Being With God

Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion

Aristotle Papanikolaou

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Jahr: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780268161446
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Christian Denominations

The central task of Being With God is an analysis of the relation between apophaticism, trinitarian theology, and divine-human communion through a critical comparison of the trinitarian theologies of the Eastern Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Zizioulas (1931– ), arguably two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century. These two theologians identify as the heart and center of all theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion, which is often understood in terms of the familiar Orthodox concept of theosis, or divinization. The Incarnation, according to Lossky and Zizioulas, is the event of a real divine-human communion that is made accessible to all; God has become human so that all may participate fully in the divine life.

Aristotle Papanikolaou shows how an ontology of divine-human communion is at the center of both Lossky's and Zizioulas's theological projects. He also shows how, for both theologians, this core belief is used as a self-identifying marker against "Western" theologies.

Papanikolaou maintains, however, that Lossky and Zizioulas hold profoundly different views on how to conceptualize God as the Trinity. Their key difference is over the use of apophaticism in theology in general and especially the relation of apophaticism to the doctrine of the Trinity. For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse, and the God experienced in the eucharist is not the God beyond being but the immanent life of the trinitarian God.

Papanikolaou provides readers with a richer understanding of contemporary Orthodox theology through his analysis of the consensus and debate between two leading Orthodox theologians.

chapter 1

Ontology and Theological Epistemology

Since the seventeenth century, theology has dealt with, and often obsessed over, the question of epistemology. Challenges by modern thought to traditional Christian notions of revelation and knowledge of God have compelled some Christian theologians to give an account for how a revelation from God or ‘knowledge’ of God, either revelatory or natural, is possible, and whether these concepts are still meaningful. In modern theological discourse, epistemology usually precedes ontology and usually determines whether so-called ontological questions are relevant.

For Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, however, the reverse is the case; an ontology of divine-human communion is the basis for their understandings of theological epistemology. Both also agree that real knowledge of God is experiential. This shared starting point, however, leads to two, somewhat mutually incompatible, theological epistemologies. In turn, their theological epistemologies shape the content of their theologies and, hence, the form of their theological ontologies.

It should come as no surprise to the theologically literate that as Eastern Orthodox theologians Lossky and Zizioulas share a methodological commitment to thinking within a particular tradition, which means to draw on the patristic writings of the tradition. Both theologians locate themselves within the movement in contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy which called for theology to return to the fathers of the church, or what Georges Florovsky coined as a “neo-patristic synthesis.”¹ Lossky and Florovsky together can be considered founders of this movement, while Zizioulas considers himself a student of Florovsky. The return to the fathers parallels the movement named ressourcement, which occurred within Roman Catholic theology of this century, associated with such notable twentieth-century Catholic theologians as Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

The motivation for the return to the fathers was, in part, a reaction to existing trends within contemporary Orthodox theology. Lossky was reacting to Russian religious philosophy, best represented in the person of Sergius Bulgakov.² Russian religious philosophy, according to Lossky, was simply the Eastern Orthodox version of the intellectualization of theology that he thought was characteristic of Thomistic theology. The same could be said of Zizioulas’s problems with his Greek predecessors and his ecumenical colleagues. As he sees it, “the German Protestant and Roman Catholic Universities of the last century acted as the pattern and the prototype in the establishment of the theological Faculties in the Universities of Athens and Salonica in Greece.”³ The structure of dogmatic manuals, such as those of Christos Androutsos and Panagiotes Trembelas, indicates the “Scholastic Captivity” of Orthodox theology in the early part of the century in which the content of Orthodox thought was determined by a “scholastic methodology.”⁴ For our purposes, Zizioulas’s rejection of the theological content of these early manuals is not as important as his claim that a particular way of doing theology determines the content of theology. The problem with both Russian religious philosophy and the Greek Orthodox manuals of the twentieth century is that they give priority to reason over experience in theological epistemology. Such a priority for Zizioulas is inconsistent with the Eastern patristic approach to theology and is the source of substantial theological differences between Eastern and Western Christianity.⁵

The return to the Eastern patristic texts authoritative for Eastern Orthodox Christianity reveals that at the core of these texts is the principle of the realism of divine-human communion that theological models in Russian religious philosophy and Western ‘scholasticism’ cannot adequately express. The danger of such models, for both theologians, is that they tend to obfuscate the fact that at the core of theological discourse is this principle of the realism of divine-human communion. Both Lossky and Zizioulas agree, formally, that having such a principle at the center of theology led the Eastern patristic writers of the Orthodox tradition to do and think theology in ways that are mutually exclusive with Russian religious philosophy and Western ‘scholasticm.’

To illustrate that the realism of divine-human communion is at the center of Eastern patristic theology, both Lossky and Zizioulas construct a history of Eastern and Western patristic thought. This history, for both, has two trajectories. The first trajectory is what both interpret as the rationalization or intel-lectualization of theology, with the truth of theology understood in terms of reason. In this trajectory, both Lossky and Zizioulas draw a line from Justin Martyr through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine. This particular movement within the tradition culminates in the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas.⁶

The other trajectory is that which maintains at the center of theology the principle of the realism of divine-human communion. For both theologians, this trajectory begins with Ignatius and runs through Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, and Gregory Palamas. Irenaeus is the one who, according to both theologians, breaks with the Justin-Clement-Origen tradition by linking truth not with nous but with, according to Lossky, “the incorruptibility of eternal life,”⁷ or, according to Zizioulas, the “incorruptibility of being.”⁸

The differences between the two histories of Eastern and Western patristic thought are in terms of emphasis. For Lossky, the emphasis is on Dionysius and Gregory Palamas as the two great synthesizers of theological apophaticism and the essence/energies distinction, both demanded by a theology that attempts to express the realism of divine-human communion in the Incarnation. For Zizioulas, the emphasis is clearly on the Cappadocian fathers and their clarification of a trinitarian, relational ontology of personhood that is grounded in the eucharistic experience of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, an experience that he attempts to trace back to an early Christian eucharistic consciousness.

The core, however, of both their theological systems remains an ontology of divine-human communion and each theologian interprets the implications of this ontology for theological epistemology differently. For Lossky, an ontology of divine-human communion results in a theological epistemology that is apophatic and an understanding of theology as ‘antinomic’ that is rooted in the very being of God, which itself is a being-in-antinomy insofar as God is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. For Zizioulas, divine-human communion is experienced in the eucharistic Body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and, as such, is a communion with the personal being of God. Their shared presupposition of an ontology of divine-human communion does not preclude the development of distinct understandings of the nature and locus of experiential knowledge of God and, more importantly, of the degree to which God is known.

LOSSKY’S APOPHATICISM

Incarnation as Revelation

Revelation is, according to Lossky, the condition for the possibility of knowledge of God. The meaning of revelation, however, is a source of controversy in theology both in terms of its possibility and its content. For Lossky, knowledge of God in terms of revelation means that in order for humans to know God, God must take the initiative. Humans cannot know God unless God allows such knowledge to be possible.⁹

Such knowledge requires that God reveal Godself. This revealing, according to Lossky, may assume many forms, each of which entails an encounter between humans and God. The type of revelation determines the degree of knowledge. For example, creation is a revelation of God in which, among other things, humans learn of God’s goodness. The revelation of God occurs in the incarnate Christ, who makes known God’s trinitarian being and makes possible a deeper knowledge of God through union with God. It is not simply a revelation of God but “the revelation of God the Holy Trinity—the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” that forms “the basis of all Christian theology; it is, indeed, theology itself, in the sense in which that word was understood by the Greek fathers, for whom theology most commonly stood for the mystery of the Trinity revealed to the Church.”¹⁰ This type of revelation, however, would not be possible if it were not for the Incarnation, which, for Lossky, makes “theology possible.”¹¹ The Incarnation reveals God as Trinity as “a primordial fact,”¹² i.e., a word or proclamation about God’s being. The Incarnation, however, is more than revelation as descriptive information about God’s being. It is the event of the giving of God’s very being in creation, of divine-human communion. As such, the Incarnation is the starting point of all theology, but also the telos of all theological discourse. The Incarnation makes possible a theology that does not simply state facts, but expresses a mystery in order to lead one toward a deeper union with God as Trinity.

This understanding of the Incarnation as the event of divine-human communion, as both the starting point and end of all theological discourse, leads necessarily for Lossky to two types of knowledge of God, cataphatic and apophatic. Cataphatic knowledge, in its simplest terms, is positive knowledge of God. An example of cataphatic knowledge is the affirmation “God is good.” Apophatic knowledge is negative knowledge of God; it is knowledge of God in terms of what God is not. For example, God is not a stone. The significance of the two types of knowledge for Lossky are not what they say about God, for even apophatic theology is a kind of saying something about God, but their role as means to what is considered the only real knowledge of God, which is union with God’s very life. One could read Lossky as saying that the only legitimate forms of knowledge in light of the Incarnation are cataphatic and apophatic theologies, since they are the only means to union with God. Since the history of theology has seen a variety of understandings of revelation and knowledge of God in light of the Incarnation, it remains to be seen how Lossky argues for the priority of cataphatic and apophatic theologies and how, in fact, his particular interpretation of the Incarnation as the event of divine-human communion leads necessarily to cataphatic and apophatic theologies as means toward union with God. Lossky’s arguments are interwoven in his retrieval of two important Greek patristic figures, Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palamas.

Cataphatic and Apophatic Theologies

Dionysius the Areopagite has enjoyed somewhat of a revival in recent contemporary theology, due in no small part to recent interest in apophaticism.¹³ Very early in Lossky’s career, however, Dionysius was a prominent figure in Lossky’s work. His first major publications focused on the thought of Dionysius, who remained central to Lossky’s thinking throughout his life.¹⁴ It is unclear why Lossky turned to Dionysius early in his career. What is clear is that from the beginning and throughout his life Lossky was determined to offer an alternative interpretation of Dionysius than the prevailing Thomistic and neo-thomistic interpretations of the time. What is also clear is that Lossky attempted to establish the thought of Dionysius as pivotal to the Greek patristic emphasis on theosis, or divine-human communion, and to the understanding of theosis in terms of the divine energies of God. Evident throughout Lossky’s analysis of Dionysius is his own concern to affirm the centrality of divine-human communion in theological discourse and his understanding of cataphatic and apophatic theologies in light of divine-human communion.

The thought of Dionysius represents for Lossky the clearest and most coherent expression of the insights of the earlier patristic texts with regard to the question of knowledge of God. Lossky is also quick to emphasize that Dionysius’s synthesis is christological and not neo-platonic.¹⁵ Its foundation is not the neo-platonic understanding of the One but the unity of the created and the uncreated in the person of Christ.

Lossky further stresses that his interpretation of Dionysius is in sharp contrast to that of ‘Western’ thinkers, especially Thomas Aquinas.¹⁶ This contrast is especially clear in the Areopagite’s understanding of ‘negative theology,’ which Lossky argues is not simply a corrective to the via eminentia, but an attitude of the mind resulting in a knowledge of the God beyond being. Referring to Dionysius’s use of cataphatic and apophatic theology, Lossky asserts that “this is not the way of eminence, whose outlines can be found in Middle Platonism—the way towards which Thomas Aquinas wished to channel the Areopagite’s apophasis in order to restore an affirmed signification to God, denying merely the human mode of signifying Him. Dionysius’s negations triumph over affirmations.”¹⁷ Thomas attempts, according to Lossky, “a synthesis of the two opposed ways” of knowing, in order to

bring them together as a single method of knowing God. It is thus that St. Thomas Aquinas reduces the two ways of Dionysius to one, making negative theology a corrective to affirmative theology. In attributing to God the perfections that we find in created beings, we must (according to St. Thomas) deny the mode according to which we understand these finite perfections, but we may affirm them in relation to God modo sublimiari. Thus, negations correspond to the modus significandi, to the always inaccurate means of expression; affirmation to the res significata, to the perfection which we wish to express, which is in God after another fashion than it is in creatures. We may indeed ask how far this very ingenious philosophical invention corresponds to the thought of Dionysius.¹⁸

In the background of Lossky’s own reading of Dionysius lies what Lossky would describe as the traditional ‘Western’ one, which is primarily a Thomistic reading and one that he attempts to refute.

What will become clear from his analysis of Dionysius is Lossky’s own theological agenda. For Lossky, divine-human communion is the center of all theological discourse and the central significance of the Incarnation. Lossky’s theology is thus christologically grounded, but in a particular understanding of Jesus Christ as the person in whom is realized the event of divine-human communion. The realism of divine-human communion in Christ leads necessarily to cataphatic and apophatic forms of theologies. According to Lossky both apophatic and cataphatic theologies are “implied in the paradox of the Christian revelation: the transcendent God becomes immanent in the world, but in the very immanence of His economy…. He reveals Himself as transcendent, as ontologically independent of all created being.”¹⁹ Cataphatic and apophatic forms of theology are rooted in God’s very being as transcendent to and immanent in created being. These forms of theologies are given their clearest explication, according to Lossky, in the thought of Dionysius. In order, then, to understand Lossky’s arguments for the priority of cataphatic and apophatic theologies, and what he means by these forms of knowledge, it is necessary to look at his analysis of Dionysius, realizing throughout that this analysis reflects much of Lossky’s own theological presuppositions.²⁰

Cataphatic theology for Dionysius is a positive form of knowledge of God. As a form of knowledge, it expresses itself through divine names or the names of God. According to Lossky, Dionysius’s Divine Names is a treatise arguing for the possibility of naming God. He adds that the basis for Dionysius’s understanding of cataphatic theology and the condition for its possibility lie in a particular understanding of an ekstatic God who transcends being, but in whose very transcendence is immanent in the incarnate Christ, “the central event of revelation.”²¹

In a sense, cataphatic theology is one side of the Incarnational coin, the side of immanence. It is the form of theology that gives expression to the positive form of knowledge given in the Incarnation. The flip side is the transcendence of God, the affirmation that God is simultaneously unknowable. In contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology the simultaneity of God’s transcendence and immanence, of the God who is both known and unknown, is expressed in the well-known essence/energies distinction. God is unknowable in God’s essence, which is really “hyper-essence” to express its transcendence beyond any created essence, beyond being. God, however, is also knowable or immanent to creation through God’s energies. The essence/energies distinction is rooted in the realism of divine-human communion in Christ and expresses the God who is transcendent and immanent. According to Lossky, this distinction, though present in the tradition from the beginning, is first given its clea...