Fr. Porphyrios, aka James S. Taylor (d. April 16, A.D. 2020)
1. Essays & Reflections: In Memoriam
I recently learned of the death of an Eighth Day friend: Fr. Porphyrios. Dr. James Stephen Taylor, as we knew him when he joined us for the 2015 Eighth Day Symposium before he became a monk at
Holy Archangel Michael and All Angels Skete, passed away on April 16 in the year of our Lord 2020. Here is a brief bio, as posted on the “instructors” page of
St Raphael School:
Fr. Porphyrios (Dr. James Stephen Taylor) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised in Columbia, Missouri, where he attended the public schools and the University of Missouri. He received his bachelor’s degree in humanities and his master’s degree in English from Southern Illinois University. The University of Kansas, Lawrence, was the setting for his doctorate in philosophy of education, and was where he attended courses in the famous integrated humanities program with professors John Senior and Dennis Quinn. At KU he taught freshmen and sophomore English and literature as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy of education. Upon graduation, Taylor taught in middle and high schools, parochial schools, and preparatory academies, including St. Mary’s Academy (Kansas), Wichita Collegiate School, and Topeka Collegiate School. For 5 years he was assistant, then associate, professor of the education department at Hillsdale College, Michigan. For 2 of those years he served as department chair. He held regular classes using the Good and Great Books as part of the teacher preparation program. His last collegiate position was at the University of Tulsa, also in the department of education, where his specialties were philosophy of education in the graduate school, and children’s literature classes for future elementary and middle school teachers. Dr. Taylor is also the author of Poetic Knowledge, a book often used and cited in the renewal of classical Christian education.
Dr. Taylor’s father, a newspaperman and writer for the Associated Press, became editor of the Missouri Alumnus magazine and a popular speaker. Taylor’s mother was a fourth-grade teacher and librarian for Columbia public schools. James Taylor was raised in the Methodist church. His journey to Orthodoxy may have well begun there while, during a lengthy sermon, he gazed at the engraving on the wooden pulpit: “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” He was pleasantly surprised years later to learn that John Wesley, founder of Methodism, was an Anglican minister deeply read in the fathers of the Church. Later, he began a tour through the various expressions of Roman Catholicism, particularly traditional Benedictine monasticism, then spent several years with a Byzantine Rite, and finally arriving, somewhat broken but not beyond repair, at peace in the Orthodox Church.
After a five year odyssey, Taylor has now been tonsured monk as Fr. Porphyrios, and resides in a monastery in northwest Missouri.
2. Essays & Reflections (and Interviews): L’homme Nouveau Interview with James S. Taylor
In a 2006 interview, Dr. Taylor was asked to define “the poetic mode.” Here’s how he responded:
First, we need to clarify that here we are speaking of the poetic mode of knowledge, for there is also the poetic mode of education with which my book is closely aligned. Second, it must be remembered that poetic knowledge does not necessarily mean knowledge of this or that poem or require a particular literary education, though such knowledge certainly cultivates the innate mode of the Musical man. The poetic mode of knowledge is a natural, spontaneous way of knowing reality and of experiencing it directly or vicariously as via the memory and imagination. It is a real mode of knowledge dramatized by Homer, considered essential by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and cited by St. Thomas Aquinas in a commentary on the Sentences, as poetica scientia. It is distinct, but not separate, from three other modes of knowledge identified in the history Western philosophy as the metaphysical, the scientific, and the rhetorical. These distinctions were first brought to my attention in their hierarchical considerations by the late American classics professor, my dear friend and teacher, John Senior who also brought so many good American students to your venerable monastery at Fontgombault.
3. Essays & Reflections: “What Is Poetic Knowledge”
In his essay-length review of Taylor’s book Poetic Knowledge, Kirk Kramer provides another explanation of poetic knowledge given by Taylor:
Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is nonanalytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awe-full), spontaneous, mysterious… Poetic knowledge is a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning… It is, we might say, knowledge from the inside out, radically different from a knowledge about things. In other words, it is the opposite of scientific knowledge.
He goes on to describe the book as
a work of philosophy worthy of a Gilson or a Maritain or a Francis Kovach or one of the other great thinkers of the scholastic revival. The author’s elucidation of the distinction between subjectivism and subjectivity is brilliant (and incidentally of great value, at least to this reviewer, for understanding the philosophical personalism of Pope John Paul). Dr. Taylor has made an exhaustive study both of what poetic knowledge is, using the methods and vocabulary of scholastic philosophy, and of its history from ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages, down to its deformation since the time of Descartes in the seventeenth century.
4. Books: Poetic Knowledge
by James S. Taylor
5. Poetry: “The Solitary Reaper” by William Wordsworth
The final four lines to this poem are the epigraph to the final chapter in Taylor’s book Poetic Knowledge
(“The Future of the Poetic Mode of Knowledge in Education”):
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
6. Bible:
Acts 12:1-11, Jn. 15:17-27 and 16:1-2.
Online here.
7. Liturgy: Feast of St George the Great Martyr
From the Life of St. George:
Diocletian: Who has stirred you up to such boldness and talkativeness?
St George: Truth
Magnentius: What is truth?
St George: The truth is Christ Himself, persecuted by you.
Magnentius: Then you are a Christian?
St George: I am a slave of Christ, my God, and trusting in Him, of my own will I have appeared among you to bear witness to the truth
And a couple of hymns to St. George:
Apolytikion: Liberator of captives, defender of the poor, physician of the sick, and champion of kings, O trophy-bearer, Great Martyr George, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved.
Kontakion: Cultivated by God, you became manifest as an honorable tiller gathering for yourself the sheaves of virtue. For you sowed with tears but reaped with gladness; in the contest you competed with your blood and came away with Christ. By your intercessions, O Holy One, all are granted forgiveness of sins.
8. Word from the Fathers: Newman on Monasticism and Poetics
In his study of “The Mission of St. Benedict,” St. John Henry Newman describes the monastic life as “the most poetical of religious discipline.” According to Newman,
the object, and life, and reward of the ancient monachism was “summa quies”—the absence of all excitement, sensible and intellectual, and the vision of Eternity. And therefore have I called the monastic state the most poetical of religious disciplines. It was a return to that primitive age of the world, of which poets have so often sung, the simple life of Arcadia or the reign of Saturn, when fraud and violence were unknown.
Later, after offering a definition poetry, he argues that the poetical
demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one.
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