Books for Christmas

It's not too late to order books for the Eastern Christian on your list. Here are some recommendations I have noted previously for those of you who are unsure what to get the Eastern Christian bibliophile on your list for Christmas. This is not, of course, anything like a comprehensive list and I'm sure everyone will immediately think of fifty titles I should have mentioned and a few that I should not but perhaps this will be helpful to some. (Feel free to add other titles in the comments.) I've divided the list into several categories.


Reference Books:
2011 was a happy year in this category with the publication of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity under John McGuckin's editorship. I discussed the encyclopedia extensively in a series of posts you may read here. See also the recent paperback publication of the Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity under Ken Parry's editorship.

Introductory Texts:
McGuckin is also the author of another recent Wiley-Blackwell publication, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. This is a serious, detailed study, ideal for those who already have some background and familiarity with Orthodox Christianity. Those needing such familiarity and background would do well to first read Kallistos Ware's classic The Orthodox Church or the book I use in my introductory classes on Eastern Christianity, David Bell, Orthodoxy: Evolving Tradition.

Dogmatics:
I have used in several classes this wonderful work by him who is regularly introduced as the greatest Greek theologian writing today, John Zizioulas: his Lectures in Christian Dogmatics is a distillation of much of his thought over the course of his lifetime, and this book makes that thought accessible in four chapters. For those wanting to break into reading Zizioulas, this is the place to start. He made his name, of course, in what is his most famous work, widely cited in Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox ecclesiology and anthropology: Being as Communion. But there are other works since that one was first published in English in 1985, including the recent collection The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today.

In addition to Zizioulas, John Behr's two-volume work The Way to Nicaea (The Formation of Christian Theology) is a significant work.

Covering some of the same territory, but in a significantly different way, is the new book by Khaled Anatolios (whom I interviewed here): Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine.

2011 has been a banner year in an already long cycle of renewed interest in Trinitarian theology. I drew attention to several new books here and here, but of these I am most impressed by, and have adopted for one of my courses, the collection edited by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity. Levering is also the author of a fantastic study on ecclesial matters that I reviewed in detail here.

Also not to be missed here is the work in English translation by Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, a really substantial one-volume treatment by an Orthodox theologian.

Patristics:
Eastern Christianity makes the frequent claim to be the "Church of the Fathers." For those new to them, John McGuckin has written the handy Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology. In a review in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies a few years ago, he highly praised the English translation of Patrology: The Eastern Fathers from the Council of Chalcedon to John of Damascus under Angelo di Berardino's editorship. Norman Russell's The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition is a welcome contribution and good overview

as is his other volume on the same topic, Fellow Workers With God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis. Michael Christensen and Jeffrey Wittung's edited collection, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions brings together a number of scholars to show that theosis or deification/divinization is no longer limited to Orthodox theology but has been appropriated and studied by Catholics and Protestants alike.

Social Issues:
Under the editorship of Susan R. Holman, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History) brings us a rich collection of scholarly articles treating various aspects in the earliest centuries of the Church. In their welcome "Popular Patristics" series, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press has recently published On Social Justice: St. Basil the Great (C. Paul Schroeder, trans.).

Iconography:
As I have frequently noted, of the publishing of books on icons there is no end. Everybody is in on it today: secular, academic, and religious presses from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox backgrounds. Here are just a few from several areas. For recent studies in an East-Slavic context, see here. See also this book for how icons fared in Soviet hands. For a good overview of the technique of icon painting, see here. For a general overview of the history of icons and their veneration, see here for a re-issue of a work by the pre-eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan. For icons in Byzantium see here. For a charming overview of the earliest icons in the pre-iconoclast period, and also proto-Coptic iconography, see the lovely little book I review here. For the Protestant on your list, interested in but theologically uneasy about icons, see here and here. But also see here for a very well done book that links images of Christ with their biblical texts, often side-by-side on facing pages. For a handsome coffee table book on East-West connections in icons, see here. Finally, for iconoclasm, see here for several recommended texts.

Ecclesiology:
I would be amiss of course if I did not mention my own recent book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

But there are many other books in the area very much deserving attention, including the splendid Radu Bordeianu, Dumitru Staniloae: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology which I mentioned earlier this week and will be discussing at length in the coming weeks. There is--once more--John Zizioulas's Being as Communion, noted above. See also Nicholas Afanasiev's superb and hugely influential study The Church of the Holy Spirit.

History:
Oxford University Press recently reissued Joan Hussey's classic work The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, about which you may read here. General historical overviews of Orthodoxy in a broad context may be had in the McGuckin and Ware volumes noted above under Introductory Texts. For North America, the United States in particular, see John Erickson's Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History.

Sacraments and Liturgy:

For liturgy and sacraments, there is nobody better to start with than, of course, Alexander Schmemann in his For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. His book on the Eucharist should also be consulted (as should Zizioulas's latest book on the topic), along with his other titles, especially Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. For marriage, there is no finer book than Paul Evdokimov's The Sacrament of Love. (See here for a discussion of many of Evdokimov's other works.)

Liturgy:
If Schmemann is the person to start with for liturgy, then for liturgical history there is, of course, really one name that towers above all others: Robert Taft. Start with his early, short, "popular" book, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Of his many other books, see especially his Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding. It is a collection of essays, and, alas, rather hard to come by now, but contains many riches. See also Taft's more recent book that begins a movement in a different direction for liturgical history today: Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It. This book is useful--as all Taft's works are--in debunking many fallacious or romantic notions some may have about the patristic period.

Oxford's Hugh Wybrew has also written an excellent one-volume treatment in The Orthodox Liturgy: The Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite. For more specialized liturgical topics, especially in the new year as we move out of the Christmas season and into Great Lent, see the highly acclaimed recent work of S. Alexopoulos, The Presanctified Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite: A Comparative Analysis of its Origins, Evolution, and Structural Components. For a less specialized and much more accessible study, see Schmemann's Great Lent: Journey to Pascha, a wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving little book that I re-read every Lent. In it I find Schmemann at his best, expounding on the "bright sadness" that attends that beautiful time of askesis. Another recent study not to be missed is Thomas Pott's recently translated Byzantine Liturgical Reform: A Study of Liturgical Change in the Byzantine Tradition. Finally, for a good overview of liturgics in general, both East and West, see the Orthodox biblicist Edith Humphrey (whom I interviewed here) and her Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven. 

Geography:
Where are Eastern Christians and their traditions and institutions to be found, and in what numbers? That is not always an easy question to answer, but Alexi Krindatch's recent Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches, discussed here, is a good start. See also several recent scholarly studies, broadly treating "geographical" and related questions, including that of Christopher Johnson (whom I interviewed here): Globalization of Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer: Contesting Contemplation. Juliet Du Boulay's Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village, as I noted here, is a wholly unique book, deeply moving in all sorts of ways. While also looking at Greece--so much in the news today because of its financial problems--see this welcome study on her Orthodox Church. Finally, Mount Athos was in the news this year after a 60 Minutes documentary (on which see below). I noted also a new book on the holy mountain, a very unique book, by Veronica della Dora (whom I interviewed here), Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place, from Homer to World War II.

Spirituality:
"Spirituality" is all the rage today, often a vacuous catch-all label for narcissism and self-indulgence by those too fat and lazy to get out of bed on Sunday, to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, or to train their minds beyond the "banality of pseudo-self-awareness" (Christopher Lasch) in order sentire cum Ecclesia. A new book this year attempts to take us to the heart of Eastern Christian spirituality: Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer: Experiencing the Presence of God and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of an Ancient Spirituality. Older works, invaluable for any serious library, include Tomas Špidlik's two volumes, Spirituality of the Christian East: A Systematic Handbook and Prayer: The Spirituality Of The Christian East (Vol.2). Also not to be missed is the collection by Olivier Clément, Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from Patristic Era with Commentary. (I note some other important works by Clément here.) Finally, see the several books by Bill Mills (whom I interview here), discussed here and especially here for his lovely book on Ephraim the Syrian's famous Lenten prayer.

Orthodox-Muslim Relations:

Islam continues to dominate the headlines of our day, and can be expected to remain a topic of great interest and concern for some time to come. Few today know, however, that trying to understand Islam, and examine its relations with non-Muslims, has a 1400-year history, begun precisely by Eastern Christians. Relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims remain very difficult in most places, but not all (Russia being a key example here), as I noted in the first part of an on-going series that began with Lebanon, continued on to a Greek context, paused to look at one inadequate recent analysis, and most recently focused on the Syriac churches encountering Islam. There have been dialogues between the traditions over the years, as David Bertaina's new book shows. (I interview Bertaina here.)

Auto/Biographical Studies:
While the publication of The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983 was a welcome event, they are not the full diaries, as Michael Plekon (whom I interviewed here about his own scholarship) noted in his review of the much longer and more complete French version of the diaries. Other biographical studies of note here include Andrew Blane's Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual & Orthodox Churchman. Two biographies not to be missed are those of Lev Gillet and especially that of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. For shorter biographical treatments of these two, along with many others, see Michael Plekon's Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church.


Audiovisual Materials:
If you feel like doing more than reading over the Christmas holidays, several DVDs have emerged recently, including a fascinating look into northern Russian monasticism in Ostrov (The Island).


Also released this year are two programs tied to books noted above on the Jesus prayer and Mt. Athos respectively:

Christmas Draws Nigh

With only a week to go until Christmas Eve, it's not too late to imagine the ineffable delight rapturously felt by the Eastern Christian bibliophile among your family and friends as he or she  unwraps a copy of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. Spread the joy this season--order your copy today!

Steven Hawkes-Teeples on Symeon of Thessaloniki

Previously I drew attention to the publication of St. Symeon Thessalonika, The Liturgical Commentaries. This major work was translated and edited by the Jesuit priest and scholar Steven Hawkes-Teeples, whom I was able to interview. Here are his thoughts: 


AD: Tell us about your background, including other research and scholarly interests.

I was born in 1953 and grew up in San Antonio, Texas. I was baptized into the Catholic Church during my first year at San Antonio College. I completed a BA and an MA in French literature at the University of Texas Austin. I entered the Society of Jesus in 1982 and was ordained a priest in the Byzantine-Ruthenian Church in 1993. Studying under Archimandrite Robert Taft, I completed a doctorate in Eastern Christian liturgy in 1998 with a dissertation on the liturgy in the commentaries of St. Symeon of Thessalonika. From 1997 to 2001, I was director of the Diaconal Formation Program of the Byzantine-Ruthenian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I also taught at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York and at Regis College in Toronto. Since 2001 I have been teaching liturgy at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome.

AD: Tell us a bit about St. Symeon of Thessalonika's life and work, and speculate if you will why you think he wrote these commentaries.

Symeon was born in Constantinople some time around 1384. He entered a monastery in the capital and was a hieromonk (priest-monk) until he was chosen to be archbishop of Thessalonika. He arrived as the new archbishop in either 1416 or 1417. He had a rather turbulent time as archbishop since the city was under threat of the Ottoman Turks during most of his episcopate. Many wanted to peacefully surrender to the Turks, which meant that most of their social and civic structures would remain intact under Ottoman rule. A military conquest on the other hand brought on three days of pillaging by the conquerors. Symeon sternly demanded that the city must never yield to the Turks. He was also frequently sick. To Symeon’s great disappointment, the Byzantine emperor handed over Thessalonika to Venice in 1423. Symeon died in 1429, just six months before the final fall of the city to the Ottomans, when much of the city was destroyed and virtually the entire surviving population was enslaved.

Symeon lived into his mid-forties, so his many writings suggest someone who wrote easily. Some of his writings, ones that I would judge his later works, frequently have a certain disorganization in them. My guess is that they were dictated to a secretary.

The two commentaries are "Explanation of the Divine Temple" and “On the Sacred Liturgy.” The first is a separate work and better organized. I suspect that it was begun before Symeon became archbishop. In the lengthy title he says that it is sent “to the pious people in Crete, who requested it.” The second commentary, in which he refers to the earlier book, is just one section of an enormous work, The Dialogue in Christ, which deals with all the services of the Orthodox Church. Both works intend to pass on and expand the tradition of mystagogy, the Church’s explanation of the Church’s rites. At the time, Symeon is also very eager to prescribe exactly how certain actions should be done in church.

AD: What led you to work on Symeon and to translate his Liturgical Commentaries?

One of my professors, Fr. Miguel Arranz, suggested that Symeon is an interesting author, worthy of further study. So I started reading his works in the existing edition, published by Jacques-Paul Migne in the 1800s. But as soon as I started reading, I found some very strange things. For instance, the chapter headings don’t fit the text. It’s as if Symeon forgot what he was going to write about after he wrote the titles. For instance, chapter one is “What is the effect of sacred baptism?” The chapter that follows mentions baptism, but is not even one complete sentence. Chapter two is “What is holy chrism?” Chrism is mentioned in the conclusion of that sentence, but the chapter goes on for pages and chrism never comes up again. There were other strange twists and turns that made me aware that there were gigantic problems with the text.

I began looking at some manuscripts and began to find some answers. It turns out that Symeon’s secretary, who wrote down his dictated text, decided to add questions in the margin to make Symeon's works more like Latin theological treatises of the time that had a question-and-answer format. When Symeon was first published, the secretary's marginal questions were inserted into the text as chapter titles.


There were a number of other cases in which the early editors just didn’t understand some of Symeon’s late Byzantine Greek. They corrected Symeon’s Greek in a number of passages, but corrected many of them mistakenly. So I needed to redo many of those “corrections.”

Finally, and most excitingly, I discovered that there is a very important manuscript in Zagora, a small seaside village near the city of Volos. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only manuscript, which has Symeon’s own corrections and additions in his own handwriting, added to a secretarial manuscript. I first got some photocopies, but eventually went to Zagora in 1996 and worked on the manuscript in person. Together with many interesting corrections, all the new material added up to several more pages of the commentaries, particularly the second one. Clearly, someone needed to do a new edition of Symeon’s commentaries on the Divine Liturgy because there was so much new material. I didn’t want to do it at first because I had never studied how this is done. Eventually friends and colleagues pushed me and helped. It took many years, but eventually I managed to put together a new edition of Symeon’s commentaries in Greek.

AD: These commentaries are particularly focused on the hierarchical or pontifical liturgy. Could you briefly describe how the pontifical liturgy in Symeon's day was celebrated?

For the most part, the development of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy stopped in 1526 with the publication of printed versions of the liturgy. For the first time in history we actually had not two or three texts, but hundreds of them with exactly the same words in the same place, and at a price that allowed them to circulate. From then on, the liturgical changes have been fairly minor and easy to trace. As we might expect, Symeon’s liturgy in the early 1400s is similar to the modern liturgy. It is a pontifical, or hierarchal, liturgy, so rather more elaborate that an ordinary priestly liturgy as in present-day usage.

AD: Robert Taft's foreword notes that Symeon is an author of "the first importance" who has nonetheless not often been studied or translated. Why do you think that is?

There are a couple of issues involved here. First, liturgical history is a fairly new discipline. Symeon is overwhelmingly involved in questions of how the services are done. Until the study of how the services developed became a major field of study, Symeon wasn’t seen as very important. Next, Symeon can be a bit “prickly” at times. He had strong prejudices. He disliked Roman Catholics and really hated the Armenians although he doesn’t seem to know much about them. Symeon’s theology became very popular in Russia through the writings of Archbishop Venjamin Rumovsky-Krasnopevkov. His book, The New Tablet, published in 1803, is at times a translation of passage after passage of Symeon from Greek into Russian. In the end, doing serious scholarship on a late Byzantine liturgist is just hard work and there are not that many people who are interested enough to trudge through it.

AD: Taft also notes a relationship between Symeon and Maximus Confessor and Pseudo-Dionysius. Could you elaborate a little bit on those relationships? Who else was influential upon Symeon?

Syemon is a part of the whole tradition of Christian mystagogy, explaining the Church’s liturgical services. It has it roots in the Old Testament explanations of the Jewish rituals. In Christian literature, we find mystagogical discussions in many of the fathers, including St. John Chrysostom. Theodore of Mopsuestia really developed a very rich symbolic mystagogy, as did the Pseudo-Dionysius a bit later. By Symeon’s time, there was a whole tradition of Greek Byzantine commentaries from Maximus Confessor to Nicholas Cabasilas. Symeon worked out of and built on this tradition of commentaries. But, above all, Symeon’s favorite theologian without any doubt is certainly the Pseudo-Dionysius. He sometimes mentions other figures, but the anonymous author claiming to be Dionysius the Aeropagite is the only one Symeon cites repeatedly.

AD: Taft further argues that some often overlook or look down upon the genre of mystagogy and liturgical commentary. Why would that be? What role does a liturgical commentary play? How would you characterize it as a text--more as "history" or more as "theology" or something else?

From the eighth century on, Byzantine mystagogy tended to become “contemplative” and not very participatory. As something to see and contemplate, rather than be involved in, liturgy tended to take on very rich symbolic interpretations. Some of this symbolism is not connected with the deeper theological meaning of the liturgy. This is a genuine problem that shouldn’t be overlooked.

On the other hand, we also have to say that Christian mystagogy is an act of Christian faith. Some people who want to do a ritual history or ritual analysis of Christian liturgy without a faith perspective may be uncomfortable with mystagogy.

In most ways, every generation has to do its own mystagogy. How we understand and how we participate in the liturgy is always changing. We should build on our past, but we can’t live in it.

Symeon’s commentaries are a sort of snapshot of the liturgy and the mentality surrounding it at one particular moment in the history of Byzantine Christians. Symeon gives a lot of information about how the liturgy was done in his day, what he and others thought it meant, and how he thought it ought to be done right; occasionally he also tells us about practices he disapproves of. Symeon really doesn’t fit into any of our modern categories. He was a writer of his own time, using other structures. For instance, Symeon doesn’t organize his thought in paragraphs. He sees it as a continuous flow. One of his most common expressions in Greek means roughly, “and on that basis it follows that…”

AD: Translators, it seems to me, are often the unsung heroes of scholarship. Take us behind the scenes, as it were, into the world of theological translation, particularly of old manuscripts. What is that process like? What are the difficulties you face, and how do you overcome them?

In preparing an edition like this, the translation is the final part, after all the hard work is done. The real work is figuring out what text itself means in Greek. What was Symeon really trying to say? Greek manuscripts don’t have modern punctuation, so one has to decide how many clauses to string together before adding a period. Maybe these two sections are so connected that we will separate them with a semi-colon.

This manuscript especially presented big problems with Symeon’s writing. His secretary wrote in a very clear black script with what was probably a metal pen. Symeon’s additions and corrections are in a reddish-brown ink and likely done with some sort of reed. Symeon’s writing is sometimes squeezed in between the lines and at other times in the margins. When the Zagora manuscript was bound, they trimmed the pages and cut off some of Symeon’s notes. The real struggle was to recover every last bit that I could of what Symeon wrote.

In the introduction of the book I discuss some of the work involved in producing the book. I wouldn’t want to say that the translation was easy. There certainly were moments when I sweated over it. Still, getting the Greek right was the much harder task.

For a serious scholar, translations are like encyclopedias: they are a good place to start. Once you get seriously into a topic, you can’t rely on a translation. You have to go to the original. Having a translation saves you a lot of time in reading through a lot of material quickly. It can help you find the sections that you need to look at carefully. Once you get there, then you need to read the original. There are all sorts of translations, but in the end, a translation is only someone else’s idea of what he thinks it means. Shakespeare has been translated into most of the written languages of the world, but a Shakespearean scholar reads Shakespeare in English, just as a real Dostoevskij scholar reads The Brothers Karamazov in Russian.

AD: What other works by Symeon are extant but still untranslated into, say, English?

To my knowledge, the only other thing by Symeon out in English is a weak translation of Symeon’s commentary on the liturgy of the hours. So everything is out there to be done.

However, as with the commentaries on the Divine Liturgy, the first thing we need to do in most cases is first produce a good Greek text of what Symeon was actually saying. Only once we have a good text does it make much sense to do a translation.

AD: Taft notes that Symeon's influence continues to live on--an example of Byzance après Byzance. Where is that influence most notable in the centuries since his death?

Much of the way the Divine Liturgy is still explained today in the Byzantine Catholic and Orthodox Churches is still very much dependent on Symeon’s mystagogy. In talking with friends in Russia, it is obvious that for many Orthodox in present-day Russia the real authority on the meaning of the Divine Liturgy is Archbishop Venjamin’s The New Tablet and that is simply Symeon recycled. Nikolai Gogol’s Meditations on the Divine Liturgy is dependent on Symeon directly and indirectly through Archbishop Venjamin. In point of fact, no one has really come up with another system, focused more on our participation in the liturgy. So without anything new, we continue to use the older system.

AD: If a graduate student today were looking for unexplored or untranslated authors and areas in Eastern liturgiology to work on, which would you recommend?


Serious liturgical research is an awful lot of very hard work. One has to learn the needed languages of the original texts, and one also has to be able to read contemporary scholarship at least in English, French, and German although recent studies in Russian and Italian are very important. So, first and foremost, one has to choose something that interests you at the beginning. It will get dull later on, but if you start with something that is boring to you at the beginning, you’ll never finish it.

There is so much to be done in Eastern liturgical studies that one can’t possibly name it all. Fr. Taft is working on finishing up his book on the anaphora and that will be his fifth book on the Byzantine Divine Liturgy from the Cherubic Hymn to the end. I am inclined to think that those will be the definitive books on that topic for some time. So I don’t recommend to anyone to work on that part of the Divine Liturgy because I doubt that you will easily find anything new and worthwhile to say. Other than that and a few other areas that have been done very thoroughly, it’s pretty much a wide open field. The other sacraments? Sure. Liturgy of the hours? Certainly. There is a ton of stuff to be done on the earlier parts of the Divine Liturgy.

If one is adventurous and hardworking, one could investigate other non-Byzantine liturgies that have been studied much less. The connection between the three Syriac liturgical traditions (Assyro-Chaldean, Syro-Antiochene, and Maronite) is a fascinating point to sort out. Especially the Ethiopic liturgical tradition has only just begun to be studied. If one has the patience, the brains and the interest, the sky is the limit.

AD: Having completed The Liturgical Commentaries: St. Symeon of Thessalonika, what are you at work on now?

I am currently working on two editing projects. First, I am preparing for publication the papers from the third congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgies held in Volos, Greece in 2010. I am also trying to finish up editing, indexing, organizing and often re-translating an English version of Juan Mateos’ book on the first half of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy.

When I finish those tasks, I hope to do more work on the Prothesis, the preparatory rites of the Divine Liturgy. With that I would also like to produce improved and updated versions of some of Symeon’s other writings.

Patristic Reading

Though, frustratingly, I have never been able to find it again after I thought I first read it in his writings, the late Pope John Paul II seems to have remarked at one point that "every age of authentic renewal in the Church has come about through a renewed study of the Fathers." It is precisely such questions as these--memory, hermeneutics, and context--that are among others explored in a new collection: Morwenna Ludlow and Scot Douglass, eds., Reading the Church Fathers (T&T Clark, 2011), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Reading the corpus of texts written by the Fathers of the Church has always been a core area in Christian theology. However, scholars and academics are by no means united in the question how these important but difficult authors should be read and interpreted. Many of them are divided by implicit (but often unquestioned) assumptions about the best way to approach the texts or by underlying hermeneutical questions about the norms, limits and opportunities of reading Ancient Christian writers.

This book will raise profound hermeneutical questions surrounding the reading of the Fathers with greater clarity than it has been done before. The contributors to this volume are theologians and historians who have used contemporary post-modern approaches to illuminate the Ancien corpus of texts. The chapters discuss issues such as:

• What makes a 'good' reading of a church Father?

• What constitutes a 'responsible' reading?

• Is the reading of the Fathers limited to a specialist audience?

• What can modern thinkers contribute to our reading of the Fathers?

The publisher also provides the table of contents:

1.Foreword: Scot Douglass, Morwenna Ludlow

Part I: Postmodern Readings of the Fathers
2. Jean-Luc Marion’s Reading of Dionysius the Areopagite. Hermeneutics and Reception History (Johannes Zachhuber)
3.Time and the Responsibilities of Reading: Revisiting Derrida and Dionysius (David Newheiser)
4. Seeing God in Bodies: Wolfson, Rosenzweig, Augustine (Virginia Burrus)
Part II: Reading Postmodern Thinkers in Parallel with Reading the Fathers
5. Emmanuel Levinas and Gregory of Nyssa on Reading, Desire and Subjectivity (Tamsin Jones)
6. The Combinatory Detour: The prefix Sun- in Gregory of Nyssa’s Production of Theological Knowledge (Scot Douglass)
Part III: Reading the Fathers Reading Themselves
7. Text and Context: the Importance of Scholarly Reading. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium (Matthieu Cassin)
8. Anatomy--Investigating the Body of Texts in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (Morwenna Ludlow)
9. Afterword: Conversations about Reading
Bibliography

Alexandria

Alexandria, of course, has long been recognized as one of the world's great cities, famed for its vast bibliographic holdings, its schools of learning, its orators, heretics, bishops, theologians, and much else besides. It is also a city that has been at the forefront of intra-Christian and Muslim-Christian conflicts. A recent book narrates that history for us: Bojana Mojsov, Alexandria Lost: from the Advent of Christianity to the Arab Conquest (London: Duckworth, 2010), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the fourth century AD Christian zealots destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria and killed Hypatia, the last director of the Platonic Academy. Over the next two centuries they systematically erased the entire ‘pagan’ heritage of that great city, previously renowned as a centre of learning. Later, war between the Byzantine and Egyptian Churches only added to Alexandria’s decline. The inquisition unleashed by the Byzantine Patriarch Cyrus against the Egyptian Copts drove them into the arms of the invading Arabs, whose tolerance ensured both the survival of the Coptic Church of Egypt and the ready conversion of many Egyptians to Islam. But when, after conquering Alexandria by force, the Arabs demolished the surrounding walls, an entire civilisation perished.

This book tells the extraordinary story of the destruction of classical Alexandria, exposing disturbing facts long erased from our collective historical memory. In charting the origins of the loss of dialogue between Europe and the Middle East, Bojana Mojsov reflects on the power and dangers of ignorance driven by faith.

Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm

Leslie Brubaker, whose collaboration with John Haldon on another book earlier this year on Byzantine iconoclasm I discussed here, has another book out this month: Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (London: Duckworth, 2011), 160pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Byzantine ‘iconoclasm’ is famous and has influenced iconoclast movements from the English Reformation and French Revolution to Taliban, but it has also been woefully misunderstood: this book shows how and why the debate about images was more complicated, and more interesting, than it has been presented in the past. It explores how icons came to be so important, who opposed them, and how the debate about images played itself out over the years between c. 680 and 850. Many widely accepted assumptions about ‘iconoclasm’ – that it was an imperial initiative that resulted in widespread destruction of images, that the major promoters of icon veneration were monks, and that the era was one of cultural stagnation – are shown to be incorrect. Instead, the years of the image debates saw technological advances and intellectual shifts that, coupled with a growing economy, concluded with the emergence of medieval Byzantium as a strong and stable empire.

I look forward to seeing this expertly reviewed in the new year.

Theosis

Based on the locus classicus of II Peter 1:4, and the almost equally famous saying of the great Athanasius of Alexandria ("God became man so that man might become God"), the topic of theosis or deification/divinization has attracted an enormous amount of attention if the number of publications in English in just the last five years is anything to go by. Over the years we have reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies almost all of the following:

In 2006 we had Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology.

Also that year we had Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition.

In 2007 we had two more books: Nancy J. Hudson, Becoming God: the Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa. Daniel Keating published a study of theosis that explicitly sought to situate it within modern Roman Catholic theology and demonstrate its acceptability to that tradition: Deification and Grace.

In 2008, we had a welcome ecumenical collection of scholars, from Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions discussing theosis in Michael Christensen and Jeffrey Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature: the History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions.

Also in that year, Kharlamov returned with another book: The Beauty of the Unity and the Harmony of the Whole: the Concept of Theosis in the Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.

And then Stephen Thomas published Deification in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition: a Biblical Perspective.

In 2009, Russell returned with a second book: Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinkers on Theosis.

In 2010, we had Paul M. Collins, Partaking in Divine Nature: Deification and Communion.

This year, Kharlamov returned again with the second volume to his 2006 volume: Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology.

And now we have just seen released Nicholas Bamford, Deified Person: A Study of Deification in Relation to Person and Christian Becoming (University Press of America, 2011), 176pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Deified Person: A Study of Deification in Relation to Person and Christian Becoming focuses on a theological exploration of “person” through the notion of deification and is placed within a Christian Orthodox–Byzantine context. The book offers new interpretations of person in relation to Christian becoming while at the same time exploring some of the difficult avenues of Christian theological developments. Nicholas Bamford encourages theological inquiry, and the book will appeal to those who wish to challenge ideas and push the boundaries forward.

Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering on the Trinity

Earlier I drew attention to a fantastic new book on the Trinity: Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford UP, 2011), 704pp.

I asked both editors for an interview to discuss this book and some of the issues raised by and treated in it. Here are their thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your backgrounds, and also how you came to know and work with each other.

We are both Catholic theologians, and both of us are interested in Trinitarian theology. Gilles has been working on Trinitarian theology for twenty years, from the time of his S.Th.D (on “The Creative Trinity”). Gilles’s publications are mostly focused on St. Thomas Aquinas, and on Trinitarian theology (have a look here). We got to know each other when in 1999 Matthew translated Gilles's article on divine essence and divine persons. Since that time, we've worked together on two acclaimed collections of Gilles's essays, and most recently Matthew translated Gilles's The Trinity: an Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God (Catholic University of America Press, 2011). We also met at several conferences in the US. We both have a strong interest in the theology of Aquinas. Matthew has published books in a variety of areas including, among others, soteriology, the theology of God, the Eucharist, the priesthood, natural law, and predestination (have a look here).

AD: What about your own backgrounds led you to work on a collection about the Trinity?

This particular project got started through a suggestion made by our friend Francesca Murphy, now at the University of Notre Dame. Francesca had translated a book of Gilles's for Oxford, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas and Matthew had known Francesca since 2003. She suggested to us that we might be interested in co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity. Tom Perridge, the superb Oxford commissioning editor, had asked her for names, and she'd mentioned ours to him. We got together at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC on 15-17 September 2007 to sketch a plan for the volume. At that time, our friend Fr. Thomas Joseph White was instrumental in helping us think about the outline for the volume as well as possible contributors. Bruce Marshall, Reinhard Hütter, Fr. Emmanuel Perrier, and others helped as well.

AD: There seems to have been quite a recent upsurge in interest in Trinitarian theology if the large number of very recent books is anything to go by. Why do you think that is? How does yours stand out?

One source of the renewed emphasis on Trinitarian theology is the retrieval of the Fathers, which has roots in the Oxford Movement, the Tübingen School, and in the Orthodox and Catholic patristic ressourcement of the early twentieth century, including the Thomistic renewal. In retrieving the theology of the Fathers, theologians had to pay attention to the rich doctrinal debates of the patristic period and especially of the fourth and fifth centuries. Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Augustine and other Fathers naturally inspire great interest in the doctrine of the Trinity. Another impetus was clearly the reaction against classical liberal Protestant and Enlightenment theology. Friedrich Schleiermacher's rejection of the doctrine as insignificant led to a surge of interest in defending the doctrine and in showing its relevance (think of Karl Barth). Lastly, as our Handbook shows, Trinitarian theology is a perennial Christian theme and so there has always been, in every era, a large number of works on Trinitarian doctrine. The Handbook shows that, rather than a “rediscovery” of Trinitarian faith in the twentieth century, there has been a real continuity of Christian thinking on the Trinity, notably in the Middle Ages, and during modern times as well. Our Handbook's greatest strength is clearly the comprehensiveness of its historical scholarship. In this regard, it stands out significantly from other books on the Trinity. Our contributors made possible a survey of the history of the doctrine that is uniquely comprehensive. The other areas of the Handbook -- for example its biblical and dogmatic sections -- are also superb.

AD: I can affirm that this is not just promotional propaganda, either: among many reasons I adopted this text for my classes, the overriding reason was precisely the comprehensiveness, which is very significant and truly outstanding vis-à-vis other comparable texts.

So did you have a particular audience in mind for this Handbook? What did you and Oxford have in mind by treating this as a "Handbook"?

The title "Handbook" is simply Oxford's way of signaling that the volume aims to be a comprehensive resource for scholars and students who seek an introduction to the basic areas of study that one might undertake regarding the Trinity. One thinks of Cambridge's highly successful series of Companions. Whereas a Cambridge Companion might have 16 essays, the Oxford Handbooks tend to have over 40. Blackwell and Cambridge both are publishing Handbook-like volumes lately. The audience for our Handbook of the Trinity is primarily Christian students and scholars (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant). We hope that the Handbook will be useful for classes, and once the paperback is published, which shouldn't be too long, it will become much more accessible for individual purchasers.

AD: Were there any surprises either in your writing parts for, or overall editing of, this book?

Other than the Introduction and Conclusion, we didn't do any writing for the Handbook, but instead we focused on discussing precisely the content of each essay with the contributors, and on editing. It was a joy to read the essays as they came in, because they were so informative and one was always learning something. Gilles in particular proved to be a master editor: he outdid even the Oxford copy-editors! We were also blessed to find excellent, timely replacements for a few scheduled contributors who were unable to write their essays due to unforeseen events. We were extraordinarily blessed in this Handbook by the talent of our contributors.

AD: Historically, of course, questions of Trinitarian theology have been thought to divide Christians, especially the vexed issue of the filioque. But over the last fifteen years, enormous strides have been made, and many Orthodox (e.g., John Zizioulas, Kallistos Ware) no longer see it as Church-dividing (a position given detailed exposition in the 2003 statement on the filioque by the North American Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue). What are your thoughts on the filioque and the ecumenical issues that attend it?

Gilles has written carefully and extensively on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son, and on the Filioque (the Catholic doctrine must not be reduced to the insertion of the word “Filioque” into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed). We are pleased indeed to see that the issue is no longer thought of as Church-dividing, at least by many scholars, and we would certainly agree with that assessment.

AD: Anglophone Roman Catholics have just begun to experience a new translation of the Roman Missal, including a new translation of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Do you think the translators missed an opportunity to translate the creed anew into English from the Greek original rather than the interpolated Latin version?

Assuming that you mean the addition of the Filioque, that is an interesting question. Perhaps what is needed is a footnote to the Filioque passage in the Latin version! Indeed, the larger question may well consist in the relationship of the Church today to the first seven Councils. It may be more an ecclesiological question than a Trinitarian one. As Gilles wrote, just eliminating the Filioque from the Catholic version of the creed cannot be the proper means to achieve ecumenical unity. Rather, if agreement could be reached and the mutual respect of each doctrinal tradition ensured (this should be the first step, a prerequisite), then opportunity could also present itself to drop the mention of the Filioque in the Latin version of the Constantinopolitan Creed.

AD: There seemed to be a moment in Trinitarian theology in the last three decades of the twentieth century where some theologians were trying to figure out the "social implications" of the Trinity--e.g., various liberation theology projects. Is that movement over?

Perhaps one could say that this movement has been given the opportunity to begin anew, but this time on a better footing. Rather than seeking the social relevance of Trinitarian doctrine by beginning with what society seems to need, it may be better to begin with what Trinitarian doctrine implies and then try to live in accordance with the exigencies of Trinitarian faith. In the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity Fritz Bauerschmidt has a splendid essay along these lines.

AD: Théodore de Régnon's infamous treatment of the Trinity (Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité [Paris: Victor Retaux, 1892/1898]) has often led people to assume that the "Latin" Triadology (especially Augustinian) is always focused on the unity of divine substance while the "Greeks" (especially the Cappadocians) are concerned about the plurality of Persons. Has 21st-century Trinitarian theology finally moved past these stereotypes?

Yes, we think it has, largely as a result of the work of patristic scholars such as André de Halleux, Lewis Ayres, and Michel Barnes. However, even if the Greek versus Latin polarity is no longer so strong, the basic impulse to set in opposition unity/substance and Trinity/Persons will be hard to overcome. Such opposition is obviously a wrong and misleading approach to the problem, both historically and from a systematic standpoint. Even today, authors frequently can be found who consider monotheism to be violent, on the grounds that monotheism seeks unity rather than permitting a diversity of gods and of religious paths; and some theologians are tempted to consider faith in the Trinity as a “looser” form of monotheism, a claim that cannot be accepted. Similarly, one fears that the need to articulate the particular strengths of Eastern and Western Christianity will lead theologians to continue to resort to negative stereotypes. Interestingly, these stereotypes frequently appear in the writings of Catholics who use them to criticize the Catholic Church. The superficiality of the stereotypes is thereby underscored.