I am a constructive theologian and philosopher of religion focused in the confluence between systematic, philosophical, and mystical theology, psychotherapy, and the arts. My key interests are in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Rudolf Otto, and Martin Luther
Within Rudolf Otto’s (1869-1937) hauntingly evocative anatomy of The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilig... more Within Rudolf Otto’s (1869-1937) hauntingly evocative anatomy of The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige), The Book of Job is revered as an unparalleled expression of the Numinous: the consciousness (gefühl) of the Numen or God expressed principally within the elements of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a mystery of fear and longing). Conspicuously, Otto also acknowledges an even darker shade of the numinous arising in Job’s climactic whirlwind: a theophanous eruption of creation which discloses something “wellnigh demonic” as well as “wholly incomprehensible” about the “character of the eternal creative power”. Such terror transcends that of the natural sublime, and even the dread of the Negative Sublime. Insofar as “It has something spectral in it”, the terror of Job is the dread of the numinous, or even, as I here examine, the exceptional horror of the Negative Numinous (Negativ-Numinose). Expanding upon Otto’s underdeveloped category in a quasi-Jungian idiom, I also call this “Negative” the shadow-side of the numinous: the dark excess of the non-rational tremendum which threatens to overwhelm fascination and exceeds theological attempts at rational sublimation. Despite reason’s best endeavours, Otto’s Negative Numinous must, in a sense, remain underdeveloped insofar as it attempts the unviable task of representing the horrendum as the apotheosis of tremendum: a horror seemingly “cut loose” from the dialectical techtonics of mysterium tremendum et fascinans and “intensified” to the dark fringes of a “demonic”. This inscrutably demonic Negative Numinous is a mysterium horrendum which seemingly eclipses all hope of fascinosum—understood as the element of Love or Grace which theologically balances, mitigates, or sublimates divine wrath
Principally, Luther defers from philosophy's authority to the authority of theology owing to an i... more Principally, Luther defers from philosophy's authority to the authority of theology owing to an intense recognition of theology's ultimate foundation in revelation. Allied to this is a suspicion about philosophy's intellectual hubris and speculative neglect of the individual coram Deo ("before God")-the "God" who is only known as revealed pro me ("for me"). As it transpires in modern philosophy's emergence from its "service" to theology, variations of such concerns come to shape a new philosophical horizon which, for better or ill, come closer to Luther's own in important and underexamined ways. Under implicit or explicit influence from Luther, key figures in modern European philosophy reconfigure critical new modes of philosophy which can be read to reflect Lutheran concerns about the nature of philosophy and reason itself. This story is related through key figures in modern philosophy (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger), leading from the birth and apotheosis of the modern, through to the critical emergence of the postmodern. Through the critical reception of Luther in these philosophers, it is shown that modern European philosophy regularly deals with Lutheran tensions but often produces visions of the role of reason and selfhood which would have deeply troubled Luther himself. Nonetheless, there are also signs of a recovery of Luther's suspicions about the possibilities of knowing which also bring into question the parameters of postmodern philosophy itself.
This article explores the religious symbolism of death and resurrection in works by Dostoevsky, H... more This article explores the religious symbolism of death and resurrection in works by Dostoevsky, Holbein, Kazantzakis, and Kierkegaard, examining the imaginative correlation between the death of God and the sickness of the soul. Exploring the symbolic analogy between the death of the self and the death of God evoked by these works, I offer an existential reading of the death and raising of Lazarus as an allegory of despair over the possibility of salvation. I illustrate this existential disease via a symbolic reading of two artistic depictions of death and resurrection. Beginning with reference to Nikos Kazantzakis's account of the death of Lazarus in The Last Temptation, and proceeding to Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous description in The Idiot of Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), I endeavor to articulate a constructive existential and psychological analogy between the death of the self and despair over the death of God (interpreted as an expression of the loss of hope in salvation). Finally, by reading such despair with imaginative-symbolic reference to Lazarus, I return to Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death in search of hope in the "impossible possibility of salvation."
Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. P... more Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. Podmore undertakes a constructive theological account of 'spiritual trial' (tentatio; known in German mystical and Lutheran tradition as Anfechtung) in relation to enduring questions of the otherness and hiddenness of God and the self, the problem of suffering and evil, the freedom of Spirit, and the anxious relationship between temptation and ordeal, fear and desire. This book traces a genealogy of spiritual trial from medieval German mystical theology, through Lutheran and Pietistic thought (Tauler; Luther; Arndt; Boehme), and reconstructs Kierkegaard's innovative yet under-examined recovery of the category (Anfægtelse: a Danish cognate for Anfechtung) within the modern context of the 'spiritless' decline of Christendom. Developing the relationship between struggle (Anfechtung) and release (Gelassenheit), Podmore proposes a Kierkegaardian theology of spiritual trial ...
Apophatic communion takes place “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence”, in a silence “be... more Apophatic communion takes place “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence”, in a silence “beyond assertion and denial” ; in other words, in secret. But where is it that this union ‘takes place’? It is a ‘place’, metaphorically speaking, which is beyond all affirmation and denial of ‘place’. This ‘place’ is the desert, the abyss, the place where there is no-thing, nothing but God beyond ‘God’. It is beyond place, and beyond experience; and yet the union within apophasis and contemplative prayer takes place, metaphorically, in a secret interior sanctum, unknown to both self and other. A sanctuary in which God dwells but which “no door is required to enter.” Yet while this ‘place’ of union may lie beyond all creatureliness, I suggest that there nonetheless remains significant affirmation of a ‘centre’ or ‘ground’ to the self (albeit de-centred and ungrounded). While the self-will is emptied out to the point of death, there still remains a ‘place’, somehow ‘apart’ from the world, i...
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the... more The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the study of Christian mysticism, with an emphasis on the third through the seventeenth centuries. The book is thematically organized in terms of the central contexts, practices and concepts associated with the mystical life in early, medieval and early modern Christianity. This book looks beyond the term 'mysticism', which was an early modern invention, to explore the ways in which the ancient terms 'mystic' and 'mystical' were used in the Christian tradition: what kinds of practices, modes of life and experiences were described as 'mystical'? What understanding of Christianity and of the life of Christian perfection is articulated through mystical interpretations of scripture, mystical contemplation, mystical vision, mystical theology or mystical union? This volume both provides a clear introduction to the Christian mystical life and articulates a bold new ...
apparatus.1 The volume was prepared for publication by Brian Daley and John Fitzgerald. This is t... more apparatus.1 The volume was prepared for publication by Brian Daley and John Fitzgerald. This is the first English translation and, as such, is an extremely valuable achievement; the Homilies are a significant instance of allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs within an Origenist tradition – they are an important text in the history of Christian exegesis, and Norris’s translation both elucidates this text and brings it to a wider readership. Norris provides us with a lucid introduction, comprising a brief, but very helpful, treatment of Gregory’s life and the context of his writings, and a somewhat longer exploration of his Homilies within the wider framework of his exegesis. The first section focuses especially on the importance of Gregory’s older siblings, Basil and Macrina, in his intellectual formation. The second section largely addresses Gregory’s approach to allegory. Norris, in my view rightly, uses Gregory’s wider worldview as a basis for understanding his exegetical procedures, rather than vice versa. For Gregory, he argues, allegory refers not only to something other than what is shown on the surface of the text, but to something of a different order of reality; the ‘surface’ of the text refers to perceptible realities, allegorical interpretation to intelligible ones. Norris correspondingly emphasises the soteriological nature of Gregory’s reading of Song of Songs as concerned with the soul’s ascent, and his analysis displays an interest in metaphysics resonant of some of his other work, such as Manhood and Christ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Norris’s treatment of Gregory’s exegesis, though necessarily short of comprehensive, brings to bear his extensive erudition in the subject. He also offers thought-provoking observations on the text, both in the introduction and in the notes, and the translation itself is superb. This volume is both an admirable piece of scholarship and a very useful scholarly tool (though, admittedly, with the latter function in mind, it would have benefited from an index of Greek terms).
Principally, Luther defers from philosophy’s authority to the authority of theology owing to an i... more Principally, Luther defers from philosophy’s authority to the authority of theology owing to an intense recognition of theology’s ultimate foundation in revelation. Allied to this is a suspicion about philosophy’s intellectual hubris and speculative neglect of the individual coram Deo (“before God”)—the “God” who is only known as revealed pro me (“for me”). As it transpires in modern philosophy’s emergence from its “service” to theology, variations of such concerns come to shape a new philosophical horizon which, for better or ill, come closer to Luther’s own in important and underexamined ways. Under implicit or explicit influence from Luther, key figures in modern European philosophy reconfigure critical new modes of philosophy which can be read to reflect Lutheran concerns about the nature of philosophy and reason itself. This story is related through key figures in modern philosophy (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger), leading from the birth and apotheosis ...
Within Rudolf Otto’s (1869-1937) hauntingly evocative anatomy of The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilig... more Within Rudolf Otto’s (1869-1937) hauntingly evocative anatomy of The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige), The Book of Job is revered as an unparalleled expression of the Numinous: the consciousness (gefühl) of the Numen or God expressed principally within the elements of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a mystery of fear and longing). Conspicuously, Otto also acknowledges an even darker shade of the numinous arising in Job’s climactic whirlwind: a theophanous eruption of creation which discloses something “wellnigh demonic” as well as “wholly incomprehensible” about the “character of the eternal creative power”. Such terror transcends that of the natural sublime, and even the dread of the Negative Sublime. Insofar as “It has something spectral in it”, the terror of Job is the dread of the numinous, or even, as I here examine, the exceptional horror of the Negative Numinous (Negativ-Numinose). Expanding upon Otto’s underdeveloped category in a quasi-Jungian idiom, I also call this “Negative” the shadow-side of the numinous: the dark excess of the non-rational tremendum which threatens to overwhelm fascination and exceeds theological attempts at rational sublimation. Despite reason’s best endeavours, Otto’s Negative Numinous must, in a sense, remain underdeveloped insofar as it attempts the unviable task of representing the horrendum as the apotheosis of tremendum: a horror seemingly “cut loose” from the dialectical techtonics of mysterium tremendum et fascinans and “intensified” to the dark fringes of a “demonic”. This inscrutably demonic Negative Numinous is a mysterium horrendum which seemingly eclipses all hope of fascinosum—understood as the element of Love or Grace which theologically balances, mitigates, or sublimates divine wrath
Principally, Luther defers from philosophy's authority to the authority of theology owing to an i... more Principally, Luther defers from philosophy's authority to the authority of theology owing to an intense recognition of theology's ultimate foundation in revelation. Allied to this is a suspicion about philosophy's intellectual hubris and speculative neglect of the individual coram Deo ("before God")-the "God" who is only known as revealed pro me ("for me"). As it transpires in modern philosophy's emergence from its "service" to theology, variations of such concerns come to shape a new philosophical horizon which, for better or ill, come closer to Luther's own in important and underexamined ways. Under implicit or explicit influence from Luther, key figures in modern European philosophy reconfigure critical new modes of philosophy which can be read to reflect Lutheran concerns about the nature of philosophy and reason itself. This story is related through key figures in modern philosophy (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger), leading from the birth and apotheosis of the modern, through to the critical emergence of the postmodern. Through the critical reception of Luther in these philosophers, it is shown that modern European philosophy regularly deals with Lutheran tensions but often produces visions of the role of reason and selfhood which would have deeply troubled Luther himself. Nonetheless, there are also signs of a recovery of Luther's suspicions about the possibilities of knowing which also bring into question the parameters of postmodern philosophy itself.
This article explores the religious symbolism of death and resurrection in works by Dostoevsky, H... more This article explores the religious symbolism of death and resurrection in works by Dostoevsky, Holbein, Kazantzakis, and Kierkegaard, examining the imaginative correlation between the death of God and the sickness of the soul. Exploring the symbolic analogy between the death of the self and the death of God evoked by these works, I offer an existential reading of the death and raising of Lazarus as an allegory of despair over the possibility of salvation. I illustrate this existential disease via a symbolic reading of two artistic depictions of death and resurrection. Beginning with reference to Nikos Kazantzakis's account of the death of Lazarus in The Last Temptation, and proceeding to Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous description in The Idiot of Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), I endeavor to articulate a constructive existential and psychological analogy between the death of the self and despair over the death of God (interpreted as an expression of the loss of hope in salvation). Finally, by reading such despair with imaginative-symbolic reference to Lazarus, I return to Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death in search of hope in the "impossible possibility of salvation."
Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. P... more Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. Podmore undertakes a constructive theological account of 'spiritual trial' (tentatio; known in German mystical and Lutheran tradition as Anfechtung) in relation to enduring questions of the otherness and hiddenness of God and the self, the problem of suffering and evil, the freedom of Spirit, and the anxious relationship between temptation and ordeal, fear and desire. This book traces a genealogy of spiritual trial from medieval German mystical theology, through Lutheran and Pietistic thought (Tauler; Luther; Arndt; Boehme), and reconstructs Kierkegaard's innovative yet under-examined recovery of the category (Anfægtelse: a Danish cognate for Anfechtung) within the modern context of the 'spiritless' decline of Christendom. Developing the relationship between struggle (Anfechtung) and release (Gelassenheit), Podmore proposes a Kierkegaardian theology of spiritual trial ...
Apophatic communion takes place “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence”, in a silence “be... more Apophatic communion takes place “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence”, in a silence “beyond assertion and denial” ; in other words, in secret. But where is it that this union ‘takes place’? It is a ‘place’, metaphorically speaking, which is beyond all affirmation and denial of ‘place’. This ‘place’ is the desert, the abyss, the place where there is no-thing, nothing but God beyond ‘God’. It is beyond place, and beyond experience; and yet the union within apophasis and contemplative prayer takes place, metaphorically, in a secret interior sanctum, unknown to both self and other. A sanctuary in which God dwells but which “no door is required to enter.” Yet while this ‘place’ of union may lie beyond all creatureliness, I suggest that there nonetheless remains significant affirmation of a ‘centre’ or ‘ground’ to the self (albeit de-centred and ungrounded). While the self-will is emptied out to the point of death, there still remains a ‘place’, somehow ‘apart’ from the world, i...
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the... more The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the study of Christian mysticism, with an emphasis on the third through the seventeenth centuries. The book is thematically organized in terms of the central contexts, practices and concepts associated with the mystical life in early, medieval and early modern Christianity. This book looks beyond the term 'mysticism', which was an early modern invention, to explore the ways in which the ancient terms 'mystic' and 'mystical' were used in the Christian tradition: what kinds of practices, modes of life and experiences were described as 'mystical'? What understanding of Christianity and of the life of Christian perfection is articulated through mystical interpretations of scripture, mystical contemplation, mystical vision, mystical theology or mystical union? This volume both provides a clear introduction to the Christian mystical life and articulates a bold new ...
apparatus.1 The volume was prepared for publication by Brian Daley and John Fitzgerald. This is t... more apparatus.1 The volume was prepared for publication by Brian Daley and John Fitzgerald. This is the first English translation and, as such, is an extremely valuable achievement; the Homilies are a significant instance of allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs within an Origenist tradition – they are an important text in the history of Christian exegesis, and Norris’s translation both elucidates this text and brings it to a wider readership. Norris provides us with a lucid introduction, comprising a brief, but very helpful, treatment of Gregory’s life and the context of his writings, and a somewhat longer exploration of his Homilies within the wider framework of his exegesis. The first section focuses especially on the importance of Gregory’s older siblings, Basil and Macrina, in his intellectual formation. The second section largely addresses Gregory’s approach to allegory. Norris, in my view rightly, uses Gregory’s wider worldview as a basis for understanding his exegetical procedures, rather than vice versa. For Gregory, he argues, allegory refers not only to something other than what is shown on the surface of the text, but to something of a different order of reality; the ‘surface’ of the text refers to perceptible realities, allegorical interpretation to intelligible ones. Norris correspondingly emphasises the soteriological nature of Gregory’s reading of Song of Songs as concerned with the soul’s ascent, and his analysis displays an interest in metaphysics resonant of some of his other work, such as Manhood and Christ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Norris’s treatment of Gregory’s exegesis, though necessarily short of comprehensive, brings to bear his extensive erudition in the subject. He also offers thought-provoking observations on the text, both in the introduction and in the notes, and the translation itself is superb. This volume is both an admirable piece of scholarship and a very useful scholarly tool (though, admittedly, with the latter function in mind, it would have benefited from an index of Greek terms).
Principally, Luther defers from philosophy’s authority to the authority of theology owing to an i... more Principally, Luther defers from philosophy’s authority to the authority of theology owing to an intense recognition of theology’s ultimate foundation in revelation. Allied to this is a suspicion about philosophy’s intellectual hubris and speculative neglect of the individual coram Deo (“before God”)—the “God” who is only known as revealed pro me (“for me”). As it transpires in modern philosophy’s emergence from its “service” to theology, variations of such concerns come to shape a new philosophical horizon which, for better or ill, come closer to Luther’s own in important and underexamined ways. Under implicit or explicit influence from Luther, key figures in modern European philosophy reconfigure critical new modes of philosophy which can be read to reflect Lutheran concerns about the nature of philosophy and reason itself. This story is related through key figures in modern philosophy (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger), leading from the birth and apotheosis ...
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