Analogical Identities: The Creation of the Christian Self: Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism in the Patristic Era (Studia Traditionis Theologiae) ... Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology)

404 Pages·2020·2.572 MB·English

by  Nikolaos Loudovikos

STUDIA TRADITIONIS THEOLOGIAE
Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology
Theology continually engages with its past: the people, experience,
Scriptures, liturgy, learning and customs of Christians. The past is pre-
served, rejected, modified; but the legacy steadily evolves as Christians
are never indifferent to history. Even when engaging the future, theol-
ogy looks backwards: the next generation’s training includes inheriting
a canon of Scripture, doctrine, and controversy; while adapting the past
is central in every confrontation with a modernity.
This is the dynamic realm of tradition, and this series’ focus. Whether
examining people, texts, or periods, its volumes are concerned with how
the past evolved in the past, and the interplay of theology, culture, and
tradition.
STUDIA TRADITIONIS THEOLOGIAE
Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology
28
Series Editor: Thomas O’Loughlin,
Professor of Historical Theology
in the University of Nottingham
EDITORIAL BOARD
Director
Prof. Thomas O’Loughlin
Board Members
Dr Andreas Andreopoulos, Dr Nicholas Baker-Brian,
Dr Augustine Casiday, Dr Mary B. Cunningham, Dr Juliette
Day, Dr Johannes Hoff, Dr Paul Middleton, Dr Simon Oliver,
Prof. Andrew Prescott, Dr Patricia Rumsey, Dr Jonathan Wooding,
Dr Holger Zellentin
ANALOGICAL IDENTITIES:
THE CREATION OF THE
CHRISTIAN SELF
Beyond Spirituality and
Mysticism in the Patristic Era
Nikolaos Loudovikos
H
F
© 2019, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, me-
chanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher.
D/2019/0095/195
ISBN 978-2-503-57815-6
e-ISBN 978-2-503-57816-3
DOI 10.1484/M.STT-EB.5.114468
ISSN 2294-3617
e-ISSN 2566-0160
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Preface .................................................... ix
Abbreviations ............................................. xv
Introduction .............................................. 1
PART ONE. THE MEANING OF SPIRITUAL BEING
Augustine and Origen: a study of the presuppositions
of Western and Eastern spirituality, and some modern
repercussions .............................................. 9
Chapter One
Augustine, Origen, and the Person as Will to Power.
The Ontology of Power ..................................... 13
1. Representational eudemonism and the spirituality of
the soul as thinking ..................................... 13
2. A spiritualistic theory of knowledge. The violence of the
spiritual and ‘monophysitism’ ............................ 24
3. Origen, following his parallel way ..................... 25
4. The thinking soul as light and the spirituality of the
will to power ........................................... 28
5. Knowledge of God through consciousness and the
ontologization of the psychological ....................... 32
6. The genesis of the ontology of the person as will to power.
The ontology of power and phenomenality ................ 42
7. The will to power as a historical concern ............... 60
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CONTENTS
PART TWO. ON WILL AND NATURE, ON PERSON
AND CONSUBSTANTIALITY
Chapter One
Maximus the Confessor’s Theology of the Will and the
complete Selfhood ......................................... 65
1. The limits of ancient will and the new opening ......... 65
2. The theology of the will in the anti-monophysite
anthropology of Maximus the Confessor ................. 68
3. Α theologico-philosophical appendix to this chapter:
is it possible to transcend naturalism in the ontology of
the p erson and of history? ............................... 79
Chapter Two
Symeon the New Theologian and the Eschatological Ontology
of the Nature of Creation ................................... 89
1. History ............................................. 89
2. The unfamiliarity of Being and melancholy ............ 90
3. The familiarity of the Being in repentance as an
eschatology of consubstantiality ......................... 99
4. Eucharistic Vigilance and Judgment. The Christology
of Light ................................................ 107
5. The embodied intellect and the poetics of matter. Joy ... 113
6. The Eschatological denial of the ‘Spiritual’ and
Eucharistic Apophaticism ............................... 120
Chapter Three
The Neo-Platonic Root of Angst and the Theology of The Real 127
On being existence and contemplation, Plotinus-Aquinas-
Palamas ................................................... 127
1. The infinite, contemplation and angst ................. 127
2. Deficient existence and the angst of its contemplation.
Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas ........................... 128
3. The real as nature and the vision of God. Saint
Gregory Palamas ....................................... 135
4. From the undermining of the real to its theology ....... 142
Concluding Addition: The ‘second Absolute’ and the
misreadings of Hesychasm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Nietzschean readings of Hesychasm? ................. 148

CONTENTS
Chapter Four
World and Existence, Nature and Person: The Being of Self and
the Meaning of Its Consubstantial Universality .............. 153
1. The Individual without the World. Epictetus ........... 154
2. The World without the Individual. From Buddha
to  Schopenhauer ........................................ 157
3. Individual and World, Person and Nature. Self and
its Consubstantial Universality of its Being in Patristic
Thought ............................................... 161
a) On Consubstantiality, on the Person and on Nature .. 161
b) Beyond the Ontologization of the Person: the Meaning
of Self ........................................... 187
PART THREE. CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism: The Poiesis/Creation of the
Self as an Analogical Identity ............................... 207
1. Weighing Christian anthropological (Neo)Platonism in
East and West .......................................... 207
2. Medieval repercussions ............................... 217
3. Descartes’ Augustinian happiness and beyond .......... 225
4. The Will to Power and the Nietzchean Obelisk:
an  Autonomous Infinity ................................ 229
5. Objections, Wise and non-Wise: a Parenthesis .......... 233
6. The Will to Consubstantiality: the Vessel in the
Open Sea .............................................. 237
7. The Heart of the Ocean: the Poiesis/Creation of a
New Self ............................................... 243
8. An Analogical Identity ............................... 264
Appendix 1
Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John
Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position ........................ 271
1. Introduction ........................................ 271
a) Person instead of Grace… ........................ 272
b) ...and Dictated Otherness ........................ 279
c) The Christology of Escape and the End of Knowledge . 292
2. Conclusions ......................................... 294
Appendix 2
Dialogical Nature, Enousion Person, and Non-ecstatic Will in
St Maximus the Confessor: The Conclusion of a long Debate .. 297
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CONTENTS
1. Personal and Natural Otherness: Evil Nature, or Personal
Possession thereof? ...................................... 300
2. Person and Homoousion ............................. 313
3. Hypostasis/Person and Atomon ...................... 318
4. Natures and Person in Christology .................... 320
5. A Christology of the Will ............................. 322
6. A Systematic Conclusion: The Anthropological
C onsequences .......................................... 329
Appendix 3
An Aquinas for the Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
I ...................................................... 337
II ...................................................... 339
III ..................................................... 340
IV ..................................................... 342
V ...................................................... 344
VI ..................................................... 348
VII .................................................... 351
VIII ................................................... 354
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Ancient and Medieval Authors .......................... 357
Modern Authors ....................................... 361
Indexes ................................................... 375
Index of Authors ....................................... 375
Index of Modern Scholars ............................... 378
Index of Concepts ...................................... 382

PREFACE
This book, concerning its part which was initially published in Greek
in 1999, has a long story behind it. It was partially born from my re-
search on Maximus the Confessor, his spiritual ancestors, and his suc-
cessors, a research which initially resulted in my first book in Greek,
entitled A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatologi-
cal Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity (1992, published under
this title in English with the Holy Cross Seminary Press in 2010). The
Greek Patristic faith in the divinely established coherence of the mate-
rial created hypostatic nature and its unending dialogical/eschatologi-
cal progress caused an unprecedented spiritual earthquake to a young
researcher who, before his theological studies, was nurtured with the
Heideggerian ecstatic subjectivism and its (unconvincing) Kehre, the
Phenomenological out of Being I, as well as the sarcastic Freudian and
Lacanian undermining of them. It seemed that a groundbreaking sense
of the self could perhaps be hidden there, beyond the absolute West-
ern dialectic(s) between essence and existence, transcendence and im-
manence, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, body and soul,
spiritual and material, universality and particularity, person and nature
(and, subsequently, freedom and necessity) – many of which exercised,
and they still do, a considerable impact upon both the Western and the
Orthodox Systematic theology in general, and even more so over the last
decades. But if this is correct, then we need a bundle of new concepts in
order to host this new perspective. Furthermore, and most importantly,
if something like that is true, then this would have left traces upon the
Patristic literature as a whole. This suspicion led me to read, more sys-
tematically, in the years that followed the publication of my first book in
Greek, a great part of the Greek Patristic deposit, concerning Trinitar-

PREFACE
ian theology, anthropology and spirituality, while a laborious study of
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas took place at the same period of time in
Paris, under the supervision of two wise teachers, Goulven Madec, and
Michel Corbin. The first offspring of that long research was precisely a
considerable part of this work, in the form of a book, in Greek, entitled,
in translation, Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self: Mysti-
cism of Power and the Truth of Nature and Person. That was a book
with historical roots, but with clearly systematic purposes. It diagnosed
a germ of nihilism in the heart of Christian Mysticism, a nihilism which
the modern philosophical nihilism simply reversed – and a possible way
out, through the elaboration of some Patristic findings.
That book, though purely academic, had an unexpected success;
it was published and sold-out many times, and it cannot be found in
Greek even as I am writing these lines. In this book I started explor-
ing the possibility of a systematic theological interpretation of the self (a
term which I generally find closer both to the ancient and the modern
experience of person), not simply beyond the above dialectic(s), by using
some new terms and concepts deriving from the Greek Patristic tradi-
tion in general, but also in dialogue with some Western theological and
philosophical ontologies of the self, both ancient and modern; it is true
that this has been also neglected by the modern Orthodox systematic
theology (which saw just a bare essentialism, for example, in Augustine,
and in the Western theology in toto). In recent years, I returned to this
research, and thus this volume must be read as the first of a trilogy, the
second book of which, entitled Consubstantial Selves: Beyond the Self-
referring Subject, will be published soon in English, while a third volume
concerning a theological interpretation of the Unconscious is being pre-
pared.
I thank James Lillie for making an initial translation of the first two
Parts of this book, which represent most of the initially published Greek
book; since I needed to solve a great number of problems of terminol-
ogy and special expressions, I worked on his translation, and I hold the
responsibility for the final English text. The Epilogue of the Greek edi-
tion is now omitted, and in its place I wrote in English the Third Part
of this book, in an effort to re-assess the whole issue, twenty years after,
and connect it to both the contemporary research, and my own work to-
day. The final outcome shows that the concept of the Christian self, and,
subsequently, the modern Greek-Western self in general, is unexpect-
edly richer than any modern survey of it (for example that of Foucault’s)
could ever suspect.
