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Formyoffspring
Charlie,Mary,Sarah,andIsaac
Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone Patristic studies for the past four decades, and a key theological figure within Orthodoxy (especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for three. Andrew is also a thinker known far beyond the world of those devoted to the study of early and Byzantine Christianity, and far beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His works have been a major source for all those—across many Christian traditions— interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the resources of classical Christianity (especially as it is developed in the Greek world between Plato and John Damascene). His monographs cover a considerable range, from his early and much appreciated two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and DiscerningtheMysteryto his translations and commentaries, and on to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and DevelopmentinByzantineTheologyand GreekEastandLatinWest: The Church AD 681–1071. Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge are rendered all the clearer in his reconceptualizing and editing of the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2022).
But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a significant essayist; many of his most significant contributions to scholarship and to theology are scattered throughout journals and edited collections, some of which are rather difficult to access. These contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at institutions and to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of the theological community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in his long contribution as co-editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early
Christian Studies,” and “Oxford Early Christian Texts.” The present two volumes attempt to reveal something of that range and erudition by presenting seventy-four of his essays, in a selection made by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is that Andrew has not included any of the many pieces he has produced for “handbooks” over many years.
Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented something of a challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic theology is also intrinsic to his work as a theologian—the division is not one between history and theology. But neither is it one simply between the theology of the Fathers over against work in modern theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would contradict Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which engagement with the Fathers is the enduring heart of theological work, however much it also must reflect on the streams of thought that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on exploring the thought and world of figures in the early Christian world (and in a few cases exploring the links between that world and the world of Byzantine Christianity) appear in the first volume. In the second volume many of the essays consider broader theological topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological writers (especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-century Orthodox diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early Christian theology. The essays in this second volume are offered in chronological order, allowing the reader to gain a sense of how Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays were written at a variety of points over the past half-century a number of them use styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were written. We have therefore left the wording of the essays as they were published.
Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and friends helped to prepare these essays for publication, especially the arduous task of checking pre-published electronic versions against the final published forms, and turning PDFs into text. We would like
to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis, Fr Demetrios Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr Christopher Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher.
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals, and others who have granted permission for the essays collected in these volumes to be reprinted.
Lewis Ayres and John Behr
October2022
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers
The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written a History of Early Christian Dogma…
The Place of TheHeartoftheWorldin the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar
Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs
The Image of Heloise in English Literature
Νάϵὔχϵσαινά᾿ναιμακρύςὁδρόμος: Theological Reflections on Pilgrimage
The Theology of the Philokalia
Theology, Contemplation, and the University
Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God
The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov
The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov
Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?
The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox Diaspora in the Twentieth Century
Pagans and Christians on Providence
What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?
The Place of Θέωσιςin Orthodox Theology
Inspiration of the Scriptures
Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian
Space, Time, and the Liturgy
Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition
Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
The Influence of the Philokaliain the Orthodox World
Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium
Theology of the ‘In-Between’
Fiunt,NonNascunturChristiani: Conversion, Community, and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity
Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology
Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View
Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some Reflections on the Development of Mariology
The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015
Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox Reflections
What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?
The Slav Philokaliaand TheWayofaPilgrim
34.
Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s DerLogosam
Kreuz
Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology
Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the Russian Émigrés
Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion
ΜονὰςκαὶΤριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology
DetailsofOriginalPublication
Index
Abbreviations
Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their original publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal or series titles), they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical and Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
Introduction
ILooking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am struck by the fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each volume there are only three essays published before 1990, by which time I was in my late 40s—one well before, in 1978, ‘The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest in the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder why. Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two books came in rapid succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (1981), and Discerning the Mystery (1983). That first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather led to my being classified (still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysticism’ (in some ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006 with its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the ‘mystical tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested in ‘mysticism’ as in a form of religion independent of institutions or dogmas (what has come to be called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism as, in a tradition revived by William James at the beginning of the nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’, rather my interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer, both personal and liturgical.
DiscerningtheMysteryadumbrated, as I see it now, an approach to theology for which the practice of prayer, and what such practice presupposed, was indispensable—indispensable, not in the sense that theology demanded prayer, and therefore faith, so that the answers had smuggled themselves in before being asked, but
indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the transcendent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the nature of things could be encompassed by human conceptuality, ruling out the notion of a closed universe.
There has remained lodged in my memory—largely unconscious, though surfacing from time to time—some lines of thought discussed by Thomas Vargish in his book, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind(1970). Discussing Newman’s ‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought”…elastic and delicate enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the uniqueness of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much as delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes progress by being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties”’ (p. 87, quoting William Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the Fathers’ use of Scripture, as discussed in the earliest essay included in these books—a freedom from both the prescriptive nature of Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single determinative meaning to be found in Scripture.
I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright, perceptively pointed out to me after reading Discerning the Mystery). Another—quite different aspect of these early books is contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to Denys’. For there had never been any question for me but that that book would begin with Plato—an interpretation of Plato much indebted to A.-J. Festugière’s seminal work, Contemplation et viecontemplative selonPlaton(3rd edition, 1967). Plato has remained important to me —probably returned to more often than to any Christian writer possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics (and G. H. Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities, not ideas humanly constructed).
It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were, reception into the Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware, soon followed. That was at the end of 1989, the year in which my third book, Denys the Areopagite, was published—in response to a
request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding Christian Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity, because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely uninformed way, and it already seemed to me that two profound influences on the Damascene were Dionysios the Areopagite and St Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then full of Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading everything I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense that, ultimately, I was going to write something on the Damascene led me, a few years later, to agree to the request of Carol Harrison, the editor of the EarlyChristianFathers, to produce a volume for the series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books were conceived in sequence—but not as a trilogy, for they are very different, the first on Dionysios—Denys, as I called him then—simply an introduction, the second on Maximos an even shorter introduction accompanied by translations of a brief selection of his works, mostly drawn from his theological, as opposed to his spiritual, works (an opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos), and the third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during the construction of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of Islam.
So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not anticipated, what still seem to me the three writers who, together by inheriting and interpreting the Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and, indeed, its best, and most enduring elements). Plato, and especially the developments of Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and I became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and Christianity. The books speak for themselves, and many of the articles in this collection fill out aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of theology and philosophy, prayer and asceticism, and liturgy and song.
II
Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual development, though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly must now seem) of my formation as a theologian. I never studied for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no Doktorvater. I did, however, while studying for the Anglican priesthood in Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there under Professor Tom (T. F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that degree was the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the most important sections of which were on the place of natural theology in his ChurchDogmaticsand doctrine of analogy. The chief influence on me during undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one, preparing for Part III) was without doubt Donald MacKinnon, the Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose guidance I took two courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of the Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the style of philosophy of religion that I mostly encountered in Cambridge (I don’t think MacKinnon made much sense of it either) and rather made my own way by careful textual study of the texts— Descartes to Kant—that we were expected to read; but it was from MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his students that I learnt to think (or rather—though that is perhaps the same thing—discovered that I could think). Another don at Cambridge, with whom I had a few supervisions in patristics, was Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal even though largely by way of disagreeing with him—a disagreement that continued when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and Fellow and Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though probably due to my philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new joint degree in Philosophy and Theology had just been introduced), did not specify what area of theology I was to pursue, so I decided to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick,
who moved from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ Church in 1970, whom I held in awe, though I never got to know him very well (though well enough in the eyes of others to be asked to write his obituary for the Independent). I also came to know, in the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently departed Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies during my time in Oxford (and before and after): my debt to him is incalculable. There are many others to whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of this volume.
Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or entirely) knew through their books; in the later 1970s (as I remember it), I often devoted the long vacation to reading some massive work that I wanted to come to terms with. One year it was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then) feeble German. Another year it was A.-J. Festugière’s monumental four-volume work, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of which tells you more about its origins (in the notes he made in the course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock, the Budé edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its contents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical thought of late antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s ExégèseMédiévale(4 vols, 1959–64), another work that starts from a particular problem and casts light much more widely. Hans Urs von Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced by Donald MacKinnon, came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for which I translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by John Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of Theologik.
My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they seemed to fill out and deepen insights that I had originally discovered in Western writers, such as those already mentioned. It was mostly through reading their works, though I came to know personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course, Fr
Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in Oxford when I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony of Essex. One Orthodox thinker whom I read early on was the French convert, Olivier Clément, the disciple of Vladimir Lossky, who has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov became increasingly important to me (I encountered him first in the French translations by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his Russian, as well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal about Florensky from Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed biography, published in 2010, already by then a great friend. She is an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and helped me to see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the broader cultural context of the Silver Age.
In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek theology, not least Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly wide reading in Greek literature—especially the amazing poets of the twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis—through whom I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and interpreted them (but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also encountered through my reading in Greek literature and had some sense of his theological insights before ever engaging with Yannaras, with whose writings I have tried to keep up over the years (in recent years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent translations). Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis, which opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of Orthodoxy (a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to translate). Something of this engagement with Orthodoxy—mostly the fruit of my becoming Orthodox, which seemed to me a fulfilment of my intellectual and spiritual development, not a rejection of the West (although such anti-Westernism has been a Leitmotiv of too much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian millennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers:
From the Philokalia to the Present (2015), which were the result of four years spent as Visiting Professor at the Amsterdam Centre of Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit, now the St Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of Radboud, Nijmegen.
Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat passed over is my ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1985 to 1995. During this period Goldsmiths went through a major change from being an Institute with Recognized Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually became head—for five years—of a new department of Historical and Cultural Studies, made up of the old departments of History, Art History, and Religious Studies, in which I taught early medieval and Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul Fouracre, a fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from him, a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—very different were the ways of the theologian’s mind—which affected my own way of thinking about history (and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of that are to be found in my volume, GreekEastandLatinWest:The Church AD 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The Church in History, originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff.
Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am not at all sure what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my aim has been to elucidate their thought and their concerns. It looks like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intellectual history, but one thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—as so many essays in intellectual history seem to imagine—float in some kind of noetic ether; ideas are thought by people, who live at a particular time and in a particular place. Their ideas are part of the way in which they have sought to make sense of the world in which they lived, and theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are the products of human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel and the Church in a world created by God and governed by his providence, in however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation
(inspired by another who greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun who spent her final years near Whitby in Yorkshire) that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology, Modern OrthodoxThinkers.
I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my friends and colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking to bring this collection of essays of mine to publication. Although the work of publication is theirs, what is to be found in these volumes is, for better or worse, mine, and I would like to dedicate the volumes to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac.
In the more traditional English theological courses, the student first comes across consideration of Christian theology for its own sake in the study of the Fathers of the early Church. Biblical Studies tend to be approached from a literary, historical, and expository point of view, rather than from a theological point of view.1 The idea of theology, the idea of dogma, emerges for the English student out of his study of the Fathers. This means that the way theology emerged in the Fathers and the form it took tend to be treated as normative, or at least as a pointdedépart. The doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation are the two foci in such an approach to theology. Even those English theologians who think of themselves as liberal or radical, and who wish to reject such an approach to theology, are seen, in their very reaction against it, to be taking up a position in relation to the patristic tradition, thus revealing the marks of their initial approach to theology. All this seems to me to be different from German Protestant theology. In Lutheran theology, say, it seems—at any rate from the outside—that whether or not the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are held or rejected, other theological themes are central. The doctrine of justification by faith becomes a principle of profound and far-reaching significance, particularly when it takes the form of the dialectic between Law and Gospel.
In this contrast there are advantages on both sides. The apprehension of the fundamental significance of the doctrine of justification by faith can lend great clarity to Lutheran theology. Here is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae; here is a criterion that enables us to see whether we are being faithful to God’s word or not. It is a criterion for distinguishing between both relevance and irrelevance. That God justifies the wicked, that this justification is apprehended by faith, not by anything we do but by our standing before God and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner’—this concentrates theology in such a way that irrelevance seems out of place. Theology embraces everything indeed—but under God. And so the irrelevance with which human ingenuity loves to distract itself is seen for what it is. German theology is a serious business, and it knows it.
The Anglican approach to theology is much less conscious. Anglicans tend to approach theology through the concerns and interests of the Fathers because that is the way they have been introduced to it. And they may see in these concerns some great principle being worked out. Such a principle, for instance, may be discerned in the way the Fathers tried to think through the implications of the Greek preoccupation with virtue (areté), and all the ways of fostering it (paideia), in the light of the Gospel. Here the Fathers are grappling with Hellenistic modes of thought so as to exploit the support such a preoccupation gives to their view of creation, while at the same time questioning it fundamentally when it appears to threaten their understanding of the radical newness of the grace of God. But this is not like grasping the central significance of the doctrine of justification: it is a personal aperçu, the idiosyncrasy of the individual scholar and a peculiarly scholarly idiosyncrasy at that, for the working out of the Gospel in Hellenistic modes of thought is not obviously our problem. But Anglican theology rarely takes that form; more often the unconscious acceptance of the Fathers’ approach simply means that the doctrines enshrined in the creeds are accepted as the programme of theology. And this can mean an academic discussion of doctrines that have
little obvious relevance to anything except the particular controversies—now long dead—in which they were originally enunciated. However, it seems to me that the Anglican approach can be something consciously approved, even if unconsciously accepted. In this paper, I want to indicate how this might be so and then how such a position might suggest an approach to the hermeneutical question rather different from that of German theology.
II begin by making a virtue of the fact that, as I have said, this English approach is not so much consciously adopted as unconsciously received. It is not, I think, a mere quirk of the syllabus that we have come to theology through the Fathers. It owes a great deal to the inherent structure of Anglican theology.2 Although our departments of theology look very secular in England, without the confessional ties found in Germany, the tradition of theology they have received has come from the ancient universities where theology was once Anglican theology. And Anglican theology is not Reformation theology, though it has been deeply influenced by the Reformation (and perhaps even more by the Renaissance). It is not confessional, but ecclesial or churchly. By that I mean there is no equivalent in Anglicanism of the Augsburg Confession, or the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Scots Confession. Anglican theology starts from a faithlived, not from a particular—and local—definition of that faith. The XXXIX Articles—the nearest thing Anglicans have to such a confession—are subscribed to ‘not as articles of faith, but as theological verities, for the preservation of unity among ourselves’ (to quote the seventeenth-century Archbishop Bramhall).3 And the way in which they are subscribed to is worth noting. An Anglican priest professes his agreement with the doctrine of the Church of England as set forth ‘in the XXXIX Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal’. He is not just agreeing to a formula, but
affirming that he belongs to a particular community, which worships God and celebrates its faith in Christ in a particular way, and that through this community he belongs to the Catholic Church of Christ. Anglicanism, therefore, tends to see the Reformation not so much as an appeal to Scripture against the Church, as making clear a continuity in the Church’s life that had been blurred in the later Middle Ages. And so, to quote Bramhall again,
the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England after the Reformation are as much the same Church as a garden, before it is weeded and after it is weeded, is the same garden; or a vine, before it is pruned and after it is pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches, is one and the same vine.4
The Anglican, then, begins within the Church, within the worshipping community, accepting the faith rather than consciously confessing it. And Scripture is something given to him within the Church, by the tradition, by the handing-on, that is the continuity of the Church. This does not mean that Scripture is subordinated to the Church. In the light of Scripture the Church can be reformed, the garden weeded, the vine pruned and freed from the luxuriant branches. And this is not an event but ideally a process, for the Church always stands under the Word, always finds through Scripture its way of obedience to her Lord. Under the Word she finds herself to be ecclesiasemperreformanda, in the words of Pope John XXIII.
As I see it, the way in which the Scriptures show the Church her way of obedience rests on no principle. The problem of hermeneutics is not the search for some key of interpretation that will enable us to extract from the word of Scripture the meaning of the Gospel today. Rather it rests on the faith of the Church that in the Scriptures God speaks to his Church, the faith—classical Anglicanism often says the experience—that the Scriptures which the Church offers us and to which she leads us kindle the light of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. So Archbishop Laud said:
I admit no ordinary rule left now in the church, of divine and infallible verity, and so of faith, but the Scripture. And I believe the entire Scripture, first, by the tradition of the Church; then, by all other credible motives and last of all, by the light which shines in Scripture itself, kindled in believers by the Spirit of God. Then, I believe the entire Scripture infallibly, and by a divine infallibility am sure of my object. Then am I so sure of my believing, which is the act of my faith, conversant about this object: for no man believes, but he must needs know in himself whether he believes or no, and wherein and how far he doubts. Then I am infallibly assured of my Creed, the tradition of the Church inducing, and the Scripture confirming it. And I believe both Scripture and Creed, in the same uncorrupted sense which the primitive Church believed them…5
If you like, the Scriptures are experiencedas self-authenticating. But this experience, though inevitably an experience of the individual, is but the experience of the individual within the Church. Only in the Church is the believer led to approach Scripture in such a way that he hears the Word of God speaking to him from it.
Only in the Church—it is this which leads the Anglican to stress the importance of the Fathers of the early Church. Scripture cannot be considered in isolation—indeed it does not exist in isolation. The Scriptures are the Scriptures of the Church: the Old Testament inherited from Israel, the New Testament the apostolic writings. Indeed, seen as witness they are Church documents, the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ—prophets and apostles being members of the Church of which Christ is the head. There is no fundamental divide between the Church in which and for which the Scriptures were written and the Church of the Fathers—not if theology is seen essentially as a reflection on God’s Word taking place within the bosom of the Church. If the Reformation discerned a continuity that had been obscured by the later Middle Ages, it was a continuity manifest in a theology closer in spirit and teaching to that of the Fathers. So unless we are to drive a wedge between Scripture and the Church, the reflection of the Fathers on Scripture must be given very great weight, to say the least.
But what do we mean by the ‘Fathers’? Most fundamentally, I do not mean a particular group of theological writers—the Fathers of
the Undivided Church (whatever that is)—though clearly I have in mind the Fathers of the first five centuries after Christ. But I do not want to limit the term ‘Father’ either to those whom the later Church accepted as ‘Fathers’ or to a particular period. Rather it seems to me that the Fathers manifest a particular approach to theology especially evident in the early centuries of the Church’s history. For the Fathers see theology as the expounding of the mystery of Christ to which the Scriptures witness. Another element which passes beyond the ‘theology of the Fathers’ (precisely as that phrase begins to be used)—comes in when theological orthodoxy begins to mean whether you agree with some earlier theologian. In the Fathers there is a direct access to Scripture as the source and criterion of theology. It is something else when Athanasius or Cyril or Augustine become the test of orthodoxy. But this defines no period, even though the period of the first five centuries is a peculiarly potent witness to such theology. Rather the ‘theology of the Fathers’ characterizes a certain approach to theology; an approach in which one can discern a certain directness in expounding Scripture, a certain boldness—parrhesia—in their expounding of the mystery of the faith. It is in that parrhesiathat the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith—of the Trinity and the Incarnation—achieved their first and enduring expression. And it is because it comes out of this parrhesiathat it is enduring. To speak of the Fathers is to speak of a way of exploring the mystery of faith that is characterized by this parrhesia, and so there is, in a sense, no ‘patristic period’. In the Cistercian theology of the twelfth century, especially in St Bernard, we recognize the voice of those who form part of the consensus patrum.
IIThere is something exemplary about the Fathers’ approach to Scripture, and it is because classical Anglican theology followed this
example that it has what value it has. Can we say more about the ‘way of the Fathers’? There seem to be two basic premises that lie behind the Fathers’ approach to Scripture. First, that Scripture must be interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith; and second, that Scripture admits of spiritual or allegorical interpretation. (True, the Fathers often frown on allegory—and not only the Antiochene school —but all admit a typological interpretation of Scripture that for my purposes in this paper can be subsumed under allegory.)
First, Scripture interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith. This rule of faith—at any rate in the pre-Nicene Church—is a freehand summary of the threefold faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, professed in Baptism. It is the faith handed down within the Church, it is the faith that admits to Baptism, and in that sense defines the Church, the community of the baptized. Scripture is handed down within the Church and so is interpreted in accordance with the rule of faith that defines the Church. But the rule of faith is no formula—it is not a form of words, but the truth the words enshrine. Even after Nicaea, after the definition of the faith in a formula, a creed, a symbol, we know—as we have learnt from the researches of Dr Kelly6—that the Nicene faith did not mean to the Fathers any formula, but the truth that formula enshrines. Indeed it seems to me that Newman was close to the mind of the Fathers when he declared in his AriansoftheFourthCenturythat
freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church… because when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth, instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is otherwise possible.7
At the heart of the faith of the Fathers is no principle, or creed, or formula, but a mystery, a mystery that is lived, a mystery that claims the whole man, a mystery that we apprehend not simply with our minds but in ways that are unconscious and unfathomable, a mystery that draws out our love. And that mystery is Christ. It is not
simply a question of believing the right things. It is not even a question of simply hearing the Word of Christ; more deeply it is a matter of being close to him, at the deepest level, in prayer. So we find St Ignatius of Antioch saying: ‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his stillness, that he may be perfect, that he may act through what he says, and be known through his silence’.8 Before any articulation of our confession of Christ, there is an inarticulate closeness to Christ, to that creative silence out of which the Word comes,9 to that stillness (hesuchia) in which are wrought the mysteries that cry out.10 This is the ultimate meaning of interpreting Scripture in accordance with the rule of faith: not simply subordinating Scripture to the articulated faith of the Church, but listening to the Scriptures from a contemplative stillness that is being with Christ. And this is something given and known in the life of the Church, in the tradition that is the movement of the Spirit in the Church. Interpreting Scripture within the Church does not at all mean subordinating Scripture to the Church, but interpreting Scripture within the life of the Church, finding in Scripture the voice of God calling us to obedience, renewed discipleship, new life. It is to see Scripture as the Word of God, because in listening to it God’s Word may be heard, and God’s Word is the incarnate Son of God, and it is his word, his voice, that we may hear speaking to us through Scripture.
The other feature of patristic interpretation of Scripture is allegory (understood in a broad sense). This is often immediately and simply dismissed by modern scholars. The Fathers, it is maintained, used allegory as a way of accommodating their belief in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures with their unwillingness—rather, inability —to believe what the Scriptures plainly taught. It was particularly used in relation to the Old Testament, and without such resort to allegory the Fathers would hardly have resisted Marcionism. What is wrong with allegory, it is said, is that it is entirely uncontrolled, entirely arbitrary, and robs the text of Scripture of any real authority even while appearing to concede to it the very fullest authority, because with the use of allegory any text can be made to mean
anything. Its origins are highly suspect, too. It goes back to Stoic attempts to justify the Homeric tales against the criticisms of the Platonists and Epicureans, and in Heraclitus’ HomericQuestions we have a clear—if unintended—insight into how arbitrary allegory can be, when he defines allegory as ‘speaking one thing and signifying something other than what is said’.11
There is much truth in all this, but it seems to me to miss the central point behind the patristic resort to allegory. While it is true that one often gets the impression when reading Origen, say, that the text of Scripture which justifies his use of allegory is Galatians 4:24 (‘Now this is an allegory…’), this seems to me to be only a formal, and polemical, justification. The real justification for the use of allegory is found elsewhere in Paul: in II Corinthians 3 and I Corinthians 13. The contrast between shadow and reality, letter and spirit, death and life, the veiled and the manifest; the contrast between seeing through a glass darkly and then ‘face to face’, in which latter glorified state love alone remains—this is the context in which the Fathers see the use of allegory. ‘Tout ce qui ne va point à la charité est figure. L’unique objet de l’Écriture est la charité’.12 Pascal’s words are a good summary of the patristic understanding of allegory. The sole truth, the sole reality, is Christ, and him we know through love. All else is shadow, all else is allegory, all else has value only so far as it points towards the Truth, Jesus Christ. We might put this another way round and say that Christ ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ is Truth, or Reality, so overwhelming, so overpowering, that our feeble minds cannot grasp it. We can only grasp the truth partially.
That is why there is such diversity in the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ. Our minds need to be drawn gradually to the whole truth, that is Christ, which might otherwise overpower us or be accepted by us in a way that radically distorted it. You will recall how Ambrose recommended the neophyte Augustine to read Isaiah. Not because Isaiah is a more direct witness to Christ than the Gospels; certainly not because it is easier; but because at that moment in Augustine’s development Isaiah could lead him more
surely to Christ. Why? Perhaps because the immensely intellectual convert from Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism needed to be baffled, needed to realize that now he knew only in part. And it is the way of allegory to help us to grasp what is contained in Scripture ‘in part’. The use of allegory is a recognition of the fact that here is not the whole truth, but a partial reflection of it through which we might be enabled to discern the truth itself. Allegory is appropriate precisely because it is not a definite method yielding clear and predictable results. Allegory helps us to discern through Scripture a truth not contained in Scripture, but simply witnessed to by it. In Scripture we have the truth, broken up, fragmented, so that we can grasp it, so that we can receive it as a gift, and then look through it and beyond it to the Giver, to Christ who is the Truth. Such an approach to Scripture is not ‘scientific’ and is not meant to be: it is contemplative, it is a way of prayer.
III
And he who approaches the prophetic words with care and attention will feel from his very reading a trace of their divine inspiration and will be convinced by his own feelings that the words which are believed by us to be from God are not the compositions of men. Now the light which was contained within the law of Moses, but was hidden away under a veil, shone forth at the advent of Jesus, when the veil was taken away and there came at once to men’s knowledge those ‘good things’ of which the letter of the law held a ‘shadow’.13
That is Origen, and if we follow through the way in which he explains his approach to Scripture, we see that his engagement with Scripture is discussed in terms drawn from the tradition of mystical theology. It is not simply a question of expounding the message of
