Praying with the World Church in Ordinary Time: Wednesday, 27 July 2022

Westcott House, Cambridge … founded as the Clergy Training School by Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) in the High Leigh Conference Centre at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire concludes today. The conference, which began on Monday, has the theme ‘Living Stones, Living Hope.’

On the main themes in the conference has been the future of theological education. In the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship, we remember remembers Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, Teacher of the Faith (1901), with a commemoration today (27 July).

I am continuing my prayer diary each morning this week in this way:

1,Reading the Gospel reading of the morning;

2,a short reflections on the reading;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

Westcott played a significant role in founding the Clergy Training School in Cambridge, later renamed Westcott House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

One of the Gospel readings provided in Exciting Holiness for Teachers of the Faith and Spiritual Writers is:

Matthew 5. 13-19 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 13 ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

14 ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

17 ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’

Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, who gave his name to Westcott House, Cambridge, died on 27 July 1901 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s reflection:

Brooke Foss Westcott was born near Birmingham on 12 January 1825. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA , 1848), was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1849, and was ordained deacon in 1849 and priest in 1851.

He left Cambridge in 1852 to become an assistant master at Harrow. There he earned a reputation as a lecturer and scholar, and published a series of scholarly works on the Bible. He wrote commentaries on the gospel and epistles of Saint John, and his History of the New Testament Canon (1855) was for many years a standard work in biblical scholarship.

His reputation led eventually in 1870 to his election as Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, a position he retained even after being named bishop of Durham in 1890.

At Cambridge, he worked with the Dublin-born theologian and Biblical scholar, Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892), and his friend from schooldays in Birmingham, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889), in leading a revival in biblical studies and theology.

Westcott and Hort collaborated on an influential critical edition of the Greek text of the New Testament. The Westcott-Hort New Testament appeared in 1881 after almost 30 years of work and became a major source for the English Revised Version of the Bible published the same year.

Westcott was influential too in the field of Anglican social thought. In 1889, he convened a conference of Christians from all over Europe to consider the arms race. From this conference emerged the Christian Social Union, with Westcott as its president.

Westcott also played a significant role in founding the Clergy Training School in Cambridge, later renamed Westcott House in his honour.

In 1890, he was consecrated Bishop of Durham in succession to Lightfoot. His social concerns found other outlets in the promotion of missionary work, which he supported enthusiastically as bishop, and in the mediation of the Durham coal strike in 1892.

He died at Auckland Castle in Durham on this day in 1901.

Today’s Prayer:

The theme in the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) this week is ‘The Way Towards Healing,’ looking at the work for peace of the Churches in Korea. This theme was introduced on Sunday by Shin Seung-min, National Council of Churches in Korea.

Wednesday 27 July 2022:

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

We pray for unity in difference. May we celebrate the diversity of our churches and communities as we journey together.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

‘Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’ (Matthew 5: 14) … the chapel bell in Westcott House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

IOCS Cambridge conference to focus on the life and work of Pavel Florensky

Patrick Comerford

For many years, I enjoyed the annual conference in Cambridge organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.

For almost a decade, these conferences usually took place in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and from 2008 the IOCS played an important role in my continuing education and in my spiritual growth. As a student of IOCS, I was interviewed in Cambridge five years ago for a video on the work of the institute.

So, I am disappointed that my health and personal circumstances mean I cannot take part in the international conference being organised by IOCS this year. The IOCS International Conference 2022 – ‘Pavel Florensky for the 21st Century’ – takes place from 14 to 16 September in Cambridge.

The martyred Russian Orthodox theologian and priest Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) was murdered on the night of 8 December 1937 in a wood near Saint Petersburg, and he is now regarded in Orthodoxy as a New Martyr and Confessor.

At the summer conference in Cambridge in 2014, Dr Christoph Schneider, Academic Director of IOCS, spoke on ‘Pavel A Florensky’s ‘Critique of Impure Reason’ and the debate about fideism and onto-theology,’ while Dr Natalia Vaganova from Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University stimulated an unexpected discussion on the unusual working relationship between Father Floensky and Leon Trotsky in the early years of Soviet Russia.

Trotsky strongly believed in Florensky’s ability in the electrification of rural Russia, and there are contemporary accounts of the remarkable sight of Father Florensky wearing his priest’s cassock and cross as he worked alongside other leaders of a government department.

Although Trotsky asked him to wear a suit, Florensky insisted that while he had no parish he was still a priest, and insisted on wearing his cassock and cross and keeping his long priest’s beard. He continued to hold teaching and research positions until 1934.

This year’s conference in Cambridge is an on-site event taking place at Wesley House (14 and 16 September) and at Westcott House (15 September). Online participation is also available and the event will be broadcast via Zoom.

The conference, organised by IOCS Cambridge with Professor Bruce Foltz of Eckerd College, Florida, will explore the significance of Florensky’s work for both thought and life in the 21st century.

In 1904, at the age of 22, Florensky wrote that his aim was ‘to establish a synthesis of ecclesiality (tserkovnost) and worldly culture’ and ‘to honestly embrace all the positive teaching of the Church and the scientific-philosophical worldview together with the arts, etc.’

A decade later, in his early magnum opus, he begins by prescribing what he calls ‘living religious experience’— accessible through ascetic practice — as the ‘sole legitimate’ path to retrieve the treasures of Christian knowledge.

These statements by the young Florensky capture the main thrust of his intellectual oeuvre. His thought is characterized by a bold and extraordinary cross-fertilisation among philosophy, mathematics, science, art, and a wide range of other disciplines that is rooted in a theological vision of the world.

Trained in mathematics and physics, Florensky employed the scientific and mathematical paradigm changes that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century to articulate his integral Christian worldview and to set out his understanding of reality, knowledge, cult and human culture.

Human existence, he believed, unfolds at the boundary of immanence and transcendence, and the one-sided, post-Kantian attempt to investigate the world sub specie finite has ran its course with little to show for its efforts.

Florensky, however, was convinced that both these revolutionary scientific discoveries and the direct experience of spiritual realities served to undermine the anti-metaphysical and positivist orientation that dominated the second half of the 19th century, paving the way for what he would later call a ‘concrete metaphysics’.’

Much of his work remains under-researched, especially in the West where his writings are only beginning to be translated. The conference seeks to help overcome this gap.

The main aim of the conference is to investigate the fruitfulness of his ideas for the task of thinking in the 21st century. Speakers are invited to analyse any aspect of Florensky’s work. For instance:

• How far can Florensky’s notion of ‘living religious experience’ be grasped as a reinterpretation or development of the noetic illumination of Byzantine mysticism?

• To what extent does his understanding of ‘experience’ resonate with the phenomenological reduction that originated in Western Europe at the beginning of the 20th century?

• Can Florensky’s ‘concrete metaphysics’ be read as a metacritique of the post-metaphysical orientation that dominates — in the wake of Wittgenstein and Heidegger — contemporary philosophy?

• Are there affinities between Florensky’s ‘concrete metaphysics’ and William Desmond’s metaxaology and his notion of the ‘intimate universal’?

• How valuable are Florensky’s theological reflections on sacrament and liturgy articulated in his lesser-known anthropodicy?

• How are we to (re)interpret Florensky’s work within the horizon of contemporary thought?

• And, not least, to what extent does Florensky’s appeal to ‘immediate experience,’ as purified through asceticism, help to ‘pass a damp sponge over the ancient writings’ that the Church has treasured, unlocking the riches of patristic spirituality for contemporary life?

The confirmed conference speakers, so far, are:

• Dr Clemena Antonova (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna)
• Dr Ksenia Ermishina (Alexander Solzhenitsyn Centre, Moscow, via Zoom)
• Prof Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College, Florida)
• Prof Paul Gavrilyuk (University of Saint Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota)
• Prof Michael Martin (Center for Sophiological Studies, Grace Lake, Michigan, via Zoom)
• Prof John Milbank (University of Nottingham)
• Dr Alexei Nesteruk (University of Portsmouth)
• Dr Anke Niederbudde (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
• Dr Avril Pyman (Durham University)
• Prof Paweł Rojek (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
• Dr Christoph Schneider (IOCS)

To register or for more information please visit HERE.