Holy Beauty is an English translation of this book which was originally published in Greek in 2004. The author is Chrysostomos Stamoulis, a professor of dogmatic and sym- bolic theology at the Faculty of Theology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who is simultaneously a musician who has released six albums. Translation is made by Norman Russell who has written, translated, and edited several books about Orthodox tradition. Praise is due to him for bringing pearls from Greek theology into the English language.
When a book receives translation eighteen years after its publication, it suggests that it has proven its value over time and deserves its place in the international discourse. This certainly applies to this book about Orthodox philokalic aesthetics and beauty. By beauty is meant a Platonic insight of beauty, disclosing the transcendent reality beyond this world. By philokalic is meant an anthology of patristic writings—the Philokalia— from the Eastern Church spanning the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. Stamoulis’s repeated reference to Dostoevsky’s protagonist Prince Myshkin helps us to understand that the whole book is an extended commentary on Myshkin’s quote ‘beauty will save the world’ (p. 83).
The casual reader might have an initial problem with the book as it is a very Greek book, rooted in the world of Greece—indeed of Thessaloniki—and most of the authors that Stamoulis deals with are little known outside Greece. In its composition, non-Greek readers were not its anticipated audience, so this English translation contains a Who’s Who appended at the end of the book to help the reader. Still, this does not mean that this is a local or niche book. Quite the opposite is the case; it is a grand project with uni- versal conclusions and ecumenical implications. The main argument of the context and dis- course that precedes the book can be described in a few sentences, which leaves more space to describe Stamoulis’s response, which is much more thought-provoking.
The recent trend in a global discussion on the nature of aesthetics lies in it becoming an autonomous discipline focused on the beautiful at the expense of the good. Among Orthodox theologians this led to increased suspicion toward Western ideas, so they replied by returning to aesthetics based on philokalia (love of the beautiful). The modern aesthetic theory in their opinion obscured the idea that ‘the beauty of the material
world is not simply a pointer to the transcendent beauty, but material world participates in absolute beauty’ (p. x). Unfortunately, according to Stamoulis, this Orthodox return to philokalia leads to further polarisation between East and West, and to growing anti-Westernism.
Stamoulis wants to reverse this trend. In his book he offers a fresh holistic presentation of Byzantine Orthodox philokalic aesthetics by avoiding any dichotomy between East and West, also by offering space to various non-Orthodox theologians in his philosoph- ical and theological debate around aesthetics, from Church Fathers to contemporary thin- kers, from philosophers to poets. Stamoulis sees his book as an ‘open dialogue, a round table’ (p. xix) at which a plethora of voices is present, such as Marxist theorist Kostas Zouraris, poets George Seferis, Georgios Themelis, and Zissimos Lorentzatos, theolo- gians Alexander Schmemann and Nikos Matsoukas, writers Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis and Fyodor Dostoevsky, alongside elders Sophrony of Essex and Porphyrios of Mount Athos, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and Church Fathers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Cyril of Alexandria, and Gregory of Palamas. This list is not exhaustive. Stamoulis brings these names into discussion to show that Orthodox aesthetics is neither narrow nor defensive, neither triumphalist nor belligerent.
In fact, this is one of the most important contributions of this book: Stamoulis over- comes the dialectical framing of the relationship between Western aesthetics and Eastern philokalia as two incompatible, opposed and conflicted approaches. He refuses Orthodox discussion that treats beauty only in terms of technology and techniques of the ecclesiastical arts. Stamoulis underlines that in the Byzantine tradition, technique and ontology build an ‘unbreakable relationship’ (p. xvii).
The book is divided into three main parts, each part separated into three chapters. The first part is called ‘Philokalia or Aesthetics? The Dilemma of Contemporary Orthodoxy’, with an emphasis on the word ‘dilemma’. Marxist political scientist, Kostas Zouraris, builds a theoretical basis for the overturning of the current image of aesthetics with his insistence on the word ‘philokalia’ and his distinction between Greco-Roman and Eastern worldviews. The choice of Russian theologian Alexander Schmemann in the second chapter could seem surprising, but based on Schmemann’s Journals, Stamoulis claims that his theology can be categorised as philokalic aesthetics (p. 38). For Father Schmemann, Orthodox aesthetics does not refer to forms and shapes alone, but it focuses chiefly on the essence of Orthodox self-awareness, ‘the essence of the mode of the ecclesial body’ (p. 36). In this sense, Schmemann rejects any East-West schema, because West is also his world, and he seeks God beyond and outside legalisations and categories (p. 56). In the third chapter, Stamoulis invites on to the scene a Thessalonian dogmatic theologian, Nikos, who ‘theologises in a holistic manner’ (p. 77). For him this dilemma does not exist (p. 62), as he strives to overcome a sterile East-West polarity. Certainly, he is not without reservations towards the West, but is not without reservations with regard to the East as well.
The second part of the book, ‘Orthodoxy’s Philokalic Aesthetics: The “Both Together” of Patristic Teaching’, is more thematic and does not follow any particular author as its main subject matter. Stamoulis relies on various Church Fathers, including the aforementioned Dionysus the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Cyril of Alexandria, and Gregory Palamas, alongside John Damascus, but also Christos Yannaras, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
John Zizioulas, and Elizabeth Theokritoff. It is no surprise that Stamoulis considers Dionysius the Areopagite to be a ‘nucleus of Orthodoxy’s philokalic aesthetics’ (p. 84), because he declared beauty to be a name for God, which is one of his most pivotal contribu- tions to Christian theological discourse. When Dionysius refers to the supra-substantially beautiful and calls it beauty, he refers to the whole of God and all that is the good, which is not impersonal, but is the good personal God of revelation (pp. 93–94). The anthropo- logical line is important here: the human being subsists only in relation to this good, the source of life, through participation in the supreme beauty. In chapter 5 Stamoulis develops this anthropological perspective and claims that the Fall includes the loss of beauty. The Fall did not lead to the loss of the image of God, but it led to the removal of the beauty of the image. Still, this does not truncate the human being (p. 116), and Stamoulis brings examples from patristic theology to manifest the value of flesh and body. In the next chapter he takes this debate on the nature of the human being and relates it to the nature of the world, the doctrine of creation, and environmental problems. Stamoulis offers examples from the contemporary Orthodox theology that depreciate creation and strives to overcome the tendency to make division between nature and history, sacred and profane, reason and myth, art and philoso- phy, aesthetics and philokalia.
In the third part, named ‘Unutterable Beauty: Examples of a Philokalic Reading of Ecclesial Life’, Stamoulis explores various models of the nature of the Church. Chapter 7 about poet and painter Nikos Pentzikis offers a rejection of liturgical life on behalf of ‘Churching of life’. Stamoulis uses a parable of a young Greek artist walking by the seashore rather than going to church in order to show that the Church is not a created entity, but is a Church of revelation to which all paths of life lead. In a further chapter, Stamoulis engages the elder Sophrony of Essex in order to approach conflict between created reality and God himself. Sophrony studied painting in his youth and had to reject art in order to achieve victory over sin. The artistic-theological combination continues in the last chapter, based around a metaphor of the song of the nightingale. Here the elder Porphyrios considers the song of a nightingale as a sound praising the Creator, and this experience helps him to discover God. This type of ‘holy sensitivity’ is criticised by many in contemporary Orthodox theology, as it denies the role of emotion, sensitivity, and feelings. For Stamoulis, the song of a nightingale is evidence of universal aesthetics; all created being is the result of the universal activity of God, and contains the beauty scattered throughout the whole world.
By being a ‘prolegomena’ to the philokalic aesthetics, the reader must accept that this book contains ‘only’ prefatory remarks on the topic and is not a comprehensive overview of the topic. This is underlined by a certain short-hand style and the absence of a more coherent, extensive, and elaborated argumentation. Each chapter can be read by itself, if needed. The reader must also expect a book where theological themes go hand in hand with poetry, art, and metaphors, so the most persisting ideas that will linger with readers might be the nightingale’s song or how it feels to walk by the seashore.
Next to what has been said, let me add that the author shows great knowledge of both patristic teaching and contemporary Orthodox theology, but he also shows knowledge of Western theology and philosophy. This enables him to build surprising, exciting conver- sations: St Silouan the Anthonite with T.S. Eliot, or Porphyrios with Adorno. The biggest value of this book is rejecting the East-West dichotomy, while still offering an authenticOrthodox perspective that smells and tastes like the Patristic banquet, where saints bring
out of their storeroom new treasures to share with others.
antidosis 