Modern Theology 24:1 January 2008

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

REVIEWS

The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought by Paul
Gavrilyuk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) xii + 210 pp.

Paul Gavrilyuks study on central matters of the ancient patristic theological construct
is to be greatly welcomed. We have been waiting for such a work, one that combines
historical skill with theological acuteness and literary analytical ability, for a very long
time indeed. Patristic theology, when it was done at all in anything but a cursory
manner (a very quick nod on the way past the New Testament on the road to the
Reformation and Modern Systematics) was largely the province of historical theolo-
gians who generally seem to have used too large an amount of Patrology-type mate-
rials to give them their analyses of what different ancient writers actually said about
a given topic. This may be an unfair characterization, but reading earlier patristic
textbooks that did retain an interest in theology certainly makes one wonder, in many
instances, whether their authors have actually ever read the writers in question, or
whether they are simply in the game of recycling clichs from earlier generations. One
key area where this sad state of affairs was unarguably true was in the matter of the
suffering of God. Impassibility was presented as if it were a simple and unvariegated
idea in the whole of patristic writing, and then contrasted with modern theological
efforts to be more sensitive to the question of divine suffering; or rather parodied as
an Aunt Sally to make modern work look necessary and useful. Gavrilyuk takes these
clichd characterizations outside and gives them a good dusting off in this book.
An early section holds up what has long been operating in common theological
presuppositions, namely a presumed strict division between biblical ideas of an
empathetic God who acts within history, and Hellenistic ideas of an impassible deity
who is abstracted from the world. Gavrilyuk shows this up to be what it is, namely a
scholarly caricature, a convenient straw man put together by proponents of the
Theory of the Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy. His argument moves to the more
rened position that the Greek Fathers are driven to their own reconsideration of the
forms of impassibility in the philosophical tradition, precisely because they were
concerned to be faithful to the biblical idioms of their church, and yet wanted to rene
theological utterance by making a strong distinction between anthropomorphism and
anthropopathism, on the one hand, and the afrmation of the grace of divine empathy,
on the other.
His second chapter discusses what the Greek Fathers meant by their use of the
concept of impassibility, concluding that it comes back time and again to the afrma-
tion that the Christian God: does not have the same emotions as the gods of the
heathen, that his care for human beings is free from self-interest, and any association
with evil; that since he has neither body nor soul, he cannot directly have the expe-
riences connected with them . . . and that in the incarnation he emerges victorious
over suffering and death. The patristic stress on impassibility, studied closely in

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Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
126 Reviews

context, therefore, was far from being an afrmation of the abstract forms of Neo-
Platonic Transcendentalism, but on the contrary was a qualier of the language that
the Bible used about the divine emotions, reminding Christians of a later age that a
deep turning away from speech (Apophasis) was perennially required to keep the
Christian theological utterances clear and clean.
To demonstrate and base his case Gavrilyuk takes specic instances of how the
impassibility issue came to the front of the stage in the passage of the Church through
history, and how in each case the same generic principles were applied by the patristic
tradition, in differing controversial circumstances. To this end he studies the issue of
early Docetism, the Patripassian controversy (early Roman Modalism), the Arian
crisis, and Cyril of Alexandrias conict with Nestorius in the fth century. Cyril is a
major thinker, but he has been so regularly and so unjustly caricatured for his phrase
apathos epathen that it is a pleasure to see a deep and accurate exegesis of his thought.
Gavrilyuks exegesis makes it abundantly obvious to any open mind that this was the
work of a man who cared passionately about divine empathy, and who never put pen
to paper for the sake of an unconsidered conundrum.
The study of Arianism that results from this engagement with the issue of divine
suffering is most interesting in its own right. Gavrilyuk gives close scrutiny to leading
scholarly analysts of the Arian question (especially Richard Hanson and Maurice
Wiles), highlighting how they contributed extensively to a modern myth that divine
suffering was at the very heart of Arian soteriology. Their texts for making this
judgment are shown to be strikingly peripheral, and the logic of their theological
categorisations is questioned, not least because it is hard to reconcile a presupposition
that the Arians were theopaschite in spirit with the reality that they raised the issue
of the Logos involvement in the suffering esh precisely as an argument to prove the
Son could not possibly be divine as God is divine.
The heart of the book is a masterly analysis of the Cyril-Nestorius exchanges,
when the issue of divine involvement in suffering really came onto the theological
agenda in a fully focused way, being fought about by two signicant, learned, and
highly vociferous theologians. As we know, that argument brought about a whirl-
wind in its trail. Its divisive effects still mark the Churches of the East to this day.
Gavrilyuk concludes that it was Cyrils victory that determined the terms of the
discussion on divine impassibility for centuries to come; certainly in the works of
Byzantine masters such as Maximus and John Damascene, but also in the hands of
skilled Cyrillians and anti-Chalcedonians such as Severus of Antioch and Philox-
enus of Mabbug.
One of the great merits of this book is that from start to nish the reader feels
engaged with a thinker who checks the sources. The presuppositions which are
here brought out for critical dialogue look so foolish in the light of day that it makes
one wonder why they held the eld captive for so long. One thing is clear: after
reading this book no one will ever be able again, without smiling, to maintain that
there was ever a single coherent idea in Hellenistic philosophy about divine impas-
sibility. Clearing the ground thus makes it possible to consider the Greek Fathers for
what they truly were, philosophers of religion forging new identities, answering old
problems of theodicy, and carving out new questions for a world with a new intel-
lectual, moral, and religious agenda. Their collective achievement thus stands out all
the more remarkably in relief, a fact that Gavrilyuk showcases persuasively.
Gavrilyuk is to be greatly commended for showing us all how powerful these
gures were as systematic theologians more than capable of holding their own
against the ranks of moderns who later pressed-ganged their agendas by carica-
turing them, sometimes unread. This is a highly recommended monograph, one
that would serve as a lively textbook in both patristic and systematics seminar
contexts.

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Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Reviews 127

John A. McGuckin
Columbia University and
Union Theological Seminary
3041 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
USA
jmcguckn@uts.columbia.edu

Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University by Thomas
Albert Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) xii + 468 pp.

Thomas Albert Howard has written a detailed and readable book pursuing the
overlapping goals of understanding the evolution of the modern German university
from the vantage point of theology and the evolution of modern theology from the
vantage point of the university (p. 6). His account allows us to place in their social,
political and institutional context a whole collection of methodological issues in the
rise of modern German theology that are more often discussed as intellectual abstrac-
tions: the place of theological prolegomena, the role of Wissenschaft, the relationship of
confessional particularity to public discourse, the place of practical theology, the
nature of Kulturprotestantismus, and so on. In performing this contextualisation he
does not simply embroider our understanding of those topics with vignettes of
colourful historical background, but enables us to understand each of them more
deeply, and to see more clearly just how much was at stake in the debates about them.
Howards centrepiece is a wonderfully thorough analysis of the foundation of the
University of Berlin in 1810, with particular attention to the role played by Friedrich
Schleiermacher, but he sets that incident within a much longer narrative. He touches
on the medieval foundation of the earliest German universities, established on the
model of Paris as autonomous legal corporations that, though they were legally
neither ecclesial nor political, nevertheless had a thoroughly ecclesial mission. He
speaks about the transformation of the German universities after the Reformation,
describing routes through Melanchthon to Protestant Scholasticism, and the pro-
cesses by which each theology faculty became a defender of the honour of its terri-
torys confessionthe academic guard dogs of the cuius regio eius religio principle.
And he describes in some detail the many-faceted decline of the German universities
in the eighteenth century: nancial mismanagement, nepotism, faculty absenteeism,
curricular stagnation, professorial pedantry, a decline in matriculation numbers, a
famously coarse student culture, and the rise of extra-mural intellectual elites ani-
mated by currents owing from enlightened France and deist England. He analyses
the increasing volume of criticism and ridicule of the university system towards the
end of the century, and describes how those critiques were fanned and complicated by
the suppression of many European universities after the French Revolution and
Napoleonic conquests.
This negative context for the foundation of the University of Berlin is joined by a
more positive, though very closely related context: the rise of what Howard, following
R. Steven Turner, calls Wissenschaftsideologiea devout faith in the minds duty and
capacity to enquire into and represent the basic essence of things, and through such
activities to improve human character (Bildung) (p. 28). He explores the many calls
made for philosophy (in the broad sense of all that was covered by the philosophy
faculty of the traditional university) to be free from confessional constraints, and free
from utilitarian concernsfree both for teachers and for pupils to follow wherever
the arguments and the evidence might lead, bound only by the inherent structures of

2008 The Authors

Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd