The Genre of Theological History

God, History, and Dialectic belongs to a distinctive and contestable genre: “theological history,” the claim that the deepest cause of a civilization’s shape is its doctrine of God. This file describes the book’s method — how it moves from Trinitarian theology to cultural diagnosis — and its four-part structure, and it marks at the outset where that method is powerful and where it overreaches.

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

What “Theological History” Means

Most histories explain culture by politics, economics, geography, or the contingencies of events. Farrell’s book proposes something more ambitious and more particular: that the fundamental explanatory variable is theology proper — specifically, how the Trinity is conceived, and above all how the relation of the divine essence to the divine persons is understood. On this view a civilization’s law, politics, philosophy, and even its characteristic pathologies are, at the deepest level, the “cultural consequences” of a doctrine of God worked out and then lived over centuries. The subtitle names this exactly: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences (see Composition and Publication History).

This is not a wholly idiosyncratic idea. It belongs to a recognizable twentieth-century family of theses that read modernity as the outworking of a theological premise — one thinks of the broad tradition that traces secular modernity to late-medieval nominalism, or of the neo-patristic argument (Lossky, Romanides) that the Filioque and the essence-first Trinity of the West set East and West on divergent paths (see The Scholarly Debate: The Neo-Palamite Lineage). Farrell radicalizes this family: where Lossky is careful and largely dogmatic and Romanides is polemical but focused, Farrell attempts a total theological history of the West, from the Cappadocians to secularization, organized around a single diagnostic category — “dialectic” (see Dialectic and Simplicity).

The Method: From the Trinity to the Culture

The argument moves in three great steps, which correspond to the structure of the book.

First, the theological premise. Farrell establishes what he takes to be the two rival ways of conceiving the Godhead: the “First European” way, in which the unity of God is grounded in the person (hypostasis) of the Father — the monarchy of the Father — and the persons are not reducible to the essence; and the “Second European” way, in which, following Augustine’s account of absolute divine simplicity, the persons are conceived as subsistent relations within a single simple essence, so that the essence becomes the ground of the unity and the persons are, as Farrell reads it, dialectically defined by mutual opposition (see The Two Europes; Dialectic and Simplicity).

Second, the diagnostic category. Farrell argues that the Augustinian construction introduces “dialectic” — a structure of defining things by opposition and mutual necessity — into the very doctrine of God, and that once dialectic is lodged at the source, it must work itself out. The Filioque is the first and decisive symptom, because it makes the Spirit’s procession depend on the Father-Son relation and so, in Farrell’s reading, subordinates person to essence and installs opposition at the heart of the Trinity (see Augustine and the Filioque Thesis).

Third, the cultural outworking. The dialectic, once installed, is claimed to generate the characteristic forms of Western Christian and post-Christian culture: scholasticism (theology as dialectical system), the Reformation (an intra-Augustinian civil war between two sides of the same predestinarian premise), and ultimately secularization (the dialectic consuming its own theological content). This is the “theological pathology of the Second Europe” (see The Cultural Consequences).

The Structure of the Book

The 2016 four-volume edition maps onto these steps (see Composition and Publication History):

• Volume I — God: The Foundation of the First Europe — the constructive Trinitarian theology of the First Europe (Cappadocians, Maximus, Photius, Palamas): the monarchy of the Father, the essence-energies distinction, and the non-dialectical conception of God (see The First Europe).
• Volume II — The Dialectical God of Augustinism — the negative core: Augustine’s absolute divine simplicity, the Filioque, and how these install dialectic in the Western doctrine of God (see Dialectic and Simplicity; Augustine and the Filioque Thesis).
• Volume III — History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe — the cultural consequences over the following centuries (see The Cultural Consequences).
• Volume IV — The Apparatus — the supporting notes, sources, and appendices.

The architecture is thus explicitly the architecture of a theological history: a doctrine of God (Vol. I), its corruption (Vol. II), and the working-out of that corruption in time (Vol. III).

Where the Genre Is Strong and Where It Overreaches

Naming the genre is also a way of locating the book’s strengths and weaknesses honestly, which is the discipline this collection is built to keep (see What the Reader Can Take With Confidence).

The genre is strong where it stays close to the dogmatic material. That the East and West did come to conceive the ground of the Trinity’s unity differently, that the Filioque is a real and Church-confessed error, that the essence-energies distinction marks a genuine and consequential divergence — these are not Farrell’s private inventions but the common patrimony of Orthodox theology, and where GHD expounds them it is on solid ground (see The First Europe).

The genre overreaches where it claims to have found a single theological key that unlocks the whole of Western history — where the doctrine of divine simplicity is made to cause scholasticism, the Reformation, and secularization in a continuous dialectical unfolding. This is a mono-causal historiography, and mono-causal historiographies of civilizations are exactly what professional historians distrust, because cultures are overdetermined and contingency is real. The very same scholarship that has re-examined the East-West Trinitarian contrast — Michel Barnes and Lewis Ayres on the so-called “de Régnon paradigm” — has argued that the neat opposition of an essence-first West and a person-first East is itself a nineteenth-century construct that the sources do not straightforwardly support (see The Scholarly Debate: The De Régnon Paradigm Critique). The genre of theological history, in short, is legitimate but dangerous: it can illuminate a real dogmatic difference and then inflate it into an explanation of everything. Reading GHD well means accepting its dogmatic core and testing its historical sweep against the historians — which is the task of the sections that follow.

See Also

• Composition and Publication History — the four-volume structure this method produces
• Dialectic and Simplicity: What “Dialectic” Means — the diagnostic category at the center of the method
• The Scholarly Debate: The De Régnon Paradigm Critique — the historiographical objection to the whole genre
• The Great Schism — the repository’s sober, multi-causal account of the same terrain

References

• Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences. [Self-published] 1997; 4-vol. ed., 2016.
• Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26/2 (1995): 51–79.
• Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.