

Understandably, any jot or tittle whereby Mark was perceived in a western politico-religious context to contribute to this political opposition of princes and prelates against the pope was an immediate threat to the politico-religious order that was desired by pope and papalists. Here, people and God are, as per usual, subjected to political and cultural expediencies. In fact, Mark of Ephesus was never canonically disciplined by any "uniate" Constantinopolitan authority, nor by a decree by a pope of Rome. Yet, he has been the object of constant invective over the centuries principally for undermining a triumphalistic narrative of Florence. Yet, Mark's communion of Orthodox churchmen only begged to renegotiate Florence and enter into new discussions toward a lasting union by means of a new conjoint council (hardly the actions of a schismatic). Of course, his Holy Synaxis (or group of friends) was rejected after the emperor solemnly declared the union of Florence in 1452 after papal threats to withhold military aid.

I do not wish to demonize these characters responsible for this programme, but rather underline that--like the lessons learned by Dvornik's immortal book on the Photian Schism rehabilitating Photius (it would seem) for ever--Renaissance literature provided an imaginative construct for demonizing Eugenicus that remained in full force well after Dvornik's challenge to sectarian scholars to exercise tolerance, fairness, and non-partisanship.

Joseph Gill's The Council of Florence is a sad tribute to once celebrated intolerance of Petit, Grumel, and Jugie (even while I admit all their merits when speaking on many a topic not related to Mark Eugenicus). Perhaps dreams and images of world peace, religious unity, or even Roman Catholic hegemony, seemed especially by these authors to be symbolically frustrated by Mark (thus meriting their animus). Take a look at the constant barrage of scholarly quotations up to and beyond the turning point in Dvornik. L. Petit referred to Mark thus:

“Every man of good faith would agree on it [previously mentioned: Mark’s hardline, savage hatred of the Council]. For Mark’s part, if his kind of argument seems insidious –nay, even serious– the lion’s share of his arguments are of an astonishingly puerile nature […] Incidentally, he passes over his adversaries [in an apologetic letter]: all these things, from the point of view of this intransigent fanatic, constitute a series of unpardonable misleading comments […] The attack directed against the august assembly [of Florence] by the archbishop of Ephesus was rude, impassioned, hateful”[1] V. Grumel writes:“The Archbishop of Ephesus is far from giving us the impression of being a great genius. He had the appearance of impotence to elevate his thought above the manner of existence of created things […] This metaphysical impotence grants nothing honorific to this ‘hero of Orthodoxy’.”[2].

Again Martin Jugie wrote: “Note, after the separation [of Greeks and Latins], the Latins always appealed to the Greeks by employing the authority of the Greek Fathers. All the same (just as Mark Eugenicus himself had done at the Council on this score), the Greeks were either entirely ignorant of the Latin Fathers, or contended babylike that Latin works were corrupted by the Latins themselves”[3].

Finally, in a style entirely bereft of the spirit of Dvornik, Gill writes:

“In the meetings about Purgatory, conciliatory at the beginning, Mark hardened in his opposition the more he went on […] Quite arbitrarily, he treated the Constantinopolitan Creed as if it were the original Nicene […] Mark was impervious to argument […] Mark’s obstinacy would not have mattered so much if all the Greek prelates, or the most of them, had been of a high intellectual calibre […] He had the strength of character to follow a single-minded, indeed a narrow-minded, purpose at any cost.”[4]

Elsewhere, Gill remarks sarcastically: “Mark of Ephesus, it is true, was unpersuaded [by the Latins], indeed, if anything, more than ever confirmed in his belief of the unassailability of the Greek position, convinced by his own eloquence.”[5]

Perhaps, at the opposite end, Mark is imagined by eighteenth-century Orthodox authors to be a symbol of burgeoning Greek self-identity, styling him the Anti-Papas who single-handedly defeated empires and popes and saw the Greek Church as the only society or organization in which Greeks under the Turkish yoke could preserve their national/ethnic identity. In stark contrast to the original office (akolouthy) written by Mark's sibling in the fifteenth century for his sanctification, the eighteenth-century liturgical office written by Nikodemos Hagioritis speaks of Mark's trampling on tiaras and, effectively, of him overturning papal government. The style of the akolouthy is completely absorbed in Greek politico-religious aspirations of the period.

In reality, Mark was above all a Palamite monk who wanted solitude and who had no desire to go to Florence because he would be taken out of monastic retreat. Because he was devoted to his ordaining patriarch Joseph II (the alleged uniate) and because the emperor pressured him, he caved to their demands and represented his church as the emperor’s personal champion. He prepared for the Council by reading Latin-Scholastic literature, including Aquinas and Scotus, and used creatively some of their ideas for his positive writings, though tending to be cautious toward Aquinas overall.


Mark mainly citing Duns Scotus as a foil to Aquinas on religious questions, where Franciscans and Greeks agreed, but Dominicans dissented. Mark loved Renaissance art – writing a treatise in praise of what he saw in Italy – he spent money on Augustine’s works in Italy, whom he quoted more than any other Eastern theologian up to this point in Orthodox history for dogma.

He initially complimented the theological dialogue with Latins at the council and praised their acuity but ultimately was brought to frustration and turned against the council after a series of shenanigans at Florence, where thin-skinned clerics were trying to control each and every word that he uttered during the council and prevent him in numerous ways from discussing anything from Ecumenical Councils’ canons to finishing his speeches by raucous interruptions. He bore solemnly and politely each and every interruption until the filioque debates, whereupon a single Latin theologian was entrusted to speak on behalf of all of Latindom but who used neither Aquinas’s nor anybody else’s discernible argument for the filioque but instead employed a hodgepodge series of texts including a subordinationist text of Ps.-Basil’s Contre Eunomium. This finally exasperated the patience of Mark. He then retreated from the council, for which absence his serious health issues provided him a legitimate excuse in the eyes of his emperor.

AD: You document the relative neglect of Mark's role in the epiclesis debate, saying that to the extent modern Orthodoxy pays him any attention it is for his "theological conclusions" rather than his "method" (37). I confess that mention of theological method is often a trigger for me, awakening immediate overpowering fatigue from having been forced as an undergraduate to slog my way through Lonergan on method! Tell us why attending to Mark's method is in fact important.  

Yes, I’m with you, for I studied at the shrine to Lonerganian studies (Seton Hall). I must confess that I did not leave Seton Hall carrying any amulets with Lonergan’s name etched on them!

The method whereby Mark arrived at his conclusions--by which he also objected to Latins--included ranking of theological authorities by their intrinsic merit, denying a priori any per se infallibility of saints’ writings, and arguing that human reason needed to enter into the debates. One instance would be with the appeals by Latins to the visions of their saints of purgatorial fire. Among other things, he demanded a philosophical explanation on how material fire affected a non-material entity, the soul (alleged by Thomists to contain no material at all). Secondly, he argued that one cannot move from the topical and local experience of saints, to generalize dogma for the whole church based upon mystical visions that are in no wise found in anyone else’s legitimate tradition. This kind of discussion was jolting for the Latins, who begged Mark to stop saying the saints aren’t per se infallible! Who’s the rationalist in this vignette?

AD: Following on from this, you note (p.187) that part of Mark's objection in the end to Florence came from its failure (in Mark's eyes) to follow the reforming work and theology of the "Photian Council of 879-80." What was so important about that earlier council? Was his view of its significance shared by others at Florence?  

The Photian Council was conjoint; all major patriarchates (including popes) officially signed and sealed the decrees. What is more, under the next pope, John VIII, the cancellation of a first or former (anti-)Photian synod (870) was declared cancelled and Pope John’s decrees or decretal entered into Latin canonical collections (e.g. St. Ivo of Chartres) until it was superseded by Gratian’s canons called the Decretum (c. 1150), but which was devoid of references to the 880 synod.

The cooperation between Rome and Constantinople and the admission of the Greek righteousness on the question of the filioque by Rome itself needed to be acknowledged in Mark’s mind before any move forward toward union could happen. After all, the council of 880 called itself and was canonized as “ecumenical.” Due to Latins trusting a Greek-convert as their posthumous expert or peritus on these canons, Manuel Kalekas’s works--celebrated at the time--convinced the Latins to dismiss out of hand the validity of the acts of this council, preventing introduction of its acts at Florence.

AD: Another figure of whom we get a very different portrait from your work is Torquemada. Give us a sketch of him and his importance to these debates. 

Torquemada was styled a genius by Roman apologists, of course, since he was allegedly Neo-Thomist and due to the fact that he (after Florence) was to coin the first acceptable notion of papal infallibility. Historiography during the ultramontane period of Roman Catholic history apotheosized Torquemada for all but making the pope’s favorite color dogmatic…

In reality, Torquemada was a professional, rather cold, and faithful Dominican who was somewhat eclectic like many Dominicans of the day. He was not a papal absolutist but (in comparison to ultramontanes) a rather weak if not heretical (vis-à-vis Vatican I) papalist.

What is more, he was not a really good philosopher and Thomas Izbicki has shown in his monograph on Torquemada that he had a number of limitations in his understanding of canon law at the time of Ferrara-Florence. Among the Dominicans, he was certainly no slouch, but much of his energy and ire was being directed at Franciscan theology during his career; specifically he tried to get Franciscans condemned by an ecumenical council for believing in the Immaculate Conception.

I have found too that his methods were not faithful to Thomas Aquinas when he thought that he would fare better in forensic debate by saying something other than the Common Doctor or Angelic Doctor on the question. Furthermore – to no fault of his own – he was forced to invent an entire theology of the Eucharist and an anti-epiclesis theology against Greek dogmatics and liturgy in the space of about three days. I show that he simply cut and pasted what he could hastily put together at the Dominican convent in town and that the quality of the document reflects the urgency, his unreasonable timetable, and his lack of knowledge of Greek liturgy and Fathers (not to mention some of the Latin Fathers).

AD: At the end of chapter 8 we are confronted with several papal documents treating issues of the sacraments, and note that their "peculiar definitions were capable of being reformulated" (p. 221). At the end of ch. 9, you note that we see such a reformulation, building on Mark of Ephesus, in the revisions to the Catechism of the Catholic Church to take account of the role of the epiclesis. Does the Catholic Church need to make some kind of official recognition of Mark's role and even his sainthood, both as an ecumenical gesture to the East but also as a way of correcting the sometimes shoddy and tendentious ways in which he was used and abused by such Catholics as Louis Petit and Martin Jugie? 

It is a strange and entirely delicious question! Already so-called uniates or Melkite Catholics can be found with icons of Mark even in their churches.

What is most amusing is that St. Pius X sent the Melkites a rather nasty circular letter in the 1900s telling them to stop repeating and teaching what was essentially Mark of Ephesus’s position on the epiclesis! The fact is, however, that only historiographers and individual theologians have condemned Mark as a heretic. There is not a single canonical sentence, East or West, ever issued against him. Mark, as an editor of the acts and decrees of no less than three ecumenical councils, correctly told Pope Eugene at the end of Florence that his refusal to sign the document called “the definition” was in fact – in our language – the refusal to sign a “joint theological declaration.” Mark’s canonical point was that the entire Florentine council never officially impugned the doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Churches on any dogmatic subject (remember that the minutes of Ecumenical Councils are not its canons or decrees).

Secondly, Florence issued no canons or decrees, nor did it attach to its acts any anathemas. So, given the reality of this, Mark asked how can Pope Eugene legally condemn him for not signing a joint declaration that has no disciplinary measures attached to it for not signing? What is more, since this style of council simply tried to declare that Greeks and Latins mean the same thing, Mark protested that for Latins Mark was already orthodox. Mark simply disagreed that the Latins were canonically correct in their assertion of unilateral powers to change ecumenical canons without consulting any other church and that the Greek word “through the Spirit” did mean the same thing as the Latin “from the Spirit” as the insufficiently-Thomist theologian at Florence had attempted to argue in his debate with Mark.

Allowing the Eastern Catholic Churches to add an appendix to their Menaion (along with the existing one of Palamas who wrote two treatises against the Dominican position on the Holy Spirit) is to me a fine way to express the reality of Mark. He certainly has nothing standing in the way of his local cultus. His canonical status in the Catholic Church is higher than Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and any other host of theologians with a messy but nonetheless Catholic identity. His sanctity is due, I think, to his sincerity and ascetical life that was unencumbered by the political machinations on both sides of the Adriatic at his time. He desired a lasting union not a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

AD: As an overall comment on the book, and much of your work more generally, is it fair to say (as David Bentley Hart did in an essay more than a decade ago now) that much of Christian division turns on, and is propagated still by, bad history, making careful and painstaking scholarly works as your own all the more important? 

Yes, I must agree. I spend so much time in manuscripts and critical editions of the primary texts and the sources used by the Medievals for their own arguments that it becomes a sad story for me. If they worked sometimes sincerely but were disadvantaged by a limited access to authentic sources, we poor contemporary Christians have at our fingertips the largest database in the history of Christianity and we come to the same conclusions with entirely different evidence.

We can see how much of theological fluff and theological opinion that was once upon a time asserted as dogma for cultural, ethnic, and political reasons, is clearly non-essential and yet our modern and even (shockingly) contemporary theologians (some of whom are good linguists and philologists) cling in an infantile manner to old narratives, by and large, written by non-saints and non-magisterial authors but which give the individual ego a feeling of belonging to a club with no cultural, linguistic, or ethnic membership with a single defect.

The psychological need for every personal or corporate action and personage of note in one’s church to perfectly contribute to a narrative of superiority or institutional infallibility is placing a ton of weight on every notable-historical member in one communion of churches that s/he will never be able to bear. Sinners sin and their post-lapsarian ignorance plays itself out like anybody else. Fairness, tolerance, and truthfulness, as the aims of a theologians with the largest database in world history, could have already resulted in solving the lion’s share of problems by now. However, on the bright side, look at the good accomplished by just one Dvornik and but one Taft. I’m hopeful that there are many, many more of these to come to overcome this silly-ongoing dialectic of otherness and opposition.

AD: Having finished the book, what other projects are you at work on now? 

I am working on a similar project with regard to the Filioque (to show how the Latin multiple-personality syndrome of filioquism, each of which personalities had little in common with each other but all iterations of the theory simply contributed to the fact that Greeks must be the bad guys). Of course, on the other side, I’m working on Mark of Ephesus’s and Gennadius Scholarius’s agreement with some aspects of the Latins’ position on “from the Son” gleaned from Palamas’s Apodictic Treatises on the Holy Spirit; wherein we see a perfectly coherent sense of “from the Son” that was even admitted at times (but sidelined at others) in the progression of thought by Aquinas. The irrational hatred of any mention of the Son in regard to immanent Trinity and his “essential” role (versus personal role) in production of the Son is fanatically opposed by anti-intellectual Orthodox without realizing that this position was endorse by Palamas, Eugenicus, and Scholarius.

The net result is that Aquinas’s theological opinion (though valid for Catholics of today) is one hypothesis, a drop in an historical sea and can be read in two different ways; one that is the majority reading of today and is unacceptable to Greeks; the other that is entirely in line with Palamas but that is unlikely to get a hearing from Dominicans, since it dares to agree with inimical Franciscan readings of Augustine’s Trinitarian productions that de-emphasize Aquinas’s famous Anselmian development of relations in favor of Augustine’s theory of psychological productions (more than mere metaphor) so that the Trinity is principally about a producing-person (viz., the Father) not about relating (with no real reason to rank the Father as first in a taxis or mere relatedness between three items). Anyway, this narrative already encountered stiff opposition from Dominicans against Franciscans (and nowadays medievalists) but that doesn’t make it any less valid.

In other news, I’m trying to put the finishing touches on my PhD thesis, written under Archbishop Elpidoforos of America, which outlines the Palamite background to the debates at Florence that resulted in the essence-energies research by Scholarios post-Florence and his publication of three separate treatise on the question.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who should read it.

I would hope that both Catholic theologians knowledgeable of Scholasticism and Orthodox theologians knowledgeable of patristics or Palamism can each appreciate the in-depth research into every source used by both Eugenicus and Torquemada and that each can agree that too many human elements intervened into what ought to have been serene and bilateral series of studies at Florence in order to come up with a truly bilateral agreement.

The lesson I hope that all readers might draw from the study is humility with regard to what we think we know and how much evidence we think we have for our positions and summarizing the positions of our church. Without interlocutors to talk us down from our Ivory Towers (which I am blessed to have at our Seminary) we are all potentially liable, due to pride and prejudice, to fall into the same unchristian temptations as Mark’s interlocutors at Florence who prevented the realization of a lasting union of minds and hearts that Mark desired at the onset of the Council. While Mark’s reputation will likely require decades to rehabilitate – given the quantity of anti-Eugenican literature in nineteenth and twentieth centuries – I hope ultimately that a modicum of respect and of admiration may be in store for Mark, the result of an open-minded reading of the monograph, no matter the theological perspective with which the reader may enter into my text.