All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic by Valentina Izmirlieva (review)

REVIEWS 302 remarkable full color illustrations. JENNIFER WEHMEIER, ART HISTORY, UCLA Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2008) xii + 238 pp. Valentina Izmirlieva argues that the practice of listing divine names “seeks to impose a vision of order upon whole communities of Christians” (3). She does this by examining two occurrences of list-making from the extremes of the rich spectrum of Christian literature. On one hand, Izmirlieva builds a stimulating interpretive scheme of the synthetic principles underlying the exegetical work of the sixth-century anonymous author known as Dionysius the Areopagite. Her focus is on the widely-cited treatise The Divine Names but within the context of the entire Areopagitical theological corpus. On the other hand, the author draws our attention to the much less known protective amulets carrying the seventy-two names of the Lord that circulated among the South Slavs over the early modern period—a phenomenon coming at the end of a tradition she traces back to the twelfth century. The subject of the study and the interpretive model Izmirlieva applies present us with an interdisciplinary project connecting various fields within the social sciences and the humanities. Drawing on her academic expertise in medieval Slavic literature, she explores what she calls tropology—a direction of inquiry that Aristotle placed between poetics and rhetoric, but Izmirlieva locates in anthropological inquiry. Her questions address the listing of divine names as a Christian praxis, a constituent element of a religious rhetoric, and her method proceeds from Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital and symbolic production. Her answer is that the religious rhetoric in question constitutes a vision of universal order that is “operative in the lives of Christian communities” (6) at two levels: speculative theology and apotropaic practices. One success of Izmirlieva’s book is that each of the two parts is enlightening on its own terms. The center of Izmirlieva’s argument is that “a list is a ‘differentiation -in-unity’ trope par excellence” (55). This statement helps connect a daring interpretation of fundamental aspects of the Areopagitical theology to the recurrent pattern of listing names typical in both the ritualistic and academic practice not only of Christianity but other religious systems as well. Izmirlieva is not afraid to transgress the boundaries of theology and yet stay strictly within the analytical framework of social sciences. Her Pseudo-Dionysius builds a cosmological program within which names render a gradual approximation of the divine essence along a grid that is similar to Bourdieu’s coordinate systems of the social sphere (55). This cosmological program transcends the dividing line between Christian theology and Neo-Platonist philosophy and brings them into a synthesis of significant consequences. The Areopagitical hierarchies, partly substantiated by the theologian’s exegesis of the divine names in Scripture , play the role of tropes connecting within the same framework the ontological principles of divine procession and divine revelation. The interpretation of the name-lists in Dionysus as tropes building a particular rhetorical model is explicated and assessed against the backdrop of Christian, Judaic, and polytheistic ritual practices, such as the Byzantine Akathistos hymn dedicated to the REVIEWS 303 Theotokos, or methods of organizing knowledge, for example, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. The second part of the book leads us into a completely different historical and cultural situation: the “sporadic and irregular tradition” (136) of a particular Slavic text Izmirlieva refers to as The 72 Names of the Lord before the appearance of Cyrillic printing, and the commercial success of later redactions beginning with the birth of Cyrillic printed books, in 1520. The text belonged to a cluster of similar lists, and was produced, in the early modern period, as part of verbal amulets, in the form of miniature codices or rolls. The names of God in this Slavic version of the list are actually seventy or eighty, a proof that the topos of the divine names, and the number seventy-two were “lumped together mechanically for the sake or producing a Christian equivalent to the Kabbalistic amulet” (126). The analysis of the obscure genesis, transmission, and functioning of such lists leads Izmirlieva into a...