To know the work of the Orthodox priest and scholar John McGuckin is at once to ask: does he ever sleep? The answer to that must surely be no! Author of an acclaimed intellectual biography of St Gregory of Nazianzus and study of St. Cyril of Alexandria, of liturgical works, books of poetry, reference books on Origen and the Fathers generally, introductory texts on Byzantine spirituality, and much else besides, he has gone from strength to strength in the past two years with several major works, all discussed previously on here. I've had a chance to catch up with him and ask him about some of his recent publications as well as current and upcoming projects. Here are his thoughts:
AD: Tell us a bit about your background, including, if you will, what it is like
teaching at two institutions and your directorship of the Sophia Institute.
What is the Institute trying to accomplish?
I am a Romanian
Orthodox Priest, of Anglo-Irish descent, husband, father of three, grandfather
of six, currently working in a small parish in Manhattan and also hold down the position of Nielsen Chair (i.e. professorship) in
Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary, and the Chair in Byzantine
Christian Studies in Columbia University. I write a lot; and in my spare time I….come
to think of it I have no spare time.
The joy of being involved in two very different institutions is sometimes muted by the necessity of having to attend two sets of
faculty meetings! But Union
is an old Ivy League school of theological studies that has traditionally
invested much in early Christian theology. Schaff, our early leader of History
here (older than Oxford’s Church History department by the way), sponsored the
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church series, for example; and was
instrumental in a very important 19th century reference set called
the ‘Creeds of Christendom.’ Columbia
is another old Ivy League school stressing more the phenomenology of religions
(under which rubric Christianity has a
large role and voice).
The different strands to my life, of course, are all
interwoven. The theological task is the
chief coloration of my priestly service to the Church. Living in both worlds of
Academy and Ekklesia is interesting-- but no more strange than most men and women will experience in the contemporary world where multiple identities
and roles often overlap, and sometimes ‘grind’ against one another. I have long
held it necessary to bring critical historical scholarship to the illumination
of deep truths. I have never thought
the critical method to be its own
justification, or that scholarship is self-justifying. It has inherent values
(whatever one calls them – truth, qualitative difference, illumination, wisdom).
One ends up as a ‘theologian’ (or at least a philosophe) in the Academy even if one is not specifically treating
the religious thought of the ancients.
That or dilettantism are our choices. On the other side of the coin, ecclesiastical life and culture without the winnowing and
aerating properties of the life of the mind, and the currents of
broader culture, can all too easily become stifling and oppressive. They
might not like each another; but they need one another.
AD: We
seem to be living in a time when scholarship, at long last, is beginning to
realize that "Christian" approaches to law and politics, in so far as
they treat the East at all, must move beyond tiresome notions of "Caesaropapism."
(I'm thinking here, e.g., of the recent three-volume collection, one volume of
which was The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature.) Where does your own forthcoming book, Ascent of Christian Law: Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization take the scholarly debate? What drew you to work on that topic? Why do you
think there remains a very high level of interest today in studies on all
aspects of Byzantium?
I agree with you
about scholarship needing to renew
itself. It can start by reviewing the many clichéd presuppositions and
short-cuts it clings to in lieu of addressing the primary sources. Our recent
times have seen a great revival of interest in Byzantine studies, and more
generally the culture of patristic
thought, and the life and culture of the Churches of the East. When one looks at the majority of texts
dealing with, let’s say, Eastern Christian religious culture, from an earlier academic age, however, one is
too often appalled by the undigested
level of prejudices, false informations, and plain silliness one finds. One of the worst examples of all, I would
suggest, is Donald Attwater’s books on the Eastern Churches. But even sharper scholars
like Dvornik had an awful lot of silly things to say about the analysis of
Byzantine subtleties of theology and politeia.
His term "caesaropapism" has had a detrimental effect. So much of western
scholarly attitudes to Byzantium
up to the late 20th century were full of prejudices distilled from
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. They are
often blind to the real balances and subtleties that a close reading of the
primary texts reveal. But you know what they say: “Why let the facts stand in
the way of a good theory?"
My recent
book on Ascent of Christian Law: Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization was written because I wanted to study and learn about an issue
where I could find very little extant literature to
guide me. I don’t mean that there aren’t a bundle of books on canon law, or on
Roman civil law – but rather that I could not find much to help me with a big
question: What did Christianity do in its passage through the first millennium
in consciously building a civilisation with its own stamp upon it? Law
was surely in the heads and minds of the Christians from the times of avoiding
Nero’s secret police to the legal scholastics of Justinian’s court. Christianity
has invested so much in law, both civilly and ecclesiastically; and yet has
always avoided the turn into becoming a religion of the law (be it Torah or
Sharia) which other religious systems have chosen. My book therefore, is not so
much a review of Byzantine canon law, or the Justinianic Code, as much as it is
a question about principles of culture and polity-building at the heart of
historical Christianity. I hope it will have much to say to a wide body of
readers and theorists who might like to take a fresh look at the way so many
areas (take Europe as an example) have advanced theories of human rights as a
way forward to a secular paradise; yet in the process have divorced their understanding of
human rights from the sense of divinely graced anthropology by which Christianity first advanced the
notion of the special dignity of
humankind. We now postulate
elevated rights for humanity
without any sense of a workable philosophical or metaphysical grounding to the
theory: and we sit and wonder why the century that saw the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was also the century that reinvented slavery, and
brought back genocide to the body
politic.
AD: Not a lot of academics get a chance to work on the production of a movie or documentary, but you did exactly that in Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer. Tell us about the process of producing the movie, and the traveling it involved.
Having completed
the film, eight years after we initiated it, I can now appreciate why so few
academics want to be involved in this genre. It was so much work; travelling,
writing and rewriting scripts, hauling equipment up mountains, moving a team by plane and bus from America to Egypt,
Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Of course now that the
film is completed it is clear that it has a charm of its own and will have a
life of its own, reaching into homes on TV screens and computer monitors where an academic work of
mine, for example, would never appear.
The film is a visual study of several famous monasteries (including
Sinai, St. Antony’s, and Sergei Posad) where we went as film-makers and just
made the simple request of the ancient Orthodox pilgrims: ‘Abba, give me a
word.’ We asked the senior monastics of each place (including several
convents) to tell us something about
their practice of the Jesus Prayer. We think the film gives a little window,
often in an intriguing way, into Orthodox monastic life and the hesychastic tradition
of the Jesus Prayer.
AD: The Jesus Prayer and the practice of Hesychasm both seem today to be attracting
a great deal of attention if the number of recent books is anything to go by.
What do you think might explain this interest, including from non-Orthodox?
What have been the reactions so far to the movie and book?
The very few
secular critics who have noticed the
film have tended not to like it. The general gist was that it ‘Did not tell me
anything new;’ which surprised yet heartened me that so many of them were already experts in hesychastic
prayer. Who would have thought it?
The
larger number of Orthodox and Catholic
faithful who have seen it and have responded back to us are almost all singing from the same hymn sheet: they
found it charming, restful and reverent, a feast for the eye and the heart, and
so on. So it seems to have greatly
pleased those who were, perhaps, more likely to have found it pleasing. I
suppose we did a good service for exposing more of the hidden world of Orthodox
monasticism to a larger audience. But I think this is the kind of film that
will work better for the heart than the head ( which is after all a good thing
for a hesychastic piece is it not?).
The more I go on in life the more depth I
discover in this simplest of all prayer forms – known as the Jesus Prayer. I
have been working recently, academically, in researching Byzantine mystical
ideas of cognition change. A recent article of mine in the St. Vladimir’s
Theological Quarterly looks at the states of soul-cognition in Elias Ekdikos, a
major figure of the Great Church in Constantinople
at the end of the first millennium. He shows, quite clearly, how advanced
studies in cognitive changes (the theory of human consciousness) were part and
parcel of what we today would call 'Byzantine spirituality.’ For many
generations, of course, spirituality and
human culture, let alone the human sciences, have been artificially
divided (this domain church; this domain culture; this domain critical thought,
and so on). But it strikes me that in their
simplest of meditative techniques on the nature of the Holy Name,
the precise idea of rising up (from material
consciousness, to intellective consciousness, to mystical awareness) is ever at
the heart of what the hesychastic tradition is all about; and the literature on
the Prayer speaks of this incessantly in the language of the ‘descent of the Nous into the heart.’ These
are all deep things, difficult to talk about, of course. But when they are
practised one sees it instinctively because (as Orthodox theology consistently
says) these things are archetypal in the structure of the heart and soul of
human beings (drop a cat--it will always land on its feet). This is why many outsiders find the fire in the Orthodox spiritual traditions,
while many Orthodox remain unaware of
their own treasures (because of over-familiarity?).
AD: Much of the movie saw you visiting or describing many venerable monasteries
around the world, including some quite famous. But monasticism seems to
struggle in North America--we have no equivalent of Athos, Sinai, the Kievan Caves,
Trinity Sergius Lavra, etc. Why do you think that is?
The Kievan Caves Lavra can give
an example to suggest an answer to your question. I could deduce the same thing
from the monasteries of most other Orthodox countries I have visited. Under the Soviets the Lavra was part
destroyed, and more or less wholly turned over to be a museum. The monks, as
you know, were thrown out. The religious memory of the place was desecrated and
ridiculed. When I visited it in 1991 a tiny group of monastics had been allowed
back and were inhabiting a small skete on the site, alongside many resentfully hostile government employees
trying to run the site as a cash-making tourist enterprise.
When we went back for the film, the site was more or less under the control of
the Church (except for the main church).
At its center was the archbishop’s administration
for Ukraine,
and the national seminary; but also a newly re-founded set of male and female
monastic communities. The latter were
struggling to establish their typikon: a word which means not just the rule of
life they should follow (how much prayer, how much study, what type of
ministry etc) but also what ethos the community will manifest. It is easy to print out the typikon if it is simply
the day’s schedule. It is by no means easy to “establish” the typikon in the
sense of building up the spiritual ethos of a place. One needs to have the stones and lanes of the monastery ‘prayed
over’ for a long time. One needs monastics who have been themselves rebuilt by
the grace of God over time. Such a vested place is recognisable by the charisms and graces of men and women who have
been rendered luminous by the Spirit: but it also an issue of having experienced
and gracious pneumatikoi or startsi (spiritual elders) who can oversee the life
of these houses, nurture their members,
direct and shape them over decades, and pass on the care of the houses to
disciples who maintain the self-same ethos.
America is good at building the
plant for monasteries, in some cases; but it has difficulties in establishing
the tradition of elders. It is still (in its head anyway) a new and ‘frontier
civilization.’ The sense of quiet alignment with ancient wisdoms and old
obediences does not come naturally to it. It is more Teddy Roosevelt than
Paisy Velichovsky. That is why I think America still has some way to go to
find itself as a monastically-graced land. It is not enough to don the klobuk
and behave as if the tsar might drop in
one day. One needs to pass through the fires of God’s pitiful mercy in oneself,
and emerge as someone who would like to build a shelter in the wilderness for
the comfort of the poor passerby.
AD: In
addition to these two major projects, you've also overseen something (to my
mind) even grander, viz., the The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity published this year in 2 volumes by Wiley-Blackwell. Tell us about the
Encyclopedia, and the process of producing such a massive work.
The old adage
says : ‘Never work with animals or children.’ I would add a line – ‘Or with Encylopedias of Orthodoxy.’ It was, actually, great fun to do. And I can
say that now that it is all over and done with. I had a team of young and
enthusiastic assistant editors to cheer things on. We had the inestimable
privilege of working with so many splendid
international Orthodox intellectuals (for almost all the entries were
by Orthodox people with doctoral level qualifications). It heartened me to see how
greatly the Orthodox world has repaired its levels of education so devastated
by oppressive forces over the previous century.
Almost all English-language reference works on Orthodoxy, if I may
exaggerate only a tiny degree, have been written about the Orthodox by
outsiders, who have had varying degrees of patience with us, or understanding
of us. This is the first really large-scale work that looks at us from
the inside: tells the story in our own words.
The Moscow Patriarchate is currently bringing out a mammoth Russian
language version--but they are still only
up to 'A,' I believe. Even when this finally emerges in the light, nevertheless,
ours will not be pushed aside; but I hope it will remain as an enduring
monument because our work takes the highest levels of contemporary critical
scholarship and analytical refinement, and allies it with a sense of reverence
and delight in the affairs and culture
of our Church. Ours also might “just fit” in a book bag. Theirs will need a
truck to move it around!
AD: One of the many charms of the Encyclopedia was the inclusion of copies of
beautiful icons produced by your wife, Eileen. Is she a full-time iconographer?
Where did she study?
Yes, you are
right. I did not realize this until I actually saw the book physically in hand,
when Blackwells sent me a boxed set: but how beautiful a thing it is to hold
and smell (I like smelling books!). It is charming. The production costs were
mounting of course, and although the publishers wanted illustrations they could not stretch to many
colored ones. So I had to reach out to another charmer, my wife Eileen, who is
a very successful professional iconographer, and I had to go playing my sad
violin so she would let me use her images to
demonstrate Orthodox iconography. This was no difficult task. Even
though I may be biased, of course, I find her work ‘commanding’ among the many splendid new iconographers we have in
our time. She, for me, is a buoyant example of some of the best things going
out there internationally. So I was
blessed to be able to include her work.
People can see a fuller range here. She studied as a fine-arts student (landscape
painter) at Newcastle University in England, and went on to have a full career as an educationalist.
When we moved to America
in 1997, and I took up my academic
appointment here, she retired early from academia and took up her painting
again (which had been a leisure-hours activity all those years). She opened up
‘The Icon Studio’ in New York
and has never since been without a list
of advance commissions. She absorbed the techniques of icon painting in many
places: studios in Athens and the Islands, and
some ateliers in Romania.
Her color palette is radiant. Her line is very pure and refined. Enough
already--you might think I had a special affection for the woman!
AD: Wiley-Blackwell also brought out your own The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture, the latest in a considerable
number of introductions to, dictionaries of, surveys covering Eastern
Christianity. Why do you think we are seeing such an upsurge in major
publications on Eastern Christianity today by major publishers--Wiley, Oxford, Routledge, Cambridge,
Columbia, and
others? Has the world--or at least the academic world--finally
"discovered" the East?
Well, Wiley
Blackwell is graced to have at the helm of its religion publishing list a
very wonderful person called Rebecca
Harkin. She is consummately professional, but also has a finely discerning eye.
And, though I should not put thoughts in her head or words in her mouth, I
think she saw in the traditions of the Orthodox church a fountain of real-world Christian wisdom that was both
grounded and mystical at one and the same moment, and which could be of great utility to the large numbers of
intelligent Christians out there today who are ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’
It was Rebecca who came to me and pushed me to compose both these very large
works. I (of course) like my Orthodox Church book. I tried to make it always faithful to the
Orthodox tradition in all respects. But I also wanted, all the way through it,
to talk about the “real world.” So it
speaks of war, and human grief, and sexuality, and corporate greed in the
market place; as well as speaking about the Virgin-Theotokos, the angels, the
liturgy and sacraments. That is
my real world, you see: the juxtaposition of the 7th age of the
unrealised hopes of humanity, with the glimmering light already breaking through
of the 8th age of the Kingdom.
AD: What projects are you at work on currently?
My immediate problem is how to get through to the end of this period of
Lent without staining my teeth dark brown with un-milked coffee. This is a
recurring project: something of the level of what the ancients would call an aporia: roughly translatable as: Solve
that one if you can! In terms of
literature I am resting my steaming head
on the table at present and glad to see the release in 2012 of Prayer Book of the Early Christians
as well as The Ascent of
Christian Law (SVS Press), and later in the year also the issuing of a set of studies I have introduced
and edited from a number of young scholars, titled The Concept of Beauty in Patristic
and Byzantine Theology. The
publisher for this is not yet settled. Make me an offer someone out there? This
last book looks at the tradition in Platonic philosophy of the ‘Ascent to
Transcendent Beauty’ (see the priestess Diotima’s wonderful speech in the Symposium). The Byzantine church Fathers
take and adapt this theme to make it a magnificent set of reflections on
the beauty of the divine
transcendent. I think this will itself
be a beautiful book, as well as a deeply instructive one. I have composed for
it the Introduction on the nature of beauty as a transcendental in patristic
thought; as well as an article in the
main body of the book on the manner in which St. Maximus the Confessor
deals with the idea. Other chapters deal
with Plato himself, with Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Niketas Stethatos and
others. I like offering patristic books which are dealing with real theology,
real philosophy – full of substance not merely dead and deadly exercises in
academic exactitudes; and thus as dry as dust. The great Fathers of the Church
were radiant mystagogues in many cases. Many of their works still leap with
the power of the Spirit. Many modern theologians have habitually dismissed
them as theologians dead and gone, who have nothing to say to the world. This is
the mistake of those who have never really read them. For us Orthodox, they are
our living treasure. The lights are still on in the house.
When my head stops
steaming, I am turning my mind for the latter part of 2012, towards two
projects on my open list. The first is the contract I have with IVP Academic publishers to offer
them, some time before 2014, a large
text book on the history of the Christian Church in the first
millennium. It is going (tentatively) to be entitled The Cross Ascendant. I am
also starting a project I have long desired to do: a translation of the Hymns of Divine Eros of St. Symeon the
New Theologian, which will itself be hymnal (poetic) in character and will reflect
in English blank verse the varying metric rhythms of the poetic originals. I
have lived on and off with St. Symeon for most of my scholarly life, since the
day he found me as a 23-year-old know-it-all in a library in Durham. And I want to render his magnum
opus in a version which will show
what a master he was in both doctrine and poetry. Just talking about it makes
me want to go and smell the Greek originals again!
So I’m off – and thank you
for your kindness is asking about my work.
and the 
. 
, and, more recently, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. French avoids all that.
, which is not cited in this article but should be.
.
is not here, especially her 
, and astonished that Paul Robert Magocsi is nowhere to be found. He has written many highly acclaimed works of scholarship that are nonetheless accessible to general readers, including:
(edited with Christopher Hann), and, of course, his well-known and hugely helpful cartographic works: 
generally does what one would expect such a volume to do and it remains a solid resource.
and autocephaly is no surprise to anyone who has followed these "pre-conciliar" discussions for some time--depressing, yes, but surprising no. For some guidance on these questions, we continue our exploration of the excellent two-volume 
. I am not bothered by the omission of autocephaly if one can see in it a downplaying of an overheated notion that has as much if not more to do with nineteenth-century nationalism than it does with any ecclesiological or theological principle. As the Orthodox theologian Nicholas Lossky has 
, too much of Orthodoxy today is still beholden to the still prevalent “autocephalist ecclesiology” in which “relations among the ‘sister churches’ tend to resemble . . . the relations between sovereign states.”
; John Meyendorff, ed., 
; John Zizioulas's 
; or Kondothra George's essay "Ecclesiology in the Orthodox Tradition" in 
and their 
system. He notes the sad decline of Constantinople after World War I and the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 and its resulting massive population transfers, leading to a decline of Christians in the city which today is almost complete. He also briefly discusses the disputes between Constantinople and Moscow over the issue of autocephaly, and the extent, if any, of the former's jurisdiction over Christians in North America and Europe. Constantinople of course claims a very expansive jurisdiction, which Russia greatly resents, not least when it sees the Ecumenical Patriarch reaching into the "Russian sphere," whether in Estonia, Ukraine, or Russian parishes in the United Kingdom and France. 
of 
, and excerpts from 
' brilliant synthesis, "An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith." 
that many people today are 
, another on 
, and, most interesting of all, editor of a forthcoming collection from Routledge, 
a 672-page work that looks like it might give the McGuckin encyclopedia a run for its money (if one may be forgiven the vulgarism.) 
.
was forcibly abolished and "reunited" to the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin's orders. 
the 
of the desert Fathers, 
, the 
tradition, 
and the 
of Christ. 