Though little known in the west, the Gnostic Chapters of Diadochos of Photike has shaped the ascetical theology and practice of prayer in eastern Christianity from the fifth century to the present day. Indeed, Diadochos is in many respects the pivotal figure between Greek patristic thought as it is understood in the west, and the distinctively Byzantine and Orthodox theology that arose from it. His understanding of the working of human free will influenced the greatest of all Byzantine theologians, Maximus Confessor, in developing his understanding of the relationship between Christ's divine and human wills. This Maximian Christology in turn underpinned orthodox arguments in defence of iconography during the great eastern iconoclastic crisis of the eighth and ninth centuries. Diadochos' theology of prayer was also the basis of Athonite hesychasm, which found its fullest expression in the fourteenth century: the use of the prayer "Lord Jesus" to concentrate both mind and body on God in unceasing recollection, and affirmation of the physical manifestation of divine light from one who is in communication with God, both derive from Diadochos. And it was to Diadochos' theology of the nature of the human "heart" that Gregory Palamas turned when composing his defence of the holy hesychasts. Diadochos is still read assiduously by Orthodox theologians today, and his comparison of God restoring his own image in mankind, to a painter making a portrait, is frequently referred to in works on the theology of icon veneration.
But as well as being little known in the west, eastern theologians and practitioners of prayer have also found it difficult to understand Diadochos' complex and integrated thinking, in part due to the elegant rhetorical style of his Greek. He framed his major work in the established ascetic genre of one hundred Gnostic Chapters; but his numbered sections grow increasingly in length to form what is in fact a single theological treatise. In addition to all this, Diadochos gives us no clue as to what his theological starting point is, or the technical significance of the subtle twists he gives to the conventional terminology of ascetic prayer. Although some manuscripts of Diadochos preface this work with a list of ten definitions, they were almost certainly not composed by him, and are so general, and in some cases tautologous, that they provide little help in any case. It is only when Diadochos gets into full swing in his attacks on Messalianism that an informed reader finds some solid theological ground. Apart from that, his ascetic instruction is compelling, and often clearly practical; but it has remained difficult to connect the dots in his theology.
It has always been clear that Diadochos composed the Gnostic Chapters in order to safeguard the best aspects of Messalian "experience"-based prayer for orthodox Christianity when Messalianism itself was condemned in the fifth century. It was standard practice to give authors an orthodox pseudepigraphical attribution when they were accused of heterodoxy, and a great deal of the Messalian inheritance came to be attributed to Makarios the Great for this reason. But Diadochos was intent on doing a great deal more. His defence of what was good in the Messalian legacy, and clarification of what was unacceptable, led him to compose a systematic theology that not only integrates soteriology and anthropology, but also provides a subtle understanding of the relationship between thought and feeling, and the ability of free will to use them in order to perceive things correctly, that makes him something of a fifth-century Kant. That all this resulted in a single systematic work is a remarkable achievement in philosophical theology in any age, let alone so early in the history of Christian thought.
But since his Greek is dense, and he doesn't state his aims clearly, Diadochos has mainly been known for having in some way united the "intellectualist" spiritual theology of Evagrios Monachos with the experience-based spirituality of Messalianism. Happily, recent Diadochan scholarship, particularly between 1996 and 2010, has provided not only a new critical edition of his Gnostic Chapters, but a complete analysis of his technical vocabulary and the deeply embedded biblical foundation of his theology (See One Hundred Practical Texts of Perception and Spiritual Discernment from Diadochos of Photike, Text, Translation and Commentary, Janet Elaine Rutherford [Belfast, 2000]). As a result, it is now easier to understand the systematic and integrated nature of his theology, as well as to see why it was written in such a seemingly hermetic way. The first clue is the name Diadochos, which is not in fact a name at all. As classical scholars will be aware, "diadochos" means "successor." Although it came in time to be used in Christian contexts of those who stood in episcopal or abbatial succession, there is no evidence that Diadochos was the abbot of any religious community, or indeed a bishop, apart from a long tradition to that effect (probably deriving from his name). More usually "diadochos" was the title given to those who succeeded to the headship of philosophical schools. Such successors did more than simply preserve the school's teachings; they developed and expanded their inheritance to meet the challenges of their day, for the benefit of their school's adherents. This reviewer has argued in various places that the reason that Diadochos is known by this name, wrote hermetically, and developed standard ascetic terminology in subtly new ways to form a new systematic theology, was because he was himself the "successor" of a tradition of ascetical theology that was already a fusion of the Evagrian and Messalian traditions. He himself makes it clear that he was not writing for a specific religious community, or a diocese, or for the general public, but for a widely dispersed "school" of disciples. He explicitly refers to the fact that some lived in towns, and others in the desert; some as hermits, others in groups of two or three or more. They were thus not a monastic "order," but the inheritors of a tradition of that theology of prayer that is known most widely through the works of Evagrios. Diadochos was writing to those who shared a common ascetic inheritance and who therefore required no explanation of its basis. What they did require was instruction as to how to continue to use established practices of prayer in correct ways; and what the pragmatic and theological underpinning of such practice was. It is the achievement of the last fifteen years of Diadochan scholarship that all this is now accessible to us also. But not in this book.
Unfortunately neither the introduction to this book or its translations show much influence of recent scholarship on Diadochos, and the most important recent publications are absent from the author's bibliography. Ermatinger asks rhetorically in his introduction why he has produced a new English translation of Diadochos' Gnostic Chapters, when two already exist (63). But good new translations of the fathers are always to be welcomed, particularly of authors whose thought and idiom are as complex as Diadochos of Photike's. Ermatinger's stated aim is to create an accurate but readable translation that is neither as free as that contained in the English translation of the Philokalia (which in any case is part of a separate manuscript tradition) nor as technically rigorous as this reviewer's translation of her own critical edition of the Gnostic Chapters (63f); and that is certainly a legitimate undertaking. The more pertinent question the author might have asked is why he embarked on such a difficult task using an outdated edition of the text? In fact, though Ermatinger claims to have based his translation of Diadochos' Gnostic Chapters (and other minor works) on the 1966 edition by douard des Places (62), the notes on his translation make it clear that he made sporadic use of the reviewer's critical edition of 2000, though he nowhere mentions its existence. This is curious, given that he does refer to her translation of the Gnostic Chapters, which was published in a parallel edition with that text, and is indeed a translation of it. Its basis was a manuscript unknown to des Places, and designated by this editor as "R."
Doubtless this omission was due, as other shortcomings of the book are obviously due, not to malice but to slovenly scholarship. Ermatinger's habit of referring to manuscripts as "translations" will certainly confuse readers. Similarly, this reviewer is placed in the invidious position of having to point out that having effectively suppressed all mention of his use of her critical edition (and indeed its existence), the author seems not to have read (or at least taken account of) the accompanying introduction and commentary in that volume. Indeed none of the secondary literature published by this reviewer between 1996 and 2010 appears in the bibliography, and the author is clearly ignorant of its content. [1]
It should be said in Ermatinger's defense that his stated aim was to produce a popular rather than a rigorously scholarly book. But to avoid giving the impression that this book reliably represents the present state of Diadochan scholarship, it would arguably have been better if Ermatinger had not included any manuscript references in his notes, and had included no bibliography. As it is, this book looks like a work of scholarship, and that is what readers will assume it to be. It is spoilt by not being scholarly enough to be a reliable secondary source for scholars, at least without reference to other works. Ermatinger's partial familiarity with previous secondary sources, combined with the absence of an accompanying Greek text, make it impossible for the reader to be certain just how reliable either his introduction or translations are; particularly since he is subject to bursts of enthusiasm and imagination that are not entirely apposite. The title itself seems to derive from the quotation from the Song of Songs with which Ermatinger prefaces his introduction: "Draw me in your footsteps, let us run together." Although there are several key passages of Scripture that underpin Diadochos, this is not one of them. Diadochos does refer in his first section to the human soul "tracking down, by an intellectual sense, that which is unseen," but his image is more that of a hound pursuing its prey in the dark than that of a disciple following in the footsteps of a master (visible or invisible). Ermatinger does indeed acknowledge in his footnote on this section that the Greek allusion is to hunting (69, note 10); but he perversely decides to translate the Greek as "follow in the footsteps" anyway. And in places his translations seem more indebted to the French translation of des Places than to the Greek.
The framing of the introduction also seems to hover between addressing a scholarly or general readership. The emphasis is on spiritual practice at the expense of theology--a dichotomy that Diadochos would have deplored. There is not, for instance, a full treatment of Diadochos' critically important understanding of the human will, and this is exacerbated by the author's apparent uncertainty about the technical significance of Diadochos' use of the word mneme. "Memory" is a very misleading translation, and the author's apparent uncertainty about its significance leads to confusion in his treatment of Diadochos' theology of prayer.
To sum up then. Given the pernicious obscurity of this most important theologian, any competent, easily available and affordable English translation of Diadochos is to be welcomed. Scholars should be aware that much important work has been done on Diadochos over the last fifteen years that is not reflected in this book, and for that reason its use should be supplemented by other, more rigorous, sources. Those whose profession is prayer would likewise have wished that recent work on the theological connections between the various strands of Diadochos' thought (not least the operation of the human will), and its intrinsic Scriptural foundation, had informed both the introduction and the translations included here. But the general reader will encounter in these pages an exciting author on the religious life, and will find much that assists prayerful reflection. Diadochos, so important for Byzantine and Orthodox ascetic theology, seems doomed to remain, in the west at least, accessible in his theological integrity only to the gnostic few; which is, of course, precisely what he anticipated.
NOTES
1. See for example J. E. Rutherford, "Sealed with the Likeness of God: Christ as Logos in Diadochos of Photike," in Studies in Patristic Christology, eds. T. Finan and D.V. Twomey (Dublin, 1998), pp. 67-83; idem, "Pythagoras, Byzantium, and the Holiness of Beauty," Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2006): 302-319; idem, "Praying the Trinity in Diadochos of Photike," in The Mystery of the Holy Trinity on the Fathers of the Church, eds. D.V. Twomey and L. Ayres (Dublin, 2007), pp. 65-78.