Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East: A Study of Jacob of
Serugh
Kristian S.
Heal
Brigham Young University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv23n2prheal
Kristian S. Heal
Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East: A Study of
Jacob of Serugh
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol23/HV23N2PRHeal.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2020
vol 23
issue 2
pp 417–421
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File updated and published by James E. Walters
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Philip M. Forness, Preaching Christology
in the Roman Near East: A Study of Jacob of Serugh, Oxford Early
Christian Studies (Oxford: University Press, 2018). Pp. xvi + 322; $100.
This important book is about a simple question: why does Jacob of Serugh pair
suffering and miracles when talking about Christ in his memre? This question naturally demands a close reading of Jacob’s
homilies (chapters 4–6), together with a detailed examination of his letters
(chapter 3), an exploration of Jacob’s relationship to contemporaneous Syriac
and Greek sources, and ultimately the project of tracing this pairing of
suffering and miracles back to key Chalcedonian documents (chapter 2). Preaching Christology tells this story with great skill
and erudition. Since its publication, reviews of this book have appeared in
several journals, and I refer the reader to those for chapter-by-chapter
summaries and for engagement with Forness’s work on Jacob’s Christology.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019.08.21 (Jaclyn
Maxwell); Reviews in Religion and Theology 26
(2019), 625–628 (Jacob Lollar); Journal of Early
Christian Studies 28 (2020), 149–151 (Volker Menze); and Scrinium 16 (2020) (Dmitry Bumazhnov).
In this review I focus on the book’s two important
methodological and theoretical claims.
The underlying message of Preaching Christology is that
Jacob of Serugh’s language reflects a deep and thoughtful engagement not only
with his literary culture, but also with his contemporary theological and
political world. But how does Forness derive this from Jacob’s verse homilies?
One way that Forness allays his readers’ concerns about connecting Jacob’s
poetic pairing of the suffering and miracles of Christ with contemporary
theological thought is by allowing us to observe this connection in the safer
genre of epistolography: “[Jacob’s] letters justify the connections
[we draw] between Jacob’s homilies and the specific debate over the Henotikon in the second and third decades of the sixth
century” (p. 90; cf. 133). Not only do we expect careful forensic argumentation
in this genre, but letters can be more readily historicized (pp. 115–125). They
often have a known addressed audience, and a more readily discoverable cultural
setting (pp. 104–115). They can often be dated (pp. 110, 125). Syriac
homilies resist the historian’s need for certainty. As Forness’s far-reaching
comparative first chapter is forced to conclude, when we work with Syriac
homilies we are almost always unmoored from a specific time, place, and context,
which means that a different set of tools are needed to tease out their
significance. These are the tools of the literary critic, the philologist, and
the intellectual historian. When these tools are deployed together the Syriac
sermon begins to yield some of its latent potential.
Thus, Preaching Christology is offering an important
response to one of the great problems in the study of Syriac late antiq- uity,
namely the seeming inscrutability of a large portion of extant sources. How are
scholars of late antiquity to utilize the hundreds of Syriac verse homilies
written between the fourth and sixth centuries? They are a tantalizing source
for social, exegetical, theological, and political historians. Yet, those who
have tried to harness them have almost always been rebuffed, primarily by an
inability to gain purchase on the historical con- text of a given homily.
This is why one of the most exciting contributions of Preaching Christology is that it offers historians “a new methodology
for linking homilies to historical investigations” (p. 3), or, as Forness says
later, it provides historians with “a model to integrate late antique homilies
into historical narratives of late antiquity” (p. 18). This methodology of
“tracing key slogans, such as the pairing of miracles and suffering, to debates
occurring among contemporaneous authors suggests how homilies might be tied to
historical situations” (p. 21). This methodology underpins the subtle and
careful philological detective work that clearly demonstrates how the deliberate
language found in Jacob’s homilies overlaps with his surviving
epistolary corpus—I say surviving because Forness convinc¬ingly suggests that
the surviving letter corpus was preserved precisely because of its
Christological content (p. 90). Using this methodology, Forness capably
contextualizes Jacob within his late antique milieu, and his sermons within a
larger world of homiletic discourse.
The far-reaching significance of Forness’s work is not merely methodological,
however, but also psychological. After reading his book, the concerns of
historians about Syriac hom- ilies are allayed. Their fears are calmed, and they
feel able for the first time to approach this corpus as a potential historical
source with confidence. This confidence in the richness, com- plexity, and
scrutability of the early Syriac literary tradition is what distinguishes the
work of scholars such as Robert Murray, Sebastian Brock, Susan Harvey, Manolis
Papoutsakis and now, Philip Forness. But historians who hope to undertake a
similar project may tumble at the first hurdle unless they are prepared to do
the kind of careful and thorough work that underlies the studies produced by
these scholars.
Forness not only provides a new methodological model for historicizing the
Syriac sermon, but also offers “a new theoretical understanding of the audience
of sermons” (p. 3). At the heart of this understanding is the idea of two
audiences, essentially listeners and readers, or, in the work of Lisa Ede and
Andrea Lunsford that Forness cites at this point, the “audience addressed” and
the “audience invoked” (pp. 29–30). Here Forness reframes our notion of
audience. But what work does this reframing do? There is certainly value in
recognizing that a homily is produced within a particular discursive context
(30); and understanding the process that stands behind the record¬ing,
redaction, collection, and circulation of Jacob’s homilies (pp. 41–53) convinces
us, among other things, that the largest audience of Jacob’s homilies,
demographically, geographically, and temporally, are the later readers of his
works in manuscript form. However, with regard to the audience Jacob actually
preached to, “The available evidence suggests that he had diverse
audiences, preached throughout a broad geographical area over a long career, and
delivered homilies in a variety of liturgical settings” (p. 40). So, has Forness
advanced our knowledge beyond the claim that Jacob preached lots of hom¬ilies to
lots of different people, in lots of different places and settings?
To frame the question in this way is, I suspect, to miss the point, since one
argument of Preaching Christology is precisely that Jacob
preached lots of homilies to lots of different people, in lots of different
places and settings, and therefore he had an almost viral effect on his
ecclesiastical community in terms of the spread of miaphysite Christology and
other knowledge. As Forness puts it, “The principal argument of this monograph
is that preaching served as a means of communicating Christo¬logical concepts to
broad audiences in late antiquity” (p. 3). Again, in the first chapter he notes
that, “The most significant claim of this monograph for the study of
Christianity in late antiquity is that homilies spread knowledge of the
Christologi¬cal controversies to wide audiences” (p. 27). This claim must be
qualified of course. Thus, even as Forness says that Jacob’s “homilies served as
a means of spreading knowledge of Christology to both clergy and laity,” in the
next paragraph he has to qualify this claim by acknowledging that “few homilies
in Jacob of Serugh’s corpus engage overtly with the Christo¬logical debates that
characterize theological discourse in his day” (p. 9). In fact, with Jacob, we
are working with a corpus of homilies that do not focus on Christological
debates but do “contain specific criticism of Chalcedonian Christology” (p. 9).
This makes the project more interesting. Forness’s extensive reading of Jacob’s
corpus enables him to make a claim about Jacob’s project that is not obvious to
the casual reader: homi¬lies are doing important cultural and intellectual work.
Among other things, they are tying both the simple believer and the
studious reader into the larger contemporary Christological conversations.
Homilies were thus the primary way that people knew about Christology in late
antiquity (p. 223). The implications of this observation lead Forness to hope
that “Homilies may yet transform our understanding of the range of society that
participated in theological debates” (p. 228).
The great strength of Forness’s book is that it reveals a Jacob who is
culturally relevant and intellectually engaged, a product of “vibrant
intellectual currents” (p. 6), and at the cen¬ter of the big issues of his day.
He is a thinker whose ideas can be taken seriously. He is also a thinker with
enormous cultural influence. A thinker who participated “in a discussion of the
miracles and suffering of Christ that spanned the Roman Empire—and beyond to
Armenia and the Arabian Peninsula—and across no less than five languages” (88).
Preaching Christology is a rich, erudite, clearly
written, generously documented, wide-ranging, and significant contribution to
the study of Jacob of Serugh. It is also an essential work for anyone wishing to
explore the large, diverse, and promising corpus of Syriac sermons from late
antiquity.