Journal of Early Christian Studies

Throughout his career, Andrew Louth has expertly and eloquently insisted that contemporary Christian theology must constantly draw from its sources in ancient and medieval works. His thesis on Karl Barth signaled an early interest in the crisis of modern theological thinking. Two books in the early 1980s made his position clear and encouraged many like-minded readers. The Origins of the [End Page 452] Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (1981) both diagnosed and attempted to overcome the “divorce” between mystical theology (which, for Louth, held priority) and dogmatic theology. Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (1983) employed Gadamer and other philosophers in its critique of the “historical-critical method” imposed by the Enlightenment, and proposed—based on a sympathetic reading of patristic authors and some modern philosophers—that theology is “the apprehension of the believing mind combined with a right state of the heart, to use Newman’s terms. It is tested and manifest in a life that lives close to the mystery of God in Christ, that preserves for all men a testimony to that mystery which is the object of our faith, and, so far as it is discerned, awakens in the heart a sense of wondering awe which is the light in which we see light” (147).

Both works, and many subsequent monographs, articles and editions, established Louth as both a thoughtful and eloquent theological critic of modernity, a guide to the sympathetic reading of and guidance by the fathers of the church, and an heir to an earlier learned English divine, John Wesley.

Thanks to his early works, Louth gained many admirers across the spectrum of Christian thinkers, particularly among those who valued the earlier proposals of Catholic ressourcement scholars such as Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. His conversion to Russian Orthodoxy increased his appeal to Eastern Orthodox thinkers, as well. That rare scholar of early Christian texts who is also familiar with Byzantine theology and fully conversant with modern philosophical and theological works, his turn to Orthodoxy enabled this Festschrift.

The book has five parts. Each one reflects Louth’s double concern—of examining in detail the development of particular thinkers or movements in eastern orthodox thought, and of engaging them to reflect critically upon contemporary views. For instance, in the first part, Thomas Graumann takes up the question of the Council of Ephesus’s nuanced reception of the Nicene Creed, while John Behr begins his essay entitled “Reading the Fathers Today” by following in the footsteps of Louth: regretting the limitations of the critical-historical, socially-contextualized reading of early Christian thinkers and proposing alternatively their appreciative reception based in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.

Three essays treat the Byzantine period: Mary Cunningham traces the reception of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in eighth-century Byzantine theologians; Krastu Banev the expansion of thought on the themes of the church and the Virgin Mary in Byzantine psalmody and hymns; and Jane Baun surveys and recommends the neglected, “more modest lights” of Byzantine theology between the deaths of John of Damascus in 749 and Gregory Palamas in 1359.

In the book’s third part, “Dialogue Between East and West,” a huge, 53-page essay by John Milbank compares the Christian reception of Platonism in eastern and western Christianity and resolves their apparently opposed views of final beatitude, while Augustine Casiday proposes Boethius was not merely a philosopher, but a theologian. Parts four and five of the book move to the modern period. In “Modern Theology,” Antoine Arjakovsky outlines alternative historiographies of Orthodoxy, particularly in light of the Orthodox school of Paris; Paul Gavrilyuk describes the relationship between Vladimir Lossky and Georges [End Page 453] Florovsky, both exiled Russians formed in the Parisian community and eager to represent Orthodoxy in and to the West. The final section is “The Future of Patristics”; in “Patristics after Neo-Patristics” Cyril Horovun allows...