Light From the East Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology This page intentionally left blank Aidan Nichols, O.P. Light From the East Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology Sheed & Ward London Copyright © 1995 by Aidan Nichols. First published 1995, this edition 1999. ISBN 0 7220 5081 3. All rights reserved. Typeset by Waveney Typesetters, Norwich. Printed and bound in Great Britain for Sheed & Ward Ltd, 14 Coopers Row, London EC3N 2BH by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn. Contents Page PREFACE Vi I Introduction i II Vladimir Lossky and Apophaticism 21 III John Meyendorff and neo-Palamism 41 IV Sergei Bulgakov and Sophiology 57 V John Romanides and neo-Photianism 74 VI Panagiotis Trembelas and Orthodox Christology 91 VII Nikolai Afanas'ev and Ecclesiology 114 VIII George Florovsky and the Idea of Tradition 129 IX Alexander Schmemann and Liturgical Theology 146 X Panagiotis Nellas and Anthropology 170 XI Christos Yannaras and Theological Ethics 181 XII Paul Evdokimov and Eschatology 194 CONCLUSION 205 NOTES 2O6 FURTHER READING 229 INDEX 231 Preface I have been greatly helped in my own Christian life, and reflection on that life, by the treasures to be found in the dogmatic theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church during the last hundred years. It is in the hope of sharing those treasures more widely that I have written this book. Its title translates Abbot William of St Thierry's phrase orientate lumen as found in his Golden Epistle: its wider bearings are charted in P. McNulty and B. Hamilton, Orientale lumen et magistra latinitas: Greek Influences on Western Monasndsm, 900-1100 (Chevetogne 1963). The cover image is from a fresco of the Transfiguration of Christ (a favoured theme of modern Orthodox iconography and writing) in the Refectory of the Pontifical Russian College, Rome, to whom grateful acknowledgment is here made. Blackfriars, Cambridge Feast of St Catherine of Siena, 1994. I Introduction My hope is that this book will achieve two things. In the first place, it will identify a variety of dogmatic issues, problems or ideas, raised or discussed by Eastern Orthodox theologians but of equal importance to Catholic theology as well. In other words, we shall be encountering dogmatic themes and ideas which either can be integrated into Catholic theology - to be, so to speak, 'repatriated' in the Catholic tradition, which is their proper home, or which, conversely, may stimulate from the Catholic side a critical response — a critical response that itself may help Catholic dogmatics to discover its own mind on various issues. In this sense, I am writing as a dogmatic theologian committed to the Catholic Church. But in the second place, the aim of this book is to discover, through looking at the work of modern Orthodox dogmaticians, the character of the Eastern Orthodox tradition itself. And in this sense, as written by a Roman Catholic, this study is, rather, a contribution to ecumenics, the understanding, by a member of one confession, of the tradition of another. In principle, an introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy might take any one of a number of forms. For instance, it could be an introduction to the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It might be argued that the present state of a community can only be explained by its past. To understand the Orthodox Church is to understand how it has become what it is. The religious awareness of the Orthodox is, certainly, very largely a matter of memory. In reading the New Testament, in reciting the Creed, they remember the story of their Church, the apostolic and 2 Light From the East patristic Church, the Church which never ceased to speak of Jesus Christ in the Greek language used by the Gospels them- selves. In this way, Church history can be a privileged means of access to the inner truth of a Christian confession. As for an individual so for a Church, your history makes you what you are. An example of an introduction of this kind would be the late Alexander Schmemann's The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy1 - a book conceived precisely as an introduction to the Orthodox Church for the general reader, as its preface tells us. This approach has definite strengths, some of which I have indicated; but it also has serious weaknesses. The Church historian is not in a good position to comment on the specifically theological dimension of a Church - the distinctive ideas or principles which govern its way of looking at the Christian faith. At best, the historian of doctrine may chronicle for us how and when specially Eastern Orthodox emphases in Christian thought came forward. But he is not well placed to evaluate their lasting significance. This, as he recognises, is the proper task of the theologian. Let us turn then to a second possibility. This would be to concentrate on the lived experience of the Orthodox Church today as a believing community. The Orthodox Church as it appears on the ground, in its parishes, monasteries, dioceses. Here the aim would be to abstract both from history and from theology, and to concentrate instead on the human reality of the Church, in a quasi-sociological perspective. This is the approach found in Mario Rinvolucri's study, Anatomy of a C/iurc/i.2 Rinvo- lucri concentrates on the Church of Greece, but looks at it, in effect, as the classic example of Orthodoxy as a whole. The strength of this approach is the fact that it is highly concrete. It gives us a very good impression of what it feels like to live within the organisational and liturgical framework of the Ortho- dox Church. But can a Christian tradition be described without doing justice to the doctrinal vision that tradition has produced? To understand Orthodoxy we need to understand its dogmatic structure as that is reflected in the writings of its theologians. Introduction 3 A third possibility might be an amalgam of the approaches I have suggested so far. This would be a combination of the historical approach, as in Schmemann, with the sociological approach as in Rinvolucri, spiced with a dash of the theological approach, which is the perspective from which I have been criticising these two authors. An example of such an amalgam approach would be Timothy Ware's best-seller The Orthodox Church^ or John Meyendorff s book, with the same title, published in translation at London the year before.4 With Ware, now Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, we have a bit of everything and therefore, perhaps, the best of all possible worlds. His book is divided into two sections - an historical first half, and a second half consisting of a summary of present day Orthodox teaching along with thumb-nail sketches of the various local churches which make up the Orthodox family of communion. Since this is clearly the fullest approach, surely it is also the most satisfactory? Probably it is. Nevertheless, I am not going to adopt it here. For one thing, if I did so, I would be in danger of simply reproducing Bishop Kallistos Ware's book. Certainly, I could not write a better one. For another thing, I would have to repeat too much of the material already offered in my earlier book, Rome and the Eastern Churches.5 And thirdly, the approach I am propos- ing has the merit of being somewhat original in the sense, at least, that so far as I am aware, no alternative book (in English) is available which adopts it in a systematic way.6 The approach found here, then, is to concentrate on contem- porary Eastern Orthodox theology, arranged in terms of major individual figures and the great themes with which they have been especially associated, and seen as a reflection of the distinctive mind of the Orthodox Church today. In this, I cannot altogether rule out references to Church history since Orthodoxy is a deeply traditional Church, for which continuity with tradition is supremely important. Nor can I rule out what might broadly be called sociological references, references to the way theological ideas are put into practice or not, in the Orthodox Church today.