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ABOUT THE BOOK
The late modern world teaches us, in various and sundry ways, a highly reductionist account of what it means to know someone or something—including, especially, what it means to know God. With a metaphysic stripped of any real connection to a transcendent source of being, we cannot help but imbibe a truncated form of knowledge and learning.
By mining the depths of patristic mystagogy—instruction in the rites of initiation (usually right after baptism)—Hanna Lucas brings to light a rich pedagogical tapestry that can show us a better way forward. Through patient and careful engagement with writings of Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, Lucas shows how patristic mystagogy grounds a theological epistemology that sees knowledge as part of the “capacitation” of our nature for heavenly mysteries and union with God. The patristic catechists teach us how even the mundane aspects of knowledge, including the rudiments of matter and sensation, fit into a larger divine gift of capacitation.
The result is a holistic and integrated theory of knowledge that envisions one all-encompassing divine pedagogy that orients toward union with God. This union is experienced fully in the eschaton, but it breaks into time through the sacraments of the church, and it echoes down through the ordinary modes of knowing we encounter in daily life. Mundane knowledge beckons the knower to become capable of a sublime intelligence: to become capable of union with the divine. This integrative, unitive, and eschatologically oriented vision of knowledge stands in stark contrast to modern and postmodern epistemologies. Sensing the Sacred positions mystagogy as a timely remedy for the “incapacitations” that modernity offers us.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“Deeply rooted in patristic mystagogy, Hanna Lucas constructs a theology of learning that guides our faculties to receive God. Sensing the Sacred wisely counsels a return to an approach that integrates all learning—sensible, rational, and spiritual—into a unified process of capacitation for union with God. Teachers in every discipline, therefore, do well to heed Lucas’s salutary appeal for a return to mystery.”
—Hans Boersma, chair in ascetical theology, Nashotah House Theological Seminary
“I have sitting before me the classic beauty on love and learning by Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. This bounty of a book by Hanna Lucas, Sensing the Sacred, walks Leclercq to yet deeper and fuller places, a vision of the mystagogical tradition at the core of salvation knowledge. Lucas has made deep dives and recovered many a priceless pearl—do read and inwardly digest soul nourishment of the highest level.”
—Ron Dart, associate professor of political science, University of the Fraser Valley
“Hanna Lucas combines deep engagement with Latin, Greek, and Syriac mystagogical texts with a broad, enthusiastic, and constructive theological vision. What she develops in this volume is both a rich retrieval and a bold development of a theology of learning.”
—Karen Kilby, professor of Catholic theology, University of Durham
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Hanna J. Lucas (PhD, Durham University) is a teaching fellow at Durham University and at College of the Resurrection in Mirfield UK and a Research Fellow with the Catechesis Institute. She holds a PhD in patristics and systematic theology from Durham University and an MA in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University. Hanna’s research concerns mystagogical catechesis in the fourth century and the theological approaches to ontology and epistemology that can be gleaned from these early sacramental and liturgical texts. Her theological interests orient around the retrieval of patristic sources both as a challenge to certain elements within the common wisdom of modern theology and philosophy and as a reinvigoration of orthodox Christian thought within the church and the academy. She has an article on Theodore of Mopsuestia published in Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia and has also written for the Martin Institute and the Young Anglican Theology Project. She serves as an editor of Koinonia, the journal of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association which seeks to promote mutual dialogue and understanding between the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Originally from Canada, Hanna now lives with her husband and four children in Darlington, UK, where her husband serves as a priest in the Church of England.
Ephraim Radner (PhD, Yale University) is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. He is the author and editor of several books on the theology of the church, biblical interpretation, and the Holy Spirit, most recently, A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and its Anti-Modern Redemption (Baylor University Press, 2019; A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life (Baylor University Press, 2016); Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2016); A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Baylor University Press, 2012); and The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Eerdmans, 1998), among many others. A volume on Christian politics, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty (Baker Academic), will appear in March of 2024. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook on Jewish Christianity and Messianic Judaism. A former church worker in Burundi and an Anglican priest, he has served parishes in various parts of the United States and has been active in the affairs of the global Anglican Communion. He is married to the Rev. Annette Brownlee, Wycliffe College’s Chaplain, and they have two children.
Simon Oliver (PhD, Cambridge University) is the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University. Focusing primarily on Christian theology and metaphysics, particularly the doctrine of creation, he is the author of Philosophy, God and Motion (Routledge, 2005 & 2013), Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), and he co-edited with John Milbank, The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (Routledge, 2009). A term project, entitled Creation’s Ends: Teleology, Ethics and the Natural, addresses the question of teleology in relation to its place in the history of ideas, the nature of metaphysical and scientific explanation, and its theological presuppositions and implications in the doctrine of creation. Professor Oliver is also an Anglican priest and residentiary Canon of Durham Cathedral; from 2009 to 2020 he sat on the Anglican Communion’s faith and order commission (the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order) and he currently serves on the Academic Board of the Lambeth Research Degrees in Theology, and the Research Degrees Panel of the Church of England's Ministry Division.