In Memoriam - Fr. Porphryios, aka James S. Taylor
by Erin Doom
Feast of St George the Great Martyr; Bright Thursday
Anno Domini 2020, April 23
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.
*If you’d like to receive the Daily Synaxis in your inbox each Mon-Fri, you can subscribe here.
**All books (and icons) in print available from Eighth Day Books.
Please support an independent bookstore that believes in the eighth day resurrection of our God and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Give them a call at 1.800.841.2541 or visit their website here. And don’t forget Eighth Day Members (Patrons+) receive 10% discount, plus many other perks! Learn more and become a member here.
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
