Depending on what Christian tradition one finds oneself in, the question of Christian art is a difficult and delicate topic. Are we permitted to have Christian art? Can we represent Jesus? What disposition should we have towards artistic representations of Jesus, the apostles, or Christian saints? Does any of this break the Second Commandment? How and why did the Christian church eventually permit the use, and sometimes veneration, of Christian art? This book, From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity by Robin M. Jensen seeks to answer that last question. Jensen is a seasoned and respected scholar of early Christian art and one could not find a more able guide.

Christians, Jensen shows in chapter four, most likely had artistic representations of some kind even as far back as the first century, only avoiding depictions of the Greco-Roman gods. When Christians began developing their own “material culture” by the third century, the artwork they commissioned was primarily narratival–depicting scenes from biblical stories–or symbolic. It was in the late fourth and early fifth centuries that the shift from narrative and symbol to portraits began to take place. With this shift also came, as explored in chapter five, debates about how to relate to such portraits of Christ or the saints. Were they vehicles facilitating a “face-to-face” encounters with the subject portrayed? By the fifth and sixth centuries, Christians felt they could honor such holy portraits while simultaneously distinguishing them from the person they represented. These debates naturally led to questions of how such connections between the subject and the portrait were possible (chapter six). Did it depend on the likeness between the subject and the portrait? Ultimately, the early Christians answered in the negative. As an aside, this chapter was the most interesting to me as she discusses and illustrates both the continuity and polymorphic representations of Christ in Christian art. Chapter seven rounds out the historical narrative of Jensen’s book by looking at the reported miracles associated with “holy portraits.”

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this book is its brevity (excluding endnotes, the book is only 169 pages). Profound brevity is the mark of a true expert, and Jensen shows herself as such. The book is filled with many fascinating examples of early Christian art that Jensen expertly weaves into her narrative. Coming in at a list price is $65 (USD), which may be cost-prohibitive for some, one hopes a cheaper paperback volume will make this excellent work more widely available.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

Publisher’s page: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/from-idols-to-icons/hardcover

Every dissertation has to find some unique way to answer a pressing question to count as adding something substantial to its academic domain. Sometimes these methodologies can feel strained and concerned merely with novelty. Other times an author will put their finger on something that not only illuminates the subject in question but also changes the way you understand the topic. Mona Tokarek LaFosse’s published version of her dissertation, Honouring Age: The Social Dynamics of Age Structure in 1 Timothy, does the latter. In it, LaFosse uses the framework of age and how different age groups relate to each other to bring clarity to the concerns of the letter of 1 Timothy as well as answer some long-held scholarly debates about the widows in 1 Timothy 5.

After arguing for the need to look at 1 Timothy through the lens of age in chapter 1, LaFosse uses contemporary ethnographic research on traditional Mediterranean societies to construct two models: 1) age status and the generational cycle and 2) generational stability and social change (chapter 2). These models help to illustrate the age structure of traditional Mediterranean societies and how such structures dictate proper behavior, especially concerning honor. LaFosse is careful to avoid anachronism here and only uses these ethnographic studies to provide a probable starting point that is corrected in light of ancient evidence. In chapter 3, LaFosse proposes a setting for the letter of 1 Timothy (which she takes to be heteronymous. Editor’s note: written by someone other than Paul, see below) in the generation after the apostles when the recipients would have been in generational uncertainty in the wake of the loss of the older Christian generation (represented by Paul) and heightened by the conflict surrounding the false teachers. These concrete realities are answered by the letter’s reinforcement of traditional age structure and the corresponding proper behaviors of those within the church (the subject of chapter 4).

Chapter five through eight, focusing on widows in 1 Timothy, are the heart of the book. Here is where LaFosse’s models become the most helpful. There is no need for her to posit an office of the widow because concerns about widows within a household–both how they were honored and how they could disgrace the (church) family if they didn’t conform to proper behavior–were serious and persistent concerns in the ancient Mediterranean (chapter 5). In chapter 6 LaFosse addresses the two difficulties of the sixty+ age requirement to be put on the “list” (1 Tim 5:9). In short, sixty was considered the demarcation of old age, and the “list” was public recognition of such a widow’s honorable and virtuous life. “The idea of ‘enlisting’ exemplary widows in 1 Tim. 5:9 reflects a similar sense of awarding public honour to those who behave properly and piously—those who embodied the ideals of a virtuous woman over her lifetime” (145). This was important not merely for the sake of honor itself, but because of the vital role an older widow would play in the guidance and formation of younger widows (chapter 7). Chapter eight proposes the “believing woman” (1 Tim 5:16) as a middle-aged woman who was neglecting her duties towards the younger widows, and thus, is the target of Paul’s critique.

I should add one final note that is less a criticism than a question my mind kept returning to as I read her book. As is common in academic circles, LaFosse understands 1 Timothy as pseudonymous (though she prefers the term “heteronymous”). She provides the typical reasons (pp. 11-12): different vocabulary from the “undisputed” Pauline letters, the difficulty in placing 1 Timothy within the timeline of Paul’s life and other letters, and the emphasis on hierarchy as opposed to the (allegedly non-hierarchical) body metaphor. This she takes as evidence for a later date and her own work showing the concern for age and the anxiety caused by generational change would reinforce a compositional date after Paul’s lifetime. Yet, as I read LaFosse I wondered if her own work actually undermined her hypothetical reconstruction of the letter’s setting. If concerns over age structure and dynamics were an ever-present reality in the ancient Mediterranean world, then it would be a concern within Paul’s lifetime just as much as after. That is, why should we think that the real Paul wouldn’t be concerned about age dynamics? It only is a problem if we first assume that somehow Paul stood outside of time and place, aloof from his own culture and concerns. Why shouldn’t he think young men should honor elders or older widows train up and guide younger widows? My intuition is to think he would, but just asking the question illustrates the value of LaFosse’s book.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

Publisher’s page: https://www.mqup.ca/honouring-age-products-9780228019350.php

Giulio Maspero’s book Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers addresses the seemingly perennial theological debate that has divided Christendom for a thousand years through a close reading of the development of trinitarian doctrine in the early Church. For those unfamiliar with the filioque controversy, a brief overview will help set the stage for Maspero’s book. “Filioque” is a Latin phrase that means “and the Son.” It was first added to the third heading of the Niceno-Constantinoplitan Creed (“I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and the Son”) at the regional Council of Toledo held in 589 and later adopted by the Western Latin-speaking Church under the jurisdiction of the Roman pontiff. Greek-speaking Christians saw this as problematic both ecclesiastically and theologically. Ecclesiastically, they saw it as an illegitimate addition to the Creed without ecumenical consent. It would be like a single state in the US making a change to the US Constitution and declaring that all the other states had to accept the change whether they liked it or not. Theologically, Greek-speaking authors thought that the addition of the filioque compromised the unity of God, which was seen to be found in the Father as the sole cause of the Trinity, by adding a second cause within the Godhead. Two causes meant there were two Gods. Ultimately, this became one of the issues that led to the schism between East and West Christendom in 1054 that has never been healed.

Maspero’s book is not an attempt to address all the issues of the Filioque. The history is long and this ground has been covered by others, such as A. Edward Siecienski’s excellent historical survey The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford University Press, 2010). Any reader interested in Maspero’s book should read Siecienski’s book first to familiarize themselves with the history. Instead, Maspero focuses on giving a nuanced historical reading of the development of filioque within the development of trinitarian doctrine in the early church from Origen (c 185-254) to Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395). At each stage, Maspero is careful to explain how these authors were addressing specific issues in their own time and how that affected their articulation of Trinitarian doctrine.

For example, Origen (the subject of chapter 1) was addressing both Stoic materialism and Gnostic cosmology when he made a sharp distinction between God and creation but kept an ordered hierarchy within the Trinity such that the Father was more truly God than the Son, and the Son more God than the Holy Spirit. This Logos-theology (as he calls it) resulted in two models of the Trinity: the linear model (Father → Logos → Pneuma) and the triangular model ( Logos ← Father → Pneuma). These were never resolved in Origen and led to the Arian controversy at the beginning of the fourth century. Maspero then traces (chapters 2 and 3) how these two models worked themselves out in the fourth century in authors like Epiphanius, Pseudo-Athanasius, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea and Marcellus of Ancyra. While Athanasius’s nature (physis)-theology approach might have helped address the Arian debates over the status of the Son, it was insufficient to answer the so-called Pneumatomachians (=Spirit Fighters) who affirmed the divinity of the Son but denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. It is this debate seen in authors like Gregory of Nazianzus and especially Gregory of Nyssa (chapters 4 and 5) that Maspero focuses on as the immediate context for the development of the Greek filioque.

I think this is a particularly important contribution not only to debates about the filioque but also to general discussions about the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century. Too often the Pneumatomachian controversy is an appendix to the Arian controversy. “Once the Arian controversy was solved,” so the story typically goes, “there were some weird people who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit but that was an anomaly and everybody just moved on until the Christological controversies of the fifth century.” Instead, Maspero argues that the Pneumatomachian controversy highlighted a gap in the nature (physis) model that made the Pneumatomachian position a comprehensible position to hold. It is in their response to the Pneumatomachians that Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa shifted from the question of nature to the question of relation that allowed them to sufficiently answer the Pneumatomachian objections: the identity of the Son and Spirit is distinguished by a difference in the way they relate to the Father (Son is begotten; Spirit proceeds). More so, the Spirit, argued the two Gregories, is metaphysically placed in between the Father and the Son such that the Father can remain cause while admitting an active role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Maspero then tests his hypothesis by comparing these Greek developments with the Syrian theological tradition (chapter 6). Here Maspero once again demonstrates historical nuance in attending to the linguistic difficulties in translating concepts developed in a Greek-speaking context into a Syrian one. Namely, Gregory of Nazianzus was able to distinguish procession as a general category (proion) from the specific relation of the Spirit to the Father (ekporeutōs). Not only does the Syrian Church’s adaptation of the Creed in 410 explicitly say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son—as well as being present in their own nascent theologians such as Ephrem the Syrian—but Syriac translations of the Cappadocians use filioque-type language to express Gregory’s terminological distinction that was unavailable to them in Syriac. When placed in the highly technical Trinitarian debates of the fourth century, it becomes clear that this evidence isn’t merely the result of translation, but of conceptual pressure arising from the Pneumatomachian debates at the end of the fourth century.

The rest of the book is a comparison between what Maspero has discovered in the Greek (and Syrian) Fathers, with the theological developments in the West, specifically Augustine. Augustine, as the most important Latin-speaking theologian, is usually charged with being the source of the filioque. In chapter 7, Maspero addresses the issue of the so-called “psychological analogy” of the Trinity which plays an important part in Augustine’s De Trinitate. Was this a cause of the filioque? Maspero argues that it was not because he also has discovered a similar, though not identical, psychological analogy at work in Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and the seventh-century theologian Anastasius of Sinai (which he argues is independent of Augustine’s influence). Secondly, in chapter 8, Maspero takes a close look at the metaphysical differences between Augustine and the Cappadocians. While he thinks that Augustine is at a conceptual disadvantage compared to the Greek-speaking East—specifically on the ontological status of relation—Maspero shows how Augustine is driven by similar conceptual pressures (a shared theological grammar) as Gregory of Nyssa to affirm a role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit.

Maspero finally concludes with a summary of his argument and an ecumenical proposal: affirm a Greek understanding of the active (but not causal) role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Maspero has written a nuanced and highly technical, historical, and theological investigation of the “Greek Filioque”. While he gives helpful summaries of his argument along the way to mark the trail he is blazing, this is still an admittedly difficult book and requires a slow and careful reading. Those unfamiliar with scholarship on the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century would do well to read Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and Its Legacy or Mark DelCogliano’s introduction and translation of Basil of Caesarea’s Against Eunomius. Nevertheless, this is an important and necessary book for three reasons. First, Maspero demonstrates how to do historical theology well. Historical theology isn’t just appealing to what theologians of the past have said, but why they said it. Second, I think Maspero does an excellent job of showing how biblical exegesis was an integral part of these debates. These early Christians weren’t just philosophizing or engaging in abstract conceptual arguments for their own sake. Their reflections arise out of their close reading of the Bible to address the needs of their time. While we might not always understand the nuances of their exegesis, we should walk away from Maspero’s book appreciating just how important the Bible was for them in these debates. Third, remembering the role the filioque played in the division of 1054, Maspero’s work is an important contribution to healing those rifts so that we, as Jesus prayed, might be one.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

Publisher’s page: https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467466417/rethinking-the-filioque-with-the-greek-fathers/

This book is an English translation of Jean Daniélou’s seminal 1944 book Platonisme et théologie mystique: doctrine spiritualle de Saint Grégoire de Nysse (originally his 1943 dissertation with a second edition published in 1953) that in many ways sparked the renewed interest in the study of Gregory of Nyssa. Daniélou’s work is an impressive feat: he has gathered together from Gregory’s wide corpus a systematic vision of the spiritual life. To do this, Daniélou uses the traditional framework of the spiritual life: purgation, illumination, and union. While not original to Gregory, it is a helpful framework that allows Daniélou to paint a coherent and persuasive picture of Gregory’s thought.

For Gregory, we are first united to God in baptism which sets us on a course to radically change our behavior no longer living according to the flesh but according to the spirit. This is the first way of purgation. Here, the concept of apatheia (passionlessness) is important. It is not so much that we become “apathetic” or have no desires, but that we develop apatheia for our sinful desires (chapters 1–3). In the second way, illumination, we start to think differently about the world around us and begin to see how it all points to God. Creation is not an end in itself, but its purpose is to always point us back to God (chapters 4–5). Finally, in the third way, we leave the world and our thoughts behind and are united in love to God who is beyond all knowledge and understanding. As we progress in these stages, we slowly begin to apprehend the presence of the Word—Jesus—in our own souls which has been there all along since baptism though we could not fully grasp it. Interestingly, the apprehension of the Word within us simultaneously points us outward to God. The more we see God working in our own souls, the more we are pushed outward to fuller union with God, a union that will never be complete because God can never be fully comprehended (chapters 6–8).

There is much more that can be said regarding Nyssa’s view of the spiritual life, but one thing that should be noticed is how much grace pervades every aspect of it. This can often be lost both when one is unfamiliar with how someone like Gregory speaks of the spiritual life, but even more so for contemporary evangelicals who have developed their own way of speaking about God’s grace in our justification, sanctification, and glorification. But for Gregory, the grace of God in Christ descending to become incarnate comes before any human action or choice (12) and is present throughout the spiritual life, even if at times Gregory’s language is not as clear as we may wish it to be.

Take, for another example, purification. Purification language is common in platonist thinkers such as Plotinus, and many times Gregory will sound very much like him, if not even directly copying his phraseology. However, when we look closer, we start to notice some important differences. Plotinus, for example, has one remove the filth of vice (or created nature) in order to see the godlike nature already always present within the human being. For Gregory, one must remove the filth of vice in order to turn to God and from God receives the image of or likeness to God. This godlikeness is a gift (grace) from God, not something that is proper to human nature itself (253–4).

In light of the explosion of Nyssan scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, the editor, Rev. Ignatius Green, has done an excellent job of adding notes scattered throughout the book that clue the reader into some of the debates and advances in Nyssan scholarship without distracting from Daniélou’s original work. Additionally, modern English translations of patristic sources are included in the footnotes as well, which is itself a testament to the influence of Daniélou’s life and work and the bibliography of Nyssa’s works at the end is a treasure trove for anyone interested in reading Gregory in his own words.

But why would anyone want to read the writings of a 4th-century bishop? What could he offer a pastor in 21st-century America? As someone who has spent a lot of time studying the early church, it can be easy for me to scoff at the question, but it is not an unreasonable thing to ask. With all the responsibilities of ministry, why should someone carve out time to either read Gregory or about his thought? I think Daniélou’s book is valuable for two reasons. The first is that he challenges the pervasive myth that still inexplicably is peddled in popular and even academic studies of the Hellenization of Christianity in the early Church. The second is that in considering how someone from another time, place, and culture read and interpreted Scripture, we are forced to recognize how our own understandings of the Bible are shaped by our time, place, and culture. Gregory, thanks to the expert guidance of Daniélou, will challenge those assumptions as we read Scripture. It is impossible to walk away from Daniélou’s book and not realize just how deeply Gregory’s thought is shaped by Scripture in a deep and profound way. For that reason, I cannot recommend enough this translation of Daniélou’s groundbreaking work and thank the editor and translators for their service to the church.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

Publisher’s website: https://svspress.com/platonism-and-mystical-theology-the-spiritual-doctrine-of-st-gregory-of-nyssa/