Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in

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Selected Essays
 Selected Essays
Volume II

Studies in Theology

A N D R E W LO U T H

Edited by
L E W I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
 Editors Preface and Acknowledgments

Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone

Patristic studies for the past four decades, and a key theological
figure within Orthodoxy (especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for
three. Andrew is also a thinker known far beyond the world of those
devoted to the study of early and Byzantine Christianity, and far
beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His works have
been a major source for all those—across many Christian traditions—
interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the
resources of classical Christianity (especially as it is developed in the
Greek world between Plato and John Damascene). His monographs
cover a considerable range, from his early and much appreciated
two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and
Discerning the Mystery to his translations and commentaries, and on
to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and
Development in Byzantine Theology and Greek East and Latin West:
The Church ad 681–1071. Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge
are rendered all the clearer in his reconceptualizing and editing of
the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
(2022).
But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a
significant essayist; many of his most significant contributions to
scholarship and to theology are scattered throughout journals and
edited collections, some of which are rather difficult to access. These
contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at institutions and
to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range
and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of
the theological community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in
his long contribution as co-editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early
Christian Studies,” and “Oxford Early Christian Texts.” The present
two volumes attempt to reveal something of that range and
erudition by presenting seventy-four of his essays, in a selection
made by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is
that Andrew has not included any of the many pieces he has
produced for “handbooks” over many years.
Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented
something of a challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic
theology is also intrinsic to his work as a theologian—the division is
not one between history and theology. But neither is it one simply
between the theology of the Fathers over against work in modern
theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would
contradict Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which
engagement with the Fathers is the enduring heart of theological
work, however much it also must reflect on the streams of thought
that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus
intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on
exploring the thought and world of figures in the early Christian
world (and in a few cases exploring the links between that world and
the world of Byzantine Christianity) appear in the first volume. In the
second volume many of the essays consider broader theological
topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological writers
(especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-century
Orthodox diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early
Christian theology. The essays in this second volume are offered in
chronological order, allowing the reader to gain a sense of how
Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays were written at a
variety of points over the past half-century a number of them use
styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were
written. We have therefore left the wording of the essays as they
were published.
Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and
friends helped to prepare these essays for publication, especially the
arduous task of checking pre-published electronic versions against
the final published forms, and turning PDFs into text. We would like
to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis, Fr Demetrios
Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios
Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr
Christopher Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher.
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals,
and others who have granted permission for the essays collected in
these volumes to be reprinted.

Lewis Ayres and John Behr

October 2022
 Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers
2. The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a
History of Early Christian Dogma…
3. The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans
Urs von Balthasar
4. Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song
of Songs
5. The Image of Heloise in English Literature
6. Νά ϵὔχϵσαι νά ᾿ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on
Pilgrimage
7. The Theology of the Philokalia
8. Theology, Contemplation, and the University
9. Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God
10. The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov
11. The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel
Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov
12. Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox
Theology?
13. The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora
in the Twentieth Century
14. Pagans and Christians on Providence
15. What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?
16. The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology
17. Inspiration of the Scriptures
18. Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian
19. Space, Time, and the Liturgy
20. Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition
21. Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
22. The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World
23. Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium
24. Theology of the ‘In-Between’
25. Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and
Christian Identity in Late Antiquity
26. Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology
27. Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View
28. Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some
Reflections on the Development of Mariology
29. The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015
30. Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox
Reflections
31. What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?
32. The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim
33. Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am
Kreuz
34. Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology
35. Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the Russian
Émigrés
36. Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion
37. Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine
Theology

Details of Original Publication

Index
 Abbreviations

Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their
original publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal
or series titles), they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near
Eastern, Biblical and Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
 Introduction

I
Looking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am
struck by the fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each
volume there are only three essays published before 1990, by which
time I was in my late 40s—one well before, in 1978, ‘The
Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest in
the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder
why. Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two
books came in rapid succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian
Mystical Tradition (1981), and Discerning the Mystery (1983). That
first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather led to my being classified
(still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysticism’ (in some
ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006 with
its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the
‘mystical tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested
in ‘mysticism’ as in a form of religion independent of institutions or
dogmas (what has come to be called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism
as, in a tradition revived by William James at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’, rather my
interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer,
both personal and liturgical.
Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, as I see it now, an approach
to theology for which the practice of prayer, and what such practice
presupposed, was indispensable—indispensable, not in the sense
that theology demanded prayer, and therefore faith, so that the
answers had smuggled themselves in before being asked, but
indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the
transcendent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the
nature of things could be encompassed by human conceptuality,
ruling out the notion of a closed universe.
There has remained lodged in my memory—largely unconscious,
though surfacing from time to time—some lines of thought discussed
by Thomas Vargish in his book, Newman: The Contemplation of
Mind (1970). Discussing Newman’s ‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it
as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought”…elastic and delicate
enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the uniqueness
of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much
as delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes
progress by being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties”’ (p.
87, quoting William Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the
Fathers’ use of Scripture, as discussed in the earliest essay included
in these books—a freedom from both the prescriptive nature of
Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single
determinative meaning to be found in Scripture.
I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the
Eastern Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright,
perceptively pointed out to me after reading Discerning the
Mystery). Another—quite different—aspect of these early books is
contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to Denys’.
For there had never been any question for me but that that book
would begin with Plato—an interpretation of Plato much indebted to
A.-J. Festugière’s seminal work, Contemplation et vie contemplative
selon Platon (3rd edition, 1967). Plato has remained important to me
—probably returned to more often than to any Christian writer—
possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics (and G. H.
Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities,
not ideas humanly constructed).
It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were,
reception into the Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware,
soon followed. That was at the end of 1989, the year in which my
third book, Denys the Areopagite, was published—in response to a
request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding Christian
Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity,
because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s
On the Orthodox Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely
uninformed way, and it already seemed to me that two profound
influences on the Damascene were Dionysios the Areopagite and St
Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then full of
Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading
everything I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense
that, ultimately, I was going to write something on the Damascene
led me, a few years later, to agree to the request of Carol Harrison,
the editor of the Early Christian Fathers, to produce a volume for the
series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books were
conceived in sequence—but not as a trilogy, for they are very
different, the first on Dionysios—Denys, as I called him then—simply
an introduction, the second on Maximos an even shorter introduction
accompanied by translations of a brief selection of his works, mostly
drawn from his theological, as opposed to his spiritual, works (an
opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos), and the
third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most
likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during
the construction of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of
Islam.
So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not
anticipated, what still seem to me the three writers who, together by
inheriting and interpreting the Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the
lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and, indeed, its best, and most
enduring elements). Plato, and especially the developments of
Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and I
became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and
Christianity. The books speak for themselves, and many of the
articles in this collection fill out aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of
theology and philosophy, prayer and asceticism, and liturgy and
song.
 II
Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual
development, though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly
must now seem) of my formation as a theologian. I never studied
for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no Doktorvater. I did, however, while
studying for the Anglican priesthood in Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh
at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there under Professor Tom
(T. F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that degree was
the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the
most important sections of which were on the place of natural
theology in his Church Dogmatics and doctrine of analogy. The chief
influence on me during undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one,
preparing for Part III) was without doubt Donald MacKinnon, the
Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose guidance I took two
courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of the
Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the
style of philosophy of religion that I mostly encountered in
Cambridge (I don’t think MacKinnon made much sense of it either)
and rather made my own way by careful textual study of the texts—
Descartes to Kant—that we were expected to read; but it was from
MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his
students that I learnt to think (or rather—though that is perhaps the
same thing—discovered that I could think). Another don at
Cambridge, with whom I had a few supervisions in patristics, was
Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal even though largely
by way of disagreeing with him—a disagreement that continued
when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of
Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and
Fellow and Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though
probably due to my philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new
joint degree in Philosophy and Theology had just been introduced),
did not specify what area of theology I was to pursue, so I decided
to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never
regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick,
who moved from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ
Church in 1970, whom I held in awe, though I never got to know
him very well (though well enough in the eyes of others to be asked
to write his obituary for the Independent). I also came to know, in
the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a
student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently
departed Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in
Eastern Orthodox Studies during my time in Oxford (and before and
after): my debt to him is incalculable. There are many others to
whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of this volume.
Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or
entirely) knew through their books; in the later 1970s (as I
remember it), I often devoted the long vacation to reading some
massive work that I wanted to come to terms with. One year it was
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in
conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then)
feeble German. Another year it was A.-J. Festugière’s monumental
four-volume work, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of
which tells you more about its origins (in the notes he made in the
course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock, the Budé
edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its
contents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical
thought of late antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s
Exégèse Médiévale (4 vols, 1959–64), another work that starts from
a particular problem and casts light much more widely. Hans Urs von
Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced by Donald MacKinnon,
came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for which I
translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by
John Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of
Theologik.
My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they
seemed to fill out and deepen insights that I had originally
discovered in Western writers, such as those already mentioned. It
was mostly through reading their works, though I came to know
personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course, Fr
Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in
Oxford when I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony
of Essex. One Orthodox thinker whom I read early on was the
French convert, Olivier Clément, the disciple of Vladimir Lossky, who
has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov became increasingly
important to me (I encountered him first in the French translations
by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted
to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his
Russian, as well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal
about Florensky from Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed
biography, published in 2010, already by then a great friend. She is
an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and helped me to
see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the
broader cultural context of the Silver Age.
In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek
theology, not least Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly
wide reading in Greek literature—especially the amazing poets of the
twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis—through whom
I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and interpreted them
(but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological
writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also
encountered through my reading in Greek literature and had some
sense of his theological insights before ever engaging with Yannaras,
with whose writings I have tried to keep up over the years (in recent
years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent translations).
Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis, which
opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of
Orthodoxy (a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to
translate). Something of this engagement with Orthodoxy—mostly
the fruit of my becoming Orthodox, which seemed to me a fulfilment
of my intellectual and spiritual development, not a rejection of the
West (although such anti-Westernism has been a Leitmotiv of too
much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian
millennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing
Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers:
From the Philokalia to the Present (2015), which were the result of
four years spent as Visiting Professor at the Amsterdam Centre of
Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit, now the St
Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of
Radboud, Nijmegen.
Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat
passed over is my ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, from 1985 to 1995. During this period Goldsmiths went
through a major change from being an Institute with Recognized
Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From
being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually
became head—for five years—of a new department of Historical and
Cultural Studies, made up of the old departments of History, Art
History, and Religious Studies, in which I taught early medieval and
Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul Fouracre, a
fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from him,
a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—very different were the
ways of the theologian’s mind—which affected my own way of
thinking about history (and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of
that are to be found in my volume, Greek East and Latin West: The
Church ad 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The Church in History,
originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff.
Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am
not at all sure what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my
aim has been to elucidate their thought and their concerns. It looks
like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intellectual history, but one
thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—as so many essays in
intellectual history seem to imagine—float in some kind of noetic
ether; ideas are thought by people, who live at a particular time and
in a particular place. Their ideas are part of the way in which they
have sought to make sense of the world in which they lived, and
theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are the products of
human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel and
the Church in a world created by God and governed by his
providence, in however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation
(inspired by another who greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an
Orthodox nun who spent her final years near Whitby in Yorkshire)
that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology, Modern
Orthodox Thinkers.
I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my
friends and colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking
to bring this collection of essays of mine to publication. Although the
work of publication is theirs, what is to be found in these volumes is,
for better or worse, mine, and I would like to dedicate the volumes
to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac.

Andrew Louth
Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0001
 1
The Hermeneutical Question
Approached through the Fathers

In the more traditional English theological courses, the student first

comes across consideration of Christian theology for its own sake in
the study of the Fathers of the early Church. Biblical Studies tend to
be approached from a literary, historical, and expository point of
view, rather than from a theological point of view.1 The idea of
theology, the idea of dogma, emerges for the English student out of
his study of the Fathers. This means that the way theology emerged
in the Fathers and the form it took tend to be treated as normative,
or at least as a point de départ. The doctrine of the Trinity and the
doctrine of the Incarnation are the two foci in such an approach to
theology. Even those English theologians who think of themselves as
liberal or radical, and who wish to reject such an approach to
theology, are seen, in their very reaction against it, to be taking up a
position in relation to the patristic tradition, thus revealing the marks
of their initial approach to theology. All this seems to me to be
different from German Protestant theology. In Lutheran theology,
say, it seems—at any rate from the outside—that whether or not the
doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are held or rejected, other
theological themes are central. The doctrine of justification by faith
becomes a principle of profound and far-reaching significance,
particularly when it takes the form of the dialectic between Law and
Gospel.
 In this contrast there are advantages on both sides. The
apprehension of the fundamental significance of the doctrine of
justification by faith can lend great clarity to Lutheran theology. Here
is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae; here is a criterion that
enables us to see whether we are being faithful to God’s word or
not. It is a criterion for distinguishing between both relevance and
irrelevance. That God justifies the wicked, that this justification is
apprehended by faith, not by anything we do but by our standing
before God and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner’—this
concentrates theology in such a way that irrelevance seems out of
place. Theology embraces everything indeed—but under God. And
so the irrelevance with which human ingenuity loves to distract itself
is seen for what it is. German theology is a serious business, and it
knows it.
The Anglican approach to theology is much less conscious.
Anglicans tend to approach theology through the concerns and
interests of the Fathers because that is the way they have been
introduced to it. And they may see in these concerns some great
principle being worked out. Such a principle, for instance, may be
discerned in the way the Fathers tried to think through the
implications of the Greek preoccupation with virtue (areté), and all
the ways of fostering it (paideia), in the light of the Gospel. Here the
Fathers are grappling with Hellenistic modes of thought so as to
exploit the support such a preoccupation gives to their view of
creation, while at the same time questioning it fundamentally when
it appears to threaten their understanding of the radical newness of
the grace of God. But this is not like grasping the central significance
of the doctrine of justification: it is a personal aperçu, the
idiosyncrasy of the individual scholar—and a peculiarly scholarly
idiosyncrasy at that, for the working out of the Gospel in Hellenistic
modes of thought is not obviously our problem. But Anglican
theology rarely takes that form; more often the unconscious
acceptance of the Fathers’ approach simply means that the doctrines
enshrined in the creeds are accepted as the programme of theology.
And this can mean an academic discussion of doctrines that have
little obvious relevance to anything except the particular
controversies—now long dead—in which they were originally
enunciated. However, it seems to me that the Anglican approach can
be something consciously approved, even if unconsciously accepted.
In this paper, I want to indicate how this might be so and then how
such a position might suggest an approach to the hermeneutical
question rather different from that of German theology.

I
I begin by making a virtue of the fact that, as I have said, this
English approach is not so much consciously adopted as
unconsciously received. It is not, I think, a mere quirk of the syllabus
that we have come to theology through the Fathers. It owes a great
deal to the inherent structure of Anglican theology.2 Although our
departments of theology look very secular in England, without the
confessional ties found in Germany, the tradition of theology they
have received has come from the ancient universities where
theology was once Anglican theology. And Anglican theology is not
Reformation theology, though it has been deeply influenced by the
Reformation (and perhaps even more by the Renaissance). It is not
confessional, but ecclesial or churchly. By that I mean there is no
equivalent in Anglicanism of the Augsburg Confession, or the
Heidelberg Catechism, or the Scots Confession. Anglican theology
starts from a faith lived, not from a particular—and local—definition
of that faith. The XXXIX Articles—the nearest thing Anglicans have to
such a confession—are subscribed to ‘not as articles of faith, but as
theological verities, for the preservation of unity among ourselves’
(to quote the seventeenth-century Archbishop Bramhall).3 And the
way in which they are subscribed to is worth noting. An Anglican
priest professes his agreement with the doctrine of the Church of
England as set forth ‘in the XXXIX Articles, the Book of Common
Prayer, and the Ordinal’. He is not just agreeing to a formula, but
affirming that he belongs to a particular community, which worships
God and celebrates its faith in Christ in a particular way, and that
through this community he belongs to the Catholic Church of Christ.
Anglicanism, therefore, tends to see the Reformation not so much as
an appeal to Scripture against the Church, as making clear a
continuity in the Church’s life that had been blurred in the later
Middle Ages. And so, to quote Bramhall again,

the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England
after the Reformation are as much the same Church as a garden, before it is
weeded and after it is weeded, is the same garden; or a vine, before it is
pruned and after it is pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches, is one
and the same vine.4

The Anglican, then, begins within the Church, within the

worshipping community, accepting the faith rather than consciously
confessing it. And Scripture is something given to him within the
Church, by the tradition, by the handing-on, that is the continuity of
the Church. This does not mean that Scripture is subordinated to the
Church. In the light of Scripture the Church can be reformed, the
garden weeded, the vine pruned and freed from the luxuriant
branches. And this is not an event but ideally a process, for the
Church always stands under the Word, always finds through
Scripture its way of obedience to her Lord. Under the Word she finds
herself to be ecclesia semper reformanda, in the words of Pope John
XXIII.
As I see it, the way in which the Scriptures show the Church her
way of obedience rests on no principle. The problem of
hermeneutics is not the search for some key of interpretation that
will enable us to extract from the word of Scripture the meaning of
the Gospel today. Rather it rests on the faith of the Church that in
the Scriptures God speaks to his Church, the faith—classical
Anglicanism often says the experience—that the Scriptures which the
Church offers us and to which she leads us kindle the light of the
Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. So Archbishop Laud said:
 I admit no ordinary rule left now in the church, of divine and infallible verity,
and so of faith, but the Scripture. And I believe the entire Scripture, first, by
the tradition of the Church; then, by all other credible motives…and last of
all, by the light which shines in Scripture itself, kindled in believers by the
Spirit of God. Then, I believe the entire Scripture infallibly, and by a divine
infallibility am sure of my object. Then am I so sure of my believing, which
is the act of my faith, conversant about this object: for no man believes, but
he must needs know in himself whether he believes or no, and wherein and
how far he doubts. Then I am infallibly assured of my Creed, the tradition of
the Church inducing, and the Scripture confirming it. And I believe both
Scripture and Creed, in the same uncorrupted sense which the primitive
Church believed them…5

If you like, the Scriptures are experienced as self-authenticating. But

this experience, though inevitably an experience of the individual, is
but the experience of the individual within the Church. Only in the
Church is the believer led to approach Scripture in such a way that
he hears the Word of God speaking to him from it.
Only in the Church—it is this which leads the Anglican to stress
the importance of the Fathers of the early Church. Scripture cannot
be considered in isolation—indeed it does not exist in isolation. The
Scriptures are the Scriptures of the Church: the Old Testament
inherited from Israel, the New Testament the apostolic writings.
Indeed, seen as witness they are Church documents, the prophetic
and apostolic witness to Christ—prophets and apostles being
members of the Church of which Christ is the head. There is no
fundamental divide between the Church in which and for which the
Scriptures were written and the Church of the Fathers—not if
theology is seen essentially as a reflection on God’s Word taking
place within the bosom of the Church. If the Reformation discerned
a continuity that had been obscured by the later Middle Ages, it was
a continuity manifest in a theology closer in spirit and teaching to
that of the Fathers. So unless we are to drive a wedge between
Scripture and the Church, the reflection of the Fathers on Scripture
must be given very great weight, to say the least.
But what do we mean by the ‘Fathers’? Most fundamentally, I do
not mean a particular group of theological writers—the Fathers of
the Undivided Church (whatever that is)—though clearly I have in
mind the Fathers of the first five centuries after Christ. But I do not
want to limit the term ‘Father’ either to those whom the later Church
accepted as ‘Fathers’ or to a particular period. Rather it seems to me
that the Fathers manifest a particular approach to theology
especially evident in the early centuries of the Church’s history. For
the Fathers see theology as the expounding of the mystery of Christ
to which the Scriptures witness. Another element—which passes
beyond the ‘theology of the Fathers’ (precisely as that phrase begins
to be used)—comes in when theological orthodoxy begins to mean
whether you agree with some earlier theologian. In the Fathers
there is a direct access to Scripture as the source and criterion of
theology. It is something else when Athanasius or Cyril or Augustine
become the test of orthodoxy. But this defines no period, even
though the period of the first five centuries is a peculiarly potent
witness to such theology. Rather the ‘theology of the Fathers’
characterizes a certain approach to theology; an approach in which
one can discern a certain directness in expounding Scripture, a
certain boldness—parrhesia—in their expounding of the mystery of
the faith. It is in that parrhesia that the fundamental dogmas of the
Christian faith—of the Trinity and the Incarnation—achieved their
first and enduring expression. And it is because it comes out of this
parrhesia that it is enduring. To speak of the Fathers is to speak of a
way of exploring the mystery of faith that is characterized by this
parrhesia, and so there is, in a sense, no ‘patristic period’. In the
Cistercian theology of the twelfth century, especially in St Bernard,
we recognize the voice of those who form part of the consensus
patrum.

II
There is something exemplary about the Fathers’ approach to
Scripture, and it is because classical Anglican theology followed this
example that it has what value it has. Can we say more about the
‘way of the Fathers’? There seem to be two basic premises that lie
behind the Fathers’ approach to Scripture. First, that Scripture must
be interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith; and second, that
Scripture admits of spiritual or allegorical interpretation. (True, the
Fathers often frown on allegory—and not only the Antiochene school
—but all admit a typological interpretation of Scripture that for my
purposes in this paper can be subsumed under allegory.)
First, Scripture interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith.
This rule of faith—at any rate in the pre-Nicene Church—is a free-
hand summary of the threefold faith in the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, professed in Baptism. It is the faith handed down within
the Church, it is the faith that admits to Baptism, and in that sense
defines the Church, the community of the baptized. Scripture is
handed down within the Church and so is interpreted in accordance
with the rule of faith that defines the Church. But the rule of faith is
no formula—it is not a form of words, but the truth the words
enshrine. Even after Nicaea, after the definition of the faith in a
formula, a creed, a symbol, we know—as we have learnt from the
researches of Dr Kelly6—that the Nicene faith did not mean to the
Fathers any formula, but the truth that formula enshrines. Indeed it
seems to me that Newman was close to the mind of the Fathers
when he declared in his Arians of the Fourth Century that

freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of

Christian communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church…
because when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth,
instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are
kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is
otherwise possible.7

At the heart of the faith of the Fathers is no principle, or creed, or

formula, but a mystery, a mystery that is lived, a mystery that claims
the whole man, a mystery that we apprehend not simply with our
minds but in ways that are unconscious and unfathomable, a
mystery that draws out our love. And that mystery is Christ. It is not
simply a question of believing the right things. It is not even a
question of simply hearing the Word of Christ; more deeply it is a
matter of being close to him, at the deepest level, in prayer. So we
find St Ignatius of Antioch saying: ‘He who truly possesses the word
of Jesus can also hear his stillness, that he may be perfect, that he
may act through what he says, and be known through his silence’.8
Before any articulation of our confession of Christ, there is an
inarticulate closeness to Christ, to that creative silence out of which
the Word comes,9 to that stillness (hesuchia) in which are wrought
the mysteries that cry out.10 This is the ultimate meaning of
interpreting Scripture in accordance with the rule of faith: not simply
subordinating Scripture to the articulated faith of the Church, but
listening to the Scriptures from a contemplative stillness that is being
with Christ. And this is something given and known in the life of the
Church, in the tradition that is the movement of the Spirit in the
Church. Interpreting Scripture within the Church does not at all
mean subordinating Scripture to the Church, but interpreting
Scripture within the life of the Church, finding in Scripture the voice
of God calling us to obedience, renewed discipleship, new life. It is
to see Scripture as the Word of God, because in listening to it God’s
Word may be heard, and God’s Word is the incarnate Son of God,
and it is his word, his voice, that we may hear speaking to us
through Scripture.
The other feature of patristic interpretation of Scripture is allegory
(understood in a broad sense). This is often immediately and simply
dismissed by modern scholars. The Fathers, it is maintained, used
allegory as a way of accommodating their belief in the plenary
inspiration of the Scriptures with their unwillingness—rather, inability
—to believe what the Scriptures plainly taught. It was particularly
used in relation to the Old Testament, and without such resort to
allegory the Fathers would hardly have resisted Marcionism. What is
wrong with allegory, it is said, is that it is entirely uncontrolled,
entirely arbitrary, and robs the text of Scripture of any real authority
even while appearing to concede to it the very fullest authority,
because with the use of allegory any text can be made to mean
anything. Its origins are highly suspect, too. It goes back to Stoic
attempts to justify the Homeric tales against the criticisms of the
Platonists and Epicureans, and in Heraclitus’ Homeric Questions we
have a clear—if unintended—insight into how arbitrary allegory can
be, when he defines allegory as ‘speaking one thing and signifying
something other than what is said’.11
There is much truth in all this, but it seems to me to miss the
central point behind the patristic resort to allegory. While it is true
that one often gets the impression when reading Origen, say, that
the text of Scripture which justifies his use of allegory is Galatians
4:24 (‘Now this is an allegory…’), this seems to me to be only a
formal, and polemical, justification. The real justification for the use
of allegory is found elsewhere in Paul: in II Corinthians 3 and I
Corinthians 13. The contrast between shadow and reality, letter and
spirit, death and life, the veiled and the manifest; the contrast
between seeing through a glass darkly and then ‘face to face’, in
which latter glorified state love alone remains—this is the context in
which the Fathers see the use of allegory. ‘Tout ce qui ne va point à
la charité est figure. L’unique objet de l’Écriture est la charité’.12
Pascal’s words are a good summary of the patristic understanding of
allegory. The sole truth, the sole reality, is Christ, and him we know
through love. All else is shadow, all else is allegory, all else has value
only so far as it points towards the Truth, Jesus Christ. We might put
this another way round and say that Christ ‘in whom are hid all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ is Truth, or Reality, so
overwhelming, so overpowering, that our feeble minds cannot grasp
it. We can only grasp the truth partially.
That is why there is such diversity in the prophetic and apostolic
witness to Christ. Our minds need to be drawn gradually to the
whole truth, that is Christ, which might otherwise overpower us or
be accepted by us in a way that radically distorted it. You will recall
how Ambrose recommended the neophyte Augustine to read Isaiah.
Not because Isaiah is a more direct witness to Christ than the
Gospels; certainly not because it is easier; but because at that
moment in Augustine’s development Isaiah could lead him more
surely to Christ. Why? Perhaps because the immensely intellectual
convert from Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism needed to be
baffled, needed to realize that now he knew only in part. And it is
the way of allegory to help us to grasp what is contained in Scripture
‘in part’. The use of allegory is a recognition of the fact that here is
not the whole truth, but a partial reflection of it through which we
might be enabled to discern the truth itself. Allegory is appropriate
precisely because it is not a definite method yielding clear and
predictable results. Allegory helps us to discern through Scripture a
truth not contained in Scripture, but simply witnessed to by it. In
Scripture we have the truth, broken up, fragmented, so that we can
grasp it, so that we can receive it as a gift, and then look through it
and beyond it to the Giver, to Christ who is the Truth. Such an
approach to Scripture is not ‘scientific’ and is not meant to be: it is
contemplative, it is a way of prayer.

III

And he who approaches the prophetic words with care

and attention will feel from his very reading a trace of
their divine inspiration and will be convinced by his own
feelings that the words which are believed by us to be
from God are not the compositions of men. Now the light
which was contained within the law of Moses, but was
hidden away under a veil, shone forth at the advent of
Jesus, when the veil was taken away and there came at
once to men’s knowledge those ‘good things’ of which the
letter of the law held a ‘shadow’.13

That is Origen, and if we follow through the way in which he

explains his approach to Scripture, we see that his engagement with
Scripture is discussed in terms drawn from the tradition of mystical
theology. It is not simply a question of expounding the message of
the Scriptures, much more it is a matter of being able to discern the
Word, or rather of being alert to the Word’s disclosing of himself
through this engagement with Scripture. So, commenting on the
verse from the Song of Songs, ‘Behold, here he cometh leaping upon
the mountains, skipping over the hills’, Origen says:

Now if at any time a soul who is constrained by love for the Word of God is
in the thick of an argument about some passage—and everyone knows from
his own experience how when one gets into a tight corner like this one gets
shut up in the straits of propositions and enquiries—if at such a time some
riddles or obscure sayings of the Law or the Prophets hand in the soul, and
if then she should chance to perceive him to be present, and from afar
should catch the sound of his voice, forthwith she is uplifted. And when he
has begun more and more to draw near to her senses and to illuminate the
things that are obscure, then she sees him ‘leaping upon the mountains and
the hills’; that is to say, he then suggests to her interpretations of a high
and lofty sort, so that this soul can rightly say: ‘Behold, he cometh leaping
upon the mountains, skipping over the hills’.14

Understood like this, allegory is not obviously absurd. It is in fact an

attempt to be faithful to the fragmentary, partial nature of the
Scriptural witness, and also to the sort of witness Scripture is. Here
lies its advantage over exclusive dependence on the historical-critical
method for theological interpretation of Scripture. For that method
seeks to discover what the writer of some text originally meant by
what he said, and also what grounds he had for saying it. But
theological interpretation of the text of Scripture goes beyond this. It
is an attempt to see Scripture as a witness, as pointing to the Word,
to Jesus Christ, in whose presence we live in the Church through the
Spirit. It may be important to understand what the original writers
said, and why they said it, but that is not the end of exegesis. Resort
to allegory sees this, because it seeks to take us beyond the text to
someone who could be captured by no text, to our Lord himself. The
historical-critical method—precisely because it is a method that
might be expected to yield results—runs the risk of duping us into
supposing that its results are what we are after when we attend to
the witness of Scripture. But the task of listening to Scripture is just
that—to listen to the Word speaking to us through Scripture. It is not
the task of piecing together the fragmentary witness of Scripture to
make some construction of our own. In the end we pass beyond our
own efforts, we let go our intellect and what we spin from it, and
simply listen. Allegory keeps this end before us.
Even if all that I have said about allegory is granted—that is a
way of interpreting the partial, fragmentary witness of the Scriptures
so that the Truth that is Christ may be discerned through it—a
difficulty remains. How do we know that what is discerned beyond
the letter of Scripture is really there? How can we escape the
apparent arbitrariness of allegory?
Here we need to be sure what sort of question we are asking, or
rather what sort of answer we would accept as an answer, and
whether we are not in fact begging the question anyway. For to
speak of the ‘arbitrariness’ of allegory is perhaps to itch for some
method that will exclude arbitrariness: the historical-critical method,
say, which yields (we hope) definite, non-arbitrary results. But the
Fathers do not see allegory as arbitrary, rather they see what we
might call an openness in allegory; an openness to God, an
openness to God’s manifestation of himself in Scripture so that we
are responding through it to the mystery to which it is a mystery to
which it is a witness. And in this openness are found the springs of
our apprehension of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
For the doctrine of the Incarnation is, from this point of view, to
do with the fact that the period of the Incarnation is the period
where there is made possible being with God through being with a
man. The ‘one thing necessary’ (Luke 10:42) that Mary of Bethany
found sitting at Jesus’ feet was a being with and listening to Jesus,
which was being with and listening to God. The heart of the Gospel
is not a message but a fact; and it is this to which the doctrine of
the Incarnation bears witness. And for this Scripture is and must be
interpreted within the tradition of the Church, a tradition that is most
basically nourished by countless Christian lives lived close to the
mystery that is Christ.
‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his
stillness…’ He who truly understands the Word of God declared and
articulated in Scripture is one who silently and inarticulately waits on
God in stillness. And this latter is more fundamental; just as the fact
of the Incarnation, the fact that God condescended to be with us
men, is more fundamental than any message we may derive from
this. Scripture is the prophetic and apostolic witness to the
Incarnation of God; it is the Church’s witness, handed down by the
Church and received within the Church. And this is no human
movement. To speak of the Church’s tradition is to speak of the
Spirit. To speak of any true witness to Christ is to speak of the Spirit:
no man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Spirit.
And here we stumble across the springs of our apprehension of
God as Trinity. The openness of allegory would be arbitrariness if we
were simply surrendering our reason to some human convention.
But the openness of allegory is the recognition of the fact—the
experience—that we are brought to the meaning of Scripture—the
mystery of Christ revealing the Father—by the Spirit, not by our own
ingenuity. For the Fathers do not suppose that their understanding of
Scripture is a purely human affair. The whole end of revelation would
be rendered nugatory if the Spirit who inspired the apostles and
prophets did not also move the hearts of believers to recognize and
obey the word of God speaking to them through their writings. In
the theology of the Fathers, their acceptance of a contemplative
approach to Scripture leads inevitably to the idea that the revelation
of the Father through the Son, to which the Scriptures bear witness,
is discerned also in God, in the Spirit. ‘All knowledge of the Father,
when the Son reveals him, is made known through the Holy Spirit’.15
So Origen. And Basil echoes him: ‘For the mind illuminated by the
Spirit beholds the Son, and in Him contemplates, as in an Image, the
Father’.16
To hear the Word of God in the Scriptures is to be in the Spirit, to
be up into the life of the Blessed Trinity, which is the love that binds
them together. And we pass beyond allegory, beyond figure. We
pass into the sole object of the Scriptures, love.*
Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0002

1 This is a generalization that admits of many exceptions, but it might be

epitomized in the contrast between two commentaries on the Fourth Gospel—the
English one by C. K. Barrett and the German one by Rudolf Bultmann. Each
admirable in its own way, but very different.
2 In passing I ought to apologize for the way I am using ‘English’ and
‘Anglican’ as if they were synonymous. They are not, of course, though the
influence of the Anglican approach extends in England beyond the borders of the
Anglican Church.
3 John Bramhall, Works, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker,
1842–45), ii. 261.
4 Bramhall, Works, i. 113.
5 William Laud, Works, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1847–
60), ii. 366f.
6 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (Longman, 1950), passim.
7 J. H. Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (Pickering, 1876), pp. 36f.
8 Ignatios of Antioch, Ad Eph. xv.
9 Ignatios, Ad Magn. viii. 2.
10 Ignatios, Ad Eph. xix. 1.
11 Quoted in R. M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (SPCK, 1957), p. 10.
12 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Louis Lafuma (Seuil, 1962), no. 270.
13 De Principiis IV. i. 6.
14 Comm. in Cant. III. 11 (tr. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26
(Longmans, 1957), 209, slightly edited).
15 De Princ. I. iii. 4 (tr. G. W. Butterworth, Origen on First Principles (SPCK,
1936), 32).
16 Ep. ccxxxvi.
* A paper read to the Oxford-Bonn Theological Seminar, 1977.
 2
The Greatest Fantasy
As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of
Early Christian Dogma…

Review Article of Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its

Rise, Growth and Dissolution, 3 vols
Marxism has been one of the most pervasive, and most
successful, movements in the last century and a half. As a political
movement it has conquered two great empires—a large part of the
surface of the globe—and does not appear to have exhausted its
energies. But it is more than a political movement; as a philosophy
or world view, it has had immense influence, not only in the realms
of thought where it originated, in philosophy, economics, and the
study of society, but in literature, literary criticism, and music, and
even theology. Its influence is met with at almost every turn in many
contexts—as a kind of set of mind, or group of premises, or a handy
collection of axioms. In this book, Leszek Kołakowski, one-time
professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Warsaw,
examines the whole phenomenon: its origins, the thought of Karl
Marx, its blossoming in the period of the Second International, and
its attaining the status of an orthodoxy as the ideology of the
Communist States that followed in the wake of the Russian
Revolution.
 In some ways this book reads like a history of dogma:
antecedents are determined, the thought of the founding fathers is
examined, and the fate of those ideas is traced through history.
Indeed, the analogy is even closer, for we seem to find in Marxism’s
second century something not unlike the phenomenon of gnosticism
in the second century of Christianity. Whatever its origins, from the
point of view of Christian orthodoxy, gnosticism took the form of a
bewildering array of attempts to (mis-)understand Christianity by
assimilating it to the climate of thought of the second century: it was
a collection of, for a time, fashionable and exciting, but for that
reason one-sided, interpretations of the Faith. In the second and
third volumes of Kołakowski’s work we find chapters with titles like:
‘German Orthodoxy: Karl Kautsky’, ‘Jean Jaurès: Marxism as a
Soteriology’, ‘Paul Lafargue: A Hedonist Marxism’, ‘Georges Sorel: A
Jansenist Marxism’, ‘Stanislaw Brzozowski: Marxism as Historical
Subjectivism’—all those from the period of the Second International,
and later: ‘György Lukács: Reason in the Service of Dogma’ and
‘Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a Futuristic Gnosis’. But in most histories of
Christian dogma gnosticism is a phenomenon that blossoms and
decays, while Christian Orthodoxy grows steadily and inherits the
earth, and histories of dogma are usually written from some dwelling
place within that inheritance. There might seem to be something
similar here, with Marxism-Leninism taking the place of the
orthodoxy which grows from strength to strength. But Main Currents
of Marxism is not written from within the fold, as the titles of the
successive volumes indicate: The Founders, The Golden Age, The
Breakdown. It is as if a history of Christian dogma had been written
by Julian the Apostate.
But the titles of the successive volumes are misleading too. They
suggest that Marxism grew, flowered, and then went awry and
collapsed; that the later developments of Marxism betrayed the
promise of its origins. That is a common apologia for Marxism by
those who wish to espouse the cause but are unable to stomach the
realities of Soviet Communism (though there have been, and still
are, many who do not find the horrors of Stalinism or Marxism that
unpalatable). But it is not a line pursued by Kołakowski. For him the
Leninist version of socialism ‘was a possible interpretation, though
certainly not the only possible one, of Marx’s doctrine’ (I.418); it can
fairly claim to be a legitimate successor of Marx. And Stalinism is a
legitimate—the only legitimate—development of Leninism. ‘There is
absolutely nothing in the worst excesses of the worst years of
Stalinism that cannot be justified on Leninist principles’ (II.517). For
Kołakowski it is quite wrong to try and represent the period of
Stalinism as the result of the wickedness and mania of a single
despot, Stalin, and it is likewise wrong to suggest that things have
changed much in principle as a result of the subsequent
denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ which developed under
Stalin: ‘on Stalin’s death the Soviet system changed from a personal
tyranny to that of an oligarchy’ (III.456). During the Great Purge of
the late thirties, ‘the whole country was in the grip of a monstrous fit
of madness, induced apparently—but the appearance was deceptive
—by the will of a single despot’ (III.82). The line from Marx to Lenin
is direct, though other lines could have developed; the line from
Lenin to Stalin is direct and inevitable. The worm was in the bud.
Marxism is not a great and hopeful movement that went wrong.
Rather ‘Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was
a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which
all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled’
(III.523). And the dream turned into a nightmare.
Kołakowski’s work is primarily a treatise—and a masterly one—in
the history of ideas. He writes as a historian, fairly and
dispassionately, and, though he does not conceal his own opinions,
they usually present themselves as a critical questioning of the ideas
under discussion. He begins in the beginning, as they say, with a
survey of the origins of dialectic, a survey that takes us back to the
thought of Plotinus, Christian Platonism, Eriugena, Eckhart, and
Nicholas of Cusa, and leads us into the immediate hinterland of the
Enlightenment with Böhme, Angelus Silesius, and Fénelon. The
survey then proceeds through the thought of the Enlightenment, by
way of Rousseau and Hume, to Kant and Fichte, and finally to Hegel
and his fully-fledged notion of dialectic. What Kołakowski shows us
in this survey is how a notion of dialectic is evolved in man’s attempt
to come to terms with his experience of transience and contingency.
In the Platonist and Neo-Platonist tradition—Christian and pagan—
man’s experience of transience is an experience of alienation from
himself, from his true being, and it is overcome by being
transcended—in union with the Eternal and Absolute, or, with Kant
and Fichte, in a process of infinite progress towards the Absolute.

A new philosophical possibility and a new eschatology comes into view with
the conception of humanity self-present as an Absolute in its own finitude,
and the rejection of all solutions that involve man realizing himself by the
actualization, or at the command, of an antecedent absolute Being. This
new philosophical prospect is that displayed in the work of Marx. (I.80)

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, as Kołakowski insists in the

very first sentence of his work, and it was in his apprehending of this
‘new philosophical prospect’ that Marx found his basic ideas.
Kołakowski traces Marx’s thought from its earliest phase, through
his criticism of Hegel and Feuerbach, his ‘discovery of the proletariat’
and his development of the key ideas of the alienation of labour and
the dehumanization of man, to his understanding of Communism as
a historical trend and the idea of class struggle leading to revolution
and the overthrow of the structures of dehumanization. After
discussing the development of Marx’s thought up to The German
Ideology, he gives an interesting survey of socialist ideas in the first
half of the nineteenth century, in comparison with Marxian socialism,
and then embarks on an analysis of the ideas of Kapital. On the
question of the ‘Young Marx’, i.e. whether there is any fundamental
difference between the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 (only
published in 1932) and the Marx of Das Kapital, Kołakowski argues
for continuity of development in Marx’s thought and finds
unconvincing the attempts to drive a wedge between the Young
Marx and the later Marx. This is not the place to go into the detail of
Kołakowski’s interpretation of Marx, except to say that his treatment
is magisterial in its balance and clarity. Often enough clarity cannot
be achieved, for Marx himself does not provide a clear exposition
even of important matters—such as his theory of value—
nevertheless Kołakowski’s exposition displays clarity in that concepts
that can be explained are lucidly explained and where matters
become murkier he at least points out the source of the difficulty
and confusion. In common with most modern interpreters of Marx’s
thought, he follows Lukács in laying stress on Marx’s ‘philosophy of
praxis’, about which, indeed, he is particularly illuminating.
Commenting on the famous phrase from Marx’s eleventh Thesis
against Feuerbach—‘The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’—
Kołakowski says:

To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging
it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself,
an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of
understanding it. This can only come about when the subject and object
coincide, when the difference between educator and educated disappears,
and when thought itself becomes a revolutionary act, the self-recognition of
human existence. (I.144)

Summing up what must be one of the definitive accounts of Marx’s

thought, Kołakowski discerns three motifs: the Romantic motif, the
Faustian or Promethean motif, and a motif supplied by the
rationalist, determinist Enlightenment. It is, in fact, from the
Romantics that Marx derived the main lines of his criticism of
capitalist society, only for the Romantics this was conservative
nostalgia, whereas Marx looked forward to a revolution that would
transcend the features of capitalist society. There was to be no
retreat from technology, rather armed with technology mankind was
to perfect its control over natural forces and in that way revive his
lost harmony with nature. Here emerges his Promethean motif: man
is on the brink of being able to understand and thus control the
immanent forces that govern his destiny. This features in Marx as a
kind of social reductionism: everything is reduced to social conditions
and Marx finds it difficult to admit that man is limited in other ways.
As Kołakowski remarks, ‘Marx’s ignoring of the body and physical
death, sex and aggression, geography and human fertility—all of
which he turns into purely social realities—is one of the most
characteristic yet most neglected features of his Utopia’ (I.414). In
this stress on social conditions determining man there emerges the
last motif, that derived from the rationalist, determinist
Enlightenment: for Marx believes that here he has discovered the
determinative laws of human society—what he presents us with is
not prophecy, but science (though this must be qualified for Marx
himself who regards these ‘social laws’ as applying only to the
development of society up to the proletarian revolution: ‘the
revolutionary movement of the proletariat is not the exemplification
of a law in this sense, for although it is caused by history it is also
the awareness of history’ (I.415). Here the Promethean motif
emerges as Marx’s philosophy of praxis).
The other ‘founder’ of Marxism is Engels, also discussed in the
first volume. Kołakowski brings out the peculiar nature of Engels’
thought in contrast to Marx, as well as the way in which it is a
development of his thought. With Engels, Marx’s ‘philosophy of
praxis’ is dissolved by a much more thoroughgoing ‘scientism’ than
we find in Marx. Marxism is assimilated to the fashionable currents
of Darwinism and evolution of the latter half of the nineteenth
century: far from human history moving to a point where man
understands the laws of history and achieves union with his
environment, human history is simply an exemplification of the laws
of nature and it is these laws that point to the coming classless
society. With Engels, then, we have a new version of Marxism,
‘differing as much from its original as did post-Darwinian European
culture from the age that preceded it’ (I.181).
It is the ‘new’ Marxism of Engels that has a continuous history,
and the second volume, The Golden Age, discusses its
manifestations in the period of the Second International (1899‒
1914). It is the breadth and magisterial quality of this volume that
lends it its value, for this was perhaps the most decisive period for
Marxism’s influence in the wider realms of culture (though this
influence was often delayed), and this volume enables us to see the
phenomenon as a whole. It was Engels’ Marxism that set the stage,
and his cruder ‘scientism’ that constituted much of the appeal of
Marxism. The sail of Marxism was filled with the prevailing winds of
thought: evolutionism, the tendency to find in an evolutionary
scientism some sort of basis for a mathesis universalis. Marxism was
‘scientific’; those who lacked conviction were reactionary
obscurantists. Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Poland:
these are the centres of the Golden Age of Marxism—and, of course,
Russia. (It is interesting that Kołakowski has nothing to say about
any English manifestations of Marxism in this period. ‘Why?’ is a
question worthy of reflection. The fact that the British representative
at the inaugural congress of the Second International was William
Morris is perhaps in some way symbolic.)
But half the second volume is devoted, quite properly, to the
growth of Russian Communism and in particular to the figure of
Lenin. And with Lenin we begin in a sense to move outside the
history of ideas, or at least find ourselves in a situation where, in
accordance with the views of some of the cruder manifestations of
Marxism, the history of ideas becomes simply an epiphenomenon of
the history of society. Lenin’s own thought is inconsistent and
incoherent, and is not inspired by any concern for the truth. ‘He was
not in search of answers to any philosophical questions, for all the
important ones had been solved by Marx and Engels…Lenin was not
seeking. He believed firmly that the revolutionary movement must
have clear-cut, uniform Weltanschauung, and that pluralism in this
respect was a grave political danger’ (II.458). What he provided was
a coarsening of Marx and Engels, a subjugation of all thought to
‘dialectical materialism’, which becomes a magic key to unlock all
problems. Kołakowski indicates the intellectual banality of it all, and
also shows how such anti-intellectualism led to qualification in the
name of ‘dialectical materialism’ of the proper autonomy of scientific
research. There is a direct line from Lenin to the Lysenko affair in
Stalin’s time. But further: this subjugation of thought to the crude
categories of ‘diamat’ (as it is engagingly called) is a manifestation
of Lenin’s concern for power, power for the party, though with
Lenin’s understanding of party orthodoxy that could hardly mean
anything else than power for himself. So, of Lenin’s writings
Kołakowski can say, ‘the obscurities of his text are not due so much
to inherent philosophical difficulties as to Lenin’s indolent and
superficial approach and his contempt for all problems that could not
be put to direct use in the struggle for power’.
The third volume, The Breakdown, moves on to deal with Stalin
and Communism after Stalin. As we have seen, Kołakowski sees
Stalin as a worthy successor to Lenin and deprecates the use of the
term ‘Stalinism’, as if it were a diseased form of an otherwise healthy
Communism. Kołakowski explains the Great Purge by saying that it
was intended to demonstrate and effect the genuinely totalitarian
nature of Communist society. It was an attack on the party lest the
party become a focus for devotion independent of the citizen’s total
possession by the State, lest it become a source of values, of an
ideology, in terms of which the State itself could be criticized. ‘The
citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even
to the state ideology’ (III.85). For Kołakowski this is a result of the
natural logic of the system, not an aberration. He admits that, under
the tsars, Russia had been equally totalitarian in principle (though
not so effectively in practice), but finds little consolation in this, as
the whole system can be perfectly well justified in Marxist terms: ‘if
freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more
freedom; as the “objective” conditions of unity have been achieved,
namely the confiscation of bourgeois property, all manifestations of
discontent are relics of the bourgeois past and should be treated
accordingly’ (I.428 f.). The effect of ‘Stalinism’ was to produce the
‘new Soviet man’: ‘an ideological schizophrenic, a liar who believed
what he was saying, a man capable of incessant, voluntary acts of
intellectual self-mutilation’ (III.97).
The third volume also discusses representatives of European
thought who stood in the shadow of Stalinist Russia: Trotsky,
Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse,
and Bloch. Apart from Gramsci (who was imprisoned in 1927 and
was therefore outside Stalin’s influence), Korsch (who was expelled
from the party in 1926), and Goldmann (who never belonged to the
party anyway), Kołakowski has severe things to say about them all.
Lukács is ‘perhaps the most striking example in the twentieth
century of what may be called the betrayal of reason by those
whose profession is to use and defend it’; Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics is ‘a model of professional bombast concealing poverty of
thought’; ‘there is probably no other philosopher in our day who
deserves as completely as Marcuse to be called the ideologist of
obscurantism’; and although he finds some kind things to say about
him, ‘Bloch must be termed a preacher of intellectual irresponsibility’.
Nonetheless, his discussion of all these writers is painstaking and
sheds valuable rays of light where otherwise there is but the murky
darkness of obscurity.
In the final chapter Kołakowski sketches what he sees as the
collapse of Marxism as an ideology in the countries of the
Communist bloc.

Marxism is practically extinct as a doctrine, though it performs a useful

service in justifying Soviet imperialism and the whole internal policy of
oppression, exploitation and privilege. As in Eastern Europe the rulers have
to resort to other ideological values than Communism if they wish to find
common ground with their subjects. As far as the Russian people itself is
concerned the values in question are those of chauvinism and imperial glory,
while all the peoples of the Soviet Union are susceptible to xenophobia,
especially anti-Chinese nationalism and anti-Semitism. This is all that
remains of Marxism in the first state in the world to be constituted on
allegedly Marxist principles. This nationalist and to some extent racist
outlook is the true, unavowed ideology of the Soviet state, not only
protected but inculcated by means of allusions and unprinted texts; and,
unlike Marxism, it awakens a real echo in popular feeling. (III.473)

This is clearly a work of the very greatest importance and interest.

The translation of the Polish original by P. S. Falla is fluent, though
the proof-reading has not been perfect. It is perhaps unfortunate
that the title suggests no more than a text book in the history of
political ideas, for this book is more than that, precisely because it
fulfils that function so well.
 ‘The greatest fantasy of our century’—but, just for that reason,
Kołakowski’s exposing its inadequacies as a political theory will not
do away with the fantasy. Men do not indulge in fantasies on rational
grounds, and so showing these grounds to be false or inadequate
will not stop them. To some extent, as Kołakowski shows, Marxism
has been so attractive because it indulged men’s irrational hopes
that in reason can be found the key to human destiny. Marxism has
posed as a science: and Kołakowski shows how at the height of its
influence Marxism made that claim in a particularly blatant way. But
here Kołakowski is himself ambiguous. In his criticism of Marcuse he
remarks at one point that ‘the destructive effects of technology can
only be combated by the further development of technology itself’
(III.420), which sounds like saying that more of the disease will
work a cure. But what if we are wrong in thinking that man is such a
being who could finally be master of his destiny, who could, with the
help of technology, finally turn his environment into just that—that
is, so control nature that it becomes simply man’s environment?

…but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable
…destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching
and waiting.
(T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, I.1‒2, 8‒10)

Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume II: Studies in Theology. Edited by: Lewis
Ayres and John Behr, Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.003.0003
 3
The Place of The Heart of the World
in the Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar

The Heart of the World was published in 1945 and was Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s first sustained piece of theological writing. By then he
had behind him his studies in philosophy and literature which
culminated in his vast thesis, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele,
and his studies at Lyons in the Jesuit scholasticate under Père Henri
de Lubac, in which he had read deeply the Greek Fathers, especially
Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Part of the
fruit of those studies had already been published, the rest was
shortly to appear, and must already have been nearing completion
when Balthasar broke away from such historical studies (though
Balthasar had never allowed himself to be a purely historical
investigator) to write The Heart of the World. Five years earlier
Balthasar had moved to Basel as a student chaplain, and it was in
Basel that Balthasar very soon came to know Adrienne von Speyr—a
meeting that issued in Adrienne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism
in the November of 1940. The Heart of the World was, then, written
out of the initial impact of his friendship with that remarkable
woman, whose influence on his own thought Balthasar readily
admits. Balthasar has said that, as he prepared Adrienne for
reception into the Roman Catholic Church, everything he said found
in her a response that seemed to come from the receptiveness of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Cross-head Designed by Mr. Porter.

The cross-head which I designed at this time has always

interested me, not only on account of its success, but also for the
important lesson which it teaches. I abolished all means of
adjustment. The cross-head was a solid block, running on the lower
guide-bars if the engine were running forward, as was almost always
the case, and these guide-bars were formed on the bed. The pin was
of steel, with the surface hardened and ground truly cylindrical, set in
the middle of the cross-head, and formed with square ends larger
than the cylindrical portion. These were mortised parallel into the
cross-head, and a central pin was forced through the whole. The
flats on the pin I afterwards copied from a print. These prevent the
formation of shoulders at the ends of the vibration of the boxes. I
would like to know to whom we are indebted for this valuable feature.
Every surface was scraped to absolute truth. The lubrication was
internal, as shown. There are many of these cross-heads which have
been running at rapid speeds in clean engine-rooms from twenty to
thirty years, where the scraping marks on the lower bars are still to
be seen.
The lesson is a most important one for the future of steam
engineering. It is this. Two flat cast-iron surfaces, perfectly true and
incapable of deflection, with the pressure equally distributed over a
sufficient area, protected from dirt and properly lubricated, will never
have the clean film of oil between them broken or even varied in
thickness, and will run together without wear perpetually and at any
speed whatever. The conclusion is also abundantly warranted that a
tendency to heat need not exist anywhere in even the least degree,
in engines running at the greatest speeds. This can always be
prevented by truth of design and construction, and the selection of
suitable material. This fact is abundantly established by varied
experience with cylindrical as well as with flat surfaces, and for other
materials, though not for all, as well as for cast iron.
The solid end connecting-rod appears in this engine. This was
shown to me by Mr. James Gulland, a Scotch draftsman at Ormerod,
Grierson & Co.’s. He did not claim to have originated it, but only told
me that it was designed in Scotland. I saw at once its peculiar value
for high-speed engines. Every locomotive designer knows the pains
that must be taken to prevent the straps on the crank-pins from
spreading at high speeds, under the pressure exerted by the
transverse fling of the connecting-rod. This solid end renders the
connecting-rod safe in this respect, even at thousands of revolutions
per minute. For single-crank engines, on which only it can be
applied, it is invaluable. This solid rod-end possesses also another
advantage. The wear of the crank-pin boxes and that of the cross-
head-pin boxes are both taken up in the same direction, so the
position of the piston in the cylinder will be varied only by the
difference, if any, between the two. With a strap on both ends, the
connecting-rod is always shortened by the sum of the wear in the
two boxes. The solid rod-end enabled me to reduce the clearance in
the cylinder to one eighth of an inch with entire safety. The piston
never touched the head.
As this construction was shown to me, the wedge was tapered on
both sides. It seemed that this would be difficult to fit up truly, and it
also involved the necessity of elongating the bolt-holes in the rod, so
that the wedge might slide along in taking up the wear. I changed it
by putting all the taper of the wedge on the side next to the brass,
making the other side parallel with the bolt-holes. This enabled the
opening in the rod-end to be slotted out in a rectangular form, and
made it easy for the wedge-block to be truly fitted.
While on this subject I may as well dispose of the connecting-rod,
although the other changes were made subsequently, and I do not
recollect exactly when. The following shows the rod and strap as
they have been made for a long time. The taper of the rod, giving to
it a great strength at the crank-pin neck to resist the transverse fling,
was, I presume, copied by me from a locomotive rod. The rounded
end of the strap originated in this way. I had often heard of the
tendency of the cross-head-pin straps to spread. This was in the old
days, when these pins were not hardened, indeed were always part
of the iron casting. The brasses, always used without babbitt lining,
would wear these pins on the opposite acting sides only. Brass, I
learned afterwards, will wear away any pin, even hardened steel,
and not be worn itself. When this wear would be taken up, the
brasses would bind at the ends of their vibration, coming in contact
there with the unworn sides of the pin. To relieve this binding it was
common for engineers to file these sides away. All I knew at that
time was that the straps would yield and spread. It occurred to me to
observe this deflection in a spring brass wire bent to the form of a
strap. The pressure being applied on the line of the pin center, the
deflection appeared to take place mostly at the back, and so I
stiffened it. Since the introduction of the flats on the pin, which
prevent the exertion of any force to spread the strap, this form
seems to be rather ornamental than useful.
 Connecting-rod and Strap.

To this strap I added a wiper for lubricating the cross-head pin

automatically. The drop of oil hung from the center of a convex
surface provided above the wiper. The latter was inclined forward,
and its edge partook of the vibration of the connecting-rod. On the
backward stroke this edge cleared the drop. At the commencement
of the forward stroke it rose to take it off.
A note of the change then made by me in stop-valves will
conclude the record of these changes. The valve and its seat had
always been made of brass. The latter was fitted in a cast-iron
chamber, and, expanding more than the iron, was apt to work loose.
I disused brass entirely, employing a cast-iron valve in the cast-iron
seat. These always remained perfectly tight, showing the additional
cost and trouble of brass to be unnecessary.
At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in 1863, held in Newcastle, I read before the Mechanical
Section a paper on the Richards indicator, illustrated by one of the
instruments and diagrams taken by it from locomotives. The paper
was very favorably received. The description of the action of the
arms, in preventing by their elasticity in combination with a stop any
more than a light pressure being applied to the paper, called out
especial applause. The president of the Mechanical Section that
year was Professor Willis, of Cambridge, the designer of the
odontograph form of tooth, which enables gear-wheels of the same
pitch to run together equally well, whatever may be the difference in
their diameters. I felt very deeply impressed at standing before a
large assembly of the leading mechanical engineers of Great Britain,
and where so many important things had first been presented to the
world, where Sir William Armstrong had described his accumulator,
by which enormous power is supplied occasionally from small pumps
running continuously, and where Joule had explained his practical
demonstration of the mechanical equivalent of heat.
On my journeys to Newcastle and back to London I met two
strangers, each of whom gave me something to think about. It
happened that each time we were the only occupants of the
compartment. Englishmen, I observed, were always ready to
converse with Americans. Soon after leaving London, my fellow-
passenger, a young gentleman, said to me, “Did you observe that
young fellow and young woman who bade me good-by at the
carriage door? He is my brother, and they are engaged. He is first
mate on a ship, and sails to-morrow for Calcutta. He hopes on his
next voyage to have command of a ship himself, and then they
expect to be married.” I did not learn who he was, but he said they
were making large preparations to welcome the scientists, and
added that he owned about six hundred houses in Newcastle.
Evidently he was the eldest son.
On my return my companion was an elderly gentleman, a typical
Tory. He waxed eloquent on the inhumanity of educating the laboring
classes, saying that its only effect must be to make them
discontented with the position which they must always occupy.
I told him I had thought of a motto for the Social Science
Congress, which was just then in session. It was a parody on
Nelson’s celebrated order, “England expects every man to do his
duty.” My proposed motto was, “England expects every man to know
his place.” He did not see the humor, but took me seriously, and
thought it excellent.
 CHAPTER X

Contract with Ormerod, Grierson & Co. Engine for Evan Leigh, Son & Co. Engine
for the Oporto Exhibition. Getting Home from Portugal.

could do nothing with the engine in England unless it

was put on the market as a condensing engine. This
fact was finally revealed to me, and I applied myself to
meet the requirement. The question as it addressed
itself to me was, not “How do you work your air-
pump?” but “How are you going to work your air-
pump?” My friends Easton, Amos & Sons told me frankly that in their
judgment I could not do it at all. Their opinion was expressed very
decidedly, that as a condensing engine the high-speed engine was
not to be thought of. This was not surprising, seeing that the beam
Wolff engines made by them ran at only 25 revolutions per minute,
which was the speed of beam-engines generally, and all stationary
engines were beam-engines; but it was discouraging. I made up my
mind that they did not know everything, and I would show them a
thing or two as soon as I got a chance. This I found easier to get
than I expected, when I had matured a satisfactory system of
condensation. My first plan was to use an independent air-pump
running at the usual slow speed and driven by a belt, the speed
being reduced by intermediate gearing.
I was able very readily to make an agreement on this basis with
the firm of Ormerod, Grierson & Co., of Manchester, for the
manufacture of the engines and governors, and we started on our
first order on the first day of January, 1864.
The ground occupied by these works bordered on the Duke of
Bridgewater’s canal from Liverpool to Manchester, where I one day
saw a cow and a woman towing a boat, a man steering.
 A railway ran through these works, parallel with the canal, at about
300 feet distance, but it was not at all in the way. It was built on brick
arches, and the construction was such that the passing of trains was
scarcely heard. The arches were utilized for the millwright shop,
pattern shop, gear-cutting shop, and the storage of lumber and gear-
wheel patterns, the number and size of which latter astonished me.
On a previous visit Mr. Grierson had shown me several things of
much interest. The one most worthy of being related was a multiple
drill, capable of drilling ninety holes, ³⁄₄ inch diameter,
simultaneously. This had been designed and made by themselves
for use in building a lattice-girder bridge, for erection over the river
Jumna, near Delhi, to carry a roadway below and a railway above.
The English engineers then made all bridge constructions on this
system, having no faith in the American truss. One length of this
bridge still stood in their yard, where it had been completely riveted
up for testing, after which all the rivets would have to be cut out. The
other lengths had been shipped in pieces. The advantage of this
multiple drill was twofold—the ability to drill many holes
simultaneously and the necessary accuracy of their pitch.
I was especially interested in the massiveness of this tool and
impressed with the importance of this feature. The drills rotated in
place, and the table carrying the work was fed upward by two
hydraulic presses. The superintendent told me that they never broke
a drill, and that to exhibit its safety in this respect they had
successfully drilled a single hole ¹⁄₁₆ of an inch in diameter through
one inch of steel. He attributed this success partly to the steady feed,
but chiefly to absolute freedom from vibration. He said a toolmaker
had had an order for a similar drill, and on visiting this one
pronounced its great weight to be absurd. He made one weighing
about half as much, which proved a failure, from the liability of the
drills to break. This gave me one of the most valuable lessons that I
ever received.
We soon had our first engine running successfully, in spite of some
annoyances. I insisted on having the joints on the steam-chest and
cylinder heads made scraped joints, but the foreman put them
together with the white and red lead putty just the same, so that work
was thrown away, and when we wanted to open a joint we had to
resort to the familiar wedges. The pipes were of cast iron, with
square holes in the flanges. The ends were left rough. They were put
together with the same putty. The joints were encircled by clips,
which prevented the putty from being forced outward to any great
extent in screwing the flanges together. What went inside had to
work its way through as it was broken off by the rush of steam and
hot water. When the engine was started we could not get much
vacuum. On taking the pipes apart to find what the matter was, we
discovered that the workmen had left a wooden plug in the
condenser-nozzle, where it had been put to prevent anything from
getting in during its transportation. The proper mode of protection
would of course have been to bolt a board on the flange.
The worst trouble was from a blunder of my own. My exhibition
engine had cast-iron valves running on cast-iron seats, and the
friction between these surfaces under the steam pressure was so
little that it did not injure the governor action appreciably. But I could
not let well enough alone. Mr. Lee had told me that in the steam fire-
engines they used gun-metal valves on steel seats, which I thought
must have some wonderful advantages, so at considerable
additional expense I fitted up my first engine in the same way. The
governor worked very badly. I had the pleasure of demonstrating the
fact that brass on steel is the very best combination possible for
producing friction. I went back to cast-iron valves, when the trouble
disappeared.
We had an order for an engine to drive the works of Evan Leigh,
Son & Co. Mr. Leigh was quite a famous man, the inventor of Leigh’s
top roller, used universally in drawing-machines. I was told he was
the only man then living who had invented an essential feature in
spinning machinery. I struck out a new design, which proved quite
successful. They wished to give 100 revolutions per minute to their
main line of shafting running overhead through the center of their
shop. I planned a vertical engine, standing on a bed-plate, which
carried also an A frame.
The engine-room was located at the end of the shop. The line of
shaft passed through a wall-box and then 3 feet further to its main
bearing at the top of this upright frame. The latter was stayed from
the wall by two ample cast-iron stays. The fly-wheel was outside this
frame and carried the crank-pin. The shaft was continued quite stiff
through the wall-box, with long bearings. By this plan I got rid of
gears. Belts for taking power from a prime mover were then
unknown in England. The fly-wheel was only 10 feet in diameter, with
rim 8×10 inches, and was of course cast in one piece. It proved to be
ample. The engine was the largest I had yet made, 22 inches
diameter of cylinder by 36 inches stroke, making 100 revolutions. I
was still tied to 600 feet piston travel per minute. I did not venture to
suggest any greater speed than that; could not have sold an engine
in Lancashire if I had.
I introduced in this engine a feature which I afterwards sincerely
wished I had not done, though not on my own account. This was a
surface condenser. It worked well, always maintaining a good
vacuum. I shall have more to say respecting this engine later, which
will explain my regret about the condenser. I had about this time the
pleasure of a visit from two American engineers, Robert Briggs and
Henry R. Towne, who were traveling together in England, and were
at the trouble to look me up. I took them to see this engine, and I am
sorry to say they were not so much carried away with the novel
design as I was. But if I had the same to do again I do not think I
could do better.
The last time I saw that engine I found no one in the engine-room.
I inquired of some one where the engineer was, and was told I would
find him in the pipe-shop. I found him there at work. He told me he
had not been staying in the engine-room for a long time, he had
“nowt to do,” and so they gave him a job there.
When I went with Ormerod, Grierson & Co., they were deep in the
execution of a large order known as the Oporto Crystal Palace.
Portugal was behind every other country in Europe in its arts and
manufactures. In fact, it had none at all. At Oporto there was a large
colony of English merchants, by whom all the trade of the port was
carried on. These had conceived the idea of holding at Oporto an
international exposition, which idea was put into execution. Our firm
had secured the contract for all the iron-work for a pretty large iron
and glass building, and for the power and shafting for the Machinery
Hall.
 I was soon called on for the plans for an Allen engine to be shown
there. This was to be a non-condensing engine, 14×24, to make 150
revolutions per minute, and which accordingly was made and sent,
with two Lancashire boilers. I went on to attend the opening of the
exposition on the first of May, 1865, and see that the engine was
started in good shape.
I sailed from London on a trading-steamer for Oporto, and on the
voyage learned various things that I did not know before. One of
these was how to make port wine. I asked the captain what his cargo
consisted of. He replied: “Nine hundred pipes of brandy.” “What are
you taking brandy to Portugal for?” “To make wine.” “But what kind of
brandy is it that you take from England?” “British brandy.” “What is it
made from?” “Corn.” By this word he meant wheat. In England Indian
corn is called maize. I do not know whether “corn” included barley
and rye or not.
We had the pleasure in Oporto of meeting a Portuguese inventor.
In England there then existed the rude method of announcing at
each principal seaport the instant of noon by firing a cannon by an
electric current from the Greenwich Observatory. The more accurate
method now in use substitutes sight for sound. This inventor
proposed planting a cannon for this purpose in an opening in a
church tower, of which there were plenty. The hammer, by the fall of
which a pill of fulminate was to be exploded and the cannon fired,
was to be held up by a string. The rays of the sun were focused by a
burning-glass on a point, which at the instant that the sun reached
the meridian would reach this string. The string would be burned off,
and the cannon would go off. In the rare case for Oporto of a cloudy
day, or if for any reason the automatic action failed, it would be the
duty of a priest, after waiting a few minutes to be sure of the failure,
to go up and fire the gun. The enthusiastic inventor urged it on the
English. It was thought, however, that the more feeble power of the
sun’s rays in the higher latitude of England would not warrant the
application of this ingenious invention there, and besides neither
perforated church towers nor idle priests were available for the
purpose.
In order to get the full point of the following story it must be
remembered that at that time there was not a stationary steam-
engine in Portugal. English enterprise and capital had recently built a
line of railway between Lisbon and Oporto, and the locomotives on
that line furnished the only exhibition of steam power in the country.
To the educated classes of the Portuguese, therefore, the steam-
engine to be shown at the Oporto Crystal Palace was the object of
supreme interest.
In one respect they used to have on the Continent a way of
managing these things which was better than ours. The exhibitions
were completely ready on the opening day. For example, in the
French Exposition of 1867, which was the last one I attended, the
jurors commenced their work of examination on the day after the
opening, and completed it in three weeks. The only exception, I
think, was in the class of agricultural machinery, the examination of
which had to wait for the grain to grow. No imperial decree could
hasten that. So the Oporto Exposition was to be complete in all its
departments when the King of Portugal should declare it to be open.
I arrived in Oporto a week before the day fixed for the opening,
and found a funny state of affairs existing in the engineering
department. A very capable and efficient young man had been
placed by our firm in charge of their exhibit. I found his work finished.
The engine and shafting were in running order. Only the boilers were
not ready, in explanation of which I heard this statement: Some time
previously an Englishman had presented himself, bearing a
commission, duly signed by the executive officials, constituting him
“Chief Engineer of the Oporto Exposition,” and demanded charge of
our engine and boilers, which were all there was for him to be chief
engineer of. Our man very properly refused to recognize him, telling
him that he had been placed in charge of this exhibit by its owners,
and he should surrender it to nobody. But the new man had a pull.
The managers were furious at this defiance of their authority. On the
other hand, the guardian of our interests was firm. Finally, after much
altercation and correspondence with Manchester, a compromise had
been arranged, by which our representative retained charge of the
engine and shafting, and the boilers were handed over to the “chief
engineer.”
I was introduced to this functionary, and received his assurance
that the boilers would be “in readiness to-morrow.” This promise was
repeated every day. Finally the morning of the opening day arrived.
The city put on its gala attire. Flags and banners waved everywhere.
The people were awakened to a holiday by the booming of cannon
and the noise of rockets, which the Portuguese sent up by daylight to
explode in the air. The King and Queen and court came up from
Lisbon, and there was a grand opening ceremonial, after which a
royal procession made the circuit of the building.
At the hour fixed for the opening the “chief engineer” was just
having a fire started under the boilers for the first time. I was, of
course, pretty nervous, but our man said to me: “You go and witness
the opening ceremonies. They will last fully two hours, and we shall
doubtless be running when you get back.” When at their conclusion I
hurried through the crowds back to Machinery Hall, there stood the
engine motionless. The door to the boiler-room was shut as tightly as
possible, but steam was coming through every crevice. I could not
speak, but looked at our man for an explanation. “The fool,” said he,
“did not know enough to pack the heads of his drum-bolts; he can
get only two pounds of steam, and it blows out around all the bolts,
so as to drive the firemen out of the boiler-room.” There was no help
for it. The boilers had to be emptied and cooled before a man could
go inside and pack those bolt-heads.
 Attaching a Steam-drum to a Lancashire Boiler.

I must stop here and explain how a steam-drum is attached to a

Lancashire boiler, or, at least, how it was in those days. The
accompanying section will enable the reader to understand the
description. The “drum” was of cast iron. The upper part, not shown,
was provided with three raised faces on its sides, to two of which
branch pipes were bolted, each carrying a safety-valve, while the
steam-pipe was connected to the third. The manhole was in the top.
A cast-iron saddle was riveted on the boiler, and was provided at the
top with a broad flange turning inward. This flange and the flange at
the base of the drum had their surfaces planed, and a steam-joint
was made between them with the putty. Square bolt-holes were
cored in the flange of the saddle, and corresponding round holes
were bored in the flange of the drum. The bolts were forged square
for a short distance under the heads, so that they would be held from
turning in the square holes. These bolts were inserted from the
inside of the saddle, and were packed by winding them, under the
heads, with long hemp well filled with this putty. As the nut on the
outside was tightened the putty was squeezed into the square hole
around the bolt, and soon became hard. This packing was what the
“chief engineer” had omitted. The reader is now prepared to
appreciate the situation.
It was not long before the royal procession appeared at the
extreme end of the hall, the King and Queen in advance, and a long
line of the dignitaries of state and church, with a sprinkling of ladies,
following at a respectful distance. Slowly, but inevitably, the
procession advanced, between the rows of silent machinery and
mad exhibitors, until, arriving near us, the King stopped. An official
immediately appeared, of whom the King inquired who was present
to represent the engine, or at least I suppose he did, for in reply I
was pointed out to him. He stepped briskly over to me, and what do
you think he said? I defy any living Yankee to guess. With a manner
of the utmost cordiality, and speaking in English as if it were his
native tongue, he said: “I am extremely sorry that the neglect of
some one has caused you to be disappointed to-day.” Me
disappointed! It almost took my breath away. Without waiting for me
to frame a reply (I think he would have had to wait some time), His
Majesty continued cheerily: “No doubt the defect will be remedied
directly, and your engine will be enabled to run to-morrow.” Then,
looking the engine over quite leisurely, he observed: “It certainly
presents a fine appearance. I expect to visit the exposition again
after a few days, when I shall have more leisure, and will then ask
you to explain its operation to me.” He then turned and rejoined the
Queen, and the procession moved on, leaving me with food for
reflection for many a day. I had met a gentleman, a man who under
the most sudden and extreme test had acted with a courtesy which
showed that in his heart he had only kind feelings towards every
one. An outside imitation must have been thrown off its guard by
such a provocation as that. In reflecting on the incident, I saw clearly
that in stopping and speaking to me the King had only one thought,
and that was to say what he could to relieve my feelings of
disappointment and mortification. He had evidently been informed
that I could not get any steam, and took pains and went out of his
way to do this; showing a kindly and sympathetic feeling that must
express itself in act and conduct even towards a stranger. I left the
next day for England with some new ideas about the “effete
monarchies,” and with regret that I should see His Majesty no more.
 One or two observations on the Portuguese peasantry may be
interesting. They did not impress me so favorably as did their King.
On my first arrival I wished to have the engine turned over, that I
might see if the valve motions were all right. The engineer ordered
some men standing around to do this. Six of them laid hold of the
flywheel, three on each side, and tugged away apparently in earnest.
It did not move. I looked at the engineer in surprise. He said, “I will
show you what is the matter,” ordered them all away, and himself
pulled the wheel around with one hand. Then he explained: “I only
wanted you to see for yourself what they are good for. We have had
to bring every laborer from England. These men are on the pay-roll,
and spend their time in lounging about, but no Portuguese man will
work. Women do all the work in this country.”
The exposition buildings were located on a level spot on a hilltop
overlooking the river Douro, at an elevation, I judged, of about 200
feet. They wished to surround them with a greensward. Between the
heat and the light soil, the grass could be made to grow only by
continual watering, and this is the way they did it. About 400 women
and children brought up water from the river in vessels on their
heads. All day long this procession was moving up and down the hill,
pouring the water on the ground, performing the work of a steam-
pump and a 2-inch pipe.
I went to Portugal without a passport. Our financial partner told me
it would be quite unnecessary. He himself had just returned from
Oporto, where he went without a passport, and found that half a
crown given the custom-house inspector on his arrival and departure
was all he needed. I understood the intimation that if I got a
passport, the fee of, I believe, a guinea would not be allowed me.
So, although I went from London and could very conveniently have
obtained a passport at the United States legation, I omitted to do it.
On landing at Oporto the two-and-sixpenny piece opened the
kingdom of Portugal to me quite readily. Getting out, the process was
different. I found that the steamer on which I had come from London
would not return for a week or more after the opening of the
exposition, and I was impatient to get back. A line between Liverpool
and Buenos Ayres made Lisbon a port of call, and a steamer was
expected en route to Liverpool in the course of three or four days
after the opening; so I determined to come by that. The morning after
the opening I was awakened early by a telegram informing me that
the steamer had arrived at Lisbon during the preceding night, having
made an unexpectedly quick run across the South Atlantic, and
would sail for Liverpool that evening. The railroad ran only two trains
a day, and my only way to get to Lisbon in time was to take the nine-
o’clock train from Oporto. The station was on a hill on the opposite
side of the Douro. There was only one bridge across the river, and
that was half a mile up the stream from the hotel and from the
station. Oporto boasted no public conveyance. So I hired a couple of
boys to take my trunk down to the river, row me and it across, and
carry it up the hill to the station. I got off with two minutes to spare.
On applying at the steamship office in Lisbon for a passage ticket,
I was informed by the very gentlemanly English clerk that they were
forbidden to sell a ticket to any one without a passport. “However,”
he added, “this will cause you no inconvenience. The United States
legation is on the second block below here. I will direct you to it, and
you can obtain a passport without any trouble.” By the way, how did
he recognize me as an American, and how was it that I was always
recognized as an American? I never could explain that puzzle.
On knocking at the door of the legation, it was opened by a
colored man, who informed me that this was a fête day, and that the
minister was attending a reception at the palace (this was the first
time I ever heard of a royal reception in the forenoon), but if I would
call again at three o’clock the passport would be ready for me. So,
leaving with him my address, I left, to amuse myself as best I could
till three o’clock.
On presenting myself at that hour I was informed by the same
darkey that the minister would not give me a passport; that he had
bidden him tell me he knew nothing about me; I might be an
American or I might not: at any rate, he was not going to certify that I
was. I had got into the country without a passport, and I would have
to get out without one for all him. I inquired if the minister were at
home. “Yes, sir,” replied the darkey, “he is at home, but he will not
see you; he told me to tell you so,” and with that he bowed me out
and shut the door.
 I went back to the steamship office and reported my failure to my
friend the clerk. He drew a long whistle. “Not see you! What’s he
here for? He must be drunk; that’s it, he’s drunk.” After a minute’s
reflection he added: “We must see the Secretary of State; I am well
acquainted with him, and he will get you out of this mess directly. If
you will kindly wait till I have finished my correspondence, which will
occupy me for about half an hour, I will take you to his office. You
can amuse yourself with this copy of the Times,” handing it to me.
When we reached the office of the Secretary of State we found the
door locked. “Oh,” said he, “I had forgotten, this is a saint’s day, and
the public offices are closed. We must go to his house.” We found
the Secretary at home. I was introduced, and the Englishman told
my case, of course in Portuguese. As he proceeded I saw the official
brow darken. I woke up to the enormity of my offense. Little kingdom,
big dignity. I had defied their laws and corrupted their official. The
case looked serious. The Secretary, in fact, found it so serious that
he did not feel like taking the sole responsibility of its decision, but
sent out for two others of His Majesty’s advisers to consult with him.
The assembling of this court caused a delay of half an hour, during
which I had time to conjure up all sorts of visions, including an
indefinite immurement in a castle and a diplomatic correspondence,
while the deuce would be to pay with my business at home.
Finally the officials sent for arrived. The instant they entered the
room I was recognized by one of them. He had accompanied the
King to the opening of the exposition the day before, which the
pressure of public business or some game or other had prevented
the Secretary of State from doing. In fact, he had headed the
procession behind their Majesties and so had seen the graciousness
of the King’s favor to me.
He spoke a few words to the Secretary of State, when, presto,
everything was changed. The court did not convene, but instead
cordial handshaking with the man on whom the beams of royal favor
had shone.
I left my smiling friends with a passport or something just as good,
added my twelve pounds sterling to the account of the ship, and had
time before it sailed to eat a sumptuous dinner at the hotel. I was in
the land of olives, and ate freely of the unaccustomed delicacy, in
consequence of which I lost my dinner before the ship was well out
of the Tagus and have never cared much for olives since.
I was full of wrath against the United States minister, and
determined to send a protest to the State Department as soon as I
reached Manchester. But there I found something else to attend to
and dropped the matter. I read, however, with satisfaction, a few
months after, that the item of the salary of the minister to Portugal
had been cut out of the appropriation bill by the House of
Representatives.
 CHAPTER XI

Trouble with the Evan Leigh Engine. Gear Patterns from the Whitworth Works.
First Order for a Governor. Introduction of the Governor into Cotton Mills.
Invention of my Condenser. Failure of Ormerod, Grierson & Co.

he Evan Leigh engine was not quite ready to be

started when I left England. On my return I found an
unexpected trouble and quite an excitement. The
engine had been started during my absence, and ran
all right, but it was found almost impossible to supply
the boilers with water. Two injectors were required,
and two men feeding the furnaces, and everybody was agreed that
the fault lay with the engine. The boilers were a pair of Harrison
boilers, from which great results had been expected. These were
formed of cast-iron globes, 8 inches internal diameter, with 3-inch
necks, held together by bolts running through a string of these
globes. They were an American invention, and naturally Mr. Luders
(who was introducing them in England) and I fraternized. I felt greatly
disappointed. I did not then see Mr. Leigh, but had the pleasure of an
interview with his son. This young gentleman denounced me in good
Saxon terms as a fraud and an impostor, and assured me that he
would see to it that I never sold another engine in England. He knew
that the boilers were all right. His friend Mr. Hetherington, an
extensive manufacturer of spinning and weaving machinery, and
who had taken the agency to sell these boilers, had had one working
for a long time in company with a Lancashire boiler, and there was
no difference in their performance. He finished by informing me that
the engine would be put out as quickly as they could get another.
I put an indicator on the engine, and show here the diagrams it
took. I could not see that much fault was to be found with those
diagrams. Old Mr. Leigh, after looking at them, said nothing, but he
did something. He went to an old boiler-yard and bought a second-
hand Lancashire boiler, had it carted into his yard and set under an
improvised shed alongside his boiler-house, and in two or three days
it was supplying the steam for my engine, and all difficulties had
vanished. The consumption of steam and coal fell to just what it had
been calculated that it should be, and everybody felt happy, except
my friend Mr. Luders, who, notwithstanding his grievous
disappointment, had never gone back on me, and young Mr. Leigh,
who owed me an apology which he was not manly enough to render.
Repeated efforts were tried to make the Harrison boilers answer, but
the result was always the same, and they were abandoned.

Diagrams from Engine of Evan Leigh, Son & Co. Sixteen Pounds to the Inch.

And, after all, the fault was largely mine. I did not think of it till long
afterwards, and it did not occur to anybody else, not even to those
most deeply interested in the boiler. My surface condenser was the
cause of all the trouble, and that was why I have to this day deeply
regretted having put it in. The oil used in the cylinder was all sent