All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic

Valentina Izmirlieva. All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ix, 224 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, cloth.In All the Names of the Lord V. Izmirlieva describes lists of divine names as the meeting place of two opposite textual traditions in the Christian world, high and low, theological and popular-magical. Part 1 shows that Dionysius the Areopagite's treatise On the Divine Names provided theological legitimacy and a model for the widespread Christian practice of listing the God-names. Part 2 concerns a tradition of listing the seventy-two divine names in amuletic texts on the margins of official Christianity.The product of the ancient duodecimal universe, the number 72 has the status of a round number signifying totality. Lists of seventy-two names presupposed a symmetrical order based on mythological thinking, homologies, and a balance in nature and the cosmos. They were oriented on the present, symbolized healing, and came to be used as magical amulets to fulfill the need for personal security and well-being. By contrast, Dionysius' s list derived meaning from sophisticated scriptural exegesis showing them to be keys to the mystical import of all biblical terms. This exegesis transformed the names into coextensive terms, reflections of a higher Oneness. The names functioned as ladders upward to the unitive experience of mystical silence beyond the self. They were open-ended, oriented on the future, and presupposed an asymmetrical cosmos. In Izmirlieva's view, they served the logic of "desire." Their impact thus depended on the existence of an educated, elite readership.Izmirlieva traces the way Dionysius' s difficult, provincial text and the marginal corpora of 72-fold lists each acquire "symbolic capital" over time and enter the mainstream of Christian culture. The meeting point of these separate histories occurs in an early 1 6thcentury printed Cyrillic miscellany for travelers. There the amulet texts act as a kind of 'Trojan horse" for initiating elite traditions of naming and Christian edification into the popular cultural mainstream. This edition combines magic with the new values of religious enlightenment. Oriented on the individual buyer (typically the travelers between Western Europe and the Balkans), it is the "site of significant shifts in Slavic cultural history" (p. 149) away from the Middle Ages to modernity.The author provides an epilogue in which she brings to light a post-modern paradigm of "desire" and "need" as a framework for explaining the complementary relationship between the two kinds of list. Izmirlieva notes that, "desire is inscribed in the need model as its ideal horizon" (p. 158). She implies that Dionysius's mystical names, oriented on "desire," and magical lists that address "need" are part of one Christian worldview reflected in the Venice miscellany. …