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I am grateful to the distinguished reviewers for not only reading Shaman and Sage but for summarizing its basic argument better than I have done. As I repeat probably too frequently, I do not think my narrative is in the least bit comprehensive. But I believe it retrieves volumes from the repressed part of the Western library that have been checked out many times over many centuries.
Nadya Williams,“Orphics in Our Midst”
Covering so much ground, I recognize at the outset that Shaman and Sage may ruffle some specialist’s feathers. Needless to say, I’m both eager and not a little nervous to read reviews from scholars of ancient Greco-Roman culture. Getting an overall thumbs-up from Nadya Williams is an encouraging start. The story of her discovering the Derveni papyrus in a papyrology class is fascinating. But it’s not all antiquarian interest. She rightly raises the question: “What does any of this have to do with Christ—and, therefore, with us, modern believers? In other words, why should Christians today care about the Derveni papyrus, those weird Orphic followers, and the plethora of other no less strange sources about complicated shamanistic beliefs and practices across ancient Eurasia?” And I’m grateful she thinks the book addresses this question.
I go back so far in this volume because the context—especially the shift from a locative to a utopian outlook—is a larger part of modernity’s story than is often realized. Nobody believed in reincarnation, for example, until the emergence of Hinduism in the sixth century BC and it came to Greece through Orphic shaman-sages. Today, more people in the West believe in reincarnation than in the resurrection. Orphic mysticism is always incubating, to return in another form as the antithesis to traditional theism. Plato’s Socrates turned away from the public religion of Athens to Orphic myths as a source for his philosophical ideas. We may see some echoes of this in contemporary secularization, which is less a gush of pure atheism than a rebellion against the God of Abraham in favor of “spirituality.” Of course, Christianity is monotheistic, but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are closer in some ways to the personal gods than to an intellectual Sun emanating itself throughout the cosmos. Like the public religion of Greece and Rome, Christendom was seen as confining the spirit to the body. The divine self wanted to make a break for it. As Nadya notes, “In other words, too often, perhaps without even realizing it, ancient mystics and pagans are remarkably (and disturbingly) similar to modern religious skeptics.”
The final chapter does indeed lead readers to the verge of the Renaissance, explored at the beginning of the second volume, with Ficino’s own description of his project as a revival of Orphism. Nadya captures well my goals in this book, noting that my approach emphasizes similarities and continuities over differences. The latter approach is essential and I leaned on many of those scholars for the spade work. But I also agree with Nadya that when focusing on a single thread, such as spirituality, a cohesive narrative can be illuminating. In any event, modernity itself is a metanarrative that many specialists presuppose. I try to navigate between over-explaining and over-simplification. So, I can breathe a sigh of relief—at least for now—and signal my appreciation for her encouraging review.
John Ehrett, “The Long Orphic Shadow”
John Ehrett gives me a little push-back, which is always helpful when you’re attempting to defend an ambitious thesis. I do indeed use (or adapt from others) sharp dichotomies for the big picture and then try to fill it in with qualifications. I’ve especially found J. Z. Smith’s “locative-utopian” categories extremely helpful.
I also distinguish sharply the biblical worldview from Greek “Orphism.” However, I try to do two things here: first, to display the uniqueness of the Christian message in its Greco-Roman milieu; second, to show how ancient Christian writers engaged this heritage both appreciatively and critically. There is a spectrum among these writers. The church’s rejection of views attributed to Origen exhibits the red line, but the story is more complicated than either the Hellenization of Christianity or the Christianization of Hellenism. I emphasize the intertextual imagination of these patristic sources as well as why I think Christians found in Platonism its ally as well as nemesis. The New Testament itself exhibits its Greek context, appropriating Platonic and Stoic concepts for very anti-Orphic conclusions. In comparison with rival schools, Platonism was Christianity’s most natural interlocutor. Besides classical divine attributes we could mention the goal of life as conformity to God as much as possible, the soul’s survival of death, and other doctrines.
So, I agree wholeheartedly with John’s quotation from Johannes Zachhuber. I am not at all trying to “disentangle Christian claims from the broadly Platonic philosophical tradition.” After all, as Turretin observed, it was the Socinians who rejected the Trinity “as a metaphysical doctrine, not biblical.” Harnack’s rejection of the Apostle’s Creed gives us a good picture of what happens when we try to strip the faith of its hard-won formulations.
But I stand by my statement that in terms of creation ex nihilo versus emanation and all that hangs in the balance (viz., the incarnation, resurrection, etc.) the two systems are totally opposite. Salvation from the world is the Orphic heart of Plato’s Socrates; salvation of the world is the heart of the gospel. Critics of Christianity like Celsus and apologists for it like Irenaeus and Tertullian recognized this quite clearly. That so many ancient Christian writers were nimble enough to negotiate their cultural-linguistic world and the apocalyptic religion of the prophets and apostles is a testimony to their vast competence in both.
I’m not sure if John is affirming “an exitus/reditus cosmology,” but emanation is not the only way of saying that “the Christian God is related to creation as its ontological source and ground.” To his question I might ask: Must we accept some form of ontological continuity to affirm that God is the source (principium essendi) of all creaturely being? Can Da Vinci be the source of the Mona Lisa without the work being an extension of his ontological existence?
Also, I’m also not quite sure what to make of the false choice of univocity or equivocity, since I defend analogy, as most Christians have done. The quote from David Bentley Hart seems to imply that we cannot speak even analogically of God as “other than” creation. Hart, in my view, is as brilliant as he is unreliable as a theologian. I am partial to the Orthodox view of God as “beyond being,” such that he could never be a being among beings or be described in his incomprehensible essence. But that hardly entails the radical apophaticism John attributes to my argument: “Horton seems to be insisting here that in order to maintain the God-creature distinction, there be no real ontological continuity or resemblance between terms as predicated of created realities and terms as predicated of God.” But “no real ontological continuity” is very different from “resemblance between terms as predicated of created realities and terms as predicated of God.” The former is a univocal view of being, which I think is wrong, the latter an analogical one that I hold.
John thinks I dispense with mystery and wonder. This reflects in my view the dominance of a uniquely modern but contemporary revival of Christian Neoplatonism (e.g., Radical Orthodoxy, Charles Taylor, et al.). “Enchantment,” as understood from the Romantics to Max Weber, is identified with pre-Christian mysteries, I argue in volume 3. The attack on the Hebrew prophets characterizes this entire élan, which I am confident that John does not endorse. The Christian mysteries are far more “enchanting” in the broader sense, with a transcendent God acting not only upon the world but assuming a human nature and enlivening creatures from within by the Spirit. Only supernaturalism affirms genuine transcendence and mystery as well as divine immanence; natural supernaturalism remains in what Taylor calls the “immanent frame.”
Moreover, I distinguish radical mysticism from Christian mysticism throughout the later chapters. My treatment of Pseudo-Dionysius alone challenges John’s rather sweeping conclusion. Here is the context of his concluding quote: “Analogous to its emergence throughout the Persian Empire, philosophy arose in Greece through the impetus of new religious concepts and ways of conceiving reality that were more mystical, speculative, abstract, and transcendent.” Here I was not offering a critique but simply describing the emerging shift between archaic religion focused on rituals for blessings in this life to more philosophical ideas geared toward the afterlife—long before Christ’s advent.
Finally, I appreciate John’s introducing me to Shahab Ahmed’s work. The point deserves further conversation. My initial query is whether John is recommending a hermeneutic in which particular doctrines and ethical commands in scripture may be contradictory to and overridden by what we interpret as a more fundamental “Pre-Text.” If this is his contention, I would indeed be inclined to see it as an example of philosophical religion ascending above the particularities of historical revelation.
