Oxford Patristics Conference

Last week I attended the biggest conference of my academic career, the fifteenth International Patristics Conference in Oxford. For those of you outside the field, this is a conference that is held every four years and had about a thousand scholars from around the globe attending.

It was fun to see the faces of all the people whose books I have been reading, and also the possibility to talk to some of them. Over all the social aspect of the event was what inspired me. To be perfectly honest, I did not find the actual papers and lectures that exciting, except four a couple that have direct relevance for my work. I guess I had hoped for more discussion on methods and the relation between Early Christian Studies and our present situation, which is what I am interested in. Now we had mostly very historical papers from the lesser scholars, while the giants presented overviews and synthesis of ancient thought. Impressive, but not exciting.

However, to meet these scholars was still interesting. Discussions of meals in St Edmund's Hall cover very interesting areas, and here I felt I was not alone in trying to seek contemporary relevance in the early Church. Somehow this interest, clearly present in the people I met, just did not seem to translate into the official proceedings. It was also interesting to see that - generalizing here - to most radical papers came from mostly female scholars of some maturity. There has been for some time a group of great women scholars in patristics, and the same group still is very good. But among the younger presenters, regardless of sex, it seemed people were dealing mostly with quite safe subjects.

This experience of mine could be caused by me not actually attending the right kind of conference, but I do not think this is the case, especially since I so much enjoyed spending time with these people. Rather, I have a feeling many shared my experience, which tells me that the problem seems to be in the general academic atmosphere at the moment, which seems to shy away from the radical and new.

Still, it was a great conference, well organized, and I especially appreciated again to meet my friends and colleagues in the now quite sizable group from the Nordic Countries.

I am Origen

This, of course, comes as a surprise to no one.

You’re Origen! You do nothing by half-measures. If you’re going to read the Bible, you want to read it in the original languages. If you’re going to teach, you’re going to reach as many souls as possible, through a proliferation of lectures and books. If you’re a guy and you’re going to fight for purity … well, you’d better hide the kitchen shears. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

13 Letters by St. Augustine

I usually do not advertise books on my blog, but this is a bit special... It is the first book published in my name, and I'm quite proud of it. It is a Swedish translation of 13 of St. Augustine's letters, that I co-edited with Anni Maria Laato. I worked mainly on turning rough translations into nice Swedish and wrote parts of the introduction (on Asceticism and on Pelagianism.)

It is a nice little introduction to Augustine. People who read Swedish and are interested can order the book here for merely 98 Swedish crowns.

Biblicalia: Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Kevin P. Edgecomb has started to post his translations of the Apophthegmata Patrum, one of the most important and interesting of the early Christian texts. If you're not familiar with these sayings, here's you chance.

Universalism

"the lost message" (aka Simon?) has been pondering the possibility of salvation for all in a number of interesting posts. I'd like to offer my perspective.

First of all, Universalism, or apokatastasis panton as us patristics snobs like to refer to it, was fairly widely accepted in the early Church. Origen usually gets the blame/credit, but his teacher Clemens of Alexandria is the first father we know thought that all would finally be saved. Several other fathers subscribed to this opinion, including heavyweights Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzes. Basil, their friend and brother was of a different opinion though, but he writes at one point that most ordinary Christians believed in this. Finally I'd like to mention Isaac of Nineveh. If it were not for the fact that it will be at least two years until it comes out I would plug my book as a decent study on this and other fascinating aspects of Isaac's thought.

I find the apokatastasis doctrine appealing, not only for the obvious reasons, that it enables us to make sense of God's love. Even if we believe that we can not really understand what God's love means, a love that will lead to the eternal punishments of a substantial part of humanity just does not seem to have any analogous connection with human love to me.

Of course what happens beyond death is something we can merely hope for, and I guess any rightminded Christian hopes that God would find a way to save everyone. But I like the fact that if we adopt a universalist standpoint it gets rid of the awful idea that one is Christian, goes to church and prays, primarily to avoid hell in the next life. If we trust that God's love is strong enough to overcome not only sin, but egoism and selfhate as well, it makes possible an understanding of Christianity that focuses on how we can make this life easier, given whatever circumstances we have to live under.

Now, for arguments in favor of the apokatastasis, I'll gladly point you towards "the lost message".

Fighting Demons

Having addressed sin and original sin, I now move on to much less solid ground. While sin in its different forms is something most theologians have some thoughts about, the demons is much more elusive. It seems that there have always been people who believe that demons are some evil monsters that have a personal will and intelligence. It is not difficult to find such people today. Interestingly enough these are not the ones that really use this symbol in their understanding of the world. This is most obvious when studying the ascetic movement within Christianity during the fourth to sixth centuries.

The most well-known text from this period is probably the esteemed bishop Athanasios biography of Antony the Great. In this we see Antony do battle with myriads of demons. They have bodies (although different from ours) and they talk, fly and attack. Antony fights them by beating them at games of logic and with great courage.

However, when we turn to the letters of Antony, where we (probably) hear Antony himself (see Rubenson’s great study on these letters), a very different picture emerges. There is still a lot of talk about demons, but the demons that Antony teaches about are not flying monsters. Instead he uses the word demon almost interchangeably with the word passion. There is a demon/passion of pride, fornication, slander and so on. In other words, for Antony demons represent forces that tempt the individual to give up his quest for communion with God. Another genius ascetic, Evagrios of Pontos, talks of demons in much the same way.

Demons, then, have a similar role in Christian theology as original sin: both describe the forces outside the individual that have an impact on the individuals freedom and identity. The difference is in the way one uses these symbols. While original sin is a description of a situation one cannot do much about, demons are there to be fought!

When reading the ascetics discussions on the war against the demons a pattern emerges. The various demons usually have a common goal. Not, as one could suspect, to drive the ascetic to sin, but what they are attacking is the ascetics faith in the self-understanding as an ascetic. The demons all try to make the ascetic give up an return to society.

While I am slightly optimistic about the possibility to use the symbol original sin in a constructive way today, it is probably impossible to use the symbol demons with a wider audience. It is just to difficult to get images from The Exorcist and similar popular notions out of people’s heads! It is a real pity, because I think this kind of language is really useful.

Who haven’t felt that we are up against some inhuman forces when we try to address how the media works, how large corporations function, how university administration… You know what I mean. There is also the notion that demons possess people and make them do things they would not do otherwise. This is exactly what happens when normal human beings make choices to run down profit-making factories and move the production to third world sweat shops, because “the market demands it”. There are dark forces at work.

So, how do you fight demons? Well, the key is truth. It will, as you know, set us free. The thing demons do is they interfere with our senses (this is why the ancients always pointed out the danger of believing the senses). They make us believe that, for example, the global system called “the market” is something that exists by itself and that its rules are somehow “natural” and not made up by people. To fight such demons we must look deeper into the structures of reality. Only this way can we expose them for the liars they are.

The ascetic fathers also recommended asceticism as preparation for the battle. Now, asceticism is about putting distance between oneself and the things that affect us, to help us see clearer. It is about stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.

But in order to fight the demons of our time, we need ascetic practices suitable for our time.