I think I first met our author, Matthew Briel, at a lovely conference at the University of Saint Thomas in the Twin Cities in July 2017, devoted to questions of reception history in theology. I gave a paper on the usefulness of forgetting, drawing on numerous books I have discussed on here since 2016. My paper had a lovely and thrilling response from Sarah Coakley.
Since then, Matthew has finished his doctoral work, found a job, and published his dissertation as A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios. Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about his background and new book. Here are his thoughts.
AD: Tell us about your background
MB: I am a Catholic layman originally from Minnesota but now an Assistant Professor of Theology at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. My undergraduate degree in philosophy and an MTS in theology are from Notre Dame and it was there that my basic view of the world through a Thomistic and Newmanian lens was confirmed. John Henry Newman, in particular, has affected my view of history and epistemology.
After a year of teaching in a Catholic high school I did a three-year MA in Classics at the University of Minnesota which strengthened my Latin, gave me my Greek, and provided a broad introduction to classical literature. It also prepared me for the academy by exposing me to critical theory. I then entered Fordham’s doctoral program to study with George Demacopoulos. This was my introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy and Byzantine theology.
AD: What led to the writing of A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios?
MB: As an MA student I read Aristotle in Greek for the first time and found myself again attracted to his basic worldview with its primacy of the particular and his, to me, mostly convincing metaphysics and ethics. I was reminded of my basically Thomistic orientation and wondered if there was a way that I could incorporate Thomas into my studies but at the same time had begun the MA in order to learn Greek to work in the Greek Orthodox theological tradition. When I learned about Greek Thomism I was committed.
I began my doctoral work by writing a seminar paper on Demetrios Kydones, the first Orthodox thinker to read Thomas with care. I came to the conclusion that Kydones wasn’t a genius and looked to so if there might be someone else. I then stumbled across Scholarios, became convinced of his towering intellect, and began working on him.
My beginning in Scholarios was a tutorial with a Thomist, Franklin Harkins, at Fordham. I would come with translations of Scholarios to our meetings and we would discuss them, identifying Thomas’ influence. After that I worked carefully with George Demacopoulos to develop a framework and to place Scholarios in the Orthodox theological tradition.
AD: Tell us a bit about your titular character and why he’s important
MB: Born around 1400 in Constantinople, Scholarios became a teacher of philosophy in his 20s. He learned Latin well early in his life and read voraciously in Latin and Greek philosophy and theology. Really the breadth of his knowledge of both theological traditions is breathtaking. By his late 20s Scholarios became convinced that Latin scholasticism, and Aquinas in particular, not only had developed and refined classical Greek philosophy, especially in logic, but that Aquinas had profound insight into the Greek Fathers, surpassing even Byzantine understanding of the Greek fathers.
Scholarios remained an unmarried lay scholar (a bachelor-don) and developed a reputation for his profound learning. As a result, he was brought to the Council of Florence in 1438 as one of three lay theological advisors to the Orthodox delegation. At this point Scholarios was very much in favor of reunion with Rome. At the same time, Scholarios was committed to a reunion established on dogmatic grounds rather than a political compromise. Returning to Constantinople in 1439, Scholarios, under the influence of his teacher Mark of Ephesus (the hero who resisted reunion on the grounds of compromised dogma), grew increasingly anti-union. Scholarios took monastic vows in his late 40s and grew increasingly frustrated with the imperial uniate position. He became the leader of the anti-union party.
After the fall of the City in 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror chose Scholarios to be patriarch in large part due to his resistance to Rome. Scholarios remained in this position for two years until he retired first to Mt. Athos and then to the manuscript- rich Monastery of the Forerunner outside of Serres in Northern Greece.
As the first patriarch of Constantinople after its fall in 1453, Scholarios laid the groundwork for the relationship of Orthodox Christians with their Muslim conquerors for the next several centuries. Serving as both ecclesial and secular ruler of the Rum Millet (Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire), Scholarios provided sophisticated defenses of Christianity to his new Muslim rulers, worked to provide places of worship for Christians, and helped to establish a place for Christians in Ottoman society.
Scholarios is perhaps more remarkable as a theologian. Among other things, he offered the first Orthodox account of transubstantiation. This was to have a long afterlife in the Orthodox theological tradition. Then there’s his reconciliation of the Palamite distinction between the divine essence and energies with the Catholic understanding of divine simplicity. His pastoral work and application of economy is a forerunner to contemporary Orthodox practice. Finally, of course, there is his account of divine providence, the subject of the book, which had a profound effect on later Orthodox theology.
AD: Your book is, as we say today, at the intersection of several phenomena: Greek Orthodox thought and Thomism, Aristotelian philosophy and theology, a Turkish Islamic context at the end of the East-Roman Empire, inter alia. What were some of the surprises you found in examining these intersections?
MB: I was surprised by the fierce debate about providence between fifteenth-century Greek theologians (including the pagan Pletho) and its parallel in discussion on the ground, so to say. There are reports of popular opinions in contemporary historians as well as a cache of letters written in simple Greek that evince a great concern with providence. Novel accounts of fate/determinism and a conception of a random universe were also circulating. It was in this context that Scholarios worked. He attempted to respond both to a popular decline in belief in providence (in part influenced indirectly by higher levels of discourse and the fall of the Byzantine Empire) and the ideas of scholars.
Pletho, too, was a surprise to me. Perhaps the greatest mind of the later Byzantine Empire, Pletho was a convinced pagan (and possibly theurgist) who was highly critical of Aristotle, whose language and concepts undergird traditional Byzantine theology, and instead preferred Plato. Pletho’s pamphlet, On the Differences between Plato and Aristotle, caused quite a stir in the mid-15th century in both Italy and the Byzantine Empire. Scholarios responded to this pamphlet with a text that presents Aristotle, without change, as compatible with Christianity. In his response, Pletho easily demolished Scholarios’ arguments and pressed him to reconsider Aristotle’s compatibility with the Christian understanding of God and the universe. Scholarios realized that Aristotle had to be transformed if he was to be used in Christian dogmatics and he did just that, largely, but not simply, following the path established by Aquinas. Scholarios’ teaching on providence became the consensus position among later Orthodox theologians and it is in part due to Pletho’s intervention. In this way a revival of paganism at the end of the Byzantine Empire led to an important development in Orthodox doctrine.
AD: Marcus Plested (interviewed here), who has endorsed your book and is the author of an earlier and similar work on Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, has helped to break down some of the assumptions and stereotypes about Latin scholasticism and Greek patristics. Does your book continue that process, differ from it, or add to it?
Plested’s book draws attention for the first time to the massive influence, both negative and positive, that Aquinas has had on Orthodox theology. There was a good sized body of literature on the Byzantine reception of Aquinas in various languages since the turn of the twentieth century. Plested brings that literature together into a coherent narrative, arguing that Orthodoxy has in the past and continues today to have something to learn from Aquinas.
At the same time this engagement with Aquinas has been and must be a critical reception. This is an important challenge to Orthodox theology which has, since the middle of the twentieth century, tended to rest content with eschewing Latin theology by reducing it to a caricature and proceeding to reject it. Plested demonstrates that this approach is in fact not the historical road of Orthodoxy and shouldn’t be the approach today.
Plested’s book gives a fair amount of attention to Scholarios and holds him up as a model for rapprochement with Aquinas in particular and with Western theology in general. Scholarios knew Aquinas deeply, recognized his genius and his mastery of the Greek patristic tradition and learned from him. Indeed, Scholarios drew upon Aquinas in his own theology. But this was not a passive reception. Instead Scholarios drew attention to Aquinas’ errors while praising him.
I focused on Scholarios because, like Plested, I am convinced that he is a model of Orthodox engagement with Aquinas. My book furthers Plested’s argument about Aquinas and Orthodox doctrine. Like Plested, I also engage the Greek patristic tradition that formed Scholarios and present Aquinas as a valid interpreter of that tradition. Because Plested’s book covers so much territory, he didn’t have the space to develop why Scholarios is a model for Orthodox theology. By focusing on him, my book is able to do this.
AD: As we learn more about the previously unknown or ignored connections between Latin and Greek Christian thought in this period, you are very clear in your introduction that the result of such an encounter does not necessarily entail “captivity” (Florovsky) or the creation of a tertium quid, but can result in “a healthy development of the Orthodox theological tradition” (p.4), referencing Newman. But I thought “development” was an impermissible category in Orthodox thought—certainly I recall Andrew Louth and others saying that as recently as 2006? Tell us more about how you understand development in the context of Scholarios.
MB: Yes, I should have clarified this in the book. My sense of Louth’s chapter in Jaroslav Pelikan’s Festschrift is that his criticism of the idea of the development of doctrine is a criticism of it as it is conceived of by modern western theologians, and not as it was understood by Newman. Although Louth presents an analysis of Newman in this chapter, he simply gets him wrong. Louth’s concern is: “if development means that there is an historical advance in Christian understanding of the faith deeper or more profound than that of the Fathers, at least in principle, then such a notion of development cannot be accepted as a category of Orthodox theology” (55).
Newman wholeheartedly agrees with Louth and I would argue that such a conception of development cannot be accepted as a category of Catholic theology either. For Newman it is not a question of the depth of understanding but rather a question of making precise and making implicit knowledge (which is real and more fundamental knowledge) explicit.
In the case of Scholarios’ understanding of providence, there existed a tension between strains of theology in the Orthodox tradition. Some fathers tended towards emphasizing human freedom and muting divine agency and predetermination, while others stressed the predetermination of events and only falteringly accounted for human freedom. The sense of the Church was that both must be true. Scholarios provided the vocabulary and framework for giving an account of this mystery but it was a mystery that was already understood, if only implicitly. Scholarios does not reflect on his achievement in his Tracts on Providence but he is aware that it is a new solution. He might not even go so far as to call his theology a development, as Palamas calls the essence-energy distinction, and he certainly wouldn’t be so bold as to describe it as knowledge disclosed by the Holy Spirit after the time of the Apostles, as Gregory Nazianzen does when reflecting on the doctrine of the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
AD: I had an “ah-ha!” moment as soon as you mentioned (p.5) the name of the rather infamous Martin Jugie, who seems to be an expert in prejudicing the reception and ruining the reputations of several figures between East and West, including Scholarios. Tell us about Jugie’s role here.
Jugie is a fascinating and important figure and we are all indebted to him. Without him we’d only have a tenth of the works of Scholarios in print instead of nearly the whole corpus. His mastery of Byzantine and modern Orthodox theology (in both Greek and Russian) was unparalleled and his body of work is lasting, if problematic.
Jugie understood himself to be a faithful son of the Church, and the approach of the Catholic Church towards ecumenism in the early twentieth century was, in large part, to bring Protestants and Orthodox into submission to Rome. The Catholic Church was not to learn from her separated brothers, but rather to make clear their errors and convince them of the truth. In addition to the lack of charity and the naïve epistemology that this entails (if I simply provide cogent arguments, you will be converted), this led, I think, Jugie to exaggerate what he considered to be errors of Eastern Orthodoxy. Thus, the essence-energies distinction was not simply a misconstrual of the divine simplicity, but it was even close to polytheism. The approach was not fraternal engagement, but more of a debate such as we see in news programs today in which you try to score points rather than actually communicate. This, of course, was almost completely ineffective in bringing Orthodox Christians to the Catholic Church.
By exaggerating the theological positions of Byzantine theologians, Jugie prompted a distancing of Orthodox and Catholic theologians. Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky responded to Jugie’s articles by accepting the dichotomy presented but arguing for the Orthodox position. Thus, it seems to me, Jugie was a catalyst for many Orthodox theologians in the 20th century to think that the Palamite essence-energies distinction was simply incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine.
AD: You use a helpful Russian architectural metaphor to explain what Scholarios did, saying it’s more akin to the building of the Kremlin Church of the Dormition than that of St. Petersburgh’s Cathedral of St. Isaac. Unpack that a bit for those not familiar with the history of those buildings.
I’m glad to hear that you found it helpful. In the fifteenth century Grand Duke Ivan III of Moscow decided to build the largest church in his realm in the Kremlin. He first hired local architects but their building collapsed after two years of construction. Frustrated by undaunted, Ivan hired an Italian, Aristotle Fioravanti to build his Church of the Dormition. Fioravanti introduced several internal structural modifications that had been recently developed in Italy. In addition to laying a much deeper foundation and driving oaks into that foundation for stability, he also designed lightweight but hardened bricks for construction and employed iron tie-rods for the vaults. Finally, he used groin vaults and transverse arches to support the massive dome, giving the interior a light and airy feel. While the church’s bones were derived from Italian Renaissance technology, the appearance of the church was fully in the Russian Orthodox Tradition. It still stands today.
Three hundred years later the French architect August Montferrand was hired to build the largest Orthodox church in the world, St. Isaacs in St. Petersburg. When standing in St. Isaacs the worshipper today might think that he is in St. Peter’s in Rome. The form is entirely western.
I think that these two churches embody two different ways for Orthodox to make use of western forms. In the Church of the Dormition, western technology is used to serve an Orthodox form and remains subservient to Orthodox traditions. In St. Isaac’s the western form takes over. Instead of playing a subsidiary role, Latin traditions replace Orthodox traditions.
I used this to illustrate two different ways for Orthodox to encounter and profit from Latin traditions. I argue in the course of the book that although Scholarios uses Aquinas to great advantage, he ultimately brings Aquinas in as a servant of the Orthodox theological tradition.
AD: One of my undergraduate professors in moral theology used to insist that “there is no more abused phrase in modern Catholicism than ‘Divine Providence wills that…’.” Tell us how you understand Providence, and what Scholarios brings to that discussion, and why that discussion was so central, as you say in your second chapter, after 1458.
MB: I wonder if your professor was especially concerned with attempts to make sense of particular events?
AD: Yes, exactly!
MB: At any rate, that statement seems on the surface to ignore human interaction with providence and our ability to participate in or reject God’s actions in our life and the world. We learn from the book of Job that any attempt to explain tragedy is a mistake. Really, we don’t know.
I think that God is involved in and foreknows everything that happens in this world. But God doesn’t will everything that happens. With the Greek patristic tradition, starting with Origen and culminating in John of Damascus, I believe that we can, and often do, refuse to participate in God’s plan for our lives. This has real consequences and, in a sense, frustrates God’s plan. In a mysterious way God foreknows all of our actions and their ramifications because he lives outside of time: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8, cf. Psalm 90:4).
Scholarios, following Aquinas, provides a metaphysical account of this absolute divine providence and full human freedom with his use of the analogy of being. The foundation of this metaphysics is the conception of God as perfectly simple, in which his essence is his existence, while creatures’ essences are not their existence and so derive their existence from being itself, God. In this metaphysics, God, as being (but beyond being) is the primary agent in any action, including existence. Creatures, however, can determine the direction of those actions as true secondary agents. Human beings can choose by free will how to participate in God as being.
An immediate problem arises for Palamites (and Scholarios considered the Palamite distinction between divine essence and energies to be settled Orthodox doctrine after the fourteenth century councils). Scholarios understands the distinction to be neither a mere notional one (and therefore not grounded in reality) nor a real distinction. Instead, drawing on and changing Duns Scotus’ understanding of a notional distinction with a basis in reality, Scholarios provides a Palamite account of divine simplicity that can be the ground of an analogy of being. Furthermore, Scholarios uses the language of Maximus Confessor to see how this relationship of God and creation is played out, especially in the area of providence. In doing so, I am convinced that Scholarios uses Latin theologies in order to grow the Orthodox tradition in an organic way. The tree remains faithful to the Orthodox tradition, but it uses Catholic fertilizer.
Byzantium experienced nearly every conceivable disaster in its last century. Plagues, besieged cities, loss of life and territory, betrayal of the Latins and the collapse of churches led many Orthodox to wonder if God had abandoned him. At the same time, old pagan conceptions of the lack of intelligibility in the universe as well as the predetermination of all events to the exclusion of free will surfaced. With the collapse of their 2100-year-old republic (going back to ancient Rome) and 1100 years as a Christian people, many Christians started to wonder if God weren’t actually favoring their Muslim conquerors. Could Islam be the true religion? Many did convert, including some philosophers (George Amiroutzes, for instance) and those who remained Christian began to have doubts about how God could be acting in their world. Scholarios began to see that while his tradition clearly maintained the two poles of divine omnipotence and human freedom, a more convincing account of these antinomies must be found.
AD: You note that Origen, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus are all significant figures in the Greek and Byzantine tradition of thought on Providence. You note later in your book that the Damascene is especially important as an interlocutor for Aquinas in the latter’s modification of a theology of providence. This modification, you say, comes to be pivotal for both East and West. This sounds like Aquinas can no longer be ostracized by the East to some cordon sanitaire of scholasticism but stands as an integral figure in Eastern thought itself and its development?
MB: I think that you’re right. Many Orthodox theologians in the centuries after Scholarios accepted his account of providence and his interpretation of John of Damascus. By the nineteenth century the Athenian dogmaticians took this position as well, especially the last great Athenian dogmatician, Panagiotis Trembelas. Now, this school has been largely abandoned (although the Volos academy has recently put together a fine volume on Trembelas), nevertheless it seems to be a settled issue that God has full foreknowledge of all creaturely events, is active in those events, and that human beings are free.
John of Damascus was a slight scandal to Andrew Louth in his excellent book on him because he limits God’s participation to good actions and excludes them from bad actions. John seems to be on to something in that God abhors sin and cannot participate in it. But John misses that God, as being (or beyond being) must underly every creaturely action. It seems to me, then, that the Aquinas’ conclusion has been accepted as a given by the Orthodox tradition, but his interpretation of the Damascene has been forgotten. I think that remembering this intervention of Aquinas’ in the Orthodox theological tradition is just what you say: Aquinas is integral to the development of Eastern Christian thought. Here too, I should have been more explicit in my book. But I hope that it’s a conclusion that the reader will draw. I’m glad that you saw this.
AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially would benefit from reading it.
My audience includes a number of groups. I think that Thomists with wide visions would be interested in it, but more importantly I hope that Orthodox theologians will read it. My goal in writing it was that by understanding the important and lasting contribution that Aquinas made to their tradition, they will both be open to engaging Aquinas and to other contributions from the West. The important thing about this story is that Scholarios integrates Aquinas into the Greek theological tradition.
In the worst way this can be understood as spoiling the Egyptians, but in a better light it might be thought of as a cooperative, fraternal search for the truth. This would be rejected if Scholarios simply allowed Aquinas’ framework and categories to determine his thought, but his critical reception of Aquinas and use in developing the Orthodox tradition, I hope, would be of interest to Orthodox theologians. It may even provide a model for how to think about engaging Catholic theology while remaining faithfully Orthodox. In this way, the main goal of the book is ecumenical.
A final group is Byzantinists. This book may be of interest to them for a few reasons. The first couple of chapters provide a window into the late Byzantine experience that has not been given before. Byzantinists interested in intellectual history might also be interested in the cultural and intellectual exchanges at the end of the Empire. Finally, I give a new account of an aspect of Pletho’s activities and account of Aristotle.
My hope is that some MA courses and several PhD seminars might use the book. The first review of the book was by Jude Dougherty, an emeritus professor from CUA and was written for a broader audience. It is probably wishful thinking but perhaps some educated general readers will come across it and find it of interest.
AD: Having finished A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios, what are you at work on now?
You know I’ve been searching for a few years on what to work on next. I’ve given a few papers on Photios and on method in Catholic historical theology. I’ve not gotten around to publishing them but hope to. My first false start was a project on Byzantine scriptural exegesis. After working in that area for a couple of years I realized that I simply didn’t find Byzantine exegesis gripping in any way and so cut of my research after writing on Photios.
One of the great needs of the field is translation, really into any western language but especially English. With that in mind I am directing my energies to two book-length projects. The first is the translation with heavy annotation of Scholarios’ five tracts on providence. This would be a nice pair to my book and would indeed go beyond it in that my book only addresses the first tract.
The second project would be a presentation and study of the metaphysical theological tradition in Byzantium. Much attention has been paid to ascetic and mystical texts in Byzantium, but few have engaged the rich (and rather difficult) philosophical theology of Byzantium. I intend to begin this volume with Dionysios and end with Scholarios, with a chapter devoted to each figure. I would hope to cover ten figures, about one per century. The first three figures are Dionysios, Maximos Confessor and John of Damascus. Those waters are familiar but after that the seas are largely unchartered. I would hope to conclude each chapter with a translation of 2,000-3,000 words as well as, perhaps, an annotated bibliography. I would hope to create an argument in the course of the book for scholars to engage while also writing a book that would be helpful and interesting to MA students. The translations and bibliography could be especially helpful to students.
Showing posts with label George Demacopoulos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Demacopoulos. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2020
Friday, March 6, 2020
Orthodox Readings of Augustine
Few things move me to mockery faster, or awaken a deeper sense of scorn, than those ignorant ravings proffered by people who, without the slightest facility in Latin or the least evidence of any ability to read primary sources and critical editions, nonetheless purport to subject us to their grand theories about how all errors of Latin Christianity may be found in what I call the A Team of Latin Christians: Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Which of us has not been subject to some bore holding forth about Augustine's doctrine of original sin, or Anselm's atonement theory, or just about anything in Aquinas as the paradigmatic figure of that wicked movement of "scholasticism"?
That is why that this book, now well over a decade old, is so important to have in a newly reissued form. Both at time of its original publication, and again today, this is such a welcome and important volume, a landmark really, showing significant progress not just in East-West rapprochement but also in the crucial question of how our historiography sometimes keeps us apart as we continue to tell tales about each other's saints and traditions rather than studying them together. If you missed it in 2008 when it first appeared, do not make that mistake again now but be sure to get your copy of this scholary collection newly reissued with a smart Coptic icon on the cover: Orthodox Readings of Augustine, eds. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 314pp.
When the original was published, we asked the now-deceased Augustine scholar and sometime Augustinian priest J. Kevin Coyle to review it for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, which he did in glowing terms.
About this newly reissued collection the publisher tells us this:
That is why that this book, now well over a decade old, is so important to have in a newly reissued form. Both at time of its original publication, and again today, this is such a welcome and important volume, a landmark really, showing significant progress not just in East-West rapprochement but also in the crucial question of how our historiography sometimes keeps us apart as we continue to tell tales about each other's saints and traditions rather than studying them together. If you missed it in 2008 when it first appeared, do not make that mistake again now but be sure to get your copy of this scholary collection newly reissued with a smart Coptic icon on the cover: Orthodox Readings of Augustine, eds. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 314pp.
When the original was published, we asked the now-deceased Augustine scholar and sometime Augustinian priest J. Kevin Coyle to review it for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, which he did in glowing terms.
About this newly reissued collection the publisher tells us this:
Orthodox Readings of Augustine examines the theological engagement with the preeminent Latin theologian Augustine of Hippo in the Orthodox context. Augustine was not widely read in the East until many centuries after his death. However, following his re-introduction in the thirteenth century, the Latin Church Father served as an ecumenical figure, offering Latin and Byzantine theologians a thinker with whom they could bridge linguistic, cultural, and confessional divides.
Contributors: Lewis Ayres, John Behr, David Bradshaw, Brian E. Daley, George E. Demacopoulos, Elizabeth Fisher, Reinhard Flogaus, Carol Harrison, David Bentley Hart, Joseph T. Lienhard, Andrew Louth, Jean-Luc Marion, Aristotle Papanikolaou, and David Tracy
Friday, October 11, 2019
Orthodoxy: Fundamentalism or Tradition
The Orthodox Christian Studies Centre at Fordham regularly hosts fascinating conferences which result in rich published proceedings, several of which I have previously spent a good deal of time on here discussing.
Forthcoming in November is another collection from a recent conference: Fundamentalism or Tradition: Christianity after Secularism, eds. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Fordham University Press, Nov. 2019), 272pp
About this collection we are told this:
Forthcoming in November is another collection from a recent conference: Fundamentalism or Tradition: Christianity after Secularism, eds. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Fordham University Press, Nov. 2019), 272pp
About this collection we are told this:
Traditional, secular, and fundamentalist―all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. This interplay brings to the foreground more than ever the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern Tradition as living discernment from fundamentalism? What does it mean to live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the “secular”? These essays interrogate these mutual implications, beginning from the understanding that whatever secular or fundamentalist may mean, they are not Tradition, which is historical, particularistic, in motion, ambiguous and pluralistic, but simultaneously not relativistic.
Contributors: R. Scott Appleby, Nikolaos Asproulis, Brandon Gallaher, Paul J. Griffiths, Vigen Guroian, Dellas Oliver Herbel, Edith M. Humphrey, Slavica Jakelić, Nadieszda Kizenko, Wendy Mayer, Brenna Moore, Graham Ward, Darlene Fozard Weaver
Monday, September 9, 2019
George Demacopoulos on Colonizing Crusaders
I had a very lovely breakfast with George Demacopolous in Romania in January at IOTA and so heard from him directly about his forthcoming book, which has just been published: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (Fordham UP, 2019), 272pp.
Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book. Here are his thoughts.
AD: Tell us a bit about your background
GD: Methodologically, I am trained as a pre-modern historian, but I’ve spent a good deal of time among Religious Studies and Theology faculties so I suppose you could say that my interests lie in applying historical-critical methods to aspects of Church history that continue to resonate with modern believers. In recent years, I’ve grown more appreciative of certain theoretical resources, such as discourse analysis and postcolonial critique, because I think that they offer fresh ways of interpreting pre-modern texts.
AD: This is a book that tackles three controversial things—the Crusades, colonialism, and competing Christian identities. Tell us a bit about how you came to see the connections between them, and perhaps especially how you found the critical scholarly literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to be helpful.
GD: It all started when Aristotle Papanikolaou and I began to explore the negative reception of Augustine among modern Orthodox communities. The more I read the various caricatures of Augustine that prevailed in Russian and Greek writing in the 19th and 20th century, the more it became apparent that there must be a “backstory” to modern Orthodox identity narration that functioned in negative juxtaposition to the West, especially Catholicism and its bogey men—Augustine, Aquinas, etc.
As it happened—and this was about 10 years ago--I was in a faculty “theory” group at Fordham at the same time and we spent a few years reading postcolonial theory. The more I thought about modern Orthodox identity in light of the stages of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialsim, the more I became convinced that there were aspects of the Orthodox story that aligned with phenomena in other cultures and contexts. While I found the work of many postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, Bhabha, Young, etc.) to be enlightening and provocative for my thinking about modern Orthodox identity formation vis-à-vis the West, it was also clear to me that there were at least two really important differences from the historical setting that I was pursuing versus the ones that postcolonial theorists typically engage in Africa, India, and the Middle East.
First, whereas their stories typically involved Christianity as an important aspect of the hegemonic colonial force, the Orthodox Christian story is possibly the only one in history where a Christian community is the victim of colonization, rather than the aggressor. I believe this has some important implications—not only for Orthodox identity but also for the ways in which it complicates our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism. Second, unlike the vast majority of the colonial stories that animate postcolonial critics, the Orthodox experience of colonialism occurred in the Middle Ages (not the early modern period). I’m convinced, in fact, that the Western European experience during the Crusading period served as an important reference point for subsequent colonial enterprises.
AD: Until his death a few years ago, the Cambridge Crusades scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith mentioned more than once his despair that no matter how this history is told, it will always be traduced and tendentiously misrepresented for present political purposes. Did you hesitate at all before wading into the histories of the Crusades? Did you despair at all after having done so?!
GD: Yes, Riley-Smith took the Crusaders at their word that they believed themselves to be doing the work of God, that their conquest of the Near East was an “act of love.” I don’t think I ever hesitated to pursue this project along the lines Riley-Smith laments. I suppose if there is one thing that I don’t want readers to do with my work it is to misread my goals for the project. When I draw attention to some of the terrible things that Western Crusaders did and the outlandish ways by which they justified them, I do not do so in order for us to dismiss Western Christianity or because I think that those people represent Western Christendom.
Rather, I draw attention to this history because it helps us to explain the political, cultural, and military context in which Eastern Christians first began to narrate an Orthodox identity that was decidedly framed by juxtaposition against the West. My theological point of view (such as I have one) is that the breakdown of Christian unity in the thirteenth century has virtually nothing to do with theology—it was entirely born of political and cultural animus. Viewing the breakdown through the lens of a colonial encounter (supplemented by the insights of postcolonial critique) helps us to see this in ways that more traditional historical-critical methods can elide.
AD: You also suggest in your introduction that the Fourth Crusade is especially painful in the East for opening up “permanent fissures within the Orthodox community.” Tell us a bit more about that.
GD: More than anything else, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade is that Eastern Christians have become divided over the proper response to the West. It was in the context of the Latin empire of Byzantium that some Eastern Christians began to say for the first time that Orthodox could not marry Latins and they could not receive the sacraments from Latins. It is a common misconception that these things occurred with the Schism in 1054 (they did not). It was also in the context of the Latin empire that some Eastern Christian began to say that other Eastern Christians who had various levels of association with Westerners could not be permitted to participate in Eastern Christian sacraments because they were tainted by the exposure to Latins. To be clear, this was not the majority position—it was clearly a minority position—but it gave birth to a trajectory within Orthodoxy that would have profound and long-lasting implications. In fact, I believe that every modern inner-Orthodox debate either explicitly or implicitly is concerned with the question of Western Christendom and what the proper response to it should be.
AD: Without naming him explicitly, Freud nonetheless seems to me to lurk in the background as you attempt to draw out the connections between sexuality, power, and colonialism. Messis and Said are some of your principal interlocutors here. Tell us a bit about what you found valuable in their works.
GD: Yes, I’ll admit that I was never really that enamored with employing psycho-analytic approaches to historical questions, but these methods are very important to many postcolonial theorists, especially someone like Homi Bhabha. Moreover, Said and Robert Young are two postcolonial theorists to draw out the sexual dimensions of power relationships as well as issues of longing, fantasy, and repulsion. I do believe that some of the pro-Crusader texts that I examine in the book give themselves easily to analysis from this perspective, even if I don’t explicitly pursue the psycho-analytic dimensions.
AD: You make it clear that Byzantium in the crusading period should not be regarded as uniformly “subaltern.” Would you elaborate a bit as to why this is an important clarification?
GD: To be “subaltern” is to have no access to power, to have no control whatsoever to one’s own discourse. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Byzantium was, arguably, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated Christian society in the world. So while I believe that it is very clear that the process of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialism helps us to understand Orthodox Christian history and culture from the Crusades to the present, I do not think that the situation is the identical to other regions of the globe where Western Europeans arrived and completely transformed indigenous societies.
AD: I’m especially struck by your third chapter on papal ambivalence, a phenomenon which is always so psychologically revealing. Here you discuss Pope Innocent III’s “double-bind” with the capture of Constantinople. Tell us a bit more about that bind. It seems clear that part of the bind (then as now) is that by calling Eastern Christians genuine Christians (with “valid orders” as Catholics might say today) in a real sacramental Church the pope appeared to undercut his own claim to being the fount of all validity and liceity in the Church?
The chapter argues that the unexpected capture of Constantinople in 1204 put Pope Innocent III into a rhetorical and practical double bind. On the one hand, the pontiff sternly criticized the crusaders for their brutality against fellow Christians and for compromising the larger military effort in the Holy Land. On the other hand, Innocent saw the conquest of Constantinople as an opportunity to resolve the schism on his own terms and, at least initially, he hoped that the accrual of Byzantium to the crusaders’ Eastern network might be beneficial to his larger objectives.
But if Innocent was to capitalize on this, it meant that he would need to reformulate the very basis of crusading ideology so as to authorize the subjugation of a community that he had previously defined as Christian. Of course, one of the ways that Innocent does this is by asserting, all the more forcefully, the prerogatives of papal authority. In the conclusion of the chapter, I assess this dimension of Innocent’s ambivalence and observe that: “Innocent’s repeated acknowledgement that the Greeks do not accept papal rule exposes the inherent contradiction within the discourse of papal sovereignty. Indeed, each papal recognition of Greek disobedience reveals a gap in the very premise of papal authority, whether the premise is constituted on the Petrine myth or some other foundation. The dissonance of papal sovereignty is 'put on trial' by its every iteration."
If the bishop of Rome is truly and authentically the source of all hierarchic power and Christian teaching that its advocates claim it to be, then any acknowledgment from the bishop of Rome that there are “Christians” who do not accept such a principle undercuts all value in the claim of papal authority as a first principle. In Bhabha’s terms, Innocent’s assertion of papal authority encodes its own inevitable undoing; its very iteration establishes an ambivalent situation that disrupts its claim to monolithic power. As discourse, the Roman claim of papal sovereignty in the Church bears at one and the same time a striking ambivalence--both possibility and dis-possibility.
Thus, papal discourse vis-à-vis Greek Christians in this period implicitly dictates either (1) that Greeks are not Christians (because they fail to acknowledge papal authority, which is a measurement of authenticity imposed by the discourse) or (2) the recognition of papal authority is not a meaningful measurement or requirement of Christianity (because the discourse admits that no Greek acknowledges papal authority). Either way, the assertion cannot withstand its own logical weight.
AD: As you are working towards your conclusion, you note that from this literature you review one can find clear evidence that neither Latin nor Greek views of the other were monolithic, and that the boundaries between each sacramental community were “extremely porous.” What lessons, if any, do these insights offer us today?
GD: This is an important question with broad implications. In general terms, it teaches us is that history, even (if not especially) the history of the Church is far more complex and varied than we typically understand. More specifically, it encourages us to see that there have always been multiple “authoritative” voices saying a variety of things about the boundaries of the Christian community and the standing of person on that borderland. There was never a time when these questions were easy and, for me, that is a cause for hope because it means the cause of Christian unity has always been a challenge, even though the Scriptures themselves have made it a mandate.
AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now?
My next major project will look at the presentation of violence in late-ancient and medieval Greek hymnography. What I’m particular interested to explore is the context in which Christians begin to ask God to destroy enemies. It didn’t start that way. I have a theory to explain what happened, but you’ll need to wait for the next book.
Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book. Here are his thoughts.
AD: Tell us a bit about your background
GD: Methodologically, I am trained as a pre-modern historian, but I’ve spent a good deal of time among Religious Studies and Theology faculties so I suppose you could say that my interests lie in applying historical-critical methods to aspects of Church history that continue to resonate with modern believers. In recent years, I’ve grown more appreciative of certain theoretical resources, such as discourse analysis and postcolonial critique, because I think that they offer fresh ways of interpreting pre-modern texts.
AD: This is a book that tackles three controversial things—the Crusades, colonialism, and competing Christian identities. Tell us a bit about how you came to see the connections between them, and perhaps especially how you found the critical scholarly literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to be helpful.
GD: It all started when Aristotle Papanikolaou and I began to explore the negative reception of Augustine among modern Orthodox communities. The more I read the various caricatures of Augustine that prevailed in Russian and Greek writing in the 19th and 20th century, the more it became apparent that there must be a “backstory” to modern Orthodox identity narration that functioned in negative juxtaposition to the West, especially Catholicism and its bogey men—Augustine, Aquinas, etc.
As it happened—and this was about 10 years ago--I was in a faculty “theory” group at Fordham at the same time and we spent a few years reading postcolonial theory. The more I thought about modern Orthodox identity in light of the stages of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialsim, the more I became convinced that there were aspects of the Orthodox story that aligned with phenomena in other cultures and contexts. While I found the work of many postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, Bhabha, Young, etc.) to be enlightening and provocative for my thinking about modern Orthodox identity formation vis-à-vis the West, it was also clear to me that there were at least two really important differences from the historical setting that I was pursuing versus the ones that postcolonial theorists typically engage in Africa, India, and the Middle East.
First, whereas their stories typically involved Christianity as an important aspect of the hegemonic colonial force, the Orthodox Christian story is possibly the only one in history where a Christian community is the victim of colonization, rather than the aggressor. I believe this has some important implications—not only for Orthodox identity but also for the ways in which it complicates our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism. Second, unlike the vast majority of the colonial stories that animate postcolonial critics, the Orthodox experience of colonialism occurred in the Middle Ages (not the early modern period). I’m convinced, in fact, that the Western European experience during the Crusading period served as an important reference point for subsequent colonial enterprises.
AD: Until his death a few years ago, the Cambridge Crusades scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith mentioned more than once his despair that no matter how this history is told, it will always be traduced and tendentiously misrepresented for present political purposes. Did you hesitate at all before wading into the histories of the Crusades? Did you despair at all after having done so?!
GD: Yes, Riley-Smith took the Crusaders at their word that they believed themselves to be doing the work of God, that their conquest of the Near East was an “act of love.” I don’t think I ever hesitated to pursue this project along the lines Riley-Smith laments. I suppose if there is one thing that I don’t want readers to do with my work it is to misread my goals for the project. When I draw attention to some of the terrible things that Western Crusaders did and the outlandish ways by which they justified them, I do not do so in order for us to dismiss Western Christianity or because I think that those people represent Western Christendom.
Rather, I draw attention to this history because it helps us to explain the political, cultural, and military context in which Eastern Christians first began to narrate an Orthodox identity that was decidedly framed by juxtaposition against the West. My theological point of view (such as I have one) is that the breakdown of Christian unity in the thirteenth century has virtually nothing to do with theology—it was entirely born of political and cultural animus. Viewing the breakdown through the lens of a colonial encounter (supplemented by the insights of postcolonial critique) helps us to see this in ways that more traditional historical-critical methods can elide.
AD: You also suggest in your introduction that the Fourth Crusade is especially painful in the East for opening up “permanent fissures within the Orthodox community.” Tell us a bit more about that.
GD: More than anything else, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade is that Eastern Christians have become divided over the proper response to the West. It was in the context of the Latin empire of Byzantium that some Eastern Christians began to say for the first time that Orthodox could not marry Latins and they could not receive the sacraments from Latins. It is a common misconception that these things occurred with the Schism in 1054 (they did not). It was also in the context of the Latin empire that some Eastern Christian began to say that other Eastern Christians who had various levels of association with Westerners could not be permitted to participate in Eastern Christian sacraments because they were tainted by the exposure to Latins. To be clear, this was not the majority position—it was clearly a minority position—but it gave birth to a trajectory within Orthodoxy that would have profound and long-lasting implications. In fact, I believe that every modern inner-Orthodox debate either explicitly or implicitly is concerned with the question of Western Christendom and what the proper response to it should be.
AD: Without naming him explicitly, Freud nonetheless seems to me to lurk in the background as you attempt to draw out the connections between sexuality, power, and colonialism. Messis and Said are some of your principal interlocutors here. Tell us a bit about what you found valuable in their works.
GD: Yes, I’ll admit that I was never really that enamored with employing psycho-analytic approaches to historical questions, but these methods are very important to many postcolonial theorists, especially someone like Homi Bhabha. Moreover, Said and Robert Young are two postcolonial theorists to draw out the sexual dimensions of power relationships as well as issues of longing, fantasy, and repulsion. I do believe that some of the pro-Crusader texts that I examine in the book give themselves easily to analysis from this perspective, even if I don’t explicitly pursue the psycho-analytic dimensions.
AD: You make it clear that Byzantium in the crusading period should not be regarded as uniformly “subaltern.” Would you elaborate a bit as to why this is an important clarification?
GD: To be “subaltern” is to have no access to power, to have no control whatsoever to one’s own discourse. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Byzantium was, arguably, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated Christian society in the world. So while I believe that it is very clear that the process of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialism helps us to understand Orthodox Christian history and culture from the Crusades to the present, I do not think that the situation is the identical to other regions of the globe where Western Europeans arrived and completely transformed indigenous societies.
AD: I’m especially struck by your third chapter on papal ambivalence, a phenomenon which is always so psychologically revealing. Here you discuss Pope Innocent III’s “double-bind” with the capture of Constantinople. Tell us a bit more about that bind. It seems clear that part of the bind (then as now) is that by calling Eastern Christians genuine Christians (with “valid orders” as Catholics might say today) in a real sacramental Church the pope appeared to undercut his own claim to being the fount of all validity and liceity in the Church?
The chapter argues that the unexpected capture of Constantinople in 1204 put Pope Innocent III into a rhetorical and practical double bind. On the one hand, the pontiff sternly criticized the crusaders for their brutality against fellow Christians and for compromising the larger military effort in the Holy Land. On the other hand, Innocent saw the conquest of Constantinople as an opportunity to resolve the schism on his own terms and, at least initially, he hoped that the accrual of Byzantium to the crusaders’ Eastern network might be beneficial to his larger objectives.
But if Innocent was to capitalize on this, it meant that he would need to reformulate the very basis of crusading ideology so as to authorize the subjugation of a community that he had previously defined as Christian. Of course, one of the ways that Innocent does this is by asserting, all the more forcefully, the prerogatives of papal authority. In the conclusion of the chapter, I assess this dimension of Innocent’s ambivalence and observe that: “Innocent’s repeated acknowledgement that the Greeks do not accept papal rule exposes the inherent contradiction within the discourse of papal sovereignty. Indeed, each papal recognition of Greek disobedience reveals a gap in the very premise of papal authority, whether the premise is constituted on the Petrine myth or some other foundation. The dissonance of papal sovereignty is 'put on trial' by its every iteration."
If the bishop of Rome is truly and authentically the source of all hierarchic power and Christian teaching that its advocates claim it to be, then any acknowledgment from the bishop of Rome that there are “Christians” who do not accept such a principle undercuts all value in the claim of papal authority as a first principle. In Bhabha’s terms, Innocent’s assertion of papal authority encodes its own inevitable undoing; its very iteration establishes an ambivalent situation that disrupts its claim to monolithic power. As discourse, the Roman claim of papal sovereignty in the Church bears at one and the same time a striking ambivalence--both possibility and dis-possibility.
Thus, papal discourse vis-à-vis Greek Christians in this period implicitly dictates either (1) that Greeks are not Christians (because they fail to acknowledge papal authority, which is a measurement of authenticity imposed by the discourse) or (2) the recognition of papal authority is not a meaningful measurement or requirement of Christianity (because the discourse admits that no Greek acknowledges papal authority). Either way, the assertion cannot withstand its own logical weight.
AD: As you are working towards your conclusion, you note that from this literature you review one can find clear evidence that neither Latin nor Greek views of the other were monolithic, and that the boundaries between each sacramental community were “extremely porous.” What lessons, if any, do these insights offer us today?
GD: This is an important question with broad implications. In general terms, it teaches us is that history, even (if not especially) the history of the Church is far more complex and varied than we typically understand. More specifically, it encourages us to see that there have always been multiple “authoritative” voices saying a variety of things about the boundaries of the Christian community and the standing of person on that borderland. There was never a time when these questions were easy and, for me, that is a cause for hope because it means the cause of Christian unity has always been a challenge, even though the Scriptures themselves have made it a mandate.
AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now?
My next major project will look at the presentation of violence in late-ancient and medieval Greek hymnography. What I’m particular interested to explore is the context in which Christians begin to ask God to destroy enemies. It didn’t start that way. I have a theory to explain what happened, but you’ll need to wait for the next book.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Eastern Orthodoxy and Human Rights
The Orthodox scholar George Demacopoulos (some of whose publications I have noted on here over the years, and whom I interviewed about his book Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome) recently announced on Facebook that the "Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University has won a $250,000
grant from Leadership 100 to conduct a five-year scholarly study of the
compatibility of Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights."
These are topics that George and his colleague Aristotle Papanikolaou have circled around for some time in some of their individual publications as well as co-edited collections from the excellent conferences they organize and host on a regular basis. See, e.g., Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine as well as the earlier and invaluable collection Orthodox Constructions of the West, which I discussed in detail starting here.
The news of this grant is welcome in a time when it has become increasingly fashionable to denounce the horrors of, and call for the total replacement of, modern liberalism, including its notions of human rights. Twenty years ago, in writing a thesis on Alasdair MacIntyre, I became very sympathetic to his splenetic dismissals of rights language, belief in which, he said, is at one with belief in witches and unicorns. Even more, of course, did MacIntyre set his face against the entire liberal project as having failed to do what it promised and instead having illicitly smuggled in (a favourite MacIntyre verb) a lot of premises and practices extraneous to it. I followed him very closely in thinking this, and still do to some extent.
I wrote at a time when the Radical Orthodoxy movement was going strong, and in fact I made inquiries with both John Milbank (when he was briefly at the University of Virginia) and Catherine Pickstock at Emmanuel College in the University of Cambridge, about writing a dissertation on medieval voluntarist corruptions of authority, with the idea of building upon MacIntyre's claim that modern emotivism rests upon the obliteration of any coherent distinction between power and authority, and upon Radical Orthodoxy's claim (increasingly challenged) that the real bogeyman here is Scotus.
More recently, however, as a student of MacIntyre, I have followed him in tempering some of the criticisms of the liberal project precisely insofar as he has admitted to not knowing how to replace it, and has admitted to being aware of the acute problems that any such "replacement" would have to grapple with. Thus in his essay "Toleration and the Goods of Conflict," published in the 2006 collection Ethics and Politics, he said those calling for new forms of community after liberalism, or built on the ashes of liberalism, have yet adequately to engage in "rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say. Nor do I.” Would that more recent authors had such humility and restraint.
Such restraint has not always been in plenteous supply among critics of liberalism, including Milbank and Pickstock who, as Eugene McCarraher noted in this splendid series of interviews, sometimes turned theology into a "blood sport" and treat “'modernity' and 'liberalism'...as though they were the spawn of Satan."
Such curdled denunciations are by no means limited to Western Christians. Eastern Christians, especially in the post-Soviet period and space, have often been even more reactionary in this regard, denouncing human rights and much else besides as threats to "holy Russia" and other places that do not exist.
More recently, however, some scholars have begun to reconsider matters, arguing that Orthodoxy is not necessarily hostile to rights language no matter how much certain of her apologists would like for this to be so. Thus we had the collection Orthodoxy Christianity and Human Rights published in 2012 under the editorship of A.Brüning and E. van der Zweerde.
In 2013, we saw the publication of The Russian Church and Human Rights by Kristina Stoeckl, whom I interviewed here about this important book.
This year--this month, in fact--we were promised another collection, Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights in Europe: A Dialogue between Theological Paradigms and Socio-Legal Pragmatics, but publication seems to have been delayed.
And soon, it would seem, thanks to Fordham's funding, we will have further treatments of these complex issues, which can only be welcomed.
These are topics that George and his colleague Aristotle Papanikolaou have circled around for some time in some of their individual publications as well as co-edited collections from the excellent conferences they organize and host on a regular basis. See, e.g., Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine as well as the earlier and invaluable collection Orthodox Constructions of the West, which I discussed in detail starting here.
The news of this grant is welcome in a time when it has become increasingly fashionable to denounce the horrors of, and call for the total replacement of, modern liberalism, including its notions of human rights. Twenty years ago, in writing a thesis on Alasdair MacIntyre, I became very sympathetic to his splenetic dismissals of rights language, belief in which, he said, is at one with belief in witches and unicorns. Even more, of course, did MacIntyre set his face against the entire liberal project as having failed to do what it promised and instead having illicitly smuggled in (a favourite MacIntyre verb) a lot of premises and practices extraneous to it. I followed him very closely in thinking this, and still do to some extent.
I wrote at a time when the Radical Orthodoxy movement was going strong, and in fact I made inquiries with both John Milbank (when he was briefly at the University of Virginia) and Catherine Pickstock at Emmanuel College in the University of Cambridge, about writing a dissertation on medieval voluntarist corruptions of authority, with the idea of building upon MacIntyre's claim that modern emotivism rests upon the obliteration of any coherent distinction between power and authority, and upon Radical Orthodoxy's claim (increasingly challenged) that the real bogeyman here is Scotus.
More recently, however, as a student of MacIntyre, I have followed him in tempering some of the criticisms of the liberal project precisely insofar as he has admitted to not knowing how to replace it, and has admitted to being aware of the acute problems that any such "replacement" would have to grapple with. Thus in his essay "Toleration and the Goods of Conflict," published in the 2006 collection Ethics and Politics, he said those calling for new forms of community after liberalism, or built on the ashes of liberalism, have yet adequately to engage in "rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say. Nor do I.” Would that more recent authors had such humility and restraint.
Such restraint has not always been in plenteous supply among critics of liberalism, including Milbank and Pickstock who, as Eugene McCarraher noted in this splendid series of interviews, sometimes turned theology into a "blood sport" and treat “'modernity' and 'liberalism'...as though they were the spawn of Satan."
Such curdled denunciations are by no means limited to Western Christians. Eastern Christians, especially in the post-Soviet period and space, have often been even more reactionary in this regard, denouncing human rights and much else besides as threats to "holy Russia" and other places that do not exist.
More recently, however, some scholars have begun to reconsider matters, arguing that Orthodoxy is not necessarily hostile to rights language no matter how much certain of her apologists would like for this to be so. Thus we had the collection Orthodoxy Christianity and Human Rights published in 2012 under the editorship of A.Brüning and E. van der Zweerde.
In 2013, we saw the publication of The Russian Church and Human Rights by Kristina Stoeckl, whom I interviewed here about this important book.
This year--this month, in fact--we were promised another collection, Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights in Europe: A Dialogue between Theological Paradigms and Socio-Legal Pragmatics, but publication seems to have been delayed.
And soon, it would seem, thanks to Fordham's funding, we will have further treatments of these complex issues, which can only be welcomed.
Friday, November 4, 2016
Christianity and Democracy in the Shadow of Constantine
With an official release just days before the elections in November, this book's relevance will continue on after "our long national nightmare" of campaigning is temporarily concluded. (The American system desperately needs to follow the Anglo-Canadian example of campaigns legally limited to 60 days or fewer!) Christians, in this country as elsewhere, in this era as in all others, know that we are citizens of two kingdoms, and the earthly kingdom, no matter its polity, will never be perfect.
That being said, are some polities closer to the Christian ideal than others? Can anyone dispute that democracy, however debased it can often be, remains superior to the communist brutalities inflicted by various governments in various countries across Europe in the last century? As those countries--most of them predominantly Orthodox--continue to recover from communist wickedness, the task of thinking through still relatively new democratic forms of governance remains a vital one. This forthcoming collection, edited by George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (author of the recent and related study, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy) of Fordham University, will aid in that task: Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine (Fordham UP, 2016), 272pp.
About this book the press tells us:
That being said, are some polities closer to the Christian ideal than others? Can anyone dispute that democracy, however debased it can often be, remains superior to the communist brutalities inflicted by various governments in various countries across Europe in the last century? As those countries--most of them predominantly Orthodox--continue to recover from communist wickedness, the task of thinking through still relatively new democratic forms of governance remains a vital one. This forthcoming collection, edited by George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (author of the recent and related study, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy) of Fordham University, will aid in that task: Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine (Fordham UP, 2016), 272pp.
About this book the press tells us:
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has forced traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries to consider the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy. Contributors examine the influence of Constantinianism in both the post-communist Orthodox world and in Western political theology. Constructive theological essays feature Catholic and Protestant theologians reflecting on the relationship between Christianity and democracy, as well as Orthodox theologians reflecting on their tradition's relationship to liberal democracy. The essays explore prospects of a distinctively Christian politics in a post-communist, post-Constantinian age.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
An Interview with George Demacopoulos on Gregory the Great
As I noted last June, when notice of this book's publication was posted, we have been living in a time of increasing scholarship focusing on the diverse figures occupying, diverse theological understandings of, and diverse practices emanating from, the bishopric of Rome in the first millennium, a focus which was called for in part by the modern Orthodox-Catholic dialogue and the recent popes of Rome themselves, including John Paul II, on whose request I have had a few things to say. The more we learn of this period the more we find that it fits easily and neatly into nobody's imagined reconstructions of the past, especially hardcore triumphalistic apologists in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
One of those prominent figures contributing to this scholarship is the Orthodox George Demacopoulos of Fordham University, author of several recent studies, including The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity, which I favorably reviewed elsewhere.
Along with Aristotle Papanikalaou, also of Fordham's theology department and its Orthodox Christian Studies Centre, Demacopoulos is editor of the invaluable scholarly collection Orthodox Constructions of the West (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought, which I discussed on here in three parts.
His new book returns to some earlier work he did on St. Gregory the Great, including a translation, The Book of Pastoral Rule: St. Gregory the Great, part of the Popular Patristics Series of St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.
Demacopoulos's first book, Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church, also featured a chapter on Gregory the Great, to whom he returns in his newest book, published this year: Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome (UND Press, 2015), 240pp. I sent him some questions to interview him about this newest book, and here are his thoughts:
AD: Tell us about your background, and what led you to this book:
George E. Demacopoulos: 15 years ago, I wrote my dissertation at UNC-CH on Gregory the Great's approach to spiritual direction, arguing that he attempted to bring to the broader Christian world the technologies of pastoral care then operative in ascetic communities. At the time, Robert Markus has recently published his excellent biography of Gregory and my dissertation advisor wisely recommended that I look in a different direction when turning the dissertation into a book. So, for my first monograph, I put the questions about spiritual direction that I had for Gregory to a broader set of early Christian authors.
My second book continued to work in Gregory's world (the late-ancient papacy) but, again, examined one facet of his thought (the link between St. Peter and the papacy) that also captivated other late ancient authors.
So, in some sense, I have been thinking about this current book for nearly fifteen years, but it was only recently that I felt ready to attempt what I believe is a new approach to the so-called "two Gregorys"--the ascetic contemplative and the shrewd administrator.
AD: As you may know, the popes of Rome for 20 years now have been calling for more scholarship on the papacy in the first millennium--and the official international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue hsa done likewise. Do you see both your recent book, The Invention of Peter, and now this one on Gregory the Great as part of this trajectory of 'ecumenical scholarship' as it were?
GED: With regard to ecumenical engagement via historical study--Yes, I do see this as part of that broader project. Not so much because I expect to strike the perfect cord between Orthodox and Roman Catholics but because I believe that the Orthodox have great deal to learn from figures like St. Gregory and because the Orthodox desperately need a little more nuance and sophistication in their understanding of the development of the papacy and the ways in which the papacy was understood by early Christians east of the Adriatic.
AD: Your introduction (p.5) speaks of a topic I've recently become preoccupied with: the role of 'editorial erasure...in the shaping of ecclesiastical memory.' Is that a significant factor in assessing Gregory's pontificate?
GED: In some sense, it is hard to know how much editorial erasure took place--we don't have much evidence of things that once existed and no longer do. But it is really important for historians to be ever conscious of the fact that we have limited access to the figures of pre-modernity and that we are very much beholden to the editors and copyists, whatever theological or ideological biases, who preserved our records.
AD: A key theme throughout your work is the influence of Gregory's ascetic theology on the rest of his life and work. Tell us a bit more about that theology and its importance.
GED: What I find so intriguing about Gregory's ascetic theology was that it was somewhat unique of major late-ancient thinkers. Whereas most ascetic theologians understood the summit of the Christian experience to be a kind of mystical encounter or union with the divine (one that typically required renunciation), Gregory speaks of the summit of the Christian life being achieved only when the ascetic forsakes the spiritual joys of contemplation for the benefit of others. In Gregory, we find someone who genuinely sees perfection in service, rather than in ascetic isolation. But this perfection is always an asceticism of a particular kind.
AD: As you know, sometimes polemical treatments (whether Protestant or Orthodox) of the papacy view it as one long campaign of self-aggrandizement motivated by what Augustine famously called "libido dominandi." Yet you note (p.43) that in Gregory there is little evidence of one seeking gratuitously to expand Roman claims. Moreover, in the famous dispute with John the Faster over the title "ecumenical" and elsewhere, Gregory, as you note, is at pains to stress Peter's faults and flaws, which strikes me as a singular and rather odd strategy, at least in the eyes of modern papal apologetics. Why would Gregory have done that--rather than, say, play up Peter as "prince of the apostles"?
Yes, Gregory is the only late-ancient pope who even addresses with any significance Peter's flaws. And, for Gregory, these are the keys to Peter (pardon the pun). Unlike Leo or Gelasius, Gregory has very little interest in asserting papal privilege on the basis of Peter (though he will of course defend Roman claims, but he doesn't attempt to extend those in any way). Gregory is deeply committed to a theology of spiritual direction, of spiritual reform, and of emphasizing the importance of humility in the Christian leader. For all of these reasons, Peter, in Gregory's hands, is a model of repentance, of humility, and of spiritual growth after failure. That's why he emphasizes the flaws.
AD: Looking at him in the eyes of contemporary scholarship and churchmanship, as well as ecumenically, what do you see as Gregory's legacy today?
GED: Gregory is clear bridge between east and west and between late-antiquity and the middle ages. He was a man who longed for retreat and contemplation but felt moved to action for the benefit of others.
AD: Having finished Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome, what are you at work on now? What's the next project?
GED: I recently received a Carpenter Foundation Grant, which allows for a year-long sabbatical beginning next month. The first book project will apply the resources of post-colonial critique to the study of Orthodox identity narratives in the wake of the Crusades. I don't think I will get to a second project in that time frame, but the next one (which I've started to write a few articles about) explores the theology of violence in early Byzantine hymnography.
One of those prominent figures contributing to this scholarship is the Orthodox George Demacopoulos of Fordham University, author of several recent studies, including The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity, which I favorably reviewed elsewhere.
Along with Aristotle Papanikalaou, also of Fordham's theology department and its Orthodox Christian Studies Centre, Demacopoulos is editor of the invaluable scholarly collection Orthodox Constructions of the West (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought, which I discussed on here in three parts.
His new book returns to some earlier work he did on St. Gregory the Great, including a translation, The Book of Pastoral Rule: St. Gregory the Great, part of the Popular Patristics Series of St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.
Demacopoulos's first book, Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church, also featured a chapter on Gregory the Great, to whom he returns in his newest book, published this year: Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome (UND Press, 2015), 240pp. I sent him some questions to interview him about this newest book, and here are his thoughts:
George E. Demacopoulos: 15 years ago, I wrote my dissertation at UNC-CH on Gregory the Great's approach to spiritual direction, arguing that he attempted to bring to the broader Christian world the technologies of pastoral care then operative in ascetic communities. At the time, Robert Markus has recently published his excellent biography of Gregory and my dissertation advisor wisely recommended that I look in a different direction when turning the dissertation into a book. So, for my first monograph, I put the questions about spiritual direction that I had for Gregory to a broader set of early Christian authors.
My second book continued to work in Gregory's world (the late-ancient papacy) but, again, examined one facet of his thought (the link between St. Peter and the papacy) that also captivated other late ancient authors.
So, in some sense, I have been thinking about this current book for nearly fifteen years, but it was only recently that I felt ready to attempt what I believe is a new approach to the so-called "two Gregorys"--the ascetic contemplative and the shrewd administrator.
AD: As you may know, the popes of Rome for 20 years now have been calling for more scholarship on the papacy in the first millennium--and the official international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue hsa done likewise. Do you see both your recent book, The Invention of Peter, and now this one on Gregory the Great as part of this trajectory of 'ecumenical scholarship' as it were?
GED: With regard to ecumenical engagement via historical study--Yes, I do see this as part of that broader project. Not so much because I expect to strike the perfect cord between Orthodox and Roman Catholics but because I believe that the Orthodox have great deal to learn from figures like St. Gregory and because the Orthodox desperately need a little more nuance and sophistication in their understanding of the development of the papacy and the ways in which the papacy was understood by early Christians east of the Adriatic.
AD: Your introduction (p.5) speaks of a topic I've recently become preoccupied with: the role of 'editorial erasure...in the shaping of ecclesiastical memory.' Is that a significant factor in assessing Gregory's pontificate?
GED: In some sense, it is hard to know how much editorial erasure took place--we don't have much evidence of things that once existed and no longer do. But it is really important for historians to be ever conscious of the fact that we have limited access to the figures of pre-modernity and that we are very much beholden to the editors and copyists, whatever theological or ideological biases, who preserved our records.
AD: A key theme throughout your work is the influence of Gregory's ascetic theology on the rest of his life and work. Tell us a bit more about that theology and its importance.
GED: What I find so intriguing about Gregory's ascetic theology was that it was somewhat unique of major late-ancient thinkers. Whereas most ascetic theologians understood the summit of the Christian experience to be a kind of mystical encounter or union with the divine (one that typically required renunciation), Gregory speaks of the summit of the Christian life being achieved only when the ascetic forsakes the spiritual joys of contemplation for the benefit of others. In Gregory, we find someone who genuinely sees perfection in service, rather than in ascetic isolation. But this perfection is always an asceticism of a particular kind.
AD: As you know, sometimes polemical treatments (whether Protestant or Orthodox) of the papacy view it as one long campaign of self-aggrandizement motivated by what Augustine famously called "libido dominandi." Yet you note (p.43) that in Gregory there is little evidence of one seeking gratuitously to expand Roman claims. Moreover, in the famous dispute with John the Faster over the title "ecumenical" and elsewhere, Gregory, as you note, is at pains to stress Peter's faults and flaws, which strikes me as a singular and rather odd strategy, at least in the eyes of modern papal apologetics. Why would Gregory have done that--rather than, say, play up Peter as "prince of the apostles"?
Yes, Gregory is the only late-ancient pope who even addresses with any significance Peter's flaws. And, for Gregory, these are the keys to Peter (pardon the pun). Unlike Leo or Gelasius, Gregory has very little interest in asserting papal privilege on the basis of Peter (though he will of course defend Roman claims, but he doesn't attempt to extend those in any way). Gregory is deeply committed to a theology of spiritual direction, of spiritual reform, and of emphasizing the importance of humility in the Christian leader. For all of these reasons, Peter, in Gregory's hands, is a model of repentance, of humility, and of spiritual growth after failure. That's why he emphasizes the flaws.
AD: Looking at him in the eyes of contemporary scholarship and churchmanship, as well as ecumenically, what do you see as Gregory's legacy today?
GED: Gregory is clear bridge between east and west and between late-antiquity and the middle ages. He was a man who longed for retreat and contemplation but felt moved to action for the benefit of others.
AD: Having finished Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome, what are you at work on now? What's the next project?
GED: I recently received a Carpenter Foundation Grant, which allows for a year-long sabbatical beginning next month. The first book project will apply the resources of post-colonial critique to the study of Orthodox identity narratives in the wake of the Crusades. I don't think I will get to a second project in that time frame, but the next one (which I've started to write a few articles about) explores the theology of violence in early Byzantine hymnography.
Friday, October 2, 2015
The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (I): Historiographical Problems
We have, for more than two decades, been living in a time of increasingly intense study of the role of the bishop of Rome in the first millennium. That call for study was, of course, given special impetus by the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, about which I have had a few things to say in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.
Recent popes and scholars have sought--following Congar's "grand law of Catholic reform"--to find models from earlier in the Church's history that might be useful today. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it runs the risk of romanticizing the first millennium as a period of unity, when the reality is far messier than that. The further problem is--as the eminent Byzantine historian Robert Taft has often remarked--that "history is instructive but not normative." In other words, even if we find all sorts of attractive or plausible models from the first millennium, that in no way absolves us of the responsibility to decide what is necessary for our own time and context, vastly different in some ways from any earlier period of Church history. We cannot simply say "Well, the Fathers did it, so we must too" and imagine that that solves anything.
So this process of studying the first millennium remains important but is rather slow-going, primarily because as we study this vast and diverse period in more detail we are constantly confronted with evidence that does not fit anybody's pre-conceived notions.
A new collection further deepens our understanding of the papacy in this period, but further complicates matters also: Geoffrey Dunn, ed., The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (Ashgate, 2015), 273pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:
The patrologist Bronwen Neil, author, editor, or translator of such works as The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor and Pope Gelasius I, The Letters of Gelasius I (492-496) contributes a chapter, "Crisis in the Letters of Gelasius I: a New Model of Crisis Management."
Glen Thompson's chapter is "The Pax Constantiniana and the Roman Episcopate." Thompson is the translator and editor of the recently published The Correspondence of Julius I.
The book is divided into three sections treating the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. In subsequent entries in this series, I shall have more to say about some of the essays in each.
In his introduction, Dunn, a senior research fellow in the Centre for Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University, notes some of the many challenges posed by studying the papacy in this time period. The question that is often asked is about the power of the pope in this time, and whether Vatican I's notion of "universal jurisdiction" was in fact promoted or discussed seriously in the antique period. Dunn acknowledges up front that answers to that question have varied and continue to vary, and part of the variance is determined by present political purposes as well as the ecclesial situation of a given scholar.
He raises the problem of whether scholars in 2015 can read antique evidence without allowing present considerations to control that reading, and without allowing, moreover, a reading that gives in to the temptation to see individual persons, practices, and texts as part of one grand narrative of historical or doctrinal development--what he calls reading "prochronistically, whereby modern ideas are projected back into the literary evidence" (2). As he goes on to say, "good scholarship should avoid looking at events in one period through the prism of later developments" (3).
There are other issues that bedevil study of this period, including the fact that much of it has not in fact been well studied at all. Apart from some really towering figures such as Leo I and Gregory I, few other popes have been studied in depth, and apart from these two, the correspondence of the rest of them, with rarest of exceptions, remains both untranslated into modern Western languages and often uncollected into Latin critical editions.
Dunn next acknowledges that much of what determined Roman pre-eminence in this period comes from its geopolitical situation as the largest city, the capital city, of the Roman Empire. This, of course, is simply a restatement of the "principle of accommodation" which Francis Dvornik made famous more than fifty years ago in his Byzantium and the Roman Primacy.
To be continued.
Recent popes and scholars have sought--following Congar's "grand law of Catholic reform"--to find models from earlier in the Church's history that might be useful today. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it runs the risk of romanticizing the first millennium as a period of unity, when the reality is far messier than that. The further problem is--as the eminent Byzantine historian Robert Taft has often remarked--that "history is instructive but not normative." In other words, even if we find all sorts of attractive or plausible models from the first millennium, that in no way absolves us of the responsibility to decide what is necessary for our own time and context, vastly different in some ways from any earlier period of Church history. We cannot simply say "Well, the Fathers did it, so we must too" and imagine that that solves anything.
So this process of studying the first millennium remains important but is rather slow-going, primarily because as we study this vast and diverse period in more detail we are constantly confronted with evidence that does not fit anybody's pre-conceived notions.
A new collection further deepens our understanding of the papacy in this period, but further complicates matters also: Geoffrey Dunn, ed., The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (Ashgate, 2015), 273pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:
At various times over the past millennium bishops of Rome have claimed a universal primacy of jurisdiction over all Christians and a superiority over civil authority. Reactions to these claims have shaped the modern world profoundly. Did the Roman bishop make such claims in the millennium prior to that? The essays in this volume from international experts in the field examine the bishop of Rome in late antiquity from the time of Constantine at the start of the fourth century to the death of Gregory the Great at the beginning of the seventh. These were important centuries as Christianity underwent enormous transformation in a time of change. The essays concentrate on how the holders of the office perceived and exercised their episcopal responsibilities and prerogatives within the city or in relation to both civic administration and other churches in other areas, particularly as revealed through the surviving correspondence. With several of the contributors examining the same evidence from different perspectives, this volume canvasses a wide range of opinions about the nature of papal power in the world of late antiquity.Among the authors who have written chapters in this collection, we find the Orthodox scholar George Demacopolous, author of The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity, which I have elsewhere largely favorably reviewed. Demacopolous contributes a chapter, "Are All Univesalist Politics Local: Pope Gelasius I's International Ambition as a Tonic for Local Humiliation."
The patrologist Bronwen Neil, author, editor, or translator of such works as The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor and Pope Gelasius I, The Letters of Gelasius I (492-496) contributes a chapter, "Crisis in the Letters of Gelasius I: a New Model of Crisis Management."
Glen Thompson's chapter is "The Pax Constantiniana and the Roman Episcopate." Thompson is the translator and editor of the recently published The Correspondence of Julius I.
The book is divided into three sections treating the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. In subsequent entries in this series, I shall have more to say about some of the essays in each.
In his introduction, Dunn, a senior research fellow in the Centre for Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University, notes some of the many challenges posed by studying the papacy in this time period. The question that is often asked is about the power of the pope in this time, and whether Vatican I's notion of "universal jurisdiction" was in fact promoted or discussed seriously in the antique period. Dunn acknowledges up front that answers to that question have varied and continue to vary, and part of the variance is determined by present political purposes as well as the ecclesial situation of a given scholar.
He raises the problem of whether scholars in 2015 can read antique evidence without allowing present considerations to control that reading, and without allowing, moreover, a reading that gives in to the temptation to see individual persons, practices, and texts as part of one grand narrative of historical or doctrinal development--what he calls reading "prochronistically, whereby modern ideas are projected back into the literary evidence" (2). As he goes on to say, "good scholarship should avoid looking at events in one period through the prism of later developments" (3).
There are other issues that bedevil study of this period, including the fact that much of it has not in fact been well studied at all. Apart from some really towering figures such as Leo I and Gregory I, few other popes have been studied in depth, and apart from these two, the correspondence of the rest of them, with rarest of exceptions, remains both untranslated into modern Western languages and often uncollected into Latin critical editions.
Dunn next acknowledges that much of what determined Roman pre-eminence in this period comes from its geopolitical situation as the largest city, the capital city, of the Roman Empire. This, of course, is simply a restatement of the "principle of accommodation" which Francis Dvornik made famous more than fifty years ago in his Byzantium and the Roman Primacy.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
