(From almost five years ago.)
.
I do not oft look up at the sky anymore,
my eyes are stuck, set for a shallow depth-of-field;
Navigating by the Light of Vanished Stars
The weeds have been snapped at the roots, yet their leaves
and long stems are still green; untwining them relieves
the choked plants, but the refuse discarded still beams
with the life that has already ended.
A Pine Tree Glowing in the Sunset
Among recent days, at one dying of the light,
I saw a brilliant pine tree that did gather all my sight,
and sent my mind past it, toward the well by which ’twas bright:
the fountain-sun within the black cold adumbrating night,
which forever pours forth deathly, cruel, irradiating blight,
making worlds barren.
Charles Taylor on Catholic and Orthodox Christianity
“What can Orthodoxy learn from the Catholic intellectual tradition,
and what can Catholics learn from the Orthodox,
specifically in light of the secular cultural condition we find ourselves in,
and given the vast heritage that we share?”
During his 2011 appearance at Boston College, after the final Q&A session was over, I hustled straight over to the podium, and asked Charles Taylor this question after he finished packing to leave.
Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle 9
The late-5th- or early-6th-century figure Pseudo-Dionysios (or simply the Latin “Dionysius” or the French equivalent “Denys”) is a cardinal figure in the history of Western thought and civilization. Given his high importance for Christian theology East and West, one would think that he would be more read, or at least better-understood by specialists. Unfortunately, he is not well-understood, not even by the most prominent name in Denys studies, Paul Rorem. Alas, the most easily-available translation of Denys’ works are marked by the massive anachronistic distortions of Rorem’s Lutheran confessional bias (a topic for another time). There are also specialist biases in play from other Athenian-Pagan-Hellenistic directions, as the scholarship of Ronald F. Hathaway shows (Hathaway I have read with much more profit than Rorem, however). Eric Perl has the best introduction to Denys. Hieromonk (now bishop?) Golitzin wrote a necessary, complementary second. John D. Jones’ translation of the Divine Names is still the best English-translation text to begin digging into Denys himself.
I’ll be posting about Denys in the future, given my love for him and his value and importance (which needs much more articulation than I can possibly give it here). In the meantime, I thought that a good place to start would be to publish a comparative list of three translations of Denys’ Epistle 9, mostly about scriptural language. The Luibheid/Rorem translation is sadly the most easily accessible, the Parker translation unfortunately forgotten or unread, and the Hathaway translation is, lamentably, mostly gathering dust on university libraries (or in professors’ shelves). Given these injustices, this columned, comparative translation seemed worth sharing. I may offer more such in the future — a chapter or two each from the Divine Names, the Celestial Hierarchy, and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. (Denys coined the term “hierarchy”, and it does not mean for him what it means for us.)
Denys’ approach to scriptural figures for God –or any figures for God at all– is markedly unlike any modern confessional theology. Such confessional theologies are dogmatically committed to the existence of secret truths about God that are simply unknowable to us until we are told them, and which reason –any model of reason or rationality– has no capacity to verify. This is idolatry, and Denys shows us the beginnings of seeing why and how this is so. (It also leads to atrocious psychological, social and political configurations, but I shouldn’t run too far, too fast.)
Into the Clarities 