This interview with Dr. Joseph P. Farrell, dated March 4, 2008
concerns
his four-volume
God, History, & Dialectic: The
Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural
Consequences. Read its Prolegomena
here.
The transcript of the interview is taken from
here.
The
interviewer is not identified.
An electronic edition of Farrell’s magnum opus
may be purchased
here.
Anthony Flood
September 9, 2009
God, History, and
Dialectic:
An Interview
Joseph P. Farrell, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
How long did it take
you to research and write this book. Can you elaborate on the kinds of
research you did, and where, when, etc.?
The book was written in about 2 weeks, due to the time constraints I was
under trying to satisfy my students in the course of the same name that
I taught. As for researching it, it is the fruit of many years of
patristic study. It would be difficult for me to say, since I started
reading the fathers way back in college. So I suppose it represents
about 20 years of research and thought.
Why did you make the
Apparatus the fourth volume (and yet it’s labeled volume 1 in the old
print edition—but it’s always really been volume 4). We’ve heard tell
of a scholar who did the same thing, releasing his apparatus only after
the main work was released. Can you explain and relate that account?
The scholar’s name was, I believe, the famous mediaevalist Kantorowitz,
but don’t cite me on this, as it may have been a well-known colleague of
his. The episode is mentioned, however, in Norman Cantor’s
Inventing the Middle Ages,
which is a book, not about the Western Middle Ages, but about those who
wrote about them, and became well-known scholars of the subject. In any
case, this scholar—whom I believe was Kantorowitz, but again, my memory
may be mistaken, it being so many years out now since I’ve thought about
these subjects—wrote a book and published it in Germany, in which he
came to certain radical conclusions for the day. He published it
without footnotes or references of any kind, and naturally was savaged
by academics in reviews. Knowing ahead of time that their reaction
would be predictably negative, he had of course prepared the volume of
massive footnotes and annotations ahead of time, so that no sooner had
the academic critiques appeared, the apparatus was released, and his
critics literally buried in a broadside of footnotes.
Many of us have read
your earlier works—your translation of St. Photius, to which the
introduction is now a classic, and your St. Maximus works. If you had
to compare what you’re doing in those books with what you’re doing in
the four volumes of GHD, what would you say?
Essentially I’m doing the same thing, I’m examining Augustinism from the
patristic dogmatic tradition of Orthodoxy and spelling out its
implications. The major difference is that the previous works can be
considered a kind of broad overview or survey of those implications. In
GHD I attempt to spell out some of them much more explicitly. I
certainly would not, however, claim that I have covered everything nor
been exhaustive. For example, I do not cover the Scotists and so on,
and their version of mediaeval scholasticism, and the philosophical
section, which I intended to be much longer, had to be pared down
considerably. I had also intended to cover some schools of modern
business management theory and philosophy to exhibit their reliance on
the theological cultural paradigm of Augustinism—which I had done in
other courses at the University of Oklahoma—but time did not permit this
either. Time in the original course that I taught simply didn’t permit
any of this, and the book is really, when all is said and done, a book
compiled from those lectures.
There are lots of
treatments of Westernization, Latinism, juridical theology, Augustinism,
etc. out there. How would you say GHD differs from what’s already been
popularly done in the field?
One difference is that it seeks a large overview while not neglecting
the details. And obviously, the most significant difference is the fact
that it is written from the Orthodox patristic dogmatic perspective as a
point of departure for analysis.
You draw somewhat on
Fr. John Romanides’ work. Can you give us some understanding of your
evalu-ation of his primary theses, and what role these played in God,
History, & Dialectic?
I had come to very similar conclusions as Fr. Roman-ides through my own
research, and thus was rather pleased when I found another researcher
who thought more or less along the same lines. Specifically, Romanides
and I both focus on the ninth century as being the turning point, for
this century is where the two theological cultures clash openly and for
the first time. Romanides’ thesis is basically the same as mine,
namely, that by dint of its Augustinized theological culture, the
Christian West cannot interpret the details of history of that
century—the coronation of Charlemagne, the rupture between Nicholas and
Photius, the subsequent reconciliation of Pope John VIII and Photius,
with anything like historiographical consistency, and that this lack of
consistency is the product of deeply rooted theological perspectives.
You once wrote a
detailed work on Gnosticism which has yet to be published. What is it
about Gnosticism that isn’t already defeated and dead? Isn’t
Gnosti-cism the problem of the first centuries of the Church, and
basically a body of doctrines no one would believe anymore?
In that work my approach toward Gnosticism was essentially the same as
that presented in GHD, namely, that Gnosticism is not so much a grouping
of various systems of doctrines as it is a set of strategies and tactics
of institutional subversion, and in that sense, was breathed new life in
the Augustinian synthesis, where one finds, as logical entailments and
implications of that synthesis, those very same strategies and tactics
revived to explain and justify the synthesis itself. So in that sense,
Gnosticism is alive and well, and easily recognizable once one knows the
strategies and tactics it employs. The bad news is that it’s alive and
well and flourishing in many seminaries, academics, and departments of
literary criticism.
GHD seems to be a
meta-history or meta-analysis, or one of the last great comprehensive
histories—there’s a term for those. Why do you think it’s so hard to
get those published anymore—is the world no longer able to do that kind
of thinking, or is it afraid to?
“Comprehensive” is a dangerous term, because of course I do not aim at
exhaustiveness in GHD, but merely to show that the Augustinian synthesis
had and has implications that continue to spill over and perpetuate
themselves in the wider culture of the West. That caveat on the record,
it is true that I fully intended to write an analysis of history “in the
grand scale.” As for why it is difficult to get such works published, I
think that too is a legacy of that synthesis. The reason I say that is
because, if one looks at the disputes in the Christian West in the ninth
century—the disputes concerning the Eucharist, or predestination and
free will, and so on—these are all taking place in piecemeal fragmentary
fashion. The participants in those disparate disputes—oftentimes the
same individuals, such as Ratramnus of Corbie—never make the connection
between their disputes. They never envision that their problems in
particular areas of theology are the result of much deeper assumptions,
and that the disputes themselves are therefore not unrelated, but, on
the contrary, deeply and intimately connected. The Augustinian
synthesis fractured the western religious mind by cutting it off from
tradition. And no institution in the modern West is more cut off from
the grand academic tradition of old than is the academy. So, in short,
as far as I’m concerning, it’s another cultural legacy of that synthesis
at its deepest level.
It is rumoured that
you once debated for several days straight, when you were at Oxford—in
other words, you never left the debate hall over the course of several
days. What can you tell us about this rumour—can you fill in the blanks?
Yes that’s true. The debate took place in, and was sponsored by, the
Oxford Union Society, the famous debating society there. It was
cosponsored by the Heineken and Guinness Corporations for Ethiopian
famine relief. By the fifth day the chamber had thinned out
considerably, but there were still a few diehards bulling their way
through, and slogging it out with each other at the dispatch boxes. The
debate was not “about” anything mind you, but more of an ongoing “roast”
of each other’s positions using parliamentary rules . . . all very
“British” and “civilized.” After eight days of this, we had achieved
our objective, made it into the Guinness book of World Records, and were
utterly exhausted. The Union Society gave little certificates to the
more vocal participants, part of which thanked the participants for
their efforts and thanking them for exhibiting “occasional sobriety.”
It was like a very raucous House of Commons at times, when the chamber
was more full. It’s untrue, however, that we never left the hall. We
had to, in order to eat or take care of “other matters.” The point of
the debate was to keep it going no matter what, because Heineken and
Guinness sent corporate representatives to sit in the chamber at all
times to ensure that the debate kept going. If one went into the
library or even went home to sleep occasionally, one would most likely
get a call from someone requesting you return in order to keep the
debate going. That happened to me. After two days I went home to
sleep, and after only about 4 hours of sleep, was called to return to
the chamber to keep it going. So for the next five days I more or less
lived, ate, and slept at the Union Society.
We’re often asked to
sum up in maybe a paragraph or two what GHD is “about.” It’s hard to
sum it up. Can you? Or at least give a potential reader an idea of
what to expect?
God, History, and Dialectic
is about exactly what the subtitle says:
The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural
Consequences.
That
is to say, my aim was not only to exhibit the Augustinian synthesis as
but a recasting of the older Hellenization of Origen et al, but also to
show its “tightness” and to explore a range of consequences that this
synthesis, employing all the standard tactics and techniques of
Gnosticism, had in the wider culture, in the formulation of law, of
biblical criticism, of the rise of dialectical views of history in the
hands of a Joachim of Fiore, a Hegel, and so on. It is more than a
review of my earlier works on Augustinism, it is a consider-ably
expanded essay on the logical entailments and implications of that
system.