Modern Orthodox Theology

Behold, I Make All Things New

Paul Ladouceur

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567664822
• eBook ISBN: 9780567664846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Modern Orthodox theology represents a continuity of the Eastern Christian theological tradition stretching back to the early Church and especially to the Ancient Fathers of the Church. This volume considers the full range of modern Orthodox theology. The first chapters of the book offer a chronological study of the development of modern Orthodox theology, beginning with a survey of Orthodox theology from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the early 19th century. Ladouceur then focuses on theology in imperial Russia, the Russian religious renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, and the origins and nature of neopatristic theology, as well as the new theology in Greece and Romania, and tradition and the restoration of patristic thought. Subsequent chapters examine specific major themes: - God and Creation
- Divine-humanity, personhood and human rights
- The Church of Christ
- Ecumenical theology and religious diversity
- The 'Christification' of life
- Social and Political Theology
- The 'Name-of-God' conflict
- The ordination of women The volume concludes with assessments of major approaches of modern Orthodox theology and reflections on the current status and future of Orthodox theology. Designed for classroom use, the book features:
- case studies
- a detailed index
- a list of recommended readings for each chapter

1

Prolegomena to Modern Orthodox Theology

Chapter Outline

Overview of Orthodox theology to the fall of Constantinople

Overview of Orthodox theology to the fall of Constantinople¹

The central issue of Christian theology is the reply to Jesus’ question to the apostles: ‘Who do you say I am?’ (Mt. 16.15). The answer to Jesus’ question determines the central Christian dogmas, those of Christ and the Trinity. From its very beginnings, Christianity encountered the highly developed culture of Hellenism, the dominant intellectual and cultural feature of the Roman Empire, derived basically from ancient Greek culture and thought, especially philosophy. This encounter is present in the New Testament, for example, in Pilate’s response to Jesus in the form of a philosophical question: ‘What is truth?’ (Jn 18.38). Jesus does not answer Pilate, but he had answered the question experientially in his exchange with Thomas at the Last Supper: ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life’ (Jn 14.6). Truth in Christianity is not a coherent series of abstract axioms, but a Person. We also see the tension in the Christian encounter with Greek thought in St Paul’s famous contrast between the ‘wisdom of this world’ and the ‘wisdom of God’ manifested in the ‘foolishness’ of the Cross, Christ crucified as ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1.18-25). The flip side of the coin is Paul’s preaching to the Athenians in the Acts – clearly Paul is addressing an educated audience and his message is formulated accordingly, in more abstract and philosophical terms than his preaching to other audiences (Acts 17.22-33).

The encounter of the two messages concerning human existence, that of the Gospel, founded on divine revelation culminating in Jesus Christ, and that of Hellenistic philosophy, based on human reasoning, lies at the origin of Christian theology. The central concern of the early Fathers of the Church was first and foremost and indeed always to expound and to defend Christ’s teaching as conveyed by the apostles (kerygma) and the experience of the church. Since some Christians put forward teachings inconsistent with those of the apostles and the experience of the church, it became necessary to elaborate more precisely the full significance of Jesus’ teachings, using a language intelligible to the educated classes of antiquity. The earliest theological writings were those of apologists such as St Justin Martyr and St Irenaeus of Lyons (mid- to late second century). Their writings were aimed at defending the faith both against non-Christian, pagan thinkers and against early forms of deviations from the mainstream of Christian thought, especially Manichaeism and the Gnosticism, dualistic philosophies which emphasized the struggle between good and evil, darkness and light, conceived broadly as the spiritual and the material realms.

The intellectual centre of the Roman Empire in these centuries was Alexandria, not Rome. The leading early Christian thinkers of Alexandria were Clement and Origen (late second to mid-third centuries). The other main centre of Christian thought was in Latin North Africa. The earliest Christian Latin writers were all from North Africa: St Cyprian of Carthage, Tertullian and St Augustine of Hippo. The fourth century was perhaps the greatest century of Christian theology, dominated by the necessity to express correctly Christ’s relationship with God and consequently that of the Holy Spirit. The fourth century is sometimes, not entirely accurately, called the ‘Trinitarian century’, because theological debates focused on the Trinity. The denial of Christ’s divinity by the Alexandrian priest Arius and his followers triggered the development of theological language, borrowing and adapting terms familiar in Greek philosophy, to express what Christians believed concerning God and Christ. The basic Christian dogma of the Trinity was proclaimed at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea in 325 and subsequently expanded at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381. The Nicene-Constantinoplean Creed was thus finalized by the end of the fourth century, with the central idea that Christ and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father: three Persons in one God. The theological giants of this period were three Cappadocians, St Basil the Great, St Gregory Nazianzus and St Gregory of Nyssa, together with St Athanasius of Alexandria and St John Chrysostom.

The Trinitarian dogma was a partial answer to Jesus’ question ‘Who do you say I am?’ While most Christians accepted that Christ was God, this left open the question of how Christ could be divine and human at the same time. The fifth century is sometimes referred to as the ‘Christological century’, because theology focused on Christ’s divinity and humanity. The basic elements of Christology were put in place at the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431 and further refined at the Fourth Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon in 451. Chalcedonian Christology hinges on the distinction between nature and person: Christ has two natures (physeis or ousia), divine and human, in one Person (hypostasis), the Logos, the Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity. The leading theological figure of this period was St Cyril of Alexandria.

But linguistic, cultural, social and personal factors resulted in a major split in the Christian community in the fifth century, between those who accepted Chalcedonian Christology, overwhelmingly Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians, and those who refused it, mainly non-Greeks, Semitic Christians, Copts, Syrians and Armenians. The Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 and the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680 dealt with challenges to the Chalcedonian dogma, as emperors and patriarchs sought to elaborate Christological definitions which would bring together the Byzantine Empire, deeply divided between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians. These Councils basically re-affirmed the Chalcedonian dogma, while rejecting attempts to modify it by saying that Christ has only one will (monothelitism) or one energy (monoenergism). The principal theologians of these centuries were St John of Damascus and St Maximus the Confessor.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 dealt with the veneration of icons, in the face of the iconoclastic movement, which sought to deny the appropriateness of representations of Christ, thus challenging, in the eyes of the defenders of icons, the reality of the Incarnation, the human nature of Christ. This issue dragged on after the Seventh Ecumenical Council and was only definitively resolved in 842, with the final restoration of icons.

The last great period of Byzantine theology was during the fourteenth century, dominated by St Gregory Palamas. The fourteenth-century quarrel over hesychasm revolved around the possibility of knowing and experiencing God. This quarrel pitted the monks of Mount Athos, led by Palamas, against rationalist or scholastic theologians, some educated in Western Europe, who argued that it was impossible for humans to know or experience God because God is unknowable in his essence, and that therefore experience of God could only be indirect, or mediated by created substances or grace. The principal dogmatic outcome of the quarrel was a clarification of the ancient distinction between God’s essence or nature and his energies. The divine essence is indeed beyond comprehension by all creatures, while God acts and makes himself known in creation by his divine energies. The divine energies are also God, not a created intermediary between God and creation, including humans. Local councils in Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 confirmed the essence-energies distinction and that created beings participate in God through God’s energies, while the divine essence remains unknowable. This is the basis of the Orthodox understanding of the doctrine of theosis (deification or divinization).

By the time of Gregory Palamas, the Byzantine Empire was already considerably weakened, as a result of Latin domination during the half-century after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade and the installation of a Latin imperial regime, and of the steady inroads into Byzantine territory by Islamic Arabs and Turks. Syria and Palestine passed to Arab rule between 634 and 641, Egypt between 639 and 641 and North Africa between 670 and 708. The Turks steadily expanded their territory from Persia through Asia Minor at the expense of the Byzantines over a period of centuries, reaching the Sea of Marmara on the doorsteps of Constantinople in 1308 and Trace in 1321. Greece and most of the rest of Balkans fell to the Turks in subsequent decades. By the early fifteenth century, little remained of the Byzantine Empire other than Constantinople itself and few pockets of territory here and there in Greece and the Mediterranean islands. The Byzantine Empire was on its knees. Even the last-minute attempt to rally assistance from the Latin West following a negotiated union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 failed, as the Orthodox repudiated the terms of union with the Catholic Church, and no help from the West was forthcoming. Constantinople fell to the Turks on 29 May 1453. The Turks subsequently continued to expand their rule to include the Orthodox lands of present-day Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia and Romania.

Although the Russian Slavophiles of the mid-nineteenth century mark the true beginning of modern Orthodox theology, their thinking must be seen in the light of Orthodox theology in the preceding centuries. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 ushered in an entirely new era in Orthodoxy and it is at this point that we begin our study of modern Orthodox theology.

Note

1 For general references to the history of Eastern Christian theology to the fourteenth century, see the Selected Bibliography for this chapter.

Part I

Modern Orthodox Thought in Historical Perspective

2

Theological Encounters with the West: Orthodox Theology from the Fifteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century

Chapter Outline

The Council of Ferrara-Florence and the fall of Constantinople

The Orthodox-Lutheran dialogue (1573–81)

Orthodoxy and the Counter-Reformation

The Orthodox confessions of the seventeenth century

The Confession of Metrophanes Critopoulos (1625)

The Confession of Cyril Lucaris (1629)

The Confession of Peter Mogila (1638–42)

The Confession of Dositheus of Jerusalem (1672)

The Russian theological academies (1635–1798)

Correspondence with the English Non-Jurors (1716–25)

The Encyclical of the Oriental Patriarchs of 1848

Conclusion

The Council of Ferrara-Florence and the fall of Constantinople

The fourteenth century marked the last great period of Orthodox theology until modern times. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, much of the Orthodox world, with the exception of Russia, then still emerging from a century and a half of Mongol domination, was under Muslim rule and the Orthodox Church and faithful were hard pressed to survive under rulers who tolerated the presence of non-Muslims in their lands, but with severe restrictions, pressure to convert to Islam and not infrequent persecution. In these circumstances, theology was relegated to a secondary role in Orthodox communities and energies were devoted to ensuring the survival of the faith in a generally hostile environment.

Much of Orthodox theology from the fourteenth century onwards was stimulated by Western initiatives or influences. Even St Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) elaborated his theology of the divine energies in reaction to challenges from Renaissance humanism, influential in Constantinople at the time, and represented especially by the Calabrian monk Barlaam. Barlaam challenged the validity of the experience of divine light asserted by the hesychasts of Mount Athos by expounding a doctrine to the effect that it is not possible for humans to have a direct experience of God, since God is utterly transcendent in his nature to creation, including humanity. This led Palamas to draw on and to develop the ancient patristic distinction between the divine essence, which remains unknowable by creatures, and the divine energies, by which God makes himself known in creation and in which humans are called to participate. Palamas exposed his theology primarily in a series of writings called the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts. ¹ He also played the lead role in the preparation of the ‘Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defence of Those who Devoutly Practise a Life of Stillness’, also called the Hagioretic Tome, a statement supporting Palamas’s theology issued in 1341 by the superiors and principal monks of the monasteries of Mount Athos.² The Palamite theology of the divine energies was approved in several councils of the Church of Constantinople between 1341 and 1351, which condemned Palamas’s opponents as heretics.³ Palamas also wrote a short Confession of the Orthodox Faith, an expanded version of the Nicene Creed which emphasizes relations among the Persons of the Holy Trinity, especially the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, and the major doctrinal pronouncements of the seven ecumenical councils, while rejecting the teachings of Barlaam.⁴

The other major Orthodox writer of the period was St Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1319/1323–92), a lay disciple of Gregory Palamas. Cabasilas was an important figure in late fourteenth-century Byzantine politics, but he is known primarily for his religious writings. His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy can be considered as initiating liturgical theology, and his work The Life in Christ, a spiritual treatise based on the principal sacraments as the means of sanctification, is a classic of Orthodox spirituality.⁵ Among his other writings are a number of sermons and several philosophical, legal and political texts.

Fifteenth-century Orthodox theology was marked by a major event, the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–9), ⁶ held as a last-minute attempt by the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (reigned 1425–48) to rally the support of the West against the inexorable advance of the Turks. By then the Turks already controlled much of what had been the Byzantine Empire, including all of Asia Minor; for all practical purposes, by the late 1430s, only the city of Constantinople itself remained in Greek hands. The motivation for the council was thus largel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• 1 Prolegomena to Modern Orthodox Theology
• Part I Modern Orthodox Thought in Historical Perspective
• Part II Themes and Conflicts in Modern Orthodox Theology
• Part III Assessments and Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Recommended Readings
• Index
• Copyright