Download PDF | Bruce V. Foltz - Byzantine Incursions on the Borders of Philosophy_ Contesting the Boundaries of Nature, Art, and Religion-Springer International Pub,2019.
280 Pages
Preface to Byzantine Incursions by Bruce Foltz
It is remarkable how little attention philosophers have paid to Byzantium. To a greater extent than the Latin-speaking West, where a tiny flame of learning was kept alive in monasteries, Byzantium inherited the full panoply of ancient philosophical culture. Although long-standing stereotypes would tell us that the Byzantines did little with this inheritance, recent research is increasingly revealing the depth and originality of prominent Byzantine thinkers such as Maximus the Confessor, John Damascene, and Gregory Palamas.
Just as importantly, these thinkers were not splendid comets lighting up the night sky, but spokesmen of a comprehensive Weltanschauung that also found expression in Byzantine art, architecture, hymnody, and legal and political life. Unlike modern philosophers, who necessarily speak as advocates of one particular view among others, Byzantine thinkers spoke from within the common understanding of God and the cosmos that was shared throughout the Eastern Christian world. It was this rich but unified Eastern Christian civilization that was the true successor of the ancient Roman Empire and the early Christian church.
In encountering it, we do not enter upon some exotic by-way, but upon a journey into the most comprehensive and fully developed expression of our own heritage. A volume of Byzantine Incursions written by a philosopher is therefore much to be welcomed. I hasten to add, however, that the focus of the present volume is not primarily historical. Although the author has a deep knowledge of the history of both philosophy and of Eastern Christianity, he writes as a thinker concerned with the issues and challenges of our own times. Perhaps most of all, he is concerned with the possibility of finding truth and beauty in an increasingly technological age.
A brief review of what he tells us of his life story will help to clarify his distinctive concerns. As he explains in Chapter Five, his own journey to Byzantium began with his youthful experiences of the beauty of nature, including some that verged upon the mystical. After several years spent in Zen Buddhism, he found in the philosophy of Heidegger an explanation of how the depth of meaning that he recognized in nature has come to be marginalized within modern thought.
He also found (or thought he found) the possibility of entering into a truer relationship with Being (das Sein) Although he does not mention it here, it was during these years that Professor Foltz produced a distinguished volume on Heidegger’s philosophy of nature and served as founder and first president of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Eventually, through reading Heideggerian interpretations of Christianity, he came to embrace a symbolic and demythologized form of Christian belief. Christian practice, however, has a way of moving the soul even when there is no intent that it should do so. Eventually, seeking a deeper sense of true worship, he decided to visit a local Orthodox parish. There he encountered the transcendent beauty of the Divine Liturgy. As he recalls, “I don’t know what I had been expecting. But not this, to be so completely swept away, taken up into I knew not what.”
Here was a form of praxis that offered what Heidegger had only theorized about, an encounter with true Being, known now to be not just a What, but a Who. The Divine Liturgy is perhaps the central cultural legacy of Byzantium, although it of course cannot be separated from the rest of Orthodox theological and liturgical tradition. It was from within Orthodoxy that Professor Foltz began to recover the riches of Byzantium and to see how powerfully they answer to the deepest needs of modern life.
This brief account may make our author’s work seem more programmatic than it actually is, and if so I do him a disservice. The reader will find here many fascinating excursions into topics one would not ordinarily link together. They range from the difference between art that is religious and that which is sacred, to the true demands of agape, to the paradoxes of the mathematics of infinity, to the centrality of imagination in university education.
Among the author’s favorite interlocutors are not only Byzantine thinkers such as Maximus and Palamas and philosophers such as Plato, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, but the novelist Dostoevsky, the poet Blake, the great iconographer Rublev, and the little known Russian polymath, Pavel Florensky.
Amidst this intellectual bounty, one always finds a mind that is fully awake, intent on answering questions that most of us have scarcely even considered, much less asked with such intensity. Even those who may disagree with the author’s conclusions can scarcely come away without being moved to look at things in a new way and to begin asking new questions. For my own part, I like to think that I have learned much from these essays, including how much I have yet to learn. It is with pleasure that I join the author in offering them to the world. May they help lead many into the riches of Byzantium. Professor of Philosophy David Bradshaw University of Kentucky Lexington, KY, USA.
Introduction: Why Byzantium?
This is a transitive book, a book of transitions, perhaps a book of translations as well, or better yet transpositions. Its rather odd-sounding title, Byzantine Incursions, suggests some of the borders that it attempts to breach, several of the boundaries it seeks to infringe. Most obviously, these chapters represent a series of incursions from the region of Byzantine thought into territory long claimed by Western philosophy and theology. But at the same time, they exhibit a more subtle (and often exploratory) project of attempting, beginning with thoughts and questions inevitably rooted in the West, to penetrate as deeply as possible into the Byzantine philosophical and spiritual landscape—and thus into terrain that is, as it should and must be, uniquely resistant to that incursion.
At the same time, this book, in proceeding from West to East, hopes to more resemble the seeking of Yeats (or, better yet, the pilgrim Egeria) than the hostile incursion of the Fourth Crusade, which sought not comprehension but only plunder. And hopefully, too, the Byzantium with which I concern myself is not the imaginary city of golden dreams fashioned by the poet’s yearning, but rather the heavenly city that the Byzantines sought to bring down to earth, the city of Uncreated Light infusing the visible, and which they have always chosen to present in leaves of gold upon their icons.
At the same time, however, these are also incursions and sometimes raids back and forth between the visible and the invisible: first of all between the natural world and the divine energies with which Byzantine thought has always found the former to be infused and saturated and—to those with eyes to see, that is, to “the pure of heart”—glorified. Between experienced realities and the logoi or inner depths that sustain them and grant them beauty and significance and ontological weight.
Creator and creation, transcendence and immanence, and visible and invisible have too long in the West been divorced and isolated from one another, resulting in a metaphysical devastation and devaluation through which the former has been rendered an abstraction and vapor and the latter a nihilistic wasteland, desolate of life or goodness or beauty—in Nietzsche’s prescient terms, an earth unchained from its sun and increasingly hurtling into the icy abysses of trackless space.
I am philosophically convinced that the severing of transcendence and immanence which everywhere afflicts us today cries out for healing, even as the urgency of this therapeutic task comes to the foreground in many areas of Western culture. But it is an open question whether this must entail forcing the fading ghost of transcendence into purely immanent enclosures, as in the reductionist hermeneutics of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, or whether it will look instead toward a transfiguration of earth and humanity with the light of a rediscovered holiness.
The latter was the perennial project of Byzantine culture, just as much in its Slavic and Arabic manifestations as in its Greek inception, whose signature instantiation was the Great Church, the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, with its dome mirroring the liturgical drama for which it was built: to bring heaven down to earth, even as it elevated and transfigured the earthly—a striking contrast to the Gothic spires of the Latin West which, a thousand years later, pointed implacably away from earth toward a heaven en route to which we must climb upon innumerable rationalistic rungs—and as Kierkegaard saw, our steps will always be too few—or else try to catapult ourselves into the heavenly ether with the aid of faith, which came to be understood by the Reformers not as trust in lived epiphanies but as an exercise in willed belief.
With regard to human aspirations and prospects, the incursions seek above all that most remarkable Byzantine breakthrough of theosis—i.e., that impossible infusion of humanity with divine energies that is so thoroughgoing as to constitute a divinization, a becoming-divine through grace. And this is how it is summed up by the Byzantine-Russian thinker Dostoevsky—that great Eastern counterweight (and fellow diagnostician of nihilism) to Nietzsche—who foresaw the decisive choice for humanity as one between the reign of the man-god, of humanity usurping the role of the Creator with the most disastrous consequences, and the God-man, of humanity united with the God who has Himself come to be united with us.
Why Byzantium? Because I believe that the perennial problem of the relation between transcendence and immanence has found its most fully satisfactory answer in the philosophical and theological legacy of Byzantine thought, which has always sought to bring together strands tenaciously held separate in the West, and indeed that at its heart is and always has been precisely that transitive movement.
For this reason, these chapters may well seem like incursions of theology into philosophy and at other times incursions of philosophical thought past the boundaries proper to it and into the territory of theology. De jure, asks the Kantian magistrate: by what right this disregard of passports and papers and proper ports of entry? But the answer lies in the very proximity of God to the world. “The Eastern tradition,” argues Vladimir Lossky, one of Russia’s finest modern thinkers, “knows nothing of ‘pure nature’ to which grace is added as a supernatural gift. For it, there is no [purely] natural or ‘normal’ state…. ‘Pure nature,’ for Eastern theology, would thus be a philosophical fiction…”1 That is, there can be no purely “natural theology” from this perspective, or rather, such a project would of necessity be an adventure in distortion. The rigid distinction between reason and revelation, if it is to be more than just a matter of relative emphasis, is alien to Byzantine thought.
God is always already with us. Already in the fourth century, the beginnings of this Byzantine permeation of life and thought with spiritual matters were wryly noted by St. Gregory of Nyssa. Depicting everyday life in ancient Constantinople, he remarks “Every place in the city, the narrow streets, the markets, the squares…. If you ask any of them about money, they will always produce philosophical discourse about the generate and the ingenerate [peri gennetou kai agennetou]; if you seek to learn the price of bread, you will get the [heretical] statement, ‘the Father is greater, and the Son subordinate.’ If, again, you were to say that the bathing apparatus is comfortable, you would be [just as heretically] instructed that the Son is out of nothing [ek ouk onton].”
The Greek historian of Byzantine philosophy, Basil Tatakis, concludes that however whimsical Gregory’s prose may be here, “yet this attachment, this total dedication of the soul to high spiritual objects, which becomes the object of Gregory of Nyssa’s satire because of its heterodox deviation, constitutes the secure key for the understanding of Byzantine civilization…. This is finally what gives the wonderful unity which Byzantine civilization presents.”2 But perhaps, too, the incursions in this book might also seem Byzantine in the pejorative sense we have inherited from Enlightenment despisers of Byzantium, such as Edward Gibbon: needlessly complicated and oddly convoluted—strangely antiquated when viewed from within the streamlined, functionalistic intellectual landscape of both modern and, unwittingly, postmodern rationalities—anathema equally to the Age of Progress and our own Age of Irony.
But here the “Byzantine” rubric is less appropriate and, indeed, I believe deeply misleading. For even though its conceptual elaboration, employing the discursive tools of language and reason, will surely end up (perhaps even of necessity) seeming arcane and complex, as generating juxtapositions that are far from neatly categorical, what this effort seeks to reach is itself sublimely simple and perfectly elegant, refracting light confusingly in disparate directions only when the arguments and concepts and illumined objects are themselves clung to with the death grip of a swimmer who has lost his nerve over deep waters.
Tatakis, writing elsewhere, notes an antinomy at the heart of Byzantine philosophy: The Byzantines were totally committed to Christian mysticism [resulting in] the following antinomy: on the one hand, the constant effort to express theological thought in a purely logically abstract form, a goal which would secure the affirmation of logic; yet on the other hand, faith in God, who transcends human reasoning, who is elusive and incomprehensible. Logical form strives to encompass an essence that is by definition elusive.3 That is to say, the Byzantine thought that I have sought to appropriate during the last two decades is at its heart apophatic, ultimately committed to using words and concepts somewhat as the early Wittgenstein urged with his ladder analogy—as instruments of ascent to be kicked away, once the work has been done.
For that sublime simplicity—for the sake of which all the odd juxtapositions of one philosophical approach alongside another, one genre alongside another, and one conceptual framework after another are undertaken in this book—has already been captured gently and elegantly in a single Hebrew word: Immanuel, God with us. It is this center, around which all Byzantine philosophy and theology, along with its art and holy hymns, its liturgies, and its symbolism, revolve—a movement that the essays in this book seek to emulate, however clumsily and feebly the movement, however weak the transitions, and however distant visible and invisible remain from one another. For surely it is most of all the movement itself—a movement both of thought and of spirit—that needs to be undertaken and sustained.
From Creation to Creator
These first chapters constitute preliminary explorations, border skirmishes within contested territories, rather than full-fledged incursions. Sometimes here Byzantium is evoked only indirectly or implicitly. Beginning with the natural, how does transcendence come into view—not just the thought of transcendence, but an encounter with the transcendent itself, which must by definition always possess a character of absolute otherness? And how can that Other enter into the Same of the world, without being reduced to its dimensions? The first chapter merely works its way toward the Byzantine intellectual landscape through a reflection on the experience of natural beauty and its strangeness or otherness, something only partly captured by the Kantian notion of the sublime, for it leads to an experience of the holy.
The second chapter, in turn, explores the limits of reason in its ability to proceed beyond the boundaries of the visible. And here the contested territory is not nature, but our understanding of human life as such, along with the requirements for certain kinds of understanding, the requirements for “seeing.” The third chapter very briefly suggests that relations between human beings, understood in relation to the ethical realm, cannot be adequately grasped in purely secular or worldly terms.
And the fourth chapter reaches a similar conclusion with regard to what has been seen by modernity as its greatest achievement: the understanding of nature through modern science, whose ability to comprehend nature as it presents itself to us, that is to “save the appearances,” is limited by a skepticism and indeed a “methodological atheism” that must always remain a precondition of science itself. That is, the “dianoetic” or explanatory account of science must be completed by a “noetic” or contemplative account, proceeding from humility and ascetic purification.
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