Senses and Perceptions of Things Divine

I well remember the moment (or do I? how reliable are senses and memories anyway?) at the turn of the century when we started seeing books devoted to exploring the role of the senses in Christian experience. Since then we have had books on smell and scent, on sight and visual culture, on hearing and listening, and other things besides. 

This year two more will be introduced into this category, their authors no strangers to long-time readers of this wee blog. The first is an edited international scholarly collection, Perceiving Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception, eds. Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk (Oxford University Press, 6 March 2022), 272pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

Sensory language is commonly used to describe human encounters with the divine. Scripture, for example, employs perceptual language like 'taste and see that the Lord is good', 'hear the word of the Lord', and promises that 'the pure in heart will see God'. Such statements seem to point to certain features of human cognition that make perception-like contact with divine things possible. But how precisely should these statements be construed? Can the elusive notion of 'spiritual perception' survive rigorous theological and philosophical scrutiny and receive a constructive articulation?

Perceiving Things Divine seeks to make philosophical and theological sense of spiritual perception. Reflecting the results of the second phase of the Spiritual Perception Project, this volume argues for the possibility of spiritual perception. It also seeks to make progress towards a constructive account of the different aspects of spiritual perception while exploring its intersection with various theological and philosophical themes, such as biblical interpretation, aesthetics, liturgy, race, ecology, eschatology, and the hiddenness of God. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume draws on the resources of value theory, philosophy of perception, epistemology, philosophy of art, psychology, systematic theology, and theological aesthetics.

The volume also draws attention to how spiritual perception may be affected by such distortions as pornographic sensibility and racial prejudice. Since perceiving spiritually involves the whole person, the volume proposes that spiritual perception could be purified by ascetic discipline, healed by contemplative practices, trained in the process of spiritual direction and the pursuit of virtue, transformed by the immersion in the sacramental life, and healed by opening the self to the operation of divine grace.

You will note here an impressive cast of contributors, including Sarah Coakley and Catherine Pickstock (who was going to be my doctoral director at Cambridge when I was admitted in 1999 before turning them down).  

The next book is Hearing the Scriptures: Liturgical Exegesis of the Old Testament in Byzantine Orthodox Hymnography by Eugen J. Pentiuc (Oxford UP, 2021), 456pp. 

About this book we are told:

Throughout the ages, interpreters of the Christian scriptures have been wonderfully creative in seeking to understand and bring out the wonders of these ancient writings. That creativity has often been overlooked by recent scholarship, concentrated as it is in the so-called critical period. In this study, Eugen J. Pentiuc illuminates the remarkable way in which the Byzantine hymnographers (liturgists) expressed their understanding of the Old Testament in their compositions, an interpretive process that he terms "liturgical exegesis."

In authorship and methodology, patristic exegesis and liturgical exegesis are closely related. Patristic exegesis, however, is primarily linear and sequential, proceeding verse by verse, while liturgical exegesis offers a more imaginative and eclectic mode of interpretation, ranging over various parts of the Bible. In this respect, says Pentiuc, liturgical exegesis resembles cubist art. To illuminate the multi-faceted creativity of liturgical exegesis, Pentiuc has chosen the vast and rich hymnography of Byzantine Orthodox Holy Week as a case study, offering a detailed lexical, biblical, and theological analysis of selected hymns. His analysis reveals the many different and imaginative ways in which creative liturgists incorporated and interpreted scriptural material in these hymns.

By drawing attention to the way in which the bible is used by Byzantine hymnographers in the living Orthodox tradition, Hearing the Scriptures makes a ground-breaking contribution to the history of the reception of the scriptures.

The Shepherd of Hermas

The Shepherd of Hermas is a wild ride. I enjoy watching students try to figure out how to interpret the text when I have assigned it over the years. Its relative neglect in 21st-century scholarship is about to change next month with the publication of The Shepherd of Hermas: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Handbook by Jonathon Lookadoo (T&T Clark, April 2021), 312pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Jonathon Lookadoo guides readers through the early Christian apocalypse known as the Shepherd of Hermas, providing a clear overview of the numerous literary, historical, and theological insights that this text contains for those researching early Christianity.

Dividing his exploration into two sections, Lookadoo first introduces the Shepherd by providing an overview of the text to those with limited familiarity, while also focusing on critical issues such as authorship, date, and the Shepherd's complex manuscript tradition and reception history. He then moves to examine the interpretation of particular passages in detail, and by close exploration of theological and literary features he is able to contextualize the Shepherd alongside contemporary contexts. This volume covers the important thematic issues in the Shepherd, and also provides a fresh perspective that arises from a thoroughly textual focus; in so doing, Lookadoo enables readers to engage both with the Shepherd itself and the scholarship that surrounds the text.

On Receiving--or Not--the Great Schoolman Thomas Aquinas

One of the most fascinating books I read in the last decade was and remains Marcus Plested's Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, about which I interviewed him on this blog. It must surely be counted as a key piece of scholarship in dismantling the bogus and tendentious tales told by Orthodox apologists about the Big Bad Schoolmen, and in that way serving as "ecumenical scholarship" of the most precious sort. 

Plested now teams up with the indefatigable Matthew Levering to bring us, early next year, The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas. The book contains several chapters on Eastern, Byzantine, and Orthodox responses to Aquinas in a variety of different historical contexts--along with many other riches. About this book the publisher further tells us this: 

The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas provides a comprehensive survey of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant philosophical and theological reception of Thomas Aquinas over the past 750 years.This Handbook will serve as a necessary primer for everyone who wishes to study Aquinas's thought and/or the history of theology and philosophy since Aquinas's day. Part I considers the late-medieval receptions of Aquinas among Catholics and Orthodox. Part II examines sixteenth-century Western receptions of Aquinas (Protestant and Catholic), followed by a chapter on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Orthodox reception. Part III discusses seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic receptions, and Part IV surveys eighteenth- and nineteenth-century receptions (Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic). Part V focuses on the twentieth century and takes into account the diversity of theological movements in the past century as well as extensive philosophical treatment. The final section unpicks contemporary systematic approaches to Aquinas, covering the main philosophical and theological themes for which he is best known. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in their respective fields, this volume provides a valuable touchstone regarding the developments that have marked the past seven centuries of Christian theology.

The Idea and Role of Nicaea I

Reception history seems to be the rage lately amongst a lot of scholarly treatments of Christianity. Much of it is fascinating. Early next year we will see published another study looking at the reception of arguably the most consequential council in Christian history: The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431-451 by Mark S. Smith (Oxford UP, 2019), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils examines the role that appeals to Nicaea (both the council and its creed) played in the major councils of the mid-fifth century. It argues that the conflict between rival construals of Nicaea, and the struggle convincingly to arbitrate between them, represented a key dynamic driving—and unsettling—the conciliar activity of these decades. Mark S. Smith identifies a set of inherited assumptions concerning the role that Nicaea was expected to play in orthodox discourse—namely, that it possessed unique authority as a conciliar event, and sole sufficiency as a credal statement. The fundamental dilemma was thus how such shibboleths could be persuasively reaffirmed in the context of a dispute over Christological doctrine that the resources of the Nicene Creed were inadequate to address, and how the convening of new oecumenical councils could avoid fatally undermining Nicaea's special status.

Smith examines the articulation of these contested ideas of 'Nicaea' at the councils of Ephesus I (431), Constantinople (448), Ephesus II (449), and Chalcedon (451). Particular attention is paid to the role of conciliar acta in providing carefully-shaped written contexts within which the Nicene Creed could be read and interpreted. This study proposes that the capacity of the idea of 'Nicaea' for flexible re-expression was a source of opportunity as well as a cause of strife, allowing continuity with the past to be asserted precisely through adaptation and modification, and opening up significant new paths for the articulation of credal and conciliar authority. The work thus combines a detailed historical analysis of the reception of Nicaea in the proceedings of the fifth-century councils, with an examination of the complex delineation of theological 'orthodoxy' in this period. It also reflects more widely on questions of doctrinal development and ecclesial reception in the early church.

The Acts of Nicaea II

I have for years quoted Joseph Ratzinger's demonstrable claim, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, that part of the explanation for periodic outbreaks of iconoclasm in the West, including after Vatican II, stems from the fact that the West never adequately received the acts of Nicaea II, and has therefore never seriously integrated its insights into the life of the Western Church. This rather messy history of reception is told in Alain Besançon's invaluable The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm; and more recently in T.F.X. Noble's book Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians.

But whatever excuses about inadequate, incomplete, or inaccessible texts the West may have had in the past are gone in the face of a newly published book, translated by Richard Price, who also supplies a commentary to The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) (Liverpool University Press, 2018), 688pp.

Part of Liverpool's ongoing and very important series, Translated Texts for Historians LUP, this hefty book, the publisher tells us, treats

The Second Council of Nicaea (787), which decreed that religious images were to set up in churches and venerated. It thereby established the cult of icons as a central element in the piety of the Orthodox churches, as it has remained ever since. In the West its decrees received a new emphasis in the Counter-Reformation, in the defence of the role of art in religion. It is a text of prime importance for the iconoclast controversy of eighth-century Byzantium, one of the most explored and contested topics in Byzantine history. But it has also a more general significance - in the history of culture and the history of art. This edition offers the first translation that is based on the new critical edition of this text in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum series, and the first full commentary of this work that has ever been written. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers from a variety of disciplines.