Foreword by Rowan Williams
FOREWORD
Analysing how the earliest Christian writers set out to define and refine their concepts is an exercise that has been repeatedly reworked over the past two centuries. The once popular model of a Babylonian captivity imposed on the simple gospel by “Hellenistic” habits of mind has almost entirely disappeared from serious scholarship. A growing sophistication in our understanding of what happened to Greek philosophy in the first centuries of the Christian era prompted some more careful study of how the themes and vocabulary of that philosophy were digested and adapted, often in starthngly innovative ways, by Christian thinkers. The notion that patristic theologians, Greek and Latin alike, were either derivative or inept readers of philosophical texts has been very properly challenged, and the intellectual respectability and interest of Christian variations on their themes has been brought out (we might think here of Richard Sorabji’s work on cosmology, for example).
But the present study, by one of the most promising theological scholars of his generation, takes this a stage further. When we encounter a discussion in patristic literature of a topic we might categorize as metaphysical, we should beware of rushing to the conclusion that it is merely a Christian contribution to an ongoing philosophical debate. Patristic theologians undertake the labor of conceptual clarification with two main and related aims in mind: to provide a toolkit for reading the authoritative text of Scripture and to do so in such a way as to make sure that Scripture is read in a way congruent with the basic logic of how the infinite God must be spoken of if we are to avoid idolatrous and trivializing accounts of divine life and agency. Faced with a treatment of some apparently philosophical problem, we need to ask, “Exactly what exegetical pitfalls is this meant to help us avoid?” And because speaking nonidolatrously of God is fundamental to our spiritual well-being, we need equally to be alert to what specific ethical and spiritual temptations have to be circumvented and what turns of phrase give unacceptable room to such temptations.
This book offers an exemplary close reading of language about divine “simplicity”—the metaphysical assumption that the divine life cannot involve any sort of plurality or divisibility. That this is in some tension with claims about Trinitarian doctrine is a familiar issue, and there have been some sound studies of how this is dealt with in the post-Nicene period. But when pre-Nicene writers discuss divine simplicity, they have in mind a set of errors that must be avoided, hermeneutical dead ends that need to be ruled out—and ruled out not only because of conceptual incoherence but because of their effect on the coherence of the life of prayer and discipleship. As Pui Him Ip shows, Trinitarian language is itself, in the thought of the greatest of pre-Nicene thinkers, Origen of Alexandria, bound up with precisely this concern to provide a defensible way through some of the complications around simplicity and plurality. Unless we understand the very particular questions he is asking, we shall just repeat the mistakes of later Greek (and modern) theologians in writing off Origen’s Trinitarian scheme as an unhappy and inconsistent mélange of proper theological reflection and dubious “Middle Platonic” tropes. The argument of these pages urges, among much else, a more imaginative and generous reading of the great Alexandrian without suggesting that post-Nicene theology needs rewriting.
This is a study of admirable clarity and freshness, raising very substantial questions around method in patristic studies, the history of our histories of early Christian thinking, and the range of constraints that shape an agreed Christian “grammar” for speaking of the God of Jesus Christ. It will surely be recognized as a really significant contribution to its subject, necessary reading for serious students both of patristics and of the wider history of Christian thought.
Rowan Williams
Cardiff, August 2021