Deep Exegesis Reviewed

I’ve been kind of interested in Peter Leithart for a couple of years now. Although the whole milieu and ethos of the ultra-confessional Reformed is of course not my thing, Leithart’s ideas and especially his interests are rather consistently appealing to me. I greatly enjoyed his book on St Constantine last year, and also read bits and pieces of Against Christianity. [1] But what I really wanted to read was Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, recommended to me by the great Esteban Vazquez, who used to blog at Voice of Stefan. In the course of working on the Lewis paper  mentioned here, I finally borrowed a copy from the OCU library, and finished reading it on Saturday.

Essentially what Leithart is up to is arguing for something very like the mediaeval quadriga. While there are a few references to the Fathers, however, he doesn’t really mention this until the epilogue, where he writes, ‘First, the hermeneutical method offered here is very similar to the fourfold method developed by medieval Bible teachers.’ [2] In other words, Leithart is not explicitly advocating a return to Patristic or mediaeval exegesis. This has the virtue of perhaps appealing to those who would be immediately inimical to such a project and hopefully persuading them. But unfortunately, it also gives the book the feel of an effort to reinvent the wheel at times.

What we are told up front—in the ‘Preface’—is that Leithart has two aims: ‘to show that a hermeneutics of the letter [which he advocates] ought not to be a rigidly literalist hermeneutics’, and ‘to learn to read from Jesus and Paul’. [3] As humdrum as these may sound though, they are also ways of restating the strengths of Patristic exegesis. With regard to the first point, John J. O’Keefe and R.R. Reno (apologies to those who do not care for the latter, but it’s such a good book!) demonstrate unambiguously, ‘For the church fathers, a faith that Jesus Christ fulfills the scriptures [the warrant for typological reading] did not supersede or make unnecessary the difficult task of struggling with the literal details of the Bible.’ [4] With regard to the second point, learning to ‘read from Jesus and Paul’ is of course precisely what the Fathers did. As an illustration of the kind of problematic assumptions he is opposing, Leithart quotes Richard Longenecker’s ‘widely quoted passage’ claiming that modern readers must not attempt to ‘reproduce the exegesis of the New Testament’. [5] O’Keefe and Reno, however, read Patristic exegesis merely as an extension, a ‘reproduction’ to use Longenecker’s term, of NT exegesis. [6] Learning to ‘read from Jesus and Paul’ can and should mean learning to read from the Fathers. Otherwise, we’re pursuing the hermeneutical equivalent of the Protestant attempts to rebuilt the NT Church from scratch.

Moving along then, Leithart’s preface points out two further things about the book: he believes, and hopes to demonstrate, that NT exegesis is not merely ‘some bizarre form of sacred hermeneutics’, but a legitimate way of approaching the reading of any text, sacred or ‘secular’. Finally, he notes that he will refer to John 9 (the healing of the man born blind) throughout as a supreme example of what he’s talking about, since it ‘superbly embodies many of the points I want to make about texts and reading’. [7]

Unfortunately, Chapter 1 gets off to a slow start. It is Leithart’s attempt to explain historically what has gone wrong with modern exegesis, whether liberal and academic or evangelical and popular. What has gone wrong is that the text has become a ‘husk’ which we can and should separate from the ‘kernel’ of its meaning. Leithart traces this notion from Lodewijk Meyer’s 17^th-c. application of Cartesianism to the Scriptures—since for Meyer biblical truth ‘is found in the rationally justifiable message and not in the rustic letter’ [8]—all the way up to Richard Longenecker, for whom the ‘kernel of doctrine is detached from the husk of Paul’s puzzling and odd, if entertaining, rhetoric and dialectic’. [9] It is certainly one way to explain and understand the modern impasse, but I found the chapter a bit tedious. More importantly, one wonders whether some of the blame at least ought not to be placed on the Reformers’ ‘abandonment of medieval modes of reading’—Leithart leaves the impression that this had no effect on Protestant hermeneutics until Descartes and Meyer came along. [10] Certainly, I wonder whether Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant—all of whom come up for blame—aren’t something more like the symptom than the disease. As Leithart notes in his comments on Meyer, the latter was attempting to ‘address the lamentable diversity of Protestant interpretation’. This diversity, according to Meyer (and Leithart?), arose from the false or at least exaggerated doctrines of Scipture’s perspicuity or clarity of meaning, and of its self-interpreting ability. [11] Of course, although Leithart does not dwell on the point, both of these ideas were attempts to develop a hermeneutics that could dispense with Tradition. Perhaps I have missed something, but is not clear to me whether our author shares Meyer’s skepticism concerning the Reformers’ doctrines, even if not his Cartesian alternative to them.

Chapter 2, ‘Texts Are Events: Typology’, is more exciting. Leithart takes stock of other attempts to justify the NT exegesis of the OT (whether they advocate ‘reproducing’ it or not), and concludes that they all end with a ‘sacred hermeneutics, applicable to the single double-authored, inspired text of the Bible but inapplicable to every other text’. But Leithart, naturally enough I think, finds this unsatisfactory. He thinks it is ‘possible to justify apostolic reading—which I will call typological—with an argument that applies to texts as such, or at least to all texts of major importance’. [12] This argument is based on those, first, of Arthur C. Danto that the significance and description of past events necessarily grows richer as their consequences develop and they enter into complex relationships with other events, and second, of David Weberman (named in the footnotes) that particular, supposedly finished ‘Events themselves change over time, taking on new properties because of later events.’ [13] To illustrate and explain this potentially counter-intuitive claim, Leithart borrows Weberman’s example of a shooting that takes place at 10 am, the victim of which doesn’t die until 1 pm. The ‘historical’ description of the event at 10, if isolated from later developments, is going to be terribly unsatisfying—it is only a shooting. But when the victim dies, the shooting actually becomes a murder.

Leithart initially compares this with the effect of Christ’s death and resurrection on the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac: ‘It becomes a promise of Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, a type and foreshadowing of the great deliverance on Golgotha, the final sacrifice.’ [14] But of course, he is arguing that all texts are events, not just biblical ones. Thus, about five pages use Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men to show that Danto’s and Weberman’s insights apply to novels every bit as much as to the Bible. [15] He draws on David Steinmetz’s comparison of NT exegesis to the generic mystery-story device of the detective explaining earlier, puzzling events in the story by means of a ‘second narrative’ that unlocks their meaning. [16] But Leithart also turns twice to John 9 to demonstrate the application of his arguments to Scripture as the text par excellence.

Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Words Are Players: Semantics’—emphasising the claim that words ‘do the unexpected, or do the expected in unexpected ways’, [17] contra those who take their semantic cues primarily from the lexicographer’s project of narrowing and isolating synchronic meanings [18] rather than the poet’s of reveling in multivalence and diachronic resonance. Leithart writes:

Words are round characters. Many words have a variety of meanings, and even those that have only a single lexical meaning have a variety of associations and connotations. These dimensions might not be connected to one another in any obvious way....When we read a text, especially one with a high level of craftsmanship, we should be alert to the possibility that a covert sense is lurking just under the surface of the overt. [19]

As evidence, Leithart draws on Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘Anahorish’, also referring to King Lear a number of times throughout the chapter. He also draws examples from ancient, non-biblical literature—such as Homer [20]—to counter the claim that ‘Appeal to etymology, and to word formation, is...always dangerous.’ [21] Leithart even does ‘the unexpected’ himself when he quotes the words ‘tit’ and ‘c-nt’ in a reference to Philip Roth’s shocking Sabbath’s Theater. [22] And finally, of course, he turns to John 9 once again, where examples of all of the things he’s talking about abound.

Although—judging by the title—one feels that Chapter 3 could have devolved into mere siliness, this is perhaps even more true of Chapter 4, ‘The Text Is a Joke: Intertextuality’. But what he means is ‘every text depends for its meaning on information lying outside the text...and a good interpreter is...one with a broad knowledge and the wit to know what bits of knowledge are relevant. All interpretation is a matter of getting it. All texts mean the way jokes mean.’ [23] This of course in response to the obsessive concern in historical-critical exegesis with avoiding eisegesis, and the concomitant charge that ‘pre-critical’, and one fears, perhaps even any kind of faith-based reading are often guilty of eisegetical readings. After the initial, obviously ‘joke’ examples, and brief considerations of a few biblical passages, Leithart looks at the use of the Bible itself in The Merchant of Venice, and of Dante in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and how Shakespeare and Eliot depend for their meaning on the two earlier works. [24] In John 9, he begins with intertextual references to earlier portions of St John’s Gospel itself, before expanding the analysis with Genesis, Isaiah, and Psalm 40.

Here, Leithart interrupts himself briefly to consider the eisegetical problem from another point of view: the supposed contrast between the ‘subjective’ methods of literary interpretation and those of the ‘harder’ disciplines. Drawing on N.T. Wright, he notes that ‘there is always an imaginative leap involved in forming a hypothesis that puts facts into a coherent narrative’, whether the ‘facts’ are literary or scientific. [25] The test is still the ability of the reading to explain the pattern of the data. Furthermore, if such leaps were never taken in any discipline, the result would extremely unsatisfying. Nevertheless, the leaps depend on attention to the ‘facts’, in the present case, the texts, from which the leap is made, and Leithart acknowledges that historical context and conventions provide restraints on reading. [26]

Chapter 5, ‘Texts Are Music—Structure’, was perhaps next to Chapter 1 my least favourite. Leithart compares texts to music in the sense that both exhibit complex structures made up of layers of meaning—a good interpreter ‘must develop an ear for the multiple melodies, not to mention the complex rhythms, of texts’. [27] It is an excellent analogy, and the result—applied to the Odyssey on pp. 152-3, Joyce’s Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on pp. 159-61, and John 9 on 161-71—is fairly impressive. The problem is that Leithart’s exploration of the musical analogy takes so long! He begins on p. 144 by answering Victor Zuckerkandl’s overstatement of the uniqueness of repetition in music as an art form, and proceeds through an overly long analysis of Bach’s ‘Minuet in G’, occupying pp. 146-9. The point is made, but at the expense of my desire to keep paying attention.

The final chapter, ‘Texts Are about Christ: Application’, argues not only the obvious—‘Scripture is about Christ’—but the less obvious as well: Scripture is about totus Christus, which means it’s about the Church as Christ’s Body; and other texts (like Oedipus Rex), and indeed, all of history, are about Christ too. The ecclesiastical emphasis of this totus Christus exegesis prompts perhaps Leithart’s longest quotations from the Fathers—St Augustine’s On Christian Teaching on p. 173 and St Ambrose’s Letter 67 on p. 179. It also suggests a much earlier analysis of John 9 than other chapters, focusing on the blind man as a type of the Church and the washing as a type of Baptism. I have already quoted from the section ‘Jesus and Oedipus’ (here, in the post on St Eustathius), but the reading of Oedipus really is quite striking, being tied into John 9 by the theme of blindness. [28]

But at this point, Leithart begins a section entitled ‘Enlightenment Ocularcentrism’. Starting with a solid quotation from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and moving through the always culpable Descartes, Frances Yates on the ‘spatialized view of knowledge’ resulting from the ars memoriae, Walter Ong on Peter Ramus’s pedagogy, and a nod toward postmodern echoes of Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, I believe that Leithart is setting up a demonstration that in John 9 we see the totus Christus as the answer to mistaken notions of light, vision, and understanding in the West. The whole passage is, I’m afraid, a little ambiguous though. Leithart acknowledges that St John too displays an ocularcentrism, though one focused on Christ the Logos rather than Enlightenment rationality, [29] but still it is hard to determine precisely where he may or may not disagree with the essentially Nietzschean and postmodernist critiques he has offered in the preceding pages. In the next section, ‘Politics of Sight’ [30], we are on firmer ground as Leithart extends the discovery of totus Christus and the reading of John 9 to a consideration of the overturning of worldly power and political structures. Leithart concludes the chapter with the following comments:

John 9, in short, opens up an angle for literary analysis, a critique of Enlightenment rationality, and some features of Christian politics. It is about Jesus; it is about the Jesus who is the head of the body, and so is about the whole Christ. It is about the Jesus who is head over all things for his church, the one in whom everything holds together. John 9 is a text about everything, just like every other biblical text. [31]

The epilogue consists of three areas of brief musings that fell outside the scope of the book: the connection between Leithart’s own exegesis and that of the mediaevals (already quoted); the communal dimension of reading—essentially a nod toward Tradition and the Church—that according to Leithart might have been a chapter entitled ‘Texts Are Community Property’; and the observation that literary ‘interpretation is ultimately a performance’, like that of a musician interpreting a composer’s work. [32] He notes that much more could be said about these things, but that all books must come to an end.

I have minor complaints, of course. As may be guessed from my comments on Chapter 5, I had a low tolerance for Leithart’s long illustrations taken from outside the discipline of hermeneutics. I also found the incessant references to ‘Yahweh’ in the discussions of the OT and Israel annoying. I realise that this has become a standard convention in ‘Hebrew Bible’ studies, but I think it strikes the wrong note for a book advocating a ‘faithful’ and Christian reading of the OT. ‘Yahweh’ is not traditional Christian language for the God of the OT—it is not found, for instance, in the traditional liturgies and prayers, East or West, nor, more importantly, is it found in the NT—and it is bound to seem artificial to the layman. Whether out of some fidelity to the ancient Hebrew piety surrounding God’s name or not, is it an accident that Christians have used ‘the Lord’ ever since the first century? I cannot think so.

But more importantly I would insist that musings 1 and 2 from the epilogue really ought to have played some role in the text itself. They are almost like an elephant in the room throughout the entire book, and they are an emphasis with which modern Western Christianity (and sometimes, Eastern Christianity too!) could really stand to be confronted a good deal more than it is. It is interesting that the back cover of Leithart’s book contains blurbs from two authors who have not failed to bring that emphasis to the fore: Reno, whose Sanctified Vision I’ve already mentioned, and Fr Andrew Louth, whose brilliant Discerning the Mystery makes many of the same points that Leithart does, but places them firmly in the context of Tradition. [33] While I’m on the subject, it’s also interesting that I do not recall Deep Exegesis insisting on the strict distinction between typology and allegory found in Against Christianity, [34] a distinction considerably looser in O’Keefe and Reno [35] and not present at all, if I remember correctly, in Fr Louth. One wonders if Leithart has modified earlier views, or simply decided not to make an issue of them.

Also, concerning Leithart’s central thesis about the husk/kernel dichotomy, I must acknowledge some justice in an objection raised by Wesley Hill in a review for Books & Culture (here):

In the eras of the church's defining Christological debates, it was not enough for the orthodox merely to attend to the Bible's words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, since the meaning of those biblical forms was precisely what was up for grabs. Simplifying the matter drastically, we might say that two opposing kernels (Nicene orthodoxy and Arian Christology) were claiming identical husks (the shared language of Scripture). Arguably, the triumph of orthodoxy depended on being able to grasp the right kernel (the Bible's message about the identity of Jesus) and fit it within a new, extra-biblical husk (the language of ousia). Ironically, given Leithart's argument, it was the biblical kernel itself that pressured its defenders to set aside the biblical husk for a moment and cast about for a new one.

Hill calls it ‘a measure of the importance of Leithart’s study that it raises questions like these’, but one really would like to have Leithart in the room, perhaps over a pint of stout, to answer such questions immediately upon completion.

That said, this really is a much-needed book, I think. Leithart’s attempts to critique Orthodoxy have been rightly and well-criticised by other Orthodox, but in most respects I can’t help but think of him as an ally.

[1] Peter Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2003). The pro-Constantinian theme and polemic with John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas is present already in the latter book. Particularly precious is Leithart’s parable about Hauerwas on the whole issue of Constantinianism:

Once there was a prophet named Stanley. The prophet Stanley was a bold and faithful man who stood with granite face against the powers of the age. 

‘you cannot do that s---t,’ he would say, as he stood before the king. ‘You are going to end up in ‘f-----g h---l, and your people are going to hate you.’

One day the king began to listen and to see the wisdom of Stanley’s words. When Stanley told him that the weak must be protected from the vicious strong, the king took steps to protect the weak. When Stanley told him that Jesus was Lord, the king bowed the knee. When Stanley told him that religious freedom is a subtle temptation, the king took heed.

And the king made a proclamation, that all in his kingdom should wear sackcloth and ashes and repent of their sins, even to the least beast of burden. 

And Stanley went out from the city and made a shelter and sat under it and refused to speak again to the king.

And Stanley said, ‘Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life. I am a d---n prophet, not a f-----g chaplain.’ 

And the Lord said, ‘Do you have good reason to be angry?’ 

As for the king, he was greatly confounded and confused, and knew not what to do; for he had done all that Stanley had asked. 

This parable ends with questions, not a moral: Will the king always refuse to listen? Says who? And, when the king begins to listen, must the Church fall silent, so as to avoid becoming a chaplain? To keep her integrity, must the Church refuse to succeed? (p. 148)

[2] Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2009), p. 207.

[3] Ibid., p. vii.

[4] John J. O’Keefe & R.R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2005), p. 45.

[5] Leithart, Exegesis, pp. 32-3.

[6] See for example, O’Keefe & Reno, p. 74.

[7] Leithart, Exegesis, p. viii.

[8] Ibid., p. 10.

[9] Ibid., p. 34.

[10] Ibid., p. 2.

[11] Ibid., p. 8.

[12] Ibid., p. 39.

[13] Ibid., p. 41.

[14] Ibid., p. 44.

[15] Ibid., pp. 55-60.

[16] Ibid., pp. 66-7. I am in the process of reading Steinmetz’s paper, ‘Uncovering a Second Narrative: Detective Fiction & the Construction of Historical Method’, and hope to read a few others from this volume before returning it to the library, particularly Brian Daley’s ‘Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable? Some Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms’—Ellen F. Davis & Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 54-65, and 69-88.

[17] Leithart, Exegesis, p. 82.

[18] Unfortunately, this includes the supposedly infallible Moises Silva!

[19] Ibid., p. 86.

[20] Ibid., p. 96.

[21] Ibid., p. 76, quoting Peter Cotterell and Max Turner.

[22] Ibid., p. 81. Leithart even leaves in the ‘u’ of the second word. Sorry folks, I just couldn’t bring myself to do that on a blog that just anyone could read! I am a little ashamed that Leithart has outcussed me.

[23] Ibid., p. 113.

[24] Ibid., pp. 119-24.

[25] Ibid., p. 133.

[26] Ibid., pp. 136-7.

[27] Ibid., p. 144.

[28] Ibid., pp. 181-8.

[29] Ibid., p. 193.

[30] Ibid., pp. 195-206.

[31] Ibid., p. 206.

[32] Ibid., p. 208. Leithart notes that he has reflected on this more in ‘Authors, Authority, & the Humble Reader’, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature & Writing, rev. & expanded ed., ed. Leland Ryken (Colorado Springs, CO: Shaw, 2005), pp. 209-24, which I read just today in a copy of the book graciously lent to me by John Granger.

[33] See my review here.

[34] See Leithart, Christianity, p. 62, where he claims, ‘At its best, then, typological interpretation is quite different from allegory.’

[35] See O’Keefe & Reno, p. 90, where ‘Allegory and typology are part of the same family of reading strategies’ whose ‘difference lies in the amount of work the reader must put into the interpretation’.

Disenchantment with Modernity: Tolkien, Lovecraft, & G.H. Dorr, Ph.D.

At the Mythopoeic Society conference I attended last weekend, the Inklings—and it seemed Tolkien especially—were naturally first and foremost in the attendees’ thoughts, writings, and conversation. But at least once or twice, perhaps largely at my instigation, the name of H.P. Lovecraft was also mentioned. In a paper I heard on the to me previously unknown works of our Author Guest of Honour, Tim Powers, a plot description at one point reminded me slightly of Lovecraft’s masterpiece, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. When I ventured later to ask the author himself about this, receiving confirmation of the accuracy of my ‘Lovecraft antennae’, I also asked his opinion whether Powers thought that Charles Williams might have been able to convert the notorious atheist Lovecraft to Christianity. An affirmative reply led to more discussion later in the evening.

At any rate, all of this is merely to preface an extraordinary discovery I made just today. Amy Sturgis, whose name I thought I recalled coming across at MythCon and who edited the book Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy & Faith in the World of C.S. Lewis, published by The Mythopoeic Press, has a fascinating article on her website entitled, ‘The New Shoggoth Chic: Why H.P. Lovecraft Now?’. [1] Although it does not mention him in the title, Tolkien is also a major subject of the article, which is essentially a comparison and contrasting of the two authors.

To get to the point, the most interesting point of comparison to me was the basically anti-modern posture they shared. Sturgis writes:

Modernity, that nebulous and abstract force of the dawning 20th century, meant various things to Lovecraft and Tolkien at different times in their lives. One thing remained constant: both were against it. To Lovecraft, modernity primarily meant entropy, the gradual decay of time-honored habits, traditions, and even people into confusion and decrepitude. . . . His racial and nationalistic assumptions fueled his disgust with the way in which industrialization and urbanization threw unlike people together in the most squalid conditions, ensuring (to his mind at least) that their most negative traits would come to the fore. He found an example of his worst fears realized when he lived, for a short time only, in New York City.

On this subject, Sturgis then quotes the semi-autobiographical story ‘He’:

But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes around them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. [2]

Sturgis then comments:

Though charged with what we today would call racism and xenophobia, Lovecraft’s description implies more than simple fear or dislike of the Other: these others are overcrowded, literally ‘teeming’, unattached to their setting or community, isolated and atomistic, uncommunicative and ‘hardened’. Lovecraft contrasted such scenes with his native Providence, Rhode Island, where generations remained in the same place and were known by their family name and traits, and where the community as a whole tended to share what Augustine called ‘loved things held in common’. [3] Lovecraft feared a humanity cut adrift from such grounding tradition and identity, left vulnerable to outside forces of superior power and unwholesome design.

For Tolkien, modernity primarily meant technology—‘The Machine’, as he called it—and its triumph at the expense of nature. Where Lovecraft idealized his hometown of Providence, Tolkien revered the English countryside, and believed the growth of cities and factories to be a direct threat to its survival. By creating the fictional Shire and the Hobbits who populate it, Tolkien praised the rural values of decentralization, artisanship, stability, and familiarity over the urban qualities of centralization, mass production, disposability, and anonymity.

Sturgis then quotes ‘On Fairy-Stories’, calling it ‘as anti-modern’ as Lovecraft:

Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk at Oxenford declare that he ‘welcomed’ the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into ‘contact with real life.’ He may have meant that the way men were living in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. [4]

Sturgis continues:

Both authors’ anti-modernism, as well as other intellectual ideas and personal traits, led them to feel out of place in a world of tremendous change and upheaval, economic depression and world war. For his part, H.P. Lovecraft felt himself to be an old man in a young man’s body, and, to use his words from ‘The Outsider’, ‘a stranger in this century’. Tolkien’s similar certainty that he was not at home came as much from his religious perspective as his disgust with all things ‘progressive’. . . .

. . .

It would be a mistake to assume that the two men were similar only in their dislikes and disappointments. Although they looked to the future with no little trepidation, they looked to the past with real fascination and affection. Lovecraft and Tolkien shared a fervent kind of antiquarianism. Lovecraft’s self-confessed ‘love of the ancient and permanent’ can best be seen in his absorption with and knowledge of early American architecture, which he used to great effect in his precise and evocative descriptions. . . . Tolkien nurtured his own love of ancient texts and national epics from Beowulf and the Kalevala to the Icelandic Eddas and family sagas. He studied the original languages of the stories and incorporated ingredients of the tales into his own work. . . .

In short, both Lovecraft and Tolkien were on a quest for something permanent, meaningful, and binding in a changing modern world, fueled by a desire for identity and community in a time in which they felt displaced and marginalized, and a thirst for structure and civilization in the face of what they saw as entropy and barbarism. Paradoxically, these concerns, while isolating each author to a certain degree, also made Lovecraft and Tolkien exemplars of their age, men of remarkable insight and sensitivity who articulated the concerns of an entire era with unusual eloquence and urgency.

Reading these comments today, I am also curiously reminded of Tom Hanks’s charactre in the Coen Brothers remake of The Ladykillers: the Southern dandy, Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. One evening, Dorr’s black landlady, Mrs Munson, says to him, ‘You are a readin’ fool, aren’t you, Mr Dorr?’ Dorr responds:

Yes, I must confess I often find myself more at home in these ancient volumes than I do in the hustle-bustle of the modern world. To me, paradoxically, the literature of the so-called ‘dead tongues’ holds more currency than this morning’s newspaper. In these books, in these volumes, there is the accumulated wisdom of mankind which succours me when the day is hard and the night lonely and long.

Things take a closer turn toward the Lovecraftian when Mrs Munson remarks, ‘Wisdom of mankind, huh? What about the wisdom of the Lord?’, and Dorr replies:

Oh yes, the ‘Good Book’, hm? I have found reward in its pages. But to me there are other ‘good books’ as well: heavy volumes of antiquity, freighted with the insights of man’s glorious age. And then, of course, I just love love love the works of Mr Edgard Allan Poe.

Mrs Munson says, ‘Oh, I know who he was—kinda spooky!’ But Dorr laughs and ‘corrects’ her, in words reminiscent of Lovecraft’s ‘Randolph Carter’ stories: ‘No, my, no, no! Not of this world, it is true. He lived in a dream, an ancient dream.’ Dorr then quotes the first two stanzas of ‘To Helen’:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome. [5]

Somewhat alarmed at Dorr’s enraptured delivery of these lines, Mrs Munson asks, ‘Who was Helen? Some kind of whore of Babylon?’ To which, slightly angered, Dorr replies, ‘One does not know who Helen was! But I picture her as very very . . . extremely . . . pale.’


[1] Originally published in Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest, 1.4 (December 2005).

[2] H.P. Lovecraft, ‘He’, The Tomb & Other Tales (NY: Del Rey, 1987), pp. 58-9. I was astonished how much this last line reminded me of Tolkien!

[3] St Augustine, de civ. Dei XIX, 24; cf. The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods (NY: Modern Library, 1950), p. 706: ‘But if we discard this definition of a people, and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love.’

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, The Tolkien Reader (NY: Ballantine, 1966), pp. 80-1.

[5] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘To Helen’, The Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (NY: Modern Library, 1965), p. 1017.

A Sober, if Futile, Ecumenical 'Dialogue'

I have recently, and for the first time on this blog, I believe, been called an ‘Extremist’ for my criticisms of the ecumenical movement. But, to be fair, even those mature enough to rise above name-calling—first and foremost, the estimable John Sanidopoulos—appear to suspect that I cannot recognise even the possibility of sober ecumenical dialogue. A perfect way to prove them wrong has occurred to me.

Among the Orthodox delegates to the Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission, which met in Moscow in 1976, were exactly two of the men that have been pointed out to me as saintly personalities involved in the ecumenical movement—Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussells (MP) and Protopresbyter John Romanides. While I can’t say much about the members of the Anglican delegation—the only ones I know anything about are Canon A.M. Allchin and Revd Hugh Wybrew—I still feel that this meeting was largely an exercise in futility. Certainly, the Anglican Communion as a whole only seems farther from Orthodoxy than ever before.

But that having been said, from a perusal of those exchanges chosen for publication from among the discussions of various points of the resulting ‘Moscow Agreed Statement’, it is clear that in many ways we have an ecumenical dialogue carried on as well as it possibly could be in our day, thanks in no small part to the Orthodox delegates I have named. I shall offer two examples. First, from the discussion concerning section I.2 of the Agreed Statement:

Professor Romanides: There is a close connection between the whole question of inspiration and revelation and the distinction between the essence and energies of God. . . . I wish to ask the Anglicans this question: When the Old and New Testaments speak of the revealed glory of God do the Anglicans consider this glory to be created or uncreated? And if they regard it as uncreated do they consider it to be the essence of God?

The Bishop of Truro [Right Revd Graham Leonard]: I am certain that Professor Romanides and I believe the same things. But I wish to ask Professor Romanides: Is it necessary to my salvation to speak about the relation of God to creation in terms of the essence-energies to distinction? Cannot this teaching be expressed in other terms?

Professor Romanides: We can speak, as the Bible does, in terms of the depth of God and of the glory of God. The Holy Spirit searches the depth of God; but can man do this? There is something that man sees, but something else that he does not see. . . .

Bishop [Robert E.] Terwilliger [Suffragan of Dallas]: I am happy about the essence-energies distinction. But how early is it? Is it found in the early Christian sources?

Professor Romanides: The distinction has roots both in Judaism and in the Greek philosophical tradition. The Church uses the distinction not for philosophical but for experiential reasons.

Archbishop Basil: We should differentiate between (i) the fact itself, as expressed in what the Old and New Testaments tell us concerning the glory of God; and (ii) the terminology, which was used in the Patristic period but not fully developed until the time of St Gregory Palamas. It is difficult to require the Anglicans to accept the terminology of the later period. But do they accept what is said on this matter by the Cappadocians, and especially St Gregory of Nyssa?

The Bishop of Truro and Bishop Terwilliger: Yes.

Professor [Eugene R.] Fairweather: The distinction between essence and energies, as made in thesis 2 [of the Truro sub-commission], is radically unacceptable to many Anglicans. They would consider it unbiblical to affirm that the divine nature or essence is for ever excluded from human knowledge. Also the doctrine of the divine simplicity makes such a distinction problematical. The widely-held Anglican (and Western) view is that, in his present state, man does not receive the essence of God; but, although man will never comprehend or wholly grasp the essence of God, he will at the Last Day see the very being of God.

Bishop [Richard] Hanson: I agree with Dr Fairweather. According to the normal Western view, God is incomprehensible, in the sense that God’s nature can never be wholly grasped by man. But in his state of glory, man will see and know God himself. The Orthodox have their own way of stating this; but this way should not be made compulsory for the Anglicans. . . .

Dr Constantine Scouteris: We Orthodox do not seek to force the Anglicans to accept what they find uncongenial; we ask them to express their own tradition in a positive way.

Archbishop Basil: We are faced by a difference between the Cappadocian and the Augustinian traditions. The Cappadocians represent ancient Christian thought. Augustinianism is a deviation from this. The essence-energies distinction is an intellectual distinction, but it is at the same time a real distinction, because based on the reality of God.

Bishop Hanson: The Cappadocians must be understood in the context of the particular historical situation which they faced; they were concerned to answer the virulent rationalism of the Eunomians. In that situation the response of the Cappadocians is intelligible. But the West has its own reasons to adhere to Augustinianism, which expresses the same convictions in another and equally legitimate way.

Professor Romanides: . . . I return to my earlier question: In the Anglican view, is the revealed glory of God uncreated? If it is, is it the essence of God?

Professor Fairweather: It is a revelation of the uncreated through the medium of the created.

Professor Romanides: Here you follow Augustine.

Canon Allchin: I myself prefer the Orthodox to the Augustinian approach. But Anglicans wish to find room for both; they see advantages in both, but each presents certain difficulties. [1]

The insistence here on the importance of the essence/energies distinction by Fr Romanides and Archbishop Basil—culminating in the latter’s observation that Augustinianism ‘is a devition’ from ‘ancient Christian thought’—is greatly to be commended. Here is another exchange, this one from the discussion of section III.10.(ii)—‘The mind (phronema) of the Fathers, their theological method, their terminology and modes of expression have a lasting importance in both the Orthodox and Anglican Churches’: [2]

Archbishop Stylianos: . . . What Orthodox value is not just the terminology but the message and mind (phronema) of the Fathers.

Professor Galitis: Instead of ‘the Patristic period’, we should say ‘the Fathers’. We do not wish to restrict the Fathers chronologically.

Bishop Hanson welcomed the phrase ‘mind of the Fathers’. We Anglicans, he said, do not always admire the hermeneutical methods of the Fathers, but we do respect the conclusions to which the Fathers came.

The Revd Mark Santer: Let us say ‘the Fathers’ method of theology, whereby theology is linked with prayer’.

Professor Romanides: That is precisely what I mean by the Fathers’ theological method. [3]

Now, the Anglicans make some very revealing statements in both of these exchanges, some of which strike me as (perhaps unwittingly) ironic, and the Orthodox allow much to slide. But keeping in mind that all is provisional and preparatory, since Orthodox could not know at the time that Anglicans would deliberately ignore Orthodox sensibilities by introducing the novel practice of ordaining women, this is on the whole an admirable example of theological dialogue on the part of the Orthodox delegates. Because of changes on both sides—for instance, the rejection of the essence-energies distinction by an important Orthodox ecumenist, Met. John (Zizioulas), and the increasing abandonment of any kind of traditional theological or moral standards by much of the Anglican Communion—such a dialogue would be difficult to produce today. But it stands as a witness that in theory, at least, genuine discussion of theological differences can be had.


[1] Archim. Kallistos (Ware) & the Revd Colin Davey, eds., Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue: The Moscow Agreed Statement (London: SPCK, 1977), pp. 46-8.

[2] Ibid., p. 84.

[3] Ibid., p. 56.

'The Lives of the Saints Are Applied Dogmatics'—On the Glorification of St Justin

By now, most English-speaking Orthodox should be aware that the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church has glorified among the Saints our Holy Father Justin (Popović) of Čelje (1894-1979), the renowned Serbian traditionalist theologian and opponent of ecumenism. As the Serbian Church has decreed that St Justin is to be commemorated 1 June on the Church’s calendar, which will fall on 14 June according to the civil calendar, I will save my usual hagiographic post until that day. But on the occasion of his glorification, I wanted to take the opportunity to say just a couple of things.

First of all, in light of the ongoing attempts by Orthodox ecumenists to marginalise and caricature those who would call them to a more faithful witness (see for instance the Encyclical of the Patriarch of Constantinople on the Sunday of Orthodoxy this year, posted here by Andreas), it is helpful to recall that St Justin was decidedly among the latter. Indeed, the statements that follow may appear very harsh to some, but we can be certain that St Justin wishes only to ‘speak the truth in love’. In his essay, ‘Humanistic Ecumenism’, St Justin writes:

Ecumenism is the common name for the pseudo-Christianity of the pseudo-Churches of Western Europe. . . . All of pseudo-Christianity, all of those pseudo-Churches, are nothing more than one heresy after another. . . . [1]

Without repentance and admittance into the True [Orthodox] Church of Christ, it is unthinkable and unnatural to speak about unification of ‘the Churches’, about the dialogue of love, about intercommunion . . . .

The contemporary ‘dialogue of love’, which takes the form of naked sentimentality, is in reality a denial of the salutary sanctification of the Spirit and belief in the truth (2 Thess. 2:13), that is to say the unique salutary ‘love of the truth’ (2 Thess. 2:10). The essence of love is truth; love lives and thrives as truth. . . . [2]

The heretico-humanistic separation of and detachment of love from truth is a sign of the lack of theanthropic faith and of the loss of theanthropic balance and common sense. At any rate, this was never, nor is it the way of the Fathers. The Orthodox are rooted and founded only ‘with all of the saints’ in truth, and have proclaimed in love this theanthropic life-saving love for the world and for all of the creation of God from the time of the Apostles until today. . . . [3]

I do not think I need to go on. It is obvious that the teachings of St Justin are diametrically opposed to those of the Orthodox ecumenists, led by the Patriarch of Constantinople himself. What the glorification among the Saints of our holy Father Justin emphasises is only something the Orthodox defenders of Tradition have known all along—we are supported by the witness of the Saints and Holy Fathers. Those holy men who have struggled in asceticism, the Elders, Confessors, and Martyrs of the Church, it is they that have denounced the Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement. Its supporters, on the contrary, may have good people, ‘decent fellows’ among them, but they do not have Saints.

St Justin has emphasised in a number of his essays the priority of lived Orthodoxy, of the three-fold path of purification, illumination, and deification, over abstract, academic theology. I will quote a few of these at some length. In ‘The Inward Mission of Our Church’, St Justin writes:

The Ascetics are Orthodoxy’s only missionaries. Asceticism is her only missionary school. Orthodoxy is ascetic effort and it is life, and it is thus by effort and by life that her mission is broadcast and brought about. The development of asceticism . . . this ought to be the inward mission of our Church amongst our people. The parish must become an ascetic focal point. But this can only be achieved by an ascetic priest. Prayer and fasting, the Church-oriented life of the parish, a life of liturgy: Orthodoxy holds these as the primary ways of effecting rebirth in its people. The parish, the parish community must be regenerated and in Christ-like and brotherly love must minister humbly to Him and to all people, meek and lowly and in a spirit of sacrifice and self-denial. And such service must be imbued and nourished by prayer and the liturgical life. This much is groundwork and indispensable. But to this end there exists one prerequisite: that our Bishops, priests, and our monks become ascetics themselves. That this might be, then: Let us beseech the Lord. [4]

In his ‘Introduction to the Lives of the Saints’, St Justin emphasises the theological nature of the Saints’ incarnate witness:

Saints are people who live on earth by holy, eternal Divine truths. That is why the Lives of the Saints are actually applied dogmatics, for in them all the holy eternal dogmatic truths are experienced in all their life-creating and creative energies. In the Lives of the Saints it is most evidently shown that dogmas are not only ontological truths in themselves and for themselves, but that each one of them is a wellspring of eternal life and a source of holy spirituality. [5]

In addition, the Lives of the Saints contain in themselves Orthodox ethics in their entirety, Orthodox morality, in the full radiance of its Divine-human sublimity and its immortal life-creating nature. . . . For this reason the Lives of the Saints are indeed experiential ethics, applied ethics. Actually, the Lives of the Saints prove irrefutably that Ethics is nothing other than Applied Dogmatics. . . . [6]

And what else are the Lives of the Saints but the only Orthodox pedagogical science. For in them in a countless number of evangelical ways, which are completely worked out by the experience of many centuries, it is shown how the perfect human personality, the completely ideal man, is built up and fashioned, and how with the help of the holy mysteries and the holy virtues in the Church of Christ he grows into ‘a perfect man, according to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (cf. Eph. 4:13). . . .

If you wish, the Lives of the Saints are a sort of Orthodox Encyclopedia. In them can be found everything which is necessary for the soul which hungers and thirsts for eternal righteousness and eternal truth in this life, and which hungers and thirsts for Divine immortality and eternal life. . . . [7]

Finally, in his essay on ‘The Theory of Knowledge of St Isaac the Syrian’, St Justin notes something that should be fundamental to any Orthodox attempt to engage in learning and rational thought, the necessity of purification for acquiring right knowledge:

The character of a man’s knowledge depends on the disposition, nature, and condition of his organs of understanding. At all levels knowledge depends intrinsically on the means of understanding. Man does not make truth; the act of understanding is an act of making one’s own a truth which is already objectively given. This integration has an organic character, not unlike that of the grafting of a slip onto a vine, or its life in and from the vine (cf. John 15:1-6). Understanding is, then, a fruit on the tree of the human person. As is the tree, so are its fruits, as are the organs of understanding, so is the knowledge they engender.

Analyzing man by his empirical gifts, St Isaac the Syrian finds that his organs of understanding are sick. ‘Evil is a sickness of the soul’, whence all the organs of understanding are made sick (Letter 4). . . . [8]

A feeble soul, a diseased intellect, a weakened heart and will—in brief, sick organs of understanding—can only engender, fashion, and produce sick thoughts, sick feelings, sick desires, and sick knowledge. [9]

The healing and purification of the organs of human knowledge are brought about by the common action of God and man—by the grace of God and the will of man. On the long path of purification and healing, knowledge itself becomes purer and healthier. At every stage of its development, knowledge depends on the ontological structure and the ethical state of its organs. Purified and healed by a man’s striving in the evangelical virtues, the organs of knowledge themselves acquire holiness and purity. A pure heart and pure mind engender pure knowledge. The organs of knowledge, when purified, healed, and turned towards God, give a pure and healthy knowledge of God and, when turned towards creation, give a pure and healthy knowledge of creation. [10]

Although it may not be immediately clear, these passages are directly relevant to what I have said above regarding St Justin’s witness against ecumenism. While the Orthodox ecumenists might pay lip service to what St Justin is saying in these various passages, they do not seem to realise the logical conclusion of his teachings. If Ascetics and Saints are our only teachers, if a soul must have undergone ascetic purification in order to correctly understand truth and reality, then it is precisely men like St Justin himself to whom we must listen when our path becomes uncertain, not worldly hierarchs and clever academic theologians.

The essays I have just quoted have been such an enormous influence on me, shaping my thinking and my studies in so many incalculable ways, that it is a great joy to me to have lived to see the glorification of Father Justin among the Saints. May the work of this divinely inspired and holy man continue to influence and guide the faithful.


[1] St Justin (Popović), Orthodox Faith & Life in Christ, ed. Fr Asterios Gerostergios (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 1994), p. 169.

[2] Ibid., p. 170.

[3] Ibid., p. 172.

[4] Ibid., pp. 30-1.

[5] Ibid., p. 44.

[6] Ibid., p. 46.

[7] Ibid., p. 47.

[8] Ibid., pp. 120-1.

[9] Ibid., p. 122.

[10] Ibid., pp. 139-40.

Fr Florovsky on Chalcedon & the 'Modern Mind'

Last week I started making a real effort to go through a lot of my papers and try to organise them. I’m pleased to say that I have made enormous progress, and best of all, I have found a few things that I had not seen in quite some time. Among others, there were some photocopies of some obscure articles by Fr Georges Florovsky. One, ‘Eschatology in the Patristic Age: An Introduction’, from a 1956 issue of Greek Orthodox Theological Review, [1] was reprinted in vol. 4 of Fr Florovsky’s Collected Works—Aspects of Church History—under the title, ‘The Patristic Age & Eschatology: An Introduction’. [2] But the other three, all photocopied from obscure sources in the theology library of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki by my friend Mark Montague, do not seem to have been included in the Collected Works.

One is called ‘The Doctrine of the Church & the Ecumenical Problem’, and was published in 1950 in The Ecumenical Review. [3] Another, taken from a 1969 volume of John XXIII Lectures at Fordham University, is actually a two-fer: the first piece is entitled ‘The Image of the Church’, and the second ‘The New Vision of the Church’s Reality’. [4] But the last has no citation information on it. It is a very brief piece (four pages), evidently from some sort of ecumenical meeting, entitled ‘The Message of Chalcedon’, and is followed by other treatments of Chalcedon by W. Norman Pittenger, Wm. R. O’Connor, Fr Alexander Schmemann, and John Dillenberger.

I thought I’d post about this for two reasons. First, I wonder if anyone can tell me the source that these papers must have come from (Mark, did you perhaps write the source on your own copy?). Second, there were a couple of observations from Fr Florovsky’s paper that I really liked and wanted to quote. So without further ado, here is a longish passage from this piece:

. . . Modern man, it is so often suggested, cannot take any interest in Chalcedon. its archaic formula is utterly irrelevant to the modern quest for living truth.

It may be true, that ancient formulas fail to impress the modern mind. I venture to submit, however, that the fault is not with the old formulas, but rather with the ‘modern mind’. The formula of Chalcedon is very often mistaken for what it was never meant to be. The Chalcedonian definition was not a self-explanatory metaphysical statement. It was a dogmatic statement, a confession, a statement of faith. It must not be isolated from the total vision of that ‘great mystery of godliness’which was to be apprehended by faith. . . . It was, in a sense, a theological fence around the Mystery. ‘Modern man’ is prone to revolt against what he believes to be ‘Greek intellectualism’, with its sophisticated, scholastic and sterile ‘definitions’. Now, I believe Karl Barth is perfectly right when he reminds the modern man that all this alleged ‘Greek intellectualism’ was in fact but an aspect of that sincere seriousness with which the Early Church used to approach and to contemplate the Mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Holy Night. . . . The mystery is so great and ineffable. No wonder that its theological description is ‘subtle’ and ‘intricate’. One cannot avoid some dialectical tension in the credal witness to mystery. ‘Simplicity’ in this case would mean inevitably rather ‘simplification’, and miss the point. On the other hand, again, it may be true that human passion and blindness did play some role in the old theological disputes, as they obviously do in our own contemporary conflicts. But it is bad historical taste to overpress the ‘non-theological’ factors of religious and theological conflicts. Heresy is often, in the witty phrase of Chesterton, ‘but truth gone mad’. . . .

The mystery of the Incarnation can never be fully comprehended by a finite mind. Still, credo, ut intelligo. Faith brings illumination to human intellect too. And this fides quaerens intellectum is the driving power of all theological inquiry and research. It has been wittly suggested that Orthodoxy consists in the right language—‘l’Orthodoxie est faite d’un bon lexique’. A vague language and an unsuitable vocabulary may obscure and betray the truth. The early Church was in need of an adequate vocabulary. It had to coin new terms—‘to kainotomein ta onomata’, in the phrase of St Gregory of Nazianzus. [5]

[1] Protopresbyter Georges Florovsky, ‘Eschatology in the Patristic Age: An Introduction’, The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 2:1 (Easter 1956), pp. 27-40.

[2] Fr Florovsky, ‘The Patristic Age & Eschatology: An Introduction’, Aspects of Church History, Vol. 4 in the Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975), pp. 63-87.

[3] Fr Florovsky, ‘The Doctrine of the Church & the Ecumenical Problem’, The Ecumenical Review, 2:2 (Winter 1950), pp. 152-61.

[4] Fr Florovsky, ‘The Image of the Church’, John XXIII Lectures, Vol. 2: 1966 Byzantine Christian Heritage, John XXIII Center for Eastern Christian Studies (NY: Fordham U, 1969), pp. 96-104; ‘The New Vision of the Church’s Reality’, pp. 105-10. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the left side of the text has been truncated in my photocopy of the last page of the second article. It’s a shame, because Fr Florovsky has some comments there that I’d very much like to use in a future post.

[5] Though I can’t give the title or publishing information, this excerpt came from pp. 395-6.

On Social Justice by St Basil the Great, Reviewed

Although I can’t remember for sure, when Bishop Savas offered to send out a number of free copies of Fr Paul Schroeder’s translation of St Basil’s homilies on wealth and poverty—On Social Justice—I believe His Grace made it a stipulation that one must agree to read the book. [1] Well, despite it being a slim volume (the Popular Patristics Series volumes are typically quite digestible) it’s taken me some four months now to finish it. But finish it I did. In the meantime, I know my good friend, the Orthodox blogger at The Ebb & Flow of Consciousness, had a couple of very insightful posts on the book (here and here).

There are four authentic homilies, and one believed to be ‘Pseudo-Basilian’. The first, entitled ‘To the Rich’ [2], is on Christ’s words to the rich young man in Matthew 19.16-22. It sets the tone for the book very nicely. St Basil teaches that if one cannot divest oneself of wealth, one has not fulfilled the law of love for one’s neighbour. He writes:

Thus, those who love their neighbor as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbour; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions! How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of many? For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love. [3]

St Basil responds to those who ask how they will live and how it could be possible for everyone to sell all, ‘Do not ask me the rationale behind our Lord’s commands. The Lawgiver knows well how to bring what is possible into agreement with the Law.’ [4] To those who say they cannot give, St Basil says: ‘How many could you have delivered from want with but a single ring from your finger? How many households fallen into destitution might you have raised? In just one of your closets there are enough clothes to cover an entire town shivering with cold.’ [5] He concludes, ‘You showed no mercy; it will not be shown to you. You opened not your house; you will be expelled from the Kingdom. You gave not your bread; you will not receive eternal life.’ [6]

The second homily is on the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12.16-21, and is entitled ‘I Will Tear down My Barns’ [7]. St Basil addresses such people: ‘You have been made a minister of God’s goodness, a steward of your fellow servants. Do not suppose that all this was furnished for your own gullet! Resolve to treat the things in your possession as belonging to others.’ [8] To the notion of storing and guarding one’s wealth so that one might take one’s ease, he says, ‘Therefore, let the end of your harvesting be the beginning of a heavenly sowing.’ [9] St Basil elabourates:

[If you scatter your wealth,] God will receive you, angels extol you, all people from the creation of the world will bless you. Your glory will be eternal; you will inherit the crown of righteousness and the Kingdom of Heaven. All these things will be your reward for your stewardship of perishable things. [10]

This homily contains one of St Basil’s most moving attempts ‘to humanize and personalize the plight of the poor’, in Fr Schroeder’s words. [11] The great Hierarch paints a picture for his wealthy audience, to bring the suffering of poverty vividly into their imaginations:

How can I bring the sufferings of the poverty-stricken to your attention? When they look around inside their hovels, . . . [and] find only clothes and furnishings so miserable that, if all their belongings were reckoned together, they would be worth only a few cents. What then? They turn their gaze to their own children, thinking that perhaps by bringing them to the slave-market they might find some respite from death. Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation a rising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts. Starvation on the one side threatens a horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children. Time and again they vacillate, but in the end they succumb, driven by want and cruel necessity. [12]

The third homily, ‘In Time of Famine & Drought’ [13], beginning with Amos 3.8, deals with exactly the situation it names. St Basil explains frankly the reason that God has allowed famine: ‘See, now, how the multitude of your sins has altered the course of the year and changed the character of the seasons, producing these unusual temperature.’ [14] He continues:

. . . [T]he reason why our needs are not provided for as usual is plain and obvious: we do not share what we receive with others. We praise beneficence, while we deprive the needy of it. . . . For this reason we are threatened with righteous judgment. This is why God does not open his hand: because we have closed up our hearts towards our brothers and sisters. This is why the fields are arid: because love has dried up. [15]

St Basil actually tells us that just business will cause our prayers to be heard: ‘Tear up the unjust contract, so that sin might also be loosed. Wipe away the debt that bears high rates of interest, so that the earth may bear its usual fruits.’ [16] He responds to the Ayn Rands of the world, ‘who account greed a virtue’, by demanding that they demonstrate what good their money and possessions are in the face of natural disaster. ‘Will your purse not be buried together with you? Is not gold earth? Will it not be interred like worthless clay together with the clay of the body?’ [17]

Interestingly, however, in this homily St Basil actually addresses the poor as well. He says: ‘Are you poor? Do not be discouraged. . . . Place your hope in God. Can it be that He does not understand your difficult position?’ [18] He also encourages the poor to give to those who are poorer: ‘Are you poor? You know someone who is even poorer. . . . Do not shrink from giving the little that you have; do not prefer your own benefit to remedying the common distress.’ [19]

But for the rich, St Basil again humanises the plight of the poor by describing the effects of starvation in vivid terms. It is interesting to note that he considers aiding such people a natural duty, and by no means a case of supernatural Christian love, for he writes: ‘Let not we who are reasonable show ourselves to be more savage than the unreasoning animals. For even the animals use in common the plants that grow naturally from the earth.’ And then, ‘We should be put to shame by what has been recorded concerning the pagan Greeks. For some of them, a law of philanthropy dictated a single table and common meals, so that many different people might almost be regarded as one household.’ [20] St Basil ends with a reminder of the threat of hell and the Judgement, which is ‘not myth, but reality foretold by the voice of truth’. [21]

The fourth homily is taken from St Basil’s homilies on the Psalms, and taking Ps 14.5 LXX as its text, is entitled, ‘Against Those Who Lend at Interest’ [22] St Basil begins by recounting a few other places in Scripture where the sin of usury is denounced, telling us, for example, that Ezekiel ‘accounts the taking of interest and receiving back more than one gave as being among the greatest of evils’. [23] Then St Basil explains:

For in truth it is the height of inhumanity that those who do not have enough even for basic necessities should be compelled to seek a loan in order to survive, while others, not being satisfied with the return of the principal, should turn the misfortune of the poor to their own advantage and reap a bountiful harvest. [24]

Of usurers, St Basil asks, ‘Do you not know that you are taking in an even greater yield of sins than the increase of wealth you hope to receive through interest?’ [25]

Again, there is the humanising of the poor in vivid descriptions of the wretchedness and anxiety of the debtor—

If he lies down, in his sleep he sees the lender as a nightmare floating over his head. If he wakes up, the interest consumes his thoughts and is a constant source of worry. [26]

If you knock at his door, the debtor is underneath the bed in a flash. His heart pounds if someone enters the room suddenly. If a dog barks, he breaks out in a sweat, seized with terror, and looks for someplace to hide. [27]

No boxer avoids the blows of an opponent as a borrower avoids chance encounters with the creditor, hiding his face among the shadows of buildings and alleyways. [28]

But in this case, St Basil means to warn the would-be debtor nearly as much as the would-be usurer. He quotes Prov 5.15, ‘Drink water at your own cistern.’ In other words, ‘It is better to take care of your needs little by little with your own devices, than to be raised up all at once by outside means, only to be completely stripped of everything you have.’ [29]

But St Basil does not suppose that all borrowers are truly desperate. He observes that usually, ‘it is not those who are truly deprived who come to procure a loan’, but ‘rather people who devote themselves to unconstrained expenditures and useless luxuries’. [30] Nevertheless, he still reminds the rich to listen ‘to the kind of counsel I am giving to the poor on account of your inhumanity: to remain in dreadful circumstances’. [31] For, St Basil says, ‘The one who weeps in despair at the rate of interest is plainly before us, but the future of the one who is about to enjoy the wealth received from them is uncertain. It is unclear whether you will not rather leave this joy behind for others, while storing up an evil treasure of injustice for yourself.’ [32]

Finally, the ‘Pseudo-Basilian’ homily, ‘On Mercy & Justice’, is placed in an appendix. Here, the emphasis is on the necessary connection of these two virtues, for, ‘Acts of charity made from unjust gains are not acceptable to God, nor are those who refrain from injustice praiseworthy if they do not share what they have.’ [33] The author introduces the teaching that while some are called to sell all of their property to follow Christ, to others He ‘ordained allotment and sharing of what they have, so that in this way they might be seen as imitators of the kindness of God, showing mercy and giving and sharing.’ [34]

Great things are promised from these homilies. In his ‘Foreword’, Gregory Yova tells us that for him personally, ‘reading the writings of St Basil the Great in the following chapters was one of those experiences: life-changing and indescribable.’ [35] Yova elabourates a bit:

There is no way to describe the power, simplicity, wisdom, and freedom of his words; . . . I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.

When you read Basil’s words, you will think they were written yesterday—not 1,600 years ago! It’s unbelievable how precisely he describes our modern struggle with material wealth, our responsibility to our fellow man, and how to live life in balance. [36]

While I wouldn’t have described the experience for me personally as ‘life-changing’, I certainly believe the homilies live up to the promise. St Basil’s teachings on these matters will no doubt stay with me, providing guidance throughout my life. Fr Schroeder’s translation is quite readable, as well, and the Popular Patristics Series format is ideal for this little collection. Translator and publisher are to be applauded for making this teaching more accessible to the general reader.

I do find the title Fr Schroeder has given to the homilies somewhat questionable. While St Basil certainly deals with issues that are typically referred to nowadays as ‘social justice’, I believe such a title can create the misconception that St Basil is advocating some kind of social activism—marches, legislation, etc. I do not read him as telling Christians to go out expressly to ‘change the world’, but rather to treat others justly and help those in need. If we all did this, I’ve no doubt the world would be changed.

I would also like to have had a Scriptural index. There are footnotes with the citations of Scripture, which is good, but it is nice to be able to see all such citations laid out and to be able to track them down quickly.

But my main criticism is directed at Fr Schroeder’s introduction. While he is understandably enthusiastic about St Basil’s teaching on these matters, Fr Schroeder feels inexplicably that he must compare the teachings of other Fathers in other contexts with those of St Basil—castigating the former for ‘addressing the spiritual condition of the [rich] young man [of Matthew] in almost exclusively individual terms.’ [37]

Thus, Clement of Alexandria emphasises that the most important lesson of the parable is that one not be attached to one’s wealth, and that our Lord is prescribing ‘the stripping off of the passions from the soul itself and from the disposition, and the cutting up by the roots and casting out of what is alien to the mind.’ [38] Similarly, the early monastic approach of concentrating on the ridding of ‘oneself of the burden of worldly possessions’ rather than on ‘the aid that is rendered to the poor by giving one’s property to them’. Thus, St Anthony and the Desert Fathers are criticised for treating the poor as ‘nameless and faceless, little more than a cipher, a receptacle for discarded possessions.’ [39]

Furthermore, Fr Schroeder is not happy with the conclusion—anticipated by Clement and St Anthony and found explicitly in the Pseudo-Basilian homily—that those in the world ‘are enjoined not to become overly attached to their material possessions’, while it is the monks who ‘fulfill the commandment in its literal sense, which is regarded as the way to true perfection.’ [40] He calls this the ‘two-tiered approach’, and suggests that it somehow makes the commandment to the rich young man inapplicable to non-monastics. [41]

By contrast, Fr Schroeder claims that St Basil interprets the parable ‘in primarily social rather than individual terms’, [42] that he ‘explicitly rejects any attempt to formulate a two-tiered approach to the commandment’, [43] and that St Basil’s humanising descriptions of poverty are superior to the treatment of the poor ‘found throughout much of the monastic literature’. [44]

It is just this readiness to criticise the Fathers that troubles me so much in so many St Vladimir’s publications. It is not enough for Fr Schroeder to appreciate the particular emphases of St Basil’s homilies, apparently he must also proffer some impious argument that those writings which do not appeal to him to the same degree are somehow inferior or deficient. Never mind that St Basil is addressing a very different audience in a very different context to the other writings mentioned. Is it necessary that a poor monk, who is most likely well acquainted at first hand with poverty, be given a detailed description of it in a saying or homily addressed just to him? Can we not recognise social and individual dimensions in Christian ethics, and allow each their proper place? Is it not obvious that the monastic divesting of the ‘burden of worldly possessions’ is but a prerequisite for attaining a deeper, truer love for all? Is it not, furthermore, an imitation of the Apostles’ forsaking all to follow Christ—precisely what He was commanding the rich young man to do?

But Fr Schroeder also seems to miss those areas of convergence that appear in St Basil’s writings themselves. Thus, it is clear in the very first homily that St Basil too sees the inner passions as the fundamental problem. He describes the young man as ‘darkened by the passion of avarice’, [45] and addresses such people, ‘But now your possessions are more a part of you than the members of your own body, and separation from them is as painful as the amputation. of one of your limbs. . . . Had you determined long ago to give to those in need, how would it be unbearable now to distribute whatever was left?’ [46] So it seems that St Basil does not ignore, but rather presupposes the detachment and ‘stripping off of the passions’ that Clement and the Desert Fathers emphasise. Furthermore, when in the homily on famine, he addresses the wealthy audience, ‘If you do not want to give everything to the better cause, at least divide your possessions equally between [the poor and yourself]’, [47] then it seems to me that St Basil is coming very close to the so-called ‘two-tiered approach’. And what else are his threats of damnation and promises of heavenly reward but appeals to an individual ethics?

Fr Schroeder’s treatment of ‘Pseudo-Basil’ is even worse. He actually suggests that this author teaches that the ‘commandment to aid the involuntary poor is . . . superseded by the requirement to render assistance to the voluntary poor’, [48] which the author never actually says! The closest statement is, ‘Eagerness to serve holy people is accounted as reverence for Christ, and the one who eagerly ministers to the poor is shown to be a companion of Christ.’ [49] Although I think in context it is clear that he is encouraging people to give to poor monks, I see no claim whatsoever that this ‘supersedes’ the commandment to help the ‘involuntary poor’.

I complained in a previous post (here) about the obsession among so many ‘scholarly’ writers, even Orthodox ones, with looking, first, for ‘handy but oversimplified classification schemas that cater to modern intellectual fashions, and second, [for] the “originality” and “uniqueness” of the various patristic authors’, to the point that the consensus Patrum gets neglected or even denied altogether. The Church has passed down the Lives and writings of all of the Saints for our instruction. Rather than picking the ones that we like and criticising the others, why don’t we find a way to learn even—or perhaps especially—from those that seem odd or uncomfortable to us. As C.S. Lewis has said, in his incredible 1941 sermon at the 12th-c. Oxford University Church of St Mary the Virgin, ‘The Weight of Glory’, ‘If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which coneals what we do not yet know and need to know.’ [50]

Addendum: At the time I originally wrote this post, I had a tendency, like many other conservative-minded Orthodox in the US it seems, to become immediately suspicious of some sort of 'liberal agenda' whenever I encountered words like 'social justice'. I tried to be very cautious about my comments on this in the post, but I think my sentiments are clear. I believe it is important to state that I have since revised my opinion on the matter. I think there is definitely a place for the terminology of 'social justice', that this terminology is a legitimate if somewhat anachronistic way to describe the theme of St Basil's homilies, and that even the idea of going beyond personal acts of justice is not such a bad one, somehow tainted by the ideology of the 'liberal', or worse, 'socialist' agenda. That is to say nothing about Fr Schroeder's personal agenda, of which I know nothing and on which I therefore cannot comment, just to say that I think the title itself is innocent enough and that my feelings about such things have indeed undergone an evolution.


[1] St Basil the Great, On Social Justice, tr. Fr C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2009).

[2] The standard designation is Homily 7.

[3] St Basil, p. 43.

[4] Ibid., p. 46.

[5] Ibid., p. 49. I was actually reminded here of the ending of Schindler’s List, when Schindler realises:

I could have got more out. I could have got more. . . . I threw away so much money. You have no idea! This car! O God, what about the car? Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. . . . This pen—two more people. This is gold—two more people. . . . I could have got one more person, and I didn’t. I didn’t!

[6] St Basil, p. 49.

[7] Homily 6.

[8] St Basil, p. 61.

[9] Ibid., pp. 62-3.

[10] Ibid., p. 63.

[11] Ibid., p. 25.

[12] Ibid., p. 64.

[13] Homily 8.

[14] St Basil, p. 75.

[15] Ibid., p. 76.

[16] Ibid., p. 78.

[17] Ibid., p. 79.

[18] Ibid., p. 81.

[19] Ibid., p. 83.

[20] Ibid., p. 86.

[21] Ibid., p. 88.

[22] Homily 2 on Ps 14.

[23] St Basil, p. 89.

[24] Ibid., p. 90.

[25] Ibid., p. 91.

[26] Ibid., p. 91.

[27] Ibid., p. 94.

[28] Ibid., pp. 95-6. These observations remind me of the figure of Raskolnikov, who, when he is introduced, ‘was over his head in debt to the landlady and was afraid of meeting her’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky [NY: Knopf, 1993], p. 3).

[29] St Basil, p. 92.

[30] Ibid., 96.

[31] Ibid., 97.

[32] Ibid., 99.

[33] Ibid., p. 103.

[34] Ibid., p. 107.

[35] Ibid., p. 9.

[36] Ibid., pp. 9-10.

[37] Ibid., p. 23.

[38] Ibid., p. 22.

[39] Ibid., p. 23.

[40] Ibid., p. 23.

[41] Ibid., p. 25.

[42] Ibid., p. 24.

[43] Ibid., p. 25.

[44] Ibid., p. 25.

[45] Ibid., p. 42.

[46] Ibid., p. 43.

[47] Ibid., p. 87.

[48] Ibid., p. 102.

[49] Ibid., p. 107.

[50] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory & Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (NY: Touchstone, 1996), p. 31.