Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: 'No Longer I'

foreign thank you all for coming thanks especially to Frank for hosting this event and for the and to the cswr staff especially Lexi goertz for putting this whole thing together thank you Lexi um and I'd also really like to thank uh Nicholas Watson and David brackey for coming in Nicholas's case across the yard and in David's case from Ohio to respond to this book um so Frank's asked me to speak on the topic of how I came to write this book and in order to do that I need to back up to 1998 but I won't narrate continuously my life from 1998. um but in the fall of 1998 I began at mdiv at the University of Chicago um and I had planned I started that degree thinking I would study modern philosophy and theology that was my focus as an undergraduate but in the spring of that first year David Tracy and Jean-Luc Marion offered a course on negative theology Marion was at that time periodically visiting the University of Chicago from Paris uh and I saw this in the catalog and I thought frankly what the hell is negative theology um and that occasioned all sorts of really lame jokes among the students which you can probably imagine um but I I had of course never heard of the term negative theology perhaps some of you haven't either but was curious is that it came to serve as a sort of spine that connected what seemed to me at the time to be disparate interests of mine it sort of connected these into something of a single body um I'm going to give you a definition of negative theology because I just recently had to write one so I'm going to test drive it with you tonight negative theology is a name given to a tradition within Christianity that confesses God to be so utterly Transcendent so beyond our Concepts and names for God that we must in fact negate them in order to free God from such cramped categories negative in Latin negativa as in the Via negativa is a translation of the Greek word apophaticos from apophasis sometimes rendered unsaying but more often simply negation negative theology is often but not always mystical theology because its negations are explicitly in the service of soliciting an encounter with this Transcendent God by negating our Concepts and names for God so it is believed we clear space within ourselves so that God can appear so to speak as God that is as the mystery God is and must be in order to be properly God thus negative theology proceeds on the assumption that the way we speak to and about God conditions the possibility of our having a mystical encounter with God okay without delving too much into spiritual autobiography I will say that negative theology delivered for me a credible Christianity now back to that course with David Tracy and John Luke Marion our first reading was pseudo dionysius Theory alphagide and my first reaction not unlike my first reaction to negative theology is pardon my crudeness who the hell is this you might have a sense of who I was at 23 that that was my reaction to anything I didn't know about um how could this can't possibly be important I don't know about it already um so for those of you who are also perhaps don't know this for whose pseudogenesis is not a um a household name let me say a few words about about him or about this Corpus in the early 6th Century in Syria there began to circulate a collection of texts that were attributed to a certain dionysius a member of the court of the areopagus in Athens who was said in Acts of the Apostles book 17 to have been converted by Paul Paul's famous speech to the areopagus in which he speaks of the unknown God when I say that this Corpus was attributed to dionysius that's something of that's not exactly right it's not that the we have a a corpus of writings that was attributed to a first century Christian someone um writes as if they are dionysius Theory Advocate through and through these these uh the Corpus is written to other as written um in a series of four treatises and ten letters to other early Christians um and references are made to the life of this uh figure dionysius so um that's what suddenly appeared on the scene in early 6th Century although no writings had ever been associated with that particular figure prior to that um as you can imagine it's reception was somewhat uh contested but by the end of the sixth Century its Advocates had won out over its Skeptics that is it was regarded as an authentic first century text it was only in the late 19th century that that was proved false that in fact this court this text could not have been written by a first century author because he borrows extensively from uh fifth century Athenian neoplatonism uh and and rather rather baldly frankly uh so it's as if it's as if someone um it's sort of there's terminology in this book it's it's as if um someone used the word astronaut and was passing themselves off as Shakespeare is very odd terminology that she would seem to date the work from our perspective but in any case um let me back up and say uh when I when after the first lecture on this on this uh text I I thought okay clearly my education is deficient and I need to find out who this dionysius Theory Opera guide is so I scrawled in the front page the passage for Max 17 and this seems sort of strangely providential because as I'll say more about in a moment I've been coming back to this passage for about 10 years um so for those of you who aren't familiar with this Corpus it amounts to the most developed mystical theology in the um in the first Millennium of Christianity and one that came to exert an enormous influence on both the greek latin and Syriac mystical traditions and you could well you could very well tell the history of Christian mysticism by telling the reception of this book you would miss some things but you wouldn't miss a lot um and that so that's some sense of of the significance of this very small Corpus for the history of Christian mysticism okay so I finished my degree at Harvard I I'm sorry at Chicago I came back to Harvard to start the THD and in my first semester here I was in a reading group with um Nicholas Costas who uh was formerly on the faculty um and that was my first encounter with this Corpus in Greek which is difficult to say the least uh dense crabbed Greek the sort of Greek that even when you've analyzed it it's not at all clear what it means um but what was clear was how much the author was drawing on the Apostle Paul so I uh approached it with I had certain questions as I was reading it more deeply this time than my first exposure I wanted to know why this author wrote Under a pseudonym and why this pseudonym why an Apostolic pseudonym and why this figure dionysius the areopagite now I was fully expecting that this and other related questions would be among the first topics treated in secondary literature and so I was sort of astonished to discover that there was almost no interest in the pseudonym so the prevailing view of the pseudonym scholarship was that this author wrote it as a sort of mercenary means to protect himself in an age of anxious orthodoxies this is in the 6th century when the Eastern Roman Empire is being torn apart by the christological controversies so it means to protect himself by hiding his identity and perhaps to secure a wider readership by having an Apostolic name attached to the corpus and people would dismiss the references to Paul as along the same lines a sort of apostolic cover for his real commitments were which were to neoplatonism so what I found instead it was an ongoing debate in the scholarly world but a debate as to whether dionysius was really a a Christian or really a neoplatonist and you can there was there were sides um I'm not going to name any names um and there were people who I I I'm not I don't want to present myself as the only one who questioned that framing of it but that was a predominant frame and it always struck me as something of an odd question to ask of the Corpus I I was thinking today what if one were to ask of Paul tillich is he a Christian or is he an existentialist they don't seem like they are equivalent or uh sort of opposing terms or if you were to ask of Herman Cohen is he Jewish or is he a kantian it doesn't make sense and I wondered whether a similar uh whether a Sim it wasn't the same actually in late Antiquity it's not entirely fair to say that it wasn't um that the question of Christianity over and against neoplatonism was was foreign to that world because at least since the fourth Century there was a very Lively debate as to whether Christianity could lay claim to the um pre-christian classical past and if they did how they could um and much of that debate was occasioned by the short reign of the emperor Julian the apostate but that's another book so I sat down when it came to dissertating to write on this book and I wanted to explore this question pseudonymity and Paul the book as it stands falls into two parts in the first part I wanted to just open up the question about pseudonymous writing so I started looking at scholarship on Ancient synonymous writing they're surprisingly no one had thought to read this Corpus in light of the vast amount of pseudonymous writing and Antiquity Jews Christians and others were writing under pseudonyms for several centuries it's actually a full millennium I also wanted to think about Chris how Christians in late Antiquity related to the apostles and how they thought about time and whether and how it could be crossed or traversed and I wanted to think about how Christians regarded holy men and women as icons of Christ whom they could imitate and in so imitating actually imitate Christ himself so at the end of section two I concluded with this passage which I'll read to you the widespread conviction that time was porous or could be collapsed led to different practices of writing meant to bridge that temporal divide including hegeography and homiletics I had a used two case studies John chrysostom and something called the acts of a life in Acts of thecla I argue that the pseudonymous Enterprise of the Corpus is another Writing Practice meant to bridge this same divide to collapse the centuries so that the late ancient writer could achieve contemporaneity with the apostolic past not by summoning It Forward in time but by traveling back in time and assuming the identity of one of the disciples So based on that if in fact the author is in a sense traveling back in time and assuming the identity of a disciple of Paul then we'd expect that the life letters and Legacy of Paul would influence the major themes of this work this mystical Theology and as a result in part two I tried to chart that influence that is how Paul is crucial for understanding the major themes of this mystical theology which themes include dionysius's notion of hierarchy and deification by the way he coins the term hierarchy dionysius's understanding of mystical Union as Unknowing agonosia and how according to dionysius the relationship of Christian Revelation what is the relationship of Christian Revelation to Pagan wisdom especially Greek philosophy in other words I thought the Corpus actually told us how Christianity and Greek philosophy were supposed to relate even though Scholars had very strong views about that I regarded the Corpus as actually having its own internal View and most importantly I was interested in what dionysius understood to be what I called it apathetic anthropology and what I meant by that is how the self that's United to the unknown God is also rendered unknown uh put that another way how the process of uniting to the unknown God is an exercise of becoming unknown to oneself and how what's that process look like and for those of you who know the Corpus you'll know that this process of Unknowing involves Eros ecstasy and Madness and I was Keen to show how dionysius looks to Paul as the premier witness of that event and he leans very heavily on one passage Galatians 2 20. it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me that no longer I does a tremendous amount of work for this author and in fact I tried to title the book no longer I but Oxford University press objected and so you have this unfelicitous monster that we have before us and has precluded Oprah Winfrey ever calling me for a book deal the biggest surprise I was close um I think had had I gotten no longer I think I would had a fair shot um the biggest surprise of writing the book um was a hypothesis that uh that pseudonymous writing is in fact integral to the aims of the mystical Theology and what I mean by that is that writing in such a way that you are one and yet two or in the words of the mystical theology that's one of the texts the mystical theology neither one self nor someone else that that the writing actually is an exercise in the service of opening the self to the indwelling of Christ and this stands as something of a hypothesis in the book from which I'll read in a moment which I have developed a little bit in other um a little bit more in other venues including the forthcoming Amy is it forthcoming it's out it's out the Cambridge companion to Christian mysticism I have an essay in there on writing which is an attempt to sort of look at how writing is it is conceived of as a um as a mystical exercise in Christianity um Beyond this figure so I'll conclude by reading um just the last few uh a paragraph of that um not the last few paragraphs a single paragraph of the book um and then saying just a brief word about what I wish I had done better nothing that's the short answer it's perfect okay um I submit that for deionesius the very practice of writing under a pseudonym is no mere Ploy for sub-apostolic authority and thereby a wider readership but is in fact an ecstatic devotional practice in the service of the negation of the self and thereby of soliciting deifying Union with the unknown God synonymous writing renders the self neither oneself nor someone else that is to say somehow both oneself and someone else in the case of the author of this Corpus he is both himself an anonymous writer from the early 6th century and also someone else dionysius the ariapagite pseudonymous writing is for our author a practice that stretches the self to the point that it splits renders the self unsaid that is unseated from its knowing Center unknown to itself and so better placed because displaced to suffer Union with quote him who has placed Darkness as his hiding place but this is no arbitrary doubling the other with whom the self must now share its space is a disciple of Paul dionysius a disciple who follows Paul's memetic imperative quote be imitators of me as I am of Christ and Paul by his own admission in Galatians 2 20 is already doubled he is both Paul and Christ only through the negation but not the denial of the single self what Paul calls the eye only through unknowing oneself can one clear space in the self for the indwelling of the other in short our synonymous author offers an account of what it is to be properly human in relation to God namely no longer an i neither yourself nor someone else because you are now both yourself and Christ and in the very telling he performs an exercise aiming to render his own self cleft open split doubled and thereby deified so it's that hypothesis that concludes the book um and I'll just say a word now about what I what I would explore further if I had time funny enough it's time I'm fascinated by well I moved quickly over the question of time in the book and given some of the stuff I have read subsequent and in fact I'm reading now I would love to return to the topic of time both perhaps looking to proclasses philosophy of time to see if in fact there was a contemporary philosophical justification for this kind of time travel which I'm imputing to this author and also given my argument that this is a a that writing is a an exercise for achieving contemporaneity with the past whether writing can also be conceived of as a practice of achieving contemporaneity with the future which is another way of saying can writing be eschatological um I'll leave it there I'm sure that David and Nicholas will have more interesting things to say but thank you for your time and now on to you [Applause] thank you Charles some of you don't realize that that's not his real name Charles Stang it's actually a pseudonym and if you stay long enough we'll tell you at the end we are very uh one of the the lovely parts of these events is to have two discussions who um will think through issues raised in the book and and take about 15-20 minutes each to open the discussion to raise some questions to explore further the issues that come up in the book having heard from the author first and we're very grateful today to have two illustrious discussions for the book uh David bracky will go first David brackey is the Joe Joe R Engel chair of the history of Christianity and professor of history at Ohio State University he received his ba in English from the University of Virginia his masters of divinity here at Harvard and PhD in religious studies at Yale David studies the history and literature of ancient Christianity up through the 5th Century his interests are wide but focus on asceticism gnosticism monasticism and Christianity in Egypt he has published widely and numerous books including just to give you a few examples athanasius and the politics of asceticism 1995 demons in the making of the monk spiritual combat and early Christianity 2006 and his latest monograph is called the Gnostic Smith ritual and diversity in early Christianity and this was named the choice outstanding academic title in 2011. he is currently a member of the international team of Scholars who are producing the first unified critical Edition and translation of the works of Shenouda of atripei the greatest native writer of Coptic and the leader of a monastic community in Upper Egypt in the fourth and fifth century and on top of all that he is president-elect of the International Association of Coptic studies our second respondent is from Closer by year as Charles mentioned Nicholas Watson come over from the yard Nicholas is professor of English and American literature and language here at Harvard and is the English Department's director of Graduate Studies and chair of the medieval studies committee he earned his ba and M.A from Cambridge University a masters in philosophy at Oxford and a PhD from the University of Toronto he's an internationally known medievalist whose principal interests lie in Christian religious text written in Middle English and anglo-norman French the vernacular of the day and to give you an idea of his writing just a couple of recent works 1999 he was a co-author of a volume entitled the idea of the vernacular and an anthology of Middle English literary Theory 1280-1520 in 2003 the vulgar tongue medieval and post-medieval vernacularities and 2000 desire for the past and also co-edited volume entitled The writings of Julian of Norwich a vision showed to a devout woman and a revelation of love and he is currently or perhaps it's finished by now not sure writing a book called tentatively called balum's ass vernacular Theology and literary history England 1050 to 1550. so we have two wonderful discussions and I believe that David will go first welcome um first I too would like to thank the center and the staff for arranging this it's really great to be here I was thinking the last time I was in this room was to talk about Karen King's book what is gnosticism which is now nine eight or nine years ago which is kind of strange and then I was talking with Frank Clooney because this this is a really nice place and when I was a student it wasn't very nice and uh in the 1980s and but before that the last time I've been here just to kind of give you a sense of how ancient this is was a party for to celebrate the tenure of Margaret miles the first woman to receive tenure at Harvard div school so that's really we've come a long way this is a really great book so first let me tell you why it's really good and you should go and read it like immediately do not wait go and do it uh first of all and the most basic reason is you can actually understand it and it's about pseudo dionysius which I'll just tell you that's a big achievement in and of itself to write a book about pseudodynesius that people can actually understand and so anyone interested in mysticism should read this and you'll learn from it um Second and this just kind of Builds on what Charlie was describing of the book he really unsettles an opposition between Christianity and neoplatonism which has plagued the study of later Antiquity which is part of a tendency in early Christian Studies to stop putting people identities and texts into neat and separate boxes it also undermines any notion of an essential Christianity or for that matter an essential neoplatonism which has been equally plagued by that we could talk more about this but it's interesting to compare it to the tillot question because it raises the question of to what extent I think platonism was a community in later Antiquity in the way of course existentialism never was and that would be we could have that conversation there are people in the room who would help us with that um next really great reassessment of pseudonymity as a Writing Practice I suggest we should all just set this against Bart ehrmann's forged that's the title of the book right which is soon to appear in a more scholarly version um then the popular Forge that is out there um Charlie's perspective identification with the other is an ascetic practice of self-splitting and self-effacement links up with earlier apocalyptic literature I think whether Jewish or Christian and I think it really provides an interesting entree into thinking about some Gnostic literature such as ostrianos and but I won't go down that path but we could talk about that because I have another path I want to go down um it's really as far as I know but I am not an expert in mysticism the first really extended discussion of the idea of an apophasis of the cell for apathetic anthropology which are terms that um you know this idea that the Mystic must unknow him or herself in the process of knowing god I think this term has sometimes been thrown around in the scholarship as a kind of idea but not really explored in full and of course as as he said it's very possible dionysius is really source for this kind of notion that you see in later later authors but I don't know anything about that but I want to focus today on the self that we unknow and that we split or open up through the practice of pseudonymity what is the cell for pseudo dionysius is there even a self you know because some people would argue that in late Antiquity and before modernity there's really no concept of the self which I don't think is true I did a book religion and the self and Antiquity therefore there must be such a thing because I'm a book about it but nonetheless I'm just going to say that it is that I don't agree with that but you know anyway so to get at this and I do I'm going to put out a hypothesis of what the self is in pseudo dionysius that then Charlie can tell me why it's wrong or right or whatever but um but to get at that I'm going to use a few comparisons to get at this Augustine of Hippo um hadwick of rabant I hope I said that right because I know nothing about her as you'll learn and uh and and finally Bruce Springsteen and I thought I'd start with Bruce because that way I get the part you're not going to respect me for over for first uh so this is it on all of this comes from when you read a book when you're reading other things you know that's the thing because I never would have noticed this before so um there's a long profile of Bruce in um a New Yorker from July and I'm so far behind and I don't know if anyone else has this experience in my New Yorkers that of course you know I'm reading notes and comments that have to do with like years ago or whatever so I was reading this while I'm reading this book and here's Bruce talking this is him speaking my issues weren't as obvious as drugs mine were different they required are just as problematic but quieter with all artists because of the undertow of history and self-loathing there's a tremendous push towards self-obliteration that occurs on stage it's both things there's a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time you are free of yourself for those hours all the voices in your head are gone just gone there's one voice The Voice you're speaking in okay that's end quote elsewhere he talks about himself in concert as being a conduit for the energy and anxieties and feelings of the crowd which Charlie didn't really say this but this is a key part of his argument that this splitting of the self is also not just about Christ just kind of occupying you but you being a conduit for Christ who is the energy that moves through the hierarchies in which we all exist so it was kind of interesting to me for that resonance now there's a lot to be said about this quote from the man from New Jersey but here's also a split self but one that's entirely internal to the self right it feels very modern to me it's not about identifying with a God or a person from the past like dionysius or whatever rather this the self that one obliterates or abandons is a set of multiple voices in your head the anxieties and self-condemations that are yourself that actually plague you the self one finds for Bruce is a single voice he says the voice you're speaking in presumably the kind of lovable authentic self that those voices oppose and don't permit you to see this voice is both you and a conduit for the energy of everyone at the concert so you know again to compare this to pseudodinesis idea that the energy of Christ pulses through hierarchies through individual persons now what Bruce is talking about sounds very spontaneous cathartic ecstatic so forth and so on but in fact as I learned from this article Springsteen meticulously rehearses every moment in a concert what he'll say between songs when he'll raise his fist even the way he looks in the spotlight at the end of a particularly great song so this abandonment and finding of the self is precisely choreographed it is trained for and planned it doesn't just happen likewise the splitting of the self and yearning for God that pseudo dionysius practices is similarly meticulous it's tied to a meticulously crafted pseudonymity and that that pushes that practice to the extreme as as Charlie described on the one hand careful and elaborate construction of a pseudo self we have on the one hand you know he writes letters he refers to specific events in people you know I was at Mary's house the other day I mean it's very you know like circumstantial specific about it on the other hand there's little effort to hide his real context in the early fifth century undisguised quotations from recent neoplatonist authors references to liturgy in his day not what happened back in the old times Etc this extremity of pseudonymity I went to college you know pushing both sides it's me but it's not me simultaneously is what contributes to this self-vacating that allows the energy that is Christ to run through him Charlie shows good precedence in the life and miracles of Saint thecla and John chrysostom and also in Paul himself for this I just want to notice it aside because my new testamenty person wants to say is that this reading of Paul's a Mystic um as is seems to at times be as much a reading of Dionysus of Paul in the book as of Dionysus which I kind of found fun and recalled for me schweitzer's mysticism of Paul the Apostle but and you know which you might want did you read that book no not appropriate I have read it but yeah you know but anyway but for Schweitzer Paul's mysticism stands only from his Jewish apocalyptic eschatology it is not Hellenistic at all anticipating the very Christian versus neoplatonist distinction regarding dionysius that Stang dismantles but in fact I would look to Gnostic works like zostrianos and alleghenies the Foreigner for the real fusion of Jewish apocalyptus and platonizing contemplation that we later find in pseudodianesis I really just think the whole thanks to Zeke measure we're seeing this that it's just all there but the gnostics don't have the whole Eros thing going on I would say but people can disagree with you okay the element of arrowser Desire inherited from Plato brings me to my second comparison Augustine obviously I could take a book to do this but I only have a couple minutes so let me make brief schematic thoughts Augustine self I would say as Charles Taylor puts it is an interior space that can be explored its memory contains the particulars of my life and experience traces of God's presence and shepherding of me from my birth I suggest that in Gustin one unites with God by a different form of splitting not an unknowing of the self but a radical knowing of it a you know what Taylor calls this Radical reflexivity by knowing myself as the image of God as one who knows and loves himself in in all of the Trinity which I mean you can say Augustine really isn't a Mystic but and which I'm actually willing to entertain so that this is not a fair comparison and The Trinity isn't really about mysticism it's about the Trinity yes so far so on but all that having said it's interesting that in that book which is massive Augustine never quotes that part of Galatians 2 20 that forms the theme of stang's book it's no longer I who live by Christ who lives me and I started to like that it was like you know Saturday morning and I was here and I didn't have my books on my shelf but I was like I know I want to find this in Augusta and somewhere I want to find what he would do with this um and even at ostia when Augustine shares a memorable memorable experience of transcendence with his mother Monica they reach Eternal wisdom by he says entering their own minds um as with his fellow platonist pseudo dionysius Augustine's mysticism is motivated by love but the ecstatic love that shatters the self in pseudodionesis appears I think rather rarely in Augustine rather Augustine's love is a kind of continual engine of the self attaching it to temporal and material Goods when it's misguided but also guiding the self to itself itself in God when it moves rightly so love leads me to my third comparison this time with hadwick of brabant who I just even learned how to pronounce her name the 13th century begin I know next to nothing about havoc and all I know is because Amy Holly would told me some things at T this morning so that's right but I had to read some excerpts from her work in teaching my undergraduate survey of the history of Christianity this semester and in one of her visions hadvix sees herself in Saint Augustine as two eagles which are both devoured by a phoenix hadvic and Augustine are united in their love for the Beloved their Unity depicted in their feathers which just which depict their respective Youth and age combined the feathers are kind of traded it's complicated but anyway the Phoenix represents the unity of the trinity in which both hadvic and Augustine are lost you know she said use that word we are lost in the love of the Trinity and so on and that devouring by the Phoenix kind of represents this like our 6th century author hadvic identifies with an authoritative Christian from the past but Augustine is changed as much by hadvic as she is by him for Augustine's feathers represent the renewed Splendor that he gains from hadvic who loves Augustine deeply and shares with August and the desire that they love the Trinity with a single love mover hadvic however then asks to be removed from this Union with Augustine for she wants to as she puts it belong to God Alone in pure love she doesn't want the security of Union with another creature rather she is herself she says a free human creature who can desire freely with her own will and will as highly as she wishes now to be sure had Vic couches all this in the language of humility and poverty I can't do this because I'm not a saint so forth and so on but she articulates herself in the remarkably modern language of Freedom the assertion of the individual will and Union with other Saints only on the basis of her own individual Repose with God not the other way around she talks about love constantly it's at the center of her spirituality she seems to be in love with it as much as with God and yet she worries about the loss of self that passionate love can involve loss of self to other creatures if not to God so when I returned to pseudonymysius and his conception of the self in these examples I find myself at something of a loss as I have often found in exploring the same theme of the self in a vaguereus ponticus who was another Fascination I share with Charlie who is some two centuries earlier Springsteen Augustine hadvich speak of the self in terms of interiority and individuality the will and freedom language that resonates with me as a product of the modern Christian West I feel like they ourselves and myself is somehow similar or if not you know both of agrius and pseudo dionysius seem to me to think of the self in more open terms like Augustine and hadvich they talk of love but here love seems to be a continual openness to the energy and influence of another toward the end of his book Charlie wrestles with chapter 11 of the Divine names where pseudodionesius says that creatures should not lose their individuality in Greek idiotetas which stand rightly I think understands as their place in the hierarchy of beings creatures Charlie tells us must must consent both to staying in their place their individuality and to being displaced in that place by the energy of Christ likewise in chapter 8 pseudo dionysius defines salvation as quote that which preserves all things in their proper places without change conflict or collapse toward evil that it keeps them all in peaceful and untroubled obedience to their proper laws that it expels all inequality and interference from the world and that it gives everything the proportion to avoid turning into its own opposite and to keep free of any kind of change of state foreign this self seems to me so here's my hypothesis which could be just totally wrong the self seems to me a lake a location a point on a three-dimensional graph or a node on an electronic grid there's nothing in the point its location the larger scheme it serves to map and the reality to which it is oriented and whose energy it conducts that's everything to the extent that this will asserts itself as a self it does so pseudonym pseudonymously well I should say that as another as open to a power that it transmits and does so effectively only in its assigned place as the author creates himself as dionysius I think he does so most thoroughly by placing himself in a network of Christians it's all about my relationships with these people and I'm writing letters to them and so forth and so on mostly associated with Paul through these letters for example so I wonder and you can tell me whether I'm right whether I have the pseudo dionysian self-rite or I'm on a path or I don't know I wonder especially about whether this is right because it seems to resonate so well with some brands of structuralist and pro-structuralist thought in which the self is All Surface and not depth in which our body selves take their characters from their positions in a larger network of language and power that operates through their positions in a larger Network that operates through us more than our by our individual agency in which cell fashioning and positioning of the cell for the primary options and which meaning is created through relationships and structures rather than through what inheres in any single word symbol or self just as they are in their own idiots or individuality okay so these are some of the inarticulate musings that this rich and deeply learned book provoked in me and for that I'm very grateful so thank you [Applause] thank you for this thank you for this chance to uh to come and meet with everybody today it's great and this is a wonderful thing which we should be doing more in the yard than we are um I'm going to be very in Kuwait um um I want to talk about time travel uh which is one of the themes of Charles's book and to uh to really phrase my one question for Charles's book in in relation to that but I thought I'd start because I I come at pseudodoniasis from the Viewpoint mostly as a scholar of the end of the Middle Ages of the 14th and 15th centuries particularly I thought I'd start with one encounter between that period and Dionysus that I hadn't really thought about in the same way until until I read Charles's book and this is um in Julian of norwich's revelation of Love um Julian looking at the cross uh suffering as she looks at it as she sees the suffering remarks at some point at one point that in doing that she's attempting a kind of renewal of the moment of the passion itself she wants to be in that time with others that were Christ's lovers and as she sees Christ not quite dying but nearly dying on the cross she remarks that the whole creation was in pain at the same time as Christ was in pain and she gives evidence for this traditionally of the uh the earthquake that took place at the time of the crucifixion all creatures that might suffer pain suffered with him that is to say all creatures that God has made to our service the firmament and the Earth failed for sorrow in their kind in the time of Christ's dying and those thought were his friends suffered pain for love she's thinking mostly the Virgin Mary but also the uh muscles and generally all that's just to say those that knew him suffered for failing of ma of of of of um every kind of comfort and those who knew him not also suffered and she gives two examples then of two people who knew him not who also suffered one was pilate Pontius Pilate and the other was sent dynasty of France that's Dionysus the areopagite which was at that time A pain him but when he saw wonders and Marvels sorrows and dreads that befell in that time he said either the world is now at an end or else he that is maker of Kinds the creator of nature suffers wherefore he did write on an altar this is an altar of the unknown God and there of course the story intersects uh oh the story which is actually sprung out of uh probably um Jacobus of erogenous golden legend intersect back with the story of Acts because it's when Paul of course comes to to Athens that he starts his sermon with the altar the unknown God and in medieval Legend Dionysus is the guy who has set up the altar of the unknown God not that many years before because he's so curious to know about what went on when the earth failed at the time of the passion Julian I had never thought until this point about whether about whether Julian was actually attempting um a kind of literary uh a literary homage at this point I've always thought it was quite possible she knew Dionysus in various forms and that she knew the name and she knew the basically the basic set of ideas but it seemed to me that um this is a piece of of time traveler her own that's uh that's uh that I thought was extremely suggestive in relation to what Charles's Charles was writing about uh for time travel Charles takes us a long way into the world of Dionysus um and um as David said he does so very clearly and very richly and we get a sense of philological closeness we get a sense of how particular kind of local cultural and intellectual Traditions uh work as we work our way into the book and this analysis of how Dionysus is thinking as it were on the ground which is conducted really brilliantly through philological analysis through the second half of the book uh is the thing that I found most sort of exciting as a scholar I also also found brushing up against things that I know quite well in a 14th century context in a fifth and 6th Century context are fascinating for the way that the categories both don't line up and do line up all the time hierarchy versus ecstasy the hierarchy and ecstasy hierarchy as ecstasy doesn't compute in the 14th century hierarchy here ecstasy there I'm trained to think that what happened in the late 14th century was that um in the 13th and 14th centuries of the people I've gradually got Dionysus more and more wrong because they moved from as they as they kind of invented the idea of affectivity we move from a kind of intellectual Ascent to God to an emotional extent to God completely wrong just has nothing to do with the facts on the ground I seems to be now that the late 14th century um well in fact the whole tradition of dionysian a commentary from from gallus in the late early 13th century onwards is actually doing something more like rediscovering the real Dionysus by as modern scholarship thinks traducing it and this brings me onto the kind of central set of things I wanted to say um Charles's book is about a hundred years in 115 years into what we could call critical scholarship on diocese critical scholarship being the body of scholarship that names Dionysus sudo this starts in the 1890s as Charles helpfully tells us with a simultaneous publication of two books by Hugo Koch and a Joseph siegelmeyer which both in similar terms disprove the possibility Dionysus could have been anything other than pseudo this is of course the moment of the higher criticism in biblical studies it's the moment of the rise of an objectivist scholarship an attempt to align uh philological scholarship with the scientific and that is a starting moment which Charles goes to all those rather nice that he comes at it by looking at some 6th Century Scholars first and sort of folding them in um and the pseudo that is created at that point is correct it's unquestionable we have no way of getting away from that Suitor we can never discover ReDiscover a primal World in which Dionysus is just himself um so the book accepts that premise because it has to and it wants to but it's also written out of the premise that there's something wrong um that the moment at which Dionysus enters the modern era for readers is a moment when something huge is lost as well as being gained Charles's analysis of the scholarship over the last 60 or so years say from the since the second world war is actually the analysis of an attempt both to explore the new late antique landscape within which Dionysus actually wrote but also I think he analyzes an attempt to recuperate some of the loss that comes into a study of Dionysus from the higher criticism his own book is an attempt to overcome that loss to take that loss and uh in some way annihilate it to restore us to a Dionysus fully inhabiting his own identity and to put very um to put very badly what Charles actually already read from his ending to restore that sense of Dionysus is having an identity cleft open split doubled and therefore deified by his decision to subsume itself into the identity of another to travel across time and to be Dionysus of Athens so the pseudo is healed um in Charles's book he actually heals as it were the raft made between uh traditions of reading Dionysus reverently as a sub-appos Apostolic author um and the present that is the product of higher critical thoughts since the 1890s onwards now this process this healing process that Charles attempt is of course it of course itself involves a sort of time travel the kind of time travel that scholarshipers had to learn to do in the wake of the higher criticism and the Divide between the present and the past the sense of an absolute divide between present and past that the higher criticism brought with it sympathetic historical evaluation and insist on an insistence on treating the past in its own terms a close reading that is not quite scientific but critical um Charles um these are some of the tools that he uh brings to bear on this um Charles doesn't say this but his project involves its own kind of apophasis it's actually one of my questions for Charles is what kind of apophysis do you think you perform and do you think we perform as Scholars when we work in this kind of mode all of us who have to have to study the Deep past have to learn to perform something of this kind what is apathetic about it well in a broad sense I think the kind of mode in which Charles is working is apophatic because it requires us to subordinate the present and its purposes to the past and under and an understanding of its purposes the higher criticism wanted to separate the true from the false it wanted very badly to find the historical Jesus good luck with that one and it wanted to sort out what could reliably be brought into the present and the sense of being made foundational for uh the new order the new order that it was coming to call modernity the higher criticism therefore like most 19th century historical scholarship was teleological to its core the very places where it denies its theological as being most teleological now Charles brings us something in a very different vein um do we learn about our own present about the long centuries between then and now from his book well perhaps we do perhaps the study of the past always does that but this isn't the point of the book the point of the book is to subsume this present into a sense of the past and this here um produces me a kind of Crisis uh in this book and a crisis in all books which have got a uh a confessional or a kind of reverential attitude to the material that they study uh if I can Charles you said it yourself so you said this is what uh this is the this is the author that made sense of Christianity to you um there's only one or two places in the book that you could have put that you could have put that in the acknowledgments you could probably have smuggled it into the index but you could not have put it in the body of the book and that is a sign of the continuing uh vital gap between the the scholarly world we inherit from the higher criticism and the world that it displaced so the protocols of Charles's mode of time travel are those of contemporary scholarship it requires close comparative reading the construction and interpretation of an archive a close sense of genre and awareness at all times are the local nature of History how the specificities of time and place help determine what dionysus's Dionysus wrote now this is very different from dionysus's own time travel which in terms of modern historical thought seems as David was pointing out outrageously presentist um proclus on whom Dionysus draws extensive he could kind of do for first century Greek wisdom okay well I'm going to be first century now so here's some proclus and the gulf between Dionysus is now in which she wrote and the then from which she wrote was like nothing I could easily be crossed this is just an easy interchange between dionysus's present and the present 500 years ago that he's inhabiting that's just not available to Charles he can't work like that he has to work much more laboriously in a certain kind of way all sorts of opportunities are lost to him as it were as a result of the gulf that he has to cross a different kind of gulf Charles's time travel therefore is tinged with tragedy and Dionysus is richly comic an ecstatic possibility is open to Dionysus that is almost closed although it's damn nearly there in the final sentences to Charles final sentence is the other place you can put things actually so there's a sense in which um there's a sense in which uh if you do see the project of this book is to overcome a kind of historical divide um then um all the project can do at the end Is tragically confess that it has failed which might turn out to be another apathetic gesture I suppose in its in its own right um because um although I'm not a deep believer in histographic models which insist on epistemic breaks if there has been an epistemic Break um of some sort of crisis in the relation between the present and the past and Western culture it's happened within the last 150 or so years and we are at the inheritors above all of that break and that crisis and so to the extent that this is a book attempting to undo that break um then it cannot in some way succeed and all it can do is work with and mediate that break and it's so interesting that sudo therefore is the center of this book rather than the thing that's trying to be pushed way um I I have a few other things to to think about and I'm not sure if they're if they're worth raising at this point but I guess I guess it is worth it is worth perhapsing one or two things about this um the protocol that I think is that gives authenticity Authority and deep interest to a book of this kind is the protocol that insists on the local on local conditions a sophisticated analysis of what words meant a particular moment of who said what to whom exactly when of how manuscripts appear of how texts are circulated these are all vital to our own sense of inhabiting authoritatively some moment in the past if we'd been reading Dennis with Julian of Norwich we wouldn't have worried about any of those things we would have worried about the authority the truth of specific statements specific narratives and that kind of thing instead we worry about these other things we don't have the opportunity even if we should want it and we probably should try not to want the opportunity to work in a kind of quasi-medieval way on these materials but I do think that I do think that it's worth taking a a careful look at the emphasis on the local that's that's um that's very productive in a book like this and in some ways forms the authority of a book like this because there's also a potentially a limiting condition to how a book of this kind how the insights of book of this kind can travel beyond the local um so um so my thought about this is that is that um that there are ways in which we should credit we should credit uh the uh the inhabitors of the dionysian tradition for the thousand years or so uh of its of its kind of strongest uh if it's as strong as dwelling between the sixth century and maybe the 16th century we shouldn't we should we should we should credit them uh we should we should credit them with understanding Dionysus in ways that um are not the same as how we understand them but they might have their own kind of authenticity we should credit them in other words uh uh with the possibility of contiguity with similarity to Dionysus and so when I think of Julian as wanting to inhabit the past of Christ's passion which he says very explicitly in some ways that's very different from I think from Dionysus wanting to be a first century Athenian in other ways I think it's not that different and it's worth thinking about the ways in which um these similarities are are available as well as differences I wanted to end by telling her uh in a way it's a silly story um from right at the end of the period where uh the the taina about from the middle of the 15th century uh which sort of exemplifies um really a startling set of similarities between the way a 15th century person might think and a fifth century person might think but is also getting close to how we might think at the same time this is a story that John capgrave tells um you would have heard of John capgrave necessarily but the story he tells about Catherine of Alexandria that great fictitious woman a virgin martyr from the early church cabgrave was an augustinian hermit living in the east of England in about the 1430s and 40s a very fine poet um and his great work was a huge sort of Epic treatment of Catherine of Alexandria he made up a lot of his facts he had a couple of sources and he wanted to work this thing as big as he could in fact what he does is he tried he's trying to he's trying to produce a a hagiographic answer to Chaucer and it's actually a damn good poem and well worth people looking at um how does he produce this story The key thing about a high Geographic narrative is it has to represent the saint has to make the saint live again the key thing about a 15th century poem is that it has to be new it has to generate a kind of a kind of sense of its own innovativeness and vigor how do you cross that particular divide between those two positions capgrave does this in his prologue by inventing a series of incidents that he knows we won't believe but that nonetheless uh do this Crossing work he claims to have uh found the source for his uh very wonderful poem a great use it's got the greatest mystical Union with Jesus seen in book three which is the kind of the equivalent of the erotic bedroom scene Insurance Crusades it's got wonderful things going on in it um from from a priest um of a priest from pancreas he says which is not yet a railway station in Northern London about a parish now this priest um was obsessed with some Catherine as well he might be she's a fascinating figure and he decides as a certain time uh that he's going to try to find the authentic story of not just her death but her life as well the problem with um virgin Martyrs is that we know all about how they die but we tend not to know too much about how they live beforehand and to help him um with this endeavor he had a dream um sent to him by God in which um not surprisingly he's given a book tweet and it's uh it's either better in his mouth or and and sweet in his stomach or the other way around and I can never remember um and this in this dream he's told to go to Cyprus which he uh does he picks up and goes to Cyprus and then he has another dream which tells him that he has to dig in a certain field the field is flowery it's a beautiful Meadow and it's clearly a literary field it's the field of lattice in some sort of way it turns out though that it's not the field of letters it's the field where the uh 300 years after athanasius is a life of uh of Catherine of Alexandra have been translated into Latin some people fearful of persecution had buried the one authentic copy of the life of Catherine the priest triumphantly brought it back translated into a dialect of English that capgrave tells us we don't want to know about and then left it to category so capgrave could produce his poem now this is a story about a forgery in a certain kind of way it's a story which knows that it's a story that knows that we're going to know somehow if it's only 600 years old you can tell that you can tell that as you read it but it's also a story which I think is really enacting the same kind of um the same kind of attempt to bridge the past and the present that's there in the Dionysus story and is there another not completely unrelated way in Charles's book it reminds me a lot of the great vision of Paul forgery's story which I'd love to hear you talk about remember the vision of Paul turns up in 397 when some people so the preface says dig under Paul's house and Tarsus they're building a Motorway or something like that and they dig under Paul's house and they discover a sealed box which they of course take to the emperor and in that they find the vision of Paul which is the story of what really happened when he went to the third heaven and authenticating detail his sandals it's the sandals I very badly want um so to me that's actually a 14th century story but it happens to come from the late 4th Century that's a story which actually problematizes pseudonymity again in some way to me um there's so many authenticating devices that I'm not quite sure what to make of it but I think I should stop because I'm wishing at this point time trap [Applause] s a chance to respond to them briefly and then we'll open up the discussion and as always thank you I'm going to try and be brief um so as to save room for other questions but thank you both those were um uh very interesting and frankly very difficult um response responses difficult because they are so rich um so and I'm not going to respond to all the pieces of either of your um talks I would say David in real in response to your your question your hypothesis I I think you're right I think you're very much right that the self in dionysius the self that's unsaid is a self of location um and perhaps for some of the people here who um aren't familiar with dionysius and I didn't give a good background to this dionysius uh coins the term hierarchy and is regarded in by many and I think in many ways this is indisputable as a deeply conservative thinker precisely because he regards uh every um Christian's task is to remain precisely where they are on the hierarchy there is no there's almost no attention given to movement in the hierarchy but the idea is precisely that if you stay where you are something can move through you so you have to you have to be fixed in order to be moved in a sense but being moved is is as as David put nicely to be essentially a conduit or a vessel that's another way of saying that I I agree with your characterization of selfhood and dionysius as unlike these more familiar cousins like Augustine um and and Bruce Springsteen um and as well um that is the markers of selfhood the idiotes the individuality are there precisely so as to be overcome um they are the just as language is there uh is given um precisely so as to be overcome um I don't know that I can on the spot I think about how dionysius's notion of selfhood relates to structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of the selfhood but I will say in in I I do think that among the people who the person who I think is has written enigmatically but most insightfully about um apothesis and the multiplicity of or the proliferation of the self is actually daried uh in uh um uh something called sophalenoma a short s short but very difficult essay of his um so that's something to pursue Nicholas wow that uh was quite a quite a quite a challenge I I when you said time travel I wasn't expecting you to turn it on me um no it's a very fair it's a very fair question you ask what sort of epiphasis do we perform by um trying to sort of inhabit and overcome what you're calling um critical historiography right or positive scholarship I don't know that I can answer this particularly well um certainly you but my having said at the beginning of this that negative theology delivered credible Christianity to me it was um quite a confessional statement and you're quite right I think most readers close readers will find that there are moments in the book where um that seems to break through especially near the end um is that tragic isn't that tragic that's the question um what I might say so your characterization of the Zappa Festus is that we have that we are subordinating um the present and its purposes to the past and its purposes um I think that that there's some truth to that uh however these these moments in the book where something else seems to break through the more confessional or devotional it it seems to me um actually where it's by subordinating the present and its purposes and appreciating the past and its purposes that I can actually sort of retrieve or reclaim the present and its purposes so this the book is an instance of I think a very much an encode project of retrieval um and and to speak of retrieval raises interesting questions what are you retrieving and for whom and in what idiom and is it a clean is it a clean retrieval in the way that um one might think retrieval would be prior to uh critical scholarship I think certainly not uh I I'm not sure I think it's tragic um but but it's uh it's certainly troubled and and I would say also that part of the kind of Mongrel nature of that in my own book is that you know this is this is um this was a dissertation and it has to serve as a revised dissertation which I'm embarrassed to say not that it's revised but um uh it's probably better for having been revised but it's it it is written in such a way as to um to attempt to please those who will um who value good critical scholarship historiographical uh positive scholarship and not lose them at the very least and yet um let something of let something of another investment in this material uh breakthrough at moments but it's not explicit it's not theorized it's not framed as such it's just sort of smuggled in or it's actually not so deliberate on my part is to say smuggling it's actually just sort of um the way I think and it sort of finds its way onto the page but I don't know whether going forward working on these same ancient materials I will be as responsible that is to say I'm that the sort of tone of the last paragraph may actually um creep forward earlier to the book into another book um I'm wrestling with this right now because uh the material I'm looking at uh for this second book is very much the majority of work on it is of course critical scholarship primarily interested in assessing this stuff for in its in its own local um context and at the same time I'm actually quite interested in it for some other reasons so I have that to negotiate uh but I'll I'll stop there and open up other questions

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

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Keywords: Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Ohio State, Christianity, Religious Studies

Id: 1rGKBjX1Ld0

Length: 70min 20sec (4220 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2012