Father Andrew Louth in Amsterdam

Photo courtesy of Jim Forest. More photos here. 

 

As I hinted at in the previous post, if earlier readers of this blog are still around they will appreciate that the coming of Father Andrew Louth to Amsterdam is a worthy occasion to resume blogging. (And if there are readers who don’t know why I should be interested in that they can click here). The reason for this was the launching of the Amsterdam Centre for Eastern Orthodox Theology at which Father Louth is going to be a guest professor and at which he was the guest speaker yesterday. This is a new institute located in the theology faculty of the Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam which will be more formally launched in October when Metropolitan Kallistos Ware will be guest speaker. Father Louth gave a lecture on “The Nature of Eastern Orthodox Theology.” I tried to take reasonably extensive notes, but couldn’t keep up with everything. However, I hope that the following is not too inaccurate an overview of his paper.

Father Louth began by noting that many people had first discovered Orthodox theology through Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Why Lossky used the term “mystical theology” in the title is not clear, for, having done a doctorate on Eckhart, he was acquainted with what the West considers mysticism, and yet the contents of Lossky’s book simply look like traditional Christian theology. However, in the introduction to the book, Lossky explains the complementarity between mysticism and theology, a complementarity that has been lost in the West:

The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology, between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church… To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically…

Lossky does not begin with the experience of God, but rather with participation in the divine mysteries, which refers both to the sacraments and to the truths of faith. These are truths that we experience and celebrate in the divine mysteries and within the Church. Experience cannot be detached from dogma, nor detached from the Church; it is not something individualistic but is rooted in the experience of the Eucharistic community.

Father Louth then proceeded to explore some of the features of this Orthodox theology by offering some reflections on the Fathers of the Church, specifically Saint Athanasius, Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Saint Maximus the Confessor and Saint Gregory Palamas.

 

Louth on the mystical, III: the reception of Dionysius in the West

If we look for the ‘mystical’ in the Dionysian corpus, what we find is something deeply traditional: mystikos and related words are indeed favourites with Dionysius, but they fit perfectly into the context we have already outlined. And that is a context of biblical and liturgical symblism … the ‘mystical’ meaning is what these biblical and liturgical symbols refer to. … Dionysius is concerned with the cosmic order disclosed by the biblical revelation and celebrated in the Christian liturgy.

But whatever Dionysius meant in the sixth century, and continued to mean for the Byzantine world, he suffered a strange alteration when he came to be known in the Latin West.

Andrew Louth, “Afterword” to the new edition of his The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford, 2007) 206-207.

Father Louth notes the re-evaluation of Dionysius work in recent years in which the depiction of him as a pagan Neoplatonist is giving way to the recognition of him as someone who used the framework of late Neoplatonism to express fundamentally Christian ideas that are dependent on Scripture and the liturgy.

While Dionysius’ reception in the West is a complex story that is not yet fully understood, the new linguistic, cultural and ecclesial context meant that his works, and particularly his understanding of the mystical, came to acquire rather different shades of meaning leading to a distinction, perhaps even a divorce, between the sacramental and the mystical. Louth writes:

… in translation – and in a Latin culture increasingly removed from the East Byzantine world to which Dionysius himself belonged – Dionysius assumed a different aspect. Again we can keep to the word mystikos, the history of which we are tracing. We have seen that in the Greek of the Fathers it means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’, and is etymologically linked to the word mysterion, which refers both to the Gospel of the Incarnate Word, and to the sacraments. The biblical and the sacramental fit together. But in Latin things start to come apart: mysterion is either translated sacramentum, especially when it refers to sacraments or sacramental actions (there was no notion of seven sacraments until the twelve century), or transliterated as mysterium. It is often remarked – right through the Middle Ages – that mysterium means sacramentum, but what was obvious in Greek comes to be inferred in Latin. Mystikos is invariably translated mysticus, but its association with the sacramental is obscured. So a collection of associations evident in Greek becomes something that is at best inferred in Latin, and sometimes lost altogether. Mysterium and mysticus begin to develop a life of their own. (207)

This shift in meaning is also influenced by two further factors.

Firstly, the liturgical focus of Dionysius’ work is less immediately obvious in a Western context as the liturgical world that he explores had become increasingly foreign to Western Christians as the Eastern and Western liturgical traditions had gone their separate ways. As a result

whereas in the traditional understanding of Dionysius, which is still found in the West as late as the twelfth century, the two works on the hierarchies – the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesial Hierarchy – form the centre of gravity, to which Dionysius’ other works relate, by the thirteenth century, the two works on the hierarchies fade into the background, and the centre of gravity becomes either the Divine Names, interpreted as a logical treatise about divine predication – so the Scholastics – or the Mystical Theology – as with the growing, largely vernacular ‘mystical’ movement. (208)

Secondly, Dionysius was now read against a very different cultural and theological background, coloured by the rediscovery of Augustine in the twelfth century. Augustine’s vision focused more on the drama of the individual soul than on the structures of a liturgical society and the cosmic dimension of Dionysius’ thought receded into the background and was forgotten.

These two factors allow the ‘mystical’ to lose its anchoring in the biblical and liturgical, as with Dionysius and the Fathers, and offer it another context: that of the individual. (208)

In the next post, I shall report on Father Louth’s discussion of the shifts that occurred in the understanding of the Body of Christ in the Medieval West.

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For anyone interested in more on this:

• Father Louth has written a book on Dionysius the Areopagite, which I am sure is worth reading, but which I unfortunately won’t get to for quite a while.
• Felix Culpa of Ora et Labora had a series of posts (I, II, III, IV & V) earlier this year in which discussed twentieth century Orthodox readings of Dionysius.
• Father Louth has an essay on “The body in Western Catholic Christianity” in Religion and the Body (edited by Sarah Coakley) in which he discusses the influence of Augustine’s shift to interiority in more detail. I read it about a year ago and don’t have access to it at the moment, but intend writing more on it when I get hold of it again.