Charles Victor on Religion

We are accustomed to looking upon the universities as the loci of scholarly investigation and consideration, but in the centuries before these institutions were born in the West scholarship found its hibernaculum in the great monasteries. The reflections of the ninth century Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, evidence the vitality extant in these great houses of study and prayer. Erigena is beholden to Pseudo-Dionysius and thus to Plato and Plotinus, but also to a number of the Greek Fathers, the founding theologians of Eastern orthodoxy. Continue reading →

St. Paul, while preaching in Athens, converted to the faith a certain Dionysius, a member of the once potent but still prestigious body that sat at the Areogapus (Ares’ Hill). Centuries later (circa 500AD), an anonymous scholar of notable abilities seemingly wished to provide his considerations with greater cachet and adopted the name. It took a millennium to recognize an allonym had been employed, but the desired celebrity had been won. Continue reading →

Augustine lived in an age of anxiety.The established state and the civilized world were being eroded by foreign elements once considered the necessary components of political stabilization and economic surety, and by political divisiveness and uncertainty as to how to deflate or to correct this oversight of judgement now virtually incorporate in the system of state. Policies of immigration, accommodation, and colonialism—one time solutions to social, economic and security problems–had transformed into situations that were not only unravelling the status quo, but toppling an entire civilization, and replacing it with something very other, something the history texts are wont to call the barbarian invasions. The 330AD move of the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium renamed Constantinople was a tacit abdication of imperial power in the West. Continue reading →

Plotinus is the last flower of the world as Greek. After him it is the Roman influence that ascends in cult and culture, and its power comes in two flavours: practicality, and legality. Both these, along with Plotinus, and the Judeo-Christian scriptures fuse in the anabatic mind of Augustine, fifth century bishop of Hippo, the last great philosopher and theologian before the crepuscule of the Dark Ages, the father of the theories of original sin, predestination, illuministic spirituality, and, not least, blain on my pre-adolescent mind. Continue reading →

In the ancient world there was a detectable ennui with the ability of any cult or philosophy to wield a binding vision. There was more serious discontent with the lack of an embraceable order to govern the acts of men. Greek thought could allow for the intellectual elite to find spiritual peace in the contemplation of the Pure Act or the Idea of the Good, or to exalt forbearance (Stoicism), or to flaunt the ephemeral nature of time (Epicureanism), but the masses of humanity were in want and in search of an understanding, a way, a light, a truth to live by in hope and with hope. Christianity was on the cusp of being able to fulfil that need. Unfortunately, history always seems to take the long and circuitous road, and along the way many things change, many things fail to happen, many things get tied up in indecipherable knots. Continue reading →

In the theories of Plato and Aristotle we have the two poles of occidental philosophical thought. All that follows orbits in some degree about one of these two understandings of how reality is constructed, and how we come to know it. Yet, as a culture we have another corpus of consideration regarding the ideas of god and soul, the Jewish and Christian scriptures. They are not philosophies, but spiritual speculations (or according to some, revelations) conveyed in socio-religious imagery and ethical codes. They, like philosophy, attest to the search for meaning, at first tribally, then individually, and finally universally. Continue reading →