The Crucifixion of Eros: An Interview with Matthew Clemente

Now more than ever the rashness of predicting the future is revealed in all its futility, but nonetheless I will make bold to say that the future of the philosophy of religion is in very good hands indeed with the young and newly minted scholar Matthew Clemente coming on board and making a splash with his new book, the fruit of his doctoral dissertation, which was just recently published: Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion  (Routledge, 2019), 202pp.

It is such a deeply fascinating book that I find myself almost ineluctably picking it up again and again to re-read parts of it, all the while plotting to find ways to use it in my courses.

Now, you might expect that with such a title and focus, this book would be catnip to me, a psychoanalyst manqué, and you would be right.

But in addition to the book's engagement with our father among the saints, Sigmund of Vienna, there are many other wide-ranging and often astonishing insights and claims, and then there is still more: the book's method, which is my second principal reason for delighting in it, recommending it, and wanting my students to read it. Here Clemente embodies, with almost effortless grace, the method of "despoiling the Egyptians," of discerning the spirits, of finding good wherever it may be found and engaging it directly.

This is a method I have had to spend no little time and energy trying to inculcate in my students in the past two years, many of whom seem increasingly to be not just uninterested in but hostile to learning from such as Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Plato, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Žižek, inter alia, all of whom (and others) feature prominently as interlocutors in this book. Rather than retreat into some enclave of Catholic identity from which to hold oneself aloof from figures such as these (one of my students said to me this year that he refused to learn from "anybody who doesn't have 'St.' in front of their name"!), Clemente finds what is good, notes what is not, and moves on without rancor or defensiveness. It is very refreshing and encouraging to behold.

Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book, and here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background

MC: My friend and mentor, the philosopher Richard Kearney, is known for asking his students Paul Ricoeur’s famous introductory question: d'où parlez-vous? Where do you speak from? And of course, the answer always comes in the form of a story. Where do you speak from means tell us your story, tell us the story of your life. Well, my life as a philosopher began by mistake. I was not called to philosophy by an oracle. I fell into it like Adam into sin.

I am notoriously bad at keeping a schedule and have been my entire life. (I often joke that my wife is the single mother of four children, our three kids and me. I wouldn’t know where I was going or what day it was if not for her). The summer before my freshman year of college, I was scheduled to register for classes on a certain day at a certain time. Naturally, I forgot. And by the time I realized my mistake, all of the classes I had planned on taking were filled. Left with few options and feeling more than a little desperate, I decided to fulfill as many core requirements as I could. I ended up taking the last available seat in the last available Intro to Philosophy class. (I had never read a word of philosophy before then and didn’t expect to read much after the semester ended).

That class happened to be taught by a professor named John Manoussakis. I was there for his very first lecture at Holy Cross and his was the first college class I took. 12 years later, I completed my doctorate in philosophy and published my first book which focuses mainly on Manoussakis’s work.

I currently teach at Boston College and at Suffolk University, am the Associate Editor of the Journal of Continental Philosophy and Religion (Brill), and have been fortunate enough to study with and work alongside some of the best living Continental philosophers, Kearney and Manoussakis in particular.

AD: What led to the writing of Eros Crucified?

MC: The things that interest me are the things I don’t understand and will never understand. What to make of death. What to make of sex. What to make of great suffering and great beauty. How to reconcile these brute facts of human existence—my existence—with my own struggles over and longing for faith.

I think it would be a fair criticism of me and my work to say that I try to say too many things. When I was writing Eros Crucified, I was nagged by this persistent feeling, this little inner-voice that kept telling me “you’re doing too much.” But I’ve always been that way. I’ve always wanted to say everything, everything I ever thought, everything I ever felt, all I had to say. Eros Crucified is a first attempt at that. (God willing, there will be many more). It represents, for better or worse, the ideas and obsessions that have boggled my mind for the past half-decade and probably much, much longer.

AD: Your disclaimer at the outset outlines a bit of an analogy between a philosopher and a detective like Sherlock Holmes. Later on you quote Ricoeur ("controlled schizophrenia") on the problems of effecting too sharp a separation between philosophy and theology. Tell us a bit more about your own understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology, and how you see a philosophical mind working.

MC: My book was born out of my dissertation. After my defense, the big take away I got from my readers was that at times it was unclear what position I was defending, which side of a question I was trying to argue for and which I was trying to upend. This, I realized, amounted to a difference in methodology.

For me, writing philosophy is not like writing a logical proof. A proof begins with a conclusion and builds an argument from which that conclusion necessarily follows. My writing was much more organic. At different points during the writing process I agreed with, or at least honestly entertained, every idea put forth. By the end, I don’t think I agreed with any of them. That is because philosophy begins with questions—or at least it ought to—and pursues answers, answers it will never find, only approach. The search is the thing. And who knows where the search will lead?

I love detective fiction and have been reading a lot of it lately. The detective is for me the ideal thinker. He is a questioner, a believer, an artist. In him, philosophy, theology, and poetry meet. As a philosopher, he knows that he knows not. He is late on the scene and so must question his way toward probable answers. He deals in probability, not certainty. Even when he solves a case, he never knows exactly what happened or why it happened. He was not there. He will never know. But he hopes to get nearer to the truth, closer to understanding, and he finds satisfaction in simply knowing what the truth is like—what might have happened, what probably happened, what is most likely to have happened.

Now although he is a skeptic and a questioner, the detective is not a doubter. Every detective is a theologian and indeed must be. By that I mean the detective is committed. He has his dogmas, his fundamental principles, which ground and orient his search. If he didn’t believe—believe to the core of him, in his very bones—he would never begin. There is such a thing as crime. There is such a thing as truth. The detective stands against one and on the side of the other. And while he may never know, still he believes there is something to know. He believes his search for truth will not be in vain. These are the premises from which his investigation begins, the foundation on which every investigation is built.

Yet in order to solve the case, the detective must do more than question and believe. He must create. He must paint a picture. Provide an image where no image exists.

Holmes and his descendants emphasize the role that reason plays in uncovering the truth. But the truth is that truth is never uncovered. It is recreated, reinvented, birthed into existence by the artists of existence, those who take the raw material of existence and make of it something that enables us to see and hear the world around us. Without inventiveness, without poetic imagination, no question would ever be answered, no problem ever solved. Experience is interpretation. Interpretation is construction. Construction is art. This fact goes unacknowledged by philosophers and detectives alike, but it is an essential aspect of how they—and we, all of us, who must create the world in order to live in it—engage with existence.

AD: Your Preface immediately takes us to the problem at hand: the poisoning of eros by Christianity (at least according to Nietzsche). For many Catholics today, bombarded with banal slogans about a "theology of the body" for 30 years now, this might come as a startling claim. Tell us a bit more about what you mean, including your claim of "the grave danger of a spiritualized sexuality" (p.80).

One of the great things about teaching philosophy is being reminded every semester of where our ideas come from, where our understandings of ourselves, our world, our relation to the divine originate. So much of what we call “Christianity” predates Christ—or at least Christ as incarnated in Jesus, the man who drank wine and went to weddings, wore clothes and did all of the unnatural and ridiculous things we human beings do.

The notion of spiritual purity, for instance, is thoroughly Platonic. The idea of the immortal soul is not a Christian one. (Why care about the resurrection of the body if there is an immortal soul that goes to heaven or hell the moment one dies?). Nietzsche is not wrong to call Christianity “Platonism for the masses.” By and large, what we think of when we think of Christianity is merely a less sophisticated form of Platonic philosophy. But this is a great danger. Because if the incarnation stands in opposition to anything, it is the spiritualized view of the human person offered by Platonic philosophy.

Sex is one of the strange and unsettling things about human existence that gets reduced by philosophy. Plato, of course, diminishes it. How often does he put into the mouth of Socrates the notion that sex (and bodily pleasure of any kind) is beneath the philosopher, the spiritualist par excellence who strives only for “higher” intellectual pleasures?

But the same is true in reverse. To idealize sex, to see it as some pure and sacred event rather than recognizing it for what it is—both beautiful and disgusting, at once the pinnacle of our existence and the epitome of our degradation—is to deny the scandalous truth of the incarnation. It is to reject the belief that God became man. Fully man, utterly man, with all of the parts of a man—even the most intimate and the most profane. Christ was—to borrow another phrase from Nietzsche—human, all too human. We, unfortunately, are not.

AD: "Eros has become an idol." There are many ways that crucial claim of your book can be hijacked, it seems to me, but you're not interested in simplistic one-sided ranting against "too much sex on TV today" or anything like that. Rather, part of your project, it seems to me, is to maintain the tension Freud saw: "The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality," a claim you immediately set alongside St. Paul's letters and, later, Kearney's recognition that "pornography...is a twin of Puritanism." Unpack all of this and tell us about the tension you maintain in the grandeur and griminess of human sexual desire, the "baseness and beatitude" you speak of later (p.125).

One of the things that Christians, myself included, don’t spend enough time reflecting upon and thus fail to take as seriously as we should is that religion itself is the greatest form of idolatry, that belief is a temptation, that Christ reserves his harshest rebukes for those who believe most ardently. To believe in God is an easy thing. It costs little and provides a good deal of comfort. What could be better than believing that everything happens for a reason, that there is someone looking down on us from on high, some utterly perfect, utterly beneficent, utterly distant being who guarantees our security and yet remains immune to the illness of the world?

Human life, we all know but rarely admit, is messy and complicated and the best aspects of our existence are also the worst. Our cities are built on top of sewers. Our advances are bought with war and destruction. Art is born of suffering. Life springs forth from the bowels. Being honest about our situation is hard enough. We prefer to flatter ourselves with thoughts of the “inherent dignity” of man. Or, if we’re being reactionary, we take pleasure in emphasizing the ills of human existence to the exclusion of its beauty. Sometimes we even deny that beauty exists. This is our lot. These are the ways in which we conceive of ourselves. And then along comes this strange and startling god—a god who is fully human, more human than any of us—and he alone is honest. He alone shows us—not with words or dictates, but with his life, with how he lives and, even more so, how he dies—that each of us is infinitely beautiful, infinitely perverse.

If Eros has become for us an idol that is because we refuse to see our sexuality (and thus our humanity) as it is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We refuse to look at the one who has been humbled and exalted, humiliated and, in his very humiliation, lifted up. In denying him, we deny ourselves. We prefer the counterfeit to the real thing, the lie to the truth of who and what we are.

AD: As one who has recently written a lot about Freud, and is working on a book ("Theology After Freud") I was fascinated by your treatment of him, which seems to me so skillful and deft in many ways--finding what is good and useful, but not being afraid to criticize or go beyond him. You also note--as did Lacan and Manoussakis--that there is significant overlap between Freud and Augustine. Tell us a bit more about that.

Thank you for your kind words. One of the goals of my writing is to test everything and retain what’s good, as St. Paul put it. A close friend, William Hendel, recently suggested to me that this single line of Scripture sums up St. Thomas’s entire project. Thomas is motivated by a desire to see how many disparate things he can incorporate into a deeper, richer, more philosophically complex understanding of Catholicism. I don’t know that anyone would call me a Thomist, but in this sense at least I view myself as very much indebted to the Thomist tradition.

Chesterton once observed, “The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike take positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.” I would say that this is what any honest man must do. That the human heart is more perverse than anything—“beyond remedy,” the prophet Jeremiah insists—is one of the first discoveries made by any man who looks into himself. It should come as no surprise then to find so much overlap between Freud and Augustine, the psychoanalyst and the orthodox Christian. After all, both attempt to offer an image of the phenomena of life by plumbing the depths of the human soul, and their own individual souls most of all.

I have never really understood why so many Christians are reluctant to accept and adopt the best arguments from the best thinkers. Heinrich Heine—an underappreciated philosopher and great wit (his work is really just a pleasure to read)—notes that so-called pessimistic philosophers, those seen by many to be the enemies of faith, actually provide the faithful with a good deal of ammunition. Their bleak (and honest) assessments of the human condition, far from refuting the tenants of faith, lend support to dogmas like original sin. Heine, of course, was bemoaning this fact. But I accept his observation and will adopt it for my own purposes. Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Lacan—these are not our enemies. They are our great thinkers, our great sufferers. Their insights have been purchased at a price. The price of honesty, an honest assessment of themselves. I am ready to listen to anyone willing to look into the depths of his own heart. And I’m not surprised when he reports having seen nothing there but dark.

AD: In a time when--if they know anything--most people assume that Catholic Christianity is conservative, if not reactionary, when it comes to questions of sex, sexuality, and gender, you speak of "the radical reevaluation of gender relations introduced by the Christian understanding of sacramental sexuality" (p.118). Tell us a bit more of what you mean here.

Freud, in classifying libido as masculine, identifies the desire to use and objectify others for our own selfish purposes—sadism in his terminology, will to power in Nietzsche’s—as the defining characteristic of human sexuality and thus the defining characteristic of human beings. The violently obsessive nature of male desire seeks the subjugation and ultimately the destruction of that which it loves; “male love is murder,” to quote Žižek. That we desire, in a very literal sense, a love object and not another human being seems to me not only experientially verifiable, but also irrefutable.

To return to a point touched upon above: isn’t desire understood as such the glue that binds together the apparent opposition between pornography and puritanism? What is the attraction of the pornographic if not that it gives the viewer an object to vent his sexual desires upon in the place of a real human being? What does puritanism offer if not an idealized (that is, inhuman) image of purity that only an object could attain?. Interestingly, Freud posits that women too are defined by this destructive desire and that sadistic sexuality, far from being an exclusively male problem, is the rule. Yet how do we account for the existence of a love beyond exploitation, one that forgoes power, refuses to objectify, loosens its grasp? (Obviously, for Freud no such love exists).

It is no secret that Christianity has throughout its history neglected the feminine, feared it, suppressed it, relegated it to the realm of the irrational and untrue. But if we’re being honest, we must admit that the Christ we meet in the Gospels is not a particularly masculine figure. A savior who comes not in power but in weakness, who preaches mercy instead of justice, forgiveness in place of revenge, who measures his wealth not by how much he can possess but how much he can give away, who shows us how to inhabit our vulnerability and be honest about our frailty, whose love is abandonment—that is not a very manly savior.

What is fascinating is that thinkers such as Nietzsche and Lacan appreciate this “revaluation of values” while many of their Christian counterparts—who focus with an almost fetishistic fervor on the perfection, omnipotence, justice, and transcendence of the divine—fail to even recognize it. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche speaks of woman as “clairvoyant in the world of suffering” and then immediately links female love with the love of Christ. Lacan, writing in Seminar XX on the “something more” (en plus) of female jouissance, says that male mystics such as John of the Cross embody feminine desire and he links that mysterious jouissance with l’amour de Dieu.

There is no question, I think, that if human sexuality is to be saved—and by that I mean, if human beings are to be saved—it can only be by means of the crucifixion of Eros, the nailing to the cross of our lust for power and might.

AD: Your quoting Mannoussakis, "There is no other" (p.123) puts me immediately in mind of Winnicott's equally blunt aphorism, "there's no such thing as a baby." Unpack this a bit for us.

Your pairing of these assertions is, I think, instructive. The first gestures at what I was just saying in response to your last question. There is no other means that the other is for me merely an object, a tool that I use and abuse for my pleasure. There is no baby means that for the infant, there is no self or rather that the self is all other, lost in the oblivion of fusion (“oceanic oneness” in Freud’s language) with the mother. Both capture something true about the human condition which strives at all costs to eliminate otherness, either by reducing it to the subhuman (sadism) or subsuming it into the indifferentiation that makes one from two (fusion). Both, of course, are different instantiations of Thanatos, the death drive, the desire our own unmaking. Both refuse the salvation that comes from without, the grace that comes from the other.

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

Whenever I write, I write with a reader in mind. That reader is the person I am trying to persuade, the one for whom all of my arguments and hesitations, illustrations and tangents are intended. The worst writing is written for an audience that already agrees. I assume a suspicious reader. My reader is hostile.

My goal is not to win a convert but simply to get the reader to acknowledge that a person as reasonable as him or herself could hold the positions I put forward. My ideal reader for this book would be someone skeptical of faith—Catholic Christianity in particular—someone with an affinity for existential philosophy and Freudian psychoanalytic thought.

But books are made to be read and ideal readers—like all ideals—simply do not exist. As I have worked through your questions, I have been touched time and again by your charitable and attentive reading of my work. That there is someone willing to show my book such good will tells me that my highest hopes for this project have already been reached. An author cannot ask for more.

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

My latest obsession has been Socrates’s assertion at the end of the Symposium that authors should be able to write both tragedies and comedies, the true tragic dramatist is also a comic poet. I see the seeds of work of literary theory developing along these lines but God only knows if and when it will be finished.

Philosophy, Theology, and the Search for Unity: An Interview with John P. Manoussakis (Updated)

I have read Jean Claude Larchet over the years, and used to think him a serious scholar, so it is disappointing that he here engages in such jejune criticisms of John Panteleimon Manoussakis and other Orthodox scholars. So I take the opportunity of re-printing here my interview from March 2015 with Manoussakis about his short but powerful and welcome book.

I was of course greatly interested when a new book crossed my desk bearing the title of  For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West. I was even more interested in seeing that the author is already someone on whom I had commented previously, viz., John Panteleimon Manoussakis, an archimandrite of the Greek Orthodox Church and a professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. As I noted earlier, Fr. John's previous essay was a wonderfully bracing blast of cool reason in the often overheated world of East-West dialogue. We have more of that in his short but elegantly written and winsomely argued book bearing a foreword from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. I sent him some questions for an interview, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

I was born in Athens, Greece and finished my primary education there, including a year of theological studies at the Rizareios seminary. In 1994 I received a scholarship to study theology at Hellenic College, the seminary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. I was then already a novice in a monastery. So I embarked on my studies and the next year I was tonsured monk and ordained to the diaconate. I completed my bachelor’s degree and continued my graduate studies at Boston College in classics (MA) and philosophy (MA, Ph.D.). My years at Boston College were of the happier sort—the kind of happiness that one intimates in Aristotle’s description of contemplation in the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, for example. It was a life immersed in books and stimulating exchanges and discussions with professors and classmates.

I had the good luck to study under Richard Kearney whose profound knowledge of philosophy, literature, and the arts was only rivaled by his generosity and hospitality, both academically and in his personal life. Under less hospitable circumstances one could imagine a work like God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic being looked upon with suspicion as crossing the borders between “unadulterated” philosophy and theology. This was never the case at Boston College—on the contrary, I was encouraged to pursue my philosophical interests no matter how far from the philosophical canon they might take me. Such an encouragement was Richard Kearney’s own work (his The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion came out just as I was working as his assistant), Fr. Richardson’s seminars on Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological readings of the Church Fathers (Marion was visiting then as the Gadamer chair). The Jesuit community at Boston College provided me with an intellectual home (I recall our endless discussions with Fr. Gary Gurtler for example) that proved equal to the excellent reputation that the Jesuits have as educators, in-forming the whole person (cura personalis). After I completed my doctorate, I was ordained a priest and continued teaching at various positions until I came to Holy Cross.


AD: What led to the writing of this book, For the Unity of All?

As I relate in the Introduction, this book was for me an outstanding debt of sorts, dating back to the theological discussions that I had with my classmates at our junior seminary in Athens. At the time—and I am afraid it might be still the case—there was a deep-rooted fear of all things Latin in the ecclesiastical environment of Greece. It was not unusual to hear teenage students recounting with the seriousness and confidence of a prelate a list of "Latin errors." These were, of course, second-hand positions, received and repeated uncritically (as one might expect) and, more importantly, very useful in solidifying one’s own identity in opposition to the West. A number of my classmates and I began to question these polemical discourses. Some of them, by the way, have moved on to become talented clergyman as, for example, the Grand Archimandrite of the Patriarchal Church at the Ecumenical Patriarchate Fr. Bessarion (we used to joke that his name was given in honor of Cardinal Bessarion who distinguished himself at the Council of Ferrara-Florence).

This interest in ecumenical dialogue, especially with the Catholic Church, was sustained throughout my life and was fostered by a number of occasions and professional engagements. I think that living and working in America—that is, in a country that is, more or less, denominationally neutral—makes it easier to engage in the ecumenical dialogue among Christians and to appreciate the need for such a dialogue. I was thinking recently of the important role that the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America played, and continues to play, in this rapprochement: the great Patriarch Athenagoras, who became the man with the courage to open his arms to the Pope at that historic embrace of 1964 in Jerusalem, had previously served as the Archbishop of America. Similarly, Archbishop Iakovos of America and Athenagoras of Thyatira were instrumental to those first meetings that broke the silence of centuries. The affiliation of all these men with the Orthodox Church in America is not accidental. From the vantage point of a religiously homogeneous country (often with a “national Church”), such as the historically Orthodox countries of Russia and the Balkans, it is difficult to recognize in the face of the fellow Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, a brother or sister in Christ, without mistaking it for the face of the enemy. So, I credited the last twenty years of studying and serving as clergyman in the United States as formative of the openness that became the presupposition of writing this book.

For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West is also a book outside the main line of my research and publications, which are focused on philosophy and, in particularly, phenomenology. Yet, the need to write it was irresistible and, therefore, worth the time that I took away from other projects. I felt that I could not move on with these other projects unless I had first “expectorated” as Kierkegaard would say what I had to say in this book. Writing it was for me an affair with a personal urgency.

AD: As you doubtless know, some people, including in the Church of Greece and atop the Holy Mountain, regard all dialogue with the West as a danger if not a ruse to distract and destroy Orthodoxy (the "pan-heresy of ecumenism"). So tell us how you see the "theological dialogue" mentioned in your subtitle.

I am well aware of the ecumenical phobias and the anti-ecumenism obsession infesting certain corners of the Orthodox world. One could say a lot about them, but very little to them. The dialogue they oppose so vehemently is not the dialogue with other Christian Churches and traditions but rather the dialogue with the Orthodox “ecumenists.” This is an important clarification, I think. The polemics of those “guardians of Orthodoxy” are not directed against western Christians (even if their language seems to suggest so): they are rather aiming at other Orthodox—it is, in short, a civil war going on within the Orthodox Church. Ironically, these very same people who denied any form of dialogue in the name of doctrinal purity are, in effect, cut off from the Orthodox Church, as their fear of becoming “contaminated” by the “pan-heresy of ecumenism” leads them often to extremes, such as refusing to commemorate their bishop or participate in the ecclesial life of their local church. They set up their own “communities”—usually “organized” around on-line sites that feed off and circulate an entirely uncritical delirium, usually coupled with propagation of conspiracy theories. They have therefore to do more with a virtual phenomenon than with a reality. This is expected: orthodoxy for them is not the truth incarnate in the person of Christ, a life lived concretely in Christ’s body, namely, within the Church and in the Eucharist; their “orthodoxy” is merely an ideological position that needs to be defended at all costs and with the same partisan zeal that, by default, remains willfully blind to both life and truth. For me there is no graver heresy than ideology (and every heresy was, historically, an ideology in its own right)—for it constitutes a denial of the incarnation. Every ideological discourse, even when carried in the name of Christianity, is fundamentally un-Christian and anti-Christian.

AD: In his preface, His All-Holiness notes that in the East-West dialogue "differences in methodological...approaches to primacy" still require attention. Tell us how you understand those methodological differences and what your book offers in this regard.

I believe that the Patriarch refers here to the recent attempts to articulate a position on primacy that would be consistent with the ecclesiology and theology of the Orthodox Church. It is important to notice that the Patriarch lists first the methodological and then the theological differences. In the chapter that discusses the issue of primacy in For the Unity of All, I try to show that the perceived theological difference on this topic between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches is rooted, in fact, in a methodological one: that is, that of inconsistency in failing to apply to the third level of the ecclesiological structure the same principles that we follow in determining primacy on the local and eparchial levels. The Orthodox Church has not adequately utilized her theological resources in thinking through the ministry of primacy. This task is being carried on at the moment, both within the Orthodox world and in the joint international commission of the theological dialogue with the Catholic Church. I have documented the progress and the shortcomings of this discussion in my book, so there is no need to repeat them here.

AD: Your chapter on the Theotokos ("Mary's Exception") is a wonderfully cogent, lucid, gracious treatment, clearing the way of difficulties and misunderstandings. But I noted you did not take up the Orthodox objection I have sometimes heard, viz., that there was no need for the West to dogmatize on the conception of the Theotokos as Pope Pius IX famously did in 1854. What are your thoughts on that?

That’s correct—as this objection does not pertain to the matter at hand but rather it questions the necessity of defining Mary’s immaculate status as well as the prerogative of the Pope to do so unilaterally. It is, in fact, more of an objection to the Pope’s role to define and promulgate the doctrine of the Church. However, in the chapter on “Mary’s Exception” I was more interested in the question itself: is Mary without sin? And how are we to understand such a statement in light of the homiletic and liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church? Perhaps the answer to this question would not have been necessary, had it not been often listed as one of the reasons that underline the separation between eastern and western Christianity. But since it has been cited as such in the past, I thought that it deserved to be re-examined under a new light.

AD: I was of course especially interested in your chapter on Petrine Primacy, and I genuinely appreciated your direct but courteous disagreement (fn. 26, p.31) with my proposal (in Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity) for a permanent ecumenical synod, which I was modeling more on the "synodos endemousa" of Constantinople than the idea of a permanent ecumenical council which, following Zizioulas (with whom I agree) is indeed an event rather than an institution. Is there value for a permanent or standing synod around the one who exercises the Petrine primacy so that it does not become unilateral or unbalanced--that the papal "monarchism" of the past does not rear its head again?

That’s a good question. I think that the confusion here might be due to a certain equivocity. There are two different bodies that bear the designation of a synod: the synod of one particular Church, assembled around its primus or prōtos, and the ecumenical synod or council. The latter is indeed an event and not an institution and therefore it cannot be a permanent body. The former, however, is an institution and it is characterized by permanence. The difference is the following: the synod of a Church is comprised by hierarchs of that Church alone: a bishop who does not belong to that local Church cannot participate in it. While the ecumenical synod aspires to the maximum representation of all hierarchs of all local Churches (it is for this reason that no synod in the Orthodox Church has been designated as ecumenical after the separation from Rome). One needs to respect the difference of these two bodies, even though they both are synods of bishops. To create a hybrid third synod that would borrow the regularity of the local synod but also be comprised by hierarchs of other local churches, as in the case of an ecumenical council, is, in my view, problematic. Nevertheless, there is a point of cardinal importance implied in your suggestion which is the need to inscribe primacy within synodality (that is, the primus, even “the universal primus,” is always in reference to a synod) and, conversely, every synod (even the ecumenical synod) is headed by a primus. This principle, however, does not necessitate that the synod of the primus on the universal level be also a permanent synod: for whoever this primus is, he is also the primate who presides over the synod of his local church, and that is a permanent body of ecclesial governance. The risk of monarchism would be accentuated were we to grant to one primate the presiding role of two permanent synods at the same time, one of his local Church, the other of the universal Church.

AD: Having just given a lecture on eschatology and the Byzantine East, I was interested in your treatment of it, especially in a Palamite light and in your chapter on Will and Grace--as well as your earlier treatment of it in the Harvard Theological Review, which was a very illuminating article. In my lecture  at Baylor on eschatology I noted a number of historians of American Christianity (especially its Protestant expressions) who said that in the 19th century preachers talked eschatology easily and frequently in Sunday sermons but would rarely if ever have preached on sex whereas today the situation is reversed: nobody talks judgment and hell, but homiletical treatments of sex are not at all uncommon. What are your thoughts on all this?

I am not sure that this is a fair assessment, given the recent revival of eschatology in every theological tradition. Think of the works on eschatology published in the last few years by Pannenberg, Moltmann, Ratzinger, and Zizioulas (to list only some representative names). On the other hand, the fact that sexuality has become a question for theology might not be unrelated to renewed interests in eschatology. One of the most pertinent concerns in every treatment of eschatology is the fate of the human body: its desires and, by implication, the question of human sexuality. A couple of days ago I was invited to give a lecture on marriage in Helsinki. I found it impossible to develop a proper theology of marriage without reference to eschatology and the role that sex plays in our salvation and condemnation.

AD: What challenges do you see remaining in the East-West theological dialogue? Do you realistically anticipate a resolution of the question of primacy any time soon?

Recent events and the kind of language that I hear generated by various Orthodox Churches has made me quite pessimistic with regards to the immediate future of the theological dialogue. In particular with reference to the question of primacy the greatest challenge is the lack of such primacy at the pan-Orthodox level. Yet, it is rather a secular mentality that demands immediate results, results which somehow we can bring about by our own efforts. The gift of Church unity and the road that leads to it does not depend on us—except in the sense of praying and working for it, remaining vigilant and receptive to God’s grace. The unity of our Churches is His gift and His doing. To oppose it is to oppose Him. Certainly, such resistance to God’s call to unity—the unity of all—is possible but it cannot be victorious. I believe, with St. Augustine, that God’s grace is ultimately irresistible and that, no matter how hardened our hearts, one day we will partake from the same bread and the same chalice at the Lord’s altar.

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

I will return to my philosophical work. I am finishing a book on the ethics of time called "The Scandal of the Good." It is conceived as a sequel of sorts to the theological aesthetics presented in my God After Metaphysics. Even though I keep promising myself to refrain from writing anything theological, I am afraid that I will be returning to these theological questions from time to time.