Interview with Dr. Farrell on GHD

Interview w. Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Concerning his 4-Volume

“God, History, & Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences”

Conducted by Asher Black, March 4, 2008

How long did it take you to research and write this book. Can you elaborate on the kinds of research you did, and where, when, etc.?

The book was written in about 2 weeks, due to the time constraints I was under trying to satisfy my students in the course of the same name that I taught. As for researching it, it is the fruit of many years of patristic study. It would be difficult for me to say, since I started reading the fathers way back in college. So I suppose it represents about 20 years of research and thought.

God, History and Dialectic

An electronic version of Joseph Farrell’s extended work, God, History, and Dialectic is now available here for purchase. I’d recommend getting it while you are able.

The 9th Century Crisis: Political, Theological, Social, and Prophetic

Farrell, Most Rev. Bishop Photios, S.S.B. God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences.  Excerpt from Volume II:

The Inception of the Two Europes

The Ninth Century Crisis and the Emergence of the Two Europes: The First Phase and its Central Ikon

 

The mediaevalist Norman Cantor made the following suggestive observation in a book on mediaeval historiography that is replete with intriguing implications:

We have not dealt with the making of the other Middle Ages — primarily Arab, Byzantine, and Jewish.  That is the subject of another inquiry.  It is my personal prejudice that while these other mediaeval civilizations are of enormous importance not only intrinsically but in respect to their impact on the West, for a variety of reasons, including sheer chance, the magisterial intellectua; structures that were created to priviliedge of the European Middle Ages in the twnetieth century were largely lacking with respect to the conceptualization of these other mediaeval socieities.^[i]

The remarks are intriguing because they allude to the elevation of the historiographical tradition of Western Europe to “canonical status”, yet hint that something is amiss that cannot be explained solely by reference to the West.  Paradoxically, it is the Jewish and Islamic aspects of “the other Middle Ages” that are the most understood by the West, and the other Christian Middle Ages, that of the splendid edifice of the Byzantine Roman Empire and Church, that are so obscure.  And yet, it is the Byzantine Empire and Church which hold the key to the decryption of the central moment in the emergence of the two Europes, that moment in the ninth century when Augustinism becomes the broad theological culture of the Frankish empire, and has begun both to be driven by, and to drive, the political and cultural outlook of the West, and come into conflict with the First Europe’s representative in the West: the papacy.  Without that perspective, all remains obscure at best or unintelligible at worst.

Accepting Augustine: The Dialectic of Opposition in Orthodoxy

Beginning with Adolph von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg in the Nineteenth century, the first historians of doctrine in the modern, comprehensive and systematic sense, there is a growing awareness of a sea-change in the fourth century, a change associated with the name of St. Augustine of Hippo Regius. The Byzantinist Joan M. Hussey remarks, in her little book, Church and Learning in the Byzantine Empire that “insofar as it is possible to assign a watershed, that comes in the fourth century, between those who follow Augustine on the one hand, and those who follow the Cappadocians on the other.”  The comment, coming as it does from a scholar of a civilization, and by no means a theologian, is a significant one, for it means that underlying all other expressions of the problem, be they cultural, canonical, or even liturgical, the underlying problem is dogmatic and more specifically Trinitarian.

Even St. Maximus the Confessor indicates as much.  When the inquiry is made concerning the presence of the filioque in some of the formularies of the Latin West, he accepts the doctrine, but only insofar as expressing the sending of the Spirit by the Son, and explicitly rejects the doctrine in its Augustinian form.

But the most succinct statements of the problem may be found in the early twentieth century Calvinist historian James Orr’s Progress of Dogma:

“With Augustine, theology passes from East to West, and from the region of theology proper to that of anthropology.  Not that this great Father was not a theologian in the stricter sense as well.  No man plunged deeper than he into the mysteries of the divine nature in his discussions of the Trinity.” (p. 131)

On this point, the perception both of Eastern Orthodox and Western scholars regarding the position and significance is the same.

Hilary of Poitiers on the ordo theologiae and commentary by Joseph Farrell

“The term homoousios (of one substance) may express a grasp of the true faith; but it lends itself to deception.  If we apply it to a combination of distinction and likeness of nature, to insist that the ‘likeness’ asserts not a likeness in mere externals (speciem) but in underlying reality (genus), then our teaching accords with the truth of our religion: providing that we take ‘one substance’ as meaning a likeness of distinct entities, so that unity means not numerical singularity but equality…. If ‘Father and Son or one substance’ is taken as implying a single entity, though signified by two names, we may confess the Son in name, but we do not acknowledge him in thought, if by confessing ‘one substance’ we are asserting that one single being is himself both Father and Son.  Again, there is a foothold for the error which supposes the Father to have divided himself, to have cut off a part of himself to be his Son…. There is also a third error, which takes ‘Father and Son of one substance’ to indicate a prior substance, which the two share equally.  The orthodox will assert ‘one substance of Father and son’; but he must not start from that: nor must he hold this as the chief truth, as if there could be no true faith without it.  HE will assert ‘one substance’ without danger, when he has first said, ‘The Father is ingenerate; the Son has his origin and existence from the Father; he is like the Father in goodness, honour, and nature.’  He us subject to his Father, as the origin of his being…. He does not come from nothing; he is generate.  He is not unborn; but he shares in timelessness.  he is not the Father, but the Son derived from him.  He is not a portion, he is a whole: not the Creator himself, but his image; the image of God, born of God, from God: he is not a creature; he is God.  But he is not another God in underlying substance, but one God through essence of undiffering substance.  God is one, not in person, but in nature.”(De synodiis 67-69)

The Augustinian Confusion: A sufficient safeguard from Arianism? Not at all.

Excerpt from God, History, and Dialectic by Most Rev. Photius (Joseph P.) Farrell, S.S.B., D.Phil.(Oxon.): 

When St. Augustine wrote his De Trinitate, he may have done so partially in an effort to combat Arianism.  Certainly the Council of Toledo advanced Augustine’s arguments for the filioque as being anti-Arian in nature.  But is the filioque in fact an adequate safeguard against Arianism?  We have seen that the Arians defined deity by confusing the hypostatic feature of the Father, ingenerate causation, with the divine essence itself: they defined the divine essence by the Father’s personal feature.  Thus, they could deny that Christ was fully God because he did not cause but was caused.  To this we saw that Athanasius’ response is to go to the root of the heresy: the definition of the divine essence as causation; if that were so, he said, then, yes, the Son in order to be God would have to cause the Spirit, and the Spirit a fourth person, and so on until on ended in Polytheism.

But it is exactly this course which Augustine pursues:

“As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”(De Trinitate, 7:3:5)

Prolegomena to God, History, and Dialectic by Most Rev. Photius (Joseph P.) Farrell, S.S.B., D.Phil.(Oxon.)

“Prolegomena: An Eastern Orthodox Geistesgeschichte

Christian civilization — or what remains of it — stands, apparently exhausted and irreparably divided, on the uncertain terrain of a century’s and millennium’s finish, ill-prepared to carry any cogent or consistent witness into the third millennium and twenty-first century of its dispensation.  This is because the equation of “Western European” with “Christian” civilization is itself founded upon a schism which resulted in a kind of cultural and historiographical heresy.Such statements may seem like good news to the “multiculturalist”, so I wish to dispel any lingering and seductive causes for rejoicing that they may have engendered.  First, these essays are not an attack on Western European civilization.  They are rather an analysis of the roots of that civilization, and of its origin in a theological heresy and of the cultural and moral crisis that heresy has sired.  For this reason, these essays are a spiritual effort, akin to the process of self-examination before confession.  By the same token, these essays are more of introspection and retrospection than of argument in any sense that a modern historian, philosopher, or “theologian” would recognize.  I believe that I have managed to surpass intuition in these pages, but it would indeed be presumptuous for me to claim that argument has been achieved, or that an exhaustive articulation of what is a very complex hypothesis has been accomplished.  I maintain only that, at the end of these essays, a very complex phenomenon will have been surveyed, and that, like all surveys, it is subject both to the usual omissions of fact,  and to the hazzards of over-generalization here or too exclusive and narrow a focus there. “Multiculturalists” will find no support or cause of joy for their projects in these pages for a second reason.  The undertaking represented here was attempted because of my personal conviction that our “culture”, as one contemporary adage has it, is in a state of profound moral crisis, a crisis which affects every aspect of our life — social, political, economic, and religious — for every aspect of our cultural conventions are at stake.  I do not, however, seek the ultimate causes for this crisis in material, and for that reason, superficial causes.    The crisis is not founded on any merely economic, political, scientific, or legal basis.  Still less it is founded, as the conservative opposition to multicultaralism has it, on “the collapse of moral values”.  Nor is the crisis founded on any combination of these factors.These essays argue rather that the crisis is a specifically theological one, for what has been lost is not “spirituality” or “moral values” or any such meaningless abstraction.  “Spirituality” and “moral values” have collapsed because the theological, ecclesiastical, and liturgical context in which they are born and nurtured has long since crumbled into the stew of competing theological illiteracies of “denominations”, themselves the result of specific doctrinal assumptions made and adopted by a part of our culture long ago, and specifically rejected by yet another part of it.And lest these terms — “theological” and “doctrinal” — be misunderstood, I mean that the crisis has specifically doctrinal and therefore conceptual roots.  It is in large measure attributable to a constellation of theological and philosophical paradigms which, once adopted, worked themselves out in the History of Christian Civilization itself.Finally, “multiculturalists” and their conservative counterparts who pretend to defend “Judeo-Christian”, by which they mean only Western European, civilization, and who profess to do “objective”history, will not find much of comfort here, for these essays are in the final analysis an intensely personal statement.  They are an examination of my own spirit, both as one raised and at home in that Western European civilization, and as one who, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, lives every day confronted by the tragedy of the Schism between Eastern and Western Europe.  These essays are an attempt to resolve a profoundly internal and personal struggle.