Analogical Identities: The Creation of the Christian Self. Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism in the Patristic Era

by Nikolaos Loudovikos, π. Νικόλαος Λουδοβίκος

Is it possible for nihilism and an ontology of personhood as will to power to be incubated in the womb of Christian Mysticism? Is it possible that the modern ontology of power, which constitutes the core of the Greek-Western metaphysics, has a theological grounding? Has Nietszche reversed Plato or, more likely, Augustine and Origen, re-fashioning in a secular framework the very essence of their ontology? Do we have any alternative Patristic anthropological sources of the Greek-Western Self, beyond what has been traditionally called "Spirituality" or "Mysticism"? Patristic theology seems to ultimately provide us with a different understanding of selfhood, beyond any Ancient or modern, Platonic or not, Transcendentalism. This book strives to decipher, retrieve, and re-embody the underlying mature Patristic concept of selfhood, beyond the dichotomies of mind and body, essence and existence, transcendence and immanence, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, person and nature, freedom and necessity: the Analogical Identityof this Self needs to be explored.

Fr Nikolaos Loudovikos studied Psychology, Pedagogy, Theology and Philosophy at the Universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Sorbonne (IV), Catholic Institute of Paris and Cambridge. He is a Professor of Dogmatics and Christian Philosophy at the University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, a Visiting Professor at the IOCS Cambridge, and a Research Fellow at the University of Winchester. He is the author of twelve books on Systematic or Philosophical Theology and numerous articles, translated in ten languages. He is the Senior Editor of Analogia: The Pemptousia Journal for Theological Studies.

Table of Contents
Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART ONE. THE MEANING OF SPIRITUAL BEING

Augustine and Origen: a study of the presuppositions of Western and Eastern spirituality, and some modern repercussions

Chapter One
Augustine, Origen, and the Person as Will to Power. The ontology of power
1. Representative eudemonism and the spirituality of the soul as thinking
2. A spiritualistic theory of knowledge. The violence of the spiritual and 'monophysitism'
3. Origen, following his parallel way
4. The thinking soul as light and the spirituality of the will to power
5. Knowledge of God through consciousness and the ontologization of the psychological
6. The genesis of the ontology of the person as will to power. The ontology of power and phenomenality
7. The will to power as a historical concern

PART TWO. ON WILL AND NATURE, ON PERSON AND CONSUBSTANTIALITY

Chapter One
Maximus the Confessor's Theology of the Will and the complete Selfhood
1. The limits of ancient will and the new opening
2. The theology of the will in the anti-monophysite anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
3. A theologico-philosophical appendix to this chapter: is it possible to transcend naturalism in the ontology of the person and of history?

Chapter Two
Symeon the New Theologian and the Eschatological Ontology of the Nature of Creation
1. History
2. The unfamiliarity of Being and melancholy
3. The familiarity of the Being through repentance as an eschatology of consubstantiality
4. Eucharistic Vigilance and Judgment: The Christology of Light
5. The embodied intellect and the poetics of matter. Joy
6. The Eschatological denial of the 'Spiritual' and Eucharistic Apophaticism

Chapter Three
The Neo-Platonic Root of Angst and the Theology of the Real
On being existence and contemplation, Plotinus-Aquinas-Palamas
1. The infinite, contemplation and angst
2. Deficient existence and the angst of its contemplation: Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas
3. The real as nature and vision of God. Saint Gregory Palamas
4. From the undermining of the real to its theology
Concluding Addition: The 'second Absolute' and the misreadings of Hesychasm
Nietzschean readings of Hesychasm?

Chapter Four
World and Existence, Nature and Person: The Being of Self and the Meaning of Its Consubstantial Universality
1. The Individual without the World. Epictetus
2. The World without the Individual. From Buddha to Schopenhauer
3. Individual and World, Person and Nature. Self and its Consubstantial Universality of its Being in Patristic Thought
a) On Consubstantiality, on the Person and on Nature
b) Beyond the Ontologization of the Person: the Meaning of Self

PART THREE. CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism: The Poiesis/Creation of the Self as an Analogical Identity
1. Weighing Christian anthropological (Neo)Platonism in East and West
2. Medieval repercussions
3. Descartes' Augustinian happiness and beyond
4. The Will to Power and the Nietzschean Obelisk: an Autonomous Infinity
5. Objections, Wise and non-Wise: a Parenthesis
6. The Will to Consubstantiality: the Vessel in the Open Sea
7. The Heart of the Ocean: the Poiesis/Creation of a New Self
8. An Analogical Identity

Appendix 1: Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas's Final Theological Position
Appendix 2: Dialogical nature, Enousion Person, and Non-ecstatic Will in Maximus the Confessor: The Conclusion of a long Debate
Appendix 3: An Aquinas for the Future

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ancient and Medieval Authors
Modern Authors

INDEXES
Index of Authors
Index of Modern Scholars
Index of Concepts

Genres: Theology

386 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2019

About the author

Protopresbyter Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos (Greek: Π. Νικόλαος Λουδοβίκος) is a Greek theologian, priest, psychologist, author and professor.

Dr. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos was born in Volos, Greece in 1959. He studied Psychology and Education at the University of Athens, Theology at the University of Thessaloniki, Philosophy at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, Philosophy and Roman Catholic Theology at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Philosophy and Protestant Theology at the University of Cambridge (England). He holds a Ph.D from the Department of Pastoral Theology of the University of Thessaloniki in 1989. The title of his dissertation was "Eucharistic Ontology in the Theological Thought of St. Maximus the Confessor".

He has worked as a researcher at the Tyndale House (Cambridge) and has taught and lectured at the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies (CARTS) of the Department of Theology at the University of Cambridge, at Durham University, as well as at other Universities and Research Centers. Today he is the Chair of the Department of Theology and Pastoral Studies and a Professor of Dogmatics and Philosophy at the University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Author for the postgraduate program of Theology at the Hellenic Open University in Patras, Greece, Visiting Professor at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Winchester, U.K.

Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos is member and co-secretary (Orthodox) of the Saint Irenaeus Joint Orthodox-Catholic Working Group.

Reviews

[Marcas]

Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos’s book on the Christian self is a wonderfully rich theology book and necessary read for anyone concerned with Christian living in a secular age. It’s quite hard to follow but makes some important claims and backs them up with copious evidence. I will try and outline a few lessons from the book below. I hope I have understood him correctly and do justice to what I have read so far.


First, Loudovikos identifies a strand within the Christian tradition which is incomplete and distorts our understanding of God and Man. He sees it in figures such as Saint Augustine and Origen.
In each, there is an inordinate focus on the intellect of mankind, without considering the whole person. This, he suggests, comes more from Plotinus than the Gospel and carefully traces the trajectory of this tragic tendency.

The scriptures speak instead of Nephesh, an embodied soul and this is more comprehensive. Without focusing on the bigger picture of Nephesh, an ambiguous, even perilous, notion of faith as a mental task begins. Through a series of complex events and changes in the realm of ideas, this is then secularised in western Europe. Famously, with Descartes’ cogito: “I think therefore I am.’


Another element which Fr. Loudovikos identifies is how this intellectualised and part-Christianised Neo-Platonism creates a picture of God that is one, almost a kind of monism, and misses the distinctions of the persons. Whereas a fuller appreciation of the Trinity (transcendent and immanent) beyond the cosmos and through it strikes the right balance. This adversely effects our understanding of God and human persons created in God’s image and likeness.

Loudovikos doesn’t simply dismiss St Augustine or Origen wholesale and recognises that they do speak to such finer points in some places and expressed some virtues in their own lives. In fact, he criticises a tendency in some Orthodox circles to write them off entirely and remains a balanced commentator on challenging histories and complex ideas. However, he does seem to suggest that Saint Augustine’s and Origen’s better known works, and what has come down to us, have been at least a partial distortion.

Why is this so important then?


These distortions are a big problem, in part, because they lend themselves to two secularist extremes today... Ideas have consequences!


1- A ‘spirituality’ that ignores the distinct character of God and mankind alike. Under the surface, what we call spirituality is really an amorphous nihilism that ignores the true Triune God’s revelation to us. It is ultimately anti-body, anti-historical, and anti-Christ in a very basic way. It acts as if Christ never rose from the dead, trampling down death by death, and as if the cosmos will not be redeemed in the ‘new heaven and new earth’.


2- An overreliance on ‘rationalism’, which is self-referentially incoherent and ends up in a kind of solipsism. We see this with the blind spots of new-atheism. They do not understand hermeneutics and assume something ironically similar to the more ‘spiritual’ side of this heterodox coin: an anti-body, anti-historical, and anti-Christ ‘view from nowhere’.


Fr. Loudovikos, like Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World, finds a better Biblical and cosmic balance in St Maximos and in someone like St Gregory Palamas.

Palamas speaks of God’s essence and energies. We can know Him in the world through His energies but His essence remains a mystery.

“The Lord came to send fire upon the earth (cf. Lk. 12:49), and through participation in this fire He makes divine not just the human substance which He assumed for our sake, but every person who is found worthy of communion with Him.”

– Saint Gregory Palamas

Similar to Fr. Loudovikos and Jonathan Pageau, I find this balance most helpful and I am grateful that this grander Biblical understanding has been preserved by great saints and theologians through the centuries- like St Gregory Palamas and Fr. Loudovikos himself.

[Dylan Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I'm looking to transcend that which is given me then I've got to be something of an ungrateful blockhead.