Composition and Publication History

God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences is a single enormous work — around a thousand pages — that Farrell self-published in 1997, circulated as a secured electronic edition in 2008, and reissued as a four-volume print-on-demand set in 2016. Its bibliographic record is genuinely thin and largely self-generated, and this file documents what can actually be established and flags what cannot.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; bibliography)

A Deliberately Careful Bibliographic Note

This repository’s methodology asks for special care about sources whose record is thin (see METHODOLOGY.md, §3.5). God, History, and Dialectic (hereafter GHD) is exactly such a case, and the irony is worth stating: a book that offers a sweeping, confident account of a thousand years of European history is itself a work whose own publication history is difficult to pin down, because it never went through a commercial or academic publisher with a stable catalogue record. What follows distinguishes the documentable from the uncertain.

The Title and the Claim of the Title

The full title is God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences. The title is itself a compressed statement of the thesis: God (the doctrine of the Trinity, and specifically how the Godhead is conceived), History (the claim that this doctrine has cultural and historical consequences), and Dialectic (Farrell’s diagnostic category for what went wrong in the West), producing “the Two Europes” — a First Europe of the Orthodox East and the pre-Augustinian West, and a Second Europe formed by Augustinism — with “cultural consequences” reaching into law, politics, and philosophy. The subtitle announces that this is a work of theological history: the thesis that theology is the deep grammar of a civilization (see The Two Europes; The Genre of Theological History).

The 1997 Edition

The earliest documentable form of GHD is a 1997 edition of roughly 1,051 pages, listed in library and book-metadata records with the publisher given simply as “Joseph P. Farrell” — that is, self-published (Google Books metadata for God, History, and Dialectic, giving 1997 and 1,051 pp.). This was a single bound volume (or a bound set), not the later four-volume arrangement. No trade publisher and no academic press stands behind it; there is no series editor, no external editorial apparatus, and no evidence of peer review (see Reception and Assessment: The Work’s Footprint). [Disputed: because the 1997 record is essentially a self-publication, the exact print run, binding, and even whether it was formally “published” versus privately produced cannot be established from a checkable source; the year 1997 and the ~1,051-page extent are the firm facts, and the rest of the 1990s production history is not documented.]

The 2008 Electronic Edition

For a decade GHD circulated mainly in a secured electronic edition released in February 2008, produced and sold by Asher Black at a price of $85, in the form of scanned manuscript pages converted to secured PDF and distributed as a Windows executable (discussion and vendor explanation on the Orthodox blog Energetic Procession, “God, History and Dialectic,” 28 February 2008). The technical form — scanned pages, digital-rights protection, Windows-only, recurring availability problems — is itself a symptom of the work’s status: this was not a book one could simply buy from a publisher, but a difficult-to-obtain artifact passed through a small Orthodox internet subculture (see Reception and Assessment: Orthodox Internet Reception). The same discussion records ongoing difficulty keeping the work available and floats the possibility of a future print edition dependent on volunteer typists.

The 2016 Four-Volume Edition

The most stable and now-standard form is the four-volume print-on-demand edition of 2016, produced through Lulu (ISBNs in the 978-1-365-… range) and carried by Amazon and other print-on-demand channels. The four volumes are:

  1. Volume I — God: The Foundation of the First Europe (the Trinitarian theology of the First Europe)
  2. Volume II — The Dialectical God of Augustinism (Augustine, divine simplicity, and the Filioque as the root of the dialectic)
  3. Volume III — History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe (the cultural consequences)
  4. Volume IV — The Apparatus (the scholarly apparatus — notes, sources, appendices)

(Volume titles and the four-volume structure from the Goodreads series listing and the Amazon/Lulu editions, all dated 2016.) The publisher’s own promotional description of this edition calls it “Dr. Farrell’s magnum opus.” The four-volume set is a repackaging of the single 1997 work, not a new or revised book; the division into four volumes — three of argument plus one of apparatus — is an editorial convenience of the print-on-demand reissue (Goodreads, “God, History, and Dialectic Series”; publisher blurbs on the 2016 volumes).

What Can and Cannot Be Established

To be explicit about the limits of the record:

  • Firm: the title and subtitle; the 1997 self-published edition of ~1,051 pages; the February 2008 secured electronic edition sold by Asher Black at $85; the 2016 four-volume Lulu print-on-demand set with the four volume titles above; and the fact that no trade or academic publisher ever stood behind any edition.
  • Uncertain / undocumented: any precise account of when the work was actually written (it plainly grew out of the 1980s Oxford and St. Tikhon’s period but the composition dates are not documented); print runs; whether the 1997 form circulated widely or narrowly; and the exact relationship between the 1997 text and the 2016 volumes beyond repackaging. These are flagged rather than guessed.

The upshot is that GHD is, bibliographically, a self-published work of the late 1990s that reached its readers mainly through a niche electronic edition and, latterly, print-on-demand — a fact that says nothing about the truth of its arguments but a great deal about the kind of scrutiny it has and has not received (see The Genre of Theological History; The Scholarly Debate).

See Also

References

  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences. [Self-published], 1997 (~1,051 pp.). Google Books metadata (id ULAiVpCMGrAC).
  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, secured electronic edition (Asher Black, February 2008). Documented in Energetic Procession (Orthodox blog), “God, History and Dialectic,” 28 February 2008.
  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, 4 vols. [Lulu print-on-demand], 2016: Vol. I God: The Foundation of the First Europe; Vol. II The Dialectical God of Augustinism; Vol. III History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe; Vol. IV The Apparatus. Goodreads series listing; Amazon/Lulu editions.