ROMEOSYNE BREAKS AND LINKS SERIES NO.

ONE

PHILIP SHERRARD:
O RT H O D OX T H E O S O P H Y A N D T H E R E I G N O F
Q UA N T I T Y
James L. Kelley

R O M A N I T Y
N O R M A N

P R E S S

O K

PHILIP SHERRARD:
ORTHODOX THEOSOPHY AND THE REIGN OF
QUANTITY
James L. Kelley 2015

For Father Christopher Banks

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel

In many respects, Philip Sherrard's ambivalent position in modern Orthodox

theology mirrors that of St. Augustine of Hippo in Orthodox Patristics. Both
Sherrard and Augustine were converts, and both entered the Church with
intellectual baggage that, some would argue, continued to guide their spiritual
trajectories long after their emergence from the Laver [1]. Their mastery of the
written word cannot be gainsaid, but this gift was too often put in the service of
dangerous speculations, the terseness of the Desert Fathers having been supplanted
in their pages by a forest of what ifs. It is difficult, given these factors, to
ascertain which side of the fold to place either man's work. Do we follow St.
Photius' direction and overlook the errors of ecclesiastical writers of note, or
instead mimic other Fathers who seem more intent on dividing the world into
those who teach Orthodoxy and those who teach heresy?
The theological formulations of Philip Sherrard and St. Augustine are, at
best, problematic from an Orthodox standpoint, but many Orthodox have still
found much to praise in the teachings of both [2]. In order to show both sides of
the coin, the essay's briefer first part examines the influence of theosophy on
Philip Sherrard's presentation of man's experience of the sacred, while the

lengthier last section analyzes Sherrard's astute critique of the much-maligned

Western civilization. Though his early embrace of German Romantic aesthetics
led Sherrard to the gravest of errors in his teachings about God, man and creation,
his insightful account of Western theological and cultural decline shows him to be,
if not an important Orthodox writer, at least a noteworthy anti-Western polemicist.
I.
Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard was born 23 September, 1922 in Oxford. His
Cambridge doctoral dissertation was not a work of theology, however. Published
as The Marble Threshing Floor in 1956, Sherrard's PhD thesis examined the
Modern Greek poets Dionysios Solomos, Costis Palamas, Constantine Cavafis,
Anchelos Sikelianos, and George Seferis [3]. Though Sherrard was received into
the Eastern Orthodox Church the same year it appeared, Threshing Floor reveals a
mind and spirit as much attuned to German Romanticism and to aestheticized
forms of Behmenism as to Orthodox theology [2].
In Threshing Floor's chapter on Solomos, Sherrard focuses on the poet's
theory of Great Realities, according to which each image in a poem corresponds
to a Platonic form [3]. For Solomos, a poem's well-ordered system of archetypal
images can bridge the soul of the poet and the Soul of the World. During moments
of desperate exaltation, the aesthete steps beyond the plenum of Platonic forms.
What is left now that an Eckhardtian breakthrough has dispersed the Great
Realities? Sherrard steps in to explain: [B]y shattering all natures forms [the
poet] experiences a supernatural Nature, what I called a Mother Nature, Creatrix,
Natura naturans. Boehme describes an understanding similar to [it]... [4].
Solomos' The Cretan narrates a love scene on a becalmed raft that elicits a
breathless exegesis from Sherrard:
But suddenly the sea becomes quiet, a perfect mirror in which the stars
are reflected. Some mysterious power constrains nature. The wind
drops, and wound in the moonlight the dark presence rises, a dazzling
darkness that fills creation with light. Shestops before the Cretan
and gazes at him. She reminds him of someone he has once known, of
some Madonna painted in a church, of something that his loving mind
has fashioned, some dream dreamt when taking his mothers milk, an
ancient pre-conscious memory. [H]e feels her eyes deep within him,
for she is one of the divine powers who dwell where they see into the

abyss and into the heart of man; and I felt that she read my mind better
than if I spoke sadly with my own lips. It was, the poet notes, an
inexpressible impression, which perhaps no one has known unless the
first man, when he first drew breath, and the sky, the earth, and the sea,
formed for him, still in all their perfection, rejoiced within his soul,
until in the drunkenness of his mind and heart, sleep, image of death,
seized him [5].
In this passage, the Mother Nature archetype embodied by the adept's lover is a
higher aspect of the adept's own soul; this girl who gazes at the Cretan's eyes is an
analogue to his own Higher Self that, daimon-like, searches the ungrund or abyss
within his spirit. Solomos' Creatrix appeals to Sherrard, doubtless, because he is
already by the mid-fifties steeped in British aesthetic theories directly inspired by
German Romanticism. Later in his career Sherrard would teach that the divine
essence is androgynous and bisexual [6] and that the Theotokos was a human
incarnation of the Eternal Feminine [7]; both the supposed androgyny of God
and the sophianity of Mary are explained by Sherrard in one of his later books as a
necessary consequence of the original process within the Godhead by which God
reveals Himself to Himself:
For [in God's essence] the Feminine is the pure potentiality that
transcends even Being or Essence itself: she is...the Nihil or totally
occluded state that is a precondition of God being able to be at all....
As such [the Eternal Feminine] is the principle of the masculine
principle itself, as that which makes it possible for God to constitute
and to deploy His very divinity [8].
It is beyond this essay's scope to retrace the history of Jakob Boehme's theosophy
as it impacted both Pietism and Russian Orthodox theology [9]. Suffice to say
Boehme's gnostic and hermetic leanings influenced his reinterpretation of
Christian teaching. Contrary to traditional accounts that clearly forbid an analogy
between the divine essence and created beings, Boehme's vision told him that man,
nature and God share a common mode of self-creation: God gave birth to Himself
out of His own undetermined, utterly simple essence, or ungrund [10]. This He did
with the help of His feminine aspect, Sophia. In like manner, man must recover his
original wholeness with the help of Sophia, here understood as both man's higher
self and the aspect of God that interfaces with the creation He emanated.
In short, Philip Sherrard's theology was an outgrowth of his literary studies.
The latter taught him that traditional art afforded man a holistic view of

God/man/natureman can become deified by an inner reenacting the God's birth

out of His ungrund [11]. Sophia, or Mother Nature, is the dynamic principle by
which the divine birth comes to pass.
II.
Orthodox Christology: Western Ecology
Though Philip Sherrard held a PhD in history from one of the most revered
universities in the world, he never seems to have taken to the more common
approach of historians, who often pride themselves on letting written sources tell
their own materially-situated and temporally-determined stories. Sherrard scorned
any approach to reality that did not attend to the inherent sacredness at the core of
any true encounter with nature. Thus, when Sherrard sat down to craft his
historical narrative of the West's spiritual decline, he seems to have spread out his
source material and commenced his search for the Ideas which, though themselves
caused by God, served as the archetypal or intermediary causes of surface events.
Immaterial, quasi-Platonic Ideas had a causative, ontological precedence over
anything caroming around in the material sphere [11a].
But there are, for the Christian Sherrard, good Ideas and bad Ideas, the worst
of all being quantity. Why? Apparently, Sherrard felt that man in his most
degraded spiritual condition looks at the natural world and sees, not logoi or forms
(read: qualities), but rather a grid of lines and dots that, far from fostering
participation or methexis, can only be mathematically modeled. Those in the
modern West who (height of all perversity!) have embraced Quantity as an
advance over Quality have dethroned true spiritual lifethe Sacredand elevated
to the vacant seat a lifeless, barren series of zeros and ones.
Sherrard sees the period between roughly 1500 A.D and 1750 A.D. to have
been crucial to his story, since this span saw the civilizational entity called The
West come into its own as the world's first more-or-less global society. The
Scientific Revolution that paralleled (some would say drove) the West's emergence
was far from a clean break from the pre-modern European tradition, Sherrard
avers. Rather, non-religious scientific humanism grew out of the Western
Christian tradition; indeed, the Western Christian world, Sherrard insists,
unwittingly caused its own foundations to be first questioned, then scornfully
repudiated. Most alarming of all is the fact it was not some Hun invader that

chewed up and spat out the bases of Western civilizationit was, rather, the
Wests own greatest minds [12].
But is it not uncharitable to suggest that the culture forged by such
household names as Descartes and Newton is in some sense responsible for
todays anti-Christianity? It is far more important, Sherrard pleads, to come to
grips with the life-and-death situation that we face today as a result of modern
attitudes toward man, cosmos, and God, than to ignore the non-Orthodox
precursors of our common crisis. Sherrard emphasizes that we can ill afford to
shield ourselves from the need to critiqueand thereby discreditthese
destructive modern ideas simply to satisfy the expectations of todays ultrairenicists, whose presuppositions are drawn largely from the same poisoned
Western well that is itself the object of inquiry [13].
In order to solve the Modern ecological problem, avers Sherrard, we must
first answer the query: What is man?
We dare not cast blame at the natural world, which God created very good.
Far from causing the crisis, the natural world everywhere travails and groans for
deliverance from its consequences.
Even less is Almighty God to blame, for He is not the author of evil;
indeed, God became man in order to inaugurate the healing of both man and
cosmos. Man's sin led to the Fall of the cosmos; man's deification through union
with the Godman is required to restore and redeem this fallen world.
Sherrard sets this Orthodox doctrine of the Incarnate Son as the recapitulator
of all beings before our eyes as a guiding motif. As the title of one of his more
searching books indicates, before we can formulate the proper world image, we
must first comprehend what is wrong with our Modern human image. But the
truth about man cannot be known apart from knowledge of the Godman, from the
Logos Who through His Incarnationthough His life, death and resurrection
called man to become a High Priest of creation who co-works with God to sanctify
a world that suffers unremittingly because of man's sins. In short, ecology must
begin with Christology, with the original Christian conception of Christ.
Christs person (hypostasis) is of two substancesdivine and humanthat
interpenetrate each other without division or confusion, as the Fourth
Ecumenical Council of the Church proclaimed [14]. Sherrard, who, unlike many
other modern Orthodox theologians, does not hesitate to acknowledge similarities
he finds between the Churchs central dogmas about Christ and the loftiest
teachings of Greek philosophy, notes that on the philosophical plane, behind the
conception of the person of Christ as formulated in the great Christological
discussions among the Greek Fathers, lies what is basically a Platonic
understanding of the relationship between universal and particular, with its focus

on the idea of the participation of the one in the other [15]. However, the Greek
Fathers were by no means Platonists, Sherrard stresses. It is more a case of the
Church Fathers borrowing from Plato the notion of independent, yet participatory
substances and transposing it into a Christian context. In Timaeus and in other of
Platos writings we find a more holistic, cosmos-affirming stance than in the
Athenians middle dialogues; one might say the Church Fathers stole away the
Truths found in Platos writings that already belonged to Christ, while passing
over in silence what was merely profane therein [16].
In fact, Sherrard does not doubt that the Church Fathers found in Plato a
ready source for overturning the central stumbling block for the Greek mind: How
a unity can relate to finite beings, the One being everything the many are not.
But why is the notion of independent, yet participatory substances so central to
Christology, and thus to a correct notion of mans relation to both God and
creation? Because mans hope of divinization is predicated upon the acceptance of
the possibility that divinity can be communicatedthrough no created
intermediaryto created beings without the distinction between the human and
divine being thereby erased. As Sherrard explains, the Orthodox doctrine of the
hypostatic unity of a divine with a human nature in Christ is,
by extensionthe basis of [the Orthodox] doctrine of mans
deification, the doctrine of the God-man: a deification realised through
the participation of the human element in the divine element without
any loss of identity or integrity in either direction. The human image
participates in the divine and universal archetype in the manner in
which, in Platonic thought, particulars participate in their universal
models, the divine ideas [17].
This participatory union of Christs two natures (Christology), mirrored in the
participation of God and man (soteriology), is analogous to the union of soul with
body in man (anthropology). Man is not primarily a disembodied soul; rather he is
wholly soul and wholly body. The Patristic writers in various places
unambiguously affirm that the soul is what is invisible about the body, and the
body is what is visible about the soul. The Incarnation of the Logos is participation
par excellence; the Incarnation is the archetypal participation upon which all other
instances of communion are predicated: mans soul-body coherence; mans
communion with other humans; mans interpenetration with the world of created
beings; and mans divinization, that is, his partaking in the very life of God.
So, how and why did Western Christianity, which began with the same
communal/participatory vision of God, man and cosmos as that of the Christian

East, deviate from this once common path? Some modern Orthodox theologians
who have tackled the question of the origin of the schism between the Christian
West and the Christian East have singled out the teachings of Augustine of Hippo
as the foundation of the deviation. Sherrard agrees that Augustines deficient
teachings on sin and free will precluded a fully-fledged, Orthodox conception of
Christology (and thus anthropology); he also cannot help but be aware of the
crippling effects that the Augustinian formulation of prevenient grace has had
upon the bishop of Hippos Western successors up to the present day [18].
However, the historical pivot point for Sherrard is the irruption of Aristotles
philosophy into Western Christian theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Because scholastic theology explicitly replaced the original theological standard
that of personal experience of God in the liturgical and ascetical life of the Church
with a new criterionthat of Aristotles philosophythe result was a drastic
veering away from the Orthodox Catholic tradition that Sherrard feels was already
becoming progressively attenuated in the West from the fourth century on [19].
A Tale of two Unities: Perichoretic East and Aristotelian West
Since some may find much about which to quibble in Sherrards handling of
figures such as Plato and Aristotle (namely, his seeming lack of nuance and his
general unconcern for scholarly apparatus), it may be helpful to recall the words of
the late Rick Roderick: I dont read Kant to find the truth; I read him to see what
I can do with him. Sherrard uses the classic texts of philosophy and theology in
this sense; that is, his sole purpose in examining the writings of the great thinkers
of the past was elucidation of what was for Sherrard the central metaphysical
themethe interrelation of God and creation. Needless to say, a reader not open to
Sherrards overall aim (or at least open to trying to understand Sherrards
overarching purpose) may feel that justice is not being done to such towering
names as Heraclitus or Proclus. With this caveat in mind, we will proceed to
outline Sherrards versions of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism, our focus
being the significancein Sherrards eyesof the isms involved for the crisis
of Modernity and for its possible solution in Sacred Ecology.
According to Plato, Forms exist in the intelligible realm, and can be
participated in by humans whose purified souls have achieved a likeness to the
intelligible. For Aristotle, by contrast, forms inhere within individual beings.
The individual human beingand indeed, each and every being in the universe
is locked inside his or her essence in the Aristotelian scheme, seemingly cut off

from other essences as essences. The idiosyncratic notion of unity that

undergirds Aristotles substantial form is the key to understanding later Western
developments. There is no place for a unity of concrete particulars for Aristotle,
since unities are identified with individual beings goals or inner purposes: each
existing thing has a telos that is its own destiny, its own set of potentialities that
beckon to be actualized.
Since Sherrard bases his theology, above all else, on the union without
confusion of the divine and human natures in the single, undivided person of
Christ incarnate [20], it is easy to understand why he objects so stridently to
Aristotles pseudo-monadic notion of substantial unity. Aristotelian substances are
unities because they are impressed with a single form that contains within itself
in potentialall future possibilities of development. As such, there can be no
composite substances [21] Indeed, substances cannot be shared or participated
[22].
It should also come as no surprise that, considering Sherrards emphasis on
communion and participation, Aristotles universe should appear to him a rather
bleak house. The Logos cannot become Incarnate within its confines; Christ
cannot become its inhominated savior, since two natures cannot interpenetrate in
Aristotles universe without either 1) destroying the lower human nature, or 2)
creating a freakish tertium quid, a demi-god who is neither God nor man, neither
uncreated nor created [23]. What is more, God cannot be present in each created
beings logos; Christ cannot be the Logos to the logoi, to the uncreated
predeterminations of all beings. The Stagirites universe, viewed through
Sherrardian spectacles, is more infernal than cosmic, since each and every one of
its constituent beings is bereft of anything like a common nature that would allow
for methexis, for participation between, on the one hand, man and neighbor; and,
on the other hand, between man and God.
Aquinass Children: Immortal Soul to Thinking Substance
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas sought to systematize Roman
Catholic theology by reformulating its doctrines along Aristotelian lines. What
resulted was nothing short of a theological revolution in Europe, a development
that, for Sherrard, sealed the fate of the Western Church, and pointed inexorably
toward todays waking nightmare of spiritual, mental, and cultural degradation
[24]. We already remarked above that Aristotles notion of substantial unity did not
allow for a perichoretic Christology, wherein Christs human and divine natures

are united without mixture or confusion in the one hypostasis of the Logos. In
considering its further implications for ecology, Sherrard notes that Aquinass
Aristotelian-inflected Christology can include no Logos-logoi component whereby
the divine can be actually present in all things without those things on that
account losing their own substantial identity [25]. As for the efficacy of the
saving mission of Aquinass Christ, Sherrard voices concern that, for Thomas, the
deification of Christs human nature does not seem to include the human
counterpartthe deification of both man and the cosmos over which He is priest.
Instead, the Incarnation is something that occurred only in the unique case of the
historical figure of Jesus [26].
The full, disastrous import of Aquinass Aristotelianism is revealed in the
Dominicans anthropology. Sherrards Aquinas reduces man to a soul-body in
which the former components knowledge is of the purely rational variety [27].
Moreover, lacking any faculty through which he can know and experience things,
including himself, as they are in God, man is forced to depend for his knowledge,
includingspiritual knowledge, on sense perception [28]. Aquinas is revealed as
the forebear of Enlightenment rationalism once we boil his anthropology down to
the following axiom: Thomist man is that animal that can acquire knowledge only
through ratiocination based solely upon sensory data. Here the reader cannot help
but detect tendencies toward over-generalization and overstatement in Sherrard's
unflattering vignette of Aquinas' theology. In order to determine if any
compensatory insight is offered in Sherrard's reading of the great Dominican, we
turn to the staid Londoner's account of the Thomist immortal soul.
The Orthodox Christian tripartite anthropology of body-soul-nous is quashed
by St. Thomas into a bipartite mind-body. In place of a Logos-nous as a principle
of communion between soul and body, Aquinas posits the soul as the unique
substance of man[;] the indwelling principle of his unity as a composite being
[29]. However, Aristotle held that the soul is material, in that it exists only as the
form of the matter that makes up a given being. Once the being dies, the form
dissolves as the body of the individual decomposes. Thus, the Aristotelian
framework to which Aquinas was bound called for a soul that was just as material,
and hence just as corruptible, as flesh and blood. In order to affirm this
Aristotelian notion of soul while yet denying that the soul is extinguished at death,
Aquinas re-defined the human soul as a self-subsistent spiritual substance, one
that receives the act of being in itself, and so is by nature immaterial, incorruptible
and immortal [30]. The body does not have its own substantial reality, but exists
merely because the real man, the immortal soul, possesses certain powers that can
only be exerted somatically [31].
But, Sherrard underlines, we must realize just how drastically Aquinass

conception of the soul-body differs from the Orthodox view. For the Orthodox,
man is a soulbody whose integrity even death cannot dissolve utterly; for the
Aristotelian Aquinas, the soul transcends the body, though the soul has need of a
body for its specific purposes, for the working out of its own inner idea. In
Sherrards words: [W]hereas before St. Thomas it was possible to think of the
soul as the most important part of man, after St. Thomas it was possible to think of
man as complete without a body at all, because what the body contributes as an
organic and material instrument is already present within the soul in a spiritual
form and as a spiritual exigency [32].
Indeed, Aquinass soul-body lives a bizarre, two-tiered existence that might
be termed Nestorian or Apollinarian, depending on one's vantage point.
Considered apart from the body, this Thomistic soul contains within its totally
transcendent, immaterial substance the reasons for its composition as a soul-body.
The flesh-and-blood human body does not have reasons or energies of its own that
require realization in order that its destiny or telos is met. Instead, in the
Thomistic view man is a function of the soul, not soul a function of man [33]. For
Aquinas, the structure of the soul is such that it needs a kind of material double to
develop bodily capacities that mirror certain of its soul capacities. However, a kind
of anthropological asymmetry is introduced by the Angelic Doctor, since the soul
contains potencies that have no counterpart in the body: For St. Thomas man qua
mandoes not have a nature: he only has a history. Man is but an accident, a
phase, in the history of his soul [34].
Though a bodily resurrection is insisted upon by St. Thomas, Sherrard
remains concerned that Aquinass anthropology provides no compelling reason
why the soul-body conjunction should continue after death. Thus, Sherrard blames
Aquinas for the ghostly, disembodied soul that has peopled so many theological
tomes since the Middle Ages. The development is complete once we reach
Descartes, who reproduced the Thomistic parallelism of soul and body, but with an
important twist: The odd stratification of energies within the soulAquinass
flimsy justification for a body-soul nexusis now gone. Sherrard notes with irony
that Descartes leapfrogged over Aquinas only to recover a purer Aristotelian
notion of essence. The Cartesian human soul has no need of a body at all, or of
anything whatsoever exterior to itself. Here Sherrards analysis brings us full
circle, Descartess res cogitans being a recapitulation of the Stagirites totally selfsufficient substance [35]. In fact, Descartes reduces the body to a kind of carnal
puppet, entirely without [the] spiritual or psychic forces or qualities that are
natural to the soul [36].
If space allowed, we could follow Sherrard's comments on Newton and
Boyle, who are viewed as the flowers that bloomed from the Cartesian bud.

Descartess notion of mans body as a hydraulic automaton [37] pushed about by

a thinking substance that can approach the cosmos only in a functionalist manner
sets the stage for the Scientific Revolution, with its ominous cry Let Newton Be!
and its exultant echo Viva la revolution!
Concluding Remarks
This essay has attempted to explain why Philip Sherrard's place in Orthodox
theology remains uncertain at best. The first time I encountered Eastern Orthodox
theology, I was employed in a telesales call-center when a bearded co-worker
(with whom I had been speaking about the only Christianity I knewWestern)
passed me a sliver of paper. On this slip was a short list of names, a list that would
change my life in many ways. The list read: Florovsky, Romanides, Lossky,
Sherrard. I wasted no time absorbing every text I could find by each of these
authors, but the only works I could track down by Sherrard at that time were his
Greek East and Latin West [38] and Church, Papacy, and Schism [39]. Both tomes
seemed to fit well with the perspective shared by the other three names on this
neopatristic list. Neither of these particular Sherrard books minced words when
confronting a Western Christian tradition that had forsaken the Fold of Christ, the
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
It was only much later that I heard rumors of Philip Sherrard's bizarre
comments concerning other traditional faiths. A second friend (also bearded, but
this time in the trapeza of a Russian Orthodox Church), whispered to me that
Sherrard is a perennialist. Though we cannot expand on the subject of Sherrard's
perennialism in these pages, suffice to say I acquired each of Sherrard's other
books and also most of his articles and reviews. Though I came to the conclusion
that Sherrard had indeed, to judge by his final theological testament, Christianity:
Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, succumbed to the heretical teaching that God
has saved and continues to save men through non-Christian religions, I remained
disconcerted as to how such a seemingly staunch Orthodox traditionalist became
misguided concerning these questions so central to Christian life and belief [40].
I have concluded that Philip Sherrard's background as a literary historian
acquainted him with a kind of generalized Romantic literary theory, which he
embraced as a kind of conversion; that his travels to Greece and his subsequent
study of modern Greek poetry provided him with a link between his Romantic
proclivities and the variety of theosophic traditionalism found in poets such as
Solomos; finally, he entered the Orthodox Church under the presumption that he

was tracing one path to Truth among many. Despite his perennialism Sherrard was
able to use his knowledge of Orthodox Patristic writers to arrive at insights into
the errant religious and secular developments of the West.
With the foregoing in mind, Philip Sherrard fits more into the illustrious list
of Christian and quasi-Christian historians of the WestDawson, Voegelin, and
Dooyeeweerd among themwhose searching analysis continues to enrich our
understanding of what Vico referred to as an Eternal Ideal History, according to
which the Histories of all Nations run in time [41]. Vico did not speak often of
the reality that parallels this Ideal History of man's imperfect sociopolitical
striving, that is, the history of Pentecost, the history of Divine Providence, of
God's relation to creation's crownof God becoming man that man might become
God. Arriving as we have at that highest and most majestic of Mysteries, it
behooves us to end with a prayer to the Holy Trinity, knowing that the saints, the
Holy Ones of God, themselves constitute this history of man's participation in
God.
Holy Father among the Saints James, Brother of the Lord,
Pray unto God for us. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Amen.

NOTES
[1] Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, revised edition (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) is a standard work on the
African bishop's life; on his Manichaean background, see the essays in Augustine
and Manichaeism in the Latin West, eds. Johannes van Oort, Otto Wermelinger,
and Gregor Wurst (Leiden: Brill, 2001). On Philip Sherrard's life, see Kathleen
Raine, Philip Sherrard (1922-1995): A Tribute (Birmingham, AL: Delos Press,
1996); Met. Kallistos Ware, Foreword, ix-xlv in Philip Sherrard, Christianity:
Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press,
1998); and Met. Kallistos Ware, Philip Sherrard: A Prophet for Our Time (Oxford:
Friends of Athos, 2003). I would like to thank His Eminence Kallistos for mailing
me an inscribed copy of the last listed work.
[2] For more-or-less positive assessments of Sherrard from Orthodox theologians,

see Fr. John Chryssavgis, Essay Review: A Tribute to Philip Sherrard (19221995), Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14.2 (1996): 345-354; idem, Beauty
and Sacredness in the Work of Philip Sherrard, Journal of Modern Greek Studies
16.1 (1998): 91-109; Ware, Foreword; idem, Philip Sherrard. Both Fr. John and
Met. Kallistos acknowledge that there are unresolved difficulties in Sherrard's
thought, however, as in Chryssavgis, Tribute, 346 and Ware, Foreword, xxxiiixxxiv and xl. Christopher C. Knight, in Tradition and the Faiths of the World:
Some Aspects of the Thought of Philip Sherrard, points out (at p. 336-337) some
possible inconsistencies in the defense of Sherrard's quasi-docetic christology
mounted in Ware, Foreword. Knight makes further mention the obituary in The
Times, 6 June 1995, which recognizes that Sherrard's writings came perilously
close to New Ageism in places (cit. in Tradition and the Faiths of the World,
337). On the spectrum of Orthodox positions on St. Augustine, see Fr. George C.
Papademetriou, Saint Augustine in the Greek Orthodox Tradition, Summary of
Proceedings of the Annual ConferenceAmerican Theological Library
Association 50 (1997): 232-242, online version at: Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of
America, http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith8153 (accessed 31 August,
2015).
[3] Philip Sherrard, The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry
(London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1956).
[4] Sherrard, Threshing Floor, 24.
[5] Ibid., 22.
[6] Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art (Ipswich, Suffolk, UK: Golgonooza
Press, 1990), 108.
[7] Ibid., 119.
[8] Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of
Sacred Cosmology (Ipswich, Suffolk, UK: Golgonooza Press, 1992), 178-179.
[9] On Boehme in general, see Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual
Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1991); and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Jacob Bhme and Christian
Theosophy, 119-127 in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (Abingdon,
Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015). Boehme's influence on Russian thought in

general and Russian Orthodox theology in particular is outlined in Zdenek V.

David, The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought,
American Slavic Review 21 (1962), 43-64.
[10] On Boehme's relation to gnosticism and hermeticism, see Walter Pagel,
Paracelsus and the Neoplatonic and Gnostic Tradition, Ambix 8 (1960), 125-166;
see also Van Alan Herd, The Concept of Ungrund in Jakob Boehme (1575-1624),
M.A. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 2003.
[11] My use of the term God-man-nature follows, in part, Antoine Faivre's
Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, translated by
Christine Rhone (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), where we find reference to a
God/Human/Nature Triangle (p. 7). See my Anatomyzing Divinity: Studies in
Science, Esotericism and Political Theology (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011) for
an earlier, less wieldy version of the term, cosmo-theanthropic rhythm.
[11a] See Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, 206.
[12] Philip Sherrard, Christian Theology and the Eclipse of Man. Sobornost 7.3
(1976): 166-179, here 166. A later version of this article appeared as chapter 2 (pp.
42-62) of Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the
Origins and Consequences of Modern Science (Ipswich, Suffolk, UK: Golgonooza
Press, 1987).
[13] Ibid., 167.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 167-168.
[16] Sherrard has the following to say about the Church Fathers Plato-inflected
conception of universal and particular: For the Fathers, the particular [is] the
likeness or image of the universal which act as its model and in whose invisible
reality it participates through its inherence in the universal and its affinity with it.
It was on the basis of this understanding that Plato was able to formulate his
conception of substances and essences which are really a network of
participations, intelligible and ordered, constituting a hierarchical system of forms:
the famous golden chain; and it was also on the basis of this understanding that
Christian theologians were able to formulate their conception of the union of the

two natures in Christ (Sherrard, Christian Theology, 170).

[17] Ibid., 168. On deification in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, see Christopher
Veniamin, The Orthodox Understanding of Salvation: 'Theosis' in Saint Silouan
the Athonite and Elder Soprony of Essex, 13-26 in The Orthodox Understanding
of Salvation: 'Theosis' in Scripture and Tradition (Dalton, PA: Mount Thabor
Publishing, 2014); Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), 196-216; and James L.
Kelley, A Realism of Glory: Lectures on Christology in the Works of
Protopresbyter John Romanides (Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute,
2009), 49-51.
[18] Sherrard, Christian Theology, 168. The concept of prevenient grace (Lat.
gratia praeveniens) originates in St. Augustine of Hippo, de natura et gratia, 3536, in which the scriptural passage his mercy goes before [praeveniet] me
(Psalms 59.10) is cited to express the African bishop's innovation that divine grace
moves toward man before man can do anything to bring about his justification
from original sin (English trans. in Henry Bettenson, Later Christian Fathers: A
Selection From the Writings of the Fathers from St. Cyril of Jerusalem to St. Leo
the Great [London: Oxford University Press, 1970], 204-205). Sherrard relates
Augustine's doctrine of grace to Western ecclesiastical legalism and the Papacy in
his Church, Papacy, and Schism: A Theological Enquiry (London: SPCK, 1978),
pp. 87-95.
[19] Sherrard, Christian Theology, 169.
[20] Ware, Foreword, xix.
[21] Sherrard, Christian Theology, 171.
[22] Ibid.
[23] See Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers. Volume
One, Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, Third Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970), 374-377, 441-443.
[24] Philip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition (Brookline,
MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), 2.

[25] Sherrard, Christian Theology, 172.

[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid., 174.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., 176.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., 177.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., 178.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid., 179.
[38] Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).
[39] See note 18.
[40] I refrain from questioning Philip Sherrard's spiritual status or the value of
some of his writings. I was once advised by a spiritual guide to avoid casting light
on others' errors, since this kind of archaeology leads to the drawing up of score
cards that codify errors into heresies. Indeed, condemning others is to condemn
oneself doubly. However, it is necessary to consider where pious men veer to the
left or to the right, that we may properly praise what they said and did properly,
knowing full well that we may be in error ourselves on some unclear point despite
our wish to uphold the Truth.

[41] Translation of Giambattista Vico, Seconda Sienza Nuova, 348-349 by Arthur

Child in his Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey, University of
California Publications in Philosophy 16 (1953), 271-310, here 291.