David Rieff on the Duty to Forget (II)

As I noted previously, among its several virtues, David Rieff's new and important book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, forces us to overcome any romantic or idealistic claims that enforced historical remembrance of certain, especially traumatic, events, in itself makes the world a better place.

The notion of collective memory comes in for unrelenting criticism from Rieff, and in my view this is wholly justified. He disputes flatly the idea that there is such a thing as collective memory as genuine memory of actual events which the collective itself experienced directly. (This is a problem I have long wondered about in all the papal calls for the "healing of memories," especially among and between Christians. How can the "memories" of, say, the entire Greek Orthodox Church be healed apart from healing each person one at a time if, that is, they have such "memories" in the first place--rather than having "acquired" them as part of their national identity kits?) This is indeed Rieff's point also: collective "memory" is an instrumentalist notion packaged into national identities and political ideologies; as such it is tendentious, narcissistic, unambiguous, unequivocal, and one-dimensional. It privileges power over truth; it does not scruple over historical accuracy, or acknowledge any ambiguity. This is what makes collective memory so useful to politicians and convincing in the hands of nationalist ideologues, and precisely what makes it so dangerous also.

Instead of an almost unquestioning insistence on remembrance, whose utility is assumed but almost never demonstrated, Rieff spends considerable time arguing that certain memories for a time may be useful in trying to prod people to repentance and reconciliation, but these cases will likely be short-lived and can only be determined on a case-by-base basis. There is, then, no room for blanket insistence on wide-spread collective remembrance by everyone forever.

Equally Rieff is not a one-sided polemicist in the other direction, insisting on blanket and widespread forgetting. He recognizes that remembering may have its place, and may be of limited use to some people.

Its utility, however, is in fact likely to be highly limited, and time-bound. Wide-spread insistence on collective remembrance has little if any demonstrable track record in making the world a better place. Collective remembrance in and of itself gives us no clues, no tools, no guidelines, as to how to prevent a future recurrence of, say, a genocide or other traumatic or violent event.

What might work better, then? Here Rieff turns to both forgiveness and especially forgetting. According to Rieff, both have considerable virtues and both have advantages that collective remembrance does not.

Forgetting, says Rieff:

• is more mature
• is more likely to bring peace
• is no more likely to ensure repetition of a traumatic, violence event than enforced remembrance is to prevent it

We insist (and legally so in some cases--e.g., France's Gayssot Act and later legislation mandating memory and criminalizing denial of, e.g., the Holocaust) on a "duty to remember," notes Rieff before asking: Why not a duty to forget? Would that not be socially useful also?

Related to a duty to forget is the question of forgiveness. Rieff does not give this as much attention, and in our final installment we will look at this in more detail before teasing out some of the implications of all this for both Christian and Muslim "memories" of such as, e.g, the Fourth Crusade.

Continues. 

Hey Jesus! What's the Hold Up?

When the headlines are especially grim, as they so often seem to be, it is hard not to pray plaintively for the Lord to come back right now and end the evils we see all around us, and find within us also. I rather suspect this has been a frequent prayer for at least some Christians since about the year 33 or so.

The fact that the Lord has not yet returned in glory has also been a frequent question for Christians for approximately the same time. We are not exempt from considering the question anew in our own day, aided now by a new collection of scholarly articles from Orthodox (Brandon Gallaher) and other academics: Christopher M. Hays et al, When the Son of Man Didn't Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia (Fortress Press, 2016), 240pp.

About this book we are told:

The delay of the Parousia—the second coming of Christ—has vexed Christians since the final decades of the first century. This volume offers a critical, constructive, and interdisciplinary solution to that dilemma. The argument is grounded in Christian tradition while remaining fully engaged with the critical insights and methodological approaches of twenty-first-century scholars. The authors argue that the deferral of Christ's prophesied return follows logically from the conditional nature of ancient predictive prophecy: Jesus has not come again because God's people have not yet responded sufficiently to Christ's call for holy and godly action. God, in patient mercy, remains committed to cooperating with humans to bring about the consummation of history with Jesus' return.

Collaboratively written by an interdisciplinary and ecumenical team of scholars, the argument draws on expertise in biblical studies, systematics, and historical theology to fuse critical biblical exegesis with a powerful theological paradigm that generates an apophatic and constructive Christian eschatology. The authors, however, have done more than tackle a daunting theological problem: as the group traverses issues from higher criticism through doctrine and into liturgy and ethics, they present an innovative approach for how to do Christian theology in the twenty-first-century academy.

The Impossibly Prolific Matthew Levering on the Holy Spirit

That horrible, no-good book-writing devil Matthew Levering (whom I am privileged to call a friend!) has another book out. Can you believe it? I think he's in some mad competition to write 50 books before he turns 50 or something. Or perhaps Pope Frank has ginned up some new enchiridion of indulgences, and for every book Levering publishes 294,000 of his closest family members get out of Purgatory? At the very least, he needs to s  l  o  w   d o w n  because he's making the rest of us look bad.

Set for release in the middle of July is Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Baker Academic, 2016), 448pp.

Here is the publisher's official blurb:

Distinguished theologian Matthew Levering offers a historical examination of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, defending an Augustinian model against various contemporary theological views. A companion piece to Levering's Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation, this work critically engages contemporary and classical doctrines of the Holy Spirit in dialogue with Orthodox and Reformed interlocutors. Levering makes a strong dogmatic case for conceiving of the Holy Spirit as love between Father and Son, given to the people of God as a gift.

In perusing this book, I see that, true to form, it will represent an engagement with the best of scholarship, contemporary and ancient, Catholic and Orthodox. Not only does his third chapter cover that old bugaboo of East-West relations, the filioque, but his sixth chapter deals with the Spirit and the unity of the Church. Along the way, there is wide and generous engagement with such Orthodox theologians as Vladimir Lossky, John Zizioulas, David Bentley Hart, Boris Bobrinskoy, Gregory Palamas, Sergius Bulgakov, and others.

There are few Roman Catholic theologians today of whom I would unhesitatingly say "When he speaks, listen." But Levering is certainly one of those, not because of his own ideas but precisely because, and to the extent that, he is a man of the Church immersed in her tradition out of which he, good householder that he is, brings to offer the world gifts both old and new (cf. Matt. 13:52).

David Rieff on the Duty to Forget (I)

As it happened, I was sitting out toward dusk on perhaps the loveliest summer evening so far, finishing the reading of David Rieff's powerful and important book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies before coming in to the news of the death of Elie Wiesel, whose efforts to ensure perpetual remembrance of the Holocaust come in for critical scrutiny in Rieff's book.

Rieff's book is one of several to have emerged stressing the importance of forgetting--indeed, the moral imperative and duty to forget, at least some conflicts at least some of the time--as I have noted on here in drawing attention to Manuel Cruz's book, inter alia. Though this work--as I noted here--does not deal much with Christian approaches to history and memory, nor to conflicts involving Christians, I have been engaged for some time in thinking with authors such as Rieff to see how useful their work could be to the on-going project of Catholic-Orthodox healing of memories as well as to Christian-Muslim relations in the context of (entirely bogus) "memories" of the "Crusades."

Rieff's book is a subtle, careful work that does indeed make the case for forgetting, but not in a simplistic manner. He recognizes the importance of memory and remembering, but severely puts to the question any notion that collective memory is a coherent and tangible reality instead of a political cipher, a metaphor, and, on balance, a rather dangerous tool of identity always in service of some agenda or other.

Moreover, he asks--as Cruz did--whether and where all this emphasis on remembering has made the world a better place. Did insistence on not forgetting the Armenian genocide of 1915 prevent the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1932-33, the Holocaust of 1939-45, or more recent genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans in the 1990s, and elsewhere? Has insistence on remembering the Holocaust solved the problem of anti-Semitism? Have no Jews anywhere been killed since 1945, or at least 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel in part as a way of saying "Never forget!" and "Never again!" to the Holocaust?

Continues. 

A Brief Note on the Somme

This month, of course, is the centenary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, the worst military slaughter in British history and perhaps the battle more than anything else that gave the First World War such an air of futility and waste in later assessments. I have on numerous occasions discussed books on here about that war and its myriad implications for Eastern Christians.

Almost a decade ago now, when it first came out, I read with great interest the historian Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: The British & the Somme 1916.

Duffy unearthed from Bavarian military archives fascinating and hitherto obscured German views of the British, whom the Germans held in condescending contempt as corrupt and decadent and the “poor little men of a diseased civilization.” Time and again the German interrogators could not believe that they were losing to an army they derided as filled with men of “crooked legs, rickety, alcoholic, degenerate, ill-bred, and poor to the last degree.”

This was not just Bavarian hubris, nor the infamous preening pride of the Prussian Junker class. Even as educated a woman as the philosopher Edith Stein, to my amazement when I read her reflections the same summer as reading Duffy, would flatly assert that  “I believe I can assert objectively that since Sparta and Rome there has never been as strong a consciousness of being a state as there is in Prussia and the new German Reich. That is why I consider it out of the question that we will now be defeated.”

Christians in the American Public : Notes on Neuhaus

As a loyal subject of Her Britannic Majesty's Canadian Dominion who is also a permanent resident of these United States of America, I find myself writing between Dominion Day (July 1) and Independence Day (July 4th) in the midst of another election campaign, with more and more Christians reporting a feeling that America is no longer a hospitable place for the faith, and with Eastern Christians in particular still struggling how to relate to the various states in which they find themselves. In such a context, let us consider for a moment how Christians, Eastern and Western, can engage the public square in this country by considering how one very prominent Christian did just that.

I just finished reading the wonderfully written biography by Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square (Image Books, 2015), 480pp. For those interested in the figure of Neuhaus, or the questions of how one Christian chose to engage the public square and such issues as racial relations in the south, the Vietnam war, the Iraq wars, abortion, and much else, this book will be fascinating. It also contains much on American Lutheranism (in which Neuhaus was a pastor for many years) and American Catholicism (to which Neuhaus converted in 1990 and in which he was ordained a priest in 1991) in the critical years from 1960 until the end of the last decade. It is, finally, a splendid example of how to write a critically intelligent biography of a controversial figure. (In a personal conversation I had last year at Baylor with Robert Louis Wilken, who was Neuhaus's oldest and closest friend for half a century, Wilken told me the biography was simply first-rate not only for its treatment of Neuhaus but also for the accuracy with which it rendered any number of controversial issues, episodes, and personages.)

Neuhaus grew up in the Ottawa Valley in Pembroke, Ontario, the son of a manse, his father being a pastor in Lutheranism's Missouri Synod. He would go on to bounce around the US in Texas and Missouri, inter alia, before spending his entire adult life in New York as a pastor and writer, where he got to know such Orthodox figures at Fr. Alexander Schmemann. He was a life-long registered Democrat and a man of the left in the 60s and 70s, opposing the Vietnam War and marching for Civil Rights, before gradually coming to be thought a "neoconservative" from the 1980s onward. Neuhaus died in New York in January 2009 after a second battle with cancer.

He was the founder of the journal First Things (which published my review of Olivier Clement's book You Are Peter in 2004), which I read first with fascinated horror in the mid-90s, and then with increasing appreciation after that, far less for its politics than for the dashing verve with which Neuhaus wrote. He was a witty, incisive "blogger" avant la blogdom with his "While We're At It" pieces. 

First Things did, however, begin to get a bit tiresome even before Neuhaus died. You could almost invariably find articles in every issue from a small circle of people (Avery Dulles, George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, Michael Novak) whose writings all grew rather predictable. And then, the closer we got to the Iraq war, the more the magazine became a mouthpiece for Weigel and Novak to argue that the war would be just. Boyagoda's biography shows that Neuhaus, behind the scenes, was at least a little bit uncomfortable with this novel argument if not unconvinced.

After Neuhaus died, the magazine's new editor had a dilettantish approach and the magazine's chaotic skittering all over the place made it almost unreadable, and I never again renewed my subscription. That said, Neuhaus was himself never dull, and I still regularly refer to at least one of his essays from that time, "The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy." It is more than a little staggering that, nearly 2 decades after he penned that piece, the forces of intolerance he describes there are even more aggressive and hostile than they were. Consider just one passage:

With the older orthodoxy it is possible to disagree, as in having an argument. Evidence, reason, and logic count, in principle at least. Not so with the new orthodoxy. Here disagreement is an intolerable personal affront. It is construed as a denial of others, of their experience of who they are. It is a blasphemous assault on that most high god, “My Identity.” Truth-as-identity is not appealable beyond the assertion of identity. In this game, identity is trumps. 

Part of this essay was an extensive commentary on a fascinating book I have discussed on here before: John Shelton Reed's Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. (Speaking of Anglo-Catholics, permit me to intrude here with an unrelated but delightful set of memoirs by Colin Stephenson, Merrily On High, documenting a type and moment in Anglo-Catholicism that is surely long dead now, alas.)

In his peroration, Neuhaus, writing in 1997, proved to be more influential than he could know in my own move out of Anglicanism and into Catholicism that same year when he wrote:

Almost five hundred years after the sixteenth-century divisions, the realization grows that there is no via media. The realization grows that orthodoxy and catholicity can be underwritten only by Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Perhaps more than any other single factor, the influence of Anglo-Catholicism among Protestants obscured this reality for a long time. It is a considerable merit of John Shelton Reed’s Glorious Battle that it contributes to our understanding of why movements of catholic restoration, posited against the self-understanding of the communities they would renew, turn into an optional orthodoxy. A century later, an illiberal liberalism, much more unrelenting than the Victorian establishment, will no longer ­tolerate the option. It is very much like a law: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. 

Obviously Neuhaus could certainly turn a phrase.

In addition to such delightful essays, I did also enjoy other of Neuhaus's books, including his most famous 1984 book, still of great relevance today, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. That book had great timing in that it landed during the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, and would afterwards be read by and discussed within his White House appreciatively as Boyagoda's biography shows.

In addition, I found even more interesting and stimulating Neuhaus's 1987 book (written while he was still a Lutheran), The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. There Neuhaus memorably and amusingly spoke of those type of Catholics who "exult in the freedom to submit to authority with wild abandon," referencing, if memory serves, Wilfrid Ward--he of the desire for a papal encyclical every morning at breakfast along with his Times of London. (Speaking of Wards and their descendants, and speaking also of biographies, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents is a rollicking good read by their son, documenting an hilarious mid-century couple engaged in Catholic apologetics.)

Anyway, back to Neuhaus and the public square: whatever one thinks of his politics and of the increasingly discredited "neoconservative" project with which he was associated (especially its boosterism for the disastrous second Iraq war, which has not just decimated but virtually destroyed ancient Eastern Christian communities all across the region), he did at least try not just to think through what it means to be a Christian engaging the public square of what he called an "incorrigibly, confusedly religious America," but also actively to engage it with vim and vigor. With some, perhaps many, Eastern Christians today pining for lost "symphonias" of Byzantium that never existed, or fatuously idealizing Putin's "Russkiy mir," or calling for confused if not superfluous "Benedict options,"  or perhaps equally romanticizing and idealizing Western liberal democracies, there is still crying need to consider the questions of how the Church ought to relate to "that dangerous and unmanageable institution" (MacIntyre) of the modern state. It is the considerable merit of Boyagoda's charming biography that he reminds us of a figure who did that with great force for many decades.

Ethiopian Bible Reading

Timing is everything in the book business--some say. This book, with an official release date of 30 June 2016, emerges in the same week as headlines were being made about the Garima Gospels (which are dated to sometime between 360 and 650) being discovered in Ethiopia: Keong-Sang An, An Ethiopian Reading of the Bible: Biblical Interpretation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church

About this book the publisher tells us:

In An Ethiopian Reading of the Bible, Keon-Sang An explores the distinctive biblical interpretation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC). He illuminates the interpretation of the Bible in a particular historical and cultural context and presents a compelling example of the contextual nature of biblical interpretation. Since the earliest years of the Christian church the EOTC has significantly informed the unique spirituality of Ethiopia. Drawing on his own experience of teaching theology in Ethiopia, Keon-Sang An provides a comprehensive consideration of the EOTC's past and present, and examines the interplay between tradition and context in biblical interpretation. An Ethiopian Reading of the Bible contributes much to current biblical scholarship and equips readers with the tools for a future of mutual learning.

Zion, Mother of the Churches of Christ

Just before Christmas I noted here the receipt of two new books in an on-going series, "Semaines d'études liturgiques Saint-Serge." I have just received the latest volume, edited in part by my good friend Daniel Galadza of the University of Vienna: Michael Daniel Findikyan, Daniel Galadza, and André Lossky, eds., Sion, mère des Églises: Mélanges liturgiques offerts au Père Charles Athanase Renoux (Aschendorff Verlag, 2016), 314pp.

Here is the publisher's description of the book, but for those who do not understand French I will give a summary of the contents below:

L’éminent chercheur Charles-Athanase Renoux travaille depuis de longues années à mettre au jour des documents dont la valeur est inestimable pour la connaissance des usages liturgiques anciens de Jérusalem. Sa générosité et son rayonnement ont suscité beaucoup de publications dans des domaines liturgiques dont l’étendue reflète la richesse de leur initiateur.

En reconnaissance au Père Renoux pour le service ainsi rendu, ses collègues et ses disciples ont pris l’initiative d’offrir ce volume rassemblant des études dans des domaines diversifiés, mais dont la source et le point commun reste la région des lieux saints, terrain d’élaboration d’une liturgie riche dont se réclament la plupart des traditions locales postérieures. Puissent ces pages susciter la poursuite de travaux scientifiques en faveur d’une connaissance accrue de traditions inspirées qu’il est indispensable d’arracher à l’oubli.

Notwithstanding the French title and description, much of the book--which is a Festschrift dedicated to the Benedictine and liturgical scholar Charles Athanase Renoux--is in English. Of the 16 articles included here by some of the leading liturgical scholars of our time, nine are in English, six are in French, and one in German.

At least three treat aspects of Armenian liturgical history and theology, including the German article by the well-known scholar Gabrielle Winkler. The majority of articles treat various aspects of the Jerusalem liturgical tradition and its influence on other traditions, or the influence of other traditions on it.

In sum, this is just the sort of diverse, interesting, smartly edited collection that everyone interested in liturgical history and theology will want to have in their library.

Recovering Post-War Armenia

Pope Francis was recently in Armenia, and as John Allen's article argues, the "politics of memory," on which I have been commenting rather a lot around here lately, was a significant part of the visit. Memory shapes identity, which in turn shapes present politics, albeit often in an unstable way as memory is itself not stable but subject to all kinds of uses and abuses.

What happened to Armenian memory and identity, and so to its politics, as it struggled to recover from the genocide of 1915? Such is the question at the heart of a new book: Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stamford UP, 2016), 240pp.

About this book we are told:

Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekcioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions.

Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekcioglu gives voice to the community's most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenianess sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles.

From 1596 to 1946 to 2016 and Back Again

At the beginning of June, I was invited to a private conference in Vienna hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation, which has for more than a half-century been devoted to Orthodox-Catholic rapprochement. This particular conference was on the pseudo-sobor of Lviv of 1946, that bogus action by which the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was forced "freely" to vote to "rejoin" the "mother church" of Russia, thereby leading to the official disappearance of the UGCC for nearly half a century. All this was undertaken on Stalin's orders and with the collusion and support of the Russian Church.

The hope of the conference was expressed in the title: “Arriving at a Common Narrative: The ‘Lviv Sobor’ of 1946 and Its Aftermath to the Present.” The original vision was to have Russian Orthodox scholars and official representatives there to discuss their perspective on 1946, and to enter into dialogue with UGCC scholars and hierarchs in the hopes that some common groundwork might be found leading to an eventual healing of memories of an extremely painful episode that is still cited constantly by the Russian Church even as recently as this year in the background of the Havana declaration between the pope of Rome and patriarch of Moscow.

The Russians didn't have the courage to come to Vienna, which was disappointing but entirely unsurprising. They sent a paper that said nothing but the same talking points one has heard for decades. No dialogue is possible when one party is too scared to show up; and no "common narrative" can be discovered when one side is ideologically committed to its own narrative and admits of no alternative interpretations, let alone challenging facts and evidence that put that narrative in question.

The chain of logic in that canned presentation in Vienna, and in ongoing Russian position, is this: the Union of Brest of 1596/6 was an historical injustice (committed by, inter alia, perfidious Jesuits and other proselytizing papists preying on innocent and helpless Orthodox) rectified by the Lviv "synod" of 1946, which the Russians then and since have celebrated publicly as an act of reunion. In this line of logic, 2016, the 70th anniversary of the synod was not an occasion for mourning or repentance, but of repeated, ham-fisted insistence that it was a good thing.

The fact that Brest has been subject to scholarly examination--including at earlier Pro Oriente conferences and in the two superlative books linked above--and the fact that the historical record does not bear out the usual version of helpless Orthodox being picked off by clever Catholics, does not seem to have altered Russian narratives at all. In this regard, I found the paper in Vienna a clear illustration of something Donald Spence argued, as I noted here: there is "narrative truth" and then "historical truth" and they do not always agree. It is sad that the Russians have chosen the former over the latter, and sadder still that their preference continues to cause a lot of pain to people in Ukraine.

The Gateway of Life

I have, shamefully, had this book on my shelf for the better part of a year now, but not gotten around to mentioning it yet. As June slips into July, and then to August, we will soon be upon the Dormition Fast and preparation for the translation of the Mother of Life to eternal life, and so this recent publication by Mary B. Cunningham seems especially appropriate: Gateway of Life: Orthodox Thinking on the Mother of God (SVS Press, 2015), 197pp.

About this book we are told:

The Bible, taken on its own, gives us little information about Mary, the virgin who bore and gave birth to Jesus Christ. Yet throughout the history of the Christian Church she has been the focus of unparalleled love and devotion, the subject of fervent prayer. For countless people she is the heavenly mother, the first one to turn to with their urgent hopes and desperate needs. To add to this, she has been the subject of significant debate over the centuries, concerning theology as well as devotion. Theologically, there were ancient questions centered on the person of Christ, whom she bore in her womb. More recently, many Christians as well as non-Christians are puzzled: What in the Bible gives us the foundation for this degree of attention to Mary? Is not her veneration a potentially dangerous exaggeration, akin to goddess-worship? Is it not God, and His Christ and His Spirit, that are our proper focuses?

Such questions arise especially in the churches born of the Reformation, although they can emanate also from people within churches where she is deeply venerated. It is not always easy to answer such queries, as the heartfelt love surrounding our experience of Mary makes it impossible fully to explain and still less feasible to convince someone of it. Yet we can learn a great deal from an informed and engaged exploration of the ways Mary, the Mother of God, has been understood in the Church. This book, by a scholar and person of faith, provides exactly that.

Eternal Memory?

Eastern Christians, especially those of the Byzantine tradition, very commonly remember their dead, both personally and liturgically, by singing "Eternal Memory!"

That prayerful phrase admits of wider usage than we may perhaps consider, especially when weighed down by the crushing weight of personal grief. What of, e.g., the memories of the destruction of an entire people, as in the Armenian genocide, the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust, the Soviet destruction of many Christians--especially Catholics--or the Holodomor? What are the risks of forgetting those? Do we need to be reminded not to forget? Must we pray that all memories are eternal, never forgotten in order never to be repeated?

Two recent essays suggest we need such a reminder. Anne Applebaum, author of such important books as, Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, has an essay in Commentary, "Russia and the Great Forgetting," which I commend to your attention.

And Daniel Gross has an essay in The New Yorker, "A Historian Who Fled the Nazis and Still Wants Us to Read Hitler." Both Gross and Applebaum, in their ways, remind us of the potentially great socio-political costs to the forgetting of recent totalitarian pasts in Russia and Germany.

The questions of memory and forgetting have come to preoccupy my thinking a great deal over the last year and more, especially in the contexts of Orthodox-Catholic relations, and Orthodox-Muslim relations. In such contexts as those, one often finds the same issue raised against the West by both: the Crusades. If you read the regular public utterances of ISIS, e.g., you see language of "the Crusaders" invoked with some regularity.

Such invocations, of course, are not brought about by people with actual personal recollections of living through the Crusades 800 to 1000 years ago and more now. These are culturally and religiously traduced "memories" designed and used for present political purposes on a broad level and, at the same time, often used on a more individual level for certain psychological reasons. This is the question that especially interests me: what is going on--at both an individual, and often unconscious, level and at a broad cultural level--when people make such invocations? What does that process tell us about them and about their psychological state, and about their political agendas?

One person who has done fascinating work in this regard is the sociologist and psychoanalyst Jeffrey Prager, whose 1998 book Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering I have briefly discussed previously on here. It is a deeply suggestive one that carefully explores some of these questions by means of a case-study of one of his early analysands. The work he has been doing in this book and elsewhere has opened up vast and rich terrain for scholars of, say, Orthodox-Catholic and Orthodox-Muslim relations (to say nothing of the Crusades) as well as the phenomenon of modern ethno-nationalism and the various founding myths of nation-states.

Prager cites recent psychological research that has shown the alarmingly malleable quality of memory and the fact that it can be, and often is, manipulated to serve our agendas both individual and cultural. He cites the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whose emerging research in the early 1990s I remember (!) reading as an undergraduate in psychology then. In works such as Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial, she has shown repeatedly that even so-called eye-witness recollections are often far from reliable. Her work should give us all pause and force a great deal more humility and circumspection in those who insist that their recollected version is the only correct one.

The Ecumenical Councils: An Interview with Sergey Trostyanskiy

From the first moments of its inception, this blog has sung the praises of Gorgias Press for its devotion to Eastern Christian publications in a collection unrivaled by anyone for its vastness. Here is but the latest of many offerings, a book I previously noted: Seven Icons of Christ: An Introduction to the Oikoumenical Councils (Gorgias Press, 2016). It will be a welcome addition to any classroom covering these most important gatherings in church history. The book follows a helpful standard format and will make not only primary documents, but up-to-date scholarship on the seven councils, accessible to students of our day.

The timing of this book is significant insofar as the topic of councils, and their status, has of course been greatly debated in these last days as most of the Orthodox churches have assembled on Crete for the long-expected council that has been in preparation for most of the last century. I asked the editor, Sergey Trostyanskiy, for an interview about this collection, and here are his thoughts.

AD:  Tell us about your background

ST: I am currently a Research Fellow of the Sophia Institute of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox studies, New York and Union Theological Seminary, New York. I hold a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. My research interests include Byzantine history and philosophy.

AD: What led you to put together this collection?

ST: The idea of this volume was introduced to me by John A. McGuckin who is my mentor and also, at the time, supervised by doctoral thesis on St. Cyril of Alexandria. Whatever this giant communicated to me was indeed some sort of categorical imperative. The rational behind the volume was to come up with a more up-to-date volume on the Councils that can be used by graduate and undergraduate students of Patristic thought possibly extending its readership to all interested in the subject.


AD: How do you see your book as different from other treatments of the Seven Ecumenical Councils (e.g., Leo Davis’s book from 1988; or more recently Stephen Need)?

We thought that the degree of discernment and theological import of those studies did not fully exhaust the subject. Leo David’s book, despite its merits, used certain conceptual tools that at this point appear quite antiquated, so to say. Stephen Need’s recent account has many merits as well. But again, this book did not exhaust the subject at stake (which is indeed inexhaustible). Our particular emphasis was on explicating the philosophical foundations of the Councils. Moreover, we aimed to provide more up-to-date reference sources for the subject matter.

AD: How has recent scholarship on the councils held up vis-à-vis earlier studies? Has there been a lot of historical revision, or is there greater continuity?

The science of Christ was set in motion a few millennia ago. Since then it keeps rethinking its own foundational sources. We can think of modern scholarship as a midrash on patristic literature. Indeed, it revolves around certain themes. Thus, there is a certain thematic and semantic continuity between any scholarly efforts (more or less modern) to make sense of this very aporetic subject (i.e. the nature of God, of Christ, etc.). In general, the science of Christ remains vibrant and moves alone swiftly, constantly reevaluating and reassessing its own historical and speculative accounts.

At this moment the question should be confined within the boundaries of the late-eighteenth to early twentieth-century scholarship. We can thus speak of “modern scholarship” within this time-frame. My opinion is that, in general, “modern scholarship” aimed to make sense of Patristic literature so as to properly elucidate its contents by rediscovering its historical horizons and philosophical underpinnings. In other words, the right exegesis of Patristic literature was the final end of Patristic studies during that time. This is indeed not to say that in many instances the studies of Patristic literature were ideologically leveraged, thus reading modern concerns into ancient sources and approaching the subject apologetically. This pattern indeed aimed at subverting the original intention of exegetical studies, practicing rather an eisegesis of Patristic literature. Even so, the idea of being faithful to the source marked off that period. The studies of the councils in general followed the same path.

I should say that there has been a major shift in Patristic studies in the second half of the twentieth century (since c. the 1970s). The subject area nowadays no longer appears simple but rather over-complex. Various clichés of the previous centuries and decades had being reevaluated and an increasing number of studies published. This ascent of interest in Patristic literature was also accompanied by an oikoumenical movement which sought to find common grounds between Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. As a result, a more sympathetic hearing was given to certain great miaphysite scholars of Patristic time.

The same can be said of various heterodox figures and movements of the same era. The agenda of restoring the reputation of the “heretics” found its implementation in the restoration of certain great figures of the time as Orthodox. Their theology was reset as reflecting diverging “theologumena” rather than subverting the purity of faith as reflected in doctrine. Hence, a certain “relativist” trend became fashionable among the scholars, one that tried to wash away oikoumenically established demarcation lines between Orthodoxy and heresy. Even so, more recent scholarly endeavors were not bound by the necessity of framing research within an oikoumenically correct rhetoric.

As far as the studies of the councils are concerned, all these aspects should be taken into account. Here we have more or less the same patterns of thought operative. Moreover, in the last few decades there was an attempt to translate the proceedings of the councils into modern languages. Richard Price’s translation of Chalcedon and Constantinople II, for instance, gave scholars and the general audience an opportunity to read ancient documents in English for the first time in history.

To conclude: the science of Christ and of its foundational oikoumenical pillars (i.e. Councils) is as vibrant as it has ever been. Its development can be described as discontinuous continuity or as a continuous revision of its own method and sources, one that remains faithful to the sources through the constant critical reassessment of its own feeble methodological and ideological roots.

AD: In the lead-up to the Orthodox great and holy council on Crete this week, there has been some discussion of two issues. First, some called for recognizing an 8th, and perhaps even 9th, council as “ecumenical” by the Orthodox East. Did you have any thoughts on that? Is the number seven somehow “sacred” for some, so that no additions to the list of “ecumenical” councils could be entertained?

Indeed, there is a certain numerological or, rather, arithmological significance attached to the numbers. If we apply Iamblichus’ arithmology to the subject at stake we may perhaps say that, in a sense, the non-Chalcedonian triad in this volume is completed by the Chalcedonian hebdomad. Even so, we may perhaps ascend to a composite number 21 (according to the Roman Catholic count) which is divisible not only by itself and unity but also by 3 and 7 (thus having 3 and 7 as its elements). At any rate, seven seems preferable for various reasons, firstly, because it represents the golden mean between the two extremes (Miaphysite and Roman Catholic), and secondly because it has a structural affinity to the Incarnate Christ. As we learn from Nicomachus of Gerasa: “its structure has been collected and gathered together in a manner resembling unity since it is altogether indissoluble, except into something which has the same denominator as itself; or because all things have brought their natural results to completion by its agency.” Thus, this volume comes to rest at number seven. We can indeed supply a speculative numerological account for the subject matter. However, I bet, not many bishops will endorse it. So, we shall better set it aside and say that, even if the number seven has a certain sacred dimension, nothing prevents Orthodoxy from extending the number of councils to 8 or 9 or 21, etc. for the sake of reinforcing unity and attaining other good things that would benefit the Orthodox Churches and their people.

AD: The second question is over the status of the Crete gathering, which remains much in dispute. Normally, of course, a council is accounted “ecumenical” in retrospect. But are there clear criteria consistently applied from 325-787 that might guide future discussions of whether the 2016 gathering is “ecumenical” or not? 

There was indeed a set of criteria for a council to be accounted oikoumenical (I briefly delineated some criteria in the volume). Even so, in some cases not all criteria were fulfilled and not all conditions satisfied by particular councils. However, the following generations of bishops endorsed such “formally impure” councils as oikoumenical. More important was the fact that for the collective phronema of the time these councils were marked off by the work of the Spirit made manifest through the gathering of the bishops. I think the formal criteria represent sufficient but not necessary conditions for a council to acquire the status of oikoumenical. It is the combination of formalities and the work of the Spirit that are thought of as both necessary and sufficient conditions for oikoumenisity.

In a sense there is a diminished degree of ecumenicity that we could already contemplate in the Seven Councils (based on their diminished representational quality after the Non-Chalcedonian fraction of Christendom was alienated from mainstream Orthodoxy and later on when the Latin Church suspended its participation in the last Council). The degree of ecumenicity of the newly proposed 8th council is indeed even more diminished as it includes only Orthodox (Chalcedonian) Churches. Hence, it is rather Pan-Orthodox (i.e. Chalcedonian Orthodoxy) or quasi-oikoumenical.

AD: Your own five-fold definition of “ecumenical” (p.1) notes in the third point the presence of the emperor to convoke a council. In the absence of an emperor today, is it impossible to have any council attain the status of “ecumenical”?

It the context of the modern world characterized by the fractured political units (mainly national states) and by the policy of separation between Church and State (adapted according to certain precepts of the Enlightenment that disjoined religion and politics), the absence of the emperor combining both political and ecclesiastical functions is indeed an obstacle for convening a council that can overcome “national interests” and rivalry between ecclesiastical groups so as to attain to the level of oikoumenisity.

AD: If, say, an aspiring graduate student were looking for a thesis topic in the area of the ecumenical councils, what areas, if any, remain unexplored or underexplored? What avenues of conciliar scholarship still need attention?

In my opinion, philosophical underpinnings of Patristic thought is the area of studies that was most neglected by “modern scholarship” because in its quest for “purity” of Patristic thought it incidentally purged it of its proper conceptual foundation. Thus, the link between late antique and early Christian thought was de-emphasized purposely. However, at this point, this policy seems to fall out of favor. Hence, the study of the philosophical horizons of Patristic and conciliar thought is a great avenue of scholarship that needs further attention.

AD: Sum up your hopes for this book, and who in particular will benefit from reading it

This book is designed to present to a wide Christian audience interested in Christian doctrinal development, these seven key iconic moments of intellectual history that formulate the classical profession of Jesus Christ as the Word of God Incarnate. The critical essays in this book, specially commissioned for this project by the Sophia Institute of Byzantine Studies and prepared by advanced scholars of the Early Church, set out an exposition of the proceedings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils; a review of the chief works of the major protagonists associated with the councils; the immediate intellectual aftermath; as well as a considered reflection or commentary on the theological ekthesis (theological profession) of each council. The end result is a book whose critical value should make it required reading by specialists, but also will allow it to serve as a solid and scholarly introduction to the subject for both undergraduate and graduate level students.

AD: If you were invited to give a presentation to the bishops assembled this month in Crete, offering them any advice or warnings or suggestions from the seven ecumenical councils, what would you say?

Well, the proposed council is not a typical one since no issues relating to doctrine are at stake at the moment, all concerns being centered on canon law and ecclesiastical discipline and issues associated with them. In a sense this reduced agenda is easier to deal with. Even so, taking into account the presence of significant disagreements on the issues of canonical territories, those of leadership and rank, etc., and the absence of imperial power capable of resolving any issues by arguments or by cutting the Gordian knot and thus appeasing the rival fractions and overriding their squabbles, I see that the only means of persuasion available for the resolution of contentious issues is discussion and argument. But that can go on and on. As the history of the Councils clearly demonstrated, the work of the Spirit and that of the Imperial power used to go hand in hand. If one element is absent, the means of persuasion by force is removed from the scene; the management of affairs by argument led by the Spirit is the only available option. I have no expertise on the subject of the proposed council, but I think that the council should move on under the guidance of the Spirit, who is the sole choir master in this case that can conduct the bishops and orchestrate any conciliar gatherings. Hence, the collective phronema of the Church leaders should reflect on or be the work of the Spirit.

AD: Having finished this collection, Seven Icons of Christ: An Introduction to the Oikoumenical Councils, what are you at work on now in your research?

I am finalizing a monograph entitled St. Cyril of Alexandria’s Metaphysics of the Incarnation (forthcoming, Peter Lang, 2016) and editing (with Theodore Dedon) a collected volume of essays entitled Love, Marriage and Family in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, also with Theodore Dedon (forthcoming: Gorgias Press, 2016).

Museums and Memories: Notes on Freud's House in Vienna

As part of my renewed and ongoing interest in the usefulness of psychoanalytic thought for understanding the problems of historical memory, especially memories of religious divisions, I made a point of visiting Bergasse 19 when I was in Vienna earlier this month.

That address, a scant kilometer from the University of Vienna where my conference was held, is of course the famous home, until 1938, of Sigmund Freud. After the Anschluss, and the temporary arrest of his daughter Anna by the Gestapo, the famous Jewish psychoanalyst used his connections, at the urging of friends, to flee to London via Paris. He would die in the British capital in 1939, just as war was breaking out.

I had known in advance that the famous couch had gone with Freud to London but thought that his Viennese house would have more of a presence than it did. The picture to the right is of a re-creation of his waiting room, and the one below at right is a replica of his chair in his study--next to the consulting room--where he did a lot of his reading and writing. But the rest of the house is rather sparse, which makes some sense insofar as he was forced to live out his remaining days in exile, and one is starkly confronted with one early effect of the anti-Semitism of the Nazis; but it was also a bit disconcerting to see the emptiness "filled," as it were, with rather slickly touristy trappings. Perhaps the museum in London, which I hope to visit some day, has a different feel to it.

As luck would have it, early next year we have a study of both museums coming out and looking at some of these questions: Joanne Morra, Inside the Freud Museums (I.B. Tauris, 2017, 288pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Sigmund Freud spent the final year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, surrounded by all his possessions, in exile from the Nazis. The long-term home and workspace he left behind in Vienna is a seemingly empty space, devoid of the great psychoanalyst’s objects and artefacts. Now museums, both of these spaces resonate powerfully. Since 1989, the Freud Museum London has held over 70 exhibitions by a distinctive range of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Mat Collishaw, Susan Hiller, Sarah Lucas and Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna houses a small but impressive contemporary art collection, with work by John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth, Jenny Holzer, Franz West and Ilya Kabakov. In this remarkable book, Joanne Morra offers a nuanced analysis of these historical museums and their unique relationships to contemporary art. Taking us on a journey through the ‘site-responsive’ artworks, exhibitions and curatorial practices that intervene in the objects, spaces and memories of these Museums, Joanne Morra offers a fresh experience of the history and practice of psychoanalysis, of museums and contemporary art.

The Habsburg Empire Reconsidered

This year marks the centenary of the death of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, who died in Schönbrunn Palace, whose magnificent gardens (pictured right) and "Palm house" (below) I toured one lovely evening while in Vienna earlier this month.

I was struck, when in Vienna, by the number of posters in the subway of one of the last and most famous portraits of Franz Josef, advertising a new exhibit reconsidering the imperial legacy a century after it more or less ended. Though it would get you lynched in any number of academic circles today, still I regard the question as one worth asking: were all forms of imperialism and colonialism the oppressive forces they are so often simplistically and reductively made out to be? My cursory knowledge of the history of the Habsburg Empire, especially in Galicia, and especially as it affects the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, would suggest very much that the answer to my question is of course negative. There was much in the empire to commend it, then and since, and I am looking forward next month, when my teaching ends, to reading a new history: Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: a New History (Belknap Press, 2016), 592pp.

About this book we are told:

In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to “their empire,” while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe’s second largest state. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were.

Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire’s administrative machinery to their local advantage. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire.

The empire’s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples―as well as the intractable problems it could not solve―left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Its lessons remain no less important today.

Nationalism, Apostasy, and the Ottoman Empire

We have seen a number of new books in the last five years or so treating both the sunset of the Ottoman Empire, and also the phenomenon of nationalism both in that empire and in the national Orthodox Churches that emerged from it. A recent study looks at nationalism alongside two other fraught issues involving Eastern Christians: Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2015), 332pp.

About this book we are told:

The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the focus of Selim Deringil's book, traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, and as this engaging study illustrates with examples from real-life cases, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their "denationalization." The book tells the story of the struggle for the bodies and the souls of people, waged between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers, and a multitude of evangelical organizations. Many of the stories shed light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two.

The School of Antioch

It has been my happy duty on here many times over the years to report the wonderful and welcome interest in the Syriac tradition of Christianity as well as the Assyrian community. A recent collection of scholarly articles deepens the exploration of these traditions, while also containing much that will interest biblical scholars: Vahan S. Hovhanessian, ed., The School of Antioch: Biblical Theology and the Church in Syria (Peter Lang, 2016), 136pp.

Part of the publisher's "Bible in the Christian Orthodox Tradition" series, this latest installment, the publisher tells us, 

contains the latest conclusions and findings of academic research by specialized biblical scholars in biblical theology of the Church in the East commonly referred to as the School of Antioch. This collection of essays will be of special interest to scholars of theology and religion, including those interested in the fields of hermeneutics, Apocrypha, Chrysostom, Orthodox Eastern Christianity, and Eastern Christianity.

Ukrainian National Identity

Though even in 2016 one still finds Russians and their apologists sneering at the very idea of Ukraine as an independent country and Ukrainians as a distinctive ethno-national group, the history of both goes back farther than some today may wish to admit. Set for October release is a new book that shows the historical roots of Ukrainian national identity are deeper than previously thought: Johannes Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier.

Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse including: Ilarion Vasilchikov’s alliance with Ukrainian activists in 1861, the forged revolutionary proclamation used to deport Pavlo Chubynsky (who is known today as the author of the Ukrainian national anthem), and the 1864 negotiations between Kyiv activists and the Polish National Government. Brothers and Enemies is the first systematic study of imperial censorship policies during the period and will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

On the Difficulty of Living Together (I)

This book's slender size is deceptive insofar as On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History, by the contemporary Spanish philosopher Manuel Cruz, is an at times dense and at others diffuse set of arguments about the relationship between memory, history, identity, and the politics of the future. This latter point really distinguishes this book, in my view, from other recent treatments of historical memory and forgetting insofar as the author insists that all too often debates about historical memory are so caught up in the past, or with preserving a particular version of the past, as to ignore entirely the question of what kind of future we want to have.

The author takes issue with a number of arguments as to why historical memory is said to be important. The act of remembering, he insists, cannot be an end in itself. Nor can it be simply a prophylaxis against future repetition of past horrors such as the Holocaust. As he puts it toward the end of the book, merely insisting something must not be allowed to happen again "leaves out the unavoidable matter of the necessary means" (73). In other words, to say "Never again!" to, eg., the Armenian Genocide tells us nothing as to how we may avoid such a thing from happening a second time.

Memory itself is not some neutral, innocent, or harmless repository of "what truly happened." It is shifting, not to say shifty, and always in the service of a narrative, an identity, and a politics. In that regard, memory is a tool of power, and here he quotes Goethe approvingly: "Writing history is a way of getting rid of the past" (21).

The author attempts something of a "small typology of memory" (44), noting five types of defenders of memory: those who insist memory has value in itself; those who see the past as legitimizing the present (e.g., defenders of modern European nation-states); those who link memory and justice; those who associate memory with necessary mourning; and those who use memory as a tool of criticism, denunciation, and a challenge to conscience.

One point the author returns to several times, albeit with great sensitivity given the tremendous controversy that would surely attend a more explicit argument, is that memories of historical injustices, and especially their victims, must not be always and everywhere assumed to be "absolute innocents" (51). To such people we must not extend what he calls an "excess of empathy" (55), allowing some past horror to excuse them of present responsibility. Part of his concern here--though he is less than forthright on this point--seems to be how often victims become victimizers. If victims are treated as untouchables, as moral innocents whose past suffering guarantees them immunity from present and future criticism, then politics will reach an impasse.

Cruz wants to put into question an over-reliance on historical memory insofar as it provides the resources for a settled, homogeneous identity in the present. He insists that "memory is, itself, a setting for conflict. Therefore it cannot be used to defend a harmonious and unitary image of identity" (65).

As I noted above, the real concern of this book is that "it may be more urgent for us to be able to reopen debate about the future" and so asking ourselves about the possibilities and prospects of "living better" (67). Cruz's project may be summed up nicely thus: "a future without any idea of the past is inane...[and] a past with no idea of the future is inert" (68).

In the end, Cruz insists that today more than ever we need the historian, for "he has the authority to reclaim forgetting," which is a way of "draining history" (95). Why should we want to forget, and to drain history? We need to forget certain things because they weigh us down from pursuing a better future.

As I continue to think this through, I will, in future installments, test out some of these ideas via a case-study method, using well-known examples of historically contested events among Eastern Christians.