Reading the Church Fathers PDF
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Reading the Church Fathers Reading the Church Fathers Edited by Morwenna Ludlow and Scot Douglass Published by T&T Clark A Continuum imprint The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. © Morwenna Ludlow, Scot Douglass and contributors, 2011 Morwenna Ludlow, Scot Douglass and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-0-5670-7268-9 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain Contents Acknowledgements vii Participants in the Conversation viii Foreword xi Abbreviations xxiv PART I: READING POSTMODERN READINGS OF THE FATHERS Chapter 1 Jean-Luc Marion’s Reading of Dionysius the Areopagite: Hermeneutics and Reception History 3 Johannes Zachhuber Chapter 2 Time and the Responsibilities of Reading: Revisiting Derrida and Dionysius 23 David Newheiser Chapter 3 Seeing God in Bodies: Wolfson, Rosenzweig, Augustine 44 Virginia Burrus PART II: READING POSTMODERN THINKERS IN PARALLEL WITH READING THE FATHERS Chapter 4 Emmanuel Levinas and Gregory of Nyssa on Reading, Desire and Subjectivity 63 Tamsin Jones Chapter 5 The Combinatory Detour: The Prefix Sun- in Gregory of Nyssa’s Production of Theological Knowledge 82 Scot Douglass vi Contents PART III: READING THE FATHERS READING THEMSELVES Chapter 6 Text and Context: The Importance of Scholarly Reading. Gregory of Nyssa, CONTRA EUNOMIUM 109 Matthieu Cassin Chapter 7 Anatomy: Investigating the Body of Texts in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa 132 Morwenna Ludlow Afterword: Conversations about Reading 154 Bibliography 181 Index 197 Acknowledgements Interdisciplinary dialogue demands of its participants not only patience and intellectual fl exibility, but also a willingness to have one’s own meth- odology exposed to scrutiny. Particularly in a small group and when a considerable amount of time is spent on each paper, each participant allows his or her work to be exposed and vulnerable. We would like to acknowledge here with gratitude the generosity, enthusiasm and good humour with which our contributors engaged in this task (not least because it was not made easier by the combined effects of altitude and jet lag). For the funding of the symposium from which this book developed, we would like to extend our thanks to the University of Colorado at Boulder, specifi cally to the Center for Humanities and the Arts, The Herbst Program of Humanities and the Engineering Honors Program. For the opportunity to spend six months in the United States, Morwenna would like to thank Princeton Theological Seminary, at which she was a visiting scholar, and her home department of theology and religion at the University of Exeter. Many thanks to the students of the University of Colorado at Boulder/ the Engineering Honors Program for their help with the symposium (Takako Hirokawa and Erik Bergal, in particular, for their French transla- tion work), and to Jon Roberts (University of Exeter) for his editorial work on the fi nal text. Finally, to our families: thank you for climbing this mountain with us. Participants in the Conversation Virginia Burrus is Professor of Early Church History and Chair of the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. She has published, most recently, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (Fordham, 2010), the latter was co-authored with Mark Jordan and Karmen MacKendrick. Matthieu Cassin is post-doctoral fellow of the Fondation Thiers and associate researcher of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris). He is currently working on the transmission and reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s works and on the history of manuscripts and libraries. Scot Douglass is Professor in the Herbst Program of Humanities, Faculty Director of the Engineering Honors Program, Faculty-in-Residence and Director of the Andrews Hall Residential College at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Tamsin Jones is Lecturer on Religion and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her recent book, A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Appar- ent Darkness (Indiana University Press, 2011) probes the coherence of Marion’s phenomenological project through an analysis of his use of early Christian sources. Morwenna Ludlow is Lecturer in Patristics at the University of Exeter. She is interested in the reception of the Church Fathers by modern theologians and philosophers and on this theme has published Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford University Press, 2007). She has also published an introduction to Christianity in late antiquity: The Early Church (I. B. Tauris, 2009). Participants in the Conversation ix David Newheiser is a Ph.D. student in Theology at the University of Chicago. His recent research aims to illuminate the character of hope, love and theological discourse through readings that carefully attend to the rich ambivalence of Christian tradition. Johannes Zachhuber is Reader of Theology in the University of Oxford. He works on Christian theology in late antiquity and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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