The Florentine Fate of the Epiclesis (Updated)

Given the sheer volume of books emerging today, it is hard to maintain excitement for a lot of them, but there are some coming along to which I am greatly looking forward as much for the topic as for the author, and one such book, just released, is The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 380pp., by Christiaan Kappes, whom I previously interviewed about his groundbreaking and revealing work on the Immaculate Conception. I've been on panels with him, and read some of his other articles, and both he and them are always dynamite, so we have every reason to look forward with delight to this new book. I am also in contact with him about a blog interview, to which he's agreed. So I hope to be able to run that in the coming weeks.

The council of Ferrara-Florence has not occasioned a lot of recent scholarship, which is curious if it is indeed the last "council of union" between East and West. Cambridge University Press, back in 2011, sent me a republished copy of Joseph Gill's 1959 study, but apart from that I have not seen a lot. So this book will be welcome for more than one reason.

Before reading the publisher's blurb, listen to what one widely respected scholar, no stranger to this blog, says about this forthcoming book:

“In this book Christiaan Kappes lays before the reader the genesis of an important, albeit often neglected, ecumenical stumbling block. Although the filioque, papacy, and azymes are traditionally considered the three great causes of the Catholic-Orthodox split, for many today the epiclesis debate remains a significant unresolved issue dividing the two churches. By detailing the theology, setting, and personalities of the first stage of that debate, along with the translation of relevant texts, Kappes has indeed provided an invaluable service to all liturgists, ecumenists, and interested historians of dogma.” --A. Edward Siecienski, Clement and Helen Pappas Endowed Professor of Byzantine Civilization and Religion, Stockton University.

And from the publisher we learn this:

The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence is the first in-depth investigation into both the Greek and the Latin sides of the debate about the moment of eucharistic transubstantiation at the Council of Florence. Christiaan Kappes examines the life and times of the central figures of the debate, Mark Eugenicus and John Torquemada, and assesses their doctrinal authority. Kappes presents a patristic and Scholastic analysis of Torquemada’s Florentine writings, revealing heretofore-unknown features of the debate and the full background to its treatises. The most important feature of the investigation involves Eugenicus. Kappes investigates his theological method and sources for the first time to give an accurate appraisal of the strength of Mark’s theological positions in the context of his own time and contemporary methods. The investigation into both traditions allows for an informed evaluation of more recent developments in the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in light of these historical sources. Kappes provides a historically contextual and contemporary proposal for solutions to the former impasse in light of the principles rediscovered within Eugenicus’s works. This monograph speaks to contemporary theological debates surrounding transubstantiation and related theological matters, and provides a historical framework to understand these debates. The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence will interest specialists in theology, especially those with a background in and familiarity with the council and related historical themes, and is essential for any ecumenical library.

A Greek Thomist

Several times in the past decade we have had important new studies emerge to show us that the separations fondly maintained by some Christians--and built upon faulty history while often accompanied by demonization of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas and those apparently horrid "scholastics" more generally--were not nearly as neat, sharp, or straightforward as imagined today by those with an agenda. Thus Marcus Plested's wholly welcome Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, began this important trajectory of clarification and complication. (See here for an interview with him and video of one of his lectures.) Shortly after him, in different but related ways, Christiaan Kappes (interviewed here) continued it with his study of the Immaculate Conception. Others more recently still have joined in.

Coming up next spring we shall have another study revealing just how interconnected the "Greeks" and "Latins" were. I've met the author of this forthcoming work at several conferences over the years and always enjoyed talking with him. So I shall make a point of trying to arrange an interview with him next spring when his book comes out: Matthew C. Briel, A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios (University of Notre Dame Press, April 2020), 272 pages.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Matthew Briel examines for the first time the appropriation and modification of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of providence by a fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian, Gennadios Scholarios. Briel investigates the intersection of Aquinas's theology, the legacy of Greek patristic and later theological traditions, and the use of Aristotle's philosophy by Latin and Greek Christian thinkers in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The broader aim of the book is to reconsider our current understanding of later Byzantine theology by reconfiguring the construction of what constitutes "orthodoxy" within a pro- or anti-Western paradigm. The fruit of this appropriation of Aquinas enriches extant sources for historical and contemporary assessments of Orthodox theology. Moreover, Scholarios's grafting of Thomas onto the later Greek theological tradition changes the account of grace and freedom in Thomistic moral theology. The particular kind of Thomism that Scholarios develops avoids the later vexing issues in the West of the de auxiliis controversy by replacing the Augustinian theology of grace with the highly developed Greek theological concept of synergy.

Healing of African Memories

One of the issues that has haunted me for a long time, especially in Orthodox-Catholic relations, is what to do with the memories of our divisions and denunciations of each other--"heretics," "schismatic," etc. Given the climate in the Church today I'm of the view that such terms should be locked away in a specialized laboratory, the way the Centres for Disease Control keeps copies of deadly viruses under guard for exceedingly rare occasions where their resurrection might occasion some social good. Otherwise, lacking such a secure and controlled setting, you have the chaos of social media where every half-wit gong-show operator flings about accusations of "heretic" every few seconds based on a reading of Church history one can only regard, at best, as jejune. These kinds of antics can be damaging to the Church and her unity.

But there are other, much more sinister, forces doing real damage to individual lives as well as the life of the Church, and Christians continue to grapple with how to respond to such traumatic incidents and their pathological sequelae. It is not at all clear how to begin healing from some of these challenges, and too often notions of the "healing of memories" remain unhelpfully vague. A recent book I'm greatly looking forward to reading examines some of these problems and proposes some concrete ways forward: The Healing of Memories: African Christian Responses to Politically Induced Trauma, ed. Mohammed Girma (Lexington Books, 2018), 208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Africa has seen many political crises ranging from violent political ideologies, to meticulous articulated racist governance system, to ethnic clashes resulting in genocide and religious conflicts that have planted the seed of mutual suspicion.The masses impacted by such crises live with the past that has not passed. The Healing of Memories: African Christian Responses to Politically Induced Trauma examines Christian responses to the damaging impact of conflict on the collective memory. Troubled memory is a recipe for another cycle of conflict. While most academic works tend to stress forgiving and forgetting, they did not offer much as to how to deal with the unforgettable past. This book aims to fill this gap by charting an interdisciplinary approach to healing the corrosive memories of painful pasts. Taking a cue from the empirical expositions of post-apartheid South Africa, post-genocide Rwanda, the Congo Wars, and post-Red Terror Ethiopia, this volume brings together coherent healing approaches to deal with traumatic memory.

Historical Contingency

As I argued here, I am increasingly convinced that many conflicts within Catholic and Orthodox Christianity today (and between their so-called apologists) are historiographical in nature. Much of what--especially in more "popular" forms, or in the proliferation of books appearing from dodgy publishers or even self-published, as well as on myriad blogs and websites--makes it into print today purporting to tell Christians about our past is not serious and scholarly history told, as I argued, with requisite asceticism, serenity, and comprehensive accounting of the evidence in a manner free of ideological bias or a tendentiousness designed to thwart your imaginary enemies--the "Franks" and "Latins" and "Greeks" and "modernist heretics" and, of course, "the Masons."

This kind of history exults in creating grotesques and fatuously glosses over any acknowledgement of the contingency of human affairs, pretending that one can here, now, today, in an unaided fashion make infallible snap judgments about long-ago events half hidden in the mists "between two waves of the sea" (Eliot). When the evidence is lacking for such judgments, then one magics up some conspiracy theories to account for such lacunae and to stitch together wholly implausible events in search of a kind of coherence which is often mythical and almost invariably constricting and constraining, sometimes lethally so if one cares about the truth.

Where, in this, is the awareness of the contingency of our lives (a theme I first learned many years ago from Stanley Hauerwas and then Alasdair MacIntyre and finally Newman)?

For some Christians, perhaps most, like people in general, they abhor any notion of contingency and instead prefer (often unconsciously) to find their lives to be determined, and to make others' lives be determined, too, according to the dictates of some pope or patriarch or preacher on the TV, or perhaps some politician, all of them offering a program, group, party you can join (for a fee, of course) and be magically rescued from having to contend ever again with the messiness of your own life--never mind that of your community, country, and Church. This thinking is typically manifest via "if only" statements: if only the pope weren't a modernist; if only the seventeenth secret of Fatima were revealed; if only we didn't have the media/deep state/Clinton/Trump/Phanar/Mt. Athos/Moscow/Constantinople (etc.) to contend with then we could really smite our enemies and bring the messiness of history to an uncluttered end.

But surely contingency is the very price and stuff of our freedom as creatures? Surely it is, and is to be welcomed as, a gift, however disguised it may often seem to people who would rather make themselves "slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary" or who "exult in the freedom to submit themselves to church authority with wild abandon" (Neuhaus)?

But that itself raises two further questions: do we secretly hate freedom, as suggested here? And do we in fact prefer to have determined lives, not only determined by others (including those wreathed about with pious smoke) but also by our own self-generated narratives and internal censors and self-diagnoses, as Adam Phillips suggests in his invaluable book, Unforbidden Pleasures, discussed here?

The question of historical contingency comes in for examination in a new book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning by Liane Carlson (Columbia University Press, 2019), 304pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics.

In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.

On the Uses of Historical Memory

As I have often noted on here over the past two years especially, the questions of the uses to which the past is often put are very important ones that often reveal abuse, nostalgia, and romanticism all bound up together, thereby underscoring Adam Phillips' observation that “memories always have a future in mind.”

Three new books will shed further light on all these questions after their publication later this fall:  Judith Pullman, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Oxford UP, 2017), 256pp.

About this book we are told:

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

Memory in Early Modern Europe offers a lively and accessible introduction to the many ways in which Europeans engaged with the past and 'practised' memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. From childhood memories and local customs to war traumas and peacekeeping , it analyses how Europeans tried to control, mobilize and reconfigure memories of the past. Challenging the long-standing view that memory cultures transformed around 1800, it argues for the continued relevance of early modern memory practices in modern societies.

The second book is an edited collection: How the Past was Used: Historical cultures, c. 750-2000, eds. Peter Lambert and Bjorn Weiler (OUP, 2017), 450pp. About this collection we are told:

This book explores how societies put the past to use and how, in the process, they represented it: in short, their historical culture. It brings together anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars to address the means by which societies, groups, and individuals have engaged with the past and expressed their understanding of it.

The utility of the past has proven almost as infinitely variable as the modes of its representation. It might be a matter of learning lessons from experience, or about the legitimacy of a cause or regime, or the reputation of an individual. Rival versions and interpretations reflected, but also helped to create and sustain, divergent communities and world views. With so much at stake, manipulations, distortions, and myths proliferated. But given also that evidence of past societies was fragmentary, fragile, and fraught with difficulties for those who sought to make sense of it, imaginative leaps and creativity necessarily came into the equation. Paradoxically, the very idea that the past was indeed useful was generally bound up with an image of history as inherently truthful. But then notions of truth proved malleable, even within one society, culture, or period.

Concerned with what engagements with the past can reveal about the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks they took place within, this book is of relevance to anyone interested in how societies, communities, and individuals have acted on their historical consciousness.

The third will perhaps be the most controversial: Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge UP, 2017).
About this book the publisher tells us:

Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

Theologies of Retrieval

Last week, when I was at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota at a fantastic conference, discussed here, I met the editor of a forthcoming collection of great interest: Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal, Darren Sarisky, ed. (T&T Clark, 2017), 368pp.

About this collection, which features an impressive array of some of the most prominent names in theology today--East and West--the publisher tells us the following:

One of the most significant trends in academic theology today, which cuts across thinking from Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox points of view, is the growing interest in theologies of retrieval. Theology of retrieval is a mode of thinking that puts a special stress on giving classic theological texts a close reading, with a view toward using the resources that they provide to understand and address contemporary theological issues.

This volume offers an understanding of what theologies of retrieval are, what their rationale is, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The contributors to this volume are all well established theologians, who answer important questions that existing work raises, expand on suggestions that have not already been developed fully, summarize ideas in order to highlight themes that are relevant to the topics of this volume, and air new critiques that should spur further debate.

We are also given the table of contents:

Introduction, Darren Sarisky (University of Oxford, UK)

I. Genealogies of Modernity: The Role of Intellectual-Historical Judgments

1. 'There's Always One Day Which Isn't The Same As The Day Before': Christianity and History in the Writings of Charles Péguy, John Milbank (University of Nottingham, UK)
2. The Past Matters Theologically: Thinking Tradition, Stanley Hauerwas (Duke University, USA)

II. Different Inflections to Retrieval: Confessional Approaches

3. Orthodoxy, Andrew Louth (Durham University, UK)
4. Reformed Retrieval, Michael Allen (Reformed Theological Seminary, USA)
5. "Only what is rooted is living" A Roman Catholic Theology of Ressourcement, Jennifer Newsome Martin (University of Notre Dame, USA)

III. Twentieth-Century Figures

6. Georges Florovsky, Paul Gavrilyuk (University of St. Thomas, USA)
7. Karl Barth, Kenneth Oakes (University of Notre Dame, USA)
8. Henri de Lubac, David Grumett (University of Edinburgh, UK)

IV. Theological Sources

9. Scripture: Three Modes of Retrieval, Michael Legaspi (Penn State University, USA)
10. Tradition I: Tradition in Congar, de Lubac and Blondel, Gabriel Flynn (Dublin City University, Ireland)
11. Tradition II: Thinking With Historical Texts - Reflections on Theologies of Retrieval, Darren Sarisky (University of Oxford, UK)

The Crusades, Part MMCCXVIII

The local Catholic radio station, Redeemer Radio, is interviewing me later this morning (tune in at 7am!) about my article last month in the Catholic Herald about ISIS propaganda and Crusades history.

So, for those who are seeking some places to begin in reading Crusades history, I suggest you start here with the works of Jonathan Riley-Smith, arguably the pioneer in contemporary Crusades scholarship until his death last year. Of his many books noted in that review essay, I would, if you pressed me to recommend only one, suggest--because it is both accessible and short, but with enough detail to point you onward to other sources if you wish--his The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, from 2008.

One of Riley-Smith's students, now teaching and well respected in North America, is Thomas Madden, and his book, The Concise History of the Crusades, noted here, is also a good place to begin, though it does not focus on the contemporary historiographical issues as much as Riley-Smith. Madden also authored this short but useful article.

For those wanting an introduction to Arab views of the Crusades, which are fascinating and highly counter-intuitive, go here. For more generally Islamic views of the Crusades, go here.

For much more specialized scholarship, follow the links here.

Finally, for those interested in the very challenging and ever-changing historiography of the Crusades, then Giles Constable's article is very valuable indeed.

The Riddle of Rasputin

I've read my share of books and articles about Rasputin over the years, and confess that I am no further ahead in understanding much of the man and the events he shaped. If nothing else, his life is a useful illustration and reminder of how often history functions as a cipher, and how unreliable it can be save for its reliably contradictory claims ostensibly about the same person and events. Those who think that "eyewitnesses" to people and events in history are always to be trusted have not read their Elizabeth Loftus closely or often enough.

This article gives a good foretaste of a new book by Douglas Smith, Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 848pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

On the centenary of the death of Rasputin comes a definitive biography that will dramatically change our understanding of this fascinating figure

A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil. Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his mysterious rise to power as Nicholas and Alexandra's confidant and the guardian of the sickly heir to the Russian throne. His debauchery and sinister political influence are the stuff of legend, and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty was laid at his feet.

But as the prizewinning historian Douglas Smith shows, the true story of Rasputin's life and death has remained shrouded in myth. A major new work that combines probing scholarship and powerful storytelling, Rasputin separates fact from fiction to reveal the real life of one of history's most alluring figures. Drawing on a wealth of forgotten documents from archives in seven countries, Smith presents Rasputin in all his complexity--man of God, voice of peace, loyal subject, adulterer, drunkard. Rasputin is not just a definitive biography of an extraordinary and legendary man but a fascinating portrait of the twilight of imperial Russia as it lurched toward catastrophe.

What's Behind the ISIS Mindset?

As I've noted previously, I am engaged in a project of examining ISIS propaganda and its uses and abuses of "memories" of "the Crusades." As I've been engaged in this, I came across the work of the historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier, editor of this recent collection, The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (Oxford UP, 2010), 296pp., which contains a number of essays of note.

I began with an essay by Farhad Khosrokhavar, a French scholar whose work has focused especially on Iranian and other contemporary Islamic contexts. His essay in the present work, "The Psychology of the Global Jihadists" is especially useful, not least for showing profound differences between Christians and Muslims on the questions of "fundamentalism" and its relationship to violence.

He begins with two factors in the psychology of jihadists: the desire for revenge against perceived (and sometimes actual) slights or attacks by the West; and a desire, equally Western in nature, to be a "star" or "celebrity." Undergirding both of these is a sense of resentment and loathing.

He further notes three other factors: internalized humiliation and an attempt to reverse this in a disproportionate manner; victimization; and "narcissistic recognition" through global media (141). I find it striking how he notices parallels between a totalized Islamic psychology of victimization at the hands of the West, and a totalized "othering" of Islam in the eyes of the West. We are closer, and more similar, than either wishes to admit.

This victimization is dangerous precisely in its absoluteness: "absolute victimization...legitimizes the use of absolute violence against 'godless' societies" that reject Islamic beliefs. If you have the slightest doubt about this, read the latest issue of the ISIS propaganda magazine, Dabiq. 

Victimization leads to jihad, understood in apocalyptic terms, says Khosrokhavar, and this apocalyptic worldview is also abundantly illustrated by picking up any issue of Dabiq. But this is an apocalypse of limited utility: the point of violence is to provoke an apocalyptic counter-violence from the West whose goal is not to inaugurate the end of the world, but to totally transform the West into an idealized vision of Islam: apocalypticism as instrumental, not eschatological, in other words.

The desire to overcome humiliating victimization leads to a "counterhumiliation [which] merges with a politics of death, and thanatos becomes the focal point. The reasons are as much psychological as instrumental" (146). Thus the jihadist searching for martyrdom is searching not just for a counter-humiliation of the West (by killing some of its citizens), but also for a narcissistic triumph over the West, which will guarantee their eternal celebrity by broadcasting their attacks far and wide and keeping their names alive after death. Here Khosrokhavar forces upon us a question I have asked before in the aftermath of ISIS attacks: should we not severely curtail coverage of them, and stop printing the names of the attackers if, as this author claims, "the world media are thus the magic ingredient of the jihadist self-image" (148). Martyrs achieve fame twice over: in Western media, and among fellow Muslims in the umma. 

Khosrokhavar ends with an interesting if often counter-intuitive argument: jijadists are quintessentially modern creatures of secularization. Had Islam not encountered secularization, with the latter's drive towards some kind of radical purity and purgation of all so-called sacred beliefs and practices, but instead remained within its traditional contexts, then such an Islam would not have been forced to adopt a counter-strategy of radical purity and purgation by jihad in which even most other Muslims (to say nothing of Eastern Christians, traditionally tolerated under Islamic dhimmi laws, as I have shown on here repeatedly) are found wanting, and thus also fit for extermination as insufficiently Islamic. Thus the jihadist response to secularization is an equally utopian vision rather than a desire or an effort to rebuild historical Islamic institutions and cultures.

This author's work on humiliation is supplemented by an earlier, shorter chapter co-authored by Bettina Muenster and David Lotto, "The Social Psychology of Humiliation and Revenge," in which they note the burgeoning research by psychoanalysts in the late 20th century. Humiliation forces one to feel helpless at the hands of unjust treatment meted out in public. These three factors lie behind the generation of narcissistic rage leading to revenge. It is possible, they conclude, for revenge to be averted with sincere apologies and a search for forgiveness, but this is by no means guaranteed.

Several authors in this collection draw attention to the work of Vamik Volkan, especially his 1998 book Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride To Ethnic Terrorism, which I have found fascinating even if it was written before the rise of ISIS. Volkan, now retired as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the University of Virginia, has, avant la lettre, provided a helpful way of understanding why ISIS has so constantly harped on the Crusades and uses this language incessantly in Dabiq. 

Volkan writes that "I use the term 'chosen trauma' to refer to an event that causes one large group to feel helpless and victimized by another group. A group does not really 'choose' to be victim­ized and subsequently lose self-esteem, but it does 'choose' to psychologize and mythologize—to dwell on—the event  For each generation, the description of the actual event is modified....Once a trauma becomes a chosen trauma, the historical truth about it does not really matter" (my emphasis).

I would apply this to the invocations of the Crusades. Volkan's notion of chose trauma is, to my mind, the best way to date of understanding what is going on by constantly referring to "the Crusades": a chosen trauma useful for buttressing group identity, and useful for creating a totalized mythology about the West and its "crusader armies" of our time.  In doing so, they make it abundantly plain that historical truth is irrelevant.

As I continue to read Volkan, I shall have more to say about his several books.

Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: a Brief Note on Donald Spence

I have been offering some ad hoc comments on here as I make my way through a number of new and other books that are helping me to think through what is going on when people continue ritualistically to invoke certain historical memories the details of which are either legitimately in dispute or even wholly and demonstrably disproven. Here I think, e.g., of groups such as ISIS and their absolutely endless and manifestly absurd invocations of "the Crusades."

One such book that has proven of some limited use has been out for a while, but I only had a chance to read it this spring: Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton, 1982).

Freud, Spence notes, was a master synthesizer, who took disparate parts of a patient's life and wove them into a compelling narrative whole via his celebrated case histories, which have "masterful control of style and content" (22). Indeed, Freud as stylist has long been commented upon, and in English his style was even said by some to have been improved by James Strachey's translations and editing of the official authorized English opera omnia. 

The problem with Freud, which can also bedevil other analysts and indeed those writing the history of controverted traumatic events--e.g., the Fourth Crusade--is that the impulse to control the narrative, to write it into a tidy or polished whole, especially for the benefit of others, can itself be distorting: "Both analyst and patient may collude in an attempt to prematurely streamline a chaotic life" (23) and this danger must be guarded against. It is not easy to resist such an impulse towards premature streamlining or tidying up because, as Spence recognizes, psychoanalysts (and also historians some of the time) are in a situation of conflict as writers of the "final" narrative, as it were, but also as keepers of the messier clinical (or other) records and archives. That conflict can become extremely acute if an analysis, or a cultural history (especially in the hands of apologists or ideological commentators whose consciences do not scruple over facts), ends up splitting off into two parts: a narrative truth within the context of the consulting room (or national or ecclesial "mythology," say), and then the historical truth or record so far as it may be fairly known and demonstrated.

Spence notes, and seems almost to condone at least in certain clinical settings, the splitting off of the two: the relationship of narrative truth to actual events of the past "may be of far less significance than creating a coherent and consistent account of a particular set of events" (28). In other words, sometimes the story an analysand tells the analyst may be only very loosely connected to the historical record, so far as it may be known, but that story may be helpful in allowing the analysand to come to some kind of coherence and perhaps even healing. Still, this does seem to invite rather troubling implications, which have been detailed by Jeffrey Prager in his fascinating and valuable study, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering.

Spence notes something else that is not often understood, at least in more "popular" attempts at portraying psychoanalysis: there is no such thing as fully "free association," and that is a good thing. For free association is not, and cannot be, like the passenger on the train describing everything seen out the window to a blind analyst. If this were so, it would be just a word salad--barely coherent, if at all. Thus the urge in both patient and analyst, in various forms and times, is to supply missing information to make a coherent whole--to move from writer to editor, as it were. That is inevitable, but it must be undertaken with great caution because of the aforementioned risk of introducing fresh distortions, tendentious deletions, or other problems. These are important cautions not only for clinicians, but also for historians and Christians telling our often dolorous, and sometimes traumatic, stories of past conflicts with and division from each other.

Fondly Imagining the Liturgical Past

The Byzantine liturgical historian Robert Taft's 2000 essay, "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal" first alerted me to the uses and abuses of Christian history in service of present political agendas. It is a fascinating study in the selective appeal to "the East" by Latin liturgical reformers to give cover to what they wanted to do.

Later this year we shall have a collection of scholarly articles that continues to explore such istoriographical questions: Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks, eds., Liturgy's Imagined Past/s (Pueblo Books, 2016), 320pp.

 About this book we are told:

This book calls attention to the importance of scholarly reflection on the writing of liturgical history. The essays not only probe the impact of important shifts in historiography but also present new scholarship that promises to reconfigure some of the established images of liturgy’s past. Based on papers presented at the 2014 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference, Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s seeks to invigorate discussion of methodologies and materials in contemporary writings on liturgy’s pasts and to resource such writing at a point in time when formidable questions are being posed about the way in which historians construct the object of their inquiry.

The History of Eastern Christian Historical Writing

I'm looking forward to teaching a course next year on the uses and abuses of history, focusing on Christian-Muslim relations and the ever-misunderstood Crusades, which the lovely inhabitants of ISIS keep banging on about in their propaganda. So historiographical questions have come to preoccupy my attention and thinking more and more over the last few months. I am therefore especially interested in this recently released volume in multi-part series: Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 2: 400-1400 (Oxford UP, 2015), 672pp.

The volume has chapters on, inter alia, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syro-Arab, Syriac, Arab, and Byzantine histories. About this book the publisher further tells us:

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400-1400? How was the past understood in religious, social and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes essays on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

The Problems of Christian Historiography

Over the last several years I have come to think more and more that disputes between Eastern and Western Christians turn as often as not on rival ways of thinking about the past in constructing identities for the present and hopes (or fears) for the future. The uses and abuses of history, as well as the calls for reassessing the past and healing its memories, continue to fascinate me. A recently published book lays bare some of the historiographical issues Christians face when writing about the past:  Jay D. Green, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (Baylor University Press, 2015), 217pp.

About this book we are told:

Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound―from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God's movement through the ages. The nature and shape of Christian historiography have been, and remain, hotly contested.

Christian Historiography serves as a basic introduction to the variety of ways contemporary historians have applied their Christian convictions to historical research and reconstruction. Christian teachers and students developing their own sense of the past will benefit from exploring the variety of Christian historiographical approaches described and evaluated in this volume.

Problems in the Narratives of Arab Conquests

It is something of a commonplace among scholars who study the origins of Islam and its first encounters with Christians that the historical narratives of those conquests are rife with problems--written long after the events in question and in such a triumphalistic and tendentious way as to put sharply into question the reliability of just about anything that is claimed for the Arab "side." A new book revisits these important if controversial questions: Boaz Shoshan, The Arabic Historical Tradition & the Early Islamic Conquests: Folklore, Tribal Lore, Holy War (Routledge, 2015), 206pp.

About this book we are told:

The early Arab conquests pose a considerable challenge to modern-day historians. The earliest historical written tradition emerges only after the second half of the eighth century- over one hundred years removed from the events it contends to describe, and was undoubtedly influenced by the motives and interpretations of its authors. Indeed, when speaking or writing about the past, fact was not the only, nor even the prime, concern of Muslims of old. The Arabic Historic Tradition and the Early Islamic Conquests presents a thorough examination of Arabic narratives on the early Islamic conquests. It uncovers the influence of contemporary ideology, examining recurring fictive motifs and evaluating the reasons behind their use. Folklore and tribal traditions are evident throughout the narratives, which aimed to promote individual, tribal and regional fame through describing military prowess in the battles for the spread of Islam. Common tropes are encountered across the materials, which all serve a central theme; the moral superiority of the Muslims, which destined them to victory in God’s plan. Offering a key to the state of mind and agenda of early Muslim writers, this critical reading of Arabic texts would be of great interest to students and scholars of early Arabic History and Literature, as well as a general resource for Middle Eastern History.

Imagining Byzantium

I have for some time been ever more fascinated with the uses and abuses of the past, with questions of memory and forgetting, particularly in the context of East-West relations. We seem to be living in a time where such questions are coming more and more to the fore, as I have noted on here several times. A new book continues the exploration of these historiographical and hermeneutical questions: Elena Boeck, Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge UP, 2015), 300pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Two lavish, illustrated histories confronted and contested the Byzantine model of empire. The Madrid Skylitzes was created at the court of Roger II of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century. The Vatican Manasses was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century. Through close analysis of how each chronicle was methodically manipulated, this study argues that Byzantine history was selectively re-imagined to suit the interests of outsiders. The Madrid Skylitzes foregrounds regicides, rebellions, and palace intrigue in order to subvert the divinely ordained image of order that Byzantine rulers preferred to project. The Vatican Manasses presents Byzantium as a platform for the accession of Ivan Alexander to the throne of the Third Rome, the last and final world-empire. Imagining the Byzantine Past demonstrates how distinct visions of empire generated diverging versions of Byzantium's past in the aftermath of the Crusades.

A Good Hill to Die On

I taught a mini-class on ecclesiology last week, and we spent a great deal of time on papal history and the papacy in general. My students asked me for references to general works in Church history, including the history of Orthodox-Catholic divisions and relations, and also papal history in particular. Unhesitatingly I recommended to them, inter alia, various works of the Chadwick brothers, including Henry Chadwick's invaluable and magisterial East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (Oxford, 2005).

It's not for the faint of heart, or those without solid background. But for those who have the background, Chadwick's book lays out, in prose so taut and spare as almost to be painful, the disintegration of East-West relations and the long process of estrangement, all of which is treated with great care and even-handedness, offering few rationalizations or comforting places to hide from the painful facts. Though the Guardian obituary for Henry's brother Owen Chadwick says of the latter that he wrote in "short sentences: no modern writer employed so few subordinate clauses. He had a penchant for one-sentence paragraphs. His writing was always crisp and vivid," that could equally be said of Henry in East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, a book which seems to have been written (or at least edited) by someone with an almost sadistic desire to prune out everything but the most essential points, with no digressions or detail beyond what was judged strictly necessary. I think only a senior scholar could have pulled it off. As I tell my students, especially those fresh out of highschool, it is much harder to write a short essay or book than a long one, and they rarely believe me. But discipline--askesis--if you will is necessary in writing as in life. 

Henry wrote as an Anglican, so in some important ways had no dog in any Catholic-Orthodox fights and could rise above polemics in East and West. He once said of ecumenical scholarship, and the ecumenical movement, that it was a "good cause to die for," and I agree. Henry died in 2008 at the age of 87, after a long and prolific life.

His brother Owen, also a Church of England cleric, theologian, dialogue partner with Orthodoxy on behalf of the Anglican Communion, and historian, lived to be 99, and died last Friday after an equally if not more prolific life as a scholar at the top of his class. He was rightly lauded by his country. Her Majesty made him a member of the Order of Merit, which is within the sole gift of the Sovereign, limited to 24 members, and is thus unique and rare in the British honours system as being free from grubby control by government ministers. (Having said that, I've never understood why the queen sullied so rare a guild by inducting the former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, as sordid, dimwitted, and oleaginous a mediocrity as ever emerged from her senior dominion.)

I have not read many of Chadwick's books, but have scholarly friends who have and they recommend various of them, including his study of the important patristic figure John Cassian.

I can say something more about two that I have read. More than ten years ago now, when I was grappling with the East-West divide over whether in any significant sense one can say that doctrine "develops," as the West, above all in the person of Cardinal Newman, says it can (and as the East sometimes denies), I found Chadwick's book From Bossuet to Newman a very useful history and chronology, studying figures who are sometimes lost in the massive shadow that Newman casts here, as in so much else.

But it is Owen Chadwick's A History of the Popes 1830-1914 (Oxford, 2003) that I have found utterly invaluable over the years. I think he and others--including the other Cambridge historians John Pollard and Eamon Duffy--are right in seeing this period as crucial for the creation of the modern papacy, with all its centralized power, global prominence--and ecumenical difficulty. Chadwick got in first with his study and it remains a landmark work of papal history, not least for Eastern Christians trying to understand how Vatican I came about with its twin problematic definitions of papal infallibility and jurisdiction (about which I have had a thing or two to say).

For such a crucial period of nearly a century, Chadwick's taut and spare style was on display again: the book, though 614pp. long, could easily have been twice that in lesser hands. Moreover, this is not dry-as-dust prose, either. He had, here as elsewhere, a keen eye for an illuminating tale, an amusing anecdote (as the typically winsome obituarist at the Daily Telegraph recognizes), or a juicy bit of gossip that was relevant but not salacious or vicious.

That latter point seems to come out in something lighter, which I only discovered upon reading the obits: I have just ordered his Victorian Miniature, about which the publisher tells us:

Nancy Mitford once observed that some of the most bitter personal clashes of all time have been 'between the Manor and the Vicarage'. Owen Chadwick's Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.

As a fan of Nancy Mitford, and even more of Trollope's Barchester Towers, which I thoroughly enjoyed more than twenty years ago, Chadwick's book sounds like pleasurably diverting reading now.

The Fascinating and Maddening Georges Florovsky

I was asked to go to Brookline later this month to Holy Cross College, the site of this year's meeting of the Orthodox Theological Society of America. OTSA asked me to be on a panel as one of the respondents to Paul Gavrilyuk's new book, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaisance (Oxford UP, 2014), 320pp.

I will not repeat here everything of what I have said in my written remarks prepared for the panel, but let me instead note some of the strengths of this book, and some of the curiosities of the man portrayed in it.

It is, first of all, a wonderfully cogent book. Its tone and balance are striking, and the author is greatly to be commended here for avoiding any kind of polemics in response to some of Florovsky's more outrageous claims. I first studied Florovsky in a doctoral course more than ten years ago now, and I came greatly to respect him. I still do in some ways, and thus, almost every semester, I have my students read his essay "St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers" (which they read alongside a Catholic treatment of many of the same issues, viz., Hans Urs von Balthasar's 1939 essay, translated into English only in 1997 as "The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves.") But reading Gavrilyuk's book made me re-think much of what Florovsky wrote, which now seems to me far less credible than I once thought. I think perhaps I was taken in by the force of Florovsky's rhetoric rather than the quality of his evidence, which today seems to me much more dubious.

Gavrilyuk's book is neither a “take-down” nor a pious hagiography, but intellectual history and biography of the best sort, allowing us to see the man in full. If, as Cardinal Newman famously said, the danger of hagiography is that it reduces complex people and their messy lives to mere “clothes racks for virtues,” we can be grateful to the author that he avoided that danger and allowed us to see everything Florovsky wore, winsomely captured in the--if you will--"bespoke" beret and rather déshabillé cassock on the front cover!

Florovsky was indeed a complex man, and it seems very clear that he rather sharply embodied something attributed to Cyrano de Bergerac, who said that he sought always "to stand, not so high perhaps, but always alone." Florovsky was forever breaking with his colleagues in Paris, New York, Princeton, and elsewhere. He seems almost driven towards a destruction of relationships and a refusal of any party line. It remains a mystery to me, given this track record, that he was so regularly invited to WCC and other ecumenical events over the years.

Florovsky, of course, is best known for his idea of a "neo-patristic synthesis," which is of value, but only to a limited degree, and in the wrong hands subject to abuse and distortion. His other big idea was that Orthodoxy was victimized by a "Western captivity" that corrupted it through a "pseudomorphosis." For lengthy reasons I shall argue later in the month, I think both claims now have to be very sharply revised not only because the evidence Florovsky adduces is so thin but also because there is now a good deal of other evidence to be considered that complicates the picture. Moreover, the image that Florovsky conveys here is a thoroughly unattractive one. In his caricatures, nobody looks good: Orthodoxy is always a victim, weak, helpless, supine before the rapacious and ravishing Western brute. Whom does that accurately or fairly describe--on either side? How do such characterizations help East or West, singly or together?

After the conference, perhaps I'll be able to post my thoughts in full. But in the meantime, this is a splendid book for all sorts of reasons, and anyone interested in not only Florovsky but Russian and more broadly Orthodox history in Europe and North America in the last century, and in the current one, will not want to be without Gavrilyuk's carefully researched and painstakingly argued scholarly work without which no credible future discussion of its subject will be possible.

What is Patristic? What Apostolic?

Augustine Casiday is a busy and prolific fellow. I interviewed him last September about his massive, and massively impressive, The Orthodox Christian World.

Since then, he has also published a book on Evagrius and the taint of "heresy" that surrounds him. And now he has another volume just out: Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage (SVS Press, 2014),198pp.
 
About this book we are told:

The faith of the Orthodox Christian is “apostolic,” in that it is continuous with the faith of the first century apostles. But to be truly apostolic it must be sent into the world, speaking to each new age. In this fresh and innovative work, Augustine Casiday shows us what it means to re-appropriate the wisdom of the Fathers and to give their words new life in a new age.
Beginning with the basic inquiry of what it means to accord the ancient writers’ authority—as it were affiliating them, or adopting them as fathers—the reader is invited to join on a journey to many new places, as well as to ones we thought we knew, but didn’t really. This book will inform anyone who wants to grapple with how we treat the past and its authoritative voices. Beginners will encounter a first-rate thinker writing comprehensibly and accessibly. Advanced patristic scholars will be guaranteed to come away from this book with new insights and challenging arguments.

I look forward to reading this book and seeing about an interview with the author. 

Turning to Tradition

I spent the better part of a day reading and thoroughly enjoying a new book by the Orthodox priest and historian D. Oliver Herbel, whom I previously interviewed about his last book (and whom I hope to interview in the coming weeks about this present work). His latest work is Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church (Oxford UP, 2014), 256pp.

This is church history at its best: an outstandingly well written scholarly book that is carefully researched, crisply written, and free of polemics. It is not a romanticized founding mythology, and in fact it carefully and calmly skewers a few such mythologies on offer about American Orthodox history. While written by someone who is obviously himself Orthodox, and who therefore brings a sympathetic "insider's" perspective to bear at certain points, the author has managed to be commendably objective and even-handed in dealing with issues and personages that are still today controverted for some. This is anything but a work of what another historian, Robert Taft, calls "confessional propaganda," and we have every reason to be grateful to Fr. Oliver for that. His book reveals considerable scholarly acumen, but it is also something that the proverbial person in the pew could easily access, not least because it is (almost!) blessedly free of jargon and abstruse theorizing.

In five compact chapters, the author reviews individuals of significance in the ongoing historical development of Orthodoxy in the United States, beginning with Alexis Toth, the former Greek Catholic chased out of his Church by Latin chauvinism and intransigence over the question of a married priesthood (even though--adding to the ineffable absurdity of it all--the man was widowed by the time he came to the attention of the infamous Archbishop John Ireland).

Chapters two and three deal, respectively, with Raphael Morgan and Moses Berry, both involved with various efforts to bring African Americans into contact with Orthodoxy, and vice versa. These two figures were the least known to me and I read these chapters with especial interest.

Chapter four deals with history closer to our own day, and I had read some of this more than fifteen years ago when I first came across Peter Gillquist's work leading evangelicals into Orthodoxy. Herbel amplifies, clarifies, and expands the "founding narratives" of the evangelicals-cum-Orthodox, whose lead apologist, Gillquist, left out crucial details in his book Becoming Orthodox. But Fr. Oliver has unearthed some staggering details in this chapter connected to the first rebuffs by the Greeks, the painful Ben Lomond situation in California, and the scandals surrounding the Antiochian priest Joseph Allen, who remarried in violation of the longstanding canon that no widowed priest can re-marry and remain a priest--but remain he did and does as a priest in the Antiochian Archdiocese. (Along the way, we also hear some of the details of how the Orthodox Study Bible came to be--a version with many problems.) In lesser hands, this could have been simple muckraking, but in Fr. Oliver's hands one never has the sense that he is either downplaying these scandals apologetically or sensationalizing them polemically. Instead, he simply and calmly narrates the various stories, whose juicier details I will not mention here--you need to read the book to get those.

What makes this study so worthwhile is Herbel's use of the concept of "anti-traditional tradition" to show, again and again, how those interested in, and eventually converts to, Orthodoxy often saw themselves as moving towards a very "traditional" expression of Christianity, one which was going to stand against the currents of the age, and this has some truth to it, especially for Christians coming from, say, Anglicanism or other "liberalizing" Western traditions. But as Herbel shows, these converts, for all their "traditionalism," were in fact radicals, that is, they were engaging in a quintessentially modern American act of venturing off on their own in search of new roots in a new church that was, in fact, one of the oldest expressions of apostolic Christianity on offer. The fact that some of these new Orthodox have turned around and denounced their former traditions, and indeed this country, is no surprise because the American experience is full of such people doing precisely that at the various "revival" (or, as Herbel prefers, "restorationist") movements that have periodically swept this country. Such is the way of all converts it seems--whether to some form of Christianity, or to a political cause like Prohibition or the abolition of slavery.

In sum, Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church is an excellent study and deserves a place on every bibliography and library shelf devoted to religious history, American exceptionalism, and of course Orthodox history as well as relations between Orthodoxy and other Christian traditions.

Stay tuned for an interview with Fr. Oliver next week....

History: Instructive but not Normative?

As I have often commented on here (see here, here, and here, inter alia), the problems of how we use and abuse history remain a serious concern and ongoing question to me. This is far from being an exclusively "Eastern" problem, either, as debates among Catholics over such issues as liturgical changes and papal authority easily reveal. In the coming days, I hope to have an interview with the Orthodox historian and priest D. Oliver Herbel about his new book that touches on some of these questions. But in the meantime, a recent collection of essays explores some of these questions, particularly the question of how theology relates to history and vice-versa: T. Merrigan et al, Tradition and the Normativity of History (Peeters, 2013), x+215pp.

About this book we are told:

This collection of essays by some of the world’s leading theological voices aims at unfolding and reflecting upon the complex relationship between theology and history, with a special focus on the development of tradition. The articles gathered here make it clear that the role of historical consciousness within theology and the contribution of historical studies to the theological disciplines, are of paramount importance, and fundamentally alter the shape of the theological enterprise. Rather than destroying theology, tradition and theological truth claims, historical consciousness contributes to the deconstruction of all facile appeals to history in order to support theological claims, and works to prevent us from proposing simplistic readings of tradition in terms of continuity or discontinuity. Moreover, it offers new opportunities to theology to engage in the process of recontextualization in the contemporary context, taking into account its sensibility to historicity, contingency and particularity. It allows us, for example, to think resurrection anew, and to constructively criticize our forgetfulness of dangerous memories. It is not by overcoming these features of the contemporary age that theology will succeed in its striving after theological truth, but by discerning how such truth is revealed precisely within, and thanks to, particular and contingent histories, and not in spite of historicity, contingency and particularity. When this is done, the dialogue between theology and history/historical studies contributes to a contemporary reconsideration of the radical dialogical character of revelation, that is, of the way in which God reveals Godself in history. It is the hope of this collective volume that it will further deepen the understanding of revelation that was developed in Vatican II’s constitution on divine revelation, Dei verbum.