The Electrified Tightrope Between Psychoanalysis and "Religion"

I'm working on a long essay right now about what I've learned from the literary scholar and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, whom I have often discussed on these pages. He persuaded his fellow analyst Michael Eigen to publish a collection of his essays, and since they came with Phillips' recommendation and under his editorship, I made a point of just finishing Eigen's The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (Jason Aronson, 1993), 320pp.

The essays rather meander somewhat which is not surprising at all. There are three things I found of benefit in the book.

First, I found Eigen's insight into the lust for omniscience very provocative and important. Psychoanalytic thought, going back to Freud, has been aware of the similar, and sometimes related, lust for power and domination and the many psychic implications and permutations of that. (I treat a good bit of that in my own new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.) But a similar demand for omniscience has not been reflected on nearly as widely until Eigen came along.

"The fantasy of omniscience is a denial of the unconscious," Phillips says in opening the book with his introduction. This is a point that would easily link up with Christopher Bollas's reflections on "normotic illness," which I discussed here. It is also, as Eigen  makes clear late in the book, a fantasy usually founded upon, and fueled by a desire for mastery over, some earlier trauma. If we cannot ourselves become omniscient, then we often project this desire and expectation onto others--priests, popes, and therapists being perhaps the three biggest examples. But Eigen offers an important clinical caution here in saying that the pressure to know, or to show that one knows, can often impede the therapist from doing good work, which sometimes consists simply in letting go and being taken up by and into that "evenly hovering attention" Freud first described, an attention in which one deliberately chooses not to know for a time, not to focus on anything, but instead to allow for the freedom to grow and develop in the transference.

I know how often that has been my experience. I was well into my analysis when, somewhat distastefully, I realized that my analyst wasn't cranking out instant interpretations of the myriad dreams I would bring her, sometimes on a daily basis. What was she good for? Why did she say so little? These were complex dreams, sometimes terrifying, and I wanted them decoded and thereby mastered. But analysis doesn't work that way when it comes to dreams.

Nor does it work that way in most other respects, either. It wasn't until many years after my analysis that I came to realize, with extreme reluctance and through clenched teeth, that I could spend the rest of my life on the couch and still not exhaust, let alone defeat, all unconscious dynamics and matter and achieve mastery over everything--an insight I resented and still do in some ways. Instead, it offers the freedom to move out from behind the prison of one's self-diagnosis and self-sabotaging search for absolute control.

It has been Phillips, and now Eigen, who have been helpful in showing that one of the benefits of analysis is that you can learn to forget about yourself, and forget about the futile quest of seeking total coherence, total understanding, total comprehension of and mastery over the unconscious mind. Perhaps such a desire is an occupational hazard of the intellectual life, especially if one's personality is of the schizoid type Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott, Klein, and others have so well described.

Second, picking up themes that Phillips would later develop, Eigen talks about the role of excess in our life, and the role of asceticism--a word he repeatedly uses, with obvious suggestive connotations in the Jewish and Christian spiritual traditions. Reflections on excess I think are important for Christians to consider because of how often we are miserly towards ourselves, and recreate God in that image instead of understanding His lavish "excessive" love, as I tried to suggest here, drawing on the insights of Jean Vanier.

Third, Eigen is noteworthy in coming from something of a Jewish mystical background, and being quite open with discussion of God in a way that avoids the reductive and often almost adolescent caricatures of God one sometimes finds in psychoanalysis. He openly discusses the notion of "faith" in several chapters, drawing on Winnicott, Guntrip, and others of the British Middle School and clearly going beyond Freud, whose treatment of God he finds, rightly, very reductive. As he puts is:

A goal of analysis is to unmask the hidden god sense displaced onto or mixed up with some mundane reality. ....In the West God was to function as the one living Reality which possessed the qualities of the ideal imago as such, thereby objectifying it. In Bion's language he was to be the one container for human desire who could not be exploded by it.

Finally, at the end of his book, in an offhand way, he notes that analysis should be seen not just as a talking cure, but also a "writing cure," which has certainly been my experience. So expect to hear more about this on here, including, soon, three new books by Adam Phillips I have just finished, including the very short Attention Seeking. 

Catholics: Heretics and Schismatics?

I've just learned of the recent publication of a new book that looks to be most interesting, and will continue the exploration, now increasingly well advanced, of the process of constructing late-medieval and early modern "identities" and images of and between Eastern and Western Christians: Savvas Neocleous, Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics?: Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century (PIMS Press, 2019), 308pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The political division of the Roman world into Western and Eastern Roman Empires at the end of the fourth century spurred the divergence of the Latinised Western and the Hellenised Eastern halves. According to a pervasive and deeply ingrained belief in modern academic, educational and popular literature, the ensuing antagonism on religious and cultural grounds between the two parts of medieval Christendom eventually led to the "schism of 1054." Less than fifty years after the schism, Greeks and Latins came into closer contact as a result of the crusades and the encounter was catastrophic, leading to the capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade. This study, the first to deal exclusively with Latin perceptions of and attitudes toward the Greeks in terms of religion, aims to revisit and challenge the view that the so-called schism between the Latin and Greek Churches led to the isolation of the Byzantine Empire by the Latin states and eventually to the events of 1204.

Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics? investigates a wide range of often neglected historiographical, theological, and literary sources as well as letters, and covers the period from the last quarter of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) first conceived the idea of the union of Christendom under papal leadership for the liberation of Eastern Christians, to the decades that followed 1204, when the crusading enterprise went out of papal control and ended up destroying the very empire which it had initially set out to defend. It brings rigorous analysis and a fresh perspective to bear on these antagonisms and divergences: it demonstrates persuasively the persistence of a paradigm of shared unity between Latins and Greeks and their polities within an integral Christendom over the course of the long twelfth century.

Desiderata for Bishops and Dioceses

With the news that arguably the most abused diocese in the country is set to receive a new bishop, herewith some desiderata for the new bishop of Wheeling-Charleston to set an example for all the others:

First, if he wants to be taken seriously, he will begin by ensuring parish councils have power to decide with their pastors on an annual budget and then require an annual outside audit. Nothing above, say, $500 can be spent without signatures of both pastor and council.

Second, the same will be done at the diocesan level: the synod meets each year to pass a budget, and then the diocesan council, empowered by and representative of the synod, works out the budget with the bishop and they and he are accountable to each other and the wider diocese for all monies spent, and for ensuring an annual outside independent audit.

Third, the bishop and parish council are also mutually empowered and accountable for the selection and removal of clergy. When a new priest is to be introduced, the parish council first must see his entire personnel file and be told by the bishop under oath that he has no evidence of any abuse and is not hiding abusers by shuffling them around.

Absent these changes at a minimum no bishop anywhere can expect to recover one shred of credibility, authority, or trustworthiness. All this (and much more) is argued in more detail in my new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis

As someone who, involved in the global ecumenical movement since 1990, has benefited from some of the works of Nikos Nissiotis, I am glad to see them brought together in this newly edited collection, Theology as Doxology and Dialogue: The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis, eds. Nikolaos Asproulis and John Chryssavgis  with a foreword from John Zizioulas (Fortress Press, 2019), 348pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Nikos Nissiotis (1924-1986) was one of the foremost and formative intellectuals of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. As professor of philosophy and psychology of religion at the University of Athens, director of the Bossey Institute, and Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he interpreted the Orthodox spiritual tradition for a Western audience and highlighted the role of Christian thought in the modern world.

This collection of his most fundamental and significant articles – some of which have been largely inaccessible until now – includes an introduction by the editors to the ecumenical and theological legacy of this exceptional thinker.

Oxford Handbook of Mary

With a release date timed to the exact beginning of the Dormition fast in the Byzantine East, this book, with a rich section on the East but much else besides, looks like it will provide a feast for mind and heart next month when it's released: The Oxford Handbook of Mary, ed. Chris Maunder (Oxford University Press, 2019), 736pp.

About this hefty collection the publisher tells us this:

The Oxford Handbook of Mary offers an interdisciplinary guide to Marian Studies, including chapters on textual, literary, and media analysis; theology; Church history; art history; studies on devotion in a variety of forms; cultural history; folk tradition; gender analysis; apparitions and apocalypticism. Featuring contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars, the Handbook looks at both Eastern and Western perspectives and attempts to correct imbalance in previous books on Mary towards the West. The volume also considers Mary in Islam and pilgrimages shared by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish adherents. 

While Mary can be a source of theological disagreement, this authoritative collection shows Mary's rich potential for inter-faith and inter-denominational dialogue and shared experience. It covers a diverse number of topics that show how Mary and Mariology are articulated within ecclesiastical contexts but also on their margins in popular devotion. Newly-commissioned essays describe some of the central ideas of Christian Marian thought, while also challenging popularly-held notions. This invaluable reference for students and scholars illustrates the current state of play in Marian Studies as it is done across the world.

We are also given the Table of Contents:

Introduction, Chris Maunder
Part 1: Foundations 
1. Mary and the Gospel Narratives, Chris Maunder
2. Mary in the Apocrypha, Tony Burke
3. Mary in Patristics, Andrew Louth
4. The Virgin as Theotokos at Ephesus (AD 431) and Earlier, Richard Price
5. Marian Typology and Symbolic Imagery in Patristic Christianity, Brian Reynolds
6. Mary in Islam, Zeki Saritoprak

Part 2: Mary in the Eastern Churches 
7. Mary in the Hymnody of the East, John McGuckin
8. The Virgin Mary Theotokos in Orthodox Piety, Christine Chaillot
9. Mary as Intercessor in Byzantine Theology, Bronwen Neil
10. Byzantine Festal Homilies on the Virgin Mary, Mary Cunningham
11. The Doctrine of the Theotokos in Gregory Palamas, Christiaan Kappes
12. The Russian Spiritual Verses on the Mother of God, Richard Price
13. The Mother of God in Finnish Orthodox Women's Lived Piety: Converted and Skolt Sami Voices, Elina Vuola
14. Marian Devotion in the Contemporary Eastern Mediterranean, Nurit Stadler
15. Mary in Modern Orthodox Theology, Andrew Louth

Part 3: Marian Themes in Western Christianity 
16. The Virgin Mary in the Hymns of the Catholic Church, Thomas Thompson
17. The Papacy and Maria Regina Imagery in Roman Churches between the Sixth and Twelfth Centuries, Eileen Rubery
18. Mary and Grace, Matthew Levering
19. Mary in the Work of Redemption, Robert Fastiggi
20. The Patristic and Medieval Roots of Mary s Humility, Brian Reynolds
21. Mary in Medieval Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin, Rachel Fulton Brown
22. The Idea of Mary as Sister in Carmelite Mariology, Kevin J. Alban
23. Mary in Medieval Hispanic Literatures, Lesley K. Twomey
24. The Annunciation from Luke to the Enlightenment: A Cultural History, Gary Waller

Part 4: Mary in the West from the Reformation 
25. Mary, Gender, and the English Reformation, Stephen Bates
26. Chasing the Lady: Revealing, Reforming, and Restoring the Virgin Mary in the Eucharist during the English Reformations and beyond, Paul Williams
27. Mary in Luther and the Lutheran Reformation, Beth Kreitzer
28. Mariology in the Counter Reformation, Robert Fastiggi
29. Mary and Inculturation in Mexico and India, Patrizia Granziera
30. Original Holiness: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Catholic Theology of Nineteenth-Century Europe, Sarah Jane Boss
31. Mary as Cultural Symbol in the Nineteenth Century, Carol Engelhardt Herringer
32. Mariology at and after the Second Vatican Council, Arthur B. Calkins
33. Mary and Modernity, Charlene Spretnak
34. Symbol, Vision, Mother: Mary in Film, Catherine O'Brien
Part 5: Marian Pilgrimage, Apparitions, and Miracles
35. Medieval Marian Pilgrimage in the Catholic West, James Bugslag
36. Marian Piety and Gender: Marian Devotion and the 'Feminization' of Religion, Tine van Osselaer
37. Mary and Migrant Communities: Pilgrimage and African Mary-craft in Europe, Catrien Notermans
38. Mary in a Mobile World: The Anthropology of a Moving Symbol, Simon Coleman
39. Mary and Multi-Faith Pilgrimages, Dionigi Albera
40. Mary and Modern Catholic Material Culture, Deirdre de la Cruz
41. Marian Apocalypticism, Daniel Wojcik
42. The Global Network of Deviant Revelatory Marian Movements, Peter Jan Margry

The Life and Works of Saint Charbel

Angelico Press asked me last winter to read in mss form a short little book that is now in my hands in published form: Hanna Skandar, Love is a Radiant Light: The Life and Works of St. Charbel, trans. W.J. Melcher (Angelico, 2019), 116.

As I said in my blurb, it is a short little book whose virtue consists in getting directly to the point, reminding us in pithy and pellucid sayings and examples of the clear and eternal truths of the gospel.

The publisher further tells us this about the book:

"A man who prays lives out the mystery of existence, and a man who does not pray scarcely exists." Thus writes St. Charbel Makhlouf (1828-1898), a Maronite monk and priest from Lebanon whose reputation for sanctity spread widely during his life, and whose heavenly intercession has worked countless miracles after his death. St. Charbel's homilies and proverbs are reminiscent of the sayings of the Desert Fathers: simple, homespun, and direct, yet shining and profound. "Success in life consists of standing without shame before God."

This holy monk speaks from a reservoir of silence about the fundamentals of the Faith and targets the temptations facing all Christians today: the flight from suffering, excessive attachment to comforts, pride over accomplishments, complacency, factiousness, substituting talk for action, fear of proclaiming the truth in an age of hostile unbelief. Alert to the reality of spiritual warfare, St. Charbel calls each one of us to hold fast to the Cross, "the center of the universe and the key to heaven," and defy the devil who seeks our ruin. This collection of some of the most beautiful words spoken by St. Charbel is augmented by a short biography that will bring him to the attention of those who have not yet made his acquaintance or profited from his wisdom.

Those Tedious Moon Landings and Greek Orthodox Villagers

With all this incessant and self-congratulatory remembrance about the moon landings going on just now, the tedium of which is most intolerable to those of us unmoved to fetishize floating rocks access to which costs a wholly unjustifiable sum better spent fixing earthly problems, I am reminded of a delightful book I have mentioned on here often before--but not for some time--which deserves a renewed audience: Juliet de Boulay, Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. 

There are fascinating insights galore in her book--about "hatch, match, and dispatch" customs; the latter, funerary customs, are especially interesting. She shows, time and again, how loosely the villagers wove together their Orthodox Christianity with beliefs and practices one might be tempted to call "pagan."

But along the way Boulay, who was in Greece doing her research at the time of the moon landings, documents how many people there utterly refused to believe in them, thinking the whole thing an enormous fabrication.

Thomas Berry: A Biography

When, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was first learning about ecological issues and the Church's possible role in them, I came across the name of the Catholic priest and theologian Thomas Berry, whose writings on ecological stewardship long seem to have predated comparable writings on the same themes by, e.g., the bishops of either old or new Rome, or other Catholic and Orthodox figures generally.

Now Berry is the subject of a full-length biography I look forward to reading: Thomas Berry: A Biography by Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal (Columbia University Press, 2019), 360pp.

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) was one of the twentieth century’s most prescient and profound thinkers. As a cultural historian, he sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to the earth in order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times. This first biography of Berry illuminates his remarkable vision and its continuing relevance for achieving transformative social change and environmental renewal.

Berry began his studies in Western history and religions and then expanded to include Asian and indigenous religions, which he taught at Fordham University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Drawing on his explorations of history, he came to see the evolutionary process as a story that could help restore the continuity of humans with the natural world. Berry urged humans to recognize their place on a planet with complex ecosystems in a vast, evolving universe. He sought to replace the modern alienation from nature with a sense of intimacy and responsibility. Berry called for new forms of ecological education, law, and spirituality, as well as the creation of resilient agricultural systems, bioregions, and ecocities. At a time of growing environmental crisis, this biography shows the ongoing significance of Berry’s conception of human interdependence with the earth as part of the unfolding journey of the universe.

A History of Eastern Monasticism

Too much of monastic history and practice is traduced today by people who seem to feel (as the useful phrase has it) they can magic up a solution to problems in Church and world alike. Careful study of monastic history, theology, and structures, as well as attendance upon the broader problems of historiography and the relationship between history and theology, is one way to avoid some of these traps. A recent book by a well-respected author will assist in this: The I.B. Tauris History of Monasticism:The Eastern Tradition by John Binns (I.B. Tauris, 2018), 336pp.

Binns is the author of, inter alia, the recent study, The Orthodox Church of Ethiopia as well as Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314-631.

About this new book on monasticism, the publisher tells us the following:

For all its rich history in the Latin lands, Christian monasticism began in the east; and it is from the third-century Egyptian wilderness that the wellsprings of monastic culture and spirituality can most directly be sourced. This essential companion to the corresponding I.B.Tauris volume on the western tradition thus begins with St Anthony, the 'Father of Monks', who retreated with his disciples into the scorched Eastern Desert. Anthony inspired the former Roman conscript Pachomius (292-348 CE) to establish a monastery for men and women and devise a formal rule. Such community monasticism then brought cells of hermits together into a federalised structure where property was held in common under an abbot or abbess.

John Binns shows how the Orthodox community of Mount Athos and the western Rule of St Benedict were alike strongly influenced by the austerity and sanctity that began with the original Desert Fathers and also by the organisational efforts of Pachomius. This vivid, authoritative account traces the four main branches of eastern Christianity, up to and beyond the Great Schism of 1054.

Oxford Handbook of Early Biblical Interpretation

With chapters by Orthodox scholars such as John Behr, Peter Bouteneff, and Mary Cunningham, as well as many other riches, this is yet another Oxford handbook that no serious library will want to be without: The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation, eds., Paul M. Blowers and Peter W Martens (Oxford UP, July 2018), 784pp.

About this hefty collection the publisher tells us this:

The Bible was the essence of virtually every aspect of the life of the early churches. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation explores a wide array of themes related to the reception, canonization, interpretation, uses, and legacies of the Bible in early Christianity. Each section contains overviews and cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of the field. 

Part One examines the material text transmitted, translated, and invested with authority, and the very conceptualization of sacred Scripture as God's word for the church. Part Two looks at the culture and disciplines or science of interpretation in representative exegetical traditions. Part Three addresses the diverse literary and non-literary modes of interpretation, while Part Four canvasses the communal background and foreground of early Christian interpretation, where the Bible was paramount in shaping normative Christian identity. Part Five assesses the determinative role of the Bible in major developments and theological controversies in the life of the churches. Part Six returns to interpretation proper and samples how certain abiding motifs from within scriptural revelation were treated by major Christian expositors.

The overall history of biblical interpretation has itself now become the subject of a growing scholarship and the final part skilllfully examines how early Christian exegesis was retrieved and critically evaluated in later periods of church history. Taken together, the chapters provide nuanced paths of introduction for students and scholars from a wide spectrum of academic fields, including classics, biblical studies, the general history of interpretation, the social and cultural history of late ancient and early medieval Christianity, historical theology, and systematic and contextual theology. Readers will be oriented to the major resources for, and issues in, the critical study of early Christian biblical interpretation.

Incarnate Maternal Bodies

I briefly met the author of this new book when I was in Romania in January for the inaugural IOTA conference. Carrie Frederick Frost was and perhaps still is one of the officers of the International Orthodox Theological Association as well as the author of Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East (Paulist Press, 2019), 144pp. About the book the publisher tells us this:

In Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East, Carrie Frederick Frost places Orthodox Christian sources on motherhood icons, hymns, and prayers into conversation with each other. In so doing, she brings an anchored vision of motherhood to the twenty-first century especially the embodied experience of motherhood.

Along the way, Frost addresses practices of the Church that have neglected mother s bodies, offering a insight for others who also choose to live within truth-bearing but flawed traditions. Whether female or male, whether mothers or not, whether mothers adoptive or biological we each make our appearance in the cosmos through a maternal body; our mother s body gives us our own body. In these bodies we live our lives and find our way into the next. From the unexpected and fresh vantage point of the maternal body, Frost offers new ways of understanding our incarnate experience as humans and better cultivating a relationship with our Creator.

Iconography and Western Christianity

As I have noted on here from the beginning, Western interest in Byzantine iconography has been growing for at least two decades now. One of the best books to introduce the area to Latin Catholics is Jeana Visel's Icons in the Western Church, which I am using later this week with some high-school students coming to the University of Saint Francis for almost a week in which they will learn about the history and theology of images, interact with university faculty from across all disciplines, and then paint their own icons with the help, and under the guidance, of Lorie Herbel, who has done this now three years in a row, and is just a wonderful teacher.

Magical Episcopal Thinking

Catholic apologists make much hay insisting that faith is not magic, and is compatible with reason. Catholics frequently talk about their own intellectual tradition as something very considerable, demonstrating a long tradition of thinking about big questions in a rigorous and serious way. And yet, when it comes to the ongoing abuse of sex, money, and power in the Church today, the default for virtually all bishops, and most others, is to magic up some spiritualized solution that will in fact solve nothing: just pray and fast more, little children! (The other, equally fatuous, approach is to scapegoat: if only we didn't have all these gays, or this "heretical" pope, or these bad bishops, or these "lavender mafias" then everything would be grand.)

There is no serious reasoning here. It is partial, ideological, and blind. One can cite, week after week, examples of this magical "thinking," this infantile exercise in wish fulfillment exactly as Freud demonstrated. It comes from those who identify as liberal, progressive, conservative, and traditional--and just about everyone in-between. This time it comes from Phoenix, whose bishop published his weekly column, ostensibly offering practical solutions for people to overcome these crises. While claiming that "problems and crises must not be over-spiritualized," he does exactly that by mindlessly rehearsing all the same old procedures in place for years now which have not prevented the crisis, and then by even more mindlessly exhorting people to just somehow believe more! believe harder! have stronger faith!

What is absent, of course, is any admission of what bishops should do, both immediately and by way of long-term reform. Instead, it's the usual pious guff designed to deflect from their own culpable wickedness and to inflict guilt on the people of God in the usually pathological way we have come to expect from hierarchs. (The Spanish Jesuit psychoanalyst Carlos Dominguez-Morano is the absolute best person here for diagnosing these psychopathological dynamics masquerading as piety.)

Thus the Latin ordinary of Phoenix claims: "Scandals are the manifestation of a crisis of faith. Therefore, scandals will be healed by strong faith, spiritual courage and heroic confidence in our Lord." This, as I argued here, is a tendentious and obvious twisting of the very meaning of "scandal," which today only means one thing: bad PR for the bishop.

And as I argued in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, drawing on Dominguez-Morano and others, the fetish for "spiritualized" solutions reflects a crypto-monophysite ecclesiology which will only continue to harm the Church.

Rather than indulging in this nonsense, what is needed is to begin to talk about power, about structures, and about the unhistorical and theologically unjustifiable monopoly on power held by hierarchs and clerics in the Church today.

My book, taking with deadly seriousness the Church's teaching on original sin, is guided by one adamantine principle: nobody, at any point and for any reason, in any organization--the Church or otherwise--should ever have a monopoly on power. The lure of libido dominandi (original sin's chief and perennially tempting manifestation) is too great, and ordination does nothing to lessen it (another form of magical thinking). The reforms we must begin to put in place in the Church today must ensure going forward that nobody ever again has a monopoly on decision-making power--whether over the appointment of parish clergy, the diocesan budget, or any other major matter.

Laics, clerics, and hierarchs must learn to hold each other accountable. Absent this, the abuse crisis will continue sine die.

Iconoclasm is Always a Prelude to a New Politics

In a time when Confederate monuments are being torn down, other colonial and imperial figures erased from university campuses, and now a mural in San Francisco being covered up, I pause only to note an invaluable book by James Noyes that many years ago laid out with pellucid cogency this rule: whenever iconoclasm breaks out, it is always a prelude to a new politics. 

Unlike many books treating iconoclasm, which often confine themselves to the so-called Byzantine outbreaks of the eighth-ninth centuries, Noyes' book, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence, and the Culture of Image Breaking in Christianity and Islam, takes a wide and fascinating approach, showing the outbreak of image smashing in a variety of Christian and Muslim contexts ancient and modern, and also in 20th-century politics in Germany and Russia, inter alia. These latter outbreaks were tied directly to the rise of revolutionary politics in and after 1917 in Russia, and the rise of Nazism after 1933 in Germany. Both destroyed old images and art and replaced it with that of their own devising for obviously political purposes.

The same is no less true today whenever the demand is made for historical memorials or other art forms to be effaced, erased, removed, or destroyed. For some people perhaps more than others, "we suffer from our reminiscences," as Freud famously said.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/12 (20 June 2019)

Say what many will about Freud, he seems, relative to Jung and Lacan, to have been a far more faithful husband and far less destructive father. Indeed, I would put that more strongly, based on reading, inter alia, Paul Roazen's invaluable books: Freud seems to have had a very charming domestic life as a rather conservative member of the upper middle-classes of Vienna. Lunch times were, many reported, including Oskar Pfister, a warm, languid opportunity to indulge in unhurried and wide-ranging conversation about all manner of topics without embarrassment. All the hoary ideas of him as some kind of sexually libertarian revolutionary find no support in how he lived his life.

Not so Lacan. I've tried off and on to read him over the years, but never with any success. What little I have read of and about him has consistently made him sound like an over-rated wanker who mistook obscurity for profundity, and recondite jargon and graphics for any serious or concrete insight.

He does not improve after reading the most recent London Review of Books, where we find L.O. Rowlands' review of A Father: Puzzle, written by Sibylle Lacan and translated by A.N. West (MIT Press, 2019), 92pp., This odd memoir of sorts makes Lacan appear by now completely unattractive. It seems impossible to understand his relationship to her other than a lifelong sadistic dangling of interest, affection, and attention that was quickly retracted, slowly driving her mad. He eventually recommended she go into analysis, but then ended up sleeping with his daughter's analyst. In the end, Sibylle killed herself.

Andrew Preston has a long and fascinating review of Michael Cotey-Morgan's new book The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2018), 424pp. The negotiations dragged on for so long and were so complicated, requiring the presence of so many people, that they ended up moving from Helsinki, judged to have inadequate and insufficient facilities for all the delegations, to Geneva. Precisely because of their complexity and length, most governments in the West and Soviet bloc alike seem to have taken their eyes off the ball, and misjudged what ought to have been top priorities for each vis-a-vis the other. In the end, it is suggested that both sides underestimated the consequences of several of the agreements, and that doing so would prove costly to the Soviets in ways they never expected.

Along the way there are amusing anecdotes, not least about the chef de mission for France. His government, like apparently all the others, lost interest in the endlessly complicated discussions, and apparently begged for far fewer documents to be sent home regularly. So he devised an ingenious method for making things work: at the end of the week, he would send, each Friday, a list of questions for further instruction back to Paris. Then he got on a plane from Geneva, flew to Paris, went into his office Monday morning, answered all his own questions with fresh instructions on how to proceed, and returned to Geneva!

Paris 1919: Centenary of the Versailles Treaty

I was reminded that yesterday was the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which of course brought the First World War to an end. But unlike other anniversaries connected to this war and others, few people seem to be marking this anniversary, largely because the Treaty has been widely thought too punitive of Germany and thus to have played an overlarge role in the Second World War.

In any event, if you are at all interested in the negotiations that led to that treaty, ending a war in which millions of Eastern Christians were slaughtered (Armenians, Pontic Greeks, Syriac and Assyrian Christians, inter alia, in 1915--to say nothing of the violence done to Greek Christians in the postwar forced migrations after 1923), then permit me again to recommend to you one of my favourite books about the entire war and its aftermath, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. It is brilliantly written, hilariously funny in parts, and deeply revealing of the characters of such as Wilson, Lloyd George, Poincaré and others of the second tier, including the leadership of Romania and Greece. It's always an enjoyable re-read.

More Gifts from Madonna House

Twice in as many weeks the lovely people of Madonna House have gifted me with books. I noted here receiving a copy of a biography of their founder. Now in the mail Fr Bob Wild has sent me copies of two of his recent books: first, A Catholic Reading Guide to Universalism,treating mostly contemporary Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox sources. Published in 2015 by Resource Publications, the book clocks in at 194pp. About it the publisher tells us this:

This reading guide to some of the philosophical and theological literature on universalism offers practical help in providing informed material on a topic that is often treated in a superficial and unenlightened manner. The reader may be surprised to learn that universalism was the predominant belief in the early centuries, and that it has always been present in the Christian tradition. Spurred on by von Balthasar's book, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? Robert Wild's guide provides current studies that support Von Balthasar's arguments that universalism is a legitimate hope for the Christian.

The second book, released a year later, treats of a related theme: A Catholic Reading Guide to Conditional Immortality: The Third Alternative to Hell and Universalism (Resource Publications), 218pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Like many other people, the long tradition about hell has been a source of serious confusion and distress for me. Over the past six years or so I was relieved to discover two other alternatives that are also part of the Christian tradition, though less prominent--universalism and the subject of the present book, conditional immortality. Universalism--that everyone would eventually be saved--did not, in the final analysis, seem to really come to grips with the overwhelming scriptural testimony that some kind of radical fateful decision is possible to people. Conditional immortality--that people who absolutely refuse God's plan for them will be taken out of existence--seems to me the best scriptural understanding of what the Lord meant by "losing one's soul"--not everlasting punishment but the withdrawal of existence. This book is an attempt to explain this theological theory. It is not presented as a definite dogma or teaching of the church, but as one of the possible results of a persistent and irrevocable decision against God.

Episcopal Elites and "Lay Involvement" in the Abuse Crisis

Perhaps some day the concept of "lay involvement" in ecclesial governance will not be treated as though it were a rare strand of plague needing special handling by men in hazmat suits trying their best to contain this contagion as much as possible. Certainly the grudging acknowledgement of "lay involvement" by the American bishops earlier this month is evidence of this, as is the fact that the motu proprio of the pope in May, which I discussed here, finding it insultingly inadequate (to put it mildly), has no "lay involvement" at all but fatuously continues to rely on bishops to police each other. It is clear that the involvement of laics--a term much to be preferred for all the reasons Nicholas Afanasiev gave--is feared by churchmen today not for any remotely theological, still less doctrinal, reasons, but merely because of prejudice, class snobbery, and a fear of loss of status.

As Claudia Rapp, Peter Brown, and others have shown, bishops have increasingly since the fourth century been part of the elites of empire and other societies in which they found themselves--and that is still true today. It is of course the nature of elites that they are exclusive and seek to police the boundaries of whom they permit to enter and whom they exclude. And elites with a monopoly on power are all the more fierce in protecting the same, as bishops undeniably have and do, especially if there is also money on the line--and as the recent news out of West Virginia makes clear, there is cash flowing about freely from one oleaginous hand to another. The episcopal sense of entitlement and privilege remains unabated even at this late hour. Who among us wouldn't fear the loss of constantly eating in the best restaurants, drinking the finest single malt, and having fresh flowers delivered every day--on someone else's dime?

Complicating matters in the "Catholic imaginary," as I call it in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico, 2019), is the role pseudo-memories play of certain high-profile examples of "lay involvement" in the Church--e.g., Henry VIII vs. Thomas More and the pope; or Henry IV and Gregory VII at Canossa; or Napoleon and Pius VII. These linger on today unconsciously to safeguard the future from any "lay involvement." As Adam Phillips says, "memories always have a certain future in mind." The Catholic, and certainly papal, imaginary since the nineteenth century has designed its power structures precisely with these paranoid pseudo-memories of power-mad tyrants in mind. But we have, thankfully, no German and French emperors or English kings to contend with today, and thus none of these are therefore remotely germane. These convenient bogeymen cannot be allowed to prevent the people of God from playing their rightful part in the careful ways I outline in the book.

Those proposals are not, as some ignorant fool who has not read the book claimed on Twitter, a proposal to make the Catholic Church Anglican--a specious suggestion I dealt with here. Precisely what the book does is to take what is good and useful in both Anglican and Armenian (and other Eastern Orthodox) structures and reconfigure them in a Catholic context. Nobody, least of all I, thinks having no serious primate with real power--as bedevils both Anglicanism and Orthodoxy--is a solution to anything.

Nor are these proposals modern. It is pathetic to see how even hierarchs (actually, it's not pathetic: nothing about these men surprises me any more) are totally ignorant of their own history, and thus scrambling after various "oversight boards" and "metropolitan models" that have all the substance and seriousness of diagrams doodled on the back of one of their cocktail napkins at the Waldorf Astoria. There is no need, dear leaders, to invent things from scratch: look at your own history and tradition to rediscover the role of synods at every level of the Church. If you need a reminder of what they are and how they function, then see Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed.

On the Life of Catherine Doherty

Last week, when I was at the Orientale Lumen conference in Washington, DC, I was approached by a lovely woman, Echo Lewis, whom I did not know, but who introduced herself as being from Madonna House, which I visited in 2004 and of which I remain a big fan. She very graciously gave me a copy of her biography of Madonna House founder: Victorious Exile by Echo Lewis (Madonna House Publications, 2013), 205pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Katya Kolyschkine, who came to be known in the West as Catherine de Hueck Doherty, lived a life of adventure, peril, persecution and exile from her native Russia. The darkness of poverty and near despair closed in on Katya; but propelled by a love so great nothing could overpower it, she proved victorious in her quest to show the face of that love to thousands of others. In doing so, Katya set a spark of pre-Revolutionary Holy Russia aflame in the Western world.

On Reforming Diocesan Boundaries and Structures

I was at the twenty-third Orientale Lumen conference in Washington this past week. Capably organized as ever by the indefatigable and ever-generous Jack Figel, its sessions were moderated this year by my friend Will Cohen, author of The Concept of Sister Churches in Orthodox-Catholic Relations Since Vatican II.

Fascinating papers were given by several people, including Anastacia Wooden, whose work on Afanasiev I noted here; by Hyacinthe Destivelle, whose book The Moscow Council has been widely read; and by my friend and co-editor Daniel Galadza, author of Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem, which is, he tells us, coming out in December in a much more affordable paperback edition.

I too gave a paper--this year's theme was on the old notion of "One Bishop to One City?"--and I drew on my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, in which my last chapter talks about restructuring dioceses, especially in the Latin Church, so that they are no longer huge corporations with archbishops, junior vice-presidents called "auxiliary bishops," and massive, dehumanized bureaucracy spending millions to hide abuse and abusers--and to hide the slush fund abusive bishops use for booze, flowers, and rent-boys.

It was, as ever, a good conference even if for many people today this whole ecumenical venture seems increasingly ignored by the vast majority of Christians. In my experience, dating back to 1991 in Australia, it has always been that way, alas.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/10 (23 May 2019)

If there's a theme to this issue of the London Review of Books it is surely historical materialism and its ghosts, for lack of a better phrase. A case in point is a review of Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), 394pp. The review discusses Christophers' evidence of how much land has been sold off, and so cheaply and with so few requirements or regulations, in the last several decades in the United Kingdom, whose government has deliberately kept poor, vague, or non-existent records of much of this transformation. One result of this is that it has jacked up housing prices by an enormous margin ("on average--that is, for all kinds of housing--land now accounts for 70% of a house's sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent").

Jacqueline Rose has a long essay, "One Long Scream," that makes for very harrowing reading indeed. She has done some very interesting work in a number of areas, including the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and trauma. She also notes one of the few psychoanalysts in South Africa today, Mark Solms, whose work has gained international attention

Her essay looks back over the last quarter-century in South Africa, discussing a number of works, including My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata.

As an Anglican coming of age in the 1980s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a hero to me from a great distance. I followed the move from apartheid to freedom with great interest, and later on I would review the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in great detail for how it handled some truly vexed questions about memories of the past and their possible healing.

But I have not followed events closely since the turn of the century, blithely assuming that progress was being made much more quickly and comprehensively than Rose shows it actually is. The tortured state of progress is illustrated in part by Rose discussing various presentations and evaluations of the life of Winnie Mandela, including, most recently, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018).

Clair Wills next reviews Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Haymarket, 2018), 330pp. This is a reissue of a book McCann first published in the 1970s. It shows the enormous complexity of the issues in the latter half of the twentieth century and how the politics was often shifting.

The essay has really forced me to start reading in Irish history. Previously I confess that my Scottish and English grandparents have left me with a residue of snobbery about the Irish, and a very strong pride about British imperialism. But I am increasingly recognizing that both were grossly unjust.

Sudhir Hazareesingh next reviews Herrick Chapman's France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard UP, 2018). It only reinforces my desire to read more about de Gaulle, who seems by all accounts to have been a maddeningly complicated man.

Poor Charles Darwin. Rosemary Hill reviews the latest volume (26) of his Correspondence. It seems the fate of all revolutionary men that they are bombarded with letters, and Darwin, we are told, is no less the case. But apparently with extraordinary patience and effort, he responded to nearly all his letters personally.

Hermites and Anchorites

Among some Christians of both East and West, there is a tendency to romanticize both monasticism and the Middle Ages. Such romanticism will find it hard to survive this new book, Hermits and Anchorites in England 1200-1550, ed. E.A. Jones (Manchester University Press, 2019), 248pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This source book offers a comprehensive treatment of solitary religious lives in England in the late Middle Ages. It covers both enclosed recluses (anchorites) and free-wandering hermits, and explores the relationship between them. Although there has been a recent surge of interest in the solitary vocations, especially anchorites, this has focused almost exclusively on a small number of examples. The field is in need of reinvigoration, and this book provides it. Featuring translated extracts from a wide range of Latin, Middle English and Old French sources, as well as a scholarly introduction and commentary from one of the foremost experts in the field, Hermits and anchorites in England is an invaluable resource for students and lecturers alike.

Horrors in the Annals of Psychiatry

In the late 1990s, when I was living with other grad students in the magnificent Somerset House in Ottawa, one of my house-mates was in medical school. I've never forgotten something he said with reference to chemotherapy: in a hundred years time, he argued, people will look back on what is today cutting-edge treatment of cancer and be utterly horrified by the barbarity of it all. Chemotherapy, he said, is in many ways a terribly destructive way to treat cancer, but in some cases it's all we've got.

The same thing could equally be said about psychiatry. I continue to read the lives of psychoanalysts in the United Kingdom, and recently finished R.D. Laing's Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist. Laing seems to have been no moral exemplar, at least in his family life, and some of his ideas are rather farouche. But his basic sense of humanity and decency, and his willingness to buck the consensus (e.g., against putting so-called schizophrenics into insulin-induced comas from which not all of them returned alive) of the time in favour of trying to reach people written off by the medical establishment, must be counted unto him as righteousness.

Wisdom, Madness, and Folly is a short but harrowing set of memoirs especially of immediate post-war psychiatry in Glasgow and beyond. It is, among other things, a reminder that so-called scientists are as much herd animals as anybody else, and "scientific consensus" often comes at the expense of science properly so called, one of whose most crucial practices must surely remain that of verifying, and if necessary falsifying, conclusions taken for granted. Otherwise we end up doing horrible things to people we have written off as "unreachable" or "unworthy."

The Pope and the Professor in Paperback

I'm pleased to see a very affordable edition of a book I discussed in three parts is now available from Oxford University Press: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age by Thomas Albert Howard (Oxford UP, 2019), 368pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Pope and the Professor tells the captivating story of the German Catholic theologian and historian Ignaz von Dollinger (1799-1890), who fiercely opposed the teaching of Papal Infallibility at the time of the First Vatican Council (1869-70), convened by Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-1878), among the most controversial popes in the history of the papacy. Dollinger's thought, his opposition to the Council, his high-profile excommunication in 1871, and the international sensation that this action caused offer a fascinating window into the intellectual and religious history of the nineteenth century. Thomas Albert Howard examines Dollinger's post-conciliar activities, including pioneering work in ecumenism and inspiring the "Old Catholic" movement in Central Europe. Set against the backdrop of Italian and German national unification, and the rise of anticlericalism and ultramontanism after the French Revolution, The Pope and the Professor is at once an endeavor of historical and theological inquiry. It provides nuanced historical contextualization of the events, topics, and personalities, while also raising abiding questions about the often fraught relationship between individual conscience and scholarly credentials, on the one hand, and church authority and tradition, on the other.

Obsessive-Compulsive Ottoman Disorder

Well do I recall reading biographies of David Lloyd George, as well as histories of the Great War and its aftermath, and hearing again how much George loathed the Ottomans and how, if nothing else came of the conflict, he wanted to ensure their empire was smashed after the war. Even sympathetic commentators and biographers regarded this as an "obsession" on George's part, but it was apparently an obsession shared by many others, as we shall soon see. Set for release early next month is what looks to be a fascinating work exploring how we construct images of "enemies" and how we view and write history in the light of current politics: Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 512pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.

In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. Useful Enemies shows how the concept of 'oriental despotism' began as an attempt to turn the tables on a very positive analysis of Ottoman state power, and how, as it developed, it interacted with Western debates about monarchy and government. Noel Malcolm also shows how a negative portrayal of Islam as a religion devised for political purposes was assimilated by radical writers, who extended the criticism to all religions, including Christianity itself.

Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Noel Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war. Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which contributed significantly to the development of Western political thought.