Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@
Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Selected Essays
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Selected Essays
Volume II
Studies in Theology
A N D R EW L O U T H
Edited by
L EW I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932341
ISBN 978–0–19–288282–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882820.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Contents
Abbreviations
xi
Introduction1
1. The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers
7
2. The Greatest Fantasy: As If Julian the Apostate Had Written
a History of Early Christian Dogma . . .
17
3. The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs
von Balthasar
24
4. Eros and Mysticism: Early Christian Interpretation of the Song
of Songs
36
5. The Image of Heloise in English Literature
50
6. Νά εὔχεσαι νά ᾿ναι μακρύς ὁ δρόμος: Theological Reflections on
Pilgrimage
67
7. The Theology of the Philokalia
72
8. Theology, Contemplation, and the University
81
9. Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Mother of God
91
10. The Eucharist in the Theology of Fr Sergii Bulgakov
106
11. The Jesus Prayer and the Theology of Deification in
Fr Pavel Florensky and Fr Sergii Bulgakov
122
12. Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox
Theology?
131
13. The Authority of the Fathers in the Western Orthodox
Diaspora in the Twentieth Century
145
14. Pagans and Christians on Providence
154
15. What Is Theology? What Is Orthodox Theology?
171
16. The Place of Θέωσις in Orthodox Theology
178
17. Inspiration of the Scriptures
191
18. Sergii Bulgakov and the Task of the Theologian
203
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
x
Contents
19. Space, Time, and the Liturgy
217
20. Apostolicity and the Apostle Andrew in the Byzantine Tradition
235
21. Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
240
22. The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World
254
23. Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium
268
24. Theology of the ‘In-­Between’
278
25. Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community,
and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity
288
26. Analogy in Karl Barth and Orthodox Theology
298
27. Easter, Calendar, and Cosmos: An Orthodox View
312
28. Pseudonymity and Secret Tradition in Early Christianity: Some
Reflections on the Development of Mariology
326
29. The Recovery of the Icon: Nicolas Zernov Lecture 2015
341
30. Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology: Some Orthodox
Reflections
362
31. What Did Vladimir Lossky Mean by ‘Mystical Theology’?
378
32. The Slav Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim
390
33. Reflections Inspired by Cardinal Grillmeier’s Der Logos am Kreuz
403
34. Bulgakov and Russian Sophiology
415
35. Exile, Hospitality, Sobornost´: The Experience of the
Russian Émigrés
428
36. Eucharistic Doctrine and Eucharistic Devotion
441
37. Μονὰς καὶ Τριάς: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Byzantine Theology
448
Details of Original Publication
Index
471
473
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
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).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
I
Looking 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.
Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, 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
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
2
Selected Essays, Volume II
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 vie contemplative selon Platon (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 Early Christian Fathers, to prod­
uce 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.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
3
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
Church Dogmatics and 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 phil­
oso­
phy 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 con­
tinued 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.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
4
Selected Essays, Volume II
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 Exégèse Médiévale (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
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Introduction
5
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, Greek East and Latin West: 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 Orthodox Thinkers.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
6
Selected Essays, Volume II
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.
Andrew Louth
Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
The Hermeneutical Question Approached
through the Fathers
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, his­tor­
ic­al, 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 point de
départ. 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 the­
ology, are seen, in their very reaction against it, to be taking up a position in rela­
tion 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
1 This is a generalization that admits of many exceptions, but it might be epitomized in the contrast
between two commentaries on the Fourth Gospel—­the English one by C. K. Barrett and the German
one by Rudolf Bultmann. Each admirable in its own way, but very different.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
8
Selected Essays, Volume II
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 dis­
cerned 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 pro­
gramme 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 ques­
tion rather different from that of German theology.
I
I 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
2 In passing I ought to apologize for the way I am using ‘English’ and ‘Anglican’ as if they were
synonymous. They are not, of course, though the influence of the Anglican approach extends in
England beyond the borders of the Anglican Church.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Hermeneutical Question
9
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 faith lived, 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 agree­
ment 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 wor­
ships 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, there­
fore, 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 com­
munity, 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 sub­or­
din­ated 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 ecclesia semper reformanda, in the words of Pope
John XXIII.
As I see it, the way in which the Scriptures show the Church her way of obedi­
ence 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
3 John Bramhall, Works, Library of Anglo-­Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1842–45), ii. 261.
4 Bramhall, Works, i. 113.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
10
Selected Essays, Volume II
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 experienced as self-­authenticating. But this experi­
ence, 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 apos­
tolic 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 cen­
turies 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
5 William Laud, Works, Library of Anglo-­Catholic Theology (J. H. Parker, 1847–60), ii. 366f.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Hermeneutical Question
11
seems to me that the Fathers manifest a particular approach to theology espe­
cially 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 wit­
ness. Another element—­which passes beyond the ‘theology of the Fathers’ (pre­
cisely 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 ortho­
doxy. 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 dis­
cern a certain directness in expounding Scripture, a certain boldness—­
parrhesia—­in their expounding of the mystery of the faith. It is in that parrhesia
that 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 parrhesia that 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.
II
There 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 typo­
logical interpretation of Scripture that for my purposes in this paper can be sub­
sumed 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 free-­hand 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 def­
in­ition of the faith in a formula, a creed, a symbol, we know—­as we have learnt
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
12
Selected Essays, Volume II
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 Arians
of the Fourth Century that
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 close­
ness to Christ, to that creative silence out of which the Word comes,9 to that still­
ness (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 lis­
tening 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 inter­
preting 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
6 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (Longman, 1950), passim.
7 J. H. Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (Pickering, 1876), pp. 36f.
8 Ignatios of Antioch, Ad Eph. xv.
9 Ignatios, Ad Magn. viii. 2.
10 Ignatios, Ad Eph. xix. 1.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Hermeneutical Question
13
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 full­
est authority, because with the use of allegory any text can be made to mean any­
thing. 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’ Homeric Questions 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 sum­
mary 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 overpower­
ing, 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
11 Quoted in R. M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (SPCK, 1957), p. 10.
12 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Louis Lafuma (Seuil, 1962), no. 270.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
14
Selected Essays, Volume II
‘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 hid­
den 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 the Scriptures, much more it is a matter of being able
to discern the Word, or rather of being alert to the Word’s disclosing of himself
through this engagement with Scripture. So, commenting on the verse from the
Song of Songs, ‘Behold, here he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping
over the hills’, Origen says:
Now if at any time a soul who is constrained by love for the Word of God is in
the thick of an argument about some passage—­and everyone knows from his
own experience how when one gets into a tight corner like this one gets shut up
in the straits of propositions and enquiries—­if at such a time some riddles or
obscure sayings of the Law or the Prophets hand in the soul, and if then she
should chance to perceive him to be present, and from afar should catch the
sound of his voice, forthwith she is uplifted. And when he has begun more and
more to draw near to her senses and to illuminate the things that are obscure,
13 De Principiis IV. i. 6.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Hermeneutical Question
15
then she sees him ‘leaping upon the mountains and the hills’; that is to say, he
then suggests to her interpretations of a high and lofty sort, so that this soul
can rightly say: ‘Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over
the hills’.14
Understood like this, allegory is not obviously absurd. It is in fact an attempt to be
faithful to the fragmentary, partial nature of the Scriptural witness, and also to the
sort of witness Scripture is. Here lies its advantage over exclusive dependence on
the historical-­critical method for theological interpretation of Scripture. For that
method seeks to discover what the writer of some text originally meant by what
he said, and also what grounds he had for saying it. But theological interpretation
of the text of Scripture goes beyond this. It is an attempt to see Scripture as a wit­
ness, as pointing to the Word, to Jesus Christ, in whose presence we live in the
Church through the Spirit. It may be important to understand what the original
writers said, and why they said it, but that is not the end of exegesis. Resort to
allegory sees this, because it seeks to take us beyond the text to someone who
could be captured by no text, to our Lord himself. The historical-­critical method—­
precisely because it is a method that might be expected to yield results—­runs the
risk of duping us into supposing that its results are what we are after when we
attend to the witness of Scripture. But the task of listening to Scripture is just
that—­to listen to the Word speaking to us through Scripture. It is not the task of
piecing together the fragmentary witness of Scripture to make some construction
of our own. In the end we pass beyond our own efforts, we let go our intellect and
what we spin from it, and simply listen. Allegory keeps this end before us.
Even if all that I have said about allegory is granted—­that is a way of interpret­
ing the partial, fragmentary witness of the Scriptures so that the Truth that is
Christ may be discerned through it—­a difficulty remains. How do we know that
what is discerned beyond the letter of Scripture is really there? How can we escape
the apparent arbitrariness of allegory?
Here we need to be sure what sort of question we are asking, or rather what
sort of answer we would accept as an answer, and whether we are not in fact beg­
ging the question anyway. For to speak of the ‘arbitrariness’ of allegory is perhaps
to itch for some method that will exclude arbitrariness: the historical-­critical
method, say, which yields (we hope) definite, non-­arbitrary results. But the
Fathers do not see allegory as arbitrary, rather they see what we might call an
openness in allegory; an openness to God, an openness to God’s manifestation of
himself in Scripture so that we are responding through it to the mystery to which
it is a mystery to which it is a witness. And in this openness are found the springs
of our apprehension of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
14 Comm. in Cant. III. 11 (tr. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26 (Longmans, 1957), 209,
slightly edited).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
16
Selected Essays, Volume II
For the doctrine of the Incarnation is, from this point of view, to do with the
fact that the period of the Incarnation is the period where there is made possible
being with God through being with a man. The ‘one thing necessary’ (Luke 10:42)
that Mary of Bethany found sitting at Jesus’ feet was a being with and listening to
Jesus, which was being with and listening to God. The heart of the Gospel is not a
message but a fact; and it is this to which the doctrine of the Incarnation bears
witness. And for this Scripture is and must be interpreted within the tradition of
the Church, a tradition that is most basically nourished by countless Christian
lives lived close to the mystery that is Christ.
‘He who truly possesses the word of Jesus can also hear his stillness . . .’ He who
truly understands the Word of God declared and articulated in Scripture is one
who silently and inarticulately waits on God in stillness. And this latter is more
fundamental; just as the fact of the Incarnation, the fact that God condescended
to be with us men, is more fundamental than any message we may derive from
this. Scripture is the prophetic and apostolic witness to the Incarnation of God; it
is the Church’s witness, handed down by the Church and received within the
Church. And this is no human movement. To speak of the Church’s tradition is to
speak of the Spirit. To speak of any true witness to Christ is to speak of the Spirit:
no man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Spirit.
And here we stumble across the springs of our apprehension of God as Trinity.
The openness of allegory would be arbitrariness if we were simply surrendering
our reason to some human convention. But the openness of allegory is the recog­
nition of the fact—­
the experience—­
that we are brought to the meaning of
Scripture—­the mystery of Christ revealing the Father—­by the Spirit, not by our
own ingenuity. For the Fathers do not suppose that their understanding of
Scripture is a purely human affair. The whole end of revelation would be rendered
nugatory if the Spirit who inspired the apostles and prophets did not also move
the hearts of believers to recognize and obey the word of God speaking to them
through their writings. In the theology of the Fathers, their acceptance of a con­
templative approach to Scripture leads inevitably to the idea that the revelation of
the Father through the Son, to which the Scriptures bear witness, is discerned
also in God, in the Spirit. ‘All knowledge of the Father, when the Son reveals him,
is made known through the Holy Spirit’.15 So Origen. And Basil echoes him: ‘For
the mind illuminated by the Spirit beholds the Son, and in Him contemplates, as
in an Image, the Father’.16
To hear the Word of God in the Scriptures is to be in the Spirit, to be up into
the life of the Blessed Trinity, which is the love that binds them together. And we
pass beyond allegory, beyond figure. We pass into the sole object of the Scriptures,
love.*17
15 De Princ. I. iii. 4 (tr. G. W. Butterworth, Origen on First Principles (SPCK, 1936), 32).
16 Ep. ccxxxvi.
* A paper read to the Oxford-­Bonn Theological Seminar, 1977.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.