Gregory Palamas and Islam

The fact that yesterday, on the Gregorian paschalion, was the second Sunday of Lent when Gregory Palamas is commemorated, and this coming Sunday the same feast of the same figure for those on the Julian paschalion, means that the father of hesychasm will be on a lot of minds this week. What better time to draw your attention to a book set for release next month by the widely respected scholar and theological translator Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam (Liverpool University Press, April 2020), 544pp.

Published as part of the Translated Texts for Byzantinists series of LUP, this collection, the publisher tells us, offers

--the first English translation of a dozen key texts by or relating to Gregory Palamas;
--fascinating first-hand accounts of fourteenth-century Christian debates with Muslim scholars;
--first English translation of all the Synodal Tomoi issued in defence of the hesychasts;
--detailed exposition of the historical context of a theological controversy that is still alive today.

Gregory Palamas, a monk of Mount Athos and metropolitan of Thessalonike from 1347 to 1357, was a leading fourteenth-century Byzantine intellectual. He was the chief spokesman for the hesychasts in the controversy bearing that name, which began when a charge of heresy was laid against him in 1340 and ended with his proclamation as a saint in 1368. Although excellent English translations of some of Palamas' theological writings are available, very few texts relating to his historical role have yet been translated. This book contains the first English translation of the contemporary Life of Palamas by Philotheos Kokkinos, which is our principal source of biographical information on him. Also translated into English for the first time are the Synodal Tomoi from 1341 to 1368, which chart the progress of the hesychast controversy from the viewpoint of the victors, together with the corpus of material relating to Palamas' year of captivity among the Turks, which offers a unique insight into conditions for Christians and Muslims in the early Ottoman emirate. The translations, all of which are based on critical texts, are preceded by introductions which set Palamas in his historical context and propose some changes to the conventional chronology of his life.

Arabic Christian Texts in Translation

The other day I received a welcome announcement from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University telling us of the publication of the first volume in a new series that Fordham UP is putting out, "Christian Arabic Texts in Translation."

The inaugural text in this important series is Revelation 1-3 in Christian Arabic Commentary: John's First Vision and the Letters to the Seven Churches by Būlus al-Būshī and Ibn Kātib Qayṣar and edited by Stephen J. Davis, T.C. Schmidt and Shawqi Talia (Fordham UP, 2019), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

The first publication in a new series―Christian Arabic Texts in Translation, edited by Stephen Davis―this book presents English-language excerpts from thirteenth-century commentaries on the Apocalypse of John by two Egyptian authors, Būlus al-Būshī and Ibn Kātib Qas.ar. Accompanied by scholarly introductions and critical annotations, this edition will provide a valuable entry-point to important but understudied theological work taking place at the at the meeting-points of the medieval Christian and Muslim worlds.

Augustine's Confessions: A New Translation

Augustine of Hippo occupies a famously ambivalent place in certain Eastern Christian circles. As a rough rule of thumb, one may estimate that the higher the percentage of polemics he attracts from Orthodox, the higher the certainty that he has never been read comprehensively in original critical editions. Instead, like other major Western figures--one thinks immediately of Anselm and Aquinas in this regard--he has been traduced by ignorant apologists. Much of this was addressed in a volume that's been out for a decade now, but remains absolutely crucial: Orthodox Readings of Augustine, eds.  George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Fordham University Press, 2008).

But regardless of what one thinks of Augustine's theology--if, indeed, one can use such a term and assume thereby to have captured something simple and singular in so vast a corpus of writings--he has profoundly shaped the world we live in through his City of God as well as his Confessions--to say nothing of myriad other works. And no person considering oneself reasonably educated in antique literature can ignore The Confessions, which have, of course, often been described as the first major Western "autobiography" or reflection on one's inner life. They may be that, but they are much more than that.

They have also been regularly released in translation from major and minor scholars. Along comes another new translation which is the subject of a searching and laudatory review by Adam Phillips (who always attracts attention in these parts) in a recent edition of the London Review of Books which I read with great interest. While recognizing the uses of other major translators (including especially that of Henry Chadwick), Phillips commends to us Confessions: A New Translation by Peter Constantine (Liveright, 2018), 368pp. He notes that Constantine's translation helps us more sharply realize just how unreliable language is in and for Augustine, and how inadequate all our attempts to describe our searching for and desiring of Him who is beyond our categories of language and being.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

No modern, well-versed literature lover can call her education complete without having read Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein―and most recently informing Stephen Greenblatt’s provocative thesis about one of our foundational mythologies in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. It is here that we learn how one of the greatest saints in Christendom overcame a wild and reckless past, complete with a rambunctious posse of friends, an overly doting mother, and an affair that produced a “bastard” child. Yet English translators have long emphasized the ecclesiastical virtues of Augustine’s masterpiece, often at the expense of its passion and literary vigor. Restoring the lyricism of Augustine’s original language, Peter Constantine offers a masterful and elegant rendering of Confessions in what will be a classic for decades to come.

The Donatist Crisis

Liverpool University Press continues an invaluable service with their series Translated Texts for Historians. Past publications, as I've noted on here, have offered critical translations of the acts of such highly controversial councils as Chalcedon and Nicaea II, inter alia. Now they have newly published in paperback just last week The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, ed. Richard Miles (Liverpool University Press

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

This is the first book for over twenty years to undertake a holistic examination of the Donatist Controversy, a bilious and sometimes violent schism that broke out in the North African Christian Church in the early years of the century AD and which continued up until the sixth century AD. What made this religious dispute so important was that its protagonists brought to the fore a number of issues and practices that had empire-wide ramifications for how the Christian church and the Roman imperial government dealt with the growing number of dissidents in their ranks. Very significantly it was during the Donatist Controversy that Augustine of Hippo, who was heavily involved in the dispute, developed the idea of 'tough love' in dealing with those at odds with the tenets of the main church, which in turn acted as the justification for the later brutal excesses of the Inquisition.

In order to reappraise the Donatist Controversy for the first time in many years, 14 specialists in the religious, cultural, social, legal and political history as well as the archaeology of Late Antique North Africa have examined what was one of the most significant religious controversies in the Late Roman World through a set of key contexts that explain its significance the Donatist Schism not just in North Africa but across the whole Roman Empire, and beyond.

Crazy Communistic Christians

In one of the first books he published over his long, distinguished career as the most important moral philosopher of our time, Alasdair MacIntyre bluntly argued in Marxism: An Interpretation (which was later revised and republished as Marxism and Christianity) that “the two most relevant books in the modern world are St. Mark’s Gospel and Marx’s National Economy and Philosophy; but they must be read together.” (For those unfamiliar with MacIntyre, I give something of a retrospective of MacIntyre's writings here; I show here how revoltingly he has been traduced by some oversharing blogger; and discuss something of his use of Marx and Freud here.)

MacIntyre has returned to a new engagement with Marx in his newest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge UP, 2016). Here, MacIntyre says, we must learn “from Marx just what it was about capitalism—that appropriation of surplus value—that transformed the relationship of the cultural and social order so radically." While recognizing the prosperity capitalism has brought some, MacIntyre also insists in his latest book on recognizing that it has also “destroyed…traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived.” All this Marx had clearly foreseen two centuries ago.

The deceptive and destructive power of capitalism today is such that we often fail—at least, ironically, until Donald Trump came along—to take seriously those inequalities and those deprived and destroyed areas that have been increasing in the last several decades. And it is not just politicians who fail to own up to this: many churchmen have also often gone along with, or at least failed to criticize, these developments, which MacIntyre, in an updated 1995 preface to his Marxism and Christianity, sees as a dereliction of ecclesial duty: “Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities” (here one thinks immediately of Dorothy Day, as Lance Richey and I tried to show in our book).

MacIntyre’s earliest published writings on Marx were from the 1950s and 1960s. Those writings were reprinted in 2008 in the collection, Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, edited by Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson.

All these thoughts came back to me today in reading David Bentley Hart's op-ed in the New York Times, "Are Christians Supposed to be Communists?" Hart's work on re-translating the New Testament has forced this question upon him again, as he notes in this op-ed and elsewhere.

It is certainly a question worth considering again and seriously because it's never been adequately answered by Christians of the last century and more. The capture of the Christian imaginary and its colonization from within by advanced capitalism remains, to my mind, one of the most insidious problems of our time. Certainly my students this semester, reading, inter alia, Vincent Miller's Consuming Religion have, with great diffidence and discomfort, raised this question of whether we should be "communists." I have no great answers to this, but when men like Hart and MacIntyre say we need to be asking such a question anew, it behooves all of us to sit up and listen.

"A Bible Study Followed by a Meal": Ephrem Lash on the Eucharist

More than a decade ago now, in a graduate class on Byzantine liturgical translations, I was first introduced to the Orthodox liturgical scholar and translator Archimandrite Ephrem Lash. Most of his work has been freely available on his very useful website, which I check regularly. Some of his other printed translations are linked here on the right and left.

I've watched a number of his videos more recently, and he has long struck me as embodying a unique kind of English Orthodoxy seemingly without pretense (which cannot always be said): English because marked by dry wit (calling the Divine Liturgy structurally "a Bible study followed by a meal") and unromantic reflection on human nature; Orthodox because of a commitment to beauty and truth.

He died yesterday in London. We pray that his memory be eternal, and that his soul be placed where all the righteous dwell in (to use his translation) "a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of refreshment, whence pain, grief and sighing have fled away."