St. Catherine's of Sinai

As I have noted previously, the collection of icons at St. Catherine of Mt. Sinai Monastery is among the oldest and most important in the world. Next month a new book will be published to give us greater insights into the collection: S.E.J. Gerstel and Robert Nelson, eds., Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai (Cursor Mundi)) (Brepols, 2011), 590pp.

About this book, which contains 139 black & white illustrations and 30 in color, the publisher tells us:

The first comprehensive study of the monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai in its full historical, art historical, and religious dimensions, the nineteen collected essays in Approaching the Holy Mountain provide a unique view of the longest continuously inhabited Christian monastery. As an important pilgrimage site, Sinai enjoyed an international reputation in the Middle Ages. The monastery also benefited from regional connections to Egypt and the Holy Land. The essays in this volume examine the pilgrims, monks, artists, builders, and scholars who came to the mountain and left their marks on the monastery and its holdings, as well as the image of the monastery that was promoted outside of Sinai.

Because of its dry, isolated location in the Sinai desert, the monastery possesses the world's greatest collection of Byzantine icons. These icons have been celebrated in highly popular exhibitions in Athens, London, St Petersburg, New York, and Los Angeles though few longer studies of the icons have been attempted. In this volume, authors investigate icons from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries and offer new interpretations of their meaning, provenance, and function. Essays also explore celebrated illuminated Byzantine manuscripts in the library of St Catherine's, pilgrim's accounts of the monastery, a recently excavated early church on the summit of Mt Sinai, liturgy at Sinai during the first Christian millennium, the influence of Sinai on later paintings and engravings, and the recent history of Sinai studies. The result is a significant advance in our understanding of one of the most important centres of early Christianity.

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Late Antique Historiography

Ever since I began reading the greatest Byzantine liturgical historian Robert Taft, especially his article "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal," I have been increasingly fascinated with historiographical questions. Too often today many in the Christian East have "invented" a version of history that bears little relation to reality, and the process of how they do that, and even more the reasons why, are fascinating indeed. As Taft says in his article, he has often been tempted to write a book called "Inventing Eastern Orthodoxy," one chapter of which would be "Inventing Eastern Liturgy."

Other scholars who have recently treated such question include the Anglo-Canadian Margaret MacMillan (author of the wonderfully thrilling Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World) in her short but important book Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library Chronicles). Such questions are inescapable in the Christian East and have profound bearing on many matters of great importance, not least the search for East-West unity, as David Bentley Hart, inter alia, has argued with great persuasiveness, or the search for Oriental-Byzantine Orthodox unity, as Kenneth Yossa has cogently demonstrated. Questions of historical method and hermeneutics are front and centre in the on-going struggle to describe and understand relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims.

Now a recently published  book has emerged to look at just these sorts of questions:  Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debie, Hugh Kennedy, eds.,  Writing 'True Stories': Historians and Hagiographers in the Late-Antique and Medieval Near East (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages) (Brepols, 2010), 240pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

The papers in this volume examine the interaction between history and hagiography in the late-antique and medieval Middle East, exploring the various ways in which the two genres were used and combined to analyse, interpret, and recreate the past. The contributors focus on the circulation of motifs between the two forms of writing and the modifications and adaptations of the initial story that such re-use entailed. Beyond this purely literary question, the retold stories are shown to have been at the centre of a number of cultural, political, and religious strategies, as they were appropriated by different groups, not least by the nascent Muslim community. Writing 'True Stories' also foregrounds the importance of some Christian hagiographical motifs in Muslim historiography, where they were creatively adapted and subverted to define early Islamic ideals of piety and charisma.

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Georgian Churches

The Georgian Orthodox Church has too often remained in the shadow of other, better-known nearby churches both in the Caucasus and in the Slavic lands. A recent book from Brepols helps shed some light on little-known aspects of Georgian liturgical and architectural life: N. Iamanidzé, Les installations liturgiques sculptees des eglises de Georgie (VIIe-XIIIe siecles) (Brepols, 2010), 304pp.


About this book the publisher tells us:

Convertie au christianisme au début du IVe siècle, la Géorgie ancienne, qui a souvent été une frontière religieuse et culturelle entre l'Asie et l'Europe, a laissé beaucoup de monuments remarquables. Néanmoins, malgré sa qualité et sa richesse exceptionnelles, lart chrétien géorgien est longtemps resté méconnu. De fait, si les peintures murales et larchitecture des églises ont attiré d'assez longue date lattention des chercheurs, leurs aménagements et dispositifs liturgiques ont été à peu près complètement passés sous silence. Pourtant ces pièces uniques représentent une part considérable du patrimoine géorgien médiéval et constituent un témoignage archéologique fort important pour cerner non seulement la tradition artistique, mais aussi les rites et les coutumes de l'Orient chrétien. L'ouvrage révèle un matériel archéologique parfois inexploré jusqu'ici, et souvent inédit. Mais cest aussi une première tentative pour faire la lumière sur lorganisation de lespace liturgique dans les églises géorgiennes, sur le rôle spécifique des divers aménagements, les rapports entre la nature des pièces, leur décor et leur fonction, et contribuer ainsi à la connaissance des usages religieux aux confins du monde byzantin.

La recherche se concentre sur trois groupes particuliers : cuves baptismales, tables liturgiques et clôtures de sanctuaire. Les limites chronologiques (VIe-XIIIe s.) correspondent à la période de lapparition puis du développement des images sculptées sur les installations liturgiques en Géorgie : inspirées par lAncien et le Nouveau Testament, celles-ci sarticulent souvent dans des programmes iconographiques amples et accomplis. La signification de ces programmes est ici particulièrement envisagée dans la perspective de leur rôle cultuel.

Mais l'attention est également portée aux problèmes liés à la production de ces monuments et à la répartition géographique des ateliers. Un autre aspect, qui relève dune problématique plus vaste, est ladaptation et linterprétation des modèles byzantins en Géorgie.

On a naturellement reproduit et traduit les nombreuses inscriptions qui permettent dobserver les différents modes de référence aux sources scripturaires, mais aussi de constater l'implication de donateurs sur des supports ; ce qui renseigne directement sur les usages dévotionnels et, dans certains cas, renvoie aux pratiques de collation des sacrements. Ainsi vise-t-on à apporter un éclairage nouveau sur la vie spirituelle et lhistoire religieuse du pays et sur ses relations culturelles avec les autres régions du monde chrétien ; cela reflétant, à côté des traditions locales, des liens étroits entre la Géorgie et les pays voisins mais aussi, à l'occasion, avec les contrées plus lointaines dOccident. L'ouvrage témoigne donc de limportance d'une production artistique qui doit être prise en compte dans toute étude du matériel sculpté paléochrétien et médiéval.

Later this year, a second book will shed further light on the churches of Georgia: Dora-Piquet Panayatova, The Georgian Churches of Oski and Iskhani: Architecture and Ornament (Pindar Press, 2011), 260pp. with 236 illustrations.

About this book, the publisher informs us:

This study deals with the churches of Oski and Iskhani, in the ancient Georgian province of Tao-Klardeti, now in eastern Turkey.

Each church is examined separately, with a focus on the architecture and carved decoration. The architectural sculpture includes the decorative layout of the facades, and the ornamentation of the windows, portals, gallery and porch. This reveals the fusion of antique elements, inherited from the East Byzantine provinces, with Sassanian and Islamic motifs penetrating through contact with the Abbasid world.

These churches were erected by the Bagratid princes in the early years of the 11th century and their construction reflects a fascinating blend of the influence of the Macedonian 'Renaissance' from the Byzantine empire and the Abbasid fashions that had spread through the Mediterranean world at this period.

American Idol Indeed

I have been reading William Cavanaugh for over fifteen years now. His 1995 article "'A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House': the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" began sketching out his thinking--and my consequent re-thinking--of the relationship between "religion" and the state in the modern West. There he began to build the case that the so-called Wars of Religion were not, in fact, about "religion" but were the bloody birth-pangs of the modern state. These are arguments he would amplify greatly in his 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, published by Oxford University Press. (This latter book is being reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in the fall.)

In the article, and then especially in the book, he has convincingly demonstrated that one of the founding myths of modernity--viz., that the state was necessarily founded in Europe (and later in North America) to keep Christians from killing one another in the aftermath of the Reformation--is rubbish. In the book he amasses evidence aplenty to support this thesis, and I will not reiterate that evidence here, instead strongly encouraging readers to buy the book and discover for themselves.

One of the many useful things about the book is that Cavanaugh does not deny that self-identified "religious" people sometimes use violence against one another, and against other non-religious actors; nor does he engage in the usual "apologetics" whereby such actions are dismissed as the unrepresentative antics of a fanatical fringe. What makes Cavanaugh's book so important is that he shows that the very creation of the categories of "religion" and "politics" or "secular" and "sacred" are tendentious attempts by the modern state to justify its existence, and especially its monopoly on violence, and to privatize "religion" while disguising the fact that the state itself makes certain transcendent metaphysical and "theological" claims. (Much of this argument is, of course, reliant upon, e.g., John Milbank and Alasdair MacIntyre.) In other words, it is impossible to speak of pure motives as though the sacred and secular were discrete and separable. The suicide bomber flying planes into buildings is doing so not only because of his understanding of a religious text ostensibly tells him to do so, but also because he has political goals in mind: to see a people, their economy, and ultimately the state itself mortally wounded and thereby ripe for conquest by another polity.

This pseudo-sacral nature of the state, with its covert theology, is the object of analysis in Cavanaugh's most recent book: Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Eerdmans, 2011), v+200pp.

This is, in parts, an extremely important book for Eastern Christians to read, though I fear most will not do so. For the modern history of Eastern Christianity, especially in Europe and especially since the end of the eighteenth century, is inseparable from various nationalistic and ethno-phyletistic movements. For too many Eastern Christians--Eastern Catholics as well as Orthodox--nationalist aspirations were kept alive during the Soviet period by and in the Churches, which in some cases functioned as surrogate "states" for those who had none in the Soviet Union. (This is true for some Western Christians who also fell under Soviet domination.)

Cavanaugh's arguments are important for both Eastern and Western Christians alike, and they are stated with the greatest cogency in the introduction and first two chapters of the book, which is really an anthology of articles disguised as a monograph. Several of the chapters fit only loosely with the book and, in my estimation, constitute something of a distraction from his very important main thesis.

Cavanaugh opens by declaring that "I don't believe that the state can be understood without theology. Carl Schmitt was right to say that all modern concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts if by 'secularized' one means 'covert'" (3). Cavanaugh will go on to note that while the "separation of church and state" can be accepted "as a liberation of the state from the wielding of coercive power, I nevertheless reject the separation of 'religion' from 'politics'" (4). It is simply impossible, Cavanaugh says, "that Christianity belongs to some special, nonempirical realm of 'religion' cordoned off from some other essentially distinct realm of human behavior called 'politics'" (4). He rejects this distinction for several reasons, not least because the relevant history shows it is false: it is a distinction we find invented in the West only in the last 400 years or so. Here a key person to read is John Bossy: Christianity in the West 1400-1700. Bossy's book is
a rollicking good historical revision of much of what we have taken for granted about Reformation and post-Reformation Christianity in the West.

Cavanaugh argues that those who think we can separate 'religion' from 'politics' end up smuggling the former back in under the disguise of the latter. This is a process he calls (borrowing Bossy's terminology) the "migration of the holy." What we once regarded as holy--viz., Christ's body in the Eucharist and the Church, understood together as Henri de Lubac showed--is no longer seen as such by more and more people today: on this, I would say, one must also read Charles Taylor's massive A Secular Age. Instead, what is increasingly regarded as holy, that for which we are willing to lay down our very lives, is precisely the modern nation-state: it, today, is regarded as holy; it, today, has become our biggest idol demanding our biggest sacrifice. How many Christians in North America are willing to kill in the name of their faith? Thankfully almost none. But how many of them are willing and ready to kill in the name of their country, and what does that startling fact tell us about Christianity today and the power--the imaginative power above all--of the modern state?

Cavanaugh's second chapter is the heart of the book. Here he argues that the nation-state is not the keeper of the common good. Making this argument requires dealing at the outset with some prominent Roman Catholic theologians who have attempted to argue that today the pursuit of the common good requires supporting the modern state. The chief person here is Charles Curran. Cavanaugh makes short work of him and spends the rest of the chapter demonstrating "the case against seeing the state as the promoter and protector of the common good" (8). He does this in significant measure by tracing the origins--philosophical, terminological, theological, sociological--of the institution of the modern state, whose roots are undoubtedly prepared "in the medieval period." Though he does not cite her, much of Cavanaugh's argument here has striking parallels to Jean Bethke Elshtain's recent Gifford Lectures:  Sovereignty: God, State, and Self,  
another very important recent contribution toward understanding the historical roots of the state's insistence on it having "sovereignty," a notion Cavanaugh briefly treats here through a discussion of Jean Bodin. This notion of the sovereign individual, and the sovereign state, are both contrary to sound Christian anthropology--a point Cavanaugh does not really develop enough.  He also does not treat the fact that the idea of sovereignty has been hugely influential in ecclesiology in the East (in its debates about "autocephaly") and in the West (in its debates, before, during, and after Vatican I, about the jurisdiction of the "sovereign pontiff," the bishop of Rome: a key person to see here is Hermann Pottmeyer; in the background, of course, is Joseph de Maistre).

While not romanticizing the modern period, nor demonizing the modern state, Cavanaugh nonetheless presents some startling ideas and facts, chief among which is that the engine that drives all state growth in every form everywhere is war: in the U.S. he says, "all but five cabinet departments and the majority of smaller federal agencies have come into being during wartime" (27, here citing Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State). We have, of course, recent evidence of this in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, now one of the largest federal bureaucracies extant. In the ongoing Congressional budget battles, nobody is talking about scaling back this department or "defense" spending. And that, Cavanaugh suggests, should not surprise us for war gives an overarching purpose or telos to the state that it otherwise deliberately if impossibly refuses to claim explicitly. (Well do I recall here my Glaswegian grandparents saying to me that the one thing they most remembered about living through World War II in Great Britain was "how united we all were." As soon as the war was over, that vanished, much to their regret--and that of many others, apparently.)

Cavanaugh notes that the nineteenth century sees the fusion of the nation with the state in the West. He has a fascinating discussion about modern nationalism as it is understood by various scholars, noting, e.g., that the very idea or "imaginary" of the nation only comes about after the idea of the state has been conceived: "nations are only impossible once states have been conceived" (34). Here he has an apt quote from the Italian patriot Massimo d'Azeglio after the creation of Italy: "We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians." This idea is crying out for critical application and empirical verification in the Christian East. I am thinking primarily of Ukraine--beyond what important work has been done already.

The problem with nationalism, and with the obeisance we give to the nation-state today, is that we make of it an idol, honoring it as we should not, and expecting of it things it cannot properly give: "the longing for true communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any truly common life is transferred onto the nation-state" (42). This is what we call idolatry. In response to this, Cavanaugh says that the "urgent task of the Church...is to demystify the nation-state and treat it like the telephone company"--that is, as the mere bureaucratic purveyor of certain goods and services, nothing more or less.

How can the Church do that? This is the burden of his next chapter: "From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space." Here Cavanaugh argues that the modern state is good at pretending to meet our "longing for unity...[and] fear that diversity will produce conflict and tear the body politic apart" (47). The modern liberal state, especially following Hobbes, claims to be in favor of diversity, to permit a variety of ends to be pursued, but it is secretly threatened by that diversity: "the nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum" (53). Cavanaugh does not, as he notes, have a lot of answers as to how we can outwit such a dynamic on the part of the state, but he does want--as he says earlier--to "argue for a more radical pluralism...[and] complex political space [that] would privilege local forms of community, but...would also connect them in translocal networks of connectivity" (4). He does not detail the practical outworkings of all this, but leaves it to readers to undertake the fascinating if difficult work of thinking through such practices.

One of the ways Christians can do that, he does argue (and not entirely adequately or with the length and depth I thought necessary) is through not merely the creation of more local forms of community, but also through better ecclesiology and liturgiology. It is in his sixth chapter, "The Liturgies of the Church and State" where he again cites (as he did earlier) John Zizioulas's landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Cavanaugh's chapter, however, resorts to vacuous sloganeering at points as, e.g., when he says that "we must look with a critical eye on liturgies that compete for our allegiance" (122). Here he has in mind "liturgies" of the state or other non-ecclesial organizations, but in advocating for a more critical evaluation of liturgy, I think he missed a crucial opportunity to turn a critical eye on Roman liturgy today, and how precisely it fails to do what Cavanaugh rightfully thinks good liturgy must do. In saying this, I have in mind the very important criticism of Catherine Pickstock--whose work Cavanaugh surely knows, not least because they've been published together--first articulated in a 1997 article in New Blackfriars, "A Short Essay on the Reform of the Liturgy" and expanded in her breathtaking work After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy.  In that 1997 essay, she argued that

 the Vatican II reforms of the mediaeval Roman Rite...failed to challenge those structures of the modem secular world which are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose: those structures, indeed, which perpetuate a separation of everyday life from liturgical enactment (56).

Pickstock hastens to add that her criticisms are not some kind of revanchist horror at modern liturgics. (She is, after all, Anglican and not a part of, say, the SSPX.) Rather they

issue from a belief that its revisions were simply not radical enough. A successful liturgical revision would have to involve a revolutionary re-invention of language and practice which would challenge the structures of our modern world, and only thereby restore real language and action as liturgy (56-57).

She picks this up again in her concluding paragraph, where she says that what we need is to

devise a liturgy that refused to be enculturated in our modern habits of thought and speech. Such enculturation, one would have to realise, can only be appropriate for a society that is itself, as a whole, subordinate to liturgical offering. But...our society... would have not only to register internally the need ‘to pray that there might be prayer’--by restoring a 1iturgical ‘stammer’, and oral spontaneity and ‘confusion’--but also the need to pray that we again begin to live, to speak, to associate, in a liturgical, which is to say truly human and creaturely fashion. It would have more actively to challenge us through the shock of a defamiliarizing language, to live only to worship, and to be in community only as recipients of the gift of the body of Christ (64).

Only such liturgy (which, I have argued elsewhere, can be found today in the Byzantine tradition) could remind us that the nation-state is not our true home: we have here no lasting city.

William Cavanaugh's Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church has reminded us of this crucial idea not through liturgy but through deeply challenging, and wholly welcome, argumentation, only some of which we have sampled here. I warmly recommend this book to all who are interested in these vital ideas and hope it receives the hearing it deserves.

Apsidal Images

As I have had many occasions to note, books on iconography have never been as popular or as plentiful as they are today. A recent publication from Reichert Verlag deepens our understanding of the placement of icons in Byzantine Churches: Beat Brenk, The Apse, the Image and the Icon: An Historical Perspective of the Apse as a Space for Images (Spatantike-Fruhes Christentum-Byzanz) (2011), 220pp.


This book, which contains 106 black and white, and 37 colored, plates, deals, as the publisher tells us,

with the apse as a showcase for images in the early Christian and early Byzantine periods. Two opposed traditions, harking back to early imperial times, nourished the invention of the apse image: on the one hand there were statues in apses of pagan temples and imperial cult rooms that were venerated during cult ceremonies; on the other hand, there were apse mosaics in nymphaea where aquatic myths and figures celebrated the amenities of water. Christian apse mosaics originated within this context and in spite of the Old Testament prohibition of the image. Mosaics and frescoes in apses of cult rooms generated very particular effects, evoking in the viewer respect, admiration, awe and even veneration. The capacity of the image to have an impact on the viewer could not be decreed by the Church, but was an affair manifested more or less casually according to the inventive power of the artist. This book explores the interactions between the various image-media during the early Christian and early Byzantine periods; it particularly investigates the participation of the viewer and of the patron

Books in Russia

Though reports of the future of the book as such have, for more than a decade, been pessimistic, there is no denying the importance of the book in shaping past history. Along comes a new book to demonstrate just that: Miranda Remnek, ed., The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2011), 320pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

From the Enlightenment to the Internet age, reading practices in Russia have been shaped by factors such as artistic and cultural trends, economics, and state scrutiny. The Space of the Book provides the most comprehensive overview to date of salient topics in Russian print culture, in a volume that promises to become the leading introduction to current research in the field.

This collection features illustrated essays by premier Russian historians, literature specialists, and innovative younger scholars on topics including the influence of commerce, diversifying readerships, education and rural libraries, reception theory, and censorship. Miranda Remnek begins each chapter with an introduction on digital applications. Skilfully connecting multidisciplinary sources along broad historical continuum, The Space of the Book will be a valuable resource as the study of Russian print culture takes on new directions in a digitized world.

Though the whole volume looks fascinating, two chapters in particular may be of especial interest:

6. Reading Between the (Confessional) Lines: The Intersection of Old Believer Manuscript Books and Images with Print Cultures of Late Imperial Russia / by Kevin M. Kain (University of Wisconsin – Green Bay

7. The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond / by Jeffrey P. Brooks (Johns Hopkins University)

Coptic Culture Past and Present

Given the recent turmoil in Egypt, attention has been focused there in a way not seen for many years. At last some attention is being given to the plight of the Copts, though many in the Western media, being indolent, ignorant, or idiotic (or, usually, a nasty combination of all three) have taken to portraying the persecution of the Copts as simply "sectarian conflict" in which "clashes" mysteriously emerge between supposedly competing religious groups, as though the Copts, comprising perhaps 10% of the population, regularly rise up and smite the Muslim majority in Egypt.

In truth, the Copts are, and have been for over a thousand years, persecuted and martyred in Egypt in ways that almost nobody, especially in the West today, understands. To treat this with the kind of "on the one hand...on the other hand" approach of the Western press betrays a revolting moral equivalency born, as noted, of laziness as well as tendentiousness.

Happily, scholarship on Coptic realities continues to emerge at a good clip, and one recent book is set to emerge soon: Mariam Ayad, ed., Coptic Culture: Past, Present and Future (Oxbow Press, 2011).

About this book, the publisher tells us:

In May 2008, the Coptic Orthodox Centre in Stevenage, UK organized a conference on Coptic Culture: Past, Present, and Future. The conference aimed to highlight the contributions and achievements of one of the most obscure periods of Egyptian history: the Coptic Period. The importance of this period lies in its valuable contributions to some of the most formative theological debates of Christianity.

Strictly defined as a Late Antique culture, spanning only the third to the seventh centuries AD, the heritage of the Coptic Period still survives today in the artistic expression, liturgical services, and heritage of millions of Egyptian Christians who live in Egypt and abroad. This period's lasting contributions, however, remain underappreciated, and many of its aspects remain unclear, or unknown to the general public.

For the first time, the conference at the Coptic Centre brought together specialists working on all aspects of Coptic Culture, from its earliest phases to the present day. One of the aims of the conference was to highlight new research on Coptic art, writings, and archaeology. By bringing together specialists, academics, and Coptic clergy, the conference fostered an active discussion of what defined Coptic identity in centuries past, and what it means to be Coptic in contemporary culture, both in Egypt and abroad.

It is important that we draw on, understand, and appreciate the rich cultural heritage of this period as we look to our past to inform our present and define our future.

The conference drew scholars from Australia, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Their papers were organized along 5 general thematic blocks that dealt with (1) The Egyptian roots of Coptic culture; (2) How do we know what we know: Archaeological Sites and Museum Collections; (3) Aspects of Early and Medieval Coptic Culture: Case Studies; (4) Current Trends in Coptic Studies; and (5) Coptic Culture Today and where it's heading. This volume contains their contributions.

Paul Evdokimov and Olivier Clement

Francophone Orthodoxy has produced an enormous number of extremely important and influential thinkers over the last century, many of them connected to L'Institut Saint-Serge in Paris. Among the outstanding figures, Paul Evdokimov occupies a unique place.

I drew on his Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty in a course on iconography last year. It is a dense treatise but worthwhile.

His Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women continues to influence my thinking as I am working on a new book about sexual differentiation in the Christian East.

His Ages of the Spiritual Life as well as In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader are both wonderful collections, the latter especially diverse, treating everything from eschatology to the Theotokos, the Eucharist, and the Church. Both of these books were edited by Michael Plekon, who provides a brief biographical sketch of Evdokimov in Tradition Alive and a longer study of him in Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Plekon continues to do so much to make European Orthodoxy accessible to North American anglophones--not just in his work on Evdokimov, but also on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Nicholas Afanasiev, and others.

But it is Evdokimov's book on marriage that I return to again and again, regarding it as the most profound treatment I have seen: The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition.

His insights into marriage and its sacrifices, and his idea of a universalized and interiorized monasticism, remain very important and are developed in that book with a depth of wisdom I have seen nowhere else--as I have briefly and modestly indicated elsewhere. Consider but one passage:

The wedding rite symbolically summarizes the entire married life. The betrothed have already exchanged rings; they have already been crowned and they partake of the one cup of life. It is only in the evening of life that this cup, symbolic of fullness, will be taken, when the shadow of the crowns will fall upon it... [and] the spaces of the heart that do not exist as of yet... are created by suffering. In order to be loved by the other, one must renounce oneself completely. It is a deep and unceasing ascetic practice. The crowns of the betrothed refer to martyrdom.

In 2007, I put together a summer course at the Sheptytsky Institute devoted to his life and works, almost all of which have, over the years, been translated into English.

One work that was not translated (there are others), but is now available in English thanks to New City Press, is Orthodoxy (New City Press, 2011), 450pp.

As Olivier Clément says in his foreword: 

The appearance in 1965 of Orthodoxy, a masterpiece of synthesis, was a landmark in religious publishing and earned for its author a doctorate of theology from the Institut Saint-Serge in Paris. Paul Evdokimov here circumvents all scholastic theology on the one hand, and the traditional approach of the 'Dogmatic' theologians on the other, to develop an original synthesis of Orthodox theological thinking. Although he constantly quotes the Fathers, he does so creatively, so as not simply to repeat them, but to incarnate their spirit in our own time and for our future. In addition, he enriches Patristic thought by bringing to bear on it the two great movements that have occurred in Eastern Christianity: the theology of the divine energies in the 14th century which enlightened our understanding of the material world and human culture; and the Russian religious philosophy of the first half of the 20th century with its prophetic intuitions, its Pentecostal understanding of the modern world, and its vital eschatology. A theological approach in which the human intelligence progresses by an ascesis of repentance, of the great conversion of the heart, metanoia, is here set forth so as to show, or rather celebrate, the theosis or deification of the whole human person.... An understanding we might call eucharistic, gathering together and clarifying the experience of life in the Church, an understanding inseparable from the golden chain of holiness, including the holiness of intelligence, which the Church venerates in those whom she calls the 'Fathers.' 

Clément, himself the author of very significant texts, has also been brought into English through New City Press:

• Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from Patristic Era with Commentary
• You Are Peter: An Orthodox Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy
• On Human Being: Spiritual Anthropology

All three contain much wisdom--as do his others from other publishers. Of course I read with great interest the second of the two, his book on the papacy, and devoted a section of my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity to discussing it.

I'm greatly looking forward to receiving Evdokimov's Orthodoxy, and I will have more to say about it on here when I do.