James L. Kelley. Joseph P.

Farrell: An Overview of the Theological Works,

Part One" Accessed 8 July, 2015.
https://josephpfarrell.wordpress.com.
James L. Kelley 2015
In 1987, the same year he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford, Joseph Farrell published a
translation of Saint Photios the Greats Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit [1]. The volume included, along
with his English translation of the Mystagogy, Farrells first published theological work, A
Theological Introduction to the Mystagogy of Saint Photios [2]. It being an introduction rather than a
full-length study, Farrell is obliged in its pages to portray with broad strokes what his later
theological works will treat at greater length [3].
The filioque is the topic at hand, both in Saint Photioss treatise itself as well as in Farrells
introduction. Though it may be a mere verbal trifle to many Western Christians, the and the Son
Creedal interpolation stands as a summation of all heresies for Saint Photios, whose Mystagogy was
the first reasoned response to Augustine and Augustinism from an Eastern Cappadocian point of
view [4]. First, Farrells introduction offers the reader a framework for understanding the
intellectual background that led Saint Augustine to formulate a filioquist theology. As we will see, this
background turns out to be Greek philosophy as it developed from its Presocratic beginnings to its full
articulation in Plotinus and his followers. Next, a thorough examination of Saint Augustines
Neoplatonized theology is presented. Here Farrell shows how the Plotinian One, conceived as a selfsufficient, non-composite unity that encloses all particulars, contains a deceptive flexibility that
either destroys the unity of the One or destroys the particularity of the Many [5]. Third, the
introductory essay gives an account of Origens filioquist theology. The key to the early Churchs
struggles with Arianism and Eunomianism is made clear once we see that these archetypal heresies are
based on the same style of filioquism present in Origens thought; obviously, the filioque is not a matter
of mere semantics, defining as it does the controversies settled by the Ecumenical Councils and the
formulation of the once-and-for-all Creed of Christendom, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan (commonly
known as the Nicene Creed). Lastly, Farrell offers a brief overview of Saint Photios anti-filioquist
critique, which is shown to be a head-on offensive against the core of Augustinianism: the Neoplatonic

dialectic of oppositions that undergirds the filioque doctrine.

Eclecticism, though a term historians of philosophy usually apply to specific groups of
philosophers, could be used to connote a general tendency in Greek philosophy to accumulate and
develop a core set of assumptions that, however refined or altered, are never set aside [6]. Though there
are innumerable variations on the pattern, it could be argued that there is a worldview shared by many
of the most prominent Greek philosophers, since certain salient features of the Hellenic mind persist in
the centuries between Parmenides and Plotinus.

Greek Philosophy on God, Man and Cosmos: The One Is (Not?) the Many

Perhaps the central thread of Greek philosophy is its insistence upon a stark division between a lower
world of changeable, corruptible beings made up of matter and a higher world of perfect, immaterial
Being. The latter was conceived, not as a personal savior, but rather as an unmoved, incorrupt principle
of Unity. Typically, this Being was seen as heading up a plurality of immutable forms or archetypes. In
the words of Father John Romanides, the underlying assumption was that the human being could,
through a rationalistic and pseudo-therapeutic process, penetrate to the deeper meaning of phenomena
and identify his mind directly with the ingenerate reality [7]. Farrell views Plotinus as the fullest
expression of this tradition that reality is attained through a merging with the Good, that is, with
perfect Being:

Plotinus has as his goal not only to demonstrate the good, but to demonstrate that the
demonstrations themselves are a means of attaining the Good. There is a conviction
here that ultimate reality mirrors the operations of dialectic and logic. (-) What is
unusual in Plotinus is the heavy emphasis placed on dialectic as the means of
demonstration, and therefore, as the means of attainment of the One, and as the
underlying structure of all reality, including, in a certain sense, the One itself [8].

Whereas previous Greek thinkers balked at positing an all-encompassing universal as the highest
Being, since it was assumed that only limited being was capable of being reached by the mind of man,

Plotinus does not hesitate to define the One as above all beings in a special sense that allows a merging
of rational beings with It. In opposition to each and every being, the One is, to borrow a phrase from
the Gitas, not this, not that [9]. Plotinus wished to hold his One apart from all plurality, change, and
composition; the One is utterly and completely simple. However, this radically simple Principle was at
the same time the source of all plurality, change, and composition. In other words, the One Being must
contain all beings in some sense to remain the unique, simple source of existence.
Before proceeding we will distinguish between two complementary frames of reference that can
be taken up vis--vis Plotinus divine simplicity: the firstthat of the Orthodox Christian ordo
theologiaeis emphasized by Farrell; the otherwhich may be termed a history of Greek
philosophy approachI hope to develop later in this chapter.

Joseph P. Farrells Plotinian One: The Ordo Theologiae and the Primordial Categories

Farrells analysis of Plotinus One in the Mystagogy introduction illustrates how and why the Plotinian
dialectic of opposition, designed to uphold the simplicity of the One and the plurality of all other
beings, wreaks havoc for Christian theology once it is introduced therein, most notably by Origen first
and later by St. Augustine of Hippo. The earliest major doctrinal controversies in Christian history
Arianism and Eunomianismhinged upon how the differing parties defined and used basic categories
such as being, attribute, and will, even though the theological terminology had not thoroughly
crystallized at the time of these disputes. In his contest with Arius, St. Athanasius objects to the
formers definition of the essence of God as an attribute of Fatherly causality, since such a dialectical
conception (shared by Origen, who defined Gods essence in the manner of Plotinus) confuses the three
primordial categories of nature, will and person. St. Athanasius upholds the traditional Christian
teaching that the generation of the Son from the Father in the Trinity is according to essence (since the
Father is the source of the being of His Son) while the creation of the world takes place according to
the divine will common to the Trinitarian persons. Arius sees the Son as a creation of the Fathers will,
but Athanasius traditional distinction between essence and will precludes any divine hypostasis from
being a passive recipient of another persons will. For Arius, the category of what God is (the divine
nature) is the same as what God does (attribute of causality), and both are identical to who God

is (the person Father). The result, for Arius, is a Father who generates a subordinate Son and a
doubly subordinate Holy Spirit. Farrell emphasizes that this impersonal Arian Godproducer of
highborn demigods who, though created, can somehow save creationcontrasts with the Holy Trinity
worshiped by St. Athanasius, for whom the trinitarian being of God was given an ontological priority
over His action and willthe precisely opposite structural order to Augustinian theology, where the
attributes and essence are given a priority to the persons [10].
Three related concepts that are at the heart of Farrells handling of the filioque question must be
clarified before we move on: the three primordial categories, ordo theologiae, and dialectic of
opposition. In order to show forth the wide-ranging implications of the dialectic, Farrells later
Maximian theological works (Free Choice in St. Maximus; God, History, and Dialectic, etc.) will be
referenced. Finally, we will round out this section with a summary and analysis of the last part of the
Mystagogy introduction, which presents Saint Photioss critique of the filioque. Though the Saint does
not use the term dialectic, Saint Photios is shown by Farrell to have objected to the theological
innovation on the grounds that the filioques confusion of categories destroys any hope of
distinguishing God from creation.
(1) Three primordial categories: It is with hesitation that I offer this label, since Farrell
purposefully avoided doing so himself; nonetheless, to avoid having to coin unwieldy phrases such as
the asymmetric categories of person, energy, and essence, we will go forward with three primordial
categories. For the Orthodox, a Church Father is one who has direct experience of the Holy Trinity
and who uses language to point toward communal therapies designed to lead others to become Church
Fathers. The Church Father knows by his own experience that the source of his inspiration and
salvation is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is the first primordial category, that of
persons, which answers the question, Who is doing it? In the case of the illumination of a Church
Father, the divine persons Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will that a human person be inspired and saved.
Energies is the second category, answering the query, What is that they They are doing? The
Trinitarian persons freely will to bestow Grace upon the worshiper; the latter freely wills to receive
divine Grace. The final categoryessenceanswers What are They that They are doing these
things? Saint Basil the Great is typical of the Fathers when he proclaims that the Three Divine
Persons, on the basis of their single power or sovereignty, are One (non-definitional) Unity.

Significantly, Saint Basils statement of faith is sacramental and liturgical in origin, being an
explication of the doxology ascribed by us from the Liturgy of Saint James [11].
(2) ordo theologiae: Farrell emphasizes that the Patristic (that is, Orthodox) method for
approaching theological questions is, in part, a faithful following of the correct order in which the
theological questions themselves are posed. Orthodox Fathers of the Church begin with the persons
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; through his experience of God the illumined Father understands that he
has not merged with the divine essence, because he knows he is in communion with a loving God; he
has not become God. The Church Father also knows that he is responding to Gods love (the divine
energy), and that all created beings are a result of divine energy (and thus they are not, as Greek
philosophy would have it, emanations of the divine essence). The worshiper participates in the Holy
Trinity, not according to essence (as St. Augustine would have it) or person (as in the misguided
personalism of Met. John Zizioulas), but according to the uncreated energies of God. The notion of
an ordo of theological questions bears directly upon the teaching about Christ, for over the course of
the doctrinal disputes surrounding the Ecumenical Councils the central issue was how to properly
formulate (and so preserve) the Orthodox teaching that Christ is one person with two sets of operations
or energiesone divine and uncreated, one human and createdwhich correspond to two natures.
Origen, Arius, Eunomius, Augustine, and all who follow them in the Christian West begin, not with
persons, but with a consideration of the divine nature as simplicity. Following the Greek philosophical
tradition, they consider the three primordial categories to be interchangeable names or definitions of the
divine nature, believing such a reduction to be the only means of guaranteeing Gods simplicity.
However, we should not conceive of this inverted ordo in a manner that fails to acknowledge the
differences in formulation among those opponents of the Fathers who did the inverting; for instance,
Arius begins with a person, the Father, but for Arius, this Monarch is defined as an impersonal
substance made up of Fatherness. So, Arius begins with the abstract essence as simplicity, even though
he claims to begin with a person, then to discuss this persons attribute.
In any case, the implications of the Hellenic, inverted ordo theologiae will be more evident once
we consider the
(3) dialectic of oppositions: For the pagan Plotinus, whose system can be considered a kind of
summation of Greek philosophical theology, there is no real distinction between what God is (essence),

what He does (energy), and who He is (person). This confusion of categories occurs because, instead of
beginning with the Tri-personal (and thus ecclesial) revelation of a divine Word to man, Plotinus turns
inward in an effort to define god as utterly transcendent because definitionally simple. Who is the One
for Plotinus? Plotinus One is the being above all differentiation whose essence cannot be distinguished
from his will. It follows that the One cannot begin to create; thus no In the beginning God created
and no God so loved the world is conceivable for the Plotinian deity. Unfortunately, we see this
theological structure operative in Saint Augustines attempt to express Christian theology according to
Neoplatonic definitions; that is, according to the same inverted ordo found in Plotinus.
The term dialectic of oppositions, in its widest sense, refers to the manner in which the
cosmos, infected with corruption since the Fall, travails and groans, mirroring the self-centeredness
inaugurated through Adam and Eves original sin, which broke direct communion with divine energies
and led to humans mistaking of happiness (self-love) for salvation through union with God (selfless
love). Henceforth, the structure of human consciousness is taken to be a self-revelation of ultimate
reality, or gnosis. Man believes that he can, through his own meditative or social efforts, separate
absolutely his thoughts (Gr. logismoi) that assure him of his own security (of sharing in divine
attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence) from his other thoughts that his being is
limited. In other words, man fools himself into playing the role of a god, when in actually, man knows
that, like all of the beings around him, he will surely die. Many today do not understand, however,
that the sole purpose of Orthodox spiritual life is the gradual overcoming of the dialectical structure of
logismoi through asceticism and the Holy Sacraments [12].
The dialectics Christological aspectwhich is, of course, not unrelated to the cosmoanthropological frame of referenceis best shown through Saint Maximus the Confessors dispute
with Pyrrhus. Farrells translation of the text of the dispute includes the following exchange:
Pyrrhus:

Did not the fathers define human movement as passibility, in contrast to the divine
energy?
Maximus: God forbid: For, to speak generally, no existent thing is known or defined
through comparison with its opposite. Otherwise, [the two] things will be found to cause

each other reciprocally. For if, because divine movement is an energy, human movement
is passible then certainly it follows that because divine nature is good, human nature is
therefore evil. And the exact opposite may likewise be said: that because human
movement is termed passible, for this reason divine movement is termed energy, and
that because human nature is evil, the divine nature is for this reason good [13].

Here Maximus refuses to follow his interlocutors definition of human operations as passible energy,
the dialectical opposite of divine active energy. Besides the obvious problem of how humans can be
actively passive (one is reminded of Anaximanders apeiron, the substance that is the source of all
opposition because it contains simultaneously all opposite properties as interchangeable definitions of
its simplicity), Maximuss analysis offers insight into the hidden implications of the dialectic. If we can
define a being through its dialectical opposite, then we are (perhaps unwittingly) positing acausal
symmetry between the components. In the case of Pyrrhuss notion of human passive energy versus
divine active energy, the binary leads one to think of God as being in need of the human actors
passive energy in order truly to be God. That is, the divine and human wills are mutually caused. We
are reminded here of Farrells explication of the flexibility of the dialectic at work in Plotinus divine
simplicity: In order that the One be free of all plurality and composition, the One must have already
always had all divine and created pluralites standing apart from It; otherwise, Plotinus would have had
to admit a creation from nothing, but then what would have been the motivation of the perfect One
willingly (and thus essentially!) creating imperfection?
At any rate, the dialectic of divine versus human impels one to posit that both have the same
logical and ontological statusGod needs man just as man needs God, since one cannot be shown with
logical consistency to precede the other. As a result of this elevation of man to the highest of planes, the
gods are demoted, even becoming subordinate to man in the sense that [they] were creations of the
community, and not vice versa [14]. Thus, on the basis of a dialectical opposition of wills, we are left
with two quasi-distinct types of nature that are distinguishable only in terms of the semantic binaries
God-man and active-passive.
Maximos next insight is to show that there is no way to keep these attribute-pairs from
multiplying: we start with passivity of will and activity of will, but we (like Aristotle, whose Table of

Pythagorean Opposites ends at ten pairs of opposites without achieving any evident
comprehensiveness) have no reason to desist from adding other parallel pairs, such as good-evil,
created-uncreated, one-many, selfish-selfless, and so on. Not only this, but the dialectical nature of the
system of binaries precludes any effort to keep each counterpart on its proper side of the ontological
fence, since if divine movement moves only because human movement is static, this implies that
God is good (by essence and by will/energy) only to the extent that man is evil (by nature and by will).
Though Farrell goes on to show that Pyrrhuss errors concerning the status of the human will in Christ
were presaged by Saint Augustine and then reprised in Roman Catholic and Protestant positions on
free will versus predestination, one might add that the extreme forms of antinomianism exhibited by
religious revolutionaries (Gnostics, Sabbateans, Franckists, and other dualist sects) and political
revolutionaries (Marxists and others who promise utopia through violence and destruction) are at least
consistent with the dialectics tendency to equate any unit of meaning (thus any possible act) with any
other conceivable unit of meaning, including the entire system itself taken as a unit (the All). Indeed, if
one is trying to merge with the All, perhaps deeds considered to be evil are, once the conscience is
soothingly raised, revealed to the gnostic as salvific.
These tremendous confusions may be said to occur because a method of thinking (dialectic of
oppositions) is applied to the three primordial categories without following the Patristic ordo
theologiae. The consequence of the dialectic for God and creation? A dualism in which God both
creates evil and is caused or conditioned by His evil creation. The consequence of the dialectic for
Christology? Christ either has no free human will, but only a single divine will; or Christs human
operations are a puppet show of passive attributes, worked from outside by the divinity of the Word
[15].

[TO BE CONTINUED]

NOTES

[1] Saint Photios, The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, translated with an introduction by Joseph P. Farrell
(Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987). Farrells doctoral dissertation, Free Choice in St

Maximus the Confessor (available from ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, U000055, accessed
28 January, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/docview/301457860/4CF2E7E10E4940B6PQ/10?
accountid=12964), was published as a monograph two years later with the title Free Choice in St.
Maximus the Confessor (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhons Seminary Press, 1989). Farrells advisor was
Met. of Diokleia Kallistos Ware; Fr. Andrew Louth and Canon Donald Allchin were on his doctoral
committee (James L. Kelley, internet video conference interview with Joseph P. Farrell, 16 August,
2014).

[2] Joseph P. Farrell, A Theological Introduction to the Mystagogy of Saint Photios, 17-56 in Saint
Photios, Mystagogy.

[3] Farrell, Theological Introduction, 19.

[4] Farrell, Theological Introduction, 18.

[5] See below for a discussion of Farrells use of the term flexibility and its probable origin in Saint
Photius Mystagogy.

[6] In these pages, Greek philosophy is taken to mean those philosophies that originated in Greekspeaking cultures around the seventh century B.C. and which trace their approaches, definitions and
parameters (in some wise) back to those philosophies, or their later representatives, such as Plato,
Aristotle, or the Stoics. On ancient Eclecticism, see the essays in The Question of Eclecticism:
Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, Edited by John M. Dillon and A.A. Long (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988). Available online: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?
docId=ft029002rv;brand=ucpress, accessed 29 January, 2015.

[7] John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of Our Ancestors Adam and
Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century Church and the

Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin, translated with an introduction by George S. Gabriel

(Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002), 45.

[8] Joseph P. Farrell, Patristics One: Origen and the Crisis of the First Hellenization of the Gospel:
Notes and Outlines by Joseph P. Farrell, D.Phil. (Oxon.), n.d., typescript in authors possession, 21
unnumbered pages, here p. 1.

[9] Avadhut Gita 1.27 (Dattatreya: Song of the Avadhut, An English Translation of the Avadhut Gita,
translated by Swami Abhayananda, 2009, http://www.intermission.nu/wp-content/uploads/dattatreyasong-of-avadhut.pdf, accessed 29 January, 2015).

[10] Farrell, Theological Introduction, 37.

[11] Joseph P. Farrell, God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes
and Their Cultural Consequences (Tulsa, OK: Seven Councils Press, 1997), 28. The citation of St.
Basil is from his On the Holy Spirit 18, translated by P. Schaff,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf208.vii.xix.html, accessed 19 February, 2015.

[12] Ourselves we see illumined, full of the light of the intelligible, or rather, as that very light itself,
pure, without heaviness, upward rising. Verily we see ourselves as made, nay, as being, God himself.
Then it is that we are kindled. But when we again sink to earth, we are, as it were, put out.
(Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.8. Cited in Harry Allen Overstreet, The Dialectic of Plotinus, University of
California Publications in Philosophy 2.1 (1909), 1-29, here 25).

[13] St. Maximus the Confessor, Disputation With Pyrrhus, PG 91:349CD, trans. Farrell in Free
Choice in St. Maximus, 166.

[14] Farrell, God, History, and Dialectic, 40.

[15] Farrell, Free Choice in St. Maximus, 168.