T HE ELEVENTH BOOK of John Cassian's treatise On the Institutions of Common Life deals with the s... more T HE ELEVENTH BOOK of John Cassian's treatise On the Institutions of Common Life deals with the spirit of vainglory, one of the eight "capital sins" or root vices in the spiritual life for which Cassian offers would-be monks a cure. Towards the end of the book, with tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, Cassian writes: There is an old maxim of the Fathers that is still current-though I cannot repeat it without a touch of shame, since I have not been able to avoid my own sister, nor escape the bishop's hands-namely, that a monk ought by all means to fly from women and bishops. For neither of them will allow a person who has once become bound to them by ties of familiarity to care, any longer, for the quiet of his cell, or to continue with pure eyes in divine contemplation, rapt in his vision of holy things." 1 The statement is as remarkable for its perspicacity as it is for its irony: Cassian seems to be saying that fantasies of ecclesiastical power are as destructive of a monk's contemplative peace as sexual fantasies. Church office, conferred by the laying-on of episcopal hands, apparently could offer a strong attraction, in fifth-century Gaul as now, to the lusts of a struggling ascetic's heart-an attraction that could destroy a life of prayer and self-renunciation if it was not steadfastly resisted. This passage, in one of Western Christianity's earliest and most influential works on the ideals of religious life, reflects a sentiment that has been widely shared by ascetical writers of East and West through the centuries. Monastic literature, from the Egyptian desert to medieval France, abounds in stories of the reluctance of holy men to be ordained: of their being made to accept holy orders only by trickery or by force, and of their fleeing to the hills or hiding in the fields to avoid it. 2 1 De institutis coenobiorum et de octo principalium vitiorum remediis 11.18 (ed. J.-C. Guy, SC 109.444; tr. E. C. S. Gibson, NPNF, 2nd series, 11.279, a translation I have partly used here). 2 For stories of monks who sucessftilly avoided ordination, see Apophthegmata patrum (Alphabetical Series), Theodore of Phermae 25; Isaac of the Cells 1; Macarius the Great 1 (PG 65.193 A10-B12; 224 B8-C5; 257 C2-6; tr. Benedicta Ward, Sayings of the Desert Fathers [Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1975] 66, 84 f., 105). The lives of Pachomius tell of a similar ruse by the founder of coenobitism to avoid being ordained a presbyter by Athana-605
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 1996
It is surely a truism that the main thing that divides Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians fro... more It is surely a truism that the main thing that divides Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians from each other is their understanding of the church itself more particularly, their understanding of the structures and procedures of authority by which the church preserves its identity. All of us profess, in the Creed of the Council of Constantinople, that "we believe in one holy, catholicand apostolic church"; yet our understanding of how that church is related to the Apostles, of how it realizesitsoneness and itsuniversalityscatteredthroughout the cities and cultures of the world in order to be the holy bride of Christ, has come to differ greatly in the course of our history, and still prevents us from sharing fully in sacramental and ecclesial communion. For all the Christian churches, however, the past quarter-century or so has been, in many respects, a period of amazing convergence, both in pastoral practice and in our ways of understanding the deepest reality of our faith. Ancient formulas for religious self-understanding and self-definition, ancient patterns of worship and community life, have come to be applied less rigidly and less exclusively in most Christian bodies, as believers have come to consider the traditions of other churches with a more sympathetic eye, and to recognize in themat least the substance of a common inheritance.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2019
A realization of the force-induced remnant magnetization spectroscopy (FIRMS) technique of specif... more A realization of the force-induced remnant magnetization spectroscopy (FIRMS) technique of specific biomolecular binding is presented where detection is accomplished with wide-field optical and diamond-based magnetometry using an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers. The technique may be adapted for massively parallel screening of arrays of nanoscale samples.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2001
In the first part of this study, we made a hasty survey of the origins and development of the dis... more In the first part of this study, we made a hasty survey of the origins and development of the dispute over the source and manner of the procession of the Holy Spirit within the divine Trinity, and over the In thefirst partof insertion of the word"Fiiioque," confessing his origin "from the Son" this studlt wemade as well as "from the Father," into the Latin version of the Creed of a hasty surveyof Constantinople, which has been, since the ninth century, one of the theoriginsand main sources of division between Christians of East and West. As we development ofthe mentioned there, the Western-sponsored attempts during the Middle disputeoverthe Ages at Lyons in 1274, and again at Florence in 1439 to forge a source andmanner reconciliation between the communions of Rome and Constantinople oftheprocession of both made it a priority to interpret this controversial word in a way theHoly Spirit that the Greek churches could recognize as part of their own theologiwithin thedivine cal tradition: as being equivalent to saying the Spirit proceeds from Ihnity. the Father "through the Son," which had been affirmed by a number of the classical Greek fathers.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2001
Late one winter afternoon, several years ago, I was just getting ready to leave my office and hea... more Late one winter afternoon, several years ago, I was just getting ready to leave my office and head home, after a long day teaching at our Jesuit school of theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the telephone rang. At the other end I heard a bright, eager young voice, that said: "Hello, Father Daley... My name is Alex, and I'm calling to ask you about the Filioque," I must have sounded a bit puzzled, so Alex went on to explain that one of his parents was a Roman Catholic, the other Greek Orthodox, and that he had been brought up partly in both traditions, without very deep intellectual immersion in either one. Recently, he said, he had become more active in an Orthodox community, and had been told by an Orthodox priest that the one real dividing line between Eastern and Western forms of Christianity the one difference from which all others, theological or spiritual or institutional, flowed was the way each church understood and expressed the procession of the Holy Spirit, more specifically their disagreement over the insertion of the word Fihoque, "and from the Son," into the third article of the Latin version of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in the early Middle Ages. "He explained the Orthodox view to me," Alex said, "but I need to get the Catholic view before I can decide which church is teaching true doctrine. Somebody gave me your name as a person who knows about these things; so could you explain for me the Catholic position?"
Daley explores divine simplicity according to Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, groundi... more Daley explores divine simplicity according to Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, grounding his account in their classical philosophical antecedents. He notes that often we think of the sixth and seventh centuries as devoted to questions about Jesus Christ, not about God per se. Admittedly, the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon produced ongoing controversy in the East regarding the unity of the two natures of Christ, for example, whether Christ had one operation or two. Maximus, a follower of Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem, became embroiled in controversy through his firm rejection of the effort by Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople to unite the churches in the East by holding solely to a single activity and a single will in Christ. Maximus's position won out at the Third Council of Constantinople (680-1). Daley draws attention here, however, to the relationship of these Christological debates to the understanding of God, and especially what it means to speak of the "divine nature" and the "divine will." This topic required of Christian thinkers not merely philosophical reflection but also Trinitarian reflection. Daley's point is that it well behooves us to look closely into what Maximus and John of Damascus have to say about divine simplicity, in light of the more central controversies in which these Church Fathers were engaged.
He was devoted to the herald Paul, was joined to him by a kind of ineffable bond, and lived on hi... more He was devoted to the herald Paul, was joined to him by a kind of ineffable bond, and lived on his writings. Often when he remembered Paul’s words, he let this be a sweet source of nourishment for him, and found consolation in their fire. Like those madly in love and inflamed with desire, he often admitted that he was so overcome by Paul that it was hard to pull himself away. When his thought was carrying him in some other direction and a memory of Paul came to his mind, he was like someone bound by chains; he wanted to remain longer with him, unable easily to be set free. So indescribably strong was his love for Paul that it seems fitting to say Paul was to John what Christ was to Paul, or better: that Christ was to John what he was to Paul, since he loved Paul so much for Christ’s sake!1
It is evident that many reflective Christians today no longer feel as confident in the value of s... more It is evident that many reflective Christians today no longer feel as confident in the value of specialized biblical study as their forebears did fifty years ago. The so-called historical-critical study of Scripture, cultivated first by European Protestant scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and adopted as a new source of theological life and energy by Roman Catholics, after it had received qualified approval from Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Divina Afflante Spiritu (1943) and later at the Second Vatican Council (e.g., Dei Verbum 12), seems now to be regarded by many theologians, young and old alike, as in need of renewal, of reintegration within the larger context of thoughtful, ecclesial reflection on the gospel that Jesus is Lord. As a result, patristic exegesis is now a "hot" topic for graduate students, scholars, and publishers in a variety of Christian traditions, as theologians and believing readers look for alternative approaches to biblical interpretation. In the light of what might generally be called the postmodern understanding of the life of texts, the project of seeking to establish the original intended meaning of an author or redactor by historical source analysis seems less achievable today than it did in the 1890s, or even in the 1960s. We are more aware today, probably, than ever before that the importance of any text is not simply its witness to the author's mind but its constantly developing significance for the tradition of understanding and moral aspiration in which it is received. If it is true that "it takes a village to educate a
The Jurist: Studies in Church Law and Ministry, 2008
Modern discussions of the structures of authority in the Church, especially by Orthodox theologia... more Modern discussions of the structures of authority in the Church, especially by Orthodox theologians, increasingly invoke the thirty-fourth Apostolic Canon—a text from a relatively obscure fourth-century collection of rules for the behavior of the clergy—as embodying a deep ecclesiological ideal: a model for the relationships between individual bishops and their primates, which conveys a wider sense of the checks and balances needed to preserve the Churches in ordered communion.1 The passage, which has in view the relationship between local bishops and their metropolitans, can be translated as follows:
T HE ELEVENTH BOOK of John Cassian's treatise On the Institutions of Common Life deals with the s... more T HE ELEVENTH BOOK of John Cassian's treatise On the Institutions of Common Life deals with the spirit of vainglory, one of the eight "capital sins" or root vices in the spiritual life for which Cassian offers would-be monks a cure. Towards the end of the book, with tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, Cassian writes: There is an old maxim of the Fathers that is still current-though I cannot repeat it without a touch of shame, since I have not been able to avoid my own sister, nor escape the bishop's hands-namely, that a monk ought by all means to fly from women and bishops. For neither of them will allow a person who has once become bound to them by ties of familiarity to care, any longer, for the quiet of his cell, or to continue with pure eyes in divine contemplation, rapt in his vision of holy things." 1 The statement is as remarkable for its perspicacity as it is for its irony: Cassian seems to be saying that fantasies of ecclesiastical power are as destructive of a monk's contemplative peace as sexual fantasies. Church office, conferred by the laying-on of episcopal hands, apparently could offer a strong attraction, in fifth-century Gaul as now, to the lusts of a struggling ascetic's heart-an attraction that could destroy a life of prayer and self-renunciation if it was not steadfastly resisted. This passage, in one of Western Christianity's earliest and most influential works on the ideals of religious life, reflects a sentiment that has been widely shared by ascetical writers of East and West through the centuries. Monastic literature, from the Egyptian desert to medieval France, abounds in stories of the reluctance of holy men to be ordained: of their being made to accept holy orders only by trickery or by force, and of their fleeing to the hills or hiding in the fields to avoid it. 2 1 De institutis coenobiorum et de octo principalium vitiorum remediis 11.18 (ed. J.-C. Guy, SC 109.444; tr. E. C. S. Gibson, NPNF, 2nd series, 11.279, a translation I have partly used here). 2 For stories of monks who sucessftilly avoided ordination, see Apophthegmata patrum (Alphabetical Series), Theodore of Phermae 25; Isaac of the Cells 1; Macarius the Great 1 (PG 65.193 A10-B12; 224 B8-C5; 257 C2-6; tr. Benedicta Ward, Sayings of the Desert Fathers [Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1975] 66, 84 f., 105). The lives of Pachomius tell of a similar ruse by the founder of coenobitism to avoid being ordained a presbyter by Athana-605
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 1996
It is surely a truism that the main thing that divides Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians fro... more It is surely a truism that the main thing that divides Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians from each other is their understanding of the church itself more particularly, their understanding of the structures and procedures of authority by which the church preserves its identity. All of us profess, in the Creed of the Council of Constantinople, that "we believe in one holy, catholicand apostolic church"; yet our understanding of how that church is related to the Apostles, of how it realizesitsoneness and itsuniversalityscatteredthroughout the cities and cultures of the world in order to be the holy bride of Christ, has come to differ greatly in the course of our history, and still prevents us from sharing fully in sacramental and ecclesial communion. For all the Christian churches, however, the past quarter-century or so has been, in many respects, a period of amazing convergence, both in pastoral practice and in our ways of understanding the deepest reality of our faith. Ancient formulas for religious self-understanding and self-definition, ancient patterns of worship and community life, have come to be applied less rigidly and less exclusively in most Christian bodies, as believers have come to consider the traditions of other churches with a more sympathetic eye, and to recognize in themat least the substance of a common inheritance.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2019
A realization of the force-induced remnant magnetization spectroscopy (FIRMS) technique of specif... more A realization of the force-induced remnant magnetization spectroscopy (FIRMS) technique of specific biomolecular binding is presented where detection is accomplished with wide-field optical and diamond-based magnetometry using an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers. The technique may be adapted for massively parallel screening of arrays of nanoscale samples.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2001
In the first part of this study, we made a hasty survey of the origins and development of the dis... more In the first part of this study, we made a hasty survey of the origins and development of the dispute over the source and manner of the procession of the Holy Spirit within the divine Trinity, and over the In thefirst partof insertion of the word"Fiiioque," confessing his origin "from the Son" this studlt wemade as well as "from the Father," into the Latin version of the Creed of a hasty surveyof Constantinople, which has been, since the ninth century, one of the theoriginsand main sources of division between Christians of East and West. As we development ofthe mentioned there, the Western-sponsored attempts during the Middle disputeoverthe Ages at Lyons in 1274, and again at Florence in 1439 to forge a source andmanner reconciliation between the communions of Rome and Constantinople oftheprocession of both made it a priority to interpret this controversial word in a way theHoly Spirit that the Greek churches could recognize as part of their own theologiwithin thedivine cal tradition: as being equivalent to saying the Spirit proceeds from Ihnity. the Father "through the Son," which had been affirmed by a number of the classical Greek fathers.
Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 2001
Late one winter afternoon, several years ago, I was just getting ready to leave my office and hea... more Late one winter afternoon, several years ago, I was just getting ready to leave my office and head home, after a long day teaching at our Jesuit school of theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the telephone rang. At the other end I heard a bright, eager young voice, that said: "Hello, Father Daley... My name is Alex, and I'm calling to ask you about the Filioque," I must have sounded a bit puzzled, so Alex went on to explain that one of his parents was a Roman Catholic, the other Greek Orthodox, and that he had been brought up partly in both traditions, without very deep intellectual immersion in either one. Recently, he said, he had become more active in an Orthodox community, and had been told by an Orthodox priest that the one real dividing line between Eastern and Western forms of Christianity the one difference from which all others, theological or spiritual or institutional, flowed was the way each church understood and expressed the procession of the Holy Spirit, more specifically their disagreement over the insertion of the word Fihoque, "and from the Son," into the third article of the Latin version of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in the early Middle Ages. "He explained the Orthodox view to me," Alex said, "but I need to get the Catholic view before I can decide which church is teaching true doctrine. Somebody gave me your name as a person who knows about these things; so could you explain for me the Catholic position?"
Daley explores divine simplicity according to Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, groundi... more Daley explores divine simplicity according to Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, grounding his account in their classical philosophical antecedents. He notes that often we think of the sixth and seventh centuries as devoted to questions about Jesus Christ, not about God per se. Admittedly, the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon produced ongoing controversy in the East regarding the unity of the two natures of Christ, for example, whether Christ had one operation or two. Maximus, a follower of Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem, became embroiled in controversy through his firm rejection of the effort by Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople to unite the churches in the East by holding solely to a single activity and a single will in Christ. Maximus's position won out at the Third Council of Constantinople (680-1). Daley draws attention here, however, to the relationship of these Christological debates to the understanding of God, and especially what it means to speak of the "divine nature" and the "divine will." This topic required of Christian thinkers not merely philosophical reflection but also Trinitarian reflection. Daley's point is that it well behooves us to look closely into what Maximus and John of Damascus have to say about divine simplicity, in light of the more central controversies in which these Church Fathers were engaged.
He was devoted to the herald Paul, was joined to him by a kind of ineffable bond, and lived on hi... more He was devoted to the herald Paul, was joined to him by a kind of ineffable bond, and lived on his writings. Often when he remembered Paul’s words, he let this be a sweet source of nourishment for him, and found consolation in their fire. Like those madly in love and inflamed with desire, he often admitted that he was so overcome by Paul that it was hard to pull himself away. When his thought was carrying him in some other direction and a memory of Paul came to his mind, he was like someone bound by chains; he wanted to remain longer with him, unable easily to be set free. So indescribably strong was his love for Paul that it seems fitting to say Paul was to John what Christ was to Paul, or better: that Christ was to John what he was to Paul, since he loved Paul so much for Christ’s sake!1
It is evident that many reflective Christians today no longer feel as confident in the value of s... more It is evident that many reflective Christians today no longer feel as confident in the value of specialized biblical study as their forebears did fifty years ago. The so-called historical-critical study of Scripture, cultivated first by European Protestant scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and adopted as a new source of theological life and energy by Roman Catholics, after it had received qualified approval from Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Divina Afflante Spiritu (1943) and later at the Second Vatican Council (e.g., Dei Verbum 12), seems now to be regarded by many theologians, young and old alike, as in need of renewal, of reintegration within the larger context of thoughtful, ecclesial reflection on the gospel that Jesus is Lord. As a result, patristic exegesis is now a "hot" topic for graduate students, scholars, and publishers in a variety of Christian traditions, as theologians and believing readers look for alternative approaches to biblical interpretation. In the light of what might generally be called the postmodern understanding of the life of texts, the project of seeking to establish the original intended meaning of an author or redactor by historical source analysis seems less achievable today than it did in the 1890s, or even in the 1960s. We are more aware today, probably, than ever before that the importance of any text is not simply its witness to the author's mind but its constantly developing significance for the tradition of understanding and moral aspiration in which it is received. If it is true that "it takes a village to educate a
The Jurist: Studies in Church Law and Ministry, 2008
Modern discussions of the structures of authority in the Church, especially by Orthodox theologia... more Modern discussions of the structures of authority in the Church, especially by Orthodox theologians, increasingly invoke the thirty-fourth Apostolic Canon—a text from a relatively obscure fourth-century collection of rules for the behavior of the clergy—as embodying a deep ecclesiological ideal: a model for the relationships between individual bishops and their primates, which conveys a wider sense of the checks and balances needed to preserve the Churches in ordered communion.1 The passage, which has in view the relationship between local bishops and their metropolitans, can be translated as follows:
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