St Dionysius the Areopagite, Postscript II

St Peter of Damaskos, after citing St Gregory the Theologian's words from his First Theological Oration (oration 27) that "what is said should be commensurate to the capacity of those to whom it is addressed," writes:

For this reason the same saint may say one thing about a certain matter today, and another tomorrow; and yet there is no contradiction, provided the hearer has knowledge and experience of the matter under discussion. Again, one saint may say one thing and another say something different about the same passage of the Holy Scriptures, since divine grace often gives varying interpretations suited to the particular person or moment in question. The only thing required is that everything said or done should be said or done in accordance with God's intention, and that it should be attested by the words of Scripture. For should anyone preach anything contrary to God's intention or contrary to the nature of things, then even if he is an agel St Paul's words, 'Let him be accursed' (Gal. 1:8), will apply to him. This is what St Dionysios the Areopagite, St Antony and St Maximos the Confessor afirm. For this reason St John Chrysostom says: 'It was not the Greeks but the Holy Scripture that transmitted these things to us. There is no contradiction when Scripture says about a certain person both that he did not see Babylon as a captive and, elsewhere, that they took him to Babylon with the rest. For one who reads attentively will find it said about the same man in another part of Scripture that they blinded him and in this condition took him off as a captive (cf. 2 Kgs. 25:7; Jer. 52:11). Thus he went to Babylon, as the one writer says, but did not see it, as the other says.' [Homilies on the Statues XIX, 3 (P. G. xlix, 195)]

Again, some say in their lack of experience that the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by St Paul, or that St Dionysius the Areopagite did not write one of the treatises ascribed to him. But if a man will pay attention to these same works, he will discover the truth. If the matter pertains to nature, the saints gain their knowledge of it from spiritual insight, that is, from the spiritual knowledge of nature and from the contemplation of created beings that is attatined through the intellect's purity; and so they expound God's purpose in these things with complete accuracy, searching the Scriptures, as St John Chrysostom says, like gold-miners who seek out the finest veins. In this way they ensure that 'not the smallest letter or most insignificant accent is lost,' as the Lord put it (Matt. 5:18).

St Peter of Damaskos, Book I: A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Chapter XXIII (Holy Scripture) in volume three of The Philokalia, pp. 265-266.

A Lenten Marching Song

The final stanza of Lewis Carroll's The Mad Gardener's Song:

He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
"A fact so dread," he faintly said,
"Extinguishes all hope!"

I know exactly the feeling. As long as we're on Carroll, I can't help but reproduce a poem of his that should become something of a Lenten marching song, given the meager sort of fair we're expected to live on until Pascha:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau-ootiufl Soo-oop!
Soo-oop of the e-e-eving,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau-ootiful Soo-op!
Beau-ootiful Soo-op!
So-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beaut-FUL SOUP!

One gets the impression that Mr Carroll could have talked, nor not talked, about soup all day.

For those wanting more Lewis Carroll, see my post Humpty Dumpty and the Cappadocians (seriously).

St Theophan's Whispered Advice About Books

St Theophan the Recluse, after advising a spiritual daughter about the when, why, and how of reading spiritual literature, adds this:

The question still remains unresolved as to whether one may read anything besides spiritual things. I would tell you with reservation, in a low voice: You may if you like, but just a little and not indiscriminately. Take this as a sign: When you are in a good mood spiritually and begin reading a book containing human wisdom, if the good mood begins to desert you, get rid of the book. This is a general rule for you.

Even books containing human wisdom may nourish the spirit. These are the books that indicate to us the vestiges of wisdom, benevolence, truth and solicitous Divine industry in nature and history. Read books such as these. God reveals Himself in nature and history in the same way as in His Word. Nature and history are Divine books for those who know how to read them.

You will say, "It is easy to tell me to read such books, but where do you get them?" This I cannot tell you. There are presently more books on scientific subjects coming out. Most of them, however, have a very bad direction; namely, they attempt to explain the origin of the world without God, and all moral-religious and other manifestations of the spiritual in our lives without the spirit and soul. Do not get those books. There are books on scientific subjects without such false wisdom. These you may read. It is good to understand the structure of plants and animals, especially man, and the laws of life as they are manifested in them. Great is the Divine wisdom in all of this! Unknowable! Ask the fellow who enjoys discussing religious subjects which books are of this sort.

What about stories and novels? There are good ones among these. To find out whether they are good, however, you must read them, and after you are finished, you will have acquired such tales and images that – God have mercy! You will soil your clean little mind. Afterward, go get cleaned up. Why would you want to bring such labor upon yourself? Therefore, I think it best not to read them. When a benevolently-minded person who has read some story recommends it, you may read it.

There are good descriptions of geography. You may also read these. However, do a little of everything, and then only for variety. Keep up your spiritual work, and do not turn your attention away from it.

May the Lord bless you.

Excerpted from "On the Reading of Spiritual and Secular Books" (letter number 70) in The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, pp. 285-287.

Nostalgia For the Future

Bishop Atanasije (Jevtic), in his essay "Christ – The Land of the Living," writes:

It is not that we, the young Orthodox faithful and theologians, the teachers of the Gospel and Orthodox theology, are so wise in our times. We simply remind others of what is the genuine, authentic Gospel of our Faith. We do not retreat into some conservatism. This is impossible to do, even if we wanted to. It would be a sham, a counterfeit and a failure, if we were to want to go backward. We say that our nostalgia for the Land of the Living is a future nostalgia, an eschatological nostalgia directed forward. It is not like the ancient Hellenic or Indian nostalgia, or any other nostalgia, which is entirely directed backward. Nostalgia means sorrow, pain for one's place of birth, for one's fatherland, for one's origin. But "our citizenship is in heaven," and our life is in heaven, as says the Holy Apostle Paul (Col. 3:1-4; Phil. 3:20). This is why we are nostalgic for the future, toward eschatology, toward the fullness that actually attracts us to itself – naturally to the measure that we are open to it, participate in it and partake of it.

From Christ – The Alpha and Omega, recently published by the Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

St Dionysius the Areopagite, Postscript

Lest one imagine that the works of St Dionysius the Areopagite have been fully rehabilitated by contemporary Orthodox scholars, have a look at this.

The Areopagite in 20th Century Orthodoxy, V

Continued from part 4.

Modern Orthodox theological scholarship has not developed in a confessional vacuum; it has borrowed the language, methods, and problems of western scholarship from its very inception. The field of Patristics as we know it today is itself a discipline borrowed from the modern Christian West and even the much celebrated "Patristic Revivial" has its origins more in Catholic France than in the Orthodox East, whatever its later adoption first by Russian emigre theologians and then by the rest of the Orthodox world. Any study of the Fathers today requires both close attention to the primary sources and a critical appraisal of the accompanying secondary literature in order to understand the lens through which particular Fathers are viewed and the key in which their theology is presented. It should come as no surprise and cause no particular scandal if a given Father has been "problematized." Even if Fr John Meyendorff went rather too far outside the boundaries of a traditional Orthodox reading of St Dionysius, his legacy may, in fact, be found in the very correction of his works by such scholars as Fathers John Romanides, Alexander Golitzin, and Andrew Louth (57), who have labored to reassert the Orthodoxy of the Dionysian corpus. Such is the way scholarship naturally advances.

Be that as it may, I would agree that it is unfair to blame Dionysius for all the ills of the later development of Orthodox theology and liturgical piety for at least three reasons (58). First, because, as Frs Romanides and Golitzin both argue, this represents a misunderstanding of St Dionysius' works, dramatically underestimating its Christological dimensions. Second, St Dionysius is blamed for the manner in which later generations chose to read his works, while ignoring his traditional reception within the Orthodox Church. Finally, it assumes that his influence is due to the pseudonym, as if those Fathers who accepted his authority did so only because they believed that the author was St Paul's convert mentioned in the Book of Acts. Once his sub-apostolic identity was disproved, he could be exposed as a cheat.

Fr John Meyendorff's analysis of St Dionysius remains problematic. His division between Dionysius' theology properly so-called and his system of hierarchies fractures the integrity of Dionysius' theological vision. Dionysius' transcendent theology and his hierarchy should not be separated: his very concern, I would argue, is to maintain God's transcendence while allowing His revelation to be mediated through hierarchy; the two are inseparable in Dionysius' vision. Fr Meyendorff's division between the static aspect (theology) and the dynamic (theugia) aspect of hierarchy likewise shatters Dionysius' soteriology. St Dionysius himself makes no such distinction: he writes that "The divine works (theurgia) are the consummation of the divine words (theologias) (59). Nor, as Fr Meyendorff contends, is Dionysius' structure devoid of the communal. The hierarchies, by their very nature, are communal: it is the members of the hierarchy who perfect and are perfected; to respond to God's love is to depend upon others. Finally, Fr Meyendorff overlooks the explicitly scriptural and exegetical nature of Dionysius' writings and dismisses both the Christological axis of the hierarchies and the incarnational basis of sacramental life.

Fr John Romanides, for all his polemical bombast, correctly points out the difficulties in maintaining Fr Meyendorff's theory of Christological correctives. St Gregory Palamas himself was not aware of applying correctives to the Dionysian corpus and, more often than not, interpreted Dionysius more faithfully than did Barlaam. Fr Meyendorff's motivation in his reading of St Dionysius does indeed stem from his desire to rid Greek Patristic theology of the influence of Platonism while asserting the centrality of incarnational mysticism. In fact, if Romanides is right, Palamas was correcting Barlaam's neo-Platonic reading of Dionysius rather than correcting Dionysius himself. It follows that Fr Meyendorff should have singled out Barlaams reading of Dionysius rather than Dionysius himself for evidence of Platonism.

Hieromonk Alexander (Golitizin) has done much to rehabilitated St Dionysius in the world of Orthodox scholarship. His reconstruction of the scholarly controversies concerning St Dionysius and their importation to the Orthodox East is certainly convincing. One wonders, however, if his reading of Dionysius – one which he claims is that of the unbroken tradition of Eastern monasticism – is in fact the only one. Fr Alexander would certainly admit that no discreet "monastic theology" exists in the Orthodox Church. It is therefore troubling that he would insist that only a "monastic reading" of Dionysius is accurate: certainly a "correct" reading of Dionysius would be that of the Church as a whole, not that of exclusively monastic circles. Such a reading takes little account of St Dionysius very peculiarity.

My own suggestion would be to adopt a reading of St Dionysius which takes into consideration his very real peculiarity, complexity, and difficulty, viewing him neither as a neo-Platonism impersonating a Christian, as would Fr Meyendorff, nor as a Christian impersonating a neo-Platonist, as would Vladimir Lossky, but rather as a Christian exegete writing works of liturgical mystagogy. The strangeness of his writings should not be exaggerated by pointing out its similarity with neo-Platonism, minimized by forcing it into a given scholar's projection or reconstruction of the patristic consensus, or confined to an esoteric realm of monastic wisdom. In any case, the lens through which St Dionysius is read needs to be periodically examined and, if necessary, cleansed or even changed.

Finis.

(56) Golitizin, "Dionysius," 187.
(57) The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1981), 159-178; Denys the Areopagite (London and New York: Continuum, 1989).
(58) I am indebted to Fr John Behr's lectures of St Dionysius for this paragraph.
(59) Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3.3.5.

The Areopagite in 20th Century Orthodoxy, IV

Continued from part 3.

Several of Fr John Romanides' criticisms of Fr John Meyendorff were taken up and developed, albeit in dramatically less polemical fashion, by Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) in many of his works, beginning with his doctoral dissertation. (42) I will consider only two from Fr Alexander's many works of St Dionysius: first, echoing the passage cited above by Romanides, how Dionysius fits into the fabric of the Orthodox spiritual life; and, second, what would have led Fr John Meyendorff who, besides being one of the leading representatives of Orthodox scholarship in the twentieth century – and was also a teacher and mentor of Fr Alexander – to such a negative appreciation of the Dionysian writings.

Fr Alexander, in the introduction to the published version of his thesis, writes that, when beginning his study of the Dionysian corpus in Oxford (following his studies at St Vladimir's Seminary under Fr Meyendorff), he "came to it quite convinced that its critics were correct" and "looked forward to joining the process of unmasking the fraud in order to expose the dangers that it still posed to, in particular, the Orthodox Church, and also the harm that it had wrought over the centuries." (43) Two thoughts, however, nagged at him. First, when read from the reigning academic perspective, the Dionysian corpus simply did not make sense, did not have any internal coherence. Second, following on this, how could someone the stature of St Maximus the Confessor have accepted these works as authoritative? Fr Alexander found the answer to his difficulty not through further academic work or through the guidance of an adviser, but rather through spending two years in Greece and in particular a year at the Simonas Petras monastery on Mt Athos.

Two features of Fr Alexander's experience figured in the resolution of his crisis and the discovery of what he believes to be at the core of the Dionysian corpus and the reason for its swift reception: first, the "as it were 'architecture' of the monastic life of personal and corporate prayer" and, second, "the phenomenon the ascetic holy man." (44) The first feature of his experience, the "architecture" of the monastic life, refers both to the "round of monastic prayer in the public worship of the katholikon and the private liturgy of the cell" and to the physical architecture of the monastery, in which everything is focused on the altar, where "the icon of the heavenly liturgy is daily enacted, and the same icon serves simultaneously as the image of the hallowed human being." (45) That is, the second aspect, the ascetic holy man or Elder, is the intended goal of the monastic life and "has been at the center of Eastern Christian piety and popular devotion since at least the fourth century." (46) Taken together, Fr Alexander arrived at what he believes to be "the proper reading of the Corpus Dionysiacum and certainly the way in which it was read and received by the tradition." (47) It is this reading, which he argues is grounded in the practice of Eastern monastic life, that informs his subsequent studies of Dionysius.

Fr Alexander responds to the question of "Christological correctives" most directly in his article "Dionysius the Areopagite in the Works of Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a 'Christological Corrective' and Related Matters." Posing the questions "First, was Gregory a faithful and accurate interpreter of Dionysius; and, second, what does this answer to that question say about either Dionysius, or Gregory, or both?" (48), Fr Golitzin finds three general responses to these questions: the first sees St Gregory Palamas as a faithful disciple of Dionysius, and therefore guilty of neo-Platonism; the second sees St Gregory clumsily distorting Dionysius; and the third sees Dionysius as the "anomaly, the lonely meteorite in the night of the patristic thought, yet whose authority, based on the apostolic pseudonym and specifically invoked by Barlaam, compelled Gregory to assault and alter the Areopagite's system under the guise of interpreting it." (49) It is this last current that is of interest, inasmuch as Fr Alexander's "own beloved teacher and patron, Fr John Meyendorff of blessed memory, was the origin of this third current." (50)

Fr Alexander argues that this "corrective" is an academic invention. The origins of this theological phantom lie in the "practically universal misapprehension of the meaning and function of the Dionysian hierarchies as the unfortunate result of dependence of late pagan Neoplatonism" (51) on the part of the scholarly mainstream, going as far back as Martin Luther and the nineteenth century scholars Joseph Stiglmayr and Hugo Koch. St Gregory Palamas, however, was not part of this mainstream and was instead "one (and not the only) fourteenth-century instance of a continuous, primarily monastic reading of the Areopagite which correctly understood the latter as himself drawing on prior currents is the ascetico-mystical, liturgical literature of the Christian East." (52) It is only within the Eastern Church, more specifically withing Eastern monasticism, that Dionysius should be read: "Dionysius, in short, is properly understood as bracketed by the tradition out of which he came and within which he continued to be read. The Eastern monks have always known this." (53)

In Fr Alexander's view, the genesis of the Dionysian "problem" arose in the West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Dionysian corpus was rediscovered. What occurred was the "recasting or re-shaping of Dionysius to conform to the already established lines of Latin theology, spiritually and ecclesiologically." (54) In this process of recasting "the unitary quality of Dionysian thought is broken up, fractured in fact, with different pieces of it then incorporated into whatever subject the particular medieval thinker is considering – e.g., the speculative theology of the Summa, the mysticism of Eckhart, the architectural plans of Abbot Sugar of Denys, or the ecclesiology of the papal apologists and canonists" (55). Only against this larger and strictly Western debate does the question of Christological corrective arise: it is an artificial problem, one projected onto both Dionysius and Palamas. The fundamental problem, writes Golitizin, is not so much the scholars who view Dionysius in this way, but the lens through which they read him. Yet the "problematization" of Dionysius should be a non-issue: "Given that patristic scholarship in its modern form is a Western invention, and that it is the West which set its agenda, it is all too easy for Orthodox scholars taking part in the conversation – and take part in it I believe they must – to be fooled by the non-issues. This is clearly what happened both to my own dear Fr John Meyendorff and, to a less degree, even to Fr Georges Florovsky, as well as to many of our contemporaries." (56)

To be continued...

(42) Et introibo ad altare dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita, with Special Reference to its Predecessors in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Thessalonica, 1994); "'On the Other Hand': A Response to Father Paul Wesche's Recent Article on Dionysius...." St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Quarterly 34 (1990): 305-323; "'A Contemplative and a Liturgist': Father Georges Florovsky on the Corpus Dionysiacum," St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Quarterly, 43.2 (1999); "Dionysius the Areopagite in the Works of Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a 'Christological Corrective' and Related Matters," St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Quarterly, 46.2 (2002): 163-190; "'Suddenly,' Christ: The Place of Negative Theology in the Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagites," ; "The Body of Christ: Saint Symeon the New Theologian on Spiritual Life and the Hierarchical Church," .
(43) Golitzin, Et introibo, 8.
(44) Ibid., 9.
(45) Ibid., 9.
(46) Ibid., 9.
(47) Ibid., 8.
(48) Golitizin, "Dionysius," 166.
(49) Ibid., 166.
(50) Ibid., 166.
(51) Ibid., 167.
(52) Ibid., 167.
(53) Ibid., 167-168
(54) Ibid., 185.
(55) Ibid., 185.
(56) Ibid., 187.