Pater Oriens scripsit:
|
| Thank you for your thoughtful, and delightfully modest, comments. I am
| grateful to you for bringing us back to a 'holistic' idea of exegesis.
| Of course, I am endeavouring, for the sake of those even less expert
| than I/me [delete offending pronoun], to draw a clear distinction
| between the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools. Naturally in real life
| things were not so simple, and I was fortunate to find such unusually
| clear examples.
|
| Actually any sermon must be to an extent tropological, or moral,
| because that is what sermons are: an attempt to relate the biblical
| passage to the lives of the preacher's hearers and to influence their
| attitudes and conduct. If a sermon doesn't do that, it isn't a sermon
| at all, but a lecture.
Ah, now there's an interesting distinction, and one that I find
difficult to accept. Tropology is not necessarily related solely to
sermons, for we do have many instances of literal, allegorical and
tropological sermons. Moreover, a sermon may have a moral intent
(and in the sermons on the statutes, if I remember correctly, are
ferociously moral!), but it does not preclude the preacher from
engaging in a variety of exegetical strategies.
Secondly, things read *moraliter* often weasel their way into
biblical 'lectures', at least in the scholastic period. Reading the
exegetical works of the fathers (and I immediately think of Basil's
Hexaemeron), we can see a delightful interplay between the various
forms of exegesis, including moral expositions.
Your comments point to an extremely difficult problem, at least for
the period I work in, namely the difference between sermons and
commentaries. Again, I think of Psalms commentaries:
Prepositinus and Philip the Chancellor are just two examples of
sermons collections on the Psalms that circulate as
commentaries, or originate as sermons (oy, how does one do this
stuff properly?).
|
| I didn't point out, in my brief comments on Origen, that just as the
| donkeys stand for the two covenants and Jerusalem stands for the human
| soul, so Jesus 'stands for' the word of God, the Logos. Now, you may
| say, that isn't allegory: Jesus is the word of God. But see how
| Origen's interest is only in Jesus as the Logos. He doesn't (at least
| in this passage) discuss how Jesus felt, what were his human
| motivations for entering Jerusalem, what he thought about the events
| which were going on around him. With such an attitude is easy to lose
| interest in the human soul of Jesus at all. Chrysostom, one feels (and
| perhaps I'll look up an actual example) would be concerned to explore
| how Jesus felt, what he hoped to achieve, how he set about it; in
| other words, he would be concerned with the full humanity of Jesus. It
| is not something his approach allows him to forget.
Granted, but I think I would have fallen over if you had
demonstrated Origen had been concerned with the human
emotions of Jesus. After all, with this anthropological views, why
would he care about how Jesus felt? What matters is not the
passions or the fleeting emotions of Jesus, but rather his human
soul (in union with the Logos) in all its rational and contemplative
glory.
You make me want to go back and read more Chrysostom, and
that is a very good thing. I suspect that it his stoic training that
attracts him to the emotive narrative, but I may be guilty of a
generalisation, an approach which I have just finished objecting to.
Oh to be consistent, at least for one day. :-)
Good, thought-provoking series.
Cheers
Jim
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Dr James R Ginther
Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT UK
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: +44.113.233.6749
Fax: +44.113.233.3654
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http://www.leeds.ac.uk/trs/
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"First up ther wor nobbut God. An 'e said, "Ee, lad, turn th'bloody
light on." -Yorkshire paraphase of Gen. 1.2
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