Recreational Reading

Some of you will remember Dr. Hankey from the 2005 conference. He writes:

This return to sources was by no means theologically or philosophically neutral. It was not only a reaching back beyond the Middle Ages, Scholasticism and Thomism to the Fathers, but it was specifically a move toward the Greek as against the Latin Fathers, and especially against the unilateral privileging of Augustine.(44) The Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou were with Blondel in opposing a Scholasticism which was logical and metaphysical to the detriment of an itinerarium simultaneously philosophical, theological and mystical. In the Greek Fathers they thought to find a Christian way which was not tightly departmentalised in the Western fashion, where its rigidities, rationalistic confidence and narrowness had not supplanted integrated spiritual movement, where a deductive theology had not been separated from Scriptural meditation.(45) Those who were seeking an alternative to Thomism, whose scientific divisions of this kind they associated with its Aristotelianism, generally saw Platonism as involving the desired integration for the sake of theology understood as mystical itinerarium.

from FRENCH NEOPLATONISM IN THE 20TH CENTURY © Wayne John Hankey