In his introduction to this lively and wide-ranging collection, Lewis Ayres rightly identifies Andrew Louth's early Discerning the mystery as one of those works which was important in breaking down some of the rigid tribalisms of twentieth-century theology by staging a serious conversation with doctrinal tradition understood as simultaneously an intellectually and spiritually rigorous, demanding and resourceful partner for modernity. The essays collected here reflect much of the same spirit, declining to be categorised over-confidently and displaying the engaged, attentive but not uncritically repetitive respect which Louth has consistently brought to his work on patristics and contemporary thought. They allow several leading younger minds in the Orthodox Church to reflect on what it means to read the Fathers theologically. John Behr notes the way in which a lot of contemporary patristic scholarship, rightly distancing itself from the textbook dogmatic histories of a century or half-century ago, still fails to offer a properly theological hermeneutic of the texts, despite its often impressive achievements in critical contextual reading. Antoine Arjakovsky, Paul Gavrilyuk and Cyril Hovorun have useful things to say about the successes and failures of modern Orthodox re-readings of the patristic heritage, querying their sometimes exclusive and triumphalist rhetoric and pointing out both the inner diversity and tensions among these readings and the reluctance to engage self-critically with fixed myths of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Christian identities. Kallistos Ware contributes a characteristically penetrating and creative summary of what it might mean to treat the Fathers as ‘witnesses’ whose work has to be reimagined for a new context, and seen as a method, ‘a path of ongoing exploration’ (p. 221).
These pieces alone would make this book worthwhile, but there is more: a crisp and insightful discussion by Thomas Graumann of how the Nicene formula came to be used normatively in the debates around the Council of Ephesus; a nuanced discussion of the use of Pseudo-Dionysius in the iconoclast controversies, taking seriously the evidence that he was not seen as exclusively the champion of iconophilia; a sound case made by Jane Baun for the significance of ‘Middle Byzantine’ writers as creators of an exegetical lingua franca; and a fine defence of Boethius as theologian by Augustine Casiday, warning us against imposing on Boethius a sharp differentiation between philosophy and spiritual discernment that would have been alien to any late antique thinker.
But nearly half of the book is taken up by two long and immensely learned and suggestive articles – Krastu Banev on Byzantine Mariological texts and interpretations and John Milbank on what an unwary reader would think was the well-worn question of ‘Christianity and Platonism in East and West’. Banev shows with masterly skill how exegetical interest in feminine Scriptural symbolism moved from ecclesiological to Mariological readings between the fifth and eighth centuries, and traces the further development of this trajectory to the fourteenth century. He also proposes a model of ‘layered’ understanding of Orthodox liturgical language and action, requiring from us a careful penetration of different levels of orality and oral allusion. Milbank's brilliant and complex essay gives a very nuanced reading of discussions over the last forty years or so of the metaphysics of Palamism. He accepts some of the criticisms made of its philosophical confusions, but also sees it as focusing a crucial set of issues for theology connected with the problem of mediation: both East and West have made mistakes in this area, both of them in different ways misconceiving the question of what it is that ‘mediates’ the actuality of God. Palamism is still awkwardly complicit with the notion that we have to imagine something ‘between’ genuinely transcendent being and creation; but debased scholasticism and Protestant anti-sacramentalism are at least as culpable in reducing divine actuality to the communicating of knowledge only rather than life. We need a better account of mediation in and through the created order, a ‘theophanic’ doctrine of created existence and transfigured materiality (Eriugena comes close, and Aquinas provides many of the tools needed but is too cautious about theophany). This entails a full-blooded account of the participation of created in uncreated life. Milbank is (probably justly) critical of this reviewer's early work for an over-intellectualised or formalised model of participation, over-dependent on Wittgenstein-influenced Thomists of the last century. I suspect there is more debate to be had here, though: covertly materialistic views of participation do need to be watched for, and a ‘formal’ model (participation as the reception in the subject of the object's intelligible structure) can be salvaged if form is seen in strongly agential terms as what the object is coherently or continuously doing and thus as what is actively creating a certain kind of determining relation with the subject and a genuine inner modification of the life of the subject. But this is a very rich study indeed, almost a monograph in itself; even if not all its conclusions are beyond dispute, it takes the discussion of Palamism and Christian ontologies to a new level of sophistication.
All in all, then, this is an exceptionally interesting volume. It certainly does what the title suggests in pointing us to the living continuity of a patristic problematic and a patristic methodology in theology today, inside and outside the Orthodox fold(s). But it also underlines what Andrew Louth himself has so consistently stressed, the impossibility of theological thinking without the thinking and absorbing of the difference that God's agency makes, a difference that demands contemplation before, during and after conceptual analysis. It is a worthy tribute to a prolific, immensely painstaking and equally imaginative writer who is very properly regarded as one of the foremost Orthodox minds of the contemporary scene; and it should generate the sort of discussion that will keep Orthodox theology – and plenty of other theologies as well – alive and exploratory without becoming rootless or arbitrary.
