Joseph de Maistre Then and Now

I have been spending many happy weeks this spring immersed in the fascinating thought of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) (as well as some of his contemporaries, especially Louis de Bonald and Felicité de Lamenais). I came across Maistre in the early part of the last decade thanks to Richard Lebrun, whose grandson, Brian Butcher, was in the doctoral program with me at the Sheptytsky Institute at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Lebrun, the doyen of anglophone scholars of Maistre, hearing of my work on the papacy, sent me a number of essays on Maistre. I did not have time to dive into him then with any seriousness, so I set him aside knowing that he was a substantial and influential figure to whom I would return at some point.

What makes Maistre so fascinating is not only how misunderstood he has been, not only how "outrageous" some of his ideas may appear to some people today (which always attaches a frisson to someone), but how often he is cited as a major influence on the First Vatican Council and the development of modern conceptions and practices of the papacy in its exercise of universal jurisdiction and infallibility. Maistre's notion of "sovereignty" is said to be hugely influential here. One figure who has been arguing for the centrality of Maistre in the modern papacy is the German Jesuit historian Hermann Pottmeyer in such books as Towards a Papacy in Communion: Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II. Others have made similar arguments on the Orthodox side: the Russian Orthodox Nicholas Lossky has suggested that the aftermath of the French Revolution shapes modern Orthodox nation-states and their churches' desire for "autocephaly." And the Greek political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides has also argued for the influence of post-revolutionary French thought on modern Orthodox ecclesiology in Greece and southeastern Europe. 

What makes all of these lines of influence even more fascinating is that Maistre spent fourteen years in Russia at the imperial court in St. Petersburg where he was ambassador of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia (whose subject Maistre was: he was never a French citizen though he wrote in beautiful, elegant French and was a noted stylist). Maistre was also, for a time, close to and influential upon Tsar Alexander I and the tsar's minister of education and "national enlightenment" Sergei Uvarov, and Maistre one of the most celebrated figures in the stylish salons of St. Petersburg, then one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe and in some ways a place of refuge for many fleeing revolutions in France and elsewhere. 

It seems clear now, thanks to modern scholarship, that many of the ideas and perceptions of Maistre are demonstrably false, and that he was a much richer, and perhaps ironically more modern, thinker than some have thought--himself a revolutionary in some ways though he despised the French Revolution and all its pomps and works. One of the newest works to continue the project of examining Maistre in depth and context comes in an edited collection by Richard Lebrun and Carolina Armenteros, Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers (Brill, 2011, 308pp.). I asked the editors for an interview about this book, and their other works on Maistre, and here are their thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your backgrounds

Richard: born 1 October 1931, on a farm near Milton, ND, grew up on another farm near Langdon, ND. Early education was mostly in the parochial school in Langdon with the Presentation Sisters. I received a B.A. in 1953 from St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN. The second semester of my third year was spent in Vienna as a participant in the Institute of European Studies – this also involved extensive travel in Italy, North Africa, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, and England. It was this experience that ignited my interest in European history. Following graduation from St. John’s, there followed three years of active duty in the U.S. Navy (an alternative to two years in the infantry during the Korean War). While in the Navy, I married in 1954. We subsequently had six children, and now have a multitude of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Following the Navy, thanks to the G.I. Bill and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, I entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota in September 1956, earned an M.A. by the spring of 1957, and then a Ph.D. (in history) in 1963. 

I was very interested on French history, but by the time I came to undertake a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota, we had small children, so the prospects of doing archival research in France were small; in these circumstances, my faculty advisor suggested a topic in intellectual history where I could rely on printed sources, and also suggested that very little had been done in English on Joseph de Maistre, someone he felt was of considerable importance. 

In September 1960, I accepted a teaching position at the University of Ottawa, where I taught until 1966, when I was invited to accept at teaching position at the University of Manitoba, where I taught until my retirement in 1998.

Carolina: Of Spanish, French, and Dominican parents, I was born on 13 October 1974 in Geneva, Switzerland. I grew up in Spain until I was twelve, when my family emigrated to the United States, the Mojave Desert of Southern California to be exact. I did my undergraduate work at Stanford, where I double-majored in history and biology and where I completed a Master’s in modern history before moving to Cambridge to do a second Master’s in ancient history.

After my second Master’s, I decided to stay at Cambridge for a Ph.D. in political thought and intellectual history, a subject for which Cambridge is world-renowned. During the first few months of my doctoral research, I discovered Maistre’s Considerations on France (1797) in the library. I thought then that they would be useful as no more than a passing reference for my Ph.D. project, which at the time was on a subject completely unrelated to Maistre. Within ten minutes of opening the Considerations, though, I knew that I would change my dissertation subject, and that I would henceforth work on either Maistre’s philosophy of history, or – if that had been done – some other aspect of Maistre’s thought. That was twelve years ago, and I have been reading and writing on Maistre ever since.

AD: What led you both to work on this book?

Richard: Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers is the third of three volumes of essays first presented at Reappraisals/Reconsidérations, the Fifth International Colloquium on Joseph de Maistre, held at Jesus College, Cambridge on 4 and 5 December 2008. This colloquium was organized by Carolina Armenteros, who subsequently asked me to work with her on editing and publishing the proceedings of this colloquium. I had first met Carolina at the fourth international colloquium on Maistre, which met in Chambéry in 2001; I was later invited to serve as the external examiner on her Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation in history in June 2004. From the time we first met, we explored our mutual interest in Maistre together through email; I also wrote many letters of reference for her for various fellowships and teaching positions.

Carolina: At Richard’s suggestion, I made the theme of the conference – Reappraisals – broad enough to accommodate a wide variety of interests. When the sessions were over, it became clear that Maistre’s posterity had been one of the major topics. It therefore made sense to gather the relevant papers into a themed volume, which we rounded off by commissioning some extra chapters.

Reappraisals yielded two additional collections of essays, which Richard and I also co-edited: Joseph De Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011) and The New enfant du siècle: Joseph de Maistre as a Writer (St Andrews, 2010).

AD: Your book, Joseph de Maistre and his European Readers, published in 2011, focuses on a man who died nearly 200 years ago. How is he still relevant today?

Richard: There are many figures in intellectual history, from Aristotle on, who, because of the brilliance of their thought and their influence on European culture and civilization, remain of perennial interest. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, from the generation before Joseph de Maistre, continues to be the subject of new and important studies, despite the huge bibliography on him. Evidence of Maistre’s continuing relevance may be found in the fact that new editions of his works and new studies of his thought and influence continue to appear in French and other languages. The subjects that he explored, including the nature of politics, the nature of language, the role of religion in society and politics, theodicy, and similar topics, continue to be of importance in our contemporary world. Fundamentally, his thought still provokes serious reflections on problems and issues that are still with us. Our 2011 volume focuses on Maistre’s European readers, but omits Spain and Portugal; there remains to be explored his influence in the Hispanic worlds of both Europe and Latin America, as well as his influence in the Muslim world and in Asia. We know that our website on Maistre has attracted interest from scholars in both Japan and China.

Carolina: As a Catholic political thinker who witnessed the de-Christianization campaigns of the French Revolution, Maistre was particularly interested in the relationship between religion and politics, and between tradition and modernity. I think these are subjects that make him especially relevant today, when traditional immigrant populations are growing in Europe and North America and when Judaeo-Christian traditions are reasserting themselves as legitimate sources of public reason. The repercussions of these trends abound in modern democracies: they range from Obamacare’s implications for religious freedom of conscience, to Switzerland’s ban on minarets, to France and Belgium’s controversial policies on the wearing of the burqa and niqab, to the dialogue between Christian churches and various Western governments over abortion, euthanasia, and world poverty. Our inheritance from the radical Enlightenment has led us to view these issues as confrontations between backwardness and progress, and it has encouraged us to see religion and tradition as mentalities to be discarded. Yet Maistre offers us alternative and much more stimulating ways of approaching the problem.

AD: Maistre has often been portrayed as perhaps the arch-reactionary, the figure resisting the revolutionary tide of 18th- and 19th-century Europe. What does this portrait (caricature?) miss of him and his thinking?

Richard: The caricature of Joseph de Maistre as the arch-reactionary is largely the product of politics in nineteenth-century France, and the long struggle in that country (a struggle that spread elsewhere in Europe and to England and the U.S. as well) between those who saw themselves as loyal to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and those who came to see the Revolution as a tragedy for France and for Christianity. In the circumstances of that period, Maistre became a symbol of the fundamental cleavage between those who admired the Revolution and those who approved it. (See my Throne and Altar: the Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre, pp. 1-3.) It is only in the past few decades that it has become possible to read Maistre anew with fresh eyes and from a broader perspective.

Carolina: The idea that Maistre was an arch-reactionary suggests that he was committed to the past. There is some truth in this: he thought, overall, that the French people had been better off under the Old Regime than they were during the French Revolution. This opinion, however, should not obscure the fact that Maistre was open to social and political changes that he saw as initiated by Providence, executed by human wisdom, and tending irresistibly toward the good. Even revolutionary calamities were productive within his scheme, because they contributed to purging society of the evils that prevented it from perfecting itself. Not only that, but despite providential intervention, humans were in charge of their own destiny, and as time went on they took increasing responsibility for producing their own social and political environments. This way of thinking is incompatible with reaction. But it dovetails very well with what I believe Maistre to have really been – a revolutionary conservative.

AD: Maistre spent fourteen years in Russia. Is there evidence of Russian culture generally--and Russian Orthodoxy in particular--shaping his thought, particularly his religious or theological thought?

Richard: It’s clear that Maistre was fascinated by his observations of Russian politics, culture, and religion. However, it must be recalled that he never learned the language, and lived only in the rarefied “French language” milieu of the court and diplomatic circles in the Russian capital. My impression is that his interactions with Russian culture only deepened and intensified his fundamental beliefs, strengthening his adherence to positions that he had reached long before his sojourn in Russia.

Carolina: I agree with Richard that the core of Maistre’s thought was already formed before he arrived in Russia. In fact, living in Saint Petersburg seems to have strengthened his identity as a Latin Catholic. I would add only that intellectual debates at the Russian court were the major stimuli that drove him to compose his mature works. Thus the Platonic illuminism that was in vogue among the Saint Petersburg aristocracy in 1809 inspired Maistre to read Origen and to write his esoteric works, the St Petersburg Dialogues and the 

Clarification Regarding Sacrifices (the first treatise on the sociology of violence), which were published in 1821. Mikhail Speransky’s initiatives to establish a national system of education also led Maistre to write his Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (published 1836), along with various pedagogical memoirs for the Russian government. As for Du Pape (1819), his magnum opus and the text that founded political ultramontanism, it was shaped by his participation in Russian religious debates and in particular by his desire to save the Orthodox Church from subservience to the state.

AD: In turn, is there evidence of his having shaped Russian culture and Russian Orthodoxy?

Richard: On Maistre’s influence in Russia, the essay by Vera Miltchyna, published first in French as “Oeuvres de Joseph de Maistre en Russie: Aperçu de la réception,” in the Revue des études maistriennes, No. 13 (2001), and in English translation as “Joseph de Maistre’s Works in Russia: A Look at their Reception,” in the volume I edited entitled Joseph De Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence: Selected Studies (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), remains a good starting place. But Carolina’s essay “Preparing the Russian Revolution: Maistre and Uvarov on the History of Knowledge,” in our 2011 Brill volume, goes far beyond the influence of Maistre’s published works to explore his direct influence on Sergei Uvarov, a figure who was very important in nineteenth-century Russian state policy.

Carolina: Maistre may have influenced Russian Orthodoxy by antithesis: I have always thought that Aleksandr Sturdza’s Considerations on the Doctrine and Spirit of the Orthodox Church (1816) were a response to Maistre’s ecclesiology. I discuss this in Chapter 3 of my book, The French Idea of History: Joseph De Maistre and His Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell, 2011). Yet Maistre exercised an influence on Russian educational policy that was far more important. He helped Razumovsky, Alexander I’s minister of education, to elaborate a curriculum for the imperial lycée at Tsarskoye Selo – a curriculum that was later adopted throughout the country. He also exercised a formative influence on Uvarov that, thanks to Uvarov’s long career as an educational policy maker, had an impact on Russian education until the end of the reign of Nicholas II. In our Brill volume I argue that, although they were designed to prevent Revolution, the educational policies that Uvarov implemented and derived from Maistre actually helped, quite ironically, to prepare the Russian Revolution.

AD: Isaiah Berlin perhaps infamously held Maistre to be a precursor of fascism, which seems rather de trop to me. What would you say in answer to Berlin? 

Richard: It seems to me that Cyprian Blamires’ essay, “Berlin, Maistre, and Fascism” in our 2011 Brill volume provides a devastating and convincing response to Berlin’s misguided efforts to portray Maistre as a precursor to fascism.

Carolina: Certainly. Blamires wrote his doctoral thesis on Maistre under Berlin’s supervision and understands both thinkers deeply. I would add too that the rest of our volume in itself constitutes further proof of Blamires’ thesis, since most of the Maistrian interpreters it discusses were thinkers on the left. This tendency to engage the left is a general facet of Maistre’s posterity: among his hundreds of interpreters across the centuries, I can think of only two who had strong fascist sympathies: Carl Schmitt and Charles Maurras.

AD: Maistre was extensively involved with Freemasonry, and at one point seems to have thought that the Freemasons would be instrumental in uniting a divided Christianity. And yet many Catholics today regard Freemasonry with horror, seeing membership in it as totally incompatible with membership in the Catholic Church. How did Maistre negotiate these difficult waters?

Richard: On Maistre’s relationship to Freemasonry, see my Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, where my treatment of this issue is based on the excellent studies by Jean Rebotton and Jean-Louis Darcel. Fundamentally, eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and in particular the strand of Masonry with which Maistre was involved, was not particularly anti-Christian or anti-Catholic. In France, many priests and bishops were involved. It was only in the clerical versus anti-clerical wars in nineteenth-century France that Freemasonry became resolutely anti-clerical. For more detailed studies of Maistre and Masonry, see the Revue des études maistriennes, No. 5-6 (1980) which includes a number of important studies on “Illuminisme et Franc-Maçonnerie,” which were presented at a colloquium held in Chambéry in May 1979.

Carolina: Maistre’s youthful social life seems to have revolved mainly around Freemasonry. He was very enthusiastic about it. In the eighteenth century, as Richard notes, Freemasonry, although formally forbidden by the Church, was not as feared and despised in Catholic circles as it would be in the nineteenth century. The message of Pope Clement XII’s In Iminenti (1738) hadn’t sunk in so to speak. The young Maistre even believed Freemasonry and Catholicism to be compatible, to the point that he proposed, in his Memoir to the Duke of Brunswick (1782), that Catholics and Protestants should use Freemasonic institutions as forums of ecumenical reconciliation.

The French Revolution changed all that. When it came, Freemasons acquired a European-wide reputation for subversion as conspiracy theories flourished speculating on the role they had supposedly played during the Revolution. It was at this point that Maistre began to be accused of having developed revolutionary sympathies among the Freemasons. He defended himself against the charge, and abandoned his Masonic activities with regret. Years later, when he was in Russia, he would console himself for this loss by befriending Freemasons (the Swedish Baron de Stedingk) and cultivating esotericism.

AD: Maistre's Du Pape seems to have had, at least initially, a rather cool reception in Catholic circles--especially in Rome itself. And yet contemporary scholars of our time (e.g., the Jesuit Hermann Pottmeyer) have said he is the figure influencing Catholic ecclesiology from Vatican I onward. How would you assess his influence on Catholic theology? How (if at all) has that influence changed in different ages from his own to ours?

Richard: Actually, the influence of Maistre’s Du Pape precedes Vatican I. Numerous editions of Maistre’s works, including Du Pape, were published in France during the Second Empire. Beginning with Lamennais in the 1820s, and then with Louis Veuillot in the 1850s and the 1860s, Maistre’s Ultramontane ideas were widely publicized in France well before 1870. He was probably important in weaning much of the French episcopacy from Gallicanism and converting them to Ultramontanism. In addition to the influence of his ecclesiological ideas, his aggressive defense of Catholicism generally seems to have heartened many nineteenth-century conservative Catholics, not only in France, but elsewhere. It’s significant, for example, that his little essay defending the Spanish Inquisition was translated into English three times in the nineteenth-century (1838, 1843, and 1851). See my “Joseph de Maistre et l’apologie de l’Inquisition espagnole,” in Joseph de Maistre (ed. by Phillippe Barthelet; Les Dossiers H; L’Âge d’Homme, 2005).

Carolina: I would add to that the influence that Maistre had on the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870. Since the 1790s, Maistre had followed Jean Bodin in ascribing absoluteness to temporal sovereignty. By the 1810s, in Book 1 of Du Pape, he observed that because temporal sovereignty is by nature absolute, and because the Church possessed both temporal and spiritual sovereignty, papal sovereignty was doubly absolute and could be termed infallible. I believe this statement to be at the origin of the dogma of papal infallibility. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Maistre does not seem to have been as great an inspiration to Catholic theology as he was in the nineteenth.

AD: Maistre seems clearly to have been an enemy of Gallicanism at least insofar as that was a movement for the "independence" of the French church from papal control. On a related matter, did he have much to say about Eastern Orthodox notions of "autocephaly" whereby each national church is held to be free from any external authority outside the nation-state?

Richard: Book Four of Du Pape, which is entirely devoted to “The Pope in his relations with the Chuches called schismatical,” argues strongly that both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church, have been and are fatally weakened by the way they have been subjected to the state. And, of course, much of the argument against Gallicanism as developed in De l’Église gallicane, blames the weaknesses of the pre-revolutionary French Church on the Gallicanism of the French crown and the parlements.

Carolina: Yes, I’m afraid Maistre was no fan of the autocephalous churches. Any and all ideas of ecclesiastical independence from Rome were anathema to him!

AD: Your book's title speaks of Maistre's "European readers." Do you know of any evidence that Maistre's theories about sovereignty influenced not just Western European readers but also those in the emerging independent nation-states such as Greece, Romania, or Bulgaria?

Carolina: This is an exciting question, which beckons to new research. Unfortunately, I am not at all aware of Maistre’s reception in any of these countries. But I can say that although he wrote on Maistre in French, and lived most of his life in France, one of Maistre’s most famous interpreters, Emil Cioran, was Romanian.

AD: The German Catholic Carl Schmitt famously said in the 1920s and 1930s, "Sovereign is he who decides the exception." What would Maistre have said in response to such a statement? Tell us, in other words, a bit about his theory of sovereignty, and whether you think his theory has influenced Catholic ideas about the "sovereign Pontiff."

Richard: As for a dialogue between Maistre and Schmitt, see the essay by Graeme Garrard, “Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt” in my Joseph De Maistre's Life, Thought, and Influence: Selected Studies mentioned above. In Du Pape, of course, Maistre based a good part of his argument for papal authority over the Church on his theory of sovereignty. See especially, Book Two of this work, which deals with “The Pope in his relations with temporal sovereignties.”

Carolina: I’ve answered a bit of this question above. Here I would say as well that Maistre would have agreed with Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty by exception (which is not surprising, since Maistre influenced Schmitt). Maistre had a very pessimistic idea of sovereignty. In On the Sovereignty of the People (1794-6), he defined it as “an absolute power that can do evil with impunity.” Like Schmitt, he believed that it always originated in an act of violence. However this was only his view of temporal sovereignty. In The French Idea of History, I have argued that for him ecclesiastical sovereignty distinguishes itself from temporal varieties precisely by its peaceful birth and rational capacity to govern non-violently. All temporal governments in his view follow over time the trajectory of a parabola: they rise with violence, and they decline when what he calls human ‘force’ is spent. But the Church is unique among all other governments in that it was born inconspicuously, and that rather than rise and fall, it has never ceased to grow steadily and in a straight line.

AD: At least as I read him--and I've not read everything--Maistre seems to have had what I would characterize as a deeply Augustinian pessimism about the human condition in general, and about the condition of sovereigns and monarchs in particular, viewing them all as (potentially) deeply corrupt. Is that a fair and accurate reading? 

Carolina: Maistre’s pessimism has been greatly emphasized, and with good reason. However I don’t think that he believed monarchs and sovereigns to be more corrupt than other people. And I also believe that Pelagianism plays a much greater role in his thought than does Augustinian pessimism. After all, this was an avowed enemy of modern Augustinians, a man with a nearly unbounded faith in the power of human beings to craft their own destiny, a Catholic who bordered on heterodoxy by maintaining that sometimes, the human will can annul God’s.

AD: Some have argued today that we live in a "globalized" world where national sovereignty has become significantly downgraded. What do you think Maistre would say in response to such ideas? 

Carolina: I think he would be very open to them. Maistre was a Europeanist, in fact a universalist, by virtue of his Christian faith. He believed that someday, the Church would extend over the whole earth, embracing and mingling with all cultures. In Europe, the political result would be a European confraternity similar to the Amphictyons of ancient Greece. Beyond Europe, a global order would model itself on the European Christian community. Maistre never addressed directly what would happen to nations in the future, but his later thought suggests that he would not have regretted their demise, at least not greatly. In the end, religious identity took undisputed precedence over political or national identity for him.

AD: Was Maistre in the end a hopeless romantic? In other words, his theory about the papacy--if I understand it correctly--was that it was supposed to function as something of a bulwark against the potential for tyranny in other sovereigns. But the "Sovereign Pontiff" is a sinful man like other leaders. Did Maistre expect too much of the popes? 

Richard: I think Maistre was fully aware that popes are as human as the rest of us. His argument was not so much about expecting the pope to be especially virtuous as about trying to identify a structural bulwark against tyranny. For various reasons he had no faith in the “Concert of Europe” that Tsar Alexander was promoting after the downfall of Napoleon, but I think he would have been sympathetic to the fundamental ideas about the League of Nations and the United Nations. We are, of course, still wrestling with the problem of what the world should do about lawless and tyrannical regimes, be they in Rwanda, Libya, or Syria.

Carolina: I agree. Maistre did not expect exceptional virtue from the popes. In fact, he defended monarchy precisely because it was the regime that required the least virtue, because even mediocre men could make it work. In this sense at least, he was no romantic, but an eighteenth-century rationalist and especially an heir of Montesquieu. 

Listen to Your Elders

Interest in the Desert Fathers and Mothers remains high, as I have noted before, with many recent books testifying to this. Along comes another from John Wortley, Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers The Systematic Collection (Cistercian Press, 2012), 463pp.

About this book the publisher tells us: 

In the early part of the fourth century, a few Christians, mostly men and some women, began to withdraw from the world to retreat into the desert, there to practice their new religion more seriously. The person who aspired to renounce the world first had to find an elder, a person who would accept him as a disciple and apprentice. To his elder (whom he would address as abba father) the neophyte owed complete obedience; from his abba he would receive provisions (as it were) for the road to virtue. In addition to the abba s own example of living, there was the verbal teaching of the elders in sayings and tales, setting out the theory and practice of the eremitic life. In due course, these sayings (or apophthegmata) were written down and, later, collected and codified. The earliest attempts to codify tales and sayings are now lost. As the collection grew, they were first organized alphabetically according to the name of the abba who spoke them, in a major collection known as the Apophthegmata Patrum Alphabetica. A supplementary collection, the Anonymous Apophegmata, followed. Later, both collections were combined and arranged systematically rather than alphabetically. This collection was created sometime between 500 and 575 and later went through a couple of major revisions, the second of which appeared sometime before 970. This second one was published in an excellent new critical edition, with a French translation, in 1993. Now, in Book of the Elders, John Wortley offers an English translation of this collection, based entirely on the Greek of that text.

Theologians and Scientists in Dialogue

As we noted in the course of our interview, Orthodox theologians have not contributed as much or as frequently to contemporary debates and discussion between and among theologians and scientists. But the volume discussed in the interview, along with another recent one, go some considerable way to filling this lacuna: a recent collection containing at least two Orthodox contributions is Gerald O'Collins and Mary Ann Meyers, eds., Light from Light: Scientists and Theologians in Dialogue (Eerdmans, 2012), 256pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

In this volume renowned scientists and theologians discuss the concept of light as understood by modern physics and employed by biblical and patristic writers. Light from Light deepens readers' understanding of light as posited by recent cosmological and physical theories, drawing connections with "light" as a theological metaphor. Striking glimpses into new scientific developments offer additional insight and interest.

Orthodox contributors include John Behr and Kallistos Ware.  

Mater Si, Magistra No?

One of Stanley Hauerwas's great questions, which I like sometimes to use with students, is: "Who taught you that you're supposed to 'think for yourself '?" The irony, of course, is that accepting and learning that idea required you to be under the tutelage of another, to be thinking not by your own lights but only in obeisance to that which another told you to do. As Hauerwas continues, there is no idea more mindlessly conformist to the lazy liberalism of late modernity than this notion that you should think for yourself. Most students, he says, do not have minds worth making up, which is why they need to be trained. And that is why he says his first task in the classroom is to help students "think just like me"! 

Hauerwas's point, in his characteristic swashbuckling style, is simply one that the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre made in more  detail in his 1990 Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, particularly the chapter on Augustine's emphasis on the teacher-student relationship as that of an apprentice of one under authority: the student must surrender to and trust the teacher's intent and ability to lead him to the truth, and only after the teacher has done so, shaping the student's capacity for reason and truth through virtue, will the student develop the ability to be an "independent reasoner."

For Christians, this job of learning how to think rightly about God has always been a central part of the task of the Church--whether through larger formal bodies like councils or through individual tutelage at the hands of a "theologian." In this latter regard, the wonderful story in Acts (8:26-40) about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch illustrates this rather nicely. The eunuch, reading Isaiah, is confronted by Philip: "Do you understand what you are reading? And he said: 'Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?' And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him." 

The Church has taught in different ways, but most obviously and authoritatively in ecumenical councils, two of which, of course, gave us their eponymous creed. For the Christian East, such a council remains the place for doctrinal statements, and any statements outside such a council have usually been rejected on those grounds alone. This, of course, is the major objection some in the East have to the filioque and to modern Marian doctrines taught by the Latin Church. (On more strictly theological, rather than methodological, grounds, the filioque today is seen by all responsible theologians, East and West, as no longer church-dividing. As for the Theotokos, as I have argued elsewhere, Orthodox theology--at least in Bulgakov's hands--can and does accept the notion of an immaculate conception; the Assumption likewise poses no serious problems--apart, that is, from it being defined by one man, the pope of Rome, on his own initiative outside an ecumenical council.)

More recently, in the modern Catholic Church, the notion of "magisterium" has developed in the last two centuries, an idea whose history Yves Congar so helpfully traced out in a number of articles and discusses also at point in his wonderful diaries. This Magisterium has an unenviable task to play, especially if you consider the ecumenical implications. On the one hand, many in the Christian East regard the heterodoxy taught in too many Catholic institutions to be an enormous scandal; but on the other hand, they also regard a strongly centralized papacy, capable of intervening anywhere in the world, as a great scandal, too ("scandal" in the original Pauline sense of σκάνδαλον: cf. I Cor. 1:23, inter alia.). Still, for all that, most recent Orthodox commentators whom I have read have said that the worst scandal, for them, is indeed the lack of coherent orthodoxy in Catholic theology: the widespread confusion caused in part by shoddy catechesis, the willful dissension and open heresy, and the failure to hold people to account. 

Prior to the recent declaration from Rome about Margaret Farley's book, the most recent and high-profile case of a magisterial intervention was here in the United States involving Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham University. That case, which garnered wide media publicity at the time (as all such cases do: cf. those of Charles Curran, Hans Kung and others), has now come in for some analysis in a collection of articles edited by Richard Gaillardetz of Boston College: When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today's Church (Liturgical Press, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Catholicism has always recognized the need for a normative doctrinal teaching authority. Yet the character, scope, and exercise of that authority, what has come to be called the magisterium, has changed significantly over two millennia. This book gathers contributions from leading Catholic scholars in considering new factors that must be taken into account as we consider the church's official teaching authority in today’s postmodern context.

Noted experts in their fields cover many intriguing topics here, including the investigation of theologians that has occurred in recent years, canonical perspectives on such investigations, the role that women religious have played in these issues, the place of the media when problems arise, and possible future ways forward.

The book concludes with “The Elizabeth Johnson Dossier,” a selection of documents essential to understanding the case of Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, whose work was recently the subject of severe criticism by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Contributors include Bradford Hinze, James Coriden, Colleen Mallon, Ormond Rush, Gerard Mannion, Anthony Godzieba, Vincent Miller, Richard Gaillardetz, and Elizabeth Johnson.

Monotheistic Reconciliation

Jews, Christians, and Muslims are both similar and different in their understanding of sin and reconciliation. A new book explores those similarities and differences: R. Bieringer and D. Bolton, Reconciliation in Interfaith Perspective: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Voices (Peeters, 2011), 216pp.


About this book, the publisher tells us:

Reconciliation in Interfaith Perspective: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Voices brings together scholars from Jewish, Christian and Islamic backgrounds to discuss the concept of reconciliation from within their respective traditions. These scholars focused on whether a common understanding on reconciliation is possible between the Abrahamic religions. In this volume the papers are arranged in two parts. The first contains generalized studies that approach the topic from a broad perspective. The second presents specialized studies that focus on specific issues like Islamic normalcy, the relationship between forgiveness and ethics or a comparison between Eastern and Western Christianity. The Jewish equivalent of reconciliation is discussed by Adele Reinhartz and Didier Pollefeyt. Reimund Bieringer, Roger Burggraeve, Yves De Maeseneer, David Pratt and Nico Schreurs focus on various aspects of the Christian understanding of reconciliation from many different perspectives. Finally Zeki Saritoprak and David Bolton as well as Marcia Hermansen and Julianne Funk Deckard deal with Muslim equivalents to reconciliation. The various studies brought together represent a great diversity of perspectives on reconciliation. While reconciliation is primarily a Christian concept coming from the Pauline tradition, it is important to see that similar ideas are present in both Judaism and Islam. Though differences remain, the contributions do demonstrate that not only is an Abrahamic trialogue on this subject possible, but that it is beneficial for all involved and that it has undoubted potential for further development.

The Franks and the Crusades

The Crusades, arguably the most abused period in history, continue to come in for welcome scholarly study, including in this recent book: Nirmal Dass, The Deeds of the Franks and Other Jerusalem-Bound Pilgrims: The Earliest Chronicle of the First Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 176pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This new translation offers a faithful yet accessible English-language rendering of the twelfth-century Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolomitanorum, the earliest known Latin account of the First Crusade. Although an anonymous work, it has become the exemplar for all later histories and retellings of the First Crusade. As such, it is filled with vivid descriptions of the hardships suffered by the crusaders, with deeds of personal heroism, with courtly intrigues, with betrayal and cowardice, and with a relentless faith that would see the attainment of the desired goal: the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1095. There is a great deal of mystery surrounding this anonymous account, especially in regard to its authorship; place, date, and purpose of composition; narrative methodology; and point of view. It is also a sweeping tale that swiftly moves from the first preaching of the crusade by Pope Urban II, to the ragtag and ultimately doomed effort of the popular People's Crusade, and then the more disciplined and concerted campaign by the French and Norman nobility that led to the conquest of the Holy Land by the crusaders.
Based on the latest scholarly research, including a substantive introduction that explores the questions surrounding the Gesta and its historical context, this definitive translation will bring the First Crusade and its era to life for all readers.

Miracles, Byzantium, and Dumbarton Oaks

Anybody who knows anything about the study of all things Byzantine today knows that Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University, is North America's leading place for Byzantine scholars today. They publish their own journal as well as a series of books, and among the most recent offerings is Alice-Mary Talbot and Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, trans., Miracle Tales from Byzantium (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library/Harvard UP, 2012), 480pp.

I asked both translators for an interview about this book, and here are their thoughts. 

AD: Tell us about your background(s) 

(AMT) I am a classicist and Byzantine historian by training, with special interests in monasticism and the lives of saints. I have long advocated the importance of translating Byzantine texts in order to make this medieval Greek literature more accessible to students and the general public, especially those actively engaged in the practice of the Christian faith. To this end in the 1990s I served as general editor of three volumes of saints’ lives in translation published by Dumbarton Oaks.

(SFJ) I too am a classicist by training, though more on the late Roman than the Byzantine side. My work has focused primarily on the literary history of the fourth to seventh centuries, mainly in Greek, but also in Latin and Syriac. I find the intersection of all the late antique Christian languages quite a compelling topic -- translation of the Bible, sites of multilingualism, etc. -- and I think more and more work will be done on this field as students of Late Antiquity and Byzantium take up the study of other languages (Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, etc.).

AD: What led to work on this book in particular?

(AMT) In 2009 I was asked to become editor of the Byzantine Greek series of the new Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, a series which also includes texts and translations in medieval Latin and Old English. Each volume has the original-language text on the left-hand page and a modern English translation on the right hand side. I felt that a collection of Byzantine miracle tales would be a good choice to launch the Byzantine Greek series, and so invited Scott to collaborate with me, since I knew he was very familiar with the miracles of Saint Thekla. I myself had already prepared draft translations of the anonymous miracles of the shrine of the Virgin of the Spring (Pege) in Constantinople and of the miracles of Gregory Palamas in Thessalonike, and was anxious to revise them for publication.

AD: Take us behind the scenes, as it were, in the translation process. Were most of these texts in Greek, or other languages? What was the status of the manuscripts or other texts and editions from which you were working? 

(AMT) All the texts in the Byzantine series are in medieval Greek. For this volume we had the advantage of working with Greek texts that already existed in good editions, but for the miracles of the Pege I ordered a copy of the manuscript from the Vatican and checked it against the printed edition. This enabled me to correct a few minor errors in the Greek text. I hope that the new DOML series will make people as familiar with Byzantine literature as they are with its art.

AD: There seems to be an endless interest today in all things Byzantine, with book upon book being published on all aspects of the East-Roman Empire. What do you think explains this abiding, if not burgeoning, interest today? 

(AMT) Interest in Byzantium has been spurred by a number of factors, including the major exhibits of Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum in recent years. I also think more people are visiting Turkey, where they encounter Byzantine churches and monuments, and are inspired to read further about this long-lived medieval civilization.

(SFJ) My former advisor, Averil Cameron, a few years ago wrote an article called "The Absence of Byzantium" which addressed particularly the lack of a sophisticated understanding of what role Byzantium should play in the modern debates over the "clash of cultures". I will leave your readers to engage her political commentary, but I would say the interest of a popular readership in Byzantium is somewhat mixed. There is an awareness of Byzantium being between East and West, and being between ancient and modern, and that makes it attractive since it seems to speak to every possible imaginary world in some way. But Byzantium itself had its own forms of discourse, political and religious, and is not always the easiest field to get a handle on. One must learn these forms and develop a knack for them. I think the DOML series will go some way to putting this unique culture in front of more readers.

AD: For some miracles are the biggest stumbling block to Christianity--superstition and trickery to dupe the credulous. To others, miracles are the supreme proof of Christianity's truth. Where, broadly speaking, did the Byzantines come down on this? 

(AMT) Although Byzantine laypeople occasionally expressed their incredulity about the efficacy of miracle-working shrines, in general the population was extremely pious and accepting of miraculous events. In an age when professional medicine had made few advances from the Greco-Roman period, and physicians were often unable to cure illnesses, the devout often visited healing shrines after the doctors had given up hope. The working of miracles was important, although not essential, testimony to the holy powers of a saint, and thus the lives of saints very often include miracles performed both during the saint’s lifetime and after his or her death.

AD: Thekla seems to be increasingly popular today, with several recent books written about her. Tell us about her, her miracles, and legend. 

(SFJ) Thekla is a legendary female companion of St. Paul during his travels in Asia Minor (40s–50s CE). I say legendary because there is no contemporary historical evidence for her life. Her fame arose during the late second century, as shown by a famous piece of Christian apocrypha called the Acts of Paul and Thekla (c.180 CE). The fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla rewrites this original Acts of Paul and Thekla into a high Greek style and adds a new text of forty-six miracles contemporary to the fifth-century that Thekla worked posthumously. This later text was written in Seleukeia-on-the-Kalykadnos, the site of a flourishing pilgrimage and healing shrine devoted to Thekla in late antiquity. Figures as significant as the pilgrim Egeria and Gregory of Nazianzus visited the site during this period. This fifth-century collection marks the apex of literary interest in Thekla and describes numerous cures and other miracles she worked for the people of Seleukeia during this period. The Miracles of Thekla are highly important for religious, literary, and cultural historians alike and have often been mined by scholars of late antique Christianity. However, due to the lack of an English translation, the text has not reached its widest possible audience. It is no exaggeration to claim that Thekla was the most famous female saint in early Mediterranean Christianity, only to be eclipsed by the Virgin Mary as late as the end of the fifth century or so.

AD: For some in the Christian East, Gregory Palamas remains the most important late medieval figure--the "last of the Fathers." What is your assessment of his life and influence? What do these newly translated miracles tell us about him and his reputation and legacy?

(AMT) Palamas is indeed the most important of the late Byzantine theologians. Since his views on the doctrines of hesychasm prevailed and were confirmed by three church councils, he had major influence on the evolution of Greek Orthodoxy as it is still practiced today. The account of Palamas’s healing miracles presents him not as a theologian, however, but as a beloved bishop of Thessalonike, who cared greatly for his flock. One particular point of interest in Philotheos Kokkinos’s narrative is that he offers one of the best surviving descriptions of the way in which the cult of a holy man developed in late Byzantium.

AD: What other projects are you at work on currently?

(AMT) Together with two colleagues, I am completing a critical edition and annotated English translation of the Life of St. Basil the Younger, a holy man of 10th-c. Constantinople, who was unusual for residing in private homes rather than in a monastic community. The Life contains a celebrated account of a vision of the journey of the soul past the “tollhouses of the air” where demons exact payment for sins committed on earth; it also includes the lengthiest surviving
description in Byzantine literature of a vision of the celestial Jerusalem and the Last Judgment.

(SFJ) I am finishing up a book on the role of Greek among Eastern Christians for whom Greek may not have been their mother tongue. It is a cultural history of Greek as a lingua franca in the eastern Roman empire. This is both daunting and exciting because is requires direct interaction with a host of languages and literatures I was not originally trained to work with. Even as a dyed-in-the-wool classicist, I can admit that some of the most interesting things in late antique
literature are happening on the fringes of the traditional Greco-Roman world. As much as possible, I hope to encourage young classicists to learn languages like Syriac and Coptic and make that a part of their research. Eventually it won’t be optional anymore. Also, a big book I edited, the The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, will be out late this summer.

This book takes some of the less acknowledged trends in late antiquity and puts them at the forefront: the broadened geographical and chronological scope, the engagement with multiple Eastern Christian languages, and new models of economy and society. I feel very proud of this book and the hard work our contributors put into it.

AD: Sum up what you were hoping to accomplish with 

this book and what you see as its merits.

(AMT) I included the miracles of the Pege shrine in the volume because they shed light on the visitation of healing shrines to obtain cures, and the development of a cult of the Virgin over many centuries. I chose the miracles of Palamas because I myself so enjoyed reading these vivid descriptions of the afflictions of ordinary citizens in Thessalonike, and details of their everyday lives. Philotheos Kokkinos was the most gifted hagiographer of late Byzantium, and writes with great empathy of the suffering of the men and women who were eventually healed by Palamas.

(SFJ) it was a great thrill for me to work with Alice-Mary. She is a marvelous translator and Byzantinist, and I learned a great deal from her during this project. For my part, that was a major motivation! But, of course, I hope this volume opens up the miracles of Thekla to a wider audience. It's a really diverse and compelling text, and the language itself is interesting as a transitional phase from classical to Byzantine Greek, in the midst of major social and religious changes surrounding Christianity in Late Antiquity.

The Eucharist East and West

Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson, of the University of Notre Dame's acclaimed program in liturgical studies, have just published another welcome volume: The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Liturgical Press, 2012), 448pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

In graduate theology programs across the United States and elsewhere, Maxwell Johnson’s The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation has become a standard text. Now Johnson and Paul Bradshaw together offer a companion volume on the historical development of the liturgy and theology of the Eucharist.
Like the earlier volume, this study proceeds historically, from the origins of the Eucharist up to our own day. Unlike most studies of this kind, it includes an introduction to and developmental summary of the diverse eucharistic liturgies of the Christian East. It also explores the various Western rites (Ambrosian, Gallican, and Mozarabic) in addition to the Roman. With regard to theological themes, the authors give special attention to the topics of real presence (including the “consecration” of the bread and wine) and eucharistic sacrifice, the most central and most ecumenically challenging issues since the sixteenth-century Reformations. Making the book especially teacher- and student-friendly are the summary points at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also contains an abundance of liturgical texts for ease of reference.

I look forward to having this book expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, to which you will want to subscribe here.