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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
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932341
ISBN 978–0–19–288282–0
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–288292–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.001.0001
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referenced in this work.
For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
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
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
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Höhe, daß sein Gesicht nicht gerade als ein besonders geistreiches
gelten konnte, »so mechte mer wohl singen, wie der Herr von Fielitz
im Berliner Opernhaus: Reich mir die Hand mein Leben, komm auf
mein Schloß — — —.«
Bumms — fällt ihm das Monokel wieder auf das Riechorgan,
was seinen halblauten pathetischen Gesang unterbricht.
»Darf ich mer machen de Hoffnung, daß Se sein nich grausam
un gestatten mer zu leisten Ihnen Ritterdienste; darf ich Se begleiten
später nach Hause?«
»Das dauert noch lange — —«
»Un wenn’s noch so lange dauerte — bin ich nich mei eigner
Herr und bin gekommen von meine Giter, blos zum Vergnügen nach
der Leipziger Messe?«
»I gar!« flüstert Rosa zerstreut, denn ein lustiger, bildhübscher,
kecker Musensohn wirft ihr eben eine Kußhand zu.
»Gott soll mer leben lassen« ereifert sich der, sich immer mehr
in sein phantastisches Lügengewebe verstrickende
handlungsbeflissne Benjamin, »mei Name is —«
»Esau — Esau« fällt der eifersüchtige Musensohn ein, der seine
Aufschneidereien mit angehört hat, »Esau — ist sein Name — und in
Meseritz ist er derhame — das E ist nur deshalb zu seinem sonst
richtigen Namen gesellt, weil sich die »Cavaliere« von Meseritz und
Umgegend auf etwas gespanntem Fuß mit der »Sau« befinden —
holdseligste Rosa!«
Rosa und die Umsitzenden lachen laut und der liebegirrende
Benjamin fährt wüthend auf, aber sein Nachbar und Concurrent
seines Chefs zieht ihn gewaltsam an den Rockschößen wieder auf
die Bank herab.
»Machen Se kenen Stuß, Levy« sagt er, »der Herr Student is e
kleiner Spaßvogel — allons — angestoßen!«
»In diesen heiligen Hallen kennt man die Rache nicht!« pflichtet
der ebenfalls aufgethaute Gymnasiallehrer bei und hält sein Glas
hin; zögernd begraben die beiden Nebenbuhler das Kriegsbeil und
die Gläser klingen hell aneinander.
»Also Levy heißt er« brummt der Student in sich hinein, »e Vieh
ist also doch dabei!«
»Was ham Se gesagt!?« fragt hitzig der nur halb versöhnte
Benjamin.
Schrumm — schrumm — schrumm rauschen die Harfentöne
durch den Keller und die drallen Mädchen erheben sich zum
Chorgesang.
Aller Streit ist vergessen, frisch tönen die Mädchenstimmen
durcheinander im Sopran und Alt und beim Refrain des Liedes aus
den »Mottenburgern« stimmt Alles mit ein:
»Ja ich bin der Oberbürgermeister — bin der Tyrann, ja der
Tyrann von Mottenburg!« — —
Der Schuster aus der Provinz singt, daß die Wände wackeln
könnten, der Gymnasiallehrer will durchaus mit dem Berliner
Grossisten Brüderschaft trinken, was aber der Mann der
Gottgelahrtheit noch glücklich verhindert. Der Bruder Studio
schwingt sich unter ungeheurem Jubel auf das Hauptfaß und dirigirt,
auf demselben reitend das Lied bis zum Ende desselben.
Der Theologe macht einen kühnen Versuch, den Arm um die
Hüfte der jetzt zum Cassiren die Runde machenden Hulda zu legen,
begegnet aber auf diesem Wege der Hand des stark
»angerissenen« Bruders, wodurch beider Hände erschrocken
zurückfahren; der »Giter« besitzende Monokelbändiger lehnt sich
stolz befriedigt und siegesgewiß zurück, denn »Rosa« hat ihm —
ach der Aermste wußte nicht, daß er bereits der Fünfte war, der
dasselbe Versprechen heute Abend erhielt — das Recht ihrer
Begleitung nach Hause zugestanden und der Student verschwindet
auf wenige Augenblicke, um draußen den Zustand seiner Casse zu
prüfen, denn »hier wird nicht gepumpt« steht in Form eines
buntkolorirten Bildes bereits im oberen Keller zu lesen.
Das Notenblatt aber, welches Hulda mit demselben Lächeln, Alt
oder Jung — Christ oder Jude — entgegenhält, bedeckt sich mit
Sechsern und Groschen, ja Zweigroschenstücken und wie sie
dasselbe in die hinter dem Bruder an der Wand hängende Geldkatze
leert, gibt es dem Nagel an der Wand einen ordentlichen Ruck.
So geht es fort, Lieder und Musikstücke wechseln ab, eine
Flasche Rebensaft folgt der andern, Niemand denkt ans Heimgehen,
bis auf einmal auf einer der oberen Stufen das »Auge des
Gesetzes« in Gestalt eines untersetzten Polizeidieners erscheint,
der halb schmunzelnd, halb dienstlich streng das noch vollzählige
Auditorium einen Moment betrachtet, als thäte es ihm Leid dies
fidele Völkchen zu stören. Indeß — der Dienst geht über Alles, er
steigt deshalb noch eine oder zwei Stufen weiter herab, hebt den
stockbewaffneten Arm und als hierauf etwas Ruhe eintritt, läßt er
seinen Vers los.
»Heern Se — meine Herrn — s’ is um Zwee, un — s’ thut mer
leid, aber s’ is Feierabend!«
Ein Abend in Auerbachs Keller.
Die Hiersemusen.