Notes on Liberal Education and Eastern Christianity

Yesterday evening I gave a lecture here in Cleveland at the Lyceum School before an audience of ten people. It is, I confess, a somewhat haphazard discussion, having been thrown together in the past few days in the midst of my work teaching six separate subjects; I could wish that it were better. The Q&A that followed the lecture was, however, excellent; some very important topics were raised. The following is the text of the address, with slight revisions.

---

My name is Peter Gilbert; I have been, for the past three months, a teacher here at the Lyceum School. Because the manner in which I came to be at this school is, in some ways, pertinent to the subject matter of this lecture, I shall very briefly provide you with some historical background. In 2005, at the time that I was still teaching at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but was preparing to leave, I made the acquaintance of Luke Macik, now the headmaster of this school; at that time, Mr. Macik served as a lawyer in Gallup, New Mexico. I had heard of him through a mutual acquaintance, Mr. Joe Cieszinski, manager and proprietor of Cornerstone Books, who one day told me about a project that was underway to found an Eastern Catholic great books college near Chicago; he mentioned Mr. Macik, a parishioner at his church in Albuquerque, as one of the men spearheading this endeavor. Through him I obtained Mr. Macik’s telephone number; I called him, then drove down to Gallup to visit him, and the rest, as they say, is history. Eventually I became closely involved in the project to found what was to be called Transfiguration College; unfortunately, for various reasons, including the downturn in the economy, the college never managed to become a reality. At the time, I found it striking how often people who heard about this college would say what a great idea it was, and how it filled a real need. I still think that such a college is a good idea, that there is a real, felt need for it, and that a marriage of the traditional, theological content of Eastern Christianity with the methodology of great books, liberal arts education makes inherent sense. It is doubtless because he knows that I think this that Mr. Macik asked me, some months ago, to deliver this lecture, to talk about why such an education makes sense.

But I have to preface this talk by stating that to attempt to talk about both liberal education and Eastern Christianity, and to accomplish this in the space of a half hour or 45 minutes, is to undertake a fairly impossible task. There are too many things that must be left undefined and unexamined. What do we mean by “Eastern Christianity”? What do we mean by “liberal education”? One could spend well over 45 minutes trying to define just one of these two entities; to attempt to speak of both is perhaps foolish.

So let me start by saying that it is not my intention this afternoon to spend the time allotted to me making an apologia for this or that brand of Eastern Christianity. I am, myself, an Orthodox Christian, and am grateful for my baptism in the Orthodox Church; but I am also an Orthodox Christian who is convinced that many Orthodox arguments commonly used to justify the continued separation of the Churches do not measure up to scrutiny. I am quite a newcomer to Cleveland, but I have lived here long enough to notice that there are various neighborhoods in town where one finds, at one end of the block, a large church with an onion dome on top of it and a sign on the front gate saying “Orthodox,” while, at the other end of the block or the street, one finds another large church, perhaps equally splendid and ornate, with perhaps even more onion domes on top and a sign on the front saying “Catholic.” I could wish that reasons of frugality, if not the better motives of Christian love and peace, might dictate an end to such unnecessary duplication. It is, indeed, distressing to see Eastern Christianity as a kind of permanent illustration of Jesus’ words about a house divided.

Much of my research over the past half decade or so has been devoted to reading and translating people who also were distressed by this division and who sought to do something to end it. In particular, I have translated some of the works of John Bekkos, who was Patriarch of Constantinople during the short-lived Union of Lyons (1275-1282); he supported that union, and argued at length that it was theologically sound. Most Orthodox do not like John Bekkos; in contemporary Greece, he is commonly portrayed as an arch-villain, a sort of Judas or Benedict Arnold who sold his priceless birthright of Orthodox truth for a mess of Frankish porridge; mythological stories are invented about him having descended upon Mount Athos with Latin mercenaries, wreaking destruction and slaughter upon the courageous monks who resisted his impious doctrines; one particularly strident commentator on my blog maintained last year that he had seen, with his own eyes, John Bekkos’s bones, preserved somewhere upon Mount Athos in some sort of liquid medium, perpetually boiling as a sure sign of his eternal damnation; how John Bekkos’s bones ended up on Mount Athos when he was buried hundreds of miles away in an unmarked grave in Asia Minor, inside a government fortress, the ardent commentator never saw fit to explain, nor how he recognized the bones as actually belonging to John Bekkos and not to some other individual.

For myself, I have no special revelation regarding the eternal destiny of John Bekkos’s soul, but I am persuaded that Bekkos was a sincere Christian and a man who loved peace and truth. Bekkos was, I think, not only a good man, but a good liberal artist; indeed, I suspect that these two things, being a good man and being a good liberal artist, have something to do with each other. What these two things have to do with each other is perhaps the most important thing we need to clarify today. But, to say a bit more about Bekkos: he accepted the Union of Lyons because he sought to inherit Christ’s blessing upon the peacemakers, because he believed it was right, and in accordance with God’s will, to seek the unity of God’s people, and because his studies of the fathers had led him to conclude that the Greek-speaking fathers of the ancient Church were not as dogmatically opposed to Latin Christian formulations of doctrine as were later Greek Christians like Photius and Michael Cerularius; he thought that the later theologians, under the pressure of nationalistic rivalry and dogmatic controversy, had emphasized those things in which the churches seemed to differ and had minimized those things that might allow those differences to be seen in a better light. Bekkos even thought that he could see, in Greek patristic literature, a teaching on the Holy Spirit akin to the Latin doctrine of the Filioque; he found evidence for this in writers like St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. Epiphanius, but also in the Cappadocian fathers themselves, in St. Athanasius, in St. Maximus, and in many others. When St. Cyril says that the Holy Spirit is “poured forth substantially from both, that is to say, from the Father through the Son” (De adoratione et cultu in spiritu et veritate, lib. I; PG 68, 148 A), and that the Spirit is “both proper to [the Son of God] and in him and from him, just as, to be sure, the same thing is understood to hold true in the case of God the Father himself” (Commentarius in Joelem prophetam 35; PG 71, 377 D), and when St. Gregory of Nyssa says that the Son “is conceived of as before the Spirit’s hypostasis only in concept, with respect to causality” (Contra Eunomium I; PG 45, 464 B-C), or when he compares the Trinity to three candles, in which the flame of the first is communicated to the third through the second one (Adv. Macedonianos 6; PG 45, 1308 B), John Bekkos infers from these statements, and others like them, that the fathers in question knew of a certain mediation of being within the Holy Trinity, that the order of the persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is not merely based upon the order of the persons’ manifestation in time, but it has a basis in an eternal order of relationships within the divine Trinity itself. Undoubtedly, there are those who disagree with this interpretation of the Greek fathers; each side has its own set of proof-texts, to which it invariably appeals. But, for the purposes of this lecture, my point is basically this: John Bekkos is one example of an Eastern Christian who is also a liberal artist, a man who makes use of his intellect in the pursuit and defense of truth. He is certainly not the only example, and probably is not even the best one, but he is one whom I happen to know pretty well. He knew that texts have more than one level of meaning, that you cannot always rely upon the currently fashionable interpretation of them, that it is important to go back to the original sources and see for yourself what they are actually saying, and that this activity is not only intellectually but also morally good; it is one of the ways in which Christ the Truth is served. In reading the texts in this way, I think he has some insight into the mind of the fathers; they also were liberal artists, who served the Truth with their intellects; they knew that, while reason cannot get us to faith and knowledge of the triune God, reason does have its proper place in defending faith and in differentiating truth from falsehood. It is not for nothing that St. Peter tells his readers to yearn after “sincere, logical milk” (1 Peter 2:2, τὸ λογικὸν ἄδολον γάλα).

Of course, someone may say that the fathers were much more than liberal artists; they were saints, and their speech about God proceeded, not merely from a mastery of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, but from prayer and spiritual experience. There is a saying commonly cited in works on Orthodox Christianity, a saying which, I think, goes back to the fourth century writer Evagrius of Pontus, to the effect that the theologian is not, primarily, the one who sets forth a propositional system, but the one who prays. The type of the theologian is Moses, the man who ascends Mount Sinai, enters the darkness there, and speaks with God face to face. It is perhaps dangerous to say this in a school called the Lyceum, but it must be acknowledged that Aristotle is not universally held in high esteem in the Christian East; there were various attempts to baptize him (much of St. John of Damascus’s work The Fount of Knowledge, for instance, consists of a summary presentation of Aristotelian philosophy), and the fathers often rely on Aristotelian categories more than they care to admit, but, by and large, the one whom St. Thomas refers to as “the Philosopher” is not, in the Christian East, presented as a model for emulation; St. Gregory the Theologian says that we need to speak of God ἁλιευτικῶς, μὴ ἀριστοτελικῶς, that is to say, like a fisherman, not like an Aristotelian. Greek Christian hymnology is full of lines like those found in the Akathist Hymn, where the Mother of God’s miraculous childbearing is said render eloquent orators as mute as fish, and to shred to pieces the “word-webs of the Athenians.” One may also recall the response of a certain Georgian delegate to the Council of Florence to the Aristotelian argumentation of the Dominican John of Montenero; he said: “What’s this about Aristotle, Aristotle? A fig for your fine Aristotle…. What is fine? St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Basil, Gregory the Theologian; a fig for your Aristotle, Aristotle.” (Cited by Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence [1959], p. 227.) More particularly, the idea that theology should be thought of as a “science of revealed truth,” a rationally adumbrated propositional system, is almost universally looked upon within the Christian East with suspicion and misgivings; this, I think, probably holds true for many Eastern Catholics as well as for most Eastern Orthodox.

All of this makes one wonder whether the subject of Liberal Education and Eastern Christianity is genuinely a fruitful topic, whether these two phenomena can be related otherwise than by mere negation. I think that they can be, although we have to be careful not to misrepresent one or the other. I remember that, when we were having our discussions about a curriculum for Transfiguration College, a proposal was made that we should structure our whole theology curriculum around the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Probably the thought behind this was that some figure was needed comparable to the role St. Thomas plays in Western Catholic thought, that is, someone who gives the East a “Neo-Platonic” synthesis, parallel to the Aristotelian synthesis Thomas supplies the West; the fact that Thomas quotes Pseudo-Dionysius so frequently was probably an added benefit. I fervently sought to shoot down this trial balloon before it got too far off the ground. First, because I am not persuaded that the Dionysian corpus is all that representative of Eastern Christian theology; it probably arose in Monophysite circles, and only became fully accepted in the Byzantine world through the interpretations of St. Maximus. But, secondly, I don’t know how many of you have actually attempted to read the works of the Pseudo-Areopagite, but I have; they make Kant’s and Hegel’s writings appear as models of expository clarity by comparison. This does not mean that one should ignore them; they are in fact important. But, as in mountain-climbing, one should start on smaller hills, and only attempt the Matterhorn or Mount Everest after one has worked one’s way up and gained a certain facility, so likewise it seemed to me folly to be sentencing undergraduates to four years of prolonged exposure to the Pseudo-Dionysius, with his super-this and his hyper-that, and his paradoxical affirmations of God as not-Being and not-Love; I could think of no surer way to guarantee high attrition.

One way to approach this subject of Liberal Education and Eastern Christianity might be to give a brief historical survey of the kinds of education Eastern Christians have actually received over the years, in their various home countries. Such a survey would not be without interest, and perhaps it would help to balance exalted philosophical claims about what constitutes an ideal education; one would like to see such speculations grounded in facts and history. For instance, I find it somewhat curious that even the very expression “Liberal Education” [rather, the expression: “Liberal Arts Education”] seems to be confined mostly to American educational discourse: people in Europe do not seem to know what a “liberal arts college” is, or at least, they have very few institutions that would answer to that description. Earlier in my life, I spent two years studying in England; one of the things I observed there is that the British educational system directs young people into an academic specialization much earlier than the American system does; in America, most students do not choose a college major until about their Junior year; in Britain, students are already taking specialized tests, their “O-Levels” and “A-Levels,” in their mid-teens, at a time when most American students are muddling through high school. It seemed to me at that time that this British system, with its earlier specialization, reflects the fact that Britain is a smaller country, there are fewer openings within the economy and more competition to fill them; thus, the competition perforce starts earlier, and children are allowed a shorter time in which to grow up. They are forced earlier to decide who they are, and are given less opportunity to explore different possible futures. Perhaps that makes for a certain maturity, or perhaps it creates, in some cases, a certain grim acceptance of inevitability, an inability to imagine new possibilities. On this point, I prefer the American system, with all its faults; I like the fact that we allow ourselves a little more time to grow up, in spite of the danger this entails that some of us will never grow up at all.

Some of the early Christians of the second century went about in the habit of philosophers, like St. Justin Martyr; these men were generally recognized as teachers and accepted students. But it is not till nearly the beginning of the third century that we find the first Christian school, and we find this in Alexandria; the catechetical school there, founded by a man named Pantaenus, featured in time famous teachers like Clement and Origen, and, later, Didymus the Blind. Of Origen’s teaching methods we have a detailed description from his student St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, who gave a panegyric on Origen in the year 238; by this time, Origen had relocated to Caesarea in Palestine, but his teaching there probably followed the same pattern as at Alexandria. St. Gregory describes Origen as an inspired teacher who brought people to Christ, not by keeping secular knowledge from them, but precisely by engaging with it, accepting in it whatever was good and rejecting what was bad, but all the while subordinating all worldly knowledge to the inestimable prize of knowing Christ. At times, St. Gregory compares Origen to Socrates, probing the students’ ideas and cutting down anything of feeble growth, so that the ground could be cleared for genuinely worthy fruits. He says that, along with giving instruction in dialectic and in the mathematical and physical sciences, Origen also introduced his students to every school of Greek philosophy, “selecting and setting before us all that was useful and true in all the various philosophers, and putting aside all that was false.” “He deemed it right for us to study philosophy in such wise, that we should read with utmost diligence all that has been written, both by the philosophers and by the poets of old, rejecting nothing, and repudiating nothing (for, indeed, we did not yet possess the power of critical discernment), except only the productions of the atheists, who, in their conceits, lapse from the general intelligence of man, and deny that there is either a God or a providence.” (In Originem oratio panegyrica, 13; PG 10, 1088 A-B; tr., Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6, p. 34.)

Origen’s Christian school, nevertheless, was not widely emulated in later times. It cannot be stressed enough that, in the Christian East, the idea that Christians should avoid secular schools never obtained much currency; quite the opposite. In the fourth century, it was quite normal for Christian teachers to teach secular subjects, and numerous saints of the Church attended secular schools and had pagans among their teachers; this was the case, for instance, with St. John Chrysostom, who studied under the pagan rhetorician Libanius, as well as with St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory the Theologian, who studied at Athens during the decade of the 340’s; one of their teachers of rhetoric was the Christian Prohaeresius; the other was a pagan named Himerius. Among their fellow students was a member of the imperial family, named Julian; while at Athens he became a secret pagan, and he openly espoused paganism at the time that he became emperor (360/361). One of Julian’s acts was to issue an edict commanding that all public teachers be approved by the emperor; the intention of this was to exclude Christians from the teaching profession. Julian’s reasoning was that the ancient classics are pagan literature, and do not belong to the Christians; Christians have no right to teach such things. St. Gregory of Nazianzus retorted that classical literature belongs to us in respect of our being human; letters are a gift from God, just as language is, and the proper cultivation of the mind cannot be rightfully withheld from any person. One result of Julian’s edict was that Christians increasingly sought to provide Christian substitutes for the classical literature that was the traditional basis for instruction; two men named Apollinarius, father and son, set to work translating the Bible into classical meters, St. Gregory the Theologian, likewise, composed great quantities of classical verse, and, in the Latin-speaking world, men like Pope Damasus and Prudentius and St. Ambrose wrote hymns and poems and epigrams; even St. Augustine tried his hand at this, producing some verses against the Donatists.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this literary work, the basic classical curriculum did not change much. Nearly a thousand years after the Cappadocians and St. John Chrysostom, John Bekkos, in the thirteenth century, still received basically the same kind of liberal education as these fathers did when he studied under his tutor George Babouskomites; he read Homer and the other Greek poets, studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, perhaps a bit of mathematics and the sciences; a similar kind of education was received by Bekkos’s chief adversary, George of Cyprus. Neither of them saw such an education as conflicting in any way with traditional Orthodox belief. One has to remember that, until the final capture of Constantinople by the forces of Mehmet the Conqueror in the year 1453, the Eastern Christian world had never known the same sort of extinction of classical learning that the West had undergone in the succession of barbarian invasions from the fifth century onward, until learning finally began to revive under Charlemagne. The East did not experience such a hiatus, and consequently the Church was not looked upon in the same way as the sole repository of knowledge — although later, during the Ottoman period, it was indeed the parish priest who was mainly responsible for keeping the Greek language alive.

* * *

Is there, then, a specifically Eastern Christian form of education? Should there be? Or should an Eastern Orthodox or Eastern Catholic believer simply receive the best education that is available, from whatever source, and leave the specific details of Christian doctrine to what can be picked up at home or in church?

As mentioned earlier, I still think that the idea of an Eastern Christian great books college, or some application of great books methodology to the study of Eastern Christianity, is a good idea. There have been at least two attempts that I know of to make that idea a reality; one of them, Transfiguration College, I have already spoken of; an earlier, Orthodox attempt, Rose Hill College, actually opened its doors in Aiken, South Carolina in the late 1990’s for about the space of a year; it finally had to close down because the president of the college, a man named Owen Jones, who had bankrolled the whole operation, had essentially spent all his fortune on it and was going broke. Currently, an Orthodox professor of philosophy named Bruce Foltz, who teaches in St. Petersburg, Florida, is one of the main people pushing the idea; he makes the claim that an Orthodox Christian, by virtue of being an Orthodox Christian, will be a better reader of the great books than other people, a claim which seems to me theoretically bold but not easily verifiable; it is not, in any case, a claim that I would be prepared to defend. Another man who still publicly argues in favor of Eastern Christian great books education is the sometime dean of Rose Hill College, Dr. James Cutzinger; my worry is that he seems a bit too enamored of the religious theosophy of Frithjof Schuon, whose works are sometimes to be seen in New Age bookstores and which teach the doctrine that all religions are one.

My own claims about the liberal arts and liberal education, claims that were embodied in the Transfiguration College Statement on Educational Policy and which I would still be prepared to defend, are the following:

Education is necessary for our humanity. Unlike frogs, which cannot be more or less frogs, or oak trees, which cannot be more or less oak trees, human beings can become more or less human; being human is a task to which we are called. We can fail to live up to our nature. One way of speaking about this difference is to say that, unlike frogs and oak trees, human beings are created in the image of God; we possess that image as our birthright, but we can also fail to live up to it, in which case we are judged by our Creator.

Part of our being made in the image of God consists in our ability to speak; the first thing we find Adam doing is that he gives names to the animals. We have what the Greeks call λόγος; we have reason. This reason pertains to our being in the image of God; just as God speaks, so do we, and we are, perhaps, most rational when we recognize God’s speech, echoing in manifold ways in the world around us, when we hear God’s word and do it.

In hearing and doing God’s word, all of us, children of Adam, have fallen short, all of us have in various ways disfigured the image of God that dwells within us. To restore that image, God sent his Image, his Word, his Son, into our midst, so that we, by believing in him, might again be rendered reasonable and be reckoned children of God.

Being restored to the image of God is not a thing which any liberal education, as such, is able to deliver. The only truly liberal education, that is able to free us and restore us to our proper humanity, is that education which is afforded in Christ’s Church, that school in which Christ is not only the Teacher, but the daily bread on which the students feed.

But this does not mean that liberal education, in the common sense of the term, is useless. Our nature as thinking, deliberating, moral beings has to be educated; we cannot make right choices if we deprive ourselves of the means of knowing what choices there are to make. We need to learn how to read, to weigh evidence, to test possibilities; this also is part of learning to recognize God’s word in the creation. And we need to learn how to speak, so as to persuade others of the truth and dissuade others from fallacy and wrong; this also is part of doing God’s word. We cannot do these things, or at least, cannot do them well, if we are illiterate and ignorant.

St. Paul is very clear: the world, by its wisdom, did not know God (1 Cor 1:21); and, he says, he does not come to the Corinthians with excellency of speech, or enticing words of man’s wisdom; he knows that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor 1:25). Those of us who are in the business of education need to remember this, that there is no inherent guarantee that a person who studies the liberal arts, who has read all the Great Books backwards and forwards, who perhaps speaks with the tongue of men and of angels, may not turn out to be an utter scoundrel. It is a sad fact about the fallenness of our nature, that intellectual excellence is able to coexist with moral depravity. But St. Paul also says that “that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them: for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Rom 1:19-20). Even if the world, in its wisdom, did not know God, it had no excuse for not knowing God; God had, in fact, left sufficient evidence of himself in the world, for anyone who had eyes to see. It pertains to a Christian education to have the eyes to see, to point out the hand of God in his works, to remind those who might not see or hear that there is in fact a Creator who will judge us. If that is what a Christian education is supposed to do, then that is also what an Eastern Christian education is supposed to do.

I need to end this talk; there is much more that could be said about this subject; we have hardly touched at all upon large questions, like the meaning of “freedom” that is implied in the word “liberal” (what is it that liberal education purports to free us from?). And much could also be said about the ambiguous stance that various thinkers, both within Byzantium and in later Russia, took towards the value of the liberal arts; if Dostoevsky famously said that, “Two and two makes four; yes, but, ‘Two and two makes five’ is sometimes also very charming,” what does this tell us about his estimation of the claims of rationality? But these are eternal questions, and a lecture, fortunately, is not eternal, but has a time limit, so I shall herewith bring this talk to a close. Thank you.

Something worth reading

From the website We Are the 99 Percent

I’ve paid taxes, including medicare and Social Security since I was 11 (and a farm worker). They have been my retirement fund, and I’ve never begrudged a penny collected for social services or education programs. Now I worry every day about the future my four children will face.

I don’t mind buying everything except food second hand. I do mind that certain Americans, by virtue of their economic status, are exempt from paying into the funds that provide social safety nets. All of us are a chronic illness away from foreclosure, poverty, homelessness.

I am the 99%
occupywallst.org

9/11

Remembering the men, women, and children who died ten years ago today, without warning and unprepared, in the attack upon New York and Washington, D.C.

Memory Eternal.

First observations on Cleveland

On August 1st, I moved into an apartment in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and, since then, I have been slowly adjusting to the new circumstances. Most of my belongings arrived safely, although one or two things were slightly broken and, in particular, a box that I sent by the U.S. Postal Service was mauled in transit and some of its contents were lost. For a time I was worried that I had lost all my neckties and refrigerator magnets; this past Tuesday, however, I found them in a plastic box in the hall closet. I have a next door neighbor named John, a native of the area, who smokes, has three dogs, and likes to sit outside and engage me in conversation when I walk by. The neighbors directly upstairs from me have very heavy feet, and have a custom of pacing back and forth agitatedly across the floor every night from about 10:30 p.m. to about 1:30 or 2:00 a.m.; this has occasioned some adjustments to my sleeping habits. I have yet to see Lake Erie. I have not yet visited the town just north of here, East Cleveland; it has — what shall I say? — a bad reputation. Nearby my apartment there is a neighborhood called Coventry (most of the streets in Cleveland Heights, for some reason, are named after towns in England); during the early 1970′s this neighborhood apparently acquired a reputation as a center for hippie culture and drug experimentation, and, to commemorate this, the street signs to this day are printed with psychedelic colors. There are some good restaurants there, a few bookstores, and some boutiques that sell busts of the Buddha, incense sticks, bottles of wine, and other paraphernalia suitable for gracing the homes of aging hippies. On the basis the evidence of the books in the Coventry branch of the Cleveland Heights library, I would judge there to be a substantial Russian-speaking population in the area; so far, however, I have not encountered many Russian speakers here, aside from the librarian. There is, however, a large and very visible Orthodox Jewish population, not so much in my immediate neighborhood as a few blocks down, on South Taylor and Cedar; I can recommend the Jerusalem Grill on Cedar Road for their excellent falafel sandwiches.

I hear police sirens here a lot more than I used to in my small town in New Jersey.

The Greek church on Mayfield Road is having its Greek festival this weekend. I was asked to put in some hours working there, but gave a noncommittal answer, and, in fact, will not go; I am very preoccupied preparing for six classes at the Lyceum School, which are to start in a little over a week.

The people at the Lyceum School have been very welcoming and kind. I will see how things go once the actual teaching starts.

I have not visited the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Nor have I, as yet, seen the Cleveland Indians play, although they are doing well this season, and the idea has occurred to me that it might be a pleasant diversion to go watch a game. I have been to the Cleveland Botanical Garden, and purchased an annual membership.

I noticed, when listening to the radio the other day, that the locals pronounce the word “vary” and the word “very” indifferently; that is to say, the short “a” sound is pronounced with a sort of sharp nasal twang.

The maple trees here are suffering some sort of blight, a brownish blotch in the middle of the leaves. Yesterday evening, when walking back to my apartment before a thunderstorm, I saw bats flying in the darkening sky; it was kind of creepy.

One day soon I will learn about Moses Cleaveland, after whom the city was named. As yet I know very little about him, except that he came from the east somewhere, early in the nineteenth century, with a commission to settle the “Western Reserve,” about which I know nothing. I doubtless offend loyal Ohioans by thus professing my ignorance concerning the glorious history of the Buckeye State, and by failing to notice all the glories and beauties of the city that should be captivating my eye, and by failing to say complimentary things about the Cleveland Orchestra; but I have been living here only for a little over two weeks now, and must be allowed some indulgence.

Mice

This morning, around 10:00, I went down to the basement to put a couple of things away, one of them a vinyl mesh grocery bag that I usually keep in my car. I stepped into the garage to put the bag back in the car. As I walked towards the car, I noticed on the floor of the basement a small, grey ball of fur; my first thought was that this was something that had been left by a mouse. On closer inspection, I saw that it was a mouse. On closer inspection still, I saw that there were three such living balls of fur on the basement floor, sitting quietly, moving slowly, to the right of my car in a spot where the sun was shining and underneath an old hole that, long ago, had been gnawed away in an air vent on the ceiling. The sight was so strange, and so disturbing, that I quickly put the bag in the car, closed the garage door, and went back upstairs.

Putting two and two together, I came to the following explanation. Throughout this past winter I had been having mouse problems in my kitchen, and these problems had not gone away, as I had hoped, with the advent of summer; when I returned from a trip to Long Island and Boston recently, mouse droppings were everywhere, even on the kitchen table (previously, mice had not ventured there). I determined to stop this, and set out fresh mice traps. When these did not work (the mouse in question was adept at licking the cheese off the tray without setting off the trap), I finally sought out more effective means. I had scrupled against purchasing glue traps, because they cause the mouse a slow, painful death (“simply deposit the trap, with the mouse, in the garbage” it says on the package, neglecting to tell the buyer that the animal, thus deposited, probably will remain alive for some hours to come until it dies of exhaustion or suffocation). But, at a visit to the supermarket on Monday, I found non-glue traps that looked promising; one of them involved placing bait inside a small, plastic chamber, into which the mouse walks; when, inside the chamber, the mouse steps on a platform upon which the bait is set, the guillotine is triggered. I bought this, along with a couple of other traps, and set them in places I thought the mouse or mice would frequent. The next morning, sure enough, I found a dead mouse on the floor of the kitchen near the kitchen sink; the chamber trap had worked. I took the dead mouse outside and dropped it under some bushes. That was, I think, Tuesday morning. Since then, I have seen no fresh droppings in the kitchen.

My guess is that this mouse was the mother of the three young mice I saw this morning. Not having been fed in awhile, they are weak; perhaps they may even have tumbled out of a nest somewhere in the air vent.

I decided that they had to go out of the house. I put on some rubber gloves, went back down into the garage, opened the garage door, got a shovel and a rake, and nudged and raked the mice onto the shovel. (One of them went willingly; one, the weakest of the three, rolled upside down as though unable to stand; eventually, he got back on his feet.) I carried the shovel, with its three passengers, outside to the corner of our property, and set them down on the road, near the curb and a public sewer. There, I am afraid, they must fend for themselves. It is possible that they may live, and it is possible that a bird or a cat may come by and eat them. It is also possible, of course, that they may simply die there for want of nourishment. I am sorry, but life is hard, and I cannot set up an orphanage for these creatures. When it comes to dealing with mice, I am a Tea Partier and a Republican.

The Lyceum School

All right, I’m able now to make it public. Starting this fall, I will be teaching at the Lyceum School, near Cleveland. It is a Catholic private school, grades 7 through 12, which emphasizes the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and, to some extent, the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, though, so far as I know, not much astronomy), and does this, to a great extent, using a Great Books methodology. The school was founded by Mark Langley, a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, and the present headmaster, Luke Macik, is also a graduate of that college, which may give readers some indication of the school’s educational philosophy and character: it is intellectually rigorous and theologically conservative. A number of the students, I am told, have won national awards for their proficiency in Latin; also, their choir is very impressive. I gave my Filioque lecture there nearly two years ago, both before the students, in the morning, and before the general public in the evening; the students asked good, sharp questions, and, in general, in the few times I have seen them at work, I have been impressed with their maturity and dedication. (Luke Macik, the headmaster, asked me also to let readers of this blog know that, at the Lyceum School, they do “the extraordinary form of the mass” once a month. That is to say, there is, I believe, a weekly mass for the school at the church next door, with the students forming the choir; once a month, this mass is said in Latin in the Tridentine form.)

I am going to be teaching the following classes this fall:

• Greek (New Testament)
• Latin (Level One)
• Medieval History
• Algebra
• Botany
• Biology

This may seem like a lot, and, in fact, it is a lot. Perhaps I will also be supplied with a cape and a Superman outfit, so that I may fly back and forth from the school to my apartment while doing Greek and Latin paradigms in my head. But, probably, I will dress like any normal person, and will do the Greek and Latin paradigms while taking public transportation.

In any case, this schedule may give readers a better idea of why, recently, I let it be known that this blog is likely to see some serious interruption in the coming months. I clearly have a lot of work to do. And that, all in all, is a good thing.

An apology

I would like to apologize to readers of this blog for my recent neglect of it; I have not posted anything to it for some time, nor answered any of the comments. Some explanation for this is called for.

Briefly, and simply, I am tired. I have spent four years writing it, and have not yet accomplished what I set out to do at the beginning, which is to finish and publish my work on John Bekkos. At the present time, my attentions are mostly focused upon the necessity of making a living somehow in the very straitened economic environment in which we live. To that end, I have taken up various teaching positions over the past year, and, in the fall, will be taking up another one. For various reasons, I have been asked not yet to make public the details regarding this new position; but it will entail my moving from New Jersey, after which my father intends to sell the house where I currently live, in which I grew up.

This blog was started in September 2007. At that time, I was unemployed, living by myself at the end of Long Island in a house where, for many days on end, I had little contact with anyone except crows, ants, oak trees, and, of course, John Bekkos, whom I was translating. Writing a blog initially provided me a means of connecting and communicating with the rest of the world; this was both a pleasant diversion and helpful for maintaining my sanity. Without doubt, this blog has seen its ups and downs; there have been times when I have been deeply engaged in it, and there have been times, like the present, when it has suffered neglect. But, on the whole, it has served to make John Bekkos better known to the public, and has allowed me to say various things that I thought needed saying. Whether I shall be able to continue writing it much longer appears doubtful; my expectation is that the responsibility of teaching new and difficult subjects, in a new and strange environment, is going to reduce the amount of time I can spend on this blog to zero.

All writing that is worth anything has something of the nature of a conversation. But not all conversations can be maintained indefinitely, or should be. The things about which conversations on this blog have tended to revolve — the Filioque, the essence/energies distinction, the schism — are not the only things in life worth knowing or thinking about. As a Christian, I believe and understand that the God who gave himself for our salvation in Jesus Christ is supremely worth knowing and thinking about; theology is a legitimate and worthy occupation of the mind, since God is the highest object of knowing. But I also believe and understand that thought about God properly issues in worship and praise of him, and in a godly life; if it does not, if it becomes a sort of end in itself and nervous habit, there is something wrong with it. To my thinking, the schism is one long, bad conversation, revolving endlessly upon itself. And it pains me to think that my blog has sometimes facilitated, and perhaps sometimes exemplified, that bad vortex, which moves nowhere but sucks in everything around it.

The latest Orientale Lumen conference opened yesterday in Washington, D.C.; I am not going to it. Partly, this is because I am too busy preparing to move, and, partly, because I did not feel like shelling out $300 for the conference and accommodations; but it is also because I have attended a few such conferences before, and have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware will treat the audience to an eloquent, informative lecture, constructed around three main points and punctuated with witty anecdotes, but, in the end, he will tell people there why nothing more can be done, and why no real movement towards a resolution of the separation between Orthodoxy and Rome can be expected in the foreseeable future. Metropolitan Jonah will perhaps explain to those present where he has been for the past few months, and what considerations have led him to place the governance of the O.C.A. temporarily into the hands of his synod of bishops — but, more likely, he will not explain this, and will, like Metropolitan Kallistos, give an apologia for maintaining the status quo indefinitely and until the eschaton. Others will say ecumenically pleasant things; DVDs will be sold; an excursion will be made to a nearby church or to a bookstore; people will leave at the end, carrying with them the pleasant feeling that they have accomplished something.

This past Sunday, my bishop (Bishop Michael of New York) presided at liturgy at my church here in New Jersey. Afterwards, at the luncheon held in his honor, he fielded questions from members of the parish. Someone asked him how long it would be before there was Orthodox unity, that is, a single, unified Orthodox Church, in America. His answer: “Not in my lifetime.” He went on to explain how the influx of people from Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union had complicated matters, and how the general expectation is very different now than it was in 1970 when the autocephaly of the O.C.A. was first proclaimed, and how some jurisdictions, e.g., the Antiochians, are more cooperative than others (presumably, the Greeks). It made me think of how, growing up in the Greek Orthodox Church in the 1960′s, one occasionally heard rumors about plans for a “Great, Upcoming Ecumenical Council” of the Orthodox Church which should resolve all problems, in particular, the problem of the ecclesiastical status of the “Diaspora” and the problem of conflicting claims of authority between Constantinople and Moscow. The reason why such a Great, Upcoming Ecumenical Council could not now take place, one was told in those days, was that so much of the Orthodox world lay under Communist rule. At this point, two decades after Communist rule in Eastern Europe collapsed, one hears no more about a Great, Upcoming Ecumenical Council which should resolve all problems. My guess is that, in a country like Greece, reeling under the effects of its own unwise borrowing and the predatory lending practices of companies like Goldman Sachs, a country where the privatization even of national assets like the Parthenon is now being seriously discussed, the calling of a Great, Ecumenical Council is probably the furthest thing from people’s minds.

Christian unity is not the answer to all questions; it does not magically supply a solution to global warming, poverty, unemployment, war, and the high price of gasoline; it does not even furnish an answer, directly, to some strictly theological questions of real importance, e.g., how to read the Book of Genesis in the light of earth science, genetics, and palaeontology. But it is a kind of prerequisite to any united, effective action by Christians in the world. Most importantly, it is Christ’s will. I confess that, when I hear a bishop answer “Not in my lifetime” to a question about unity, I must infer that something is deeply wrong, and that someone is not doing his job. If not in your lifetime, then in whose? To quote Rabbi Hillel, “If not now, when?”

A Table of Contents to Kyparissiotes

I would briefly note here that I have put a Table of Contents to John Kyparissiotes’s Decades on my blog as a page, with links to the separate articles; you will find it on the side bar.

Kyparissiotes: Decade 2.8

From John Kyparissiotes, Decades, PG 152, 771 B – 772 C.

Chapter Eight. That even the most eminent among theologians theologize on the basis of the creatures; and, as for the “back parts” of God, they are the creatures themselves, and their corresponding reasons.

Gregory the Theologian, in his Second Oration on Theology, says:

“I was disposed to lay hold on God, and thus I went up into the mount, and passed through the cloud.”

And a little after this:

“And when I looked a little closer, I saw, not* the first and unmingled nature, known to itself — to the Trinity, I mean; not that which abides within the first veil, and is hidden by the cherubim; but only that nature which at last even reaches to us. And that is, as far as I can learn, the majesty, or as holy David calls it, the glory which is manifested among the creatures, which it has produced and governs. For these are the back parts of God (Exod 33:23), which he leaves behind him, as tokens of himself, like the shadows and reflection of the sun in the water, which show the sun to our weak eyes, because we cannot look at the sun itself, for by its unmixed light it is too strong for our power of perception. In this way then you shall discourse of God; even if you were a Moses and a god to Pharaoh; even if you were caught up like Paul to the third heaven, and had heard unspeakable words; even if you were raised above them both, and exalted to angelic or archangelic place and dignity. For though a thing be all heavenly, or above heaven, and far higher in nature and nearer to God than we, yet it is farther distant from God, and from the complete comprehension of his nature, than it is lifted above our complex and lowly and earthward sinking composition.”

[2.8.1] Gregory of Nazianzus, or. 28.3; PG 36, 29 A-B.

* Kyparissiotes actually has εἰς here, meaning "to" or "towards," rather than οὐ, "not." Torres, the Latin translator, takes this as a scribe's error, and I adopt his reading, since it is hard to make sense of the sentence otherwise.

And the great Athanasius says, as though inquiring:

“Given that God is bodiless and without shape, what were those ‘back parts’ which Moses saw?”

Then, resolving this, he says:

“We believe that the whole God is alone uncreated, [existing] before the ages and before all creatures. Whence it is apparent that the ‘back parts’ of God are the creatures and their reasons, which [God] looked to when setting [the creatures] forth. This is [what is meant by] the text, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

[2.8.2] Ps.-Athanasius, Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem, PG 28, 633 A-B.

And the divine Gregory of Nyssa, in his work On the Life of Moses, says:

“But the uncreated glory, that is to say, the divine nature, is, by itself, entirely ineffable and incomprehensible and invisible. Not one thing which that thing is in itself comes in its pure nakedness to the comprehension or the vision of bodily eyes in any way whatsoever, since it is uncreated, and what is uncreated is ungraspable by bodily eyes, even if a Moses or a Paul who ascends to the third heaven or an angel should be the one who catches hold of the divine vision. For that which is really real and existent is the true Life, and this, to angelic or human knowledge, is unattainable.”

[2.8.3] Not found. See below.

From these things it becomes clear that even the most eminent of theologians do not go beyond the creation in those things in which they see God, but what they have in view is this very thing — the creation — and the reasons proper to it. But if even men such as these theologize in this manner, it follows of necessity that apophatic theology is by far more valuable and more contemplative than the kataphatic kind.

---

Note on citation 2.8.3

As mentioned above, I was unable to trace this quotation back to St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, or to any other known work. A general Thesaurus Linguae Graecae search failed to produce any results. Here are some possible explanations for this:

• The passage actually is there in the present text of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, and I simply need to look harder. (TLG searches are notoriously temperamental.)
• Kyparissiotes’s text of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s De vita Moysis differs significantly from the current text.
• Kyparissiotes is quoting from a third source which attributes the passage to St. Gregory of Nyssa’s De vita Moysis, but attributes it to this work mistakenly; Kyparissiotes failed to check his quotation against the original source.
• Kyparissiotes is quoting from memory, and attributes to Gregory of Nyssa a passage that he has in fact read elsewhere.
• Kyparissiotes has made up the quotation.

I think the last possibility is unlikely. Kyparissiotes wrote his book for a Byzantine audience, to whom the works of the fathers were well known and readily available; surely he would not have wanted to compromise his argument by knowingly introducing corrupted texts.

Bear in mind the circumstances under which Kyparissiotes wrote this book: in his Introduction, he states that he wrote it while in exile, using books that he had brought with him for other reasons:

“Perhaps, with God’s help, if we should come across copies of the requisite books, we shall treat also of these matters. For now, however, since we have been driven from our home, and are the object of universal vilification, we lack the resources and leisure to treat of these things and to look into making this a better book. As for these texts which we now present to the public, it is with great labor that we have collected them, since we brought the books with us for other uses and other occasions. Because of these things, we have been deprived of many aids that would have brought this work to a more perfect state; but, in the meantime, we have not strayed from stating those things which were of the greatest necessity.”

Given that he was unable to consult a proper library, it seems quite possible that, in the case of citation 2.8.3, Kyparissiotes is either quoting from memory, or, more likely, quoting from a third source that attributes the text to St. Gregory of Nyssa’s De vita Moysis, and he lacks the means to check up on the citation.

Here follows the Greek of the passage, from the manuscript Ottobon. gr. 99, fol. 126v:

Καὶ ὁ θεῖος Γρηγόριος Νύσσης ἐν τῷ εἰς τὸν βίον Μωσέως φησιν· ἡ δὲ ἄκτιστος δόξα ἤγουν ἡ θεία φύσις παντελῶς ἐστι καθ’ ἑαυτὴν ἄρρητος καὶ ἀκατάληπτος καὶ ἀόρατος. οὐδὲν ὅπερ ἐστιν αὐτὸ τοῦτο, καθ’ ἑαυτὸ γυμνὸν καθαρῶς εἰς κατάληψιν ἢ ὅρασιν ἔρχεται σωματικῶν ὀφθαλμῶν ὁπωσδήποτε, ἄκτιστον γάρ· τὸ δὲ ἄκτιστον σωματικοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἄληπτον, κἂν Μωσῆς κἂν Παῦλος ὁ εἰς τρίτον οὐρανὸν ἀνελθὼν κἂν ἄγγελος ἦ ὁ τῆς θείας θεωρίας ἁπτόμενος. τὸ γὰρ ὄντως ὄν, ἡ ἀληθής ἐστι ζωή, τοῦτο δὲ εἰς γνῶσιν ἀγγελικὴν ἢ ἀνθρωπίνην ἀνέφικτον.

Earliest printed Bekkos texts

Nearly four months ago, I pointed out that Hugo Laemmer’s 1864 edition of some of John Bekkos’s major writings (Scriptorum Graeciae Orthodoxae bibliotheca selecta) is now available on Google Books. Over the course of the past two weeks, I have discovered that some even older Bekkos resources, dating back to the seventeenth century, may be found on the same source. Below, I provide links to the three earliest printed versions of Bekkos’s writings, the editions that both Laemmer and Migne relied upon in their nineteenth-century reprintings of Bekkos’s works. These are, Leo Allatius’s Graeciae Orthodoxae, volumes 1 (1652) and 2 (1659), and Peter Arcudius’s Opuscula aurea theologica (1670; a reprint of the 1639 [1629?] edition). The last-mentioned book is especially interesting insofar as it contains, on pp. 98-159, an early work by Bekkos that was never again republished, a collection of patristic texts that, in Greek, is titled the Συναγωγὴ ῥήσεων γραφικῶν. In an article published in 1977, Vittorio Peri speculated that Bekkos, late in his life, may be alluding to this work when he states, in his work De libris suis, §4, that, at a certain, early point in his career, he defended the orthodoxy of the Filioque by speaking about the Holy Spirit being from the Father and the Son “as from one God” rather than by using the more controversial expression “as from one cause” (see V. Peri, “L’opuscolo di Giovanni Vekkos ‘sull’infondatezza storica dello scisma tra le chiese’ e la sua prima redazione,” Rivista dei Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, new ser., 14-16 (1977-79), pp. 203-207, esp. p. 209).

The images of title pages below are links; if you click on any one of them, it will cause the corresponding Google Book to open in another window.

---

---

---