Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy

Chance and Choice

Jérôme Brillaud, Virginie Greene, Virginie Greene, Jérôme Brillaud

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350160927
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting.
With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology, and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century, while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches.

Chapter 1

ENCOUNTERING THE DIVINE: ON THE COGNITION OF GOD IN EARLY FRENCH CHRISTIAN HUMANISM

Jacob Vance

This essay is about the way early sixteenth-century French humanists theorized the mind’s encounter with the divine through cognition. It addresses the relation between reason and faith in early French humanist discourse, and how humanists theorized the unity of faith and reason in articulating the soul’s encounter with God. The early Renaissance humanists Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1450–1536) and Josse Clichtove (1472–1543) formed an important part of the sixteenth-century Catholic Pre-Reformation movement.¹ The Pre-Reformation represents a brief period in the history of French Renaissance intellectual thought, but also a period of great humanist scholarly activity during which Catholic reformers sought to cultivate models for spiritual life and to theorize the soul’s encounter with the divine in both philosophical and Scriptural terms.² By making available classical and medieval texts, along with new commentaries on those texts, Lefèvre and his associate Clichtove sought to renew both philosophical and spiritual models for the soul’s encounter with God, in order to revitalize religious life and piety in France. They strove to reform educational and religious institutions, at a time when the French educational system and Church had fallen into disarray, and to cultivate devotional life by translating and publishing philosophical and spiritual texts. In their commentaries on these texts, they conceived of the soul’s encounter with the divine in both philosophical—pertaining to rational cognition—and pietistic terms of the Christian faith. Their synthesis of faith and reason as alternative but complementary paths to encountering the divine represents one important chapter in the long history of speculation about the connections between philosophy and religion in Western Europe, from Late Antiquity to the early Renaissance.³

Lefèvre d’Étaples’ travels to Italy to meet the great Italian humanists, and to assimilate their scholarly and historical methods, are now a story well known within Renaissance studies. Lefèvre actively sought to rediscover classical and medieval theories of the human soul’s encounter with the divine through both reason and revelation, and to situate these theories within a broader Evangelical framework. Lefèvre led the early Pre-Reformation initiative in France, which spanned from approximately 1450 to 1536. He died in 1536, the same year that his great contemporary Northern humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), passed away on the eve of the French Protestant Reformation. The year 1536 marks an end to the Catholic Pre-Reformation in France, as it was the same year that John Calvin (1509–1564) published his Institutes of the Christian Religion.⁴

Lefèvre and Clichtove took a particular interest in classical philosophy, and in medieval theology and spirituality, reacting as other humanists did against the dominance of logic in late-medieval education and theology. Logic, they thought, could not account for the fullness of human religious experience. Instead, they turned to models of encountering the divine that integrated both reason and faith. They took a particular interest in medieval Greek theological texts, in part because medieval Greek theology represented an alternative to late scholastic theology and to the influence of Greco-Arab philosophical thought.⁵ For Lefèvre and Clichtove, the tradition of medieval Greek theology represented a synthesis of philosophy and theology that could serve to remedy the degenerate state of medieval educational and religious life. Their editorial and commentarial activity served to put patristic texts into circulation in modernized editions—with new introductions, and new critical notes—as a way of promoting theological and spiritual models which integrate a strong cognitive component. This cognitive element, this emphasis on gnosis, was arguably vital to the way in which they understood the soul’s encounter with God.

Two medieval Greek Christian thinkers—Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth or early sixth century CE), and Saint John of Damascus (675–753 CE)—held a particularly important status for Lefèvre and Clichtove. Pseudo-Dionysius offered a theory of theophany in which the human soul encounters the divine through knowledge of its manifestations in nature and human tradition. Dionysius was (probably) a Syrian monk who synthesized Platonic philosophy with Christian thought in a manner that proved central to early French humanists. He offered a theory of the soul’s encounter with the divine that combined Pagan philosophy and Christian theology.⁶ Lefèvre and Clichtove joined Dionysius’ theory of the soul’s ascent to the divine with their humanist and Evangelical perspective, bringing together philosophy, theology, and Evangelical literature into a coherent, unified whole. However, Dionysius was a pseudonym: the author fictitiously presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian judge at the Areopagus who was converted by Saint Paul in the first century CE. This pseudonymous authorship later contributed to the creation and circulation of a legend in France that this Dionysius was Denis, the third-century Christian martyr and saint who was believed to have become the first Bishop of Paris.⁷

Lefèvre’s and Clichtove’s interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ works was based on what could be described as an uncritical acceptance of the legend of Dionysius’s fictitious identity as a disciple of Saint Paul. This legend had already been put into question by, among others, Nicholas of Cusa, Lorenzo Valla, and Erasmus of Rotterdam. Yet until 1522, Lefèvre held to the fictitious authority of Dionysius as a disciple of the Apostle.⁸ Lefèvre perhaps upheld the legend in part because it enabled him to theorize the unity of Christian piety and philosophical reasoning. We may speculate that Pseudo-Dionysian philosophy in general, and of the idea of theophany in particular, represented an important model for the encounter between the divine and the human soul.

Thus, while one could interpret Lefèvre’s and Clichtove’s acceptance of the legend of Pseudo-Dionysius as a lack of historical method and as an adherence to authority, and while they could be understood as having merely prolonged an error, there was arguably more at stake than mere adherence to the authority of a legend. Lefèvre and Clichtove possibly upheld the legend of Dionysius because his works offered a synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and a way to conceive the unity of patristic and medieval spirituality. They developed an Evangelical interpretation of Dionysius in their commentaries by referencing the relevant passages of Scripture in the margins of Dionysius’ text. In this way, they constructed an Evangelical lens through which to interpret Dionysius—a lens that harmonized Evangelical faith and theological reasoning. Lefèvre and Clichtove used the notion of theophany to unify various strands of Aristotelianism, Platonism and Evangelism. By maintaining the legend of Pseudo-Dionysius, they could conceive of theophany as an extension of Saint Paul’s teachings. They appropriated the idea of theophany to situate philosophical, mystical, and theological texts within an Apostolic lineage. Moreover, the Pseudo-Dionysian notion of theophany involves the view that the cosmos is a hierarchical and rational order. Thus, by using Pseudo-Dionysian philosophy, Lefèvre and Clichtove embraced a theory of hierarchy that made reason and rational order central to their spirituality. They interpreted Pseudo-Dionysian theophany, and hierarchy, from their unique perspective in French religious history—that is, from the perspective of the first generation of early French Renaissance thinkers to combine philosophy and theology with Christian Evangelism.⁹

In Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius theorizes a God that lies beyond all created beings; he also offers a Platonic theory of the way the multiplicity of entities in the created world relate, through a series of cosmic and institutional hierarchical structures, to the unknowable divine essence.¹⁰ For him, this unknowable divine essence is absolutely simple and unified, but it emanates, manifesting itself and making itself known as it descends through the rationally ordered hierarchy. The divine essence, though mysterious in and of itself, emanates through the order of the hierarchy, which enables the soul to return to divine unity and divine simplicity—and to thereby become deified.¹¹

For Pseudo-Dionysius, theophany is a kind of epiphany or mode of encountering the divine through order and structure in which cognition plays a vital role. In the Pseudo-Dionysian philosophical and theological model, the order and hierarchy of creation represents a theophanic revelation of the divine. God is conceived as transcending creation, but also as disclosing Himself in and through the order of the created world. In this perspective, creation is theophany, a rational and ordered manifestation of the divine, that deifies the soul. According to Pseudo-Dionysius, the soul encounters the divine through rational structure.¹² Reason, which discerns the order of the universe, plays a vital part in the deification of the soul.

Dionysius’ synthesis of Platonism and Christianity—specifically in terms of his theory of theophanic revelation—would provide Lefèvre and Clichtove a lens for interpreting John of Damascus’ work. The latter was a monk and priest of Syrian origin who lived under Islamic rule during the period of the Umayyad caliphs and belonged to the Christian Melkite tradition. His Fount of Knowledge (c. 720–43) defined the Christian position on orthodoxy within the Islamic world.¹³ The book has three parts, of which the third part, titled On the Orthodox Faith, consists of a compendium of Christian theological treatises. In this part, John of Damascus offers the Platonic and Christian idea, which we also find in Dionysius’ works, that God is entirely unknowable in His essence. He is, however, knowable through His energies that manifest themselves in and through the created world. These energies can be known, in this Greek tradition of speculation, partly ...