Willemien Otten

The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena

This book deals with Eriugenas view of man in the context of his thinking on universal nature. Although man is seen as possessing a sinful created state, this does not prevent him from entertaining a free and direct relationship with God and the surrounding universe. It is shown that, while man is governed by natures unfolding, he can also exercise significant control over it.

Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy

Throughout the history of Christian thought the theological role of scripture as source of transcendent meaning has exercised considerable influence on the art and manner of biblical interpretation. In the early church the problems revolved mostly around the canon, specifically although not exclusively the New Testament, as defining the confines of scripture. The question arose, therefore, which biblical writings were divinely inspired and which were of doubtful origin. The latter were unacceptable for the Christian communities that had broken away from their ancestral Judaic religion. Even before the canon was fixed, however, the problems shifted from the divinely inspired composition of the Bible to its intrinsic signification; interpreters saw scriptural language itself as infused with theological content. As exegetical positions led to the development of credal statements that solidified into theological dogma, the early church established a link between biblical interpretation and sound doctrine. By enforcing sanctioned interpretations through effective excommunication, an ever more powerful church sealed the dominance of orthodoxy over heresy with the nearly divine force of ecclesiastical authority. In the church-dominated culture of the Middle Ages, the adequacy of scriptural interpretation—its method, its content, the credentials of its practitioners—often depended on its conformity with an expanding theological tradition.

Augustine on Marriage, Monasticism, and the Community of the Church

The author attempts to situate Augustines theology of marriage in the broad historical and theological context of the early Church. She does so by connecting his view of marriage to his thinking on virginity and monastic life, and especially by integrating his views on all three states against the background of church preoccupations about the year 400. This more comprehensive account of Augustines views draws upon the Confessions, On the Good of Marriage, On Holy Virginity, and On the Work of Monks.

From Paradise to Paradigm

This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. The book explains both the appeal and the demise of this humanism.

Between Augustinian Sign and Carolingian Reality: the Presence of Ambrose and Augustine in the Eucharistic Debate Between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie

From a historical perspective, it seems fair to say that the heyday for eucharistie controversy was the era of the Reformation. In this period, more than in any other before or after it seems, there was an intense longing to define exactly what happens at the eucharist, i.e., at the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine as the age-old sacrament that became increasingly crucial in shaping the identity of the Christian communities. Given the nature of the Reformation movement

The Dialectic of the Return in Eriugena's Periphyseon

The Periphyseon , the magnum opus of the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810–877), is widely recognized as the most original work in the history of Christian thought between Augustine and Anselm. Set in the form of a dialogue between a Master and his Student, the Periphyseon presents a daring view of the universe, for which Eriugena coins the term natura . Instead of the traditional Christian dichotomy of God versus creation, Eriugena presents a unified view of reality, the intimidating whole of which he can only conceive by submitting it to a process of division. Hence the name Periphyseon or On the Division of Nature .

Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, Its Theoretical and Theological Appeal

The development of medieval Christian thought reveals from its inception in foundational authors like Augustine and Boethius an inherent engagement with Neoplatonism. To their influence that of Pseudo-Dionysius was soon added, as the first speculative medieval author, the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810–877 CE ), used all three seminal authors in his magisterial demonstration of the workings of procession and return. Rather than a stable ongoing trajectory, however, the development of medieval Christian (Neo)Platonism saw moments of flourishing alternate with moments of philosophical stagnation. The revival of the Timaeus and Platonic cosmogony in the twelfth century marks the achievement of the so-called Chartrian authors, even as the Timaeus never acquired the authority of the biblical book of Genesis. Despite the dominance of scholastic and Aristotelian discourse in the thirteenth century, (Neo)Platonism continued to play an enduring role. The Franciscan Bonaventure follows the Victorine tradition in combining Augustinian and Dionysian themes, but Platonic influence underlies the pattern of procession and return — reflective of the Christian arc of creation and salvation — that frames the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Echoing the interrelation of macro- and microcosmos, the major themes of medieval Christian Platonic thought are, on the one hand, cosmos and creation and, on the other, soul and self. The Dominican friar Meister Eckhart and the beguine Marguerite Porete, finally, both Platonically inspired late-medieval Christian authors keen on accomplishing the return, whether the aim is to bring out its deep, abyss-like “ground” (Eckhart) or to give up reason altogether and surrender to the free state of “living without a why” (Marguerite), reveal the intellectual audacity involved in upending traditional theological modes of discourse.

On Sacred Attunement, Its Meaning and Consequences: A Meditation on Christian Theology*

Coming from my background in medieval Christianity and thinking about theological matters, I am fairly certain that I would not have thought of Sacred Attunement as the most obvious title for a contemporary theological project that aspires to be both innovative and classical. Sacred Atonement would sooner come to mind. For behind that title one can discern the vast horizon of Anselm of Canterbury’s great project Why God Became Man ðCur deus homo, ca. 1098 CEÞ, which still forms the essence of Christian redemption theology, stretching itself out from medieval until present times. Leaving the homophonic quality of “attunement” and “atonement” aside for the moment, I find the analogy with Anselm’s medieval project more than a gratuitous one. After all, Anselm’s treatise came about as a direct response to a contemporaneous dispute with Judaism on the question of whether incarnation was a fitting gesture for God to make given the dignity of the divine, as Jews were among the most learned critics Anselm faced. The simultaneous closeness of and difference between Christianity and Judaism that I suggest here will be an underlying theme in my response, which will

Special Issue: The Augustinian Moment

The issue of the Journal of Religion that lies before you has a markedly different format than that to which readers of the journal are normally accustomed. As a thematic one, the current issue contains four essays on Augustine’s Confessions that have formally in common that they were all read at a one-day conference held on May 26, 2010, at the University of Chicago Divinity School. My reason for organizing this conference lies in the remarkably enduring centrality of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) in theological and philosophical thought. Augustine has been at the center of a host of recent studies and developments, all of which show that despite the secularization of Western culture, there is a significant expansion, rather than reduction, of his role. From a major Latin church father he has developed into an enduring intellectual patriarch and epistemological mainstay of the West. As a result, his works and reception have a different fate than other patristic writings, as they remain actively and widely discussed in a variety of scholarly fields, both inside and outside the sphere of Christianity. This is especially true of his Confessions, which since the Renaissance has been taken to uncover Augustine’s innermost thoughts and never seems to have been read more as such than today. The uniqueness of this situation has led James O’Donnell quite rightly to claim in his new biography of Augustine (Augustine: A New Biography [New York: HarperCollins, 2005]) that there is no neutral starting point from which to undertake the study of the historical Augustine, since

The Suspended Middle. Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural

John Milbank is one of the most prominent representatives, if not the outright founder, of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy movement. Inasmuch as this English based but strongly ecumenical theological movement aims at retrieving the Christian tradition for the purpose of doing contemporary theology with a critical posture towards its surrounding culture, they have considered it in its premodern phase as basking in a deifying, Neoplatonic light. Naturally, that is, when seen from a Neoplatonic perspective, Augustine and the Greek fathers have enjoyed their primary sympathy. But Radical Orthodoxy has developed a strong interest in Thomas Aquinas as well, typecast more as quintessentially Catholic than historically medieval it seems, even though on the surface Aquinas may be harder to reconcile with Neoplatonism. The way to do so could have gone the historical route as in recent studies by Fran O’Rourke by tracing the Dionysian element in Aquinas and to a certain extent the path of Dionysius and John of Damascus is indeed being followed, presented on p. 19 as the dominance of Augustinianism in Thomas blended with Procleanism, but Milbank, who appears to revel in performing theological acrobatics of the most difficult, if not convoluted kind, has decided in this book to walk us instead through the thought and works of Henri de Lubac. He finds the reason and occasion for this approach in De Lubac’s Surnaturel, published in 1946 and condemned in the Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in 1950. The work has never been translated into English. Justifying De Lubac’s findings on the supernatural as true to the thought of Thomas, he engages in a reading of Aquinas and the medieval tradition that may not yet be fully Neoplatonic but that is certainly non-neo-Thomistic and as such, if we follow the compelling logic of Milbank’s double negation, less Aristotelian and more truly Thomistic. As a side-effect, calling de Lubac the greatest twentiethcentury theologian proves another way for Milbank to criticize the primacy of Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, which for Milbank is a divine gnostic drama (p. 14) and insufficiently rationally consistent. As Milbank states on p. 53, De Lubac’s view of the supernatural which he wants to highlight in celebrating this author as the greatest twentieth-century