Updating Mortimer Adler’s Classical Reading List

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of titles on here because I just don’t see how…well, I’m not going there.  And I’ve changed some works by some authors.  I think Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is far more powerful and infinitely more relevant to FEMA-Camp America than are his novels.  I’ve BOLDFACED the ones I have already read.

1. Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories (I’ve read it but I need to reread it)
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – “Letter to Herodotus”; “Letter to Menoecus”
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius – Conics
16. Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
19. Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
23. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
24. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
25. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
26. Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
27. Ptolemy – Almagest
28. Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds;Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
29. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
30. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
31. The New Testament
32. Plotinus – The Enneads
33. St. Augustine – “On the Teacher”; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
34. The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
35. The Song of Roland
36. The Saga of Burnt Njál
37. Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
38. St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
39. Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); “On Monarchy”; Divine Comedy
40. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales

Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks

1. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
2. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies (I’ve read different parts of Erasmus
3. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
4. Thomas More – Utopia
5. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
6. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
7. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
8. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
9. William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
10. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
11. Edmund Spenser –; The Faerie Queene
12. Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
13. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
14. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
15. Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
16. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
17. Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
18. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy (It’s on the Shelf)
19. René Descartes –  Discourse on the Method; Meditations on First Philosophy; 
20. Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
21. John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes) (In progress)
22. Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
23. Blaise Pascal –  Pensées;
24. Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist
25. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
26. Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
27. John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Currently reading)
28. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
29. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
30. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe;
31. Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal
32. William Congreve – The Way of the World
33. George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (On the shelf)
34. Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
35. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
36. Voltaire – Candide; 
37. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
38. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
39. David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England (Currently on the shelf)
40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile; The Social Contract; Confessions
41. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
42. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations (Currently on the shelf)
43. William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
44. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals;Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
45. Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;(Currently reading)
46. James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
47. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
48. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
49. Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
50. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; 
51. Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
52. John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
53. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
54. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic;Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History (I’ve read most of these)
55. William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
56. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner );Biographia Literaria
57. David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
58. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
59. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
60. Lord Byron – Don Juan
61. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
62. Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
63. Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
64. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
65. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
66. Honoré de Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet;Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
67. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
68. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
69. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (Halfway through reading)
70. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty;Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women;Autobiography
71. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography (Currently reading)
72. William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond;The Virginians; Pendennis) (On the shelf)
73. Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield;Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
74. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
75. George Boole – The Laws of Thought
76. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
77. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
78. George Eliot – Silas Marner
79. Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
80. Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
81. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
82. Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
83. Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
84. Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
85. Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll’s House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder) Currently reading
86. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; “What Is Art?“; Twenty-Three Tales (Currently reading)
87. Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Mysterious Stranger
88. Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
89. Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
90. William James –  The Varieties of Religious Experience; (Currently reading)
91. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
92. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
93. Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
94. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
95. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays to the Theory of Sex;Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
96. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces (Have on shelf)
97. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
98. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
99. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
100. Alfred North Whitehead – Process and Reality; (I have on shelf)
101. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
102. Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
103. Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits; History of Western Philosophy
104. Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
105. James Joyce – “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;Ulysses (Have on shelf)
106. Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
107. Franz Kafka – Metamorphoses (Currently reading)
108. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1-3.  Currently reading.

I can now sort of understand the Patristic angelic celibacy thing

I posted my Musings on Methodius on Puritanboard.   They didn’t like my dichotomy of Hebrew vs Hellenic thought.  I’ve spent almost a decade reading Greek (pagan and Christian) sources.  What I say is beyond dispute.  I’m also (not) surprised they didn’t take up the line of Methodius’s neo-Galatian two-class Christianity, but enough of that.

I’m fairly harsh on the Fathers for the idealization of angelic celibacy.  But as I reflect upon it, I can kind of get where they were coming from. They lived in a decaying, overly sexualized debauched culture of the late Roman Empire (nominally Christian or not).  The appeal to monasteries fairly obvious:  faced with starving poverty, unfulfilled sexuality, and lack or order, monasteries offered a stable alternative.  Does that justify later monastic trends?  Of course not, but it’s worth remembering.  If the Fathers were over-reacting to what is below, then I can understand, even if I do not approve.

(Wisdom prevailed and I didn’t post any pictures)

Musings on Methodius of Olympus

All citations taken from Schaff’s Ante-Nicene Fathers volume 6

Pros of Methodius

1. His prose often exquisite and always lyrical.  He occasionally approaches the talent of Gregory Nazianzus, the Christian Pindar.
2. While he often gets off track of his topic, his “wanderings” are very interesting and usually more sound than his main point.

Cons

1. I do not believe Methodius lost the gospel.  I do think he came within a razor’s edge of losing it.
2. His use of excessive allegory is subject to the critiques of that position.  If allegory is true, it is impossible to falsify since there is no permanent standard to say “X is wrong.”

Banquet of the Ten Virgins

Like many ancient Christians, Methodius held perpetual virginity to be the summum bonum.  Unlike other ancient Christians, his defense of it, while suffering in terms of exegesis and argument, is the best-written defense (Augustine’s is confused and he knows it; Tertullian’s ranks as the worst treatise in the history of written thought).

• “Virginity mediates between heaven and earth” (312-313).
• Methodius bases much of his argument on legal analogies from Old Testament shadows: 327-329; 344.  Even though this is a form of the Galatian heresy, even here he is not consistent, for he knows that people can bring up another OT text: Genesis 1:27ff about procreating (and even worse, maybe enjoying it). Indeed, he calls such men “incontinent and uncontrolled in sensuality” (320).
• “The likeness of God is the avoidance of corruption.”  A problematic statement, but not too bad.  It gets worse when he adds another premise:  virgins have this likeness (313).  This brings up a troubling conclusion:  can married people have the likeness of God?
• Indeed, if you are married you need to work towards the goal of never having sex again.  Methodius writes, “Until it removed entirely the inclination for sexual intercourse engendered by habit” (312).  It gets worse:  if married people enjoy sex, “how shall they celebrate the feast” (347)?  What does Methodius mean by feast?  Probably not the liturgy in this section (though of course he would draw that same application); it could be either “the kingdom of God” or the “proper Christian life.”  The narrative isn’t clear.
• He knows the prohibition against marriage is a demonic doctrine, so he hedges his bets: marriage is to produce martyrs (314).
• He has a fascinating discussion on numerology (339) and his commentary on the Apocalypse, while wild and fanciful, is no less arbitrary than any other “spiritual” interpretation of it

Evaluation

It is not accidental that Methodius used OT legal shadows to buttress his argument.  He picked and chose from God’s law and supplemented it with the doctrines of man.   Gone is the freedom of the Christian life.  Indeed, the Gospel has become a New Law (348-349).

Concerning Free Will

This is an important text because it summarizes ancient thought on freedom and necessity.  What is the origin of a human action (357).  Methodius wants to make sure that God is not the author of evil, but without the categories of “ultimate and proximate causality,” it’s not clear he can avoid giving evil a semi-independent existence.

His larger point is worth considering, though.  The form of necessatarianism he fights is some mixture of astrology and fatalism.  Methodius wants to free God from the charge of evil by noting he is separate from matter.  (Nota bene:  in ancient thought matter and necessity were linked.  It makes sense if you think of it.  If the above two are connected, and the will is immaterial, then the will is free).

Evaluation

As a full treatise on freedom it is inadequate, but his suggestions on matter and freedom are quite interesting.

Oration Concerning Simeon and Anna

“and preserved his mother’s purity uncorrupt and uninjured” (385).  the last two words suggest Jesus was born miraculously without damaging Mary’s ‘lady parts.”  He “opened the virgin’s womb  and yet did not burst the barriers of virginity.”  While this sounds absurd, it is consistent. The evil for men, per Methodius and ancient Christians, is corruption.   The tearing of the vaginal canal, for example (forgive the rough illustration), is corruption.  Therefore, the Logos, the Incorrupt One, could not have caused it.

The only way to really combat this idea is to attack the original premise.

Minor Works and Fragments

Many of these are corrupted mss and/or lyrical panegyrics on deceased saints.  Not much of history except we see early Marian devotion.  While this is perhaps uncharitable towards Methodius, one wonders if the point of Jesus in our lives is so we can praise Mary.

Evaluation and Conclusion

Methodius is a good witness to Eastern Christianity before the Nicene Council.  He has some interesting suggestions on free will and determinism.  Unfortunately, he exalts man-made ideas of perpetual celibacy to the first-order level of the gospel.  It is instructive that we see why:  sex–assuming it to be married sex–is messy and smelly and arouses extreme passions between man and wife.  This is low on the scale of being and it does not become the one who wants to transcend finitude to the realms of the passionless.

This is very good Hellenistic philosophy, but is an open attack on an earthy Hebraic Christianity.   Methodius himself suggests as much (see page 344).

He is worth reading for the occasional insight, but even where he is right (e.g., the Trinity) he has been surpassed by other luminaries.  Where is wrong, he is fatally wrong.

 

Examining ancient hymns and prayers (1)

This line of posts will be somewhat different.  Normally I go on the attack towards Orthodoxy and such.  Orthodox Bridge recently posted a contrast between theosis and Reformed sanctification.  I have a detailed response to it but I will forego posting it because the author mentioned S. Wedgeworth and Derek Rishmway. Those two gentlemen are far more competent Calvin students than I am.  Secondly, when I don’t comment that site doesn’t really have many comments and gets less traffic.

Today I want to explore the ancient prayers of the church, particularly as they formed personal devotion.  My source is the Orthodox Study Bible (which as study bibles go is better than most, but with a few shortcomings).  I realize this isn’t the only source of Orthodox devotion, but it is the most accessible.

I think it is important to examine these ancient prayers because the content is richly Trinitarian and even in my tamed Americanized study bible, the language is dignified and noble.  Further, imbibing these prayers will provide the devotee with a manner of praying that avoids the tendency to end every prayer with “Lead, guide and direct us” “Lead guide and direct us.”  Etc.

And as I reviewed the OSB NT, I noticed that these prayers lack the appeals and going throughs of Mary.  With the exception of two lines in the benediction, a Protestant can say these prayers without changing anything.

Beginning

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Glory to you, O Lord, glory to you.

O heavenly King, O comforter, the Spirit of Truth who are in all places and fillest all things.  The treasury of good gifts and the giver of Life.  Come and abide in us, cleanse us from every Stain and save our souls, Amen.

The above is a rather ancient prayer and is worth incorporating into one’s spirituality.  This is only the beginning.

Christopher Hall lectures on Ancient Christian Spirituality

I know, I know.  He’s a Protestant so he really doesn’t understand Christianity [end sarcasm], but since he has written a cutting-edge book promoting the Fathers, I figured he knows what he is saying.  I plan to review that book later. hese look to be tinteresting.

A limited appreciation of non-Jesus icons

I have to wonder:  could iconic art reinvigorate a culture?  I ask my Protestant friends:  if you take away the bowing down to images and the making of hypostases of the Logos outside of the hypostasis of the Logos, what exactly is the problem with icons?  Nothing really.  Nothing that wouldn’t apply to art in general.  Orthodox iconography is beautiful.  It is infinitely superior to Roman Catholic art.   Indeed, my favorite icon is of the Norwegian king, Olav Ogre-Bane.

And people say I read chain of being into everything

(And lest I am misunderstood, my target audience was not originally the Orthodox, though my comments directly apply to them.  Rather, some Reformed guys took issue with my Covenantal Ontology and didn’t believe that chain of being was a real deal).

“The Old Testament makes the body obedient to the intelligence and raises it up towards the soul by means of the virtues, preventing the intellect from being dragged down towards the body. The New Testament fires the intellect with love and unites it to God. Thus yet Old Testament makes the body one in its active with the intellect; the New Testament makes the intellect with God through the state of grace.”-

St. Maximos the Confessor ( Philokalia Vol. 2, Fourth Century of Various Texts)

But anyone who is a “portion of God,” on account of the logos of virtue that exists in God, as was explained above, and who abandons his own origin, is irrationally swept away toward non-being, and thus is rightly said to have “flowed down from above,” since he did not move toward his own origin and cause, according to which, by which, and for which, he came to be.

“Flowing down from above” in this manner, he enters a condition of unstable deviations, suffering fearful disorders of soul and body, failing to reach his inerrant and unchanging end, [1085A] by freely choosing to turn in the direction of what is inferior. Here the sense of “flowing down” can be understood literally, for though such a person had it well within his power to direct the footsteps of his soul to God, he freely chose to exchange what is better and real for what is inferior and non-existent.

St Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum 7. Translation by Fr Maximos (Nicholas Constas)

10.74} As for Elijah, he is the image of nature, not simply because he preserved inviolate the principles of his own nature (along with the deliberative frame of mind appropriate to these principles) free from any change due to passion, but because he taught by judging, like a kind of natural law, those who twist nature to unnatural ends. For such is nature, punishing those who undertake to violate it to the degree that they actually live in unnatural opposition to it, by not allowing them to acquire naturally all of nature’s power, for they have been partially deprived of its very integrity and for this they are punished, since it is they themselves who pointlessly and foolishly [1164D] have procured this lack of existence by inclining toward non-being.

Ambiguum 10

>>>>Elijah was free from passions? Didn’t he call down fire on the king’s army?

>>>>Notice how he says “inclining toward non-being.”  That is about as stark an admission of chain of being that I have ever seen.  I did worry at a time that I might be reading chain of being into ancient sources.  That is no longer the case.  You do not get any clearer than that.  In fact, this is far clearer than Plato ever was.

29. Just as evil is a privation of good, and ignorance a privation of knowledge, so non-being is a privation of being – not of being in a substantive sense, for that does not have any opposite, but of being that exists by participation in substantive being. The first two privations mentioned depend on the will of creatures; the third lies in the will of the Maker, who in His goodness wills beings always to exist and always to receive His blessings.

St Maximos Four Hundreds Texts on Love, Third Century. Philokalia v 2

 

On why I am opposed to magic ontologies

You might expect me to say, “Because God condemns sorcery.”  That is true.  Or you might expect me to say, “Burning incense to the Queen of Heaven is a sin.”  That is true.  But that is not what I am talking about.  I was in some fascinating Facebook discussions about Greek thought.  Here is a summary of my points:

I do not think there is a dichotomy between Hebrew and non-Hebrew languages. In that sense I agree with Barr’s critique. However, Greek though, influenced by Egyptian magic (Plato studied in Egypt), does have differences with the structures behind the “Hebrew way of life.”

We will say it another way–and this is where Augustine is very helpful, if very wrong: when I ascend up the chain of being, do I gain more being inversely with corporeality?

But if you read Ps. Dionysius and others, one knows God by beginning with abstract concepts of Deity and then rises up the chain of being by negating those concepts. Plotinus, Nyssa, Origen, Evagrius and others are very clear on this. Jesus, on the other hand, descends to us and takes flesh and knowing him we know God.

Footnote: in the eschaton are we going to drink wine on Yahweh’s mountain or achieve hyperousia and contemplate the Empyrean Forms?

when I say thought patterns I mean the way the human brain forms ideas. They most certainly saw the world differently, which might be why God called for war against Hellenism in Zechariah 9.

John Henry Cardinal Newman summarizing the anchoretic life (which is Hellenism applied). 
“Surely the idea of an apostle, ummarried, pure in fast and nakedness, and at length a martyr, is a higher idea than that of one of the old Israelites, sitting under his vine and fig-tree, full of temporal goods, surrounded by his sons and grandsons” (Newman, Loss and Gain).

This is chain-of-being ethics in all of its terrible purity. There is a line in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time where wolves will stop what they are doing, even sacrifice the whole pack, to kill a Myrdraal (think goblin bad guy). That’s sort of how I feel about chain of being ontology.

And it is by no means a Greek thing. I have long maintained that the Greeks–Plato–borrowed from Egyptian magic religion. ANd you can find similar horrors in other Eastern religions.

Once you accept chain-of-being as the normative paradigm for getting our thoughts about God, and we see this same paradigm in other religions (and hermetic traditions), then it doens’ tmake any sense to say, “Well, our’s is different.”

I realize it looks like I am equating neo-Platonic magic with all of Hellenism. Allow me to clarify. I see a continuity between neo-Platonism and earlier Hellenisms. Almost all (all?) hold to an ontology of overcoming estrangement. Secondly, neo-Platonism is simply the apex and most beautiful finale of Hellenistic thought. (When the last Magus, Iamblichus, died, NeoPlatonism and Hermeticism (basically the same thing) went underground until the Templars. This lines up with Justinian’s closing the academies and Damasius’s getting back at him by pretending to be Dionysius the Aeropogatie. I pick on NeoPlatonism because most ancient Christian thinkers drew upon some variety of it.

And by the way: I have read DEEPLY into the ancient hermetic, magical, and neo-platonic traditions from a historical standpoint. You can line up Origen and Trismegestus on ontology and it is basically the same thing. I want to consider myself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets (no, I don’t predict the future). As a result I violently hate all forms of magic. PM me if you want more details. I don’t want to go into it in public.

A Clement-Plotinus connection?

Plotinus studied philosophy at Alexandria in the 230s, at a time when Clement’s works would have been well known among the city’s Christian scholars. Plotinus’ famous teacher, Ammonius Saccas, was either a Christian throughout his life (as believed by Eusebius) or had been raised a Christian and converted to paganism (as claimed by Porphyry). It thus is not unlikely that Plotinus encountered the Stromata in his studies. If so, could it have been from Clement that he derived the idea of using energeia as the key to his own theory of emanation?

David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West

Killing Dinosaurs

Orthodox Bridge compares the Protestant search for the “early church” to the movie Jurassic Park.   As usual, it’s the same thing as the other articles in that site.   But here goes:

to adopt an episcopal structure would mean surrendering congregational autonomy so precious to so much of Evangelicalism.

But are the only two options available episcopacy and congregationalism?  To anyone who has been to a Presbytery meeting this is silly.  For what it’s worth, I have no administrative problems with episcopacy.  What RA is not telling you is that False Dionysius’s ontology undergirds RA’s understanding of episcopacy: the bishop mediates grace to the priest who mediates it to you.

He quotes Ignatius on where the bishop is present in the congregation, there is the church.   A few minutes reflection will show OB really doesn’t believe this without qualification:  the last Greek service I went to did not have a bishop present.   So is Ignatius using the term “bishop” like the apostles did, something akin to the president of the assembly?

Many Protestants by reading only the Bible and ignoring the early church fathers end up projecting their Protestant bias onto church history.

This is bearing false.   He is equivocating on the terms “evangelical” and “protestant.”  I have challenged him dozens of times to clarify his terms, and he occasionally does, so he knows better.  When I was in seminary, as lame as the curriculum was, we read more of the medievals and church fathers than we did of the Puritans (or Bucer, or Melanchton, or John Knox, or Samuel Rutherford. Okay, I will stop).

 Similarly, for Protestants all they had to go by were ancient patristic texts but no living church tradition that goes back to the early Church.  This leaves them guessing as to what the early Church must have been like.

Quick question: Where is the “link” (since we are talking about dinosaurs) between verifiable apostolic documents and traditions like burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and the iconostasis?  There is none; therefore, he must admit to his own reconstruction.

 Protestants end up having to reconstruct the early Church as they best understood it to have been. The Jesus Movement of the 1970s had house churches where people sat on the floor, played guitars and sang praise songs, and everyone with a Bible in their hands.

More false witness, for he is equating hippies with magisterial protestantism.  Martin Bucer did not think he was reinventing the wheel.  He (and others) didn’t want to worship God in a way that God had promised to kill his covenant people if they worshiped him in those modes.

The Protestant view of history assumes that there once was an apostolic Church but itno longer exists today.  But Protestants and Evangelicals need to ask the question:What if the apostolic Church still exists today?  What if there was a church where the errors of the papacy were avoided?  What if that church was within driving distance today?

You show me the verifiable, written link between the apostles and burning incense to the Queen of Heaven.  I deny that a church that does so is a true church.

But when approached from the standpoint of the Old Testament pattern of worship transformed by the New Covenant of Jesus Christ, the Divine Liturgy makes perfectly good sense.  The vestments worn by Orthodox priests are patterned after those worn by the Old Testament priests.

But the OT worship is types and shadows.  Why are you gong back to types and shadows?  I agree with your comparison.  That is why we don’t do it.

If Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb who takes away the sins of the world then it makes sense to view the Eucharist as the culmination of the Old Testament sacrificial system.

But if Jesus was once for all sacrificed, then why repeat it?

A careful reading shows that icons have a biblical basis in the Old Testament (Exodus 26, 2 Chronicles 3).

Church art is a different category than saying we worship God through pictorial intermediaries (which Karl Barth defined as the essence of idolatry).  It is bad logic to jump from cherubim on the ark to making a picture of God.   Further, if the OT is types and shadows, then the argument, such that it is, nearly refutes itself!

Protestant ecclesiology assumes a major discontinuity in history.

Said no magisterial Reformer ever.  Third instance of bearing false witness.

Protestant church history is based on the idea that there once was a pure and apostolic Church but that early Church fell into spiritual darkness.

The apostle Paul said that wolves would come in after he left.  He also warned against Hellenistic philosophy.  The Orthodox church is heavily Hellenistic.  Who is the “BOBO” now?

The current Patriarch of Antioch,John X, can trace his apostolic succession back to the first century.

Caiaphas killed Jesus and he could trace his claim back to Aaron.

The early form of church government was episcopal – rule by bishop.  Ignatius of Antioch, the third bishop of Antioch and a disciple of the Apostle John, wrote a series of letters on his way to martyrdom in Rome in 98 or 117 about the importance of obeying the bishop.  In his letters he exhorted people not to celebrate the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper) apart from the bishop

Except that most (all?) Orthodox churches do not have bishops presiding every Lord’s Day.  Which means that “bishop” was understood more along the lines of presiding elder.  The very quote from Ignatius seems to imply this.  Did OB even read it?

Continuity in theology

It’s not enough to claim continuity with the apostles.  The Jesus-murderers could claim continuity with Aaron.  The Episcopals can claim apostolic succession.  You must also, per your reading, claim theological continuity.  Okay, so where was the essence/energies distinction back then?

While Basil did anticipate elements of it, the Cappadocians saw God’s ousia as his divine life, not a hidden interiority.   FTW.