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The Dionysian Mystical Theology – Paul Rorem

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Categories: esotericism, hellenic, religion

The Dionysian Mystical Theology coverPaul Rorem is the series editor for Fortress Press’s Mapping the Tradition, a collection of compact guides to pivotal thinkers in Christian history, divided into eras of Early Christianity, Medieval, Reformation, Early Modern and Modern. Part of the Early Christianity grouping alongside works on Irenaeus of Lyon, Athanasius and John of Damascus. The Dionysian Mystical Theology is Rorem’s contribution to the series, providing an overview of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and his apophatic mysticism.

The unknown author referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius was a late fifth and early sixth century CE theologian who wrote under the guise of the first century CE St. Dionysius the Areopagite, a member of the Athenian judicial council whose conversion to Christianity by St. Paul is described in the Acts of the Apostles. Rorem draws attention to the events surrounding this conversion, and how it was initiated by Paul’s sermon in which he remarked on an Athenian statue dedicated to the Unknown God, effectively identifying this Agnostos Theos with his god, whose name was forbidden to be said. Centuries later, this story provided a fitting hook, as Rorem terms it, for the adopted name of the author and its intersection of themes around Neoplatonist ideas of divine knowability and unknowability.

Rorem divides his book into two parts, first providing an overview of Pseudo-Dionysius’s cosmology and apophatic theology using the Areopagite’s own miniature essay, The Mystical Theology, progressing through each statement with commentary. The Mystical Theology is very much a condensing of the ideas in Dionysius’s longer works, and is used here as a particularly good example of his incorporation of negations in an apophatic theology that recognizes the transcendence of God beyond human words and concepts, seeing God in the absence and darkness. Each of the three chapters of The Mystical Theology are analysed section by section with extensive notations.

In the second part of this book, Stages of Dionysian Reception and Interpretation, Rorem turns to discussing how Dionysian thought has been received and interpreted by theologians and church historians, compiling four previously published essays. As this body of work would suggest, this is not Rorem’s first Pseudo-Dionysian rodeo, having, in addition to such essays, written a significant commentary on the corpus, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and with John C. Lamoreaux translating the Dionysian scolia of John of Scythopolis, also published by OUP under the Clarendon Press imprint as part of their Oxford Early Christian Studies series. Prior to that, in 1980, a sprightly Rorem completed his doctoral dissertation on the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis, which was then published in 1984 as the book Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo Dionysian Synthesis by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto.

In the first of these essays, The Doctrinal Concerns of the First Dionysian Scholiast, originally published by Études Augustiniennes in their 1997 Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident, Rorem begins with the Byzantine theologian, lawyer and bishop John of Scythopolis whose most significant contribution to early theology was the penning of several works, now lost, in opposition to the Monophysite heresy. Bishop John, writing a mere generation after Pseudo-Dionysius, composed an extensive set of scholia to his predecessor’s works, prefaced by a long prologue in which he set out his reasons for commenting on the corpus, principally as a defence against the Apollinarism and Eutychianism forms of Monophysitism. Using minute points of grammar, vocabulary, and biblical sources in his comments on the Dionysian corpus, John affirms that Christ assumed an earthly body and a rational soul, against Apollinaris and other Monophysites, and that final salvation is of the soul and the body.

The second chapter, The Early Latin Dionysius: Eriugena and Hugh of St. Victor, was originally published under a slightly different title in Modern Theology (2008) and also a year later in Wiley-Blackwell’s anthology Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite. Here Rorem considers the exposition and appropriation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s work in ninth and twelfth century Western Europe, where the Areopagite was conflated with a third century local saint, the cephalophoric St Denis of Paris. For those looking for responses to apophatic theology, there’s little here, with Pseudo-Dionysius instead being called upon for his role as a, as Hugh describes him, “theologian and describer of the hierarchies,” with few traces of Dionysian influence being found in his work.

In Martin Luther’s Christocentric Critique of Pseudo-Dionysian Spirituality, previously published in Lutheran Quarterly 11 (Autumn, 1997), Rorem very much enters his Lutheran wheelhouse, turning to the theologian who dismissively referred to “Dionysius ille, quisquis fuerit” (‘that Dionysius, whoever he was’), describing him as pernitiosissimus (‘most pernicious’). The practical Luther was dismissive of Pseudo-Dionysius’s idle speculation about celestial hierarchies, calling his “hodge-podge about angels” dangerous and accusing him of being more a Platonist than a Christian; not an unfair assessment, if a little mean. The same was true of Luther’s approach to apophatic theology, countering the Areopagite’s vision of the darkness of God with an incarnational theology of the cross in which God is hidden, concealed in the darkness of humanity, where he could not be seen but only heard.

Finally, in Negative Theologies and the Cross, Rorem delineates the intellectual legacy of apophatic thinking, dividing it into a triad of streams: the progressive apophatic, the complete apophatic, and the incarnational apophatic. First published in Harvard Theological Review 101 in 2008, and then reprinted a year later in Lutheran Quarterly, this expands on the previous chapter, comparing Luther’s interpretation to others which centre Christ, the incarnation, and the cross. The progressive apophatic is based on Exodus 33, with its imagery of Moses ever advancing morally and spiritually by following the hidden God in everlasting time, with negations lead to more negations. The complete apophatic understands Sinai’s darkness of unknowing as a mystical union with God in ecstatic eternity, with negations leading to a union with God. Finally, the incarnational apophatic explicitly turns from such Sinaic darkness, following John 1 and Philippians 2, to the incarnation and cross of Christ in salvation history.

Due to the nature of the format as a compact overview, with a page count of a mere 141 pages, there’s a feeling that Rorem races along, never dwelling on anything for too long, brevity trumping considered reflection. While he is a largely impartial presenter, it is clear that Rorem favours incarnation over negation, and there are multiple moments in which he comes across as flabbergasted with Pseudo-Dionysius’s apodictic embrace of the apophatic, palpably telling him off back down through the centuries. Despite having written so extensively on Pseudo-Dionysius throughout his career, there is no sense of Rorem merely regurgitating what he’s previously written and augmenting it with a couple of editing changes. Even the straight-up textual analysis of the corpus in the first half of this book, which clearly mirrors, by its very nature, some of the content in his 1993 A Commentary On The Texts And An Introduction To Their Influences, by no means feels beholden to that ur-text. There are some limitations in the consideration of the broader influence of Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism, borne out Rorem’s status as a Lutheran theologian, where the historical trail ends with Luther and the strain of negative theology within Dominican mysticism. In his closing sentence, Rorem underscores what might have been, bowing out and leaving more suitable others to consider what modern and postmodern minds make of Dionysian apophaticism. He does give a few suggestions, referring to philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the theological side of the aisle, Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Published by Fortress Press

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The Antichrist: A New Biography – Philip C. Almond

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Categories: esotericism, middle ages, religion, Tags:

The Antichrist: A New Biography coverPhilip C. Almond is all about new biographies, having previously used that titular conceit for explorations of both God and the Devil. This latest biography acts as a companion to one of those, his 2014 work on the Devil, and like its predecessor, it is imminently readable with its body copy set in a larger-than-usual point size on smaller-than-usual digest-size pages (averaging ten words a line), all aided by Almond’s easy manner and authorial voice.

Any consideration of the Antichrist inevitably brings to mind Bernard McGinn’s masterful exploration of the topic, 1994’s Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. Almond acknowledges a debt to McGinn for that work and his other many titles, mentioning the quote from Denis the Carthusian with which McGinn closed his own study, “Have we not worn ourselves out with that accursed Antichrist.” With the completion of this biography, Almond wryly notes that he now includes himself amongst the company of Denis and McGinn as a sufferer of this Antichrist-fatigue.

Almond opens by describing the Antichrist as a fluid and unstable idea from its inception, and noting how from this flux emerged two primary characterisations: the tyrannical Antichrist who opposes and persecutes the Christian church, followed by the later concept of a hypocritical papal Antichrist who deceives from within the very church. The former idea, which dominated the first millennium of the Common Era, was consolidated in its last century by Adso, a Benedictine monk from Montier-en-Der in north-eastern France. For his first chapter, Almond summarises Adso’s highly detailed biography of the Antichrist as a Jew born of the tribe of Dan, into whose mother the Devil would enter at the moment of conception so that the child, though conceived by human parents, would be “totally wicked, totally evil, totally lost.” Born in Babylon and raised in the unrepentant Galilean cities of Beth-saida and Corozain, the Antichrist would travel to Jerusalem where he would circumcise himself, upon which the Jews would flock to him as the Messiah. He would then terrorise Christians, and kill the returning Old Testament figures of Enoch and Elijah (sent by God to convert the Jews to Christianity), until after a three and a half year period of tribulations he would be defeated by either Jesus or the archangel Michael. With this narrative established by Adso, Almond, in a rather pleasing device, then takes a historical step backwards and shows how a millennium’s worth of influences and eschatological speculation culminated in its creation.

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This analysis begins by exploring the considerably slight appearances of the Antichrist in the biblical record, the first of which is the plurality of lowercase antichrists that are mentioned in some of John’s epistles, where the term is used as a pejorative directed against fellow but estranged Christians who, contrary to orthodox interpretation, denied the divinity of Jesus. Almond then highlights less specific elements from both the Old and New testaments that would be incorporated into the vision of the singular Antichrist, beginning with the analogous false prophets and false messiahs which Jesus warns of in Mark’s gospel when discussing the end times. In the same gospel, Jesus also talks about the abomination of desolation or desolating sacrilege, an idea drawn from the Old Testament book of Daniel and the first book of the deuterocanonical Maccabees, where the term refers to the profanation of the temple in Jerusalem by a foreign tyrant (for Daniel, the second century BCE Greek king Antiochus IV). In later Antichrist traditions, the abomination of desolation became not an act (usually assumed to be Antiochus’ sacrifice to Zeus of a pig on the temple’s altar) but was personalised as the Antichrist, thereby aligning with Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians in which he talks of another Antichrist analogue referred to as ‘the man of sin, the son of perdition’ who not only takes his seat in the temple of God but declares himself to be God. Irenaeus in the second century of the Common Era was the first to consolidate these various strands, along with the little horn of the book of Daniel and the beast of Revelation, into a single figure identified as the Antichrist, and over the centuries, as Almond documents, more details would be added.

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It is this approach that marks a welcomed difference between this work and McGinn’s denser and more obviously chronological Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. By beginning with the end, and then effectively having Christendom ‘show its work’ to explain how its vision of the Antichrist was arrived at, Almond underscores how the picture of the Antichrist developed over the first millennia from the smallest of scriptural crumbs and how by the time Adso composed his definitive biography, the monk was able to confidently narrate a story with a considerable amount of details not explicitly found in scripture. Key to this was the way in which speculation over the tiniest scriptural phrase or allusion, not to mention gematria and theological and eschatological mathematics, led to an accretion of popular and unquestioned key points, such as the idea that the Antichrist would be from the tribe of Dan. This was something first expounded by Irenaeus based on a decidedly creative reading of a verse from Jeremiah 8.16 (in which the city of Dan is meant, not the tribe, and where it is a victim of an invasion, not the source of a tyrant), and because the author of Revelation did not include Dan amongst the twelve tribes of Israel whose members would make up the 144,000 souls marked for salvation by God; a list from which the tribe of Ephraim is also missing, so who knows what they did wrong.

Due to this speculative accretion, a fairly complete idea of the Antichrist was in place by the end of the century, with the work of Irenaeus being joined by contributions from other including Hippolytus of Rome, Tertulian, Commodian, and the anonymous author of the Sibylline Oracles, with each bringing their own, though not always complimentary, additions to the lore. One of these is the quite delightful idea that the Antichrist was Nero, but not the living Nero as he was during his reign as Roman emperor but rather a future incarnation, who had either escaped death to wait in hiding, or who had returned from the dead in a sublime perversion of the resurrection of Christ. Five hundred years later, Adso’s influential vision of the Antichrist was still current, and can be seen in Luca Signorelli’s fresco The Preaching of the Antichrist, which, with its cast of apocalyptic characters and events, shows, as Almond puts it, Adso’s life of the Antichrist in pictorial form.

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When it comes to the alternative idea of a papal Antichrist, Almond does not quite have the equivalent of Adso’s perfect summary, nothing that necessarily combined all the interpretation’s main elements. So rather than working backwards, Almond instead provides a further history of the conception of the Antichrist throughout the centuries, marking a trail of ideas, rather than explicit themes, which culminated in a then novel interpretation by the Cistercian monk Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Almond shows how concerns about the Antichrist gradually evolved three hundred years into the Common Era and how, following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312CE, Christianity was no longer the sole province of a persecuted faithful minority but was instead the dominant religion. With it now being hard to imagine an external tyrant persecuting a powerful Christian empire, a once imminent Armageddon was, for many, put on hold. Other than the exception of military leaders briefly figured as the Antichrist, such as the Vandal king Gaiseric or later the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, accusative fingers were now often pointed inwards. However, in these initial stages, there was no single Antichrist identified within the church, and instead a plurality of lowercase antichrists, the faithless hidden amongst the faithful, were excoriated for their hypocrisy, disbelief or heretical thoughts by luminaries such as Augustine, Tyconius, and Pope Gregory the Great. This intramural suspicion of other members thus imagined the body of the Antichrist as something active, like a virus, within the very body Christ that was the church. In 1190, Joachim of Fiore brought such ideas to their logical, singular conclusion when he told King Richard I of England, that the Antichrist was not only alive but had been born in Rome and would be elevated to the Apostolic See. While King Richard’s response, as recorded by Roger de Hoveden in his annals, was surprise, this idea would grow in popularity, with Joachim’s vision of a papal Antichrist equalling in spread and influence the older Adsonian tradition, particularly amongst Franciscans.

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Almond continues his biography of the Antichrist down through the centuries, noting how both the Adsonian and Joachite traditions perpetuated and mutated, with expectations changing as events occurred and conditions for the arrival of the Antichrist evolved. One notable change was the addition of a multitude of other characters to the apocalyptic tableaux, including the heroic Last World Emperor, a restorative Angelic Pope, and sometimes even dual Antichrists: a mystical one and a martial one; while in the case of Ubertino of Casale, who seemingly couldn’t get enough of Antichrists, there would be two Mystical Antichrists (Boniface VIII and Benedict XI) as well as the final boss, the Great Antichrist.

Almond concludes in the modern era in which the decline of prophetic history from the middle of the nineteenth century lead to the idea of the Antichrist as a floating signifier, less associated with the apocalyptic and more a general critique of perceived evil in the world. Thus anyone, or anything, could be accused of being the Antichrist, be it a royal, a politician, or even entire religions or progressive social movements. Here Almond also turns his focus on literary and cinematic representations of the Antichrist, briefly summarising Rosemary’s Baby, the Omen trilogy, the Left Behind series, and in considerably greater detail, Vladimir Solovyov’s A Short Story of the Antichrist; but sadly, no Good Omens.

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In all, this is an enjoyable read in which Almond’s pleasant narrative style belies a depth and thoroughness, acting as a testament to his familiarity with his subject. The Antichrist: A New Biography is presented as a hardcover edition bound in orange cloth, with title and author debossed in black on the spine, all wrapped up in a full colour dustjacket featuring William Blake’s rather fetching watercolour The Number of the Beast is 666 from 1805; continuing a Blakean pattern seen in Almond’s previous biographies. More colour is found in a section of colour plates towards the book’s centre, thirty images in all drawn from a variety of sources ranging from mid-eleventh century France to modern cinema. While each image has a caption describing it, there’s no specific title, credit, source or date included with it and the reader has to thumb back to an index of plates in the preamble for rather minimal information that could just as easily have annotated each image.

Published by Cambridge University Press

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Meaningful Flesh – Edited by Whitney A. Bauman

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Categories: queer, religion, Tags:

Meaningful Flesh coverSubtitled Re­flections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet, Punctum Books’ Meaningful Flesh is a relatively brief anthology featuring contributions from Jacob J. Erickson, Jay Johnson, Timothy Morton, Daniel Spencer, Carol Wayne White, and editor Whitney A. Bauman. It presents a variety of musings on nature and religion, two things that, as the preface describes it, are much queerer than we ever imagined; hrmph, speak for yourself, I have some pretty queer imaginings.

Following a preface from Whitney A. Bauman and an introduction from Daniel T. Spencer, Carol Wayne White opens the proceedings with the longest contribution here, Polyamorous Bastards: James Baldwin’s Opening to a Queer African-American Religious Naturalism, in which she begins by highlighting Baldwin’s use of the ‘bastard’ epithet as a multifaceted expression of the black experience of marginality in North America. This she then incorporates into the idea of African-American religious naturalism, a concept she has developed before and in great depth, most notably in 2006’s Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism. Here, though, this African-American religious naturalism is less defined, and so the appeal to it, and its incorporation into the preceding and thorough exploration of Baldwin’s ideas, feels inconclusive, almost abrupt.

A highlight here is Jacob J. Erickson’s Irreverent Theology: On the Queer Ecology of Creation which uses as its starting point Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno series of short films on animal sexual behaviour. Indeed Rossellini does much of the work early on, with the preamble consisting of a recounting of her gentle and whimsical excoriation of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, in which the divine directive of male and female animal pairs is rendered foolish by the queer diversity of gender within the animal kingdom. Erickson incorporates an overview of Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism from her 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, seeing her writing as key in the way it mutually-enhances and collaborates with the insights of queer theory, philosophies of science, and ecology. Pursuing Rossellini’s observation that “Nature is infinitely scandalous,” Erickson uses Barad’s idea of nature as post-humanist performativity to uncover a delightful and profound queerness in Martin Luther’s incarnational theology of creation, in which creatures are considered larvae dei (‘masks of God’) or involucrum (God’s ‘wrapping’). Acknowledging the ‘burlesque attitude’ with which Luther approaches theological language, Erickson argues that this use of carnivalesque masks of God effectively casts the divine as something “caught up in a kind of queer performativity of the earth,” wherein it desires to play and revel in its grounding.

Jay Emerson Johnson mines a similar vein to Erickson with Liberating Compassion: A Queerly Theological Anthropology of Enchanting Animals, in which, informed by queer theory’s suspicion of binary classification, he muses on what defines an animal and a human, noting the way in which both scholar and lay so easily assume an often hierarchical distinction between human and animal, one that mirrors similar Western assumptions about sexually gendered categorisation. As an explication of these themes, Johnson examines the multiple performativities in ecosystems of gay affection most specifically in the fetish of human-pup-play. This thinning of classifications is then applied to theology, with Johnson suggesting that the dissolution of the idea of the imago Dei as the sole preserve of ‘humans’ would lead to “an awareness of other-than-human pain and suffering, or empathy.”

In the penultimate entry, Queer Values for a Queer Climate: Developing a Versatile Planetary Ethic, Whitney Bauman follows the contributions that precede him with an attempt to decentre anthropocentrism in the perception of nature and thereby create new forms of performance that re-engage with/on/in the planet by respecting its agency at multiple levels. Like Johnson before him, Bauman embraces queer perspectives in order to create a better way of viewing the world, taking cues from Jack Halberstam’s call for an ethics of ambiguity and unknowing rather than progress, Timothy Morton’s call for a queer ecology or “ecology without nature,” as well as a queering of our sense of linear time. As Jacob J. Erickson did earlier, Bauman also draws attention to the queerness of gender and sexualities amongst the animal kingdom, referencing Joan Roughgarden’s book Evolution’s Rainbow to show how heteronormativity has been read into the evolutionary record by those doing the reading. For Bauman, then, a better world is one unshackled from hierarchies of time, and the unassailable, inexorable destiny of progress or the heteronormative nuclear family, replaced by an understanding of a reverberating and non-teleological time that cultivates “an ecology of relationships that stretches across multiple generations and multiple terrains” akin to a Deleuzian rhizome without beginning or end.

Bringing everything to a meaningful and fleshy end is Timothy Morton, who, would you believe, provides a reflection on queer green sex toys in order to challenge the ontology of agrilogistics. Um, yes. What that means in practical terms is perhaps less salacious than one might hope, with each of the words acting as a heading for various philosophical musings. Queer considers the metaphysics and epistemology of perception in which anything, be it a frog, a meadow or climate change is impossible to purely define and must therefore, and paradoxically, not exist at all. Green builds on this philosophical conceit to define agrilogistics, Morton’s idea of agriculture as a virus, running since about 10,000 BCE when hunter-gatherers settled down and farmed grain, whose three axioms are the law of noncontradiction is inviolable, to exist is to be constantly present, and more existing is better than any quality of existing. As for Sex, which, not unexpectedly, cannot be limited to just one heteronormative expression within a ‘gigantic ocean’ of sexualities and gender, Morton defines it as an ontologically fundamental category like queer and green, as the uncontainable enjoyment that occurs when the first two categories begin to resonate in an enjoyment that implies movement. These queer, green sex beings are finally categorised as the toys of the title, being contingent, fragile, and most significantly, playful; for to play is to make violable the first axiom of agrilogistics: the law of noncontradiction. For Morton, then, thinking ecologically is not an exercise in themes of normative purity and eternal truths, but rather an understanding that things are queer green sex toys.

With its five entries, Meaningful Flesh provides a little something for everyone so inclined, with certain themes that run through each pieces, especially the last four, in which the queerness of nature is a central tenant. Also, the cover design by Chris Piuma incorporating images from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur is lovely.

Published by Punctum Books