[Note: The following is a post I'd been working on for a few days prior to my previous announcement about a blog sabbath. Please note also, that I am doing more focused daily reading in the Church Fathers, and posting without commentary passages I've come across over at my companion blog. My family and I continue to covet your prayers.]
In my previous blogging about sola scriptura, one of my fellow parishioners emailed me about David Trobisch's The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford: 2000). I was intrigued. He offered it to me as a gift. And I am extremely grateful. I present here something of a summary and review of Trobisch's argument.
First, a resume of the conventional “conservative” understanding of the formation of the canonical New Testament. Each individual book that would later form the canon was inspired from the moment of its writing. The canonization process was primarily a matter of the Church's recognition of that divine origin and authority. Over the period of about two and a half centuries from the consensus date of the composition of the last of the New Testament books, the early Church sifted through various early documents purporting to be divinely authoritative, eventually settling on the 27 we now recognize. There was no ecumenical council who declared these books to be canon, but a grassroots recognition as exemplified in the “Muratorian canon,” in the works used by early Christians such as Origen in their own writings, and St. Athanasios' festal letter (though this was later recognized by local councils in Rome, Hippo and Carthage), so that by A.D. 400, the canon of the New Testament was recognized universally.
Trobisch, however, wants to call this “consensus view” into question.
The thesis of this study is that the New Testament, in the form that achieved canonical status, is not the result of a lengthy and complicated collecting process that lasted for several centuries. The history of the New Testament is the history of an edition, a book that has been published and edited by a specific group of editors, at a specific place, and at a specific time. (6)
I have restrained myself from advancing a theory about where and when and who published the Canonical Edition. However, I hope this study will serve as an important step toward finding valid answers to these questions. In addition, I do not intend to challenge the current consensus that none of the writings included in the New Testament originated significantly later than 150 C. E. (7)
Indeed, this canonical edition was in place early and used widely.
At the end of the second century and in the beginning of the third, Irenaeus was reading this edition in Lyons; Tertullian read it in Carthage and Asia Minor; Clement had it in Alexandria, and Origen in Palestine. This particular edition, in other words, was read worldwide. (106)
A view such as this, that breaks with the received scholarship is going to have to argue cogently and clearly for such a position. Trobisch does just that. His argument falls into three parts: the manuscript evidence, internal evidence of a final redaction and internal evidence of the editor(s) addressing the readers. I will focus primarily on the manuscript evidence.
Manuscript evidence
Trobisch focuses on five key pieces of evidence in the manuscripts that, he argues, provides incontrovertible evidence of a final redaction of an editor (or group of editors) intent on publication of the volume. Those five pieces of evidence are: the widespread use of nomina sacra; the almost exclusive use of the codex; the arrangement of the writings into clearly demarcated groups, and the number of those writings; the titles of the works; and the title of the canonical edition.
nomina sacra
The nomina sacra are abbreviations of sacred words such as theos (God), huios (Son), christos (Christ), iesous (Jesus), and so forth. The manuscripts vary in how they abbreviate the original word, and have a horizontal line drawn across the word. That these are not intended to be abbreviations is evident from the fact that there is no standard shortening to which they adhere and that in many cases would take more time and effort (especially in drawing the horizontal line over the word) than would standard abbreviations. Neither are the nomina sacra an imitation of the Jewish Tetragrammaton (the four consonantal characters for the name of God, usually rendered in English YHWH, and always unpronounced, with the word Adonai, Lord, usually substituted in oral readings), since the Tetragrammaton was frequently written in Hebrew characters. Further the nomina sacra was not a consistent convention for the Tetragrammaton even in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament).
Furthermore, the nomina sacra exist in our earliest manuscripts and consistently throughout all our earliest New Testament writings. It is extremely unlikely that the nomina sacra was an agreed convention by all the New Testament writers since they wrote at such disparate times and places and under extremely variant circumstances.
Clearly then the nomina sacra are an intentional publishing convention.
use of the codex
Christians were alone among their contemporaries for devoting their important literature to the codex form. Trobisch charts a provisional graphic demonstrating the growth of the use of the codex from the first century onward. Among the users of the codex, Christians by far outnumbered their contemporaries. Indeed, our earliest copies of the New Testament are codices.
That the use of the codex was an intentional publishing convention is seen from its universality among the manuscript copies we have, dating back to our earliest copies, and that this was a unique characteristic of the “first edition of the New Testament” that set it apart from similar works of its day.
arrangement and number of writings
The oldest complete copies of the New Testament all show the complete list of 27 New Testament canonical books (or it can be determined, if they are incomplete, that they are almost certainly to have done so). The fourth century codex Siniaticus lists all twenty seven, in the groups of Gospels, Praxapostolos (Acts with the Catholic epistles), the Letters of Paul and the Apocalypse. Fourth century Vaticanus is incomplete but from various factors is considered to have had the New Testament 27. The fifth century codices Alexandrinus and Ephraemi Rescriptus had all twenty-seven books. All four of these early manuscripts are independent text traditions (different families of copies) and all of them contain the Septuagint—thus making them complete Christian Bibles. And although the arrangement of the books differ among the codices, both in the arrangement of the four groups (Gospels, Praxapostolos, Letters of Paul and Apocalypse) and works withing those groups, they all have the same four groupings and all groupings have the same works within them.
Given this consistent grouping of the New Testament books, this is almost surely an intentional publishing decision.
titles of individual works
That the titles of the individual New Testament books (e. g., “Gospel according to John”) were not original is almost universally accepted. But our earliest manuscripts contain these titles. These titles are awkward both in the grammatical constructions (“according to [author's name]”--kata plus accusative) and are not entirely accurate representations of the genre they entitle (gospel, praxapostolos), once again points to an intentional publishing decision.
title of the canonical edition
Finally, tucked away in 2 Corinthians 3 is the distinction made between the “old testament” and “new testament.” The joining of the Septuagint and the canonical New Testament in our early manuscripts, and the denomination of them as “old” and “new,” similarly represents an intentional publishing decision to give the entirety of the New Testament books a name and reflects a clear theological position on the relationship of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.
Internal evidence
implied authorship
Trobisch notes that the titles of individual works indicate who the authors are. The entire New Testament canon is put together in such a way so as to identify the authors. For example, the order of the catholic epistles matches the order of the list of the “pillars” of Galatians 2:9. The identity of Matthew is provided by the references to “Levi” in the other gospels, but by “Matthew” in the Gospel according to Matthew. Mark is identified in the Acts and in Paul's letters; which serves to connect Peter with Paul and all of Paul's letters. Trobisch goes into great details making all these connections. But his point is simple, the entirety of the canonical New Testament serves to authenticate the authorial titles of individual works with dozens of intricately connected references within the New Testament works itself.
That this preponderance of connections was an intentional publishing decision seems a very strong plausibility.
canonical New Testament arrangement mirrors Septuagint
The title of the canonical edition, noted in 2 Corinthians 3, is joined with the Greek Old Testament, and the arrangement of the New Testament canon is a mirror of the arrangement of the Old Testament canon. The Torah is the foundation of the Septuagint as the Gospels are for the New Testament. Just as the historical books of Joshua through Esther connect the Torah with the wisdom literature, so too does the Acts connect the Gospels with the Epistles; where the wisdom literature and the epistles together put into practice what is fundamentally revealed in the Torah and the Gospels. The prophetic literature of the Old Testament points to the coming of the Lord in his incarnation just as the Apocalypse points to the coming of the Lord in his glory.
That this was an intentional publishing decision, especially since the arrangement of the Septuagint differs markedly from the Hebrew Masoretic text, seems clear.
editorial note to the reader
The Gospel according to John ends (21:25) with a very clear address to the reader. There are other similar such notes scattered throughout the New Testament. There is Luke's acknowledgment of other Gospels in Luke 1:1-4. There is Peter's acknowledgment of Paul's writings as canonical Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16). Paul himself acknowledges other of his own writings that are not present in our canon (the epistle to the Laodiceans, Colossians 4:16). All of these, and others Trobisch discusses, are an intentional publishing redaction intent to draw the reader's attention to the fact that what they hold in their hands is the canonical edition of the New Testament.
My extremely brief summary of Trobisch's argument does not do the book justice. His work is only a bit over a hundred pages long, but his evidence and argumentation are dense and tightly written.
I'm not competent to judge Trobisch's argument on its merits. I know just enough of some of the subjects he addresses (textual criticism, New Testament manuscripts, etc.) to both follow his argument and find it extremely persuasive.
I definitely recommend this book for your reading.
If you haven't read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and/or you don't want to know the really big plot spoiler I will reveal in my rant, do not click on the link to continue reading.
I'm serious: You will be reading about THE REALLY BIG THING THAT HAPPENS AT THE END OF THE BOOK if you read any further.
Are you sure you wanna?
TURN BACK NOW IF YOU HAVE ANY HESITATION.
Are you sure?
IT'S STILL NOT TOO LATE TO TURN BACK. BUT IF YOU CONTINUE READING I WON'T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE.
Alright then. What's the password?
Heh. Jes' kiddin'. Rant now ensues . . .
Dumbledore?! For pity's sake! Dumbledore?! C'mon, give me a Snape, heck I'd've taken a Ginny, or, *gulp*, even a Ron. But not Dumbledore.
Oh, sure, I know. When you have a young or inexperienced protagonist who is being guided by a nearly omniscient or omnipotent mentor, you've got to kill off or severely incapacitate the mentor for the protagonist to grow into the full hero the narrative (and the readers) demand.
But Dumbledore . . . *sigh*
The book as a whole lacked that sort of action-and-riddle-driven plot that all of the previous books have been known for. And I'm not sure I think Harry's lessons with Dumbledore provided the most effective way for us to get the backstory. 'Course, that being said, it was always difficult to put the book down and attend to my real life duties.
But the writing was much better, much tighter. There seemed to be not a wasted paragraph in this one. All of the side stories provided the appropriate comic relief or pause prior to rebuilding the tension. I must say, I was very pleased to see Ron and Hermione get together. And we all knew it would be Ginny and Harry; that's been obvious for the last few books. Snape's killing of Dumbledore was a complete surprise, which shows how well Ms. Rowling has written his character. But there was just enough foreshadowing from the very beginning (Dumbledore's dead hand, anyone?) so that last night, with about a third of the book to go, I looked at my wife and said, "She's going to kill off Dumbledore."
Verdammt! I was right.
I kept hoping I was wrong. But when the expected did, after all, happen, I have to say, I got teary. I liked Dumbledore better than I ever did Harry.
She's a good writer. But still . . . J K Rowling sucks.
John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul, translated by E. Allison Peers, is available online. So, too is Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Spiritual Canticle.
From that other well-known Carmelite, Teresa of Avila, you can read the following online: Life of Teresa of Jesus, Interior Castle, and Way of Perfection
Those with Russian and/or Orthodox predilections will be glad to know that The Brothers Karamazov is also available.
(For a full list of available works from this site, go here.)
. . . [T]he theology of the Eastern Church distinguishes in God the three hypostases, the nature or essence, and the energies. The Son and the Holy Spirit are, so to say, personal processions, the energies natural processions. The energies are inseparable from the nature, and the nature is inseparable from the three Persons. These distinctions are of great importance for the Eastern Church's conception of mystical life:1. The doctrine of the energies, ineffably distinct from the essence, is the dogmatic basis of the real character of all mystical experience. God, who is inaccessible in His essence, is present in His energies 'as in a mirror,' remaining invisible in that which He is; 'in the same way we are able to see our faces, themselves invisible to us in a glass,' according to a saying of St. Gregory Palamas. [Sermon on the Presentation of the Holy Virgin in the Temple, edited by Sophocles, Athens, 1861, pp. 176-7.] Wholly unknowable in His essence, God wholly reveals Himself in His energies, which yet in no way divide His nature into two parts--knowable and unknowable--but signify two different modes of the divine existence, in the essence and outside of the essence.
2. This doctrine makes it possible to understand how the Trinity can remain incommunicable in essence and at the same time come and dwell within us, according to the promise of Christ (John xiv, 23). The presence is not a causal one, such as the divine omnipresence in creation; no more is it a presence according to the very essence--which is by defintion incommunicable; it is a mode according to which the Trnity dwells in us by means of that in itself which is communicable--that is to say, by the energies which are common to the three hypostases, or, in other words, by grace--for it is by this name that we know the deifying energies which the Holy Spirit communicates to us. He who has the Spirit, who confers the gift, has at the same time the Son, through whom every gift is transmitted to us; he also has the Father, from whom comes every perfect gift. In receiving the gift--the deifying energies--one receives at the same time the indwelling of the Holy Trinity--inseparable from its natural energies and present in them in a different manner but none the less truly from that in which it is present in its nature.
3. The distinction between the essences and the energies, which is fundamental for the Orthodox doctrine of grace, makes it possible to preserve the real meaning of St. Peter's words 'partakers of the divine nature.' The union to which we are called is neither hypostatic--as in the case of the human nature of Christ--nor substantial, as in that of the three divine Persons: it is union with God in His energies, or union by grace making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God. In deification we are by grace (that is to say, in the divine energies) all that God is by nature, save only identity of nature . . ., according to the teaching of St. Maximus. ['De ambiguis,' P. G. XCI, 1308 B.] We remain creatures while becoming God by grace, as Christ remained God in becoming man by the Incarnation.
These distinctions in God which are made by the theology of the Eastern Church do not in any way contradict its apophatic attitude in regard to revealed truth. On the contrary, these antinomical distinctions are dictated by a concern for safeguarding the mystery, while yet expressing the data of revelation in dogma. Thus, as we have seen in the doctrine of the Trinity, the distinction between the persons and the nature revealed a tendency to represent God as a 'monad and triad in one', with the consequence that the domination of the unity of the nature over the trinity of the hypostases was avoided, as was the elimination or minimizing of the primordial mystery of the identity-diversity. In the same way, the distinction between the essence and the energies is due to the antinomy between the unknowable and the knowable, the incommunicable and the communicable, with which both religious thought and the experience of divine things are ultimately faced. These real distinctions introduce no 'composition' into the divine being; they signify the mystery of God, who is absolutely one according to His nature, absolutely three according to His persons, sovereign and inaccessible Trinity, dwelling in the profusion of glory which is His uncreated light, His eternal Kingdom which all must enter who inherit the deified state of the age to come.
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, pp. 85-88.
Annie Dillard ends her meditations with a prayer for Julie.
There is Julie Norwich. Julie Norwich is salted with fire. She is preserved like a salted fillet from all evil, baptized at birth into time and now into eternity, into the bladelike arms of God. For who will love her now, without a face, when women with faces abound, and people are so? People are reasoned, while God is mad. They love only beauty; who knows what God loves? Happy birthday, little one and wise: you got there early, the easy way. The world knew you before you knew the world. The gods in their boyish, brutal games bore you like a torch, a firebrand, recklessly over the heavens, to the glance of the one God, fathomless and mild, dissolving you into the sheets.
You might as well be a nun. You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you! Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room? Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means. That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil. There are two kinds of nuns, out of the cloister or in. You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child. Learn Latin, an it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes.
And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You'll climb trees. You won't be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. Mornings, when light spreads over the pastures like wings, and fans a secret color into everything, and beats the trees senseless with beauty, so that you can't tell whether the beauty is in the trees--dazzling in cells like yellow sparks or green flashing waters--or on them--a transfiguring silver air charged with the wings' invisible motion; mornings, you won't be able to walk for the power of it: earth's too round. And by long and waking day--Sext, None, Vespers--when the grasses, living or dead, drowse while the sun reels, or lash in any wind, when sparrows hush and tides slack at the ebb, or flood up the beaches and cliffsides tangled with weed, and hay waits, and elsewhere people buy shoes--then you kneel, clattering with thoughts, ill, or some days erupting, some days holding the altar rail, gripping the brass-bolt altar rail, so you won't fly. Do you think I don't believe this? You have no idea, none. And nights? Nights after Compline under the ribs of Orion, nights in rooms at lamps or windows like moths? Nights you see Deneb, one-eyed over the trees; you vanish into the sheets, shrunken, your eyes bright as candles and as sightless, exhausted. Nights Murzim, Arcturus, Aldebaran in the Bull: You cry, My father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof! Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.
Julie Norwich; I know. Surgeons will fix your face. This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned. Or if you're scarred, you're scarred. People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves. Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love. So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
Today is Friday, November 20. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, burned; we can get no word of her condition. People released from burn wards, I read once, have a very high suicide rate. They had not realized, before they were burned, that life could include such suffering, nor that they personally could be permitted such pain. No drugs ease the pain of third-degree burns, because burns destroy skin: the drugs simply leak into the sheets. His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" And Christ, who spat on the ground, made a mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man's eyes, and gave him sight, answered, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the words of God should be made manifest in him." Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself--and not the subsequent cure--as "God's works made manifest," then we have, along with "Not as the world gives do I give unto you," two meager, baffling, and infuriating answers to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?
The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can--and will--do? . . .
Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a "spiritual scale," and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of the substance is: Holy the Firm.
Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with metals and minerals? With salts and earths? O fcourse, and straight on up, till "up" ends by curing back. Does something that touched something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it, and trees? Of course. . . .
But if Holy the Firm is "underneath salts," if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle's materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is. Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas. Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base. Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea. Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the sense; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher's stone.
***
These are only ideas, by the single handful. Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hold? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
Facing squarely the rock mountain and the salt sea, the airplane fallen from the sky, and little Julie Norwich burned, Annie Dillard is ready. Am I?
I know only enough of God to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were: God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery. . . .
There is one church here, so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I quit the house and wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. On a big Sunday there might be twenty of us there; often I am the only person under sixty, and feel as though I'm on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a Congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world--for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God's grace to all--in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, "Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week." After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much. "Good morning!" he says after the first hymn and invocation, startling me witless every time, and we all shout back, "Good morning!" . . .
The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
Julie Norwich lies burned in the hospital. Annie Dillard continues her meditation.
So I read. Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God, and stand closer to him than the others. Seraphs love God; cherubs, who are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten? The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God's throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, "all wings," having, as Isaiah noted, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God, they perpetually praise him, crying Holy, Holy, Holy. . . . But, according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first "Holy" before the intensity of their love ignites them again and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames. "Abandon everything," Dionysius told his disciple. "God despises ideas."
God despises everything, apparently. If he abandoned us, slashing creation loose at its base from any roots in the real: and if we in turn abandon everything--all these illusions of time and space and lives--in order to love only the real: then where are we? Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift. Then we reel out love's long line alone toward a God less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns.
Of faith, I have nothing, only of truth: that this one God is a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged. This is no leap; this is evidence of things seen: one Julie, one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart, and enraging the mind, and causing me to look at the world stuff apalled, at the blithering rock of trees in a random wind, at my hand like some gibberish sprouted, my fist opening and closing, so that I think, Have I once turned my hand in this circus, have I ever called it home? . . .
Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose? Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home? Is there--even if Christ holds the tip of things fast and stretches eternity clear to the dim souls of men--is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which universe furls like a ribbon twined into time?
Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand in it at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone. The universe is neither contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire. The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun--but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of o ur senses.
But how do we know--how could we know--that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve?
I sit at the window, chewing the bones in my wrist. Pray for them: for Julie, for Jesse her father, for Ann her mother, pray. Who will teach us to pray?
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
I continue to swallow the necessary medicine. Dillard continues:
Jesse her father had grabbed her clear of the plane this morning, and was hauling her off when the fuel blew. A gob of flung ignited vapor hit her face, or something flaming from the plane or fir tree hit her face. No one else was burned, or hurt in any way.
***
So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparenntly perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
In 1975, Annie Dillard spent some time on the islands of Puget Sound. In the course of a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in November, a plane crashed on the island. From the events of that week, she wrote a book, Holy the Firm. I am reading it now because I need to. Here are some excerpts.
I came here to study hard things--rock mountain and salt sea--and to temper my spirit on their edges. "Teach me thy ways, O Lord" is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. . . .
Into this world falls a plane.
The earth is a mineral speckle planted in trees. The plane snagged its wing on a tree, fluttered in a tiny arc, and struggled down.
I heard it go. The cat looked up. There was no reason: the plane's engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the firs. It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed in the thin woods where cattle browse; the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face.
Little Julie mute in some room at St. Joe's now, drugs dissolving into the sheets. Little Julie with her eyes naked and spherical, baffled. Can you scream without lips? Yes. But do children in long pain scream?
It is November 19 and no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods. . . .
The volunteer firemen have mustered; the fire trucks have come--stampeding Shuller's sheep--and gone, bearing burnt Julie and Jesse her father to the emergency room in town, leaving the rest of us to gossip, fight grass fires on the airstrip, and pray, or wander from window to window, fierce.
So she is burnt on her face and neck, Julie Norwich. The one whose teeth are short in a row, Jesse and Ann's oldest, red-kneed, green-socked, carrying cats.
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977)
I read twenty-six fewer books in 2003 than in 2002. Guess that's what a new baby will do to you.
Among the notable reads:
1. Hieromonk Damascene Christenson, Not of This World and Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works. I actually began reading the original version of St. Seraphim's biography in the fall of 2002. But it was piece-meal at best, and I took it up with more fervor at the beginning of this year. The revised biography is light years better. If you want to see the process of the making of an American Orthodox saint, read Father Seraphim Rose.
2. St. Theophan the Recluse, Unseen Warfare. This book was the primary text for my Lenten reading. St. Theophan actually revised an earlier revision done by St. Nikodemos of Mt. Athos on an Italian Roman Catholic book. It is an amazing spiritual read. St. Theopan's insights into the inner struggle of faith is among the best. And the healthy introduction giving the history and theology of the book is similarly helpful.
3. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement since 1945. Though self-described liberals and other general cynics may scoff at the title, the book is incredibly interesting. It discusses the thoughts, ideas and impact of such men as Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Jr., Whitaker Chambers, et al. If you thought you knew what opponents call "the radical right," think again. (Note: Lee Edwards' The Conservative Revolution touches on some of the same luminaries, but focuses on the political sphere.)
4. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. I've actually read this book many times before. But earlier in the spring, I came across a first edition hardcover at a local used bookstore. It's a brief (about 80 pages) account of a weekend Ms. Dillard spent on an island in Puget Sound. If you ever want to see what good incarnational theology is about, read this book.
5. Christos Yannaros, Freedom of Morality. With Metropolitan Zizioulos' Being as Communion and Panayiotis Nellas' Deification in Christ, Yannaros' work highlights how human ethical behavior flows from the Trinitarian image in which we have been made. These three books alone have been fundamental in my shift of theological thinking toward the patristics and the Tradition.
6. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man. This is a posthumous collection of St. Seraphim's writings (and transcribed talks) on Genesis, anthropology, cosmology and the relation between faith and science. The patristic commentary on Genesis 1-12 alone is worth the price of the book.
There were many more good books that I read, but these were among the most important.
There is one regretted read from 2003:
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Armageddon. This is the penultimate book in the "Left Behind" series, and since I'd read all the others a couple of years ago, I couldn't help but slog through this one. (And by the way, my regretted read for this year will be the final book in the series.)
Yannaras' The Freedom of Morality is not for the average reader. One needs a decent grounding in both philosophy and theology. But if one can patiently come to grips with the point of the first chapter ("The Masks of Morality and the Ethos of the Person"), and its reinforcements in the next two, the remaining nine chapters will deepen and broaden one's thinking on Christian morals and anthropology.
At the risk of oversimplification, the theme of the book can be encapsulated in this passage:
In the life of the Church, God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life. The personal existence of God is the comprehensive and exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence or the energy of God which constitutes being, but His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis of being. (p. 16)
and the following:
The identification of being with the personal existence of God--an indentification with vital consequences for the truth of man and human morality--explains the revelation of the God of the Church, who is one and at the same time, trinitarian. The one God is not one divine nature or essence, but primarily one person: the person of God the Father. The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His essence or being, making it into "hypostases": freely and from love He beget the Son and causes the Holy Spirit to proceed. Consequently, being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom if its love which "hypostasizes" being into a personal and trinitarian communion. God the Father's mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal communion. (p. 17-18)
It is here that one must start: God, in whose image and likeness man and woman were created. Yannaros continues:
. . . In the light of the truth about the trinitarian hypostasis of being, the Church is enabled to shed light on the mystery of human existence, and to give an ontological foundation to human morality.
Created "in the image" of God in Trinity, man himself is one in essence according to his nature, and in many hypostases according to his persons. Each man is a unique, distinct and unrepeatable person; he is an existential distinctiveness. All men have a common nature or essence, but this has not existence except as personal distinctiveness, as freedom and transcendence of their own natural predeterminations and natural necessity. The person is the hypostasis of the human essence or nature. He sums up in his existence the universality of human nature, but at the same time surpasses it, because his mode of existence is freedom and distinctiveness. (p. 19)
This is expanded by the following:
. . . Man's nature in general--mankind as a whole, as a biological species--can be defined objectively: it possess will, reason, intellect, etc. But each human person exercises his will and converses and thinks in a way that is unique, distinct and unrepeatable.
Consequently, the person is not an individual, a segment or subdivision of human nature as a whole. He represents, not the relationship of a part to the whole, but the possibility of summing up the whole in a distinctiveness of relationship, in an act of self-transcendence. (p. 21)
Humankind, therefore, is not merely biological, nor merely spiritual. But as the Incarnation teaches us is a hypostasis of spirit and flesh. We are not relegated to our mere biology. We are greater than our genes. But because we are enfleshed souls, we are greater than mere spirit as well. We are greater because the particular combination of body and soul (or spirit) which constitutes who we are is so constituted by love, and therefore by koinonia. We are sums greater than our parts.
There is hope here: the alcoholic may transcend his disease, the deeply sexual being may similarly be chaste, the powerfully spiritual need not be lost to chaos but may be grounded in the depth of God's love through the very body which gives it sustenance and which it also sustains.
We find that we need not be weighed down by the incessant demands of the flesh, nor that we must be cut loose from this world by the powerful call of the spirit. Instead, called into unique existence by God we can obey that which seems impossible: sexual acts may be limited by God's obligatory call yielding the freedom of holiness; the yearning ache for holiness can be instantiated by respect and loyalty to our forebears, living and dead.
This basic paradigm, this basis patristic doctrine of humankind, is fleshed out and enspirited in the ethoi of the "Fools for Christ," the Liturgy, the Eucharist and the sacraments, asceticism and virtue, ecclesiology and the canons, and, not least, iconography.
There are some weaknesses to Yannaras' work. His take on Protestant pietism, while true in the main, succumbs to mere polemic in some of the specifics. There are times when his Trinitarian anthropology sounds a bit too much like Heidegger and bit less than it should like St. Paul. But when kept within the clear paramaters of the anthropology he explicates from the Fathers and the Scriptures, these weaknesses can be seen for what they are and illustrate ways we may avoid the dangers of which Yannaras warns us.
These weaknesses may also be balanced by two other works in the same series: John D. Zizioulas' Being as Communion and Panayiotas Nellas' Deification in Christ. Indeed, these three works in themselves provide perhaps the most complete foundation in Christian thinking on Christ, salvation, the Church and humankind one can get from a mere handful of books.
Published posthumously, Genesis, Creation and Early Man is a compendium of the writings of Blessed Seraphim of Platina dealing with the patristic interpretation of Genesis 1-11 and the wider topic of evolution.
Hieromonk Damascene Christenson, editor of Blessed Seraphim's writings and author of his biography, provides a detailed preface describing the origin of these writings. Much of it was composed and delivered as part of an "Orthodox Survival Course" given in the late seventies and early eighties at St. Herman Monastery to new American Orthodox converts. This course was intended to give them a grounding not only in the content of the Faith, but in the development of the Christian mind.
This preface is followed by an introduction by Phillip E. Johnson, well-known critic of evolution. Dr. Johnson had contact with Fr. Seraphim, before the latter's blessed repose, and knew of and admired his work. His recommendation of Fr. Seraphim's writings on these topics is strong and full. Fr. Seraphim was gifted both with a brilliant mind, and a submissive one.
The remainder of the book is divided into five parts: a patristic commentary on Genesis 1-11 (alone worth the purchase of the book), a detailed critique of evolution and an explanation of the relationship between the Faith and true science and the dangers of evolutionary philosophy, a third part detailing the patristic dogma of creation, followed by the final two parts of questions and answers on matters of evolution and patristic dogma and selections from Blessed Seraphim's correspondence which touch on these matters as well.
This central body of the book is followed by an epilogue in which Hieromonk Damascene details the dangers of so-called "theistic, or Christian, evolution." And to the entire work are appended excerpts from Fr. Seraphim's notes on science, evolution and Christian philosophy, an outline of proposed studies dealing with evolution and patristic doctrine, a transcript of Fr. Seraphim's last talk on creation and evolution (given just weeks prior to his death), a critique of radiometric dating by famed scientist Curt Sewell, and, finally, an annotated bibliography on the various topics covered in this 700-plus page book. There are subject and scriptural indices as well.
Having read the entire book one comes away with some pretty clear points: Faith and true science are eminently compatible; Faith and evolution are not. Along with other well-known scientists, Fr. Seraphim utilized expertly Phillip Johnson's "wedge": revealing the dichotomy between the fact of science and the faith of evolution. Evolution is not science, it is philosophy, belief in which takes a leap of faith from fact to interpretation. The faith of evolution, then, banks on an etiology that necessitates nothing but time and chance. This faith is antithetical to the Faith of Christianity. Not even theistic evolution can successfully wed the two. It is a simple tale of two masters; and Fr. Seraphim contends one cannot serve both.
While scientific minds may gravitate towrds Dr. Michael Behe's writings, or those of Dr. Johnson, theological minds will find Blessed Seraphim's patristic commentary and his expert criticism of evolutionary philosophy more than amenable to their faith. For those too embarrassed to accept the biblical and patristic (though, Fr. Seraphim clearly contends, not fundamentlist) dogma of creation, this will provide enough stiffening agent to the theological backbone to wed reason and doctrine. Even those unpersuaded by Fr. Seraphim's critique will nonetheless find they have somewhat less confidence in their previous position.
In the life of the Church, God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life. The personal existence of God is the comprehensive and exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence or energy of God which constitutes being, but His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis of being. . . .
. . . The God of whom the Church has experience is the God who reveals Himself in history as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom. . . .
The identification of being with the personal existence of God--an identification with vital consequences for the truth of man and human morality--explains the revelation of the God of the Church, who is one and at the same time trinitarian. The one God is not one divine nature or essence, but primarily one person: the person of God the Father. The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His essence or being, making it into "hypostases": freely and from love He begets the Son and causes the Holy Spirit to proceed. Consequently, being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom of its love which "hypostasizes" being into a personal and trinitarian communion. God the Father's mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal communion. . . .
. . . When the Christian revelation declares that "God is love" (1 Jn 4:16), it is not referring to one among many properties of God's "behavior," but to what God is as the fulness of trinitarian and personal communion. . . .
. . . In the light of the truth about the trinitarian hypostasis of being, the Church is enabled to shed light on the mystery of human existence, and to give an ontological foundation to human morality.
Created "in the image" of God in Trinity, man himself is one in essence according to his nature, and in many hypostases according to his persons. . . . All men have a common nature or essence, but this has no existence except as personal distinctiveness, as freedom and transcendence of their own natural predeterminations and natural necessity. The person is the hypostasis of the human essence or nature. He sums up in his existence the universality of human nature, but at the same time surpasses it, because his mode of existence is freedom and distinctiveness. . . .
. . . Man constitutes an image of God as an ontological hypostasis free from space, time and natural necessity. . . .
. . . This is why the existential hypostasis of man is more than his biological individuality. What man is as a hypostasis of life, of life eternal, is his personal distinctiveness, which is realized and revealed in the existential fact of communion and relationship with God and with his fellow men, in the freedom of love. . . .
. . . Man, however, derives his ontological hypostasis not simply from the will and energy of God, but from the manner in which God gives substance to being. This manner is personal existence, the existential potentiality for loving communion and relationship--the potentiality for true life. . . . This is why man is capable of either accepting or rejecting the ontological precondition for his existence: he can refuse the freedom of love and personal communion, and say "no" to God and cut himself off from being.
--The Freedom of Morality, pp. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20