The Tower and the Ruin, by Michael Drout

Michael Drout has long and precious memories of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is a scholar who has been reading Tolkien like the Bible and for decades, thinking about what he loves, trying to understand better, and gathering from it all a sense of something he puts into this book. This has to be one of the most extraordinary and wonderful books on the significance of Tolkien that exists.

Drout starts out with Tolkien’s lineage. Walter Scott was a writer trying to capture a sense of true things that we still remember. William Morris endeavored to translate that sense of the Medieval through his romances. Rider Haggard wrote Eric Brighteyes, endeavoring to transmit to his generation the sense of the world of the Sagas of Icelanders. The very title of Drout’s book evokes Tolkien’s essay, definitive in Anglo-Saxon studies about Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, in which a dominant illustration is that of the ruins of a tower, examined in all kinds of foolish ways, but which were made as a tower from which the builder could look out on the sea. Beowulf is poignant because it is obviously written by a Christian remembering and lamenting the passing and loss of a heroic pagan way of life. Drout argues that Tolkien figured out a way to lament something made up in such a way that it powerfully suggests an enduring reality. Aristotle said that fiction is better than history, because fiction can be calibrated and focused on the permanent things. Drout’s book is an explanation of how Tolkien did that.

The argument of the second chapter is that in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses frames. The frame of The Hobbit is more obvious: we are being told thing through a narrator who is framing the story with his observations. The frame of The Lord of the Rings is more subtle: it is suggested in the appendices and in allusions to other books. The frame here consists in various different people telling stories which are being transmitted, translated, compiled, and imperfectly collated. That contributes in at least a subliminal way to the sense that we are getting ancient records. These layers in turn suggest historical accuracy, even when there are inconsistencies because historical records always generate these. It gives the whole a feel of real memories of true experiences.

This leads Drout to consider how Tolkien focalizes his narrative through the most ignorant character. It is what keeps him from expositing crucial information tediously. We are watching developments, even when other characters talk, through the eyes of the person who has the most at stake in learning that information. It avoids a notorious pitfall of which imitators are often guilty: awkward, uninteresting information dumps. There is a lot of information one has to gather to make sense of The Lord of the Rings. There are appendices, genealogies, and the detailed maps, all beside a long, intricate story. All these are incorporated in such a way that after the main narrative, you read on, you flip back and study the map, you ponder the relations in the family trees. It is due to that ingenious focalization, with the curious intrusion only once (if I remember correctly) of a narrator who’s point of view cannot be explained.

Scholars, among whom Drout is not the least, have figured out that The Lord of the Rings has repeated patterns. If you think of it, any story by Tolkien will have caves, perils, treasures, giants, battles, etc. There is also the pattern of alternating good and bad. Tolkien did not tell The Tale of the Children of Hurin that way, for example. That story is only worse and worse. But in The Lord of the Rings especially, you have the pattern of expecting good to follow bad. As you have episodes repeat, you have the variations in the general pattern that generate experiences and expectations. This is part of the magic: repeated experiences of trouble overcome, which train the reader’s soul in hope. The sense of possibilities, for example, is generated thereby, till you have Frodo’s amazing possibility when he glimpses a far green shore.

This book is deeply personal. Drout does not apologize for it because he understands that his life has been so intertwined with the experience of reading and rereading Tolkien’s works that it is not possible for him to understand his life apart from them, and that he cannot understand Tolkien apart from the important personal experiences Tolkien has shaped through his stories. So that things that are secret, and difficult, and of the most profound sadness are offered up in this public way: there is no other way to demonstrate how real and true the shaping is. It is what Tolkien has most meaningfully given him, as if Drout were the mines of Moria and Tolkien the smith who shaped what can then be brought to the light of day.

The sixth chapter, Threads, was for me the most ambivalent. I read it with a lot of attention, but attention full of misgiving. Drout is arguing about The Silmarillion that the plot is driven in part by the racism of its characters. He is not arguing that Tolkien was writing a racist book. He is arguing that the perceived ontological hierarchies that the characters experience, are abused, sinfully abused, leading to lamentable consequences. Here is where I think I somewhat disagree with Drout: I don’t think he understands the hierarchies that obtain between beings to be ontological. That elves are better than men, and men are better than dwarves. Not just superior in some ways, but in an ontological hierarchy. I can affirm unreservedly an analogia entis. I don’t think Drout can. He cannot understand that some elves are better than others because some elves are more proximate to grace. Or if he acknowledges that grace (I doubt it though) he cannot acknowledge ontological benefits: that some elves are greater beings than others. I don’t think he even believes dwarves are inferior beings – the whole consideration is off the table for him—it seems to me. I can’t agree with this. If you put that aside, his argument is good. It is by looking down on others, treating them with contempt, despising and lowering others in sinful and abusive ways drives the conflict in The Silmarillion. Something similar occurs in The Hobbit. There, Drout demonstrates, there is an interesting conflict created by the interaction of the bourgeois world of Bilbo, and the epic world of the dwarves. Neither is dismissed by the narrator, both have their limits, and brought together they enrich and mature the protagonist.

The climax of his argument is chapter seven, Threads. In The Lord of the Rings the epic and the tragic are woven together to great effect. Drout examines two things in detail: the exact power of the ring and the occasion for its beginning to dominate Frodo and the consequences. Here is where Drout’s long studies and wide acquaintance with all the scholarship, which are so stupendous all through this book that one is in danger of taking it all for granted in the chapter for which all the book prepares, shine. You have to read how he does this, how he uses it to explain what is happening to Frodo, and why Frodo’s triumph is imbued with tragedy, pregnant with intangible realities that fill the reader to brimming.

Drout ends with a very personal conclusion that allows him to show how, despite his knowing that Tolkien’s works is all fiction, and despite the fact that he is not a believer, The Lord of the Rings has formed his soul in the virtue of hope. I understand there was a chapter he had to excise. I hope we will eventually get this. Drout can talk as long as he wants to me about Tolkien. I will pay. I will read. I will listen.

Reader, this book is one of the best things to happen ever in the now blossoming field of Tolkien studies. It is technical, intricate, and is best read after good exposure to the works it seeks to illuminate: everything Tolkien ever wrote. But it is worth it. It is a truly astonishing tribute to the greatness of Tolkien’s accomplishment.

Chapter 18 – On the Devil and the Demons

By their own free choice, some angels fell. The fall of an angel is the equivalent to a human death in that there is no more opportunity for repentance. The angel who was charged with ruling our planet is the Devil. John believes that “every evil has been devised [ἐπενοήθη] by them, along with the unclean passions.” (103) It seem to mean that every sinful motion of our hearts is given original intellectual existence by demons, in a way, as God devises creation by first conceiving its idea. Perhaps it is a little like Morgoth, who took elves and tortured them into orcs.

Speaking of Demons, a Rant on a Footnote

John explains that evil is the privation of good, and, in a footnote, Norman Russell somewhat gratuitously points out that, according to him, Plotinus did not quite think this. Russell quotes Arthur Hillary Armstrong who wrote the introduction, translation, and footnotes for the Loeb edition of Plotinus. Armstrong is a big name in the study of Plotinus, up there with Brehier, O’Meara, and Gerson. I think Russell fails to see the irony in what Armstrong is saying at that point, and takes at face value the statement that Plotinus viewed prime matter as evil. For heaven’s sake, Armstrong even indulges in an exclamation mark!

The adjective prime is important. For Plotinus—and this was one of his differences with his gnostic students—reality is structured a certain way. There is the one, a divine simplicity of goodness and being, the fount and origin. From this fountain of all, there is an emanation (exitus) which is moving away from the good. Not good! But it turns back (reditus) and thus becomes informed matter. This is Mind (νοῦς), or a real of utter coherence with perceptible distinctions. The emanation happen again, and as what is emanated turns back, is it informed by the contemplation of Mind, becoming World Soul (ψυχή). This World Soul is a level of being consisting of separate things in harmony, we could say, to distinguish it from the higher level of Mind. A last emanation takes place from World Soul. Two things happen: some matter turns back and is informed. This is good! To despise this is another thing for which Plotinus excoriates his gnostic students. This is the visible world, you and me, physical nature. But there is some of this emanation which does not turn back. It is not informed. It is headed away from the good. This is evil, and this is also prime matter—matter that is unformed and therefore unknowable. But evil is not simply prime matter, though prime matter is evil in its tendency. Evil is facing away from the good, which works out to privation.

It is a real problem that fads and prejudice affect scholarly endeavor as much as they do. “Plotinus is not cool, Plotinus is not my area, I can say whatever I like by just glancing into a book by an authority and citing him.” Origen is often treated the same. And I suppose all of us have done it. But we should not.

Chapter 17 – On Angels

The incorporeality of angels is a major premise in John’s understanding. They are flames of fire, which means they are spirits characterized by spiritual “lightness, ardor, warmth” and (my favorite) “extreme sharpness, and acuity in their ardor for God.” (99) Angels are incorporeal in relation to us, because in relation to God, everything, including spiritual beings are “dense and material” in some way. If this doesn’t make sense to you, master Neoplatonism.

What are the faculties of a rational spiritual being? Logos and autexousia – which are translated as reason and “free will.” An angel, however, cannot repent because he is incorporeal—he cannot be excused and granted repentance since he cannot claim the weakness of the body.

The immortality of the angels is not natural, it is an effect of grace. If you want to say that angels are supernatural to us, then that which is natural to them still depends on something higher.

The angels communicate telepathically, and are made and fitted for the rank they occupy, for, indeed, some are given greater light than others. John quotes Dionysus as authoritatively reasoning that the ranks of angels are nine. We do not understand all the tasks they carry out, but some of them keep watch over human affairs. Because they are incorporeal, they are not limited by physics, but they are limited by metaphysics: if they are in heaven they are not on earth, and if they are on earth they are not in heaven (though heaven is not, strictly speaking, a spatial location). They operate with immediate, unhesitating, and adroit obedience.

Angels do not of course have bodily passions but that does not make them impassible. Only God is truly impassible just as only God is truly eternal (Boethius calls them aeveternal). John acknowledges a debate as to whether angels were created before all other things or along with everything else. But “those who say that angels are creators of any substance whatsoever are the mouthpiece of their father the devil.” (102)

Chapter 15 – On the Aeon

Not every theological treatise God’s people have produced has a chapter on the aeon. I find what John says about it somewhat mysterious. In a footnote, the translator says that aeon can either mean ages or in the singular, eternity. In keeping with all he has said, John wants to understand how to properly use the many meanings of this (Greek) biblical term.

Each human life lasts an aeon. Ages, such as the ages of the world, the duration of a thousand years, or even the life to come are called aeons. John believed, along with many before him, that the world was destined to have seven aeons and finally usher in an everlasting eighth, an aeon beyond aeons.

“Before the formation of the world, when there was no sun dividing day from night, there was no measurable aeon.” (97) On the basis of this I conclude that an aeon is a long moment, an interval of time with greater significance. An interval, perhaps, with an intelligible form—or a platonical measure of time.

John notes that God is called aeonial, which means eternal or timeless. But he denies that God who is the creator of aeons himself inhabits an aeon, since God is beyond all aeons. Also, one day the blessed will enter into aeonial life and the damned into aeonial death. John distinguishes these two aeons by saying that the blessed will be in an aeonial day, while the damned without the light of God will endure an aeonial night.

Chapter 14 – The Properties of the Divine Nature

John is talking first of all in terms of the divine aseity. He has a long and by now familiar list of divine attributes all of which are strung together to say that God is of himself without limits or boundaries and always.

John is also talking about the mutual indwelling of the divine persons. He affirms this, interestingly enough, applying to the divine hypostases the denials Chalcedon applies to the natures of the Son: without confusion, blending, or mixing and also without division. He affirms the inseparable operations of the Godhead not for the first time.

In the next paragraph he talks about the divine radiance and energy, which is one: one glory, one purpose or will (and one agency, I think I can say). We do not say there are the harmonious parallel agencies of the Father and the Son, but rather that there is one single purpose and agency. There is likewise one trasmission of being from God to all the varieties of being which receive being from God in their abundance and variety.

God pervades all things without mingling with them: divine immanence. God also knows all things everywhere always in one simple act of knowing. “And there is the property of sinlessness and its remitting sin and saving,” John says (96). Which is a good property to remember, along with the fact that God can do whatever he wills, but does not therefore do all that he could.

Chapter 13 – On the Place of God and That Only the Divine Is Uncircumscribed

It is interesting that this chapter on being circumscribed begins and ends as it does. Whatever begins where we end circumscribes us, and that is called air. At the end of this longer chapter, John is talking about the Spirit, and what kinds of spirits there are, and last of all the fact that spirit also means wind and air. So his chapter is circumscribed by air, as human beings are.

This meditation on place first shows that physical place limits us. It goes on to explain that intellectual space also limits intelligible things. Even angels cannot be in more than one place. This leads into a long section on God and place. God is uncircumscribed in every way, not limited by space or time of comprehension. So that when we talk of God and place we talk about effects God causes somewhere: a place where we experience his energy and his grace. God who “is invisible by nature … becomes visible by his operations.” (94) John explains that all things are distant from God. Not by space but by nature. We, for example, have states of mind, but God who knows no flux, never experiences changing states of any kind, and this puts him in a place very far from ours.

This brings him to the most recondite place, the place where the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit dwell together. The Son, the Word, is always present with the Father. Besides the divine Word, there are other words, “powers of the soul not contemplated in their own hypostases,” (95) The word that is a part of mind, the word as it is distinguished from the mind, and the word in utterance. Thus he climbs down from the highest Word to the most common word. John descends from the most recondite place also by way of the Spirit: there is the divine hypostasis in the divine simplicity, there are descending angelic spirits, there is the human soul, and the human mind, both of which are sometimes called spirit. And lowest of all there is the air, which brings us back to the low place in which we find ourselves circumscribed.

Chapter 12 – On the Same

This chapter also reflects on the rules of speaking about God (all John’s theology proper can be called an guide to speaking of the divine). I will use the opportunity to make three observations.

The first is that John is concerned about the transmission of more than information. His aim is the transmission of a theological culture. It is a culture of reverence, it is a culture of advanced philosophical terminology (see his Philosophical Chapters in the trilogy the Fount of Knowledge of which this tome, On the Orthodox Faith, is the third), and one in which a deep respect for a theological inheritance received and maintained is crucial.

He begins his chapter with a quotation from the Pseudo Dionysus, drawing heavily on this work throughout. It is a foundational text in Christian theological discourse. One of the reasons the English language is so rich in vocabulary is that the Anglo-Saxon Germanic base was intermingled with Latin in three waves, as Owen Barfield describes it. There were words picked up from the Roman occupation of Britain, from the long influence of Latin through the church, and from that derivative of Latin, French, in the Norman Conquest. Similarly, the Platonic tradition has enriched Christian theological thought. It is obvious that Middle Platonism (Philo is an example, and Numenius of Apamea who according to Eusebuis asked “what is Plato, but Moses written in Attic Greek?”) brought an influence even if only in the allegorical technique that Alexandrians—developed for reading Homer in order to find in themselves Greek ideals who ethnically and by location were not Greek and yet as a colony of Greece had cultural aspirations. I could mention Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria as examples. The second wave is the Neo-platonic. If you want to understand Origen, read his contemporary Plotinus, this will bring clarity. If you want to read Augustine with greater philosophical precision, read the marvelous Platonists who delivered him from the intellectual quandary of Manicheism (again same Plotinus and also Porphyry, whose hostility to Christianity is a feature of The City of God). The tension between Antioch and Alexandria, upon further examination, turns out to be a tension between a more literary (the Antiochene, rather than the old literal) and a more philosophical approach. Building to the third wave, in the Neo-platonic genealogy you start with Plotinus, whose pupils were Porphyry and Iamblicus, and the last great name of the line, two centuries after Plotinus, is that of Proclus. If you read Proclus first and then read the Pseudo Dionysius, you will understand why scholars date the latter to sometime after Proclus’ works were published. The Pseudo Dionysius had read Proclus, understood what developments Proclus obtained, and sought to incorporate them in his unique and enviably effective way.

My third observation is that a return to the theological Aristotelianism of scholasticism (Medieval and Reformed) does not seem to me enough, because this necessary Aristotelian sophistication of taxonomy was an organic development of the theological Platonism of the first millennium of the development of Christian doctrine. Not if theological formulation, requiring its native culture, is something we inherit.

Chapter 11 – On What Is Affirmed Corporeally about God

That which in theological language is somatikos is symbolikos because God is incorporeal, simple, and without form. So, John explains the various biblical symbols: eyes, knowledge; ears, readiness to receive supplication; mouth, will; food and drink, our wills conformed to his; smelling, receiving our affection toward him; face, expression of his character; hands, energy or power; right hand, best deeds; touching, precise discernment; feet, presence; oath, irrevocable will; wrath and anger, hatred of evil; forgetting and sleep, postponement.

“All that is said in physical terms about God has a hidden meaning … unless it is said about the bodily dwelling among us of God’s Word. For he assumed humanity in its fullness for our sake and of our salvation, a rational soul, a body, the properties of human nature, and the natural, blameless passions.” (87) It is worth observing, because later it will be useful, how dominated by Christological concerns John’s theology is. It has positive and, oddly, negative outcomes.

Chapter 10 – On Divine Union and Distinction

John’s reverence is expressed in his concern to to make sure that his words about that which is highest and most wondrous are as precise as possible. We must affirm the oneness and simplicity of God, and never talk of him in ways that diminish this. We must also affirm all that God reveals, including the three. And we must make clear that when we speak of the three, we never deny the one.

John affirms that we understand but do not comprehend God’s essence. He affirms divine ineffability. In this mode of theology, our theological terms serve to draw boundaries in order to speak with truthful reverence. To say that God is timeless and immutable and uncircumscribed and invisible, after all, is to speak of him in negative ways. God, however, is not some kind of transcendent and ultimate negation. God is the source of all being, the fountain of all goodness, the first cause and true power of everything else. God is real in a way that makes all other reality contingent on and derivative of his own. God is the absolute simplicity from which all else descends in increasing diversity and complexity to the point of disordered, particulate dissolution. All things depend on God who depends on nothing. When we understand the divine attributes, “and have been guided by them to the divine essence, we do not grasp the essence itself, but only what is ‘around’ the essence.” (85)

Chapter 9 – On What Is Said about God

Divine simplicity requires an acknowledgment when we speak about God. It is that we do not think of God’s attributes as coming together in pieces like a mosaic or by forming a composite. Nor must we, on the other hand, make God and his attributes convertible: God is love, but love is not God. God is God. All that God is, is God and no less.

John then thinks about the two most important names he has for God. The most important name is the one God gave Moses: I am, or he who is. The second most important name is that of Theos—according to John. “The first name is thus indicative of his being but not of what he is. The second is indicative of his energy,” for reasons of Greek etymology (84). Readers who may balk at this conclusion should consider that when the Apostle Paul speaks in Romans about what can be known of God through natural revelation, being (god-ness) and power are the listed attributes.

John, last of all, illustrates three ways of speaking about God. We show what God is not by speaking of what we might call his incommunicable attributes: incomprehensibility, timelessness, impassibility. We show what God is like through what we call communicable* attributes: goodness, mercy, justice. Neither of these suggest all that can be said of God’s ineffable, simple essence. They gesture at something we may know either by elimination or by comparison. The third way to speak of God is by his relations: he is Lord (of something not-god), he is Creator, he is Shepherd (of a flock).

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*participable? Since, after all, participation is analogy

Chapter 8 – On the Holy Trinity

Nobody should miss out on the rich first sentence of the opening paragraph of this unusually long chapter. This long sentence is almost the whole paragraph in itself. John concisely puts into one angelically breathless statement all the divine attributes he knows, affirming the oneness of the triune God. You can read it here.

https://biblehub.com/library/john/exposition_of_the_orthodox_faith/chapter_viii_concerning_the_holy_trinity.htm

He often does something shorter throughout the work with lists of incommunicable attributes. It seems a rhetorical tick, perhaps an incantatory gesture at reverence, as if to mention God without a corresponding train of wondrous attributes would be unworthy and indecorous and bald. In this case, he is summarizing all he can say about God. It is substantial! It is good to remember about these ancient expressions that the concept of systematic theology as we have it was born several centuries later. In John’s usage, theo logos means words about God. He has a very good list.

His second paragraph begins to treat the persons and their distinctions. John explains and demonstrates that the generation of the Son must be an eternal generation. And not only eternal but in subsequent paragraphs shows the eternal generation is also immutable, impassible, without flux, without separation, and never violating the divine simplicity. An example from impassibility: “Therefore with regard to God, who alone is impassible, unchangeable, immutable, and always the same, both begetting and creating are free from passion.” (73) Nor are the divine processions an act of will, like creation, which had a beginning and was out of nothing, requiring will and power to come into being. The Son is born of the Father’s substance without being born out of the substance as a separate substance since they are one substance, consubstantial.

The Father is the cause of the person of the Son, and the Son has his being from the Father: it is the same being, after all, not a replica of the original. And the three persons do not make a compound substance out of the harmonizing of three, but subsist together in one simple essence: because God is perfect. God is uncreated, an uncreated essence, and in that essence the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeds. John does not affirm, of course, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Chapter 7 – On the Holy Spirit

If there is a Word in the Godhead, there is a πνοή or πνεῦμα, because even our speech is driven by breath. But the breath or Spirit of God does not go out of him to be diffused. It is not another element that he first draws in, as if he were composite. The Holy Spirit in the godhead rather than being something other than God’s very essence is “an essential power, contemplated as it is itself in its own individuating hypostasis, proceeding from the Father and resting in the Word and making him manifest.” (69)

John affirms that the Spirit is most free, omnipotent, without beginning or end, consubstantial with the Father and the Son, and having the will of its energy—in other words, agency.

He ends contrasting this Christian approach to the divine with the Hellenic and the Jewish. The Hellenic has the diversity but lacks coherence. The Jewish, on the other hand, lacks the distinction between Speaker, Spoken, and Breath. John uses the Old Testament to refute the idea that God from all eternity has no Word and no Breath.

What is also intriguing about this last polemic is that John of Damascus is writing during the Umayyad Caliphate. He left Damascus, where his family had been civil servants, due to the increasing Islamization of the administration. Why does he mention the pagans and the Jews but not the error of Islam? Is it that he is still doing theology in an antiquated mode, staying within parameters which, for example, Gregory Naziansen had? Is it instead that he doesn’t think Islam rises to learned attention? Or is it something like discretion or censorship?

Chapter 6 – On the Word of God

This chapter is about the Logos. Λόγος is reason, rationality, speech, and of course Word. Because were are ephemeral and imperfect, when we speak, our word is soon lost in the air. It goes from us and is dissolved. God, however, is not ephemeral and not imperfect. When he speaks his Word does not go out of him or dissolve. His Word susbsists. “Since God exists eternally and is eternally perfect, he possesses his own Word as something perfect and subsistent, and eternally existing and living, and possessing everything that the begetter possesses.” (68)

The Son derives his hypostasis from the Father. When it come to the being or essence, it is the same, there is no distinction made. “He is the same on the level of nature as God is.”

Chapter 5

For those who accept the testimony of Scripture, a rational demonstration that God is one is not strictly necessary. But John believes the error of polytheism can be demonstrated even to people who deny the authority of Scripture.

One way he does it is by reasoning that the divine must be perfect, and that divine perfection lacks nothing, and has no boundaries. If we say there is more than one divinity, we then need to distinguish them. When we try to distinguish them, we run into problems. How do you distinguish one infinite perfection from another? Only if you remove something and thereby render one or all of your divinities less than perfect.

Besides, he adds, “it is a natural necessity for a monad to be the source of a dyad.” (87) I think John is being generic, but his unfamiliar terminology can be rendered more familiar. Erigena would in two centuries take this (originally) Pseudo-Dionysian expression and say that there are two things: God and not-god. God is ultimate, and from God the monad you derive that fundamental dyad, Creator and creation.

Chapter 4

John considers in this chapter what we can say about God’s essence. As he often does, he lists a series of divine attributes: infinite, limitless, formless, impalpable, invisible, and simple or non-composite. These all begin with the Greek letter alpha, which is like saying “non”: non-limited, non-visible, etc. After reasoning about some of them (“for composition is the source of conflict, conflict the source of separation, separation the source of dissolution, and dissolution is utterly alien to God” [65]), he observes that all we have said is in terms of denial. We cannot properly speak about God’s essence, but only speak about what He is not, making verbal gestures at what is inexpressible. This emphasis on inexpressibility is called apophatic (as opposed to kataphatic).

John follows the Pseudo-Dionysius all the way, even to the denial of being. The denial of such a fundamental category is not merely the use of equivocal language or a denial of the existence of God. After all, John believes he demonstrated that God really exists in chapter three. The radical Dionysian denial is a denial of sameness, of the legitimacy of strictly univocal language, even at the most basic level. God’s existence is like our existence; that is the most we can say. God exists, and we similarly exist, but these existences are analogous rather than univocal (that God exists much as we do) or equivocal (that existence cannot meaningfully be predicated of God). God exists analogously to our existence, in the same way that Scripture says God is light. Kataphatic theology affirms, “God is light.” Apophatic theology warns, “God is not light as we know it,” and, for good measure, adds, “God is darkness.” God is darkness, John hyperphatically affirms, because “He is not light since He transcends light” (66). Hyperphatically, God is light beyond light. And God is being beyond being.

This apophatic approach is necessary. It sets us free from naively kataphatic assertions and gestures toward the hyperphatic. When we speak about what things are not, we endeavor to avoid univocal and idolatrous expressions. When we gesture with our language, we endeavor to avoid the dissolution of meaninglessness.

Chapter 3

John has one observation about, one aside, and three proofs demonstrating that God exists.

Observation

He observes that anybody who accepts the Holy Scriptures or, alternatively, is a Greek philosopher, (or perhaps like him is both) needs no proof for God’s existence. There are a very few people, because of sin and because human depravity has so many manifestations, who deny God’s existence.

Aside

Because of these denials, the Lord gave to his Apostles the power of miraculous signs. John believes their successors, the apostolic fathers, also enjoyed these powers. He denies that the powers are on display among people in his time, but not because he was a cessationist. “We, for our part, have received neither charism of working wonders nor that of teaching, for we have made ourselves unworthy by our attachment to pleasures.” (63) Insufficient ascetical rigor has prevented the outpouring of signs and wonders former ages of the church enjoyed.

Three Proofs

His first argument is a causal argument. All creatures are subject to change. Lower things are subject to degradation—perhaps an anticipation of the law of entropy. Creatures like us are subject not only to necessary change but also to voluntary change. We make choices and these have real outcomes. Above us are a third category of creatures, those who do not suffer necessary change but can change voluntarily. They change morally by making choices toward or away from the good. This is similar to Albertus Magnus doctrine of aeveternity. The upshot is to say that only God is absolutely unchanging. The highest angelic being is not unchanging and therefore not absolutely eternal, because all angels can choose to abandon their station, even if they don’t. John concludes: created beings need an uncreated cause, something truly immutable. That must be God. I think there is an undisclosed premise in his argument: if there is no unchanging something, then there is only flux.

His second argument is from coherence. We do not see that the disparate and contradictory elements of creation all dissolve. What keeps everything from reverting to formless, prime matter? There must be a coherence that embraces or informs all: God, the divine simplicity from which all coherence derives.

This third argument is from order. Nothing is more Greek than to see the cosmos as an orderly and beautiful arrangement. Plotinus would chastise his gnostic students for denying the beauty of the world and impugning the divine which was apparent in its order. John argues that order does not arise spontaneously, thus anticipating Intelligent Design.

Chapter 2

John wants to discuss four considerations when speaking about divine things (based on those two attributes drawn from John 1:18: incomprehensibility and ineffability). That which is knowable, that which is unknowable, that which is expressible, and that which is inexpressible. Are not knowability and expressibility the same category? No, speaking is one thing, knowing is another, simply because they are different acts.

John then combines the four considerations. We express things we do not know when we speak of God, for example, as asleep or angry. There are also things we perceive about God obscurely, and because of this, we cannot express them precisely. In this case, we grope with both mind and language. Besides this, there are things we neither know or express. An interesting and not obvious example he gives of the last combination is the question how our Savior was able to walk on water and not get his feet wet.

What it all adds up to is that John wishes to conclude that we cannot say anything about God apart from what he has revealed of himself. God gives us words to speak where we do not know, he gives us knowledge of things we struggle to express, he reveals things we do not fully know or adequately express, and of course there are things both knowable and expressible which God in his goodness reveals to creatures in his image.

I don’t think John intends to suggest that doctrine develops in this chapter, but I would say that some of what is inexpressible sometimes finds greater expression. Look at how theologians before Nicea grope and fumble at the doctrine of the Trinity. Also, that that which is less understood, through specialized vocabulary and appropriated philosophical tools of thought, is somewhat more so: as with the definition of what a divine person actually is. This does not mean departing from that which is revealed which alone is true and certain, but growing in understanding and expression. That which is revealed, has to be mined more deeply and processed more thoroughly so that over time we can accumulate more that is better known and more precisely expressed.

Chapter 1

Norman Russell’s recent translation of John of Damascus’ On the Orthodox Faith in the popular patristics series has the Greek critical text on one side so you can learn all the hard technical terms. Most of the chapters are short.

The first chapter is about the mood or attitude in which Christians speak of divine things: reverence. One does not, John believed, come to theology out of curiosity. Two divine attributes are marshalled in support. From John 1:18 he derives divine ineffability and incomprehensibility. God must reveal himself, and he does so by natural and special revelation: by means of creation, and by means of the speech both of the law and the prophets and of Jesus Christ.

From the goodness of God, John derives divine impassibility. Since God supplies all good things freely, he must do so without envy or any passion. John quotes Gregory of Nazianzus, “for envy is far from the divine nature, which is dispassionate and alone is good.” So God gives us what which we need to speak of the ineffable and know the incomprehensible and rejoice in the goodness of the impassible.

John developed a theological treatise that draws only from divine revelation. He never wants to move the ancient boundaries, staying within the centuries old stream of the embattled Chalcedonian theology he inherited.