God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium by Ashley Purpura (review)

“All power in heaven and on earth is given unto to me” (Matt 28:18). The words of Christ in the Great Commandment make plain that all power derives from God and is vested in Christ as the locus of divine-human communion. If we allow, with Foucault, that all discourse is power discourse then all discourse should ultimately be considered as theological discourse and, more specifically, discourse about Christ. While Ashley Purpura does not, so far as I can see, quote the Great Commandment in her new book God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium, she is crystal-clear about the properly divine origin of all power and sets up a vibrant challenge to modern construals of power which rarely, if ever, acknowledge this indispensable theological and Christocentric dimension.

Purpura’s book is a perceptive and poised first book, based on a Fordham doctoral dissertation. The bulk of the book consists in a careful analysis of a set of Byzantine treatments of hierarchy and power: Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor, St Niketas Stethatos, and St Nicholas Kabasilas. Purpura has rightly recognized that “hierarchy” is generally considered a bad word in the contemporary secular arena, connoting all sorts of deplorable notions of domination and inequality. One of the great merits of this book is its attempt to retrieve hierarchy as a positive concept, rightly emphasizing the consistent way in which Byzantine theologians understood hierarchy as the means of communicating divinity—in other words, as a vehicle of theosis. It was, of course, Dionysius who coined the term, defining it as a “sacred order, an understanding and an activity being approximated as closely as possible to the divine” (Celestial Hierarchy, 3). Purpura adroitly explores the various dimensions of hierarchy in the Areopagite, emphasizing that it is never just a matter of office within the Church but focuses rather on the mediation of divinity thorough the angelic ranks (the celestial hierarchy) and through the various sacraments and orders of the Church (the ecclesiastical hierarchy). She also offers some salutary push-back against critiques of Dionysius that treat him as the exponent of a kind of magical clericalism in which the congregation is reduced to an audience cowed into passivity by its god-like hierophant. This is an admirably rounded portrait of the Areopagite.

Purpura goes on to explore the various ways in which the Dionysian understanding of hierarchy is received and mediated by the aforementioned later Byzantine theologians. While detecting a thoroughgoing overall coherence in their accounts, Purpura is alive to the differences of emphasis and approach in each. Many useful points are made in the course of this analysis, for instance, on possible practical implications and on the social and co-operative aspects of hierarchy—Byzantine hierarchy is not just a matter of top-down control but a liberating concept that, at least in theory, embraces all participants in an ongoing dynamic of love and service.

Purpura also engages in some interaction with modern power theorists: Marx, Foucault, Arendt, and Butler. While necessarily acknowledging the yawning gulf that separates these discourses from those of the Byzantines, she has evidently found these thinkers illuminating in her approach to the base material—for instance, regarding the social dimension of the so-called “performance” of hierarchy. More importantly to my mind, such thinkers serve as a foil for the articulation of a fundamentally different notion of power: one in which the giving up of power is the most powerful act of all. Power in the Church is, or at least should be, very much in the nature of an inverted pyramid: those above exist to serve those below. Purpura has done a great job in illustrating just such a paradigm.

There is, it is fair to say, an avowed sub-text to much of this work. Purpura is clearly interested in what Byzantine notions of power and hierarchy might contribute to our own context, for instance, in terms of...