Icon of the Mother of God the "Multiplier of Wheat"

The Icon of the Mother of God, the "Multiplier of Wheat", was painted at the blessing of the Elder Ambrose (October 10) of the Visitation Optina wilderness monastery. St Ambrose, a great Russian ascetic of the nineteenth century, was ardent with a childlike faith towards the Mother of God. In particular, he revered all the Feastdays of the Mother of God, and on these days he redoubled his prayer. With the icon, "Multiplier of Wheat," St Ambrose blessed the Shamordino women's monastery established in honor of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, which he had founded not far from the Optina monastery.

On this icon, the Mother of God is depicted sitting upon the clouds, and Her hands are extended in blessing. Beneath her is a compressed field, and on it amidst the grass and flowers stand and lay sheaves of rye. Elder Ambrose himself decreed the day of celebration, October 15, and called the icon "Multiplier of Wheat", indicating by this, that the Most Holy Theotokos "is a Helper for people in their labors for the acquiring of their daily bread."

Before his blessed repose, St Ambrose ordered many copies of this icon and sent them to his spiritual children. For the Akathist to this icon, the Elder composed a particular response, "Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with You! Grant unto us unworthy ones the dew of Your grace and the showing forth of Your mercy!"

St Ambrose's burial took place on October 15, the Feastday of the icon (he reposed on October 10). The first miracle from the holy icon was witnessed in 1891, when throughout Russia there was a famine because of crop failure. In the Kaluga district and on the fields of the Shamordino monastery, however, grain was produced. In 1892, already after the death of St Ambrose, his attendant John Cherepanov sent a copy of the icon to the Pyatnitsa women's monastery in Voronezh district. In this locale there was a threat of drought and famine, but soon after a Molieben was celebrated before the icon "The Multiplier of Wheat", rain fell and ended the drought.

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The Concept of the Divine Energies

by David Bradshaw, University of Kentucky

Anyone familiar with the history of western philosophy is aware of how large a role has been played within it by theology. This is true not only of the Middle Ages, when philosophy was the handmaiden of theology, but as recently as Hegel and Kierkegaard, or arguably even Heidegger and Wittgenstein. For almost two millennia philosophers have drawn on theology to help them grapple with issues including, obviously, the existence of God and the relationship of faith and reason, but also such fundamental questions as the objectivity of morality, the meaning of our existence, and the nature of being itself. Naturally borrowings have gone in the other direction as well, and often what philosophers have found in theology is something that theology herself had drawn from philosophy centuries before. Despite this long and intimate association, in recent centuries the trajectory of philosophy has unquestionably been in the direction of secularization. It would be fair to say that most contemporary philosophers, if not embarrassed by philosophy’s theological past, are at least glad that it is behind us, and prefer to think of their discipline as now relatively autonomous. Accompanying this attitude is a tacit assumption that, whatever philosophy may have drawn from theology in the past, today the theological well has more or less run dry. To think that philosophy might find in theology today a revolutionary inspiration is, on this view, mere nostalgia.

When one turns from the history of philosophy to that of theology, however, one finds grounds to question these prevailing views. I do not have in mind any deep insights about the nature of theology or the superiority of its methods over those of philosophy. Rather, I have in mind a simple historical fact: the bifurcation of the Christian theological tradition into two streams during the early Middle Ages, and the limitation of western philosophy to only one of those two streams. How this came about is, I trust, a relatively familiar story. Sometime around the late fourth century the elites of the Roman Empire largely ceased to be bilingual, with those of the West increasingly reading and speaking only Latin, and those of the East reading and speaking only Greek. The change is illustrated by the career of Augustine, who tells us in the Confessions how much he detested Greek as a boy and how glad he was to put it behind him. His entire theological formation seems to have taken place without reference to the enormous body of Greek theological writing which was at that time the main repository of Christian thought. Although this absence no doubt aided the flowering of Augustine’s originality, it meant that the legacy he bestowed on the western church was remarkably disconnected from the earlier tradition. Meanwhile the Greek tradition continued along its own path, almost wholly oblivious to the enormous importance that Augustine had attained in the West. No works of Augustine were translated into Greek until the thirteenth century, while only a few of the later Greek works—most famously, the Dionysian Corpus and the De Fide Orthodoxa of St. John of Damascus—were translated into Latin. Since these were read outside of their original context, however, they were often misunderstood, particularly at points where they are at odds with Augustine.

Thus the theology which influenced western philosophy was primarily that of Augustine and his Latin successors. One might think that with the recovery of Greek learning in the Renaissance this imbalance would have been corrected. By that time, however, a long succession of councils and popes had made it clear that western Christianity was and must remain fundamentally Augustinian. The Protestant reformers, far from challenging this result, drew on Augustine for their own understandings of predestination and salvation by faith alone. From the point of view of both camps, the Byzantine Christians were schismatics and heretics. So far as philosophy was concerned, the effect of these hard doctrinal lines was that the way of thinking about God typical of Latin scholasticism—as First Cause, actus purus, eternal, unchanging, perfectly simple, and so on, with all of these attributes knowable through “natural reason” alone—remained the starting point of philosophical reflection. Philosophers quarreled over it, tinkered with its details, and in growing numbers wholly rejected it. However, that something like this God is, as it were, the philosophical shape of Biblical religion remained unquestioned, save for a few isolated and eccentric figures such as Kierkegaard.

My goal in this paper is two-fold. First I wish to show that a sharply different way of thinking about God was present within the Christian tradition from an early point, that is, prior to Augustine. Second, I wish to show that this alternative conception is of live philosophical interest. Although I shall be discussing primarily Christian sources, I by no means believe that what I have to say should be of interest only to Christians. The question of what God is like, if there is a God, is of universal human importance. What ought to interest us in any answer is not what religious label it comes under, but whether it is true.

The concept I will focus on is that of the divine energies. In a sense, the notion that God is energy is thoroughly traditional. The term ‘energy’ comes from the Greek energeia, a term coined by Aristotle. Aristotle’s earliest works use it to mean the active exercise of a capacity, such as that for sight or thought, as distinct from the mere possession of the capacity. It is easy to see how from this beginning it came to be used in two otherwise unrelated ways, for activity and for actuality. (Its correlative term dunamis likewise has two meanings, capacity and potentiality.) These two senses, which seem to us quite distinct, sometimes reconverge. In Metaphysics ix.6 Aristotle distinguishes energeia from motion or change (kinēsis) on the grounds that a motion or change is ordered toward some extrinsic end—as housebuilding aims at a house—whereas an energeia is its own end. The examples he gives are seeing, thinking, understanding, living well, and flourishing. Plainly these are activities, but they are activities that are fully actual in the sense that they contain their own end and thus are fully complete at each moment of their existence, rather than requiring a stretch of time. Aristotle illustrates this difference with the so-called “tense test,” namely that at each moment that one sees (or thinks, or so on) one also has seen, whereas at each moment that one builds a house one has not also built a house.

The most interesting application of energeia in this sense is in Aristotle’s theory of the Prime Mover. The Prime Mover is a being whose substance (ousia) is energeia (Met. xii.6 1071b20), in three distinct but related senses. First, since the Prime Mover is posited to explain motion it cannot itself be subject to motion, and thus it has no potentiality to change or be acted upon. Second, because it must be eternally and unchangingly active it can have no unrealized capacities to act; everything it can do it already does, all at once and as a whole. The first point raises the question of how the Prime Mover can move without being moved. Aristotle answers this question with his famous theory that the Prime Mover is self-thinking thought, a being whose “thought is a thinking of thinking” (xii.9 1075b34). This means that there is yet a third sense in which its substance is energeia, this time in the sense of activity rather than actuality: namely, its substance is nothing other than the self-subsistent activity of thought.

In saying this I do not wish to imply that the Prime Mover thinks of nothing but itself and thus has a rather impoverished mind. Aristotle is quite clear that the Prime Mover’s thinking embraces all possible intelligible content; after all, if it did not, there would be a kind of thinking in which it could engage but does not, and it would in that respect fail to be fully actual. In saying that the Prime Mover “thinks itself,” what he means is that, precisely because its act of thinking is fully actual, this act is identical to its object, for there is nothing other than the object—no unrealized potency—constituting the act as what it is. (One might compare Hume’s view that the self is a bundle of impressions and ideas. Aristotle would in general say that our selves are distinct from our actual thought because they include a vast range of unrealized potencies; in the case of the Prime Mover, however, that distinction disappears.) Given the identity of the Prime Mover’s thought with its object, a remarkable result follows: the Prime Mover not only thinks all possible intelligible content, it is all possible intelligible content, existing all at once as a single eternal and fully actual substance. Aristotle does not draw this conclusion explicitly, but later commentators, beginning with Alexander of Aphrodisias, did so, and it became a fundamental ingredient in the synthesis of Plato and Aristotle executed by the Neoplatonists.1

My interest here is not in the Prime Mover as such, but in what all this implies about the meaning of energeia. In the Prime Mover we have a being which both thinks and is all possible intelligible content, existing as a single eternal and unchanging whole. The intelligible structure of things, however, is what makes them what they are. (This is the familiar doctrine that form is substance, articulated particularly in Metaphysics vii.17.) Thus one could equally say that the Prime Mover is present in all things, imparting—or rather, constituting—their intelligible structure, and thus their being. In light of all this, when we say that the Prime Mover is pure energeia, how ought we to translate that term? Activity? Actuality? Plainly the answer is both—and therefore neither. It seems to me that the closest we can come in English is to say that it is pure energy. Specifically, I have in mind the sense given in the American Heritage Dictionary as “power exercised with vigor and determination,” and illustrated with the phrase, “devote one’s energies to a worthy cause.” But of course no illustration drawn from ordinary objects will be adequate to the notion of a being that is pure energy, an energy that constitutes the being of other things.

At the same time, let us note that Aristotle assumes that one can sensibly speak of what it is like to be the Prime Mover. For example, he states that its way of life is “such as the best which we enjoy . . . , since its energy (energeia) is also pleasure,” and he goes on to add that it “is always in that good state in which we sometimes are” (xii.7 1072b14-25). Lest we think of the identification of the Prime Mover with energy as a sort of physicalistic reduction, we must remember that it is a being with mental states in some sense analogous to our own. That there is such an analogy is presupposed in the identification of its activity as thought (noēsis), for thinking is something in which we too engage, although in an incomparably more partial and limited way.

Now I wish to fast-forward about four centuries to the Apostle Paul. During the intervening period the metaphysical associations that Aristotle gave to energeia were largely ignored. In popular usage energeia simply meant activity. However, even in this sense it is natural to speak of the energeia of God or the gods, and one finds such references among Hellenistic historians and within Alexandrian Judaism. This raises the question of how the divine energeia relates to our own. What happens when a god wishes to perform something through a human being? Does the divine energeia simply overpower the human? Or is there instead some sort cooperation or synthesis, and if so how are we to conceive it?

An answer to these questions is implied in the writings of St. Paul. I do not wish to suggest that Paul explicitly addressed the divine energeia as a theological topic, but only that he uses the term often enough, and in a sufficient variety of contexts, that we can determine what his answer to these questions would have been. For example, Paul refers to himself as “striving according to Christ's working (or energy, energeia), which is being made effective (or actualized, energoumenēn) in me” (Col. 1:29).2 Here it would seem that the divine energy serves two distinct functions. It is at work within Paul, transforming him, so that from this standpoint he is the object of God's activity; at the same time it finds expression in Paul's own activity, so that he may also be seen as the agent or conduit through whom God is working. Yet nothing in such external direction prevents his actions from remaining his own. It would be possible to fill out in detail the events in Paul's life that this passage alludes to, for he has left us some vivid descriptions of his various trials and exertions. Not only do they exhibit full engagement and self-control, they do so more than did his actions prior to his conversion. As the story is told in Acts, Saul was trapped in self-deception until God set him free on the road to Damascus. Now the divine energy that works in him is also his own, more truly than anything he did was his own before he ceased to “kick against the pricks” (Acts 9:5).

The belief that God is active in human beings is, of course, deeply rooted in the Old Testament. There it is usually God's Word or Spirit that is the vehicle of divine indwelling, ways of speaking that tend to suggest control from without. Paul's use of energeia and related terms, such as sunergein (to cooperate) and sunergos (co-worker), shifts the emphasis from one of external control to one of cooperation.3 However, the term ‘cooperation’ can be misleading if it suggests that there are here two equal agents who simply choose to work together. In the present case, since one is the Creator and the other a creature, the action of the latter depends for its reality upon the active support of the former. I take it that Paul interprets this notion in light of the common experience of feeling that one’s actions were not truly one’s own while one was mired in sin and self-deception. On his view, synergy, the cooperation of God and man, is neither a symmetrical relation nor one in which the divine overpowers and replaces the human. It is rather one in which the human becomes fully human by embracing the divine. This is not a radically new idea; something like it can be found in the Old Testament, as well as in other religious traditions.4 What is new is the use of the vocabulary of energeia to express it.

The last stage preparatory to the thought of the Greek Fathers was pagan Neoplatonism. Let us return to the philosophical tradition to ask precisely how the Neoplatonists attempted to synthesize the thought of Plato and Aristotle. One criticism which might be raised against Aristotle’s theology is that it has no room for a proper sense of the mystery of the divine. After all, if the Prime Mover is the summation of all intelligible content, what he is can in principle be grasped by the act of thinking (noēsis), however far our own thinking falls short of that ideal. In Plato there are hints of a sharply different picture. The famous depiction of the Good in the Republic as “beyond being” could be taken—and was taken by the Neoplatonists—as meaning that the Good is beyond noēsis as well, notwithstanding that Plato himself seems to regard it as an intelligible object. This development was spurred by the association of the Good with the One of the First Hypothesis of the Parmenides. In this section of the dialogue, Parmenides gives the strictest possible interpretation to the notion of unity. He concludes that the One has no limits or shape, is neither at rest nor in motion, is neither like nor unlike anything else, and finally that it does not partake of being, has no name, and is not an object of knowledge, perception, or opinion (Parm. 137c-142a). To think that the Good of the Republic should be identified with this wholly unnamable and unknowable no-thing is certainly a remarkable idea. However, it is worth remembering that in his unwritten doctrines Plato posited a One which (in conjunction with the Indefinite Dyad) is the source of the Forms. Aristotle tells us that some in the Academy, perhaps including Plato himself, identified this One with the Good (Met. xiv.4). Later interpreters, putting these various fragments together, concluded that the One of the unwritten doctrines, the One of the Parmenides, and the Good of the Republic, are all one and the same.

Here we have, then, a first principle sharply different from that of Aristotle: unknowable, unnamable, the source of being for other things, while itself “beyond being.” Yet because it is also the Good, all things in some inchoate way seek it. The philosopher who saw a way to harmonize this Platonic conception of the first principle with that of Aristotle was Plotinus. Plotinus identified the One (or Good) as the ultimate first principle, and Aristotle’s Prime Mover he rechristened as Intellect (nous), the first hypostasis after the One. The One is no-thing, not any particular being because it is the source of all particular being. In the overflow of its goodness it gives rise to Intellect, which is all things inasmuch as it is present in all as their being, intelligibility, life, and other perfections. The object of Intellect’s thought is in a sense the One, but since Intellect cannot apprehend the One in its unity it instead refracts it into a vast array of separate intelligibles (noēta), which are the Forms. By relating the One and Intellect in this way, Plotinus established a careful balance between the apophatic—that is, the denial to God of all predicates—and the kataphatic—that is, the ascription to God of all predicates.

The most striking point for our purposes is the use that Plotinus made of the concept of energeia. I argued earlier that the Prime Mover is pure energy, an energy that constitutes the being of other things. It is natural to ask whether this conception is truly coherent; that is, whether an energy that is not the energy of something, some active agent that is not itself simply identical with the energy, actually makes sense. Plotinus answers this question with what is known as the “theory of two acts.” Intellect comes forth from the One precisely as its external act or energy, what Plotinus refers to as its energeia ek tēs ousias, the energy that comes forth from the substance. So far, then, the answer is that Intellect as an energy is dependent upon the One. However, Plotinus is too deeply steeped in Aristotle to think that substance is not itself a kind of energeia (a point emphasized in Metaphysics viii.2). Hence he also posits an energeia tēs ousias, an internal act or energy constituting the substance, of which the external act is a kind of image. His favorite illustration of this is fire, which has an internal heat that constitutes its substance and an external heat that it gives forth into the world, but the distinction is meant to be perfectly general. Ultimately it turns out that the internal act of all things is some form of contemplation, for all things are what they are by contemplating their prior in the chain of emanation.

We now have enough background in hand to see what use the Greek Fathers made of these ideas. The provocation that caused them to develop a more or less philosophical doctrine of God was the Arianism of Eunomius around the mid-fourth century. Eunomius had a simple argument that the Son is not God. It was that God is ingenerate or unbegotten, and furthermore this is not merely a privative attribute or human conception, but the divine substance or essence (ousia) itself. Plainly such an ousia cannot be shared with another by begetting. Hence the Son, who is begotten of the Father, cannot be of one essence (homoousion) with the Father. As for terms such as ‘life,’ ‘light,’ and ‘power,’ which in the New Testament are used of both the Father and the Son, Eunomius argued that they must be taken differently in the two cases. Since the divine essence is utterly simple, “every word used to signify the essence of the Father is equivalent in force of meaning to ‘the unbegotten’ (to agennēton).”5

The task of replying to Eunomius fell to St. Basil of Caesarea. Basil objected both to the assumption that the divine ousia can be known and to assumption that, because of divine simplicity, all non-privative terms said of God are identical in meaning. He writes:

"We say that we know the greatness of God, His power, His wisdom, His goodness, His providence over us, and the justness of His judgment, but not His very essence (ousia) . . . But God, he [Eunomius] says, is simple, and whatever attribute of Him you have reckoned as knowable is of His essence. The absurdities involved in this sophism are innumerable. When all these high attributes have been enumerated, are they all names of one essence? And is there the same mutual force in His awfulness and His loving-kindness, His justice and His creative power, His foreknowledge and His requital, His majesty and His providence? In mentioning any of these, do we declare His essence?"

The question, then, is how to characterize the distinction between that in God which cannot be known (the divine ousia) and that which can be known, such as the divine power, wisdom, and goodness. Basil’s answer emerges in the continuation of the passage:

"The energies are various, and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach."6

As I understand him, Basil is here applying to the Christian God the distinction between ousia and energeia found in the philosophical tradition, and particularly in Plotinus.

His doing so raises at least two distinct questions. One is that of the ontological relationship between the essence and the energies. In Plotinus the external act of the One comes forth as the distinct hypostasis of Intellect. Is something similar true here in Basil? The other question is that of divine freedom, or, more precisely, the capacity to do otherwise. In Plotinus the One could not do otherwise than produce Intellect. Of course Plotinus sees this fact as not an impairment but rather an expression of the One’s freedom, since nothing other than the One’s own nature determines it to act as it does. By contrast, in the Christian tradition God is thought of as sufficiently like a person that in at least some cases, such as the creation of the world, he could do otherwise. Should we say, then, that his energies could be different than they are?

Let us begin with the first question. Plainly for Basil the energies are not a separate hypostasis, or series of hypostases. Rather, they are acts which God performs. Many scholars would in fact prefer to translate energeia in the passage that I have quoted as ‘operation,’ and to take Basil as saying only that God’s operations come down to us. I believe that the history of the distinction between the divine ousia and energeia, as I have sketched it here, argues against such a view. I find support at this point in an interesting semantic argument presented by Basil’s brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who defended Basil against a reply by Eunomius. Gregory adopts the view, which was widespread in antiquity, that a name is in some way indicative of the form or intrinsic characteristics of the thing named. Since God has no form, he has no name in the proper sense. Instead terms such as ‘god’ (theos) name the divine energeia of oversight or governance. (Gregory derives theos from theaomai, behold.) Now it is plain that by energeia here Gregory has in mind an operation. However, it cannot be only an operation, for then in speaking of God we would be speaking of an operation of God—that is, an operation of an operation, and so on in an infinite regress. Somehow by energeia Gregory and Basil would appear to understand both that which God is, and that which God performs.

I believe that this is perfectly intelligible in light of the history that we have traced. From the time of its introduction by Aristotle, energeia always indicated the energy which God both is and does. Plotinus refined this picture by distinguishing between internal and external act, but he did not overthrow it. Basil and Gregory in their turn revise Plotinus by rejecting the distinction of hypostasis between Intellect and the One. For them the relevant distinction is rather that between God as he exists within himself and is known only to himself, and God as he manifests himself to others. The former is the divine ousia, the latter the divine energies. It is important to note that both are God, but differently conceived: God as unknowable and as knowable, as wholly beyond us and as within our reach.

To put the distinction this way, however, could be misleading if it suggests something like a fixed and permanent boundary. The Cappadocians—Basil, Gregory, and their colleague, St. Gregory Nazianzen—think instead of that which is unknowable in God as a kind of receding horizon. Precisely the fact that we cannot know God as he knows himself draws us forward to seek to know him ever more deeply. Gregory Nazianzen expresses vividly this sense of a longing that is always both being satisfied and seeking satisfaction:

In Himself [God] sums up and contains all being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great sea of being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily—not from the things directly concerning Him, but from the things around Him; one image being got from one source and another from another, and combined into some sort of presentation of the truth, which escapes us when we have caught it, and takes to flight when we have conceived it, blazing forth upon our master-part, even when that is cleansed, as the lightning flash which will not stay its course does upon our sight—in order as I conceive by that part of it which we can comprehend to draw us to itself . . . and by that part of it which we cannot comprehend to move our wonder, and as an object of wonder to become more an object of desire, and being desired to purify, and by purifying to make us like God.7

The “things around God” are, I take it, another name for the divine energies. Two points are here especially worth noting. One is the necessity for the play of images, “one image being got from one source and another from another,” in order to form anything like an adequate conception of God. Here we find the underlying philosophical rationale for the immense variety of liturgical poetry and iconographic expression within the eastern Christian tradition. The other point is the sequence leading from wonder, to desire, to purification, and finally to homoiōsis theōi, likeness to God. A philosophical reader cannot help but notice here the echoes of Plato and Aristotle, as for instance of the famous statement of Aristotle that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder, and of the Platonic emphasis on the need for purification of the soul, and of the theme found in both authors that the human telos is achieving a likeness to God.

Nonetheless, the fundamental distinction between God as He is known to Himself and as He is known to us was derived by the Cappadocians not from philosophical sources, but from Biblical revelation. Most obviously, it was inspired by the encounter of Moses with God on Mount Sinai in Exodus 33. There God warns Moses that “thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” Nonetheless he continues: “it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen” (33:22-23). Gregory Nazianzen takes this passage as a model for understanding his own experience. In doing so he draws a distinction much like that we have seen in Basil between God as he is known to himself and as he “reaches to us”:

"What is this that has happened to me, O friends and initiates and fellow lovers of the truth? I was running up to lay hold on God, and thus I went up into the mount, and drew aside the curtain of the cloud, and entered away from matter and material things, and as far as I could I withdrew within myself. And then when I looked up I scarce saw the back parts of God, although I was sheltered by the rock, the Word that was made flesh for us. And when I looked a little closer I saw, not the first and unmingled nature, known to itself—to the Trinity, I mean; not that which abides within the first veil and is hidden by the Cherubim, but only that nature which at last even reaches to us. And that is, so far as I can tell, the majesty, or as holy David calls it, the glory which is manifested among the creatures, which it has produced and governs. For these [i.e., the majesty and glory] are the back parts of God, which He leaves behind Him as tokens of Himself like the shadows and reflections of the sun in the water, which show the sun to our weak eyes because we cannot look at the sun itself."

More broadly, the Cappadocians took all the Biblical theophanies—including, most famously, the burning bush of Exodus 3—as pointing to a similar distinction. In such events God is known precisely as unknowable; it is the very extremity of his condescension in appearing and making himself known which underscores the deep chasm between his mode of being and our own.9

In light of this Biblical background, the notion of theōsis or deification may seem like a foreign importation. It is at this point that the Pauline usage of the concept of energeia becomes crucially important. An especially important passage was I Corinthians 12. There Paul speaks of the “gifts of the Spirit” as including both miraculous powers such as prophecy, speaking in tongues, and the discernment of spirits, and enduring states of soul such as faith and wisdom. Significantly, he describes these gifts as energēmata (works performed) of the Spirit, and the Spirit as “working” (energōn) them. Basil in his work On the Holy Spirit develops this notion to understand such gifts as a form of divine energy. He writes:

"As is the power of seeing in the healthy eye, so is the energy (energeia) of the Spirit in the purified soul . . . And as the skill in him who has acquired it, so is the grace of the Spirit ever present in the recipient, though not continuously active (energousa). For as the skill is potentially in the artisan, but only in operation when he is working in accordance with it, so also the Spirit is present with those who are worthy, but works (energei) as need requires, in prophecies, or in healings, or in some other carrying into effect (energēmasin) of His powers."10

This passage is almost Aristotelian in its distinction between an enduring state of the soul (in Aristotelian terms, first actuality) and its active expression (second actuality). However, for Basil these are two different forms of energy, the one latent and the other active. Thus Basil understands participation in the divine energy as an ongoing state of the soul that finds expression, as need be, in particular acts. This is what is meant by deification in the Greek patristic tradition: an ongoing and progressively growing participation in the divine energies.

It is worth noting how this understanding of participation in the divine avoids a certain cul-de-sac present in pagan Neoplatonism. For Plotinus we do not so much participate in Intellect—much less the One—as rediscover our true identity as Intellect. We are each in our truest core an unfallen intellect (nous) which shares in the unity-in-multiplicity of Intellect, much as the light of each lamp in a room shares in the room’s light, or each theorem of a science shares in the integral meaning of the whole. In rediscovering our true identity as nous, we leave behind the accidents of memory and personality that individuate us here below in order to merge into the pristine clarity of perfect noetic activity. Later Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Proclus were dissatisfied by this starkly impersonal conception of our relationship to the divine, and attempted in various ways to change it. For the Cappadocians, however, such a problem does not even arise. The distinction of essence and energy enables them to understand human-divine communion as taking place within the sphere of joint personal activity. In coming to be deified we share progressively in God’s activity, but without losing our distinct identity. Indeed, much like St. Paul, they believe that we only fully achieve our own identity when we make our own activity that of God. Such synergy is, in their view, a way of knowing God that is neither inferential, nor noetic in the Aristotelian sense, nor a matter simply of feeling or intuition. It is the knowledge that comes through sharing actively in the work of another, and thereby coming to know him as the author of that work.

From all of this it is clear how the second of our two questions, that of whether the divine energies could be different than they are, is to be answered. If they are the sphere of personal action in the way that I have described, then at least some of them could be different; otherwise they would be a kind of emanation rather than the free acts of a free Creator. However, the same constraint means that there are limits to the ways that they could be different. The range of acts that would constitute a legitimate expression of my character is quite large, yet I trust that at least some acts, such as murder, adultery, or treason, fall beyond it. In the same way, if the divine energies are to manifest the divine ousia, then although they can vary enormously they must fall within the range that is properly related to the divine ousia (whatever the ousia might be!) as expression to source. For example, God need not have created, and given that he did create he might have created the world differently than he did; furthermore, even given that he created this world he might act within it differently, for example, by distributing different spiritual gifts. Thus many of the divine energies, including those of creation, providence, and foreknowledge, as well as the gifts of the Spirit, could be different or could not exist at all. On the other hand, if he acts at all his action cannot fail to be good. Hence if there are any energies at all, goodness is among them. The same would seem to be true of wisdom, being, power, life, love, holiness, beauty, virtue, immortality, eternity, infinity, and simplicity, all of which the Cappadocians (or other Fathers after them) list among the divine energies.

To know whether these energies are necessary, then, we must ask whether it is possible that God not act at all—that is, whether he could be wholly without energy (anenergēton). So far as I know this question was not raised in such terms. However, a question very close to it—that of whether there would be divine energies even apart from creation—was at the center of a celebrated controversy in the fourteenth century. Certain monks known as hesychasts claimed to have been granted a vision of what they called the uncreated light. Whether it is possible that there be such a light, and if so what is its nature, became the focus of an intense debate. Ultimately it was decided that there is an uncreated light and that it is simply the visible form of the divine energy. This means that the divine energy is present in some form with the godhead from all eternity, quite independently of the act of creation. That in turn implies that the divine energy is not (as one might otherwise be tempted to suppose) simply the way in which God manifests himself to creatures. It is that, to be sure, but even without creatures there would still be an eternal self-manifestation within the godhead. Within a Christian context it is natural to understand this as the mutual love and self-revelation of the persons of the Trinity. There are hints of such a view among the earlier Greek Fathers, beginning with Gregory of Nyssa, but unfortunately the debate over the divine energies in the fourteenth century failed to make these connections explicit. The end of Byzantine civilization not long thereafter prevented any final clarification.

Where does all of this leave us? It seems to me that the Greek patristic conception of God has a number of advantages over that found in Augustine and his successors. In the first place, it succeeds in incorporating the apophatic approach to God in a way that western theology does not. The divine ousia is beyond any act of naming or conceptual thought, known only by actively sharing in its energetic expression. Such a view is in keeping with both the Biblical theophanies and the New Testament concept of synergy. It is also philosophically well grounded, for as Plotinus saw, if God is the source of form he must himself possess no form. Yet if he is the source of form he must also be present in things as their form, the intelligible structure which makes them what they are. Whereas Plotinus separates these two functions into distinct hypostases, the Greek Fathers consider them two ways of understanding the one God.

One might expect that Augustine, with his knowledge of Plotinus, would have followed a similar path. In fact he did not. Augustine characteristically thinks of God as Truth itself, the Truth that is present to our minds enabling us to know. In line with the classical identification of thinking and being, he also describes God as ipsum esse, being itself. In essence this is the Plotinian understanding of Intellect. Augustine has no use for the other side of Plotinus, the understanding of God as beyond being and beyond intellect. Granted, he acknowledges that in this life we cannot know the divine essence, but that is a limitation of our present bodily existence. Moses and St. Paul are for Augustine paradigms of persons who for a brief time were taken out of their bodies into a state of rapture, enjoying a direct vision of the divine essence. The blessed in heaven, being finally removed from this life, will enjoy such a vision for all eternity. Aquinas adopts this idea and integrates it within his own Aristotelian framework. He argues that as pure act God must be intrinsically intelligible, however much our present limitations prevent us from understanding him. Drawing on Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, as well as Augustine, he identifies the telos of human existence as the intellectual apprehension of the divine essence.

These differences regarding apophaticism point to a second major area of difference, the roles that the two traditions assign to personal activity. I have pointed out how the Greek Fathers drew on the Pauline concept of synergy to see the human telos as an ever deepening participation in the divine energies. Such participation begins in this present life and engages the body as much as the soul. On this view, our present acts of obedience to God, seeking him in prayer, and sharing in his life through worship and the sacraments are the sort of thing that is ultimately constitutive of our final beatitude. Our final state will be purer and richer, of course, but it will be recognizably in continuity with these present ways of knowing God. On the Augustinian-Thomistic view, by contrast, prayer, obedience, and the sacraments are related to the human end instrumentally rather than constitutively. According to Aquinas, in the afterlife God will infuse the blessed with the lumen gloriae, the “light of glory” that will enable them to apprehend the divine essence. All of our present acts are designed to bring us to that point. The body has no real role in the beatific vision, and indeed Aquinas states explicitly that the resurrection of the body is not necessary for beatitude and does nothing to increase its intensity. So far as I can see, the same is true of our memory and other personal characteristics. Since the beatific vision is strictly an act of intellect, it is no more a personal act than is the Aristotelian theōria upon which it is modeled.

Finally I will touch briefly on a third area of difference, one that is large and deserves more careful exploration than I can give it here. Much of traditional natural theology is built around the concept of divine simplicity. Augustine and Aquinas have different ways of reaching this point, but they agree that all non-relational and non-privative predicates said of God are different ways of signifying the divine essence. Part of what this implies is that God’s will is identical to his essence. Of the many difficulties to which such a view gives rise, I will mention two. The first pertains to divine freedom. If God is free in the way traditionally assumed in Christianity, he could will differently than he does. Does this mean that in such a case his essence would be different? And if so, how different could it be? Assuming that there is at least some aspect of the essence that could never be different—say, divine goodness—then there must be a distinction within the essence between that which could be different and that which could not. Surely, however, if anything is contrary to divine simplicity, it is the presence of such a distinction within the divine essence!

The second difficulty pertains to reciprocity between God and creatures. If the divine will is identical to the divine essence, it would seem that the divine will cannot in any way be a response to creatures’ own initiative, for in that case creatures would contribute to determining the divine essence. Aquinas recognizes this problem, if it is one, and bites the bullet: his position is that God’s will is not in any way a response to creatures but is determined solely by God. It is hard to see how most traditional religious practice, including petitionary prayer, sacrifice, and even simply the desire to please God, can make sense on such a view. Indeed, as Aquinas recognizes, on this view the Augustinian interpretation of predestination is not only true but is necessarily true, since God could not create creatures who are capable in any way of affecting his judgments regarding salvation and damnation.11 Yet the Augustinian position began precisely as the attempt to exalt the divine will over all necessity. Such are the tangles one is led to by divine simplicity.

It is problems such as these that led Pascal to exclaim that the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Augustinian-Thomistic God, who is perfectly simple and fully actual, seems to be locked within a box from which he cannot escape in order to interact in any meaningful way with his creatures. Plainly there needs to be some other way of understanding divine simplicity, one that does not involve these unacceptable limitations. Such a way is provided by the distinction of the divine essence and energies. The Greek Fathers think of simplicity as itself a divine energy, one of the ways in which God manifests himself in his activity. As with any energy, God is both simplicity itself and beyond simplicity as its source. Just as the sun is simple and yet possesses an indefinite multitude of rays, so nothing about divine simplicity prevents God from possessing an indefinite multitude of energies. Likewise nothing prevents these energies from being affected by creatures. The energies are precisely the realm of reciprocity, that in which God shares himself with creatures and summons them to offer themselves to him.

Undoubtedly many questions remain to be answered. I hope I have said enough, however, to make good on my original claims that we have here a way of thinking about God that is both deeply traditional and worthy of serious philosophical attention. In closing I will only say that it seems to me that the long movement of philosophy away from God has been, for the most part, a movement away from the God of Augustine and western theology. Will we find that all the while that we have been fleeing from the God of the West we have in fact been approaching the God of the East? That is a question that I invite you to ponder.

Colloquium on David Bradshaw’s book, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom, Cambridge: CUP 2004.

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Has Modern Conservatism Become a Cult?

Friday, October 2, 2009
Joe Carter
First Things

Mark Thompson found an interesting quote that is relevant to the current healthcare debate:

"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. . . . Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken, . . ."

Here’s a sign of the times: If a libertarian cable TV personality or a conservative talk radio host were to hear this quote they would likely accuse its author of espousing socialism. No doubt they’d be shocked to find the passage is found in their favorite anti-socialist tome, F.A.Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Hayek is more quoted than read. Despite being on the short list of leading intellectual heroes for the American right, few conservatives or libertarians are all that familiar with his actual views on classical liberalism and free-market capitalism. Instead, as Thompson notes in his post, the rhetoric of the right reveals that we are more influenced by Ayn Rand than Hayek:

"This is why, for all the bluster about “death panels,” and health care reform being an irreversible step on the road to socialism, it is the Randian vision of the world that animating the Right’s position on reform at the expense of the far more rigorous, thoughtful, and classically liberal vision of Hayek. Were the influence of these visions reversed, we would have a situation where the Right would actually make a good-faith negotiating partner on the issue of health care reform rather than leaving it up to liberals to negotiate reform with spineless and philosophically unmoored centrists."

I think this is a very astute point that cuts to the heart of the problem on the right. The libertarians often prop up Hayek as their hero while we traditionalist conservatives like to trot out Edmund Burke. But the truth is the vast majority of the right subscribes to a form of libertarian populism inflected with social conservative attachments—an unholy hybrid of Ayn Rand, William Jennings Bryan, and Morton Downey, Jr.

One of the key concepts in this weird era—adopted from Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged—is “Going Galt.” From Tea Party protestors to think-tank intellectuals, folks talk about Going Galt without the slightest hint of irony. The problem is not such much that it’s a silly hollow threat, but that it exemplifies a trait that is prevalent in conservative movement: The embrace of personality driven ideas that are often incompatible with some of our most basic philosophical, religious, or political beliefs.

This lack of reflection about how foundational views mesh is one of the most significant failings of the modern right. During the Cold War-era people who held incompatible views—such as libertarianism and social conservatism—embraced a limited form of “fusionism” in order to provide a united front against a common enemy—communism.

Today, the common enemy is liberalism and the fusionism occurs not between disparate groups but within an individual. People who would laugh at the absurdity of a “Christian Muslim” seem not to recognize the similar incongruity between being a follower of Christ and an acolyte of Ayn Rand.

The American right has begun to mimic the left in adopting a perverse form of political syncretism. A decade ago we’d mock well-intentioned, but misguided, liberals for being so intent on advancing their cause that they’d gloss over the views of their nutcase, extremist radical allies. Now, we do the same thing without giving it a second thought. Indeed, if you point out that there may be something wrong with embracing the loony ideas of fringe cultists—directly as with Ayn Rand, or indirectly, as with W. Cleon Skousen—you’ll be accused of being, depending on how polite your accuser, everything from an elitist to a socialist dhimmi.

Despite the fact that these well-meaning conservatives fail to exhibit any discernment about the views they are imbibing, they become terribly offended when you question how they could accept such nonsense.

Their defense tends to be based on a variation of a common theme: They don’t actually subscribe to those crazy views (at least not all of them), they just align themselves with a personality that does. It’s politics by proxy with a Machiavellian cult of personality twist. If any victories against liberal elites can be attributed to our favorite TV personality/failed politicians/radio host/third-rate novelist, then that cult figure, their views, their motives, and their actions, are provided blanket immunity against criticism.

These St. Georges slaying the liberal dragons are placed beyond reproach. You are no more allowed to question the right’s preferred cult of personality—CoulterHannityBeckLimbaughPaulLevinRandPalinWhoever—than liberals can challenge Obama. Even thinking contrary thoughts about these figures is enough reason for them to question your conservatism (if not your patriotism, manhood, and love for small animals).

The result is that the conservative movement is becoming increasingly ineffective, insular, and irrational—in other words, we’re becoming the mirror image of the political left.

This reliance on personalities rather than ideas is particularly worrisome. Conservatism has never exactly been a bookish movement. And since the rise of talk radio during the Clinton-era, we’ve become accustomed to having ideas and issues presented to us in the form of pre-digested talking points.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, does it? Isn’t it possible that we could create a movement where people read books—real books, not insta-books ghostwritten for a former Morning Zoo DJs or brick-sized political novels about narcissistic atheist industrialists? Is it too much to ask that ideas be presented to us in a sober manner rather than like a dramatic reading of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels? Shouldn’t we hold our pundits and politicians to the same standard of behavior—no screaming, lying, talking gibberish, or fake crying on national television—that we expect of our children?

If not then the movement has morphed into something beyond recognition. I don’t know what this syncretic cult of libertarian populism should be called, but its certainly unworthy of the label “conservative.”

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Late Roman Imperial Seal of Manuel I Comnenos Found

This is a photo of the lead seal of Roman Emperor Manuel I Comnenos (1143 - 1180) that was discovered recently in Lindelbrunn, Germany. It depicts the emperor with the inscription: "Master Manuel - the Porphyrogenitos".

Read more here (in Greek).

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Teleturgics 101: How Not To Baptize :-)

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The Pop-Culture Wars

by Carson Holloway
October 13, 2009

If we take seriously what is said by Plato and Aristotle, then we must also pay attention to what is being said by the likes of Taylor Swift and Kanye West.

A few weeks ago, rapper Kanye West made headlines by crashing Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Swift had won the prize for best female video, but West, believing that Beyoncé should have won, took the stage and interrupted Swift to make his opinion known. Confronted with a torrent of uniformly condemnatory public commentary, West soon apologized. In all of the discussion his actions provoked, however, little thought was given to the significance of the connection between West’s self-absorbed music and his boorish behavior.

There was a time in America, not too long ago, when this question might have been raised. Over a period of some decades America’s cultural politics involved a debate between the left and the right over whether some popular music tended to weaken society by eroding standards of personal conduct. This controversy extends at least as far back as the rise of jazz, but it gained intensity with the rise and progress of forms of rock—and, later on, rap—that seemed to celebrate liberation from self-control, especially in relation to sex, drugs, and even violence. Some conservatives have held that such music poses a serious threat to society. Such music, they contended, glorifies and thereby encourages self-indulgent and violent behavior. Yet a free society requires citizens with a capacity for self-control. In the absence of the voluntary public order such citizens support, the alternatives are either disorder or government-coerced order. Thus the worst popular music educates the young not for free and responsible citizenship but for anarchy or despotism—or, more likely, anarchy followed by despotism. In contrast, liberals have seen the great threat to freedom not in such music but in the conservative critics’ reaction to it. Pop music, they suggested, is in fact merely harmless fun. There is, after all, no scientific proof that such music produces violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. Those who think otherwise threaten freedom by their illiberal and un-American interest in regulating other people’s private pleasures.

This argument was alive and well as recently as ten years ago, when troubled artists like Marilyn Manson and Eminem rose to prominence producing troubling music that expressed and celebrated their extreme loves and hatreds. The dispute over the moral and cultural consequences of pop music, however, was soon crowded out of the public discourse by matters of national security. The terrorist attacks of 9-11, and the subsequent American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, turned the minds of Americans away from the culture wars for a time. And, when the culture wars resumed later in the decade, they took the form of the struggle over same-sex marriage. The musical front in the culture wars, it seems, has been abandoned by both sides.

An argument, however, can be forgotten without deserving to be forgotten. In fact, the debate between left and right over the morality of popular music touches upon issues of the deepest significance and gives expression to concerns that were explored with the utmost seriousness at the very beginnings of the tradition of western political philosophy. When conservatives and liberals argued over whether pop music could transform the character of individuals—and hence, eventually, of whole generations and of society itself—they were not, as contemporary social scientists often contended, pursuing a diversionary debate about merely “symbolic” issues. They were rather disputing a question that thinkers like Plato and Aristotle had treated as inseparable from their inquiry into the best political order. To be sure, the contemporary debate was often characterized more by passion than insight. This, however, is not a reason to dismiss its central concerns as fundamentally irrational, but instead to turn for instruction to the classical political philosophers.

What, then, is the classical teaching on the moral and political significance of music? And what light does that teaching shed on the recurring (although presently suspended) American argument over popular music?

Surprisingly, to us, the ancients not only thought music worthy of serious attention, they in fact considered it an issue of supreme political importance. Plato’s Socrates, for example, suggests, in the Republic’s discussion of the political institutions of the best city, that among these the rearing in music is “most sovereign.” He later adds that the guardians of the best regime “must beware of change to a strange form of music . . . For never are the ways of music changed without the greatest political laws being moved.” Even more surprisingly, Plato and Aristotle hold the primary preoccupation of the contemporary debate to be of mere secondary importance. For they insist that the political importance of music arises not only from the message of the lyrics of a song but also from the emotional and moral power of the music itself. Hence the ancients’ constant emphasis on “rhythm,” “harmony,” and “tune.”

Plato and Aristotle attribute this great political importance to musical rhythm and harmony because of their power to contribute to the fulfillment of the primary aim of political life. This aim, as Aristotle states it, is to “produce a certain character in the citizens, namely, to make them virtuous, and capable of performing noble actions.” Yet, he continues, music obviously “contributes something to virtue” because “it is evident through many things” that “we become of a certain quality in our characters on account of it.”

Music, the ancients contend, is an “imitative” art. That is, it depicts the various passions and states of character of which human beings are capable. Again, Aristotle: “in rhythms and tunes there are likenesses particularly close to the genuine natures of anger and gentleness, and further of courage and moderation and all of the things opposite to these and of the other things pertaining to character.” Such images do not merely present themselves to the soul but in fact impress themselves upon it. In the case of the extremely impressionable souls of the young, moreover, the mark left by such images is apt to be lasting. Indeed, the ancients attribute this character-forming power to artistic images generally. Hence Socrates’ concern in the Republic that the young, by “grazing” on “licentious, illiberal, and graceless” works of art, will create some great evil in their souls, and his hope that, in contrast, they will, if surrounded by graceful images, be led to “likeness and friendship as well as accord.” Of all such images, however, music is by far the most powerful. Rhythm and harmony, Socrates contends, “most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man most graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite.”

The ancients appear particularly interested in using music to foster a kind of moderation. Music’s ability to engage the passions, it seems, includes a capacity to calm them. Thus Aristotle’s concern to exclude from education those forms of music that are “frenzied and passionate” and instead to emphasize music capable of putting us “in a middling and settled state.” The calm disposition of the passions fostered by the proper rearing in music prepares one for the activities of virtue because, as Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, one’s capacity for moral reasoning and choice is disrupted by excessive passion. Aristotle argues that living virtuously requires prudence, the twofold ability to discern the first principles of action, the moral virtues, and to discover by calculation how, in particular circumstances, these virtues can be realized by particular actions.

With regard to the former capacity, Aristotle notes that the Greek term for moderation literally signifies “preserving prudence.” This is so, he argues, because moderation in fact preserves our understanding of what is good, since pleasure and pain, which accompany the passions, tend to pervert or destroy our beliefs concerning moral virtue. Aristotle also indicates that the latter capacity is likewise impeded by passion. In the Ethics he contends that there are those who see the goodness of the virtues but who nonetheless fail to live them in their particular circumstances because when under the influence of passion they, in a sense, forget their principles, like men who are asleep, mad, or drunk. It is in this light that we can understand Aristotle’s comment, in the Politics, that the proper rearing in music makes one capable not only of judging noble tunes, but even of judging the noble things themselves.

Looking even higher, the ancients go so far as to suggest that the proper rearing in music can prepare the soul for philosophy. How can music accomplish this? Plato and Aristotle both suggest that excessive passion is an impediment to philosophic activity no less than to moral activity. Hence their moderation-inducing music paves the way for philosophy by quieting the desires that distract the soul from the search for truth Moreover, and more positively, music can foster in the soul an attraction to the truth that philosophy seeks. The graceful music of the best city presents the young soul with a kind of intelligible and beautiful order, and, by its grace and the natural pleasure that accompanies it, such music fosters a lasting taste for such beautiful order. Yet this ultimately is the object of philosophic longing, according to the Republic: the philosopher, Socrates says, keeps company with the divine and orderly, the beautiful order of the cosmos.

What, the modern reader might wonder, does all this have to do with politics? The ancient account offers two answers. To begin with, Plato and Aristotle contend that the kind of character fostered by the proper rearing in music tends to support a decent and free public order. The Republic’s music education is said to produce gentlemen, men who are attracted to virtue and repelled by vice. Thus a city with good music education will not have to bother with a multitude of laws regulating conflicts among the citizens. Absent the moderate and gentlemanly disposition fostered by the right music, however, the preservation of peace is very difficult. One of the themes of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is the close connection between immoderation and injustice: the man with excessive passions eventually must turn to unjust means to satisfy them. Thus the character formed by the lack of passion-taming music, or, worse, by a rearing in passion-inflaming music, leads necessarily to widespread injustice, thence to conflict among the citizens, and thence to the multiplication of laws in a futile attempt to solve these problems.

Furthermore, the concern with musical character formation is political to the ancients because to them the political is above all not so much that which conduces to public order (as important as that is) as that which conduces to human excellence, both moral and intellectual, and hence to human happiness. This is an important point, because it reminds us that the music education they offer moderates the passions not by artificially constraining them but instead by eliciting other longings, for moral nobility and philosophic insight. Such longings are, for the ancients, not only natural but at the core of human nature. Intellect, with its capacity to contemplate and to act in the light of the true and the noble, is our “true self,” says Aristotle. But this true self can only come into its own with the assistance of music. Thus for the ancients music, no less than politics itself, is essential to our becoming fully human, and fully humanly happy.

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Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics and, most recently, of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press). This article is the first in a two-part series.

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Homosexuality 'not a civil right'

[It's astonishing to me that California would celebrate a man like Harvey Milk. Granted, the movie had some superb acting and Sean Penn may have deserved his academy award, but it also left out a lot of truth. For the truth about Harvey Milk, see the video here. - J.S.]

Jim Brown
OneNewsNow
10/14/2009

The chairman of the Orange County (California) Board of Education says she is "appalled" that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is asking schools to set aside a day to honor a controversial homosexual activist.

Schwarzenegger signed a bill earlier this week creating an annual day of recognition for Harvey Milk. The designation of each May 22 as "Harvey Milk Day" encourages schools around the state to commemorate the murdered homosexual politician and activist. (See earlier story)

Last month, the Orange County Board of Education voted unanimously (5-0) to oppose the creation of Harvey Milk Day. Dr. Alexandria Coronado, chairman of that board, says she is "absolutely furious" that the homosexual community is claiming that passage of the Harvey Milk bill is a civil rights victory.

"I think it just absolutely denigrates the entire civil rights movement. Homosexuality is not a civil right," Coronado emphasizes.

"I don't remember the last time that a homosexual person was forced to move out of their seat on a public bus, like Rosa Parks. And I don't remember the last time that a homosexual person or student...was forced to go to a segregated school, as in the case of Mendez v. Westminster, which took place right here in Orange County, California."

Dr. Coronado says she also opposes Harvey Milk Day because several Californians are more worthy than Milk of a special day of recognition, including the late President Ronald Reagan and former Governor Pat Brown. She also argues that Harvey Milk Day wastes school staff time and money that could be used for more educational purposes.

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The Dionysian Authorship of the "Corpus Areopagiticum" According to Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae

[On October 3rd I posted a few texts by the Rev. John Parker in which he set out to prove, against most scholarly opinions of the late 19th century, that the writings of St. Dionysius the Areopagite are authentic 1st or early 2nd century writings written by the author they are ascribed to. The only Orthodox scholar I was aware of that defended this patristic thesis was Fr. John Romanides, who even though he wrote nothing to my knowledge on the subject, nevertheless defended it in passing in an audio lecture I have in which he comments sarcastically: "Modern theologians call St. Dionysius a 'pseudo' as if he is a liar or deceiver, which they make him out to be". It was brought to my attention at that time by Vlad Protopopescu that the eminent Romanian Orthodox theologian Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae also defended this thesis in his last writing before his falling asleep in the Lord, which happened to be his translation of the entire Corpus Areopagiticum. According to Vlad, this was a thesis he defended in the academia but it was quickly dismissed without consideration. Since one of my many goals is to liberate St. Dionysius from the fetters of the academics who dismiss him as a neoplatonic wannabe, I asked Vlad to translate the "Introduction" to Fr. Dumitru's translation in which Fr. Dumitru defends the apostolic dating of the Corpus Areopagiticum. To put the "Introduction" in its proper context, Vlad has informed me of the following:

"It should be mentioned that Fr. Staniloae answered to very specific issues, namely to the translations made in Romania of The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and The Mystical Theology made by Fr. Cicerone Iordachescu, who was a Professor and on the Faculties of Theology at Chisinau and Cernauti, and in collaboration with Theofil Simensky, a Professor of Classical Languages at the University of Iasi (both before the WWII); also to a French translation by Maurice de Gandillac in 1943. My view is that Fr. Staniloae held these opinions since that time (which he expressed in his various courses at the Theological Academy of Sibiu, where he was a professor until 1947 and subsequently on the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest where he offered a course on 'Ascetics and Mystics' until 1949 when the chair of 'Ascetics and Mystics' was abolished). It is very likely that the 'Introduction' to the translation was compiled mainly from notes and last talks, which will account for the apparent "outdatedness" that his critics made much about."

He also says concerning the only passage in the "Introduction" which he did not translate, since it answers a particular theory of one of Fr. Staniloae's students:

"In the 'Introduction' Fr. Staniloae addresses also a recent theory emitted by a Romanian doctor Fr. George Dragulin. According to Fr. Dragulin the real Dionysius was Dionysius Exiguus. Fr. Staniloae, who was the director of the thesis, dismisses it gently, although shows some 'sentimental' sympathy. Dionysius Exiguus was born in Scythia Minor (Dobrogea of today) and the thesis was rather an exercise in national pride. In fact Fr. Staniloae sticks to his guns. Fr. Staniloae's purpose was to combat the idea that one can affirm that Dionysius shows a pantheistic philosophy, as the learned Professors asserted. He quotes the thesis of Fr. Dragulin only to show that he affirms the perfect Orthodoxy of Dionysius who combatted Neoplatonism. Fr. Staniloae's argument is precisely the challenge of Dionysius to the philosophies of his day, which were 'Platonic'."

I am grateful to Vlad and I pray this translation serves to enlighten doubters and faithful alike concerning the apostolic or post-apostolic authorship of these highly revered texts of Orthodox patristics. - J.S.]

Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae (1903 – 1993) was undoubtedly a great contemporary Orthodox theologian and a Christian thinker of “truly ecumenical proportions” (Charles Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae). Olivier Clement, the French Orthodox, declared that the 20th century has known only three true theologians: Vladimir Losski, Fr. Justin Popovic and Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae. He was a pioneer in the return of theological thinking to the Fathers of the Church which occurred in the first part of the 20th century. He translated into Romanian a great number of the writings of the Fathers, being a pioneer also in the revival of St. Gregory Palamas, being the first to publish unknown manuscripts of the saint that he discovered in Paris. His Life and Teaching of St. Gregory Palamas, was published in Romanian in 1938 and therefore unfortunately remained virtually unknown for a long time. His translation of the Philokalia of St. Nicodemus (to which he added a great number of other writings, so that now people speak of the "Philokalia of Stăniloae"), of Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa is the proof of his complete mastery of the mystical/ascetical tradition of Orthodoxy in which he was immersed, not only in the “academic” mode, but living it as well. He was in permanent contact with the monastic life, very rich at all times in Romania, where the hesychast tradition is still alive and great spiritual fathers and mothers still talk to the people. His very last work, published posthumously (1996), was a translation into Romanian of the Complete Works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, together with the Scholia of St. Maximus the Confessor and a number of his own commentaries. Fr. Stăniloae was definitely a defender of the traditional attribution of the Areopagitica to the disciple of St. Paul. In his "Introduction" he offers a series of arguments which point to the validity of the traditional attribution. Needless, but sadly, to say that a new generation of “patrologists” with doctorates at “the most prestigious Western Universities” poured scorn and ridicule on his “gaffes” and “obstinacy” in trying to demonstrate “against all scientific common sense the identity of the author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy with the disciple of the Apostle Paul, for the sole reason that the thesis ‘accepted by all specialists was… occidental’”. Here are a few excerpts from the "Introduction" to demonstrate where the common sense was.

Vlad Protopopescu - Sydney

Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae, Complete Works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, "Introduction":

I. The Alleged Neoplatonic Pantheism of the Areopagitic Writings

We can say that the presentation of Dionysius as a pantheist has encouraged in the western Christian world a separatist and secularist vision of the world in relation to God, which in turn reinforced the philosophies of the world as the unique reality… This understanding was the reason why in the West, Dionysius was suspected as encouraging pantheism, whereas in the East he always enjoyed a great authority as a source of Christian spirituality.

In regards to the alleged pantheistic mark of the areopagitic writings, which would therefore have them written after Plotinus and Proclus, we deem necessary to prove their Christian character. That will allow us to show the uncertainty of a date after Proclus for the writings, and as unfounded the exclusion of the possibility that they have been authored by Dionysius from the Areopagus of Athens who was converted by the Holy Apostle Paul to the Christian faith. This possible conclusion will be enhanced by some other facts, no less conclusive than those adduced by the deniers of the authorship of Dionysius of the Areopagus.

II. The General Christian Content of the Areopagitic Writings and Their Principal Components as a Basis for Their Attribution to Dionysius the Areopagite

We cannot notice in all the areopagitic writings any concern with the defense of the Holy Trinity, any concern with the defense of the teaching about the Christ as hypostasis in two natures, any concern with nestorianism or monophyisitism. This suggests that they had been written neither after the First Ecumenical Synod, nor after the Second, the Third or the Fourth, i.e. between the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth. Of course one cannot say that there is no teaching about the Trinity or about Jesus Christ. Also lacking are the developments about the Holy Trinity from the writings of St. Athanasius the Great, St. Basil the Great or St. Gregory Nazianzen. There is no concern with the union of the two natures in the unique hypostasis of the Word from the writings of St. Cyril of Alexandria…

The theme of the Dionysian writings is the defense of the teaching about God in Trinity as different from the world, in other words a defense of the Christian faith in general against the philosophical thinking of the time, but using its vocabulary. Was a rejection of the pantheistic philosophies at the end of the fifth century still necessary? Who could have been keener to win the intellectuals, formed in the mould of the pantheistic philosophies than a philosopher himself? Could he have remained idle since becoming a Christian and not use his gifts in an activity for which he was qualified? He could have put together those writings around the year 100 AD, when the opposition against the Christian teachings was taking shape.

One can raise today the same objection raised by an Orthodox theologian in 533 during his polemic with a Severian Monophysite: How can we be sure that these writings belong to Dionysius of Areopagus, when we cannot see them used by the Fathers since? To this objection one can answer: The writings were not offering any arguments for the defence of the Holy Trinity or of the teachings about Christ. They must have been, perhaps, less copied and they were used in more restricted circles. In general, the Fathers were not perusing too much the writings of the preceding Fathers, but almost exclusively the Holy Scriptures.

But how does the author of the Areopagitica defend the Christian Faith, using the philosophical language of the time?

a. He makes a clear distinction between the being (trans. n. – in Romanian fiinţa) of all things among which we live and the One above being. In Greek being is derived, like in Romanian, from the verb to be: it is actually the participle of the verb to be (trans. n. – a fi, fiinţă). That is, that being is the same as existence. The author of the Areopagitica uses for God the term the one above being, not in the sense of the highest being, but in the sense of beyond existence. He is not simply existence, but is beyond existence, because all things that exist, as we know them, must have a cause. God is beyond existence because He has no cause, but is the cause of everything. That points to a total difference between God and the world. The author makes an “existential” difference between everything that exists and Him – this gives Him the power to be the sole cause of everything. Dionysius defends the idea of God as totally different from the world, in contrast with pre-Christian philosophies.

b. The author borrows from Plato the idea of the identity of existence with good. Existence itself is a good. The highest existence is the highest good. But Plato does not draw the conclusion that the good implies an eternal relation between Person and Person, as the author of the Areopagitica does.

But God is not simply goodness, but is above goodness. It is goodness caused by nothing and the cause of all goodness .This is a different kind of goodness than the one known by us. The goodness of God is from itself, and is one with perfect freedom.

The stages of existence, dependent of one another, the higher ones obliged to sustain and raise the inferior ones in existence, therefore in goodness, and the inferior ones attracted by the superior ones, are all in a state of dependence between themselves, but also of God who is above all goodness, good in itself, the perfect good. This is the foundation of the celestial and world hierarchies and of their relations. The obligation (of the superior hierarchies) towards the inferior and the attraction of the inferior (ones) towards the higher give an internal basis to the relations between the members of the hierarchies. Dionysius asserts thus not only the existence of a God different from the visible world, but also the existence of a hierarchical order superior to this world, a thing rejected by ancient philosophy.

According to Dionysius, the hierarchy of the entire creation links not only the angelic world with the earthly one, but also all the orders of the angelic world with those of the earthly world. In this hierarchical vision, all the inferior steps receive divine illumination from those above and the superior ones have the duty to communicate these illuminations to the inferior ones. Only the supreme angelic order receives illumination exclusively from God. But that does not mean that God is in direct relations only with the hosts of the supreme order (Thrones, Cherubims, Seraphims), nor that He is separated from the hosts under them. The orders that follow the first one live also in God, but as united with the first. The first order communicates their knowledge of God to the inferior ones. Not even men can feel the relation with God without a relation with other people, and therefore, albeit unconsciously, with the angels.

Everything that exists in the world is a unit. But there are different degrees of unity between them and an overall unity between all. But these units are composed and dependent on one another and of the One who has nothing composed and is not united involuntarily with others, but is the One by itself and independent of all. He is the Uncaused Cause of all units in the world and of the unity between themselves. The things of the world show that they are dependent on the One who is above everything - that we know as units.

This One, who is also the supreme good by itself, is not opposed to love. His Unity is a living unity, not opposed to the Trinity. His Unity is a unity of love. He is a living One or the One full of love in Himself. Through love He goes eternally out of Himself, remaining eternally in Himself. God remains in Himself and goes out of Himself in Himself eternally, but when He so desires, He goes out of Himself into other things, producing them by creation and wanting to draw them close to Him.

His procession out of Himself does not oblige Him to proceed into the things that are different from Himself. He does not go out of Himself in Himself, as Trinity, in order to create things, as Fr. Cicerone Iordachescu said. Therefore proodoi cannot be translated as “emanations” as was done by Fr. Iordachescu.

c. All these attributes of the divinity places Him above understanding. God cannot be characterized by the characters proper to the world. He is neither existence, nor goodness, nor unity, nor understanding… But negation of these attributes has not the meaning of nothingness, but the superior meaning of things above what is proper to the world. The author of the writings stresses very often this fact.

The man attaining sainthood lives in God, rather than explaining Him through rational concepts.

d. Another “existential” difference between God and the world is asserted by the author of the Areopagitica when he considers God as non-passive, not exposed to relations and passions, whereas the world, by its very dependence of God, is passive and subject to relations and possibilities of passions. But the passivity of world components has different degrees. The angels are passive, because they are dependent in their being on God, but at the same time they have a responsibility towards Him. But responsibility unites in itself dependence and freedom. They can, therefore, contend against their dependence or responsibility towards God, as some of them have done. An inferior degree of creatures, humans, have not only the dependence from God united with the responsibility towards Him, but also a purely passive part, the body, with its processes and passions. But man can, through his responsibility towards God, fill his body with the divine powers [energies] and make it participate in the freedom of the spirit. An even inferior degree of creatures has only the passivity of the senses, deprived of consciousness - these are the animals, and the plants. But they have as their reason to exist the sustaining of the physical life of man. At the very bottom of this category is the simple matter of the earth and the minerals, which are purely passive, but also necessary for the life of man.

In pantheism, everything is dependent on everything. There is nothing independent above the whole and everything, because the essence from which everything is emanated is itself subject to a law.

The author of the Areopagitica makes therefore a categorical distinction between God and the world. But he also links firmly the world to God. This can be seen from the fact that, on the one hand, God goes out of Himself conferring being upon the things different from Him, and on the other hand He goes out through “processions” (proodoi) to the things in order to “bring” them back to Him, to fill them with the gifts of His goodness. Those who saw a pantheistic character in the writings have confused these two kind of acts or “processions” of God. But, if there is no difference between them, why would God continue to raise to Him and in Him the things brought into existence by Him? The author uses different terms for the bringing into existence of the things of the world, of the angels and man, which he calls paragein (to give existence) and for the gifts which he bestows subsequently to the created things in order to rise them to Him, which he calls proodoi. It is wrong to confuse the terms.

But the creative act, as well as the acts of enrichment of the creatures through ever increasing gifts, show the creatures inseparably united with God. Although the author speaks of distinctions or separations between the creatures, and between the creatures and God, he does not exclude a certain inseparability between Him and creatures, even when they close themselves to the waves of goodness and superior life which come from Him; because things could not exist if they were not maintained in existence by the Cause who is above all existence. It is impossible to think of a total separation of the world from its Cause.

A very important component of the theme of the relation of God with the world, which is central to the Dionysian writings, is the fact that all things different from God are brought into existence to serve as symbols through which we see the works of God. They have thus a certain capacity to receive in themselves and to transmit through themselves the works of God. Actualizing the things and the human gestures as symbols, they are sanctified and made the means of sanctification of ones through the others. That confers a liturgical character to their existence.

In the earliest Christian times the liturgical life – hymns, sanctifications, blessings - was extremely rich. From its rich extension in the Apostolic Constitutions or the Liturgy of St. James, the Liturgy became shorter until it crystallized in the shape of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. The fact that the areopagitic writings point to a very rich liturgical life of the Christian communities is another proof of their antiquity. The Orthodox East, the faithful keeper of the apostolic tradition, persists to this day the practice of multiple acts of sanctification, along with the conscience that God is present in all His sanctifying works. Dionysius has influenced the theological explanation of this active presence of God in everything by His works or by His uncreated energies, which are different from his being. We see this in the works of St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Gregory Palamas. The West, rejecting this distinction, as we can see in the opposition Barlaam made to St. Gregory Palamas, and unable to admit a union of men and the world with the essence of God – because that would confound everything with God - has persisted in the conscience of a God distant from the world and people, with a church led by a vicar (a deputy of the absent Christ) and/or has fallen into the extremes of a pantheist mysticism (Eckhart, Jacob Bohme), or in the philosophies that affirm that this world is the only reality.

In the East, as in the areopagitic writings, the Son of God took on human nature in order to make it the medium of our divinization, of our sanctification, which sustain us on the path of a more controlled and holier life. That is why all Fathers, including Dionysius, use the bold terms ‘divinization’, ‘gods’, and of course ‘by grace’… St. Gregory Palamas has found in the writings of Dionysius most of the arguments in his defense of the assertion of the hesychast monks that through the incessant prayer of Jesus they see in their hearts Jesus in light. One can see this in the multiple quotations from Dionysius. Generally speaking the writings of Dionysius have been in the Orthodox world the grounds for the affirmation of the active presence of God in the life of the Church and in the world.

III. Other Indications That Seem to Point to the Post-Apostolic, even Apostolic Age of the Dionysian Writings

In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius said that Baptism and the Liturgy were performed by the bishop assisted by a few priests but many deacons. In general older people were baptized, but not children. This situation was proper to the early Church, when churches were founded in cities, where bishoprics were founded and the first faithful were older people.

The bishop is also shown performing the burials. Another sign that the writings belong to the early Christian times, when Christians were persecuted, is the mention of the ‘therapeutes’ (doorkeepers or porters), sort of sextons, usually not married, who were guarding the doors of the places of assembly. This service was no longer required in the 5th-6th centuries when the time of persecutions had passed.

Another objection against the antiquity of the areopagitic writings is that in the sixth chapter of The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius described the consecration of monks, which appeared only in the fourth century. But we know that St. Anthony the Great became a monk in the third (he was born in 255). Was he following an older tradition? It is not unlikely that there were a few Christians who chose the purity of a life of solitude… Maybe they were the therapeutes of the Dionysian Epistles, a term that St. Maximus the Confessor translates plainly as “monachos”. (f.n. The linking of the therapeutes of Philo of Alexandria with the first Christian community in Alexandria was made already by Eusebius of Cesareea. St. Jerome affirmed that the monks of his time were perpetuating the life of the therapeutes. John Cassian made the same affirmation ascribing an apostolic origin to the institution. That means that the monastic institution is as old as Christianity itself!)

This is a very poor and general summary of the richness and profundity of the areopagitic writings that our translation is far from rendering it faithfully. Because the language itself is so subtle and complex that nobody can render it satisfactorily. In French they have been translated eleven times… This is the reason that we undertook to offer a new translation (f.n. In Romanian, besides those of Fr. Cicerone Iordachescu and Theofil Simensky.) striving to express it in Romanian terms more traditional and spiritual, avoiding as much as we have been able the neologisms of French origin (f.n. Much too current in modern Romanian). This is the reason why we disagree with Fr. Cicerone Iordachescu, when he says: ‘The writing of Dionysius reminds us of the dialectic of Plato and Hegel, without possessing the genius of those great masters of human thought.' We deem that the thinking of Dionysius is far more satisfactory than Plato’s or Hegel’s.

In conclusion, in view of all the arguments offered, we want to keep the name of Dionysius the Areopagite as the author of these writings. Even if the author was someone living at a later time but he took the name, we respect his will and declare him worthy of the appellation of Saint, as all the Church Fathers did.

As a contribution to the understanding of the Areopagitic writings, we have also translated the Scholia of St. Maximus the Confessor. Hans Urs von Balthasar thought that the Scholia did not belong to Maximus, but to John, bishop of Scythopolis in Galilee in the first half of the sixth century. But Otto Bardenhewer believed that they belonged to St. Maximus. I think that his opinion is far more probable.

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