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C O M M U
This was the rather surprising title of Erik
Peterson’s article in the review Communio that was
discussed when the Communio Circle met on
Thursday, 19th December, 2002. The presentation was
made by Mr. Riad Mufarraj with remarkable insight
into Patristic theology.
Erik Peterson (1890-1960) is now realised as having
been an unfairly neglected Christian thinker,
although his retiring nature may be considered as
largely to blame. He was brought up by an agnostic
father and a severely Calvinist mother. From 1910
onwards he followed theology courses in a number
of German universities and qualified as a lecturer in
1920, after specialising in classical and Christian epigraphy.
After contact with such leading Protestant
theologians as Harnack, Karl Barth and Rudolph
Bultmann, he finally moved away from both liberal
and dialectical theology towards Catholic notions of
revelation, faith and Church. Despite attempts by
such eminent friends as Jacques Maritain to help him,
Theology of Dress
A welcome to
Communio
from Dr. Edward Alam.
he refused academic positions in the Catholic world,
except one at the Pontifical Institute of Christian
Archaeology, and lived a lonely and penurious life. A
number of his theological and historical essays were
published before he died in his birthplace, Hamburg,
leaving a wife and five children.
In the essay now published in English in Communio,
he insisted that man’s dress was not, as is popularly
supposed, a moral problem at all, but rather a metaphysical
and theological one. He noted that those
who advocated a cult of nudity did so out of conscious
opposition to the Church on an ideological
basis. This, incidentally, was confirmed by Dr.
Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous (NDU) out of his own
experience in German-speaking Europe. The author
pointed out that the biblical account in Genesis refers
to nakedness only after the Fall. The previous lack of
clothing was not nakedness; nakedness supposes
lack of clothing but is not identical with it (it should
hardly be necessary to point out that the popular
belief that Adam’s sin was a sexual one is utterly erro-
12 NNU SPIRIT