Along those lines, I agree that the Orthodox Christian conception is distinct: Nyssa, for instance, says numerous times, “it is not the standing for long hours in prayer, or the making of many prostrations, which brings one to God, but the giving of the heart to God.” He goes on to say that if one’s ascetic efforts bear no fruit–the fruits of the Spirit–they were utterly useless. Worse, they make the ascetic out to have been a fool. The trick is that, on account of this understanding of ascesis as wholly secondary (training for a race is good, but is not to be confused with running the race), he nonetheless is quite clear about it’s importance, too!

I realize I switched to ascesis when you were talking about liturgy. The two don’t completely overlap, but I think that some of the logic applies in both cases. I mean, current Eastern Orthodox understanding of the liturgy is such that its effectiveness is not “automatic.” The priest may not celebrate without the people, and the people are not adjuncts: if they are not praying truly (from the heart, where God alone judges the heart), nothing occurs! So St Theophan the Recluse will say that true prayer is prayer from the heart (i.e., basically, with the whole being–in rapt attention); when that exceeds one’s capacity, praying with the mind alone (i.e., consciously concentrating on the words and their meaning, is a partial form of prayer that God also honors–in part on account of the effort). But inattentive prayer, he says, is no prayer at all! B/c the whole point is the communion of the heart with God. Which, again, is a totally different economy than in Hindu guru rites, and possibly than in theurgical rites.

All of which returns me to my initial question: so what is Pseudo-D doing w/ the term “theurgy”? How does he use it?

I do think though that Iamblichus in “On the Mysteries” is a little more “religious” in his understanding of the rites. First, the language of the rites (the invocation and evocation as you named it) is divinely given. This means two things: first the human is the recipient of a divine favor/action even in the theurgical rites; and two, this language has to be preserved since it is divinely spoken. Though the first might sound more like Nyssa and Augustine, and thus Christian, the latter is what I think separates theurgy from theosis, or more precisely liturgy.

The piece I think is fascinating is that Iamblichus is clear that theurgical formation is not really about human effort. He wouldn’t use the language of grace, but the initial action is always from the divine side. The question for me is more about the nature of liturgy and worship than about theosis. I am still trying to unpack a kind of comparison between theurgy and Christian liturgy. Suffice it to say, I think its no coincidence that Julian “The Apostate” returned to the Neo-Platonic theurgists to replace the role of Christian worship in the late Roman Empire.

dan and I have been working on this angle for a while….so I am going to speak for him!

Gregory Shaw noted in his article on Deny and Theurgy that theourgia shows up nearly fifty times in the Dionysian works. Unfortunately the Christian translators (in the Classics of Western Spirituality) never reveal that in their translation.

Josh