THEOLOGY-PHILOSOPHY
Interdisciplinary Research Seminar
FRIDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 24 2010, 3 p.m.
Silverman Phenomenology Center
The keynote speaker for our Fall 2010 meeting of the seminar is Dr. John D. Jones, professor of philosophy at Marquette University. Dr. Jones is a noted scholar of Pseudo-Dionysius. He is the translator of the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names, and the author of several studies dedicated to the interpretation of the Corpus Dionysiacum and its medieval reception. His historical and philological research is doubled by philosophical reflection on some central ps.-Dionysian themes: the notion of God "beyond being," the notion of theological language beyond both affirmation and negation, the notion of theology as "liturgy" or "science," and so forth.
His presentation, entitled "Filled with the Visible Theophany of the Lord: Reading Dionysius East and West," will be followed by a panel discussion with Dr. Michael Harrington, Dr. Therese Bonin (Philosophy), Dr. Marie Baird, and Dr. Bogdan Bucur (Theology).
FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2010: CLICK HERE [PDF] OR ON THE POSTER BELOW:
The guest speaker of our first meeting is Dr. Michael Vlad Niculescu (Bradley University). In a series of published articles, Niculescu has proposed a critical-phenomenological interpretation of the thought of Greek Patristic authors such as Origen of Alexandria, the Cappadocians or Evagrius Ponticus. In addition to his continued interest in Patristic literature, Niculescu’s research is currently focused on the post-modern criticism of the reductionist, power-driven, use of reason (the so-called “logocentrism”) in post-Enlightenment continental philosophy, with a particular concentration on logocentrism’s contribution to the ideological repression of the rational-critical and religious-testimonial forms of dissent in recent totalitarianisms.
Niculescu is the author of The Spell of the Logos: Origen of Alexandria’s Exegetic Pedagogy in the Contemporary Debate regarding Logocentrism (Gorgias Press, 2009).
A Non-Logocentric Logos?
Placing Origen within the Debate Regarding Logocentrism
ABSTRACT
The scholar of recent continental philosophy and the patristic studies scholar seem to develop different, if not outright divergent, associative threads upon the hearing of the term “logocentrism.” To take just one of the many possible examples of a recent employment of the term, Derrida sees logocentrism as the tendency to condition the open semiosis of writing on narrowly defined principles of speech-communication (speech pragmatics) or on rigidly analytical requirements of logical consistency. According to Derrida, the roots of logocentrism should be sought in profound, matricial, strata of Western thought, which seems to have embraced rather uncritically a metaphysics of presence, i.e., an ultimate and potentially totalizing justification of its discourse on the basis of a reflexive presence-to-self or self-identity of one foundational principle such as Being, Reason, Spirit, the thinking subject, consciousness, etc. By contrast to the discourses authorized by this self-centered reason (logos), the Logos-unauthorized discourses (the ethical and the esthetical by comparison with the ontological; the feminine by comparison with the phalocratic; the non-Western by comparison with the Western; etc.) will appear as ex-centric, marginal, or even anomalous.
On the other hand, the patristic scholar has made acquaintance with a different version of logocentrism through the study of at least three traditions, namely, Late-Greek philosophy (most notably, the late-Platonist systems and Stoicism), the Jewish Hellenistic thought of writers such as Philo, and the early Christian developments of John’s Word-centered theology. Given the high regard in which these three traditions hold the Logos, should one automatically label them as “logocentrist”?
In this presentation I shall attempt an evaluation of the role of the Logos in the thought of Origen of Alexandria, a Christian scholar who was schooled in both the late-Greek and the Christian traditions, was well-acquainted with Hellenistic Judaism, and, was also familiar with various aspects of Rabbinic, non-Hellenistic Judaism. If, as Origen believed, humanity’s hope for salvation has been answered by a divine Word, whose coming into the world has unfolded history according to a messianic intrigue, Origen’s messianic reading of world history as a soteriological discourse should not come as a surprise. How does Origen refer to this discourse? A speech that spells the coming Word, this discourse would have to be soteriological in its very wording, it would have to happen soteriologically. The Word’s historical unfolding would have to be approached as a gospel, a good-news or a revelatory speech event, which, literally, spells salvation. Receiving this messianic Word would necessarily imply as well the believer’s application to the study of the Bible as “gospel” in the broadest sense.
The task of my reading of Origen is twofold. In addition to offering a detailed analysis of Origen’s understanding of exegesis as a liturgical attending to the Word’s evangelic advent in the Bible (a sort of textual redoubling of the incarnation), it also addresses a recent concern regarding the totalizing potential of Origen’s Logos-centered reading of history as evangelic or Christian. One may indeed wonder whether Origen’s exegetical spelling of the Word as universal Gospel can prevent the silencing of the speech of, let us say, the Greek or the Jew outside of Christianity? Ultimately, one may wonder whether it is possible to dissociate Origen’s Christian understanding of the Bible-incarnate Word from the totalizing rigor of a universalist metaphysics, and what would be the consequences of such an attempt.
After an analysis of Origen in light of the recent concerns with logocentrism, I shall discus a few aspects of Origen’s Logos-centered thought that might not be easily fit under this notion. Moreover, I shall suggest that the need to account for certain aspects of the Origenian Logos justifies a revaluation of the very notion of logocentrism. I would like to suggest that, for a better account of Origen’s ethical and agapic revision of the metaphysical notion of Logos, one could reconsider Derrida’s prevalently negative assessment of the Logos in light of the thought of another recent thinker, namely Marion. Following some clues in Levinas and Lyotard, I shall maintain that, while aptly designating an attempt to reduce the saying to the said, the term logocentrism could be also interpreted as the event of a phenomenalization that is neither speculative nor idolic. In addition to the Derridean reading of logocentrism, which has its undeniable but also limited advantages, I shall approach Origen’s “logocentrism” through a revised Marionesque hermeneutics, pointing out its aspects of ethical and agapic opening along with the more obvious elements of totalizing closure (for example its assimilationism and supersessionism).
