Tuesday, December 27, 2005
(1:55 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Assessing the Damage: Fatherly Reflections, pt. 1 of 2
It has been suggested that in the wake of my recently completed directed study of selected church fathers, I should write out some reflections, perhaps even as a blog post. I've decided it would probably work best as a two-part post -- the first dealing with themes that struck me as especially prominent or surprising and the second dealing with avenues for further study (either in terms of writing up something over the material I've already read, or else continuing into new areas). For review, the following are the figures under consideration:- The Apostolic Fathers (Clement of Rome, Ignatius, et al.)
- Justin Martyr
- Irenaeus
- Clement of Alexandria
- Origen
- Athanasius
- Basil
- Gregory of Nazianzus
- Gregory of Nyssa
At the same time, it was amazing how much wasn't in place -- basically, how weird a lot of this stuff was. Barnabas and Hermas stand out as the most bizarre, the former for the almost ridiculous lengths to which allegorical reading is taken, and the second in basically every respect. I'll be honest and say that I didn't understand Hermas at all, except for the most basic aspects of the text (which I arguably knew beforehand -- such as claiming there is one possibility of further forgiveness after baptism). Thus I was surprised by the extent to which the Alexandrians in particular held Hermas in such high esteem -- and I wondered what Christian history might have looked like if it had made it into the canon. The allegorical readings were particularly strong in Alexandria, and though it seemed to me as if Origen was more restrained than some others, that may just be because I only read his commentary on Romans, rather than on a narrative or legal text (thus, to preview the next installment, I'd like to read his commentaries on John and Leviticus). What began to scare me was the way in which I was getting used to the allegorical reading -- we moderns are taught that the allegorical method consisted of the following steps:
- Pick a point you want to prove
- Pick a random text out of the Bible
- Craft the least convincing possible argument to support the connection between that text and your preconceived idea
Related to this kind of Platonic reading of the Scriptures, I was surprised by the prestige of the Septuagint (LXX) in early Christianity. My days of reading Catholic apologetics had acquainted me with the use of the LXX as the origin of the "extra" books of the Old Testament in Catholic Bibles, but in the early years in particular, there was an attitude that if the Hebrew text conflicted with the LXX, so much the worse for the Hebrew. The legend of the translation of the LXX was repeated by Justin Martyr and others, giving the LXX the aura of divine inspiration, but there was also such a conviction that the Old Testament was obviously all about Christ that any counter-evidence was taken to be a deliberate falsification by the Jews. In the early years, of course, such argumentation cannot be taken to be strictly anti-Semitic, given the indistinct boundaries between Judaism and Christianity -- but it does become quite disturbing in its prevalence over the years, particularly in the accusations that some heretics are "Judaizing." Origen even says that the Jews contemporary with him would have crucified Christ just as readily as the generation contemporary with Christ, and other similar things -- at the same time as he defends Judaism against a common enemy in Against Celsus. And to bring this paragraph back into focus, even though Origen went to the trouble of learning some Hebrew and of juxtaposing the Hebrew text with various Greek translations in his critical edition of the Old Testament, the goal was ultimately to establish the authentic text of the Septuagint.
I was struck by the sheer genius of Origen and in fact read substantially more of his works than of anyone else's. His First Principles, though far from flawless, is an incredibly rich work of both philosophy and theology -- and one could view the reception of Origen's work as a kind of turning point in theology, whereby creative theological work is more and more entrusted to churchmen. The catechetical school in Alexandria was, for whatever reason, ultimately an unsustainable model, but it was an attractive one -- one sees in Clement's writings a distinctly philosophical Christianity, in the ancient sense in which philosophy would imply a particular mode of life as well as speculative thought. This more philosophical as opposed to priestly mode of Christianity seems to have had more of a place for women, as well -- Origen, in his capacity as head of the school, was supposed to have castrated himself precisely so that there could be no objection to his teaching women.
The shift from Origen to Athanasius was particularly stark, in that on the one hand you have an audacious speculative thinker and near-obsessive scholar of scripture, and on the other hand you have a capable propagandist who makes the most of his own "martyr" and outcast status in the context of imperial politics. Athanasius was largely as I had expected him to be, with the exception of the double work Against the Heathens/On the Incarnation, where we get some hint of what Athanasius might have produed had he not been constrained by the Arian controversy. The stark distinction between polemical and creative works was particularly striking in the latter half of my study, although it was present to some degree in the early works as well. The ways in which these thinkers would soften and complicate their positions when they were outside the context of church controversy was interesting and ultimately led me to go easier on them in their polemical works.
At first, I felt as though there was some seriously dishonest arguing going on -- and I'm still not convinced that it was appropriate to cast inaccurate beliefs about God as a specifically moral failing -- but by and large, I came to see what their real concern was in such superficially outrageous statements as accusing the Arians of giving in to philosophical speculation (even while the Nicene camp was crafting the idea of the Trinity, one of the most intricate intellectual structures in the history of humanity). Gregory of Nyssa's creative works seemed to me to be the most helpful in terms of understanding what was really at stake -- whereas the heresies tended to follow out the logical consequences of the various terms at play ("Why, if we're talking about an ousia, then that must mean this...."), Gregory and the orthodox more generally refused to let the terms dominate what they were supposed to be pointing toward. That is, if we are dealing with something that is properly inexpressible, then it represents a major misunderstanding to think that the terms used somehow introduce constraints on God -- for instance, claiming that if God is "one," then the Son can't also be God, because then it wouldn't fit what we mean by "one." Although one might wish that the orthodox had been less assholish, I do find orthodoxy to be the most convincing available account of God's work in Christ and (paradoxically, perhaps) the humblest theological method, at least as compared with the heresies under consideration thus far. (If I'd read further, then maybe I would have found Nestorianism hugely convincing or something -- who knows?)
Finally, I was struck by the extent to which so many of these thinkers were arguing based on commonly held ideas -- for good and for ill. I could wish that some of the Platonic assumptions about the nature of God and of the soul had been less firmly held, but I found the idea that one could come to find the Trinity or the incarnation to be rational very appealling, as well as the deemphasis on Scriptural authority as such. Some have faulted these thinkers for not really being concerned with what the Bible really means, but they never seemed to think of themselves as simply repeating the Biblical arguments or as elaborating "biblical concepts." I don't think that the encounter between Christianity and philosophy -- or the idea of Christianity as (the best) philosophy, as even someone as late as Gregory of Nazianzus seemed to hold -- was primarily a negative one, and in fact, I'm not sure how it could have been avoided. Even the prestige of mysticism in the later writings (such as the importance of Paul's vision, etc.) seems to grow out of, rather than contradict, the philosophical inheritance of Christian theology.
Overall, I feel like this exercise has rescued me somewhat from my tendencies toward a "Rousseauism of Christianity" -- that is, it doesn't strike me that anyone really ended up "selling out" in particular. Even the least appealling texts in this study took me by surprise -- for instance, both Barnabas and Justin Martyr with their emphasis on economic justice, even in the midst of their unfortunate polemics against the Jews. If I had time, I would read (almost) every one of these texts again, and then some. (I'd skim Justin Martyr -- sorry, Doug.) Hopefully I will eventually gain the language skills necessary to do some useful research in these texts, but I already feel like this exercise has benefited me precisely insofar as I intend never to be a historian of doctrine, but instead -- shall we say -- a "contemporary" "theologian." In fact, on a purely personal level, I was struck, going over my notes, by the connections I was drawing between my other research and these thinkers, during an approximate six-month period in which I was reading a lot of different things at different times, and none of them struck me as stretching in retrospect.
The next installment will deal with some potential future avenues for research, from the perspective of "world enough and time."
