The Spell of the Logos: Origen's Exegetic Pedagogy in the Contemporary Debate Regarding Logocentrism (review)

This book ambitiously undertakes a constructive engagement between strains of contemporary philosophy and Origen's pedagogical exegesis. The author not only seeks to recover Origen for a philosophic climate far distant from the Alexandrian exegete's own—and indeed to approach Origen from a direction that would initially seem to be inhospitable—but also to present Origen's thought as authentically messianic and soteriological. In this way, Niculescu takes up the longstanding problem of Origen's "Platonism" and provides a fresh context in which to approach that issue.

The argument unfolds in four lengthy chapters. In the first, Niculescu economically sketches three critiques of logocentrism, importantly adding to the usual lineup of Derrida and Levinas, writers from the lineage of French phenomenology, including Jean-Luc Marion, who provide space for a robust concept of Logos in tandem with an anti-logocentric commitment. He locates the differentia of philosophies in their understanding of the relationship between thought and language. A logocentric philosophy operates from a primacy of thought over language and regards communication ultimately as an act of formation of a translinguistic community of minds between the addressor and the addressee. By contrast, an "anti-logocentric" approach sets its task as to attest to language's transcendence as an event that maintains an irreducible alterity. Language, that is, cannot be reduced to any final meaning, either as a correspondence of discourse to the intention (or "mind") of a speaker or as a formal, grammatical agreement between parties in a conversation. In anti-logocentric thought, the Logos can stand for "the irreducible event of language" (6), rather than a pre-existent intellectual concept embedded in the rational order. Niculescu applies both these frameworks to the definition of gospel in Origen's Commentary on John and proposes a means by which to understand this usage as an anti-logocentric messianic advent. It is this conception of Logos as "legic" event that Niculescu seeks to assess in Origen's pedagogical exegesis.

This task dominates the second and third chapters. In Chapter Two, the author rehearses the familiar understanding of Origen's exegesis as a pedagogy that leads the reader in an ascent from an initial, naïve understanding to spiritual perfection in the adept's assimilation to the Logos. Niculescu judges that this schematization of the pedagogical process, if accepted, would locate Origen within certain forms of logocentrism (117-19). Hence, in Chapter Three, he presents an alternative reading of Origen's pedagogy that focuses on the pragmatics of Origen's homiletic instruction. In a sensitive and astute close reading, informed by Lyotard's speech-act theory, of the Homilies on Leviticus, Niculescu expands on the way in which Origen's homiletics can be understood as performing and attesting to an advent of Logos rather than as pointing to a self-sufficient principle and all-embracing truth.

In the final chapter, Niculescu probes the adequacy of this anti-logocentric reading. The reader also discerns in this chapter the stakes that the author perceives in these competing frameworks. The ultimate result of logocentrism, Niculescu fears, is a "desensitization" to the suffering of the other, in part because that other becomes a "mere actor in a metaphysically plotted theo-drama" (203), which "mutes" that suffering under the guise of a "quasi-providential concern" (206). The central interpretive moment in this examination is the Emmaus road experience, which Niculescu judges potentially to authorize a totalizing of Christian discourse, casting a "spell"—the "spell" of the book's title—that authorizes the stance of the interpreter as final and universal, and thereby both marginalizes the voice of the other, but also reduces the transcendence of the Logos itself. Niculescu weighs different possibilities for Origen's understanding of the "grand scenario" of Emmaus, and ultimately concludes that Origen's exegesis demonstrates an "undeniable" but only "selectively actualized potential" of understanding the other (263).

The book could have benefitted...