A.V. Nesteruk

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3. What Makes Theology Unique among Sciences: The Patristic Vision versus Modern Understanding

Theology as Experience of God: Patristic Vision – The Inevitability of

Mysticism in Theology – Theology as Unique – Church's Definitions as Boundaries of Faith – Apophaticism of Orthodox Theology – The Faculty That Makes Theologia Possible and Its Role in Discursive Theologizing – What in Theology Can Be Related to Science? – Christ-Event as the Foundation of Theology – Science and Theology “Compared” – Spiritual Intellect and Mediation between Theology and Science – Orthodox Theology and Philosophy

Orthodox Theology and Science: Epistemological Formula

Theology as Experience of God: Patristic Vision

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) offers the following definition of theology: it is “science of religion, especially Christian.” Since this definition employs the term science, one wonders whether theology is a science in a sense similar to physics, biology, psychology, or sociology. Historical evidence shows that this definition of theology as a particular subject, which can be taught and studied, is not exactly what the church fathers meant when they used the term theologia.

Theology is not a scriptural term; it does not appear in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The Apologists of the second сentury treated this term with some suspicion, for at the time it was thought to involve speculations about pagan gods, similar to those from Greek philosophy. The term was introduced and legitimized in the Christian context by Origen and by Clement of Alexandria, who is considered by some authors to be the founder of theology.116 Clement inserted philosophy into the realm of faith in order to establish a more “scientific and exact faith” – to Clement, a theology, or the demonstrated faith, that is, gnosis.

Considering that the term theology was introduced into the Christian context by Clement, no uniform, general definition of theology existed for the Greek Patristics. The Fathers were united in their view that theology is the organized exposition of the Christian doctrine, but they expressed their approach to it differently. A sharp contrast to Clement’s discursive definitions of theology, for example, is Evagrius Ponticus’s famous affirmation that theology is prayer: “If you are a theologian you will pray truly and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.”117 This remark makes the invaluable point that truth, which is a subject of a theologian’s inquiry, is accessible only through personal participation in this truth through prayer – prayer that forms the living experience of truth, and it is only through prayer that the experience of truth is possible. In the quote above, Evagrius develops the ideas of his teacher St. Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) that the necessary condition to be a theologian is to live an ascetic life, to be virtuous and go through moral purification.118 More categorically, theology is not possible without purification (katharsis); the reference to this dimension of theology can be found in the New Testament: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5.8).

Elsewhere, Evagrius employs the notion of communion in the context of prayer: “Prayer is communion of the intellect with God” – that is, theology is communion with God.119 This aspect of theology is especially emphasized by St. Maximus the Confessor. According to Maximus, theology is the last and the highest “stage” of spir­itual development in man; it is the accomplishing mode of a Christian’s experience of deification. Maximus interprets this experience as a liturgical one, exercised by man in the world before God. As a culmination of this “cosmic liturgy,” man receives in grace God’s communication, that is, the knowledge of the Holy Trinity in theolo­gia.120 Maximus writes: “When the intellect practices the virtues correctly, it advances in moral understanding. When it practices contemplation, it advances in spiritual knowledge… Finally, the intellect is granted the grace of theology when, carried on wings of love beyond these two former stages, it is taken up into God and with the help of the Holy Spirit discerns – as far as this is possible for the human intellect – the qualities of God.”121

It is clear from this passage that theology for Maximus – that is, the knowledge of God as he is in himself – is granted only in the mystical union with God, at the last stage of deification, which is not an instant act but is preceded by a long spiritual development (katharsis). This highest state of union with God was granted to saints – for example, to Moses, who, on the Sinai mountain, entered the mysterious darkness of God, and to apostles at the mountain of the transfiguration.122 Developing this insight by Maximus, St. Gregory Palamas argued later that it is the saints who are the only true theologians, for only they received the full communion with God: “Through grace God in His entirety penetrates saints in their entirety, and the saints in their entirety penetrate God entirely.”123 By the virtue of the saints and the Fathers, theology acquires, so to speak, an extended historical dimension, because “the Fathers are liturgical persons who gather round the heavenly altar with the blessed spirits. Thus they are always contemporary and present for the faithful.”124 This is why Patristic theology is the living, incarnate Orthodox faith, which never ages and is always present in the mind of the church. Patristic theology transcends its historical title as the theology of the ancient Fathers and cannot be dismissed from the modern theological discourse as old and outdated.

We see that this approach to theology, based on the personal and ecclesial experience of God, makes it clear that authentic Patristic theology radically differs from what is understood by the term theology among modern academics. Borrowing the concise definition of theology from the glossary of The Philokalia, the main source of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, we find that this definition differs indeed in comparison with the one quoted earlier in this chapter: “Theology (theologia) denotes... far more than the learning about God and religious doctrine acquired through academic study. It signifies active and conscious participation in or perception of the realities of the divine world – in other words, the realization of spiritual knowl­edge.”125 Theology is the spiritual knowledge that is attained through communion and participation and is a gift bestowed on extremely few people.126 Theology, according to this definition, is not a theory, or a science with a definite subject, prior to investigation. On the contrary, theology is the mode of existence with God in which knowledge of God is the unfolding of one’s own experience of life in God.

According to The Philokalia’s definition, in order to receive a gift of theologia one must be nearly a saint. How, then, can one be a theologian if one is not a saint? How can theology be communicated and taught if it involves a personal experience of union with God? Gregory Palamas suggested that those who have no direct experience of God but who trust the saints can also be regarded as true theologians, but at the lower level.127 This means that in order to be a theologian in this lower sense, one must be able to read and trust the saints and the Fathers of the church. This implies, however, one’s participation in the life of the church, whose living experience (that is, historical experience of the saints and fathers) constitutes its tradition and its theology. This participation is attained through communion with Scripture and through the church’s sacraments, that is, liturgically. Theology, as a personal experience of participation in truth, which is affirmed by the church, thus constitutes communion with God.

The notion of truth being involved in a theological context makes the experiential dimension of theology even more vivid because – as far back as Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons – truth was linked with life, understood eucharistically. This innovative view proclaimed the eucharist as a principle of existence, understood as life. The eucharist became a principle of truth, as a principle of immortality. Since in our everyday lives we are subject to decay and death, life in the church, understood as the acquisition of the ecclesial hypostasis in our nature (that is, incorruption and immortality), is achievable through the eucharist, keeps us alive, and provides us hope of immortality.

Christ is the center of the eucharist and the principle of life. As Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained incorruptibility and immortality, unless we have been united to incorruptibility and immortality.”128

Proclaiming the truth of Christ as the truth of incorruptible and everlasting life, Irenaeus justifies his view by appealing to the eucharist, which, according to him, establishes his doctrine: “Our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion.”129 In other words, it is the eucharist itself that forms a principle of truth: namely, that participation in truth is attained only through the eucharist. Theology thus is seen as life in Christ, life in unceasing com­munion with God, life through participation in building the body of Christ (the church), whose being is sustained from the eschatological future. Theology thus is not only the way but also the reality of God conferred to the person in an ecstatic rap­ture, in the form of the blessings of the age to come.130

Another important aspect of the Orthodox view of theology is that theology, and the truth that it proclaims, is inconceivable without the presence of the Spirit of God. Here, the charismatic dimension of theology surfaces, making it inseparable from the liturgy. We experience the presence of God in the eucharist as the presence of his Word (Logos) in either written or spoken form, but we also know that God is pres­ent because we experience that presence in the Spirit. “For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace; but the Spirit is truth.”131 This indicates that the only theology that is true is that which receives its fulfillment in the Spirit. Charisma as another aspect of theology thus means that the knowledge of God is revealed to us by Christ and through Christ: “No one has ever seen God: the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father – he it is who revealed God to us” (John 1:18). This indicates in turn that theology is not just our searching for God but rather God’s self-revelation to us, God’s charismatic manifestations, where we receive knowledge of God from God in response to our quest, which is faith. God grants to the person this knowledge because the person is known by God through the communion of faith (see Gal. 4:1). The charismatic nature of theological knowledge is distinctive, when compared with anything in science, because the knowledge is bestowed upon us by God, by the triune hypostasis, who wants us to know him and who is the active center of theology, understood as an “outflowing” and a “shining” from God. The charismatic dimen­sion of theology leads naturally to the conclusion that truth affirmed by theology has strong ecclesiological connotations.

What is indispensable for the presence of the Spirit in the eucharist, as a communion event, is the particular structure of the eucharistic gathering, that is, the Christian community around the bishop.132 This implies that church dogmas cannot survive as truth outside communion events and, as a consequence of the structure of the latter, outside the community. Truth in theology depends on the community. It is because of this that the church historically has expressed its faith officially through the councils of bishops as leaders of the eucharistic communities and not through academic theologians. This measure prevented the conceptualization of truth, mak­ing it an abstract philosophical idea.

We see thus that even this lower level of theologizing, which is available to all “who trust the saints,” requires an enormous effort of participation in the church tra­dition, for the experience of communion with God through ecclesial life will condition a person’s claim to be a theologian.

The Inevitability of Mysticism in Theology

It is now appropriate to ask what is the relationship between an “experiential” mode of theology, discussed in the previous section, and theology as verbal expression of the church’s dogma, that is, a set of formulas that can be transmitted and taught to everyone. For the early church, in which experience was empirical, using ordinary language and dogmatic affirmations became a necessity both for Christian instruction and for the defense of the church’s ecclesial truth against enemies and heretics. But in all circumstances, theology, as a set of definitions, had meaning for the early church only in the context of mystical experience, because knowledge of dogmas does not provide any ground for their genuine understanding, which can come only from experience of them. Thus contemporary writers from the Christian East are eager to defend this “ancient” view of theology in the modern context, where the experiential dimension of theology is often forgotten and is replaced by formal knowledge and the art of arguing.

The Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky reminds us that

the eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church... Far from being mutually opposed, theology and mysticism sup­port and complete each other. One is impossible without the other. If the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith, theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone... There is, therefore no Christian mysticism without theology; but above all, there is no theology without mysticism. Mysticism is... the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence.133

Bishop Kallistos Ware talks about the danger of separating mysticism from theology: “Just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, ‘academic’ in the bad sense of the word.”134

It is worth stressing again that theology in its spoken or written form is able to create an environment such that every person can experience God, but it does not provide any direct means of this experience. The direct experience comes only from personal participation in ecclesial and liturgical life.

The modern Greek Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras develops a similar thought. The Eastern Christian tradition of theology has a different meaning than that in the West today: to the former, theology is the gift of God, the fruit of interior purity of the Christian’s spiritual life, based mostly in living the church’s truth empirically, that is, through what is experienced by the members of the church body directly. The language, terms, and expressions were introduced to express the eccle­sial experience, but the verbal and written word about God is intrinsically linked to the vision of God, with the immediate vision of the personal God.135 Theology there­fore is not a theory of the world (that is, a metaphysical system) but is “an expression and formulation of the Church’s experience… not an intellectual discipline but an experiential participation, a communion.”136

One should admit, however, that articulating the experiential dimension of theology is not a prerogative only of the modern Orthodox theologians. The Scottish theologian T. Torrance, in his arguments for the objectivity of theological knowledge, talks about the dialogical dimension of theology as participation in the relationship with God: “Theological knowledge is not reflection upon our rational experience or even upon faith; it is reflection upon the object of faith in direct dialogical relation with that object, and therefore in faith – i.e. in conversation and communion with the living God who communicates Himself to us in acts of revelation and reconcili­ation and who requires of us an answering relation in receiving, acknowledging, understanding, and in active personal participation in the relationship He establishes between us.”137

Lossky, Yannaras, and Torrance affirm that the key element of the proper approach to, and understanding of, theology is personal experience. This experience, received as a gift of grace, is active since it assumes participation, communion, and transfiguration, which lead ultimately to a vision of God. Theology implies personal involvement and personal experience in a way the other subjects do not. As theolo­gians, we cannot be detached from – and objective (in an ordinary sense of this word) with respect to – what we study. If we remain outside the subject, we cannot understand it properly; in the words of Diadochos of Photiki: “Nothing is so desti­tute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him.”138 To theologize truly, one must be part of the experience.139 Given this view, is it possible to teach the­ology, and if so, what are the means of doing so? Despite its purely experiential and mystical nature, theological teaching, as the exposition of Christian faith, must be expressed through language. What, then, is the foundation for theological teaching as an expression of the church’s mystical experience in words? How is this teaching pos­sible at all?

The answer is theological in its essence, since it relies on the mystery of the incarnation of the Word of God (Logos) in the words of Scripture, in nature, and in Christ. God revealed himself through his Word in the world; it is because of this that humans are endowed with language and other faculties in order to witness the presence of the incarnation in the world. The Word of God can be thought, painted, and sung.

If teaching in words is possible in principle, how then can we teach (as we do with different university subjects) the experience of ecclesial life, the experience of knowing God through personal participation? This probably can be done through learn­ing about and teaching the experience of saints, who are, according to Gregory Palamas, the only true theologians and who must be trusted. Not everyone can be a theologian, not everyone can teach theology, and theology cannot be taught to everyone, any subject.140 The trust in saints assumes two things: asceticism and edu­cation. A person who learns theology must be educated, tested, and involved in purification.141

Theology involves human language and reason, which is employed in its ultimate limit and requires an extreme vigor in its exercising. But theology does not depend simply on reason. Faith, personal faith, enters in: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, manifestation of realities unseen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith is not a psychological attitude; it is a state of communion with God that provides “an ontological relation­ship between man and God.”142 It is worth recalling that, according to Clement of Alexandria, knowledge is based on the first principles, which are not demonstrable; the acceptance of the principles forms faith in them. In this, knowledge depends on something that is not knowledge, and this is faith. In other words, one must believe in order to know.143 Augustine affirms a similar thought: that belief has to come prior to understanding. If one does not believe, then one will not properly understand.144

It follows, then, that the student of theology cannot be detached from what is studied; one needs faith and participation in the object studied. This indicates that theology has a distinctive position because of its subject matter (that is, God): to know something of God, one must participate in God. This knowledge cannot be objective (in the sense of modern rationality) because it depends on how one is involved in the subject; one’s knowledge is relational with regard to what is studied, since the subject of the study is accessible only through one’s personal communion with God, that is, in one’s experience. As will be explained later, dogmas and verbal theological formulas provide only the limits of human experience of the divine; they never substitute for or exhaust the experience itself.

Since theology, as activity, demands participation in the subject that is to be comprehended, it inevitably presupposes that there is a genuine object of the theological knowledge; participation in something is not possible if it does not exist as object. In other words, the “rationality” of theology, in philosophical parlance, is that theol­ogy’s subject matter (its object) is God, and theology as participation is possible as long as it has its object in which one can participate. In this view, all nontheological, a priori assumptions have no meaning for theology, for theology is driven by its own object, God (see John 1:8; Gal. 4:9). This is why true theology is open to the infinite self-disclosure of its object.

From the preceding view, it can be argued that theology establishes a special understanding of objectivity, different from that prevalent in modern scientific dis­course – namely, that objectivity means detachment from the object. In order for an object to be revealed as it is in itself, one should remove all passions and emotions involved in the inquiry, to suspend one’s activity and any subjective influence on the object. In other words, one must shed any a priori assumptions that can influence the vision of the object. This is supposed to be possible because reason can separate itself from attachments in order to be detached from the finite object.

However, theology involves the spiritual intellect, which makes it possible to exercise direct cognition of metaphysical realities and the Divine. Thus no prior assessment of attachments to the object is possible, for the intellect itself is revealed only through its relationship with the Divine, which means that any imagined detachment of the intellect from its object would represent the immediate cessation of its function. Because of the attachment of the spiritual intellect to its object (God), we can achieve an objective knowledge of the object, of God. The difference between the commonly accepted objectivity in science and that in theology can be described as the difference between, on the one hand, detachment from all presuppositions about the object, which is required by scientific objectivity, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of detachment from the object in theology, understood as experience of participation in the Divine. In the words of Thomas Torrance: “It is sheer attachment to the object that detaches us from our preconceptions, while we detach ourselves from our preconceptions in order to be free for the object, and therefore free for true knowledge of it.”145

Knowledge of God can be said to be objective and true – that is, not accidentally subjective and individual – because it is the engagement with God that disengages one from any attachments that could eventually distort the vision of God.

Theology as Unique

One can see that the Patristic understanding of theology and its treatment of possible knowledge of God removes the “problem” often addressed in modern Western sources as the relationship between truth of revelation (that is, truth in “revelational theology”), and those truths established by reason from observing the natural world and brought to its limit (“natural theology”). The truth of revelation, in its Patristic sense, can be attained gradually through participation in the ecclesial reality of the Christian mysteries; any genuine knowledge can be achieved only if this suprara­tional knowledge – that is, faith – is established. This implies that the conclusions of reason taken in and of themselves can never constitute ultimate, genuine knowledge; rather, they represent relative truths. The reason can achieve a glimpse of “genuine relative knowledge” only if it conforms itself to the truths that transcend the natural order. This transformation means that the reason participates in the activity of the spiritual intellect, which is able to know truth by direct intuition and through participation in the orders that transcend nature.146

This explains why the division and tension between revelational theology and natural theology that are so often referenced in modern discussions on science and theology do not constitute a problem from the Patristic perspective. The reason, and natural theology, which employs this faculty, cannot provide any access to true knowledge if it is considered separately from the spiritual intellect, which not only provides a direct intuition of the divine but also justifies the activity of the reason itself. The Orthodox theologian P. Sherrard, analyzing the Patristic understanding of faith and reason, concludes: “The idea that the reason in itself may attain to anything more than a most relative kind of knowledge does not occur [in Patristic thought]; nor does the idea that the reason may operate independently of the truth of revela­tion and faith, its conclusions being valid in one sphere, where the truths of revela­tion valid in another.”147

St. Isaac the Syrian affirms a similar thought on the function of reason. He talks explicitly about the limits of reason, stating that the knowledge that is accessible to reason can be thought of as legitimate and true only if it deals with the finite things in the natural world: “Knowledge adheres to the domain of nature, in all its ways… Knowledge is not able to make anything without materials. Knowledge does not ven­ture to step over unto the domain which lies outside nature.”148 This is why accurate designations can be established concerning only earthly things. This is not the case, however, if reason trespasses the boundaries of its legitimate sphere and attempts to discuss things not of this world. In this case, it is “faith [that] makes its course above nature,” such that “knowledge is united to faith and… lifted up from the service of earthly things towards the place of its creation, acquiring also other things,” that is, toward the things of the age to come.149 These things do not possess a true name and can be apprehended only by simple cognition, which is exalted “above all perceptibility,” all signs, forms, colors, and composite denominations.150 Therefore, when “knowledge elevates itself above earthly things and... faith swallows knowledge, gives anew birth to it, wholly spiritual,” the fathers use any designations they like concerning this knowledge, for no one knows their real names.151

One can then infer from St. Isaac that theology, understood as faith, is unique in its subject matter. Science discusses earthly and visible things, those of the present age and natural world (that is, created reality). Theology, on the other hand, dis­cusses things of the age to come, transcendent reality, the uncreated.

This means that however exhaustively scientific reason inquires into the origins of the universe, it cannot infer from this knowledge to the knowledge of God. The theologians, without claiming that they know the mind of God, at least exercise talking about it. This is exactly what Isaac means when he says that the Fathers used any designations when they talked about God. In this way, the theologian uses human language and concepts that are derived from the sensible world. It is appropriate to compare this thought with Athanasius of Alexandria’s caution against using the lan­guage with respect to humans and God: “Terms must be taken in one way through their reference to God and understood in another way in their reference to men.”152 While theologizing, however, the theologian employs these concepts with respect to what is beyond the sensible world, beyond language itself, beyond the intelligible world and concepts. It is because of this that when the theologian attempts to talk about God, he cannot produce precise definitions or descriptions of what he means. He exercises an enormous freedom that involves any means for expressing his faith and his personal experience but still remains within certain boundaries.

Church’s Definitions as Boundaries of Faith

Despite the previous discussion, one must not be confused here with what is meant by the dogmas when referring to the Councils of the Church, which produced many verbal and written statements described as “definitions”. What we today call “dogma” was for the Fathers a “definition” (Gk. horos, literally “a limit, boundary, horizon”).153 In this context, the definitions of the church function as a fence, setting a limit around the Christian mysteries and excluding certain false interpretations while – and this is fundamental – not claiming to explain the mysteries themselves. At this point, we come back to our previous observation that acquaintance with the dogmas does not provide knowledge of what is actually stated in the dogmas, that is, the experience of the Christian mysteries. This means that any abstract theology, which is based on philosophical speculations around the dogmas, is not theologia in the Patristic sense, for what it is lacking there is precisely the experiential dimension and personal involvement in ecclesial life that fills dogmas, as boundaries of faith, with living truth. Dogmas as constituting the traditional doctrine “can be appre­hended and understood only in the living context of faith… Faith alone makes formulas convincing; faith alone makes formulas live.”154 “Theology, and even the ‘dogmas’ present no more than an ‘intellectual contour’ of the revealed truth, and a ‘noetic’ testimony to it. Only in the act of faith is this ‘contour’ filled with content.”155 This is why J. Zizioulas affirms that “credal definitions carry no relationship with truth in themselves, but only in their being doxological acclamations of the worshiping community.”156

The dogmas formulated by the church councils, despite being formulated in ordinary language, transcend this language; they also transcend the historical reality of those places where they were set up as the definitions of the historical church communities. It is through the charismatic events at the church councils that dogmas acquire the features of the communion, universal for all church communities. The incorporation of the dogmas into the structure of the communion hypostasizes in dogmas the element of truth: “Dogmas, like ministers, cannot survive as truth out­side the communion-event created by the Spirit.”157 This last remark points toward another aspect of the experiential nature of theology: its close bondage to the com­munion as the only true relationship with the subject matter of theology (God).

One must not, however, diminish the importance of an epistemic dimension in theology. Its presence in theology must not mislead us about the true foundation of this dimension: since theology is to go beyond concepts and is to support con­templation, there is no sense in building up or constructing a fixed theology for the sake of the construction, be it even philosophically consistent and an aesthetically attractive enterprise. According to Lossky: “A theology that constitutes itself into a system is always dangerous: it imprisons in the enclosed sphere of thought the reality to which it must open thought.”158 Lossky stresses here an interesting and important point – despite the fact that theology cannot avoid rational, systematic thinking, the very form of thinking must be open to novelties of the real­ity at which this thinking aims, that is, the reality of the Divine. Torrance argues, from a different perspective on the same topic, that theological statements operate with essentially open concepts, that theological inquiry must operate with an open epistemology, so that it is impossible to set in advance any particular philos­ophy of knowledge that could constrain a theological discourse, making it just a prison for an attentive soul.159 It is because of this that any theological inquiry, while being made with application of the reason, must still be deeply rooted in faith and experience of God, for only the inexhaustible “objectivity” of God, God’s potential “infinite intelligibility,” prevents reason from being constrained by the dogmas of philosophical systems. It is in this sense that “theology is never a self-explanatory discipline. It is constantly appealing to the vision of faith”160 On the other hand, Christian dogmas, being only the boundaries of faith (not epistemological delimiters), never prevent the analytical soul from expanding its theologi­cal inquiry into the depths of faith, readjusting its epistemology to the needs of the religious experience.

Apophaticism of Orthodox Theology

As the definitions of faith, dogmas never exhaust the experience of the religious life, for although revealed, God is never totally and exhaustively revealed. For the living community of the church, the limits set through dogmas are fixed points of truth, which means that members of the ecclesial community cannot change or deviate from these definitions. However, being faithful to these definitions does not restrict church members in their experiential unfolding of the living truth of the church, which is always a mystery; to be a Christian means to follow a way of life that leads to truth, not just to follow a theoretical notion of truth. Knowledge of truth is not exhausted in its formulation. To the Eastern Orthodox tradition, this is the apophati­cism of knowledge of God, the freedom within the horizon of the church’s definitions that helps to separate and distinguish truth from its distortion and falsification.

The apophatic dimension of theology thus points again toward its distinct and unique position among other – let us say, scientific – ways of knowledge. While employing discursive reason in its dogmatic formulations, theology also has to rely on symbolism, paradox, and antinomy. It uses poetry and images, music and liturgy, to manifest itself internally in the ecclesial life, which externally is circumscribed by the dogmas. It thus can be seen here that some human faculties are involved in theo­logical understanding that do not assume the discursive reason at all.

It sounds paradoxical, but it is true, that theology admits the inadequacy of the mind and the tongue in expressing the significance of what it studies. St. Basil the Great expressed this thought in one of his letters: “No theological term is adequate to the thought of the speaker, or the want of the questioner, because language is of nat­ural necessity too weak to act in the service of the objects of thought.”161 Theology appeals to other forms of reflection, which are more suitable for capturing what the­ology attempts to express, namely, the mystery. The mystery should be understood in religious terms, as something that is revealed to us by God, but never exhaustively revealed. As Scripture says: “We see in a mirror in a riddling, enigmatic way” (1Cor. 13:12). Naive, cataphatic thinking is tempted to make God conceivable, expressible, and visible, to create the idols full of deception. Liturgy and prayer are indispensable tools for recognizing this deception and destroying such conceptual images by bringing us ontologically to the mystery of the Divine in its incomprehensible grandiosity.

This function allows us to reaffirm that theology is unique and distinct from other sciences. Science, dealing with the mysteries of the world, never talks mysteriously; rather, it aims to formulate the concepts and their content in discursive terms, employing reason and ruling out any attempts to make scientific judgments intuitively and inarticulately. It is interesting to observe, however, that in those modern scientific fields where discursive reason has difficulty creating a coherent vision of reality, mysticism is coming through the back door, in numerous speculative and competing interpretations, which are similar to endless attempts to catch the ulti­mate truth in words and formulas that are not adjusted for expression of this truth.

The Faculty That Makes Theologia Possible and Its Role in Discursive Theologizing

To discuss this topic, we must inevitably enter the field of theological anthropology, for the model of the human being, as it was developed by Patristic writers, contains in itself the answer to what makes theologia possible. The Patristic model differs from the modern, widely accepted understanding of the human person as a being endowed with a reasoning brain, consciousness, will, and emotions. The early Fathers considered the human person not only in the light of the dualism between body and discursive reason (dianoia, or intellect in its contemporary sense, the mind). They made a subtle distinction between dianoia and nous, in which the latter stands for the faculty of apprehending truth, which is superior to discursive reason. The notion of nous cannot be easily translated into modern English because the understanding of humanity has shifted since the era of the Greek Fathers. Thus the meaning of the term nous as it was used in Patristic anthropology must be carefully explained in modern terms, which have no direct reference to the Patristic lexicon. It can be broadly explained in modern language as spiritual insight or as intellect beyond which logic cannot be used; instead, the intellect (reason) experiences silence, which gives way to nous, or spiritual intellect.162

Dianoia (reason, mind) functions as the discursive, conceptualizing, logical faculty in man. In other words, dianoia employs such particular cognitive operations as dissection, analysis, measurement, and the use of mathematics. It works by either induction or deduction. The function of dianoia is to collect information about objects that are outside itself, be it data derived from sense observations or received through spiritual knowledge or revelation. In all cases, the limits of dianoia are outlined by its ability to draw conclusions (by syllogistic deduction) and to formulate concepts (by induction).

Dianoia is similar to object-oriented thinking, which by definition aims to obtain knowledge of an object, posed in thought as an external object, by means of the log­ical formulas “A is B” or “A is not B.” Dianoia thus can grasp objects that are given in experience as either sensible or intelligible entities, which can be related to the reason through the syllogism; this constitutes the rational mode of knowledge. This is why dianoia is the cognitive faculty used in scientific research. Historically, the acquisition of syllogistic structures in the natural sciences led to modern science.163

At the same time, it has been clear, since the early Fathers, that dianoia can be applied only to things that allow rational thinking, that is, to things of the created world. Maximus the Confessor comments thus: “Created beings are termed intelligi­ble [that is, they can be grasped by the reason (dianoia)] because each of them has an origin that can be known rationally [that is, discursively]. But God cannot be termed intelligible, while from our apprehension of intelligible beings we can do no more than believe that He exists.”164

Maximus agrees with Isaac that rational thinking (that is, dianoia) cannot be used in theologia, in the immediate vision and experience of God. The glossary of The Philokalia explains this point by qualifying knowledge based on the dianoia as the knowledge of a lower order than spiritual knowledge: “It does not imply any direct apprehension or perception of the inner essences or principles of created beings, still less of divine truth itself.”165 The apprehension in the latter sense is made possible only by nous and is beyond the scope of reason.

This distinction can help us understand the apophaticism of Patristic theology from the anthropological and psychological points of view. Apophaticism can be understood as the inability of the reason (dianoia) to have any direct apprehension of God; at the same time, apophaticism means that any rational discursive defini­tions of God as truth are inadequate – that is, the rational concept of truth is not possible. The dianoia as a passive organ, or faculty, of the whole human cannot par­ticipate in things that are inquired into; it cannot, as taken in itself, provide com­munion with truth.166

In contradistinction to dianoia, the nous works by direct apprehension. Its subject matter is not simply outside itself. It does not reason from premises to conclusions by strict logical steps; rather, it apprehends the truth through a kind of inner vision. Nous, according to The Philokalia's definition, is the “highest faculty in man, through which – provided it is purified – he knows God or the inner essences or principles of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception.”167

According to St. Maximus: “The intellect [nous] is the organ of wisdom, the intelligence that of spiritual knowledge.”168 The Fathers made a clear distinction between knowledge in the ordinary sense, as the knowledge of things, and spiritual knowl­edge, which by its function transcends the natural realm and aims to apprehend intelligible realities and the realm of the Divine: “It possesses the capacity for a union that transcends its nature and that unites it with what is beyond its natural scope. It is through this union that divine realities are apprehended, not by means of our own natural capacities, but by virtue of the fact that we entirely transcend ourselves and belong entirely to God.”169

This aspect of transcendence exercised by the nous closely resembles what many religious people would simply call faith. Faith, for many, is a gift of God’s grace, which should not be discussed or positioned in the whole hierarchy of human faculties. One can assume that the nous provides conditions for faith to be intentional: one who wants to find God through reason can do it, theoretically speaking, by developing one’s nous. At the same time, it is clear that the exercise of rational faculties in order to develop the nous requires one, in a sense, to deny the rational faculties that one starts with. This is an important observation, for it asserts that if the nous, by its constitution and function, is the denial of the priority of the relational, discursive mind, then the nous is ultimately the ground of the dianoia, for the nous manifests itself in the otherness of the dianoia. Faith sometimes is juxtaposed with knowledge. In our context, this juxtaposition means one of nous with dianoia.

The nous thus provides a foundation for reason to infer from the created things to the existence of God, that is, to experience the foundation of all things in their otherness (that they are created and they have a creator). This inference constitutes faith in the existence of God (which is more than any logical proof) and is granted to a believer by God himself: “Faith is true knowledge, the principles of which are beyond rational demonstration; for faith makes real for us things beyond intellect and reason (compare Heb 11:1)”170 Faith, whose organ is nous, allows us to transcend general conditions of knowledge imposed by mind and reason with respect to things of this age. This transcendence makes it possible to “see” not only the intelligible realities but also the underlying principles of existence of all things (that is, their uncreated logoi) leading to God.

So how is theologia possible? The answer so far is that theologia as experience of God is possible because humans have the faculty of nous, which allows them in prin­ciple to have the experience of God and to be in communion with God. It is clear for any careful reader that the logic of our argument is based, in fact, on the acceptance of the Christian Patristic model of the human being, which means in turn that the question of why theology is possible is in itself the theological question, for Christian anthropology is a part of Orthodox theology. In other words, to justify the existence of nous, we should appeal to theological anthropology, which calls for another, simi­lar question as to why theological anthropology is possible. To avoid this closed cir­cuit in rational thinking, the only feasible way out is to assert that, theologically speaking, it is impossible to detach the question of the faculties involved in theolog­ical knowledge from theological anthropology at all. They go side by side together. For ultimately our attempt to give a discursive description of the human faculties involved in theology, as well as anthropology, demands that both have the same source in the integrity of the human person and the integrity of religious experience. The nature of this experience can be investigated only by abstraction from the expe­rience itself, by the dissection and analysis with which the dianoia is so successful.

It is important also to realize that the affirmation that nous makes theologia possible assumes, in fact, not only that this faculty is present in human composite but also that nous is related to the essence of the human person, to that individual, distinct link that a person has with God and which makes one person different from another. This clearly indicates that there is something in nous that transcends the natural aspects of the human person (the body and soul). The nous refers rather to hypostatic properties in people, which transcend what is naturally differentiated. In Patristic thought, body and soul constituted the natural composition, which is held in human hypostasis. St. Maximus compares human composite with Christ. The unity of body and soul in Christ is purely hypostatic (that is, nonnatural), whereas in humans the same unity is not only hypostatic but also natural.171 It is exactly this unity that, according to St. Maximus, constitutes a person. The hypostasis of humankind (being not only of human nature) is rooted in the Logos of God, that is, it is itself enhypostasized. This implies that human nature – that is, the unity of body and soul (which are both co-hypostasized, meaning they both have the same hypostasis) – assumes the personal relationship to God.

Nous as a mode of human existence has a close relationship to human hypostasis; it is understood by some Fathers as the divine part of humans. As a faculty, nous is associated with the contemplative part of man and is primarily responsible for man’s relationship to God. As mentioned earlier, nous is the “organ” that makes faith possi­ble, for nous is connected with prayer, hope, and love for God. On the other hand, nous is identified by Maximus with the totality or wholeness of man, with the mode of human existence known as what Maximus calls “the inner self” (or the person, in modern parlance).172 Realizing one’s potential toward full existence makes a challenge for nous; if humans succeed in this – that is, if they manage to establish ultimate personhood, to make “a monk of the inner self” – their nous will fit for theologia, for the mystical contemplation of God to the extent that is possible for humans.173

What in Theology Can Be Related to Science?

The question now is, what is the meaning of the dialogue, or mediation, between theology (understood Patristically) and science (which represents an opposite to theology) as knowledge of particular things achieved through discursive reasoning and clearly articulated in scientific language? Is it possible to relate the experiential mode of theology, requiring personal participation in the mysteries, with the objective knowledge obtained from scientific research, the knowledge that is universal in terms of languages and their material references, accessible to the majority of an educated population, at least in a popularized form? The negative response to this query would be quite obvious if one did not make a distinction between the ever-living mysticism in the church (the theologia), on the one hand, and the verbal and written tradition of transferring its experience through the church’s earthly history in economic theology.

As above, our ability to talk of God, to read God’s Word, and to express our convictions in religious and philosophical language is grounded in the incarnation of the Logos of God. It is the confession of the incarnation that allows us to witness to the transcendent God in his immanent revelation to us in Christ. The reality of our knowledge of God (in an apophatic mode) and the possibility of our personal participation in God’s mysteries is granted by Christ, who, by unifying the divine and the human, made it possible for us to be theologians in two ways: (1) to experience God directly, apophatically; and (2) to think, talk, and write about God, to express our knowledge of God cataphatically. Christ, who revealed God in the world through his immanent, economic activity, witnessed at the same time God who is transcendent to the world; that is, Christ witnessed for the knowledge of God as God is in himself through theologia.

The gift of theology (both theologia and economia) thus has its origin in the incarnation of the Word and is active in us through the Holy Spirit. By receiving this gift, this revelation of God, we have to adapt our thought and language to it. For this we need wisdom, which will never let us sink in the endless attempts to express verbally the mystery of theology. The wisdom we need comes from faith in the incarnate Word of God, which is Christ: “God has spoken to us finally through His Son” (Heb. 1:2). According to Lossky: “For the theologian the point of departure is Christ, and it is also the point of arrival.”174 Christ is theology. As the unity of divine and human, Christ transferred upon us a twofold experience of God: God in Himself, who opened his mystery to Christ the Son and about whom we know from the Son, and also through the natural order, of which Christ the Son is a part. Acting in the natu­ral order, God revealed himself by creating the world through his will and the love of the Holy Trinity, in order for his Son to be incarnate and to profess the message about the Father through this order. This is why the roads of the natural sciences, which study the economic activities of God in the created world, could constitute a mode of theological experience.

The Greek Fathers of the fourth century made a clear distinction between theologia and economia, which were based on two different aspects of the church’s life. On the one hand was the direct experience of the Trinity, with no references to the activity of God in the world. On the other hand was the philosophically developed teaching on the incarnation, salvation, the church and its mysteries, the second coming of Christ, and so forth. The Fathers called this latter teaching economia.175

The distinction between theologia and economia is not absolute, for any discussion of the activity of God in the world (that is, God’s economy) assumes that we believe in God as maker of this world, a belief that comes first; this belief, sustaining the empirical life of the church, is in itself mystical theology (theologia). G. V. Florovsky expressed this thought in the context of a discussion of St. Athanasius’s distinction between the essence of God and God’s will. According to Athanasius, the ontology of the created world is rooted in the will of God, so that a radical difference exists between theology of God as God is in himself and theology of the willing activity of God in the world: “Θϵολογια in the ancient sense of the word, and οικονομια must be clearly and strictly distinguished and delimited, although they could not be sepa­rated from each other. God’s ‘Being’ has an absolute ontological priority over God’s action and will.”176

Later in the history of Patristic thought, the distinction between God as he is in himself and God’s revealing activity in the world was expressed in a different lan­guage, one that made a distinction between the essence of God and his energies as the processions of God beyond himself toward creation. This ontological distinction reveals the difference between theologia and the realm of God’s economy through energies, which is the subject matter of economic theology. Whereas theologia deals with the aspect of unity in God, economic theology is interested in “distinctions” of God, or God’s processions beyond himself, that is, God’s energies. This leads in turn to the distinction between apophatic and cataphatic theology. St. Dionysius the Areopagite saw the contrast between negative and positive theology in the distinc­tion between unknowable essence of God and self-revealing divine energies. The energies occupy a middle place in theology: on the one hand, they belong to theology of the Trinity as it is in itself (that is, they are transcendent); on the other, they enter economic theology, because it is in God’s energies that God manifests himself in the creation (that is, God’s energies are immanent.)177

It is much more nontrivial to demonstrate that economic theology, starting its discourse from the activity of God in the world (that is, in its cataphatic mode), leads (through an apophatic stage) necessarily to a trinitarian theology. If one infers scientifically from the created order to God, one should legitimately ask on what grounds all claims on the nature of the Divine will have any reference to the Holy Trinity, whose essential being transcends its own economy. This points again to the thought that ultimate and true theology must be mystical, for any discursive ascension from our knowledge of God’s economy through God’s creation of the world and God’s incarnation will demand the confession of belief in the Trinity, implying an apophatic thrust.178

The distinction between theologia and the teachings of economic theology can be seen through the logos of human being, or human hypostasis, which assumes the differentiation between the spiritual intellect – as ability to experience God directly (this provides the ability of theologia in man) – and that of the reason – based on logic and discursive description of the realities visible and invisible (which are employed by economic theology).

Later in history, the distinction between theologia and economia disappeared, and the term theology was substituted for knowledge both of God and of God’s relationship with the world. As follows from the discussion above, the experiential approach to the­ology (theology as worship or liturgy, as participation in the mysteries of the church, corresponding to the Patristic use of the word theologia) is missing from most modern discussions of science and religion. This gap is linked to the fact that theology, as understood in modern Western usage, represents mostly economy, the teaching on the relationship between God and the world. It has acquired different names in modern academic usage, including systematic theology, natural theology, and theology of nature. It is this spectrum of theological discourses that the modern dialogue with sci­ence employs. Nobody risks talking seriously about the engagement of science with mystical theology. Thus what are the consequences of forgetting the mystical dimen­sion of theology for the modern dialogue with science? If this happens, theology and science can be leveled and compared. One example of such a comparison can be found in J. Polkinghorne’s attempt to draw analogies between the formation of christological concept and modern quantum theory.179 It is the fact that Christology is linked to the mystical dimension of theology, whereas quantum mechanics deals with the realities of this world, that makes the comparison devoid of any constructive outcome.

Christ-Event as the Foundation of Theology

Here we must rearticulate the role of the Christ-event as the major ontological reference in the church’s experience and theology. As discussed earlier, the church had an empirical focus in the beginning of the Christian era and had to commend itself to the systematic exposition of its doctrine in order to defend itself against enemies and heretics. What, then, was that element of the church’s experience that was indispen­sable for the church and which kept it alive and invariant during its empirical mode?

The phrase “church of Christ” refers to the historical initiation of the church’s mysteries in the event of the meeting of humanity with God in Jesus Christ (we call this meeting the Christ-event). This implies that, despite the fundamentally mystical aspects of church life, there was a point where the mysteries, including the mystery of the church itself, were revealed to man. Thus the church (as the gathering of the faithful in order to commemorate this event) is constituted by the initial, and historically real, communion-event, the meeting with the incarnate God Jesus Christ in physical space and time. This event is unique in time as well as in space.

A mind outside Christian faith can question on what grounds is it reasonable for the church to consider this single event in history as the foundation of its claim that through this event man received knowledge of truth (Christ as Alpha and Omega), such that by its very constitution it transcends history (that is, time and space). If such a mind invokes a natural, scientific view of the realities of things, it refers to their sta­bility and endurance in space and time,180 which guarantees that these things can be accessed by different observers, or participants, in different places and at different times. It is because of this that a scientific mind, being restricted in its vision by things in space and time, can hardly understand the grounds of the church’s claims that the reference to the Christ-event – as a single happening in the fixed historical past (two thousand years ago) and in a fixed place (Palestine) – constitutes the foundation of the integral Christian experience as a totality seen in different ages and places. On the other hand, if the Christ-event as a historical meeting of man with God could happen repeatedly and predictably at different times and places, then the meaning of all claims of the church as to the divine origin of this communion-event would be undermined by a simple observation – that this event is, in fact, a part of the natural order, and that any claim for its transnatural meaning would be only a matter of a collectively established opinion, based on either mystical piety or superstition.

There is a fundamental difference between the status of the Christ-event, understood as initiating the church’s history on earth, and any natural event that could lead to explainable consequences in its own future. A good example is the idea of the big bang in cosmology as an initial event in the remote past of the universe that, accord­ing to modern physics, predetermined the necessary (not sufficient) background for the display of all consequent events in the long history of the universe, including its present state. The reality of this initial cosmological event thus is based on a strong belief that there is a correspondence between this initial event and its remote conse­quences that we observe here and now, based on the laws of dynamics, which drive the evolution of the universe. Can, then, the Christ-event be considered an “initial condition” for the “dynamics” of the Christian Church?

The outward impression the Orthodox Church produces is that there is no dynamics at all. The appearance of the church in the world and the church’s message and liturgical life are all nearly the same as they were centuries ago. This sharply contrasts with the inward contemplation of an intense dynamics in the life of the church, accumulated and expressed in the church’s written and unwritten tradition of the vision of God and in its liturgical and worshiping experience.

The internal dynamics in the church’s life can be seen only as the realization of the plan of humankind’s salvation, which has been initiated through creation of the world and the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh. But this dynamics is not based on natural laws. This means that the inward dynamics of the church – her prayer and theology – escapes, from a purely scientific mode of inquiry, leaving a curious mind only with mystery.

How is this internal church dynamics, independent of any natural laws, preserved in the ever-changing historical conditions of the social world? On the one hand, we talk about “the tradition,” which sustains the life of the Orthodox Church. The tradi­tion acquires here an ontological status (that is, the church exists as tradition, and tra­dition exists in the church). On the other hand, we would be right to guess that the church’s dynamics, initiated by the Christ-event, is sustained through the continuous presence of this event in the life of the church – presence understood not only through the historical memory of an empirical meeting with Jesus Christ but also as a never-ending effort to build the church as body of Christ (in other words, the church understood not only as historical reality but also as eschatological reality). Christ, after the resurrection and ascension, left us with the memory of the meeting with him, conceived later by the church not only historically but also eucharistically and eschatologically, as an act of communion with God in his kingdom.181 But this communion is ontologically different from what is meant by involvement through natural law and causation. The absence of causal dynamics, which is so essential for things in the empirical world, is replaced here by the activity of the divine agency, the Holy Spirit.

This leads us to the important conclusion that the dynamics of the church’s life, being in its outward impression unchanging and uniform in time, is, in its inward ontological grounds, atemporal and eschatological, that is, open to the endless source of its unfolding fulfillment in the body of Christ. The Christ-event is conceivable as constitutive for the church only if it is treated as eschatological reality. This is why it is not considered the foundation of the history of the church in the past but rather is treated as building the church’s history in the reverse order, that is, by coming from the future kingdom. When the church commemorates the Christ-event in the eucharist unceasingly, it invokes the name of God in his kingdom; in doing so, the church transcends space and time to experience the presence of Christ (the Christ-event) in the eternity of his kingdom.182

It becomes clear now that when we said that the church lived its first centuries empirically, we did not mean that its experience was based on an attempt to reproduce the Christ-event literally as the meeting with Christ in physical space and time. The church employed a perception of the reality of God that did not rely upon its sta­bility or repetition in space and time. The church’s stability in physical space and time has been since then her function as the worshiping community, scattered across the world, and the preaching of the apostolic message of God, which could not be expressed and referred to by anything other than the historical Christ-event; in its essence, this message of truth has been coming through the ages from the realm of God.

This means that the earthly church sketches only the visible boundaries of her continuous existence. Her experience and the inward mode of existence unobservable from the perspective of space and time thus form her communion with God in his kingdom. It is known to the members of the eucharistic communities, whereas it is obscured for those who do not participate in the church’s mysteries and who are inquiring about religious matters only out of vain curiosity.

Our theological inquiry experiences here an antinomial difficulty in its attempt to reconcile the dualism of the Christ-event as historical and eternal, temporal and everlasting, visible and spiritual. There is no stability or spatiotemporal repetitions in our meeting with Christ; this event was historically unique, but, paradoxically, it belongs to eternity as a part of God’s plan of salvation for humanity. This problem was tackled by the Greek Fathers, who had to adjust the biblical vision of truth with the Classical Greek tradition’s approach to truth. Greek ontology placed the question of truth in a cosmological context, that is, truth was a locus of the Greek cosmos, interpreted as the unity of the intelligible principles of being (logoi); the mind, which could comprehend these principles (nous); and being itself. It is because of this cos­mic view of truth that history was problematic for the Greeks. History itself does not bear any reality and truth; it must be explained in terms of its logos. All truth is beyond this visible world in the world of ideas, which are eternal in their essence but conceivable by human beings. If one could not find a corresponding logos of a his­torical happening, it was equivalent to explaining it away, just to dismiss history. It is easy to realize that both approaches – that is, either explanation of history in terms of the logoi or its dismissal as unreal – are similar in saying that there is no place for truth in the flux of historical events.

The Fathers of the church had to demonstrate that truth, because it is ultimate in its essence, can operate in history without ceasing to exist as ultimate truth, and that this truth is the historical Christ, who is at the same time the Son-Logos of God and the Alpha and Omega of history. The historical flux (despite being seen outwardly as taking place in the empirical world, which is subject to corruption and decay) is thus understood as containing in its every moment truth eternal, which is not subject to change.

What, then, is the truth of theology, which expresses in different ways our experience of God? The truth of theology is Christ himself. What we should understand, then, is the nature of our participation in the Christ-event as participation in a real­ity that, on the one hand, consists of our memory of the historical happening in Palestine two thousand years ago and, on the other hand, manifests the condescension of God to man, which we believe endures throughout the ages and places. Our constant participation in this event forms the communion with God that sustains our existence as Christians. This leads us to the understanding that the truth of the­ology, its acting ontology, is the proclamation of our existence – that is, that theolog­ical ontology is in its essence an existential ontology.

Modern science could easily dismiss any arguments on the importance of the Christ-event, arguing that there is no necessity in this event, for the necessity, if it were present, would be rooted in natural laws. From a sheer scientific point of view, there is no underlying law for the Christ-event; it is seen as a contingent happening in history, representing the outcome of historical and social circumstances rather than anything fundamental and ontological. But the history of events fits with great difficulty into the general scheme of natural law. It is this inevitability of thinking of the Christ-event in both historical and transcendent rubrics that allows us to affirm that in order to understand the Christ-event, one should participate in it, that is, live with Christ and in Christ liturgically.

The stability of the church’s experience or, in different words, the ontological references of her theologia are thus rooted in two inseparable modes of the church’s existence: her tradition and her worship, because it is in the liturgical reality that the church experiences the stable presence of Christ.183 The liturgy and the communion make the church and her theology because as long as the eucharist exists, the church exists (and vice versa).184 Christian worship is exactly that element of the visible, empirical practice of the church which is stable in time (worship does not cease at any time) and invariant in space (the church and its worship is everywhere in the world). It is because of this stability that we affirm that liturgy constitutes such a sta­ble pattern in the church’s life, which can be treated as the church’s ontological refer­ence, that is, the constitutive element of the reality, which the church experiences and treats as theological truth.

Science and Theology “Compared”

When science in its philosophical arrangement is co-related to theology, it is often assumed that both terms of this relation – science and theology – are uniform terms, that is, their subject matter as well as their metodologies, if not similar, at least allow them both to be considered within a conceptual system wider than the two combined. Put differently, some Western trends in science and theology assume that there is a subject called science, which is concerned with the natural world (and does not need any justification from nonnatural agencies), and there is a subject called theology, academic theology, whose subject is God and God’s relationship with the world and humankind. Then the quest for the relationship between the two subjects is seen as a different, third subject, which by assumption is able not only to grasp knowledge of both science and theology but also to judge their relationship. It is not difficult to imagine, then, that a variety of different outcomes of the relationship between science and theology is possible, because everything becomes a matter of a chosen ad hoc methodology of mediation between science and theology that is “above” both terms and relies on metascientific and metatheological ideas.185

This approach to science and theology becomes possible only because the discursive reason, detached by its ambition from its own spiritual foundation (the spiritual intellect), believes that it is able to ascend above both science and theology and to conduct a comparative analysis of the two from within an intellectual frame that is wider than those in science and theology. Such a frame can be chosen from the vari­ety of philosophies. This assumption contains in itself the premise that science and theology are uniform both epistemologically and ontologically – that is, it assumes that the philosophical foundations of science and theology, if not identical, are uni­form. The naïveté of these assumptions can be grasped easily if one refers to our pre­vious analysis of theology (as theologia) and its obvious dissimilarity with science. The very fact of such a straightforward approach to science and theology points toward the danger that ambitious reason will have to face if, forgetting its own spiri­tual grounds, it tries to judge with authority those aspects of human experience whose nature transcends reason’s capacity. As far back as the fourth century, the Latin Patristic writer Hilary of Poitiers criticized those who applied the logic of their natural reason to things that instead demand “infinite comprehension”: “They measured the omnipotent nature of God by the weakness of their own nature, not that they exalted themselves to the heights of infinity in their conjectures about infinite things, but confined infinite things within the boundaries of their own power of comprehension and made themselves the judges of religion.”186

Such a noncritical reason should probably seek some support from the spiritual intellect. The difficulty that discursive reason experiences in establishing an authoritarian position with respect to science and theology can be characterized as an assumption about a symmetry between science and theology. In fact, this symmetry between science and theology can be established only if science receives its treatment and justification from theology. When we criticized the scheme of the relation between science and theology, in which both are treated as uniform terms, we naturally meant economic theology in its academic version – that is, when it is separated from its experiential grounds, from theologia. Such a detachment of economic theol­ogy from the theologia either has sense as an empty abstraction or is just a fallacy, for, as analyzed earlier, it is theologia as a direct experience of God in personal or ecclesial modes that is the foundation and sense provider for economic theology. This means that all truth affirmed by economic theology is derived epistemologically from the immediate intuition of God through the mystical experience of the church, that is, from theology in the Patristic sense, in which faith in God must be present all the time to initiate and to sanctify the reasoning.

It is easy to realize then that the realities proclaimed by economic theology all have their deep foundation in the life of the transcendent God-Trinity, in God as he is in himself. If economic theology makes serious claims of the presence and activ­ity of God in the world and, then, as follows from our previous discussion, the grounds for this activity are not confined by the limits of created realities – visible (empirical) and invisible (intelligible) – but rather have their origin in the relationship with the God-Trinity, then the last thought can be rephrased to say that the ontology of God’s manifestations in the world is relational upon God’s mystical existence in himself. It is because of this that economic theology is always open-ended with respect to the manifestations of God’s willing and providential condescension to the world. All affirmations that economic theology makes about the presence of God in the world can thus be seen as confirmation of the fundamental theological intuition that the world has its own foundation in God, who creates the world, but who is still transcendent to the world. The neglect of this understanding in the dialogue between science and theology, when economic theology is put on a level with science and both are treated by discursive reason with no reference to the spiritual intellect, represents a theological fallacy rather than a philosophical mistake. It follows thus that the dialogue between science and theology is not possible from a nontheological perspective, for thinking about theology (if it is understood Patristically) is itself the activity of theologizing – that is, it is theology.

Spiritual Intellect and Mediation between Theology and Science

We now draw attention back to the role of the human faculties involved in theology and science. It is quite clear that the main faculty involved in scientific research is rea­son (dianoia), understood in Patristic thought as an analytical part of the human soul. Reason exercises rational, or object-oriented, thinking, based on laws of logic. By its constitution, reason is not in a position to grasp either the inner essences (the logoi) of things or the Divine. Reason needs the help of the nous to advance its abil­ity to comprehend spiritually the logoi of created things. To do this, a person requires not so much training in the use of the logical abilities of reason but an advance in spiritual life, which means the development of the faculty of contemplation (in the modern context, this term would correspond to the faculty of imagination and conceptual intuition). Contemplation’s function is to go beyond the outward appearances of sensible things or intelligible entities to the attentive soul and to “see” behind them the logoi of things or ideas.187

Some Fathers would call this natural contemplation. However, there is not a smooth, logical transition from the appearances of things and their ideas through the reason to the natural contemplation of their logoi. Because, as discussed earlier, the latter relies on the help of the divine part of man (that is, ultimately on the help of God), the Fathers stress that the contemplation of the logoi in creation belongs to the work of the Holy Spirit in humankind’s sanctification and deification.188 Knowledge of the logoi is the divine gift.189 Thus natural contemplation represents a mode of spir­itual knowledge available to man that is not yet theologia but that, according to the Fathers, forms the condition for man to receive true knowledge of God through mys­tical union with God – that is, to receive theologia. But any further advance toward the fulfillment of theologia (which, in theological anthropological language, means the transfiguration of human nature, its deification, the acquisition of the ecclesial hypostasis) has no direct reference to rational faculties of the human soul (this feature of theologia makes it fundamentally different from any kind of gnosticism, be it the ancient heresy of the early church or some novel gnostic movements, such as New Age). Thus there clearly is an ultimate frontier in all attempts of the discursive reason to discover God from within the created world.

When all outward impressions of things and ideas given to reason are exausted, interpreted rationally, and explained logically, reason comes to a clear awareness of its own limited nature, such that it cannot exalt itself beyond its own rationality and logical insufficiency. But before this happens, there is a long road for reason to exercise its curiosity and to attempt to explain things that are not explainable. This reminds us of the apophaticism of theologia as an inability to constitute the concept of truth and the insufficiency of reason to reflect upon the mystical experience of the logoi or the Divine. The natural contemplation of the logoi, which is to expand rea­son beyond its legitimate domain, requires the nonanalytical transition from the fac­ulty of reasoning to the act of faith in God (employing the nous for this purpose), which will persuade the reason to accept its own limit in the search for the Divine, if it exercises the standards of object-oriented thinking. If this happens, reason will have to change its own logic and to transcend itself, thus negating the validity of logic as general conditions of knowledge in favor of “spiritual knowledge,” whose “logic” is different and relational upon the object of spiritual knowledge, the source of the logoi of creation, the divine Logos. This logic, which is (in contradistinction to dis­cursive logic) deeply imbued with faith, can be exercised only in the Spirit; that is, it must be voluntarily sanctioned by God himself.

It is important now to realize, however, that the logical approach to the transition from discursive thinking to natural contemplation can be demonstrated discursively, because it is an ascension from the created realm to its grounds, which are manifested in the otherness of this realm. This demonstration, which is by its function the exercise of logic in its extreme, leads to the understanding that something lies in the foun­dation of the things or ideas in the created realm. The detection of this foundation brings us further to a purely logical conclusion – that the things and ideas that are given to the reason through outward impressions, have in their depth a nonworldly ontology, that is, they are relational upon God. The mediation between theology and science thus requires the understanding in immanent, rational terms how to identify this threshold between the created things and ideas, on the one hand, and their ulti­mate essences, which are not from this world, on the other hand. The problem of the relationship between theology and science is how to give a rational account of knowl­edge beyond the limits of the experience related to this created world, either sensible or intelligible (this is exactly what can be called in the spirit of Torrance a “theological science”), by using concepts established by rational thinking in this world. The pur­pose of this is not to claim that rational thinking can apprehend fully knowledge of the uncreated; rather, the purpose – modest in its aims – is to direct the reason toward what is beyond it, toward what is novel and cannot be grasped in terms of the usual. This mediation between the world where science is an efficient mode of description and the uncreated realm of the Divine, being only directional in its nature and not pretending to say too much on what is the Divine, provides – in the words of Torrance – “the medium of transcendental reference” to God.190

The mediation between science and theology can thus be understood as the development of transcendental references to God from within the faculty of reason, but in such a way that reason exercises its function at its extreme, transgressing intentionally its own limits and leading the thinking to paradox or antinomy that points toward the otherness of the reason itself, as well as the otherness of those ontological references that reason tries to establish. In doing this, reason operates with strange concepts that have a dualistic constitution: on the one hand, they are formed by rational thinking rooted in this world; on the other, because they are directed toward God, they are fundamentally open-ended, for no logical restriction exists on the nonworldly side of these concepts. This incomprehensible, open-ended intelligibility of the Divine makes reason unable to think anymore, for the intelligible entities become nonrational or, more precisely, transrational; reason enters the domain of learned ignorance: it knows that it knows something, but it cannot express what it knows.191

It is intuitively clear that when we refer to the exercise of reason in its extreme, in trespassing the legitimate limits where it can function correctly, we implicitly refer to such a philosophical situation where reason itself must be criticized (a well-known example of such a situation is Kantian transcendental philosophy). What is impor­tant for us here is that philosophy must inevitably be used if one wants to direct rea­son to its limits. Varieties of philosophical systems exist where philosophical theology plays a concluding part. All of these systems exercise reason in order to cre­ate a consistent synthesis with a transition from the world to God. The questions that naturally arise in the context of our research are the following: Can the ideas of the God of the philosophers be useful tools in mediation from science to theology? And, what particular philosophical system would be more suitable for the purposes of the synthesis of science and Orthodox Christian theology? To answer these questions, a review of Orthodox theology’s attitude to philosophy is in order.

Orthodox Theology and Philosophy

We have already discussed that Christian theology, being enclosed in the boundaries of the church’s definitions (Christian dogmas), does not prevent an attentive soul from exploring faith in God through its analytical mode (reason). The only caution that has been clearly articulated since the early church fathers is that reason, in its attempt to ascend to an understanding of the Divine, will have to readjust itself throughout the process not by following a predetermined epistemology of its own but by allowing itself to be involved in open-ended development, which is guided by the infinite intelligibility of God revealed through nous. This evolving reason will have to be deeply rooted in faith in order to find adequate ways of absorbing the knowledge that is provided by the experience of God.

Previous sections focused on the difference between reason (dianoia) and the spiritual intellect (nous). We can approach this difference now from a slightly differ­ent angle: the ability of reason to follow a flexible epistemology of the experience of God is exactly rooted in nous. What does this mean from a philosophical point of view? If we, together with Torrance, accept that theological statements operate with essentially open concepts, concepts that are not constrained by this-worldly logic and references to space and time, and which are open to change in the face of God’s intel­ligibility, we say that the open-ended epistemology of theological inquiry not only assumes the removal from this epistemology of any references to the space and time of this world but also assumes that object-oriented thinking, which is based on the ordinary logic of propositions such as “A is B” or “A is not B,” must be completely abandoned.192 The way that reason functions with respect to the open experience of an infinite God should acquire the features of the relational logic rooted ontologically in the reality of the Divine.

What philosophical system, then, can demonstrate the shift from the logic assotiated with object-oriented thinking to that of relational logic, in which the object of inquiry cannot be predicated at all? The following section will show that the demonstration we are seeking is possible and can be developed in the framework of apophatic theology by employing a particular philosophical approach as a starting point. Is it essential that we use a particular line of philosophical arguments to demonstrate the need for a change of logic in theology? Can other philosophical trends to be useful for theology? In order to respond to these questions, we should briefly discuss the ontological aspects of the transition from worldly logic to open, “illogical” epistemology.

When we affirm that theology can be adequately expressed in a conceptual frame only if this frame is not fixed, and is therefore subject to changes and developments, which are driven by its subject matter (the Divine), we also affirm that fundamental ontological differences exist between this world and the realm of the Divine. It is exactly this different ontology of the Divine that demands a development of open epis­temology, any suitable epistemology that will be a part of the dynamics of approaching the Divine, guided by faith and kept within its boundaries. This poses, however, a seri­ous problem for the development of such a new, open epistemology; most classical philosophical systems are monistic, and correspondingly their epistemology could be applied effectively only within the world. The same problem will arise in any attempt to mediate between theology (dualistic in its nature) and science (monistic by its aims and construction). We have pointed out that attempts have been made to remove this problem: the discursive reason (dianoia), if it is detached from its roots in the spiritual intellect (nous), is tempted to level theology and science in order to eliminate ontolog­ical differences in their systems and then to compare them as uniform terms.

An alternative to this approach would be to develop a consistent system of ontological dualism, which, in the manner of any existing philosophical theologies, could offer the conceptual basis of Christian faith. In the latter case, the mediation between science and theology would become a hierarchical relationship, in which science, being monistic, would be a lower term in the unified philosophical and theological synthesis, which is “dualistic.” This was the tendency of the early church fathers, rooted in their afifinity to Platonism. Agreeing in general with their line of thought, we still should make clear one point to make our view coherent with what we said before on open epistemology. Even if we accept that the philosophical frame of thought suitable for theology and its mediation with science should be dualistic, it does not imply that epistemology, built upon this system and operating from within our human capacity, should be fixed (that is, conceptually, the system of ontological dualism would be developed once and forever).

The fundamental feature of ontological dualism is that it affirms that the ontol­ogy of this world is relational upon the realm of the Divine, which implies that the epistemology that is to grasp this dualism is relational in turn upon a “limitless eternity of God” and demands an “infinite comprehension” of things by which God is known in the world. To say that theology, philosophically, is a dualistic system is equivalent to saying that one needs open epistemology in order to express this dual­ism – that is, that any philosophical form of expression of the Divine through the capacities of our creaturely reason is relational not upon the fixed categorical bound­aries provided outwardly by the relationship between subject and object but on the Divine itself, entering into the human person through nous. This means that when we quote “ontological dualism” in a theological context, we simply set the boundaries of our philosophizing about God. This is similar to Christian dogmas understood as boundaries of faith: they never exhaust faith in terms of a personal encounter with God. Similarly, “ontological dualism” is just a delimiter, which states clearly that no monistic philosophy can hope to express, conceptually, divine truth. The dualistic frame provides the freedom of search, the openness of intellectual expressions of faith, which never constitute a closed, accomplished vision of God, for all of these will exercise an attempt to break the monistic ontology rooted in the ontology of the world. This makes clear that the dualism between God and the world is another expression of the apophaticism of Orthodox theology, which implies in turn that all philosophical systems have a similar weight in their utility in theology – that is, there is no particular philosophy that would better fit the purposes of theology than any other. Thus what particular language of philosophy must be employed is not so important, since its role is mostly to express in rational terms the experience of God, not to propose any ontological schemes for God’s being.

There is no risk of using philosophy in theology if one follows the rule of apophaticism that concepts never exhaust truth. Lossky highlights this point, referring to the Fathers of the church: “The question of the relations between theology and philosophy has never arisen in the East. The apophatic attitude gave to the Fathers of the Church that freedom and liberty with which they employed philo­sophical terms without running the risk of being misunderstood or of falling into a "theology of concepts.’”193 Lossky’s conclusion seems similar to the results of our dis­cussion above: “There is no philosophy more or less Christian.”194

This observation provides us with a valuable methodological rule on mediation between science and theology, namely, that any suitable philosophy can be used as a methodological tool for such mediation. Since there is no fixed subordination between Eastern Orthodox theology and philosophy, one is free to employ any philo­sophical models and schemes to reveal the relationship between theology and sci­ence, as long as such schemes fall under two “dogmatic” requirements: they must be both dualistic and open-ended. This would require following the spirit of theologi­cal apophaticism, which simultaneously sets the boundaries of the dialogue between Orthodox theology and science and secures us from any danger of substituting scientifico-philosophical ideas in place of the living God of Orthodox faith.

Orthodox Theology and Science: Epistemological Formula

It should be clear from the previous analysis that, theologically speaking, it is impossible to build an accomplished, fixed epistemology that could serve theology once and forever. This points to a fundamental methodological conclusion that, with ref­erence to the ontological dualism between God and the world, we are actually saying only one thing: that the ontology of this world is relational upon God. The only way to express this philosophically, using the categories of thought from this world, is to say that the experience of this relational ontology transcends the norm of creaturely rationality, involving in itself the process of multilogical, irrational, or open-ended thinking, which those who like clarity and simple logic would call mysticism. Indeed, the open-ended epistemology exactly resembles mysticism from the point of view of a person trained in the rigorous logic of propositions. This merger of the open-endedness of theological discourse with mysticism indicates what we have already denoted as the apophaticism of theology, that is, an inability to express adequately the experience of God by using concepts and logic employed by reason.

It is interesting to note that the very existence of an opposition of dualism versus monism, in the mediation between science and theology in human thought, is pos­sible only because of the position of humans as microcosm, that is, as the only beings capable of mediating between the sensible and the intelligible, between the created and God. Humans are the only creatures who are able to think in a twofold way – on the one hand, to think in classical Hellenistic terms bounding oneself to the necessity of the world, and thus denying its own freedom from the world; on the other hand, being spiritually advanced, to long for freedom from this world, looking for its source beyond the world in God. It is this aspect of humankind’s mediating position between the world and God (humans as zoon theoumenon) that makes mediation between science and theology possible at all. It follows, then, that, without faith in God, reason cannot even see the problem of science and theology. It is only through faith that the problem of how to reconcile monistic science with theological dualism can be tackled in a way that preserves the rigor of scientific method in its search for contingent truth as well as the profession of faith in God as an ultimate ground of this truth. This makes the mediation between science and theology a plausible and justified undertaking.

When we affirm that theology must rely on open epistemology – that is, apophati­cism as to the inability to have an accomplished conceptual presentation of the Divine – we inevitably promote the same view in relation to the mediation between theology and science. In other words, the logic that has to be developed in relation to such a mediation should depart from its naive version (such as when science and theology are related to each other in such concepts as friendship, compatibility, complementarity, assimilation, and confrontation). What kind of logic must replace these naive choices? To construct a new epistemological formula of the relationship between science and theology, we here undertake a case study by appealing to a par­ticular passage in Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. This passage states precisely and clearly what to expect from theology in its relation to science. Our analy­sis will allow a provisional justification of the methodology of mediation between the­ology and science.

Lossky proposes his formula in the context of the discussion of an attempt by Father Pavel Florensky, one of the original Russian theologians of the twentieth cen­tury, who was also a scientist, to build a joint scientific and theological venture. In response to Florensky’s attempt, Lossky states that any new cosmology and actually “any scientifically defensible synthesis has no real value for Christian theology, which is able to accommodate itself very easily to any scientific theory of the universe, provided that this does not attempt to go beyond its own boundaries and begins impertinently to deny things which are outside its own field of vision.”195

Any straightforward, naive interpretation of this quotation could create the wrong impression that there is not and cannot be any mediation or dialogue between Eastern Orthodox theology and science; however, this is only a surface impression. When Lossky says that science “has no real value” for theology, this statement, despite its outwardly negative tone, has a positive meaning for our discussion, because it declares that there is no conflict between science and Orthodox theology. This is an inspiring beginning in our search for relationship between science and theology, if one hopes to avoid confrontation and to establish mediation between the two. What Lossky probably means here is that science is not able to engage any conflict with theology or to add anything new to it that could change its dogmas, that is, the boundaries of its experience. Lossky does not spell it out, but he assumes that since the subject of science is rooted in the created world, it is hardly to be believed that science could advance theology as the experience of nonworldly things. Since true theology is the way toward mystical union with God, Lossky argues that any reference to the natural sciences has meaning for theology in the following sense: “The cosmology, or rather cosmologies, of the Fathers, have only been mentioned here in order to single out from them certain theological ideas which have their place in the doctrine of union with God.”196

This is why, in the second part of the same quotation, Lossky states that Orthodox theology “is able to accommodate itself” to any scientific theory. In doing so, he tacitly admits that the relationship between science and theology is possible. However, this relationship follows a special type of logic. It assumes that, despite the fact that any advance in science does not change anything in the primes of theology, theology incorporates any scientific novelty into its conceptual structure with no loss of its truth and meaning as experience of the live God.

One can observe some dialectics in the relationship between science and theology deduced from Lossky’s quotation. On the one hand, nothing from positive knowl­edge of the world can disturb or amend the personal mystical experience of God in this world. God as he is revealed to us through faith is not accessible by science or by any type of comprehension based on the logic and faculties bounded by the created realm, which is not God. On the other hand, scientific knowledge can be properly treated by apophatic theology in a sophisticated manner (for example, the Patristic approach to science) when nature and science receives its interpretation from its pur­poses and end – that is, science could acquire some features of theological inquiry.

One can formalize this dialectics in the form of antinomy on science and theology:

Thesis: Science has no real value for Christian theology.

Antithesis: Christian theology is able to accommodate itself to any scientific theory.

If one considers the thesis and antithesis in this antinomy as symmetrical propositions, it is no wonder that the antinomy will look like a contradictory statement. It has been known, however, since Kant that the genuine meaning of antinomies is not to formulate simple puzzles but, on the contrary, to point out serious epistemologi­cal problems dealing with the limits of applicability of the concepts entering the antinomies – in our case, the limits of science in its relationship to theology. This antinomy touches also the difference between science and theology in terms of their different, but at the same time overlapping, ontological references.

Let us first clarify that there is no symmetry between the thesis and antithesis in this antinomy. If one treats the thesis in isolation – that is, as not a part of the antinomy – it is natural to arrive at a principle of complementarity of science and theol­ogy: that they operate in different domains. Science conducts its inquiry within its own logic and methods in the realm of contingent nature, searching for a pattern in the created order, whereas theology makes its inquiry in the transcendent ground of this order by using rational thinking and religious experience to contemplate the otherness of this world and acquire the vision of the Divine.197 The principle of com­plementarity makes the dialogue between science and theology meaningless, and even impossible.

The disadvantage of this approach is that one loses the chance of an interpretative treatment of science by theology (and vice versa) as well as a reflection upon both science and theology as two modes of human experience that both flourish from the common source, the human’s nous, the divine part in man.

The antithesis states that Christian theology can easily accommodate itself to any scientific theory. This statement opens a way to treat all theories of the world order as activities that look, in a historical perspective, as existing in their own right; but, if they are understood anthropologically, they originate from the same source in human beings, their spiritual intellect. If we accept that both theology and science manifest two modes of spiritual activity of human beings, it is hardly possible to also accept that these two modes lead to contradictory views on the nature and meaning of humankind and the universe as God’s creation. This is why an understanding of the meaning of science would benefit if carefully treated within a broader theologi­cal context (one that relies on open epistemology). Only in this case can Lossky’s statement, made implicitly in the thesis that any scientific synthesis cannot affect the­ology, indeed be interpreted in a positive sense – that is, nothing in science (as only a component of a much broader experience) can be in opposition to the wholeness of this experience that is theological by definition.

It does not mean that everything in science has a genuine theological meaning. Theology is dealing, rather, with questions of ultimate reality and the meaning of all that exists in its transcendent ground in God. Science, on the contrary, has many worldly insights and technological implications, which are useful for man’s earthly existence but have nothing to say about the meaning of nature and its origin. There are several fundamental issues in science, however, that deal either with the total aspects of the world or with the principles of life and knowing that could challenge theology and thus need to be placed in the focus of the dialogue between science and theology.

One should stress, however, that science in the proposed treatment is not subordinated to theology. Scientific activity takes place in the realm of contingent nature, and its aim is not to produce philosophical models or theological ideas as inferred from knowledge of facts in this realm but to investigate nature. The fact that theories can have theological meaning can be revealed only from beyond science, by a kind of external introspection, when scientific theories become a subject of philosophical or theological contemplation. This is why, instead of subordination of science to theol­ogy, we treat the antithesis as a theological judgment about scientific activities, treated as man’s endeavor of seeking knowledge of God from within creation.198

The positive evaluation of the thesis comes in a paradoxical way from its purely negative assertion that “science has no real value for theology.” Indeed, if one excludes interaction between science and theology, this in turn prevents conflict. The further implication of the thesis could be to reverse the formula in order to say that theology has no real value to science. Fortunately this reversion is not possible, for, as is well known, scientific theories have deep roots in metaphysics and implicit theo­logical principl∩es.199

The antithesis, in its positive affirmation that theology can “accommodate itself to any scientific theory,” affirms, in fact, that there is essentially no difference among different branches of science as related to theology; all of them have the same weight when compared to theology (this is similar to our previous conclusion that there is no particular philosophical system that fits better with Christian faith than the others). All sciences have a common principle (logos, the underlying principle of their functioning, structure, object of interest). This principle can be formulated so that all varieties of the scientific discourse have a similar relationship to theology: the latter can accommodate itself to them. Or, in different words, all varieties of the sciences have common metaphysical ground (monism), which makes them all similar with respect to theology (which is nontrivially dualistic in its essence). The existence of this principle makes impossible the reversal of the thesis – that is, making the claim that theology has no real value for science – because the logos of science is that it is methodologically and epistemologically rooted in philosophy and theology (scien­tists can think of the world because the world is endowed with intelligibility, and humans have access to it through dianoia and nous).

It can now be easily understood that the antinomy, constructed from the quota­tion from Lossky, is not exactly an antinomy in classical form, such as that of Kant, for example. There is an asymmetry between the thesis and the antithesis that is based on the difference of their ontological references. The thesis can be treated as a statement that the subject domain where science and theology can meet is void. In mathematical symbols, the thesis can be written as S ∩ T = 0. The antithesis can be written in a symbolic form as the proposition S U T = T – that is, that the subject domain of the­ology is wider than that of science; the scientific domain is a subset of the realm of theological inquiry in both the ontological and the epistemological sense. It is easy to observe, then, a formal contradiction between the thesis (S ∩ T = 0) and the antithe­sis (S U T = T). The fallacy originates from a wrong conclusion that the thesis implies that science and theology operate in two distinct subject domains that are different not only methodologically but also ontologically. The antithesis demonstrates that this is incorrect, because it explains that the ontological references in both science and theology, being different, do not exclude a relationship between science and theology, for the subject domain of science is not outside that of theology but is just a subset of the latter. This means that the symbolic formula for the thesis must be corrected as follows: S ∩ T = S; hence it removes a contradiction with the antithesis S U T = T. Both the thesis and the antithesis lead us to a simple formula that theology incorporates science epistemologically and ontologically:

S ϵ T.

The antinomy based on the passage from Lossky is resolved now by recovering a proper meaning of those ontological references that are present implicitly in Lossky’s statement. One can now reformulate this antinomy as an “antithetical” proposition:

Thesis: Science has no real value for Christian theology in the sense that its subject domain is narrower than that of theology, and science cannot affect theology in its concerns with things that transcend scientific inquiry.

Antithesis: Christian theology is able to accommodate itself to any scientific theory, because the ontology of the subject domain of theology is broader than that of science and contains the scientific domain as its subset. Theological epistemology is open, that is, it is able to incorporate any particular scheme science uses in its methodology.

A kind of dialectics in the relationship between science and theology, which we develop here, may probably upset “hard-line” scientists, who can argue that the sci­entific method (because of its incredible efficiency in knowing things and transforming them) has every right to be free from employing the ideas of transnatural causes in order to prove some truth about the world. Theology, in such a view, is always redundant or superfluous because it makes things more complex. The prob­lem, however, as we have said before, is that those aspects of scientific theory that have relevance to the dialogue with theology are based on many tacit philosophical presuppositions (which are often not spelled out clearly in theories themselves). This indicates that the scientific enterprise always exists in a wider social and cultural con­text, which is dependent on the dominant philosophical and theological views of reality and which penetrates science, influencing the outcomes of its quest.200

Any scientific inquiry is carried out under the rubric of rational thinking, which has a limited domain of application (an epistemological horizon) that predetermines its ontology. It is always difficult for science to transcend this horizon and to judge its ontological statements from outside, from an epistemological frame that transcends the world (into the realm of existence not embraced by science), because this “out­side” is not identified by science as a comprehensible, objective reality.

The belief in a single reality, as the only reality, which is comprehensible by rational inquiry, constitutes the philosophical position of science known as onto­logical monism. It does not actually matter whether this monism is rooted in empiricism or dogmatic rationalism (in different terms: objective realism [materialism] versus idealism). The crucial feature of monism is its belief in the self-sufficient and self-explanatory nature of the world, which is ontologically necessary and does not assume anything from beyond in order to sustain its order and the cause of its existence.

Science never questions how to free itself from the necessity of that ontology, which forms a basis for any research. It is simply impossible, because science cannot make an ecstatic exit from its own monistic boundaries in order to evaluate itself from a broader epistemological perspective – that is, science is not able to develop an awareness that the world has no grounds of its being in this being (the world is not causa sui). If this were to happen, science would cease to be just an exploration of the outward world; it would transform into a metascientific (philosophical) enterprise conducting a quest for general principles of the knowledge and foundations of the world. These principles that structure our reason cannot be deduced from science in any chain of empirical causation (the old Kantian assertion).

As soon as philosophical scientists realize that science cannot overcome the monistic ontological necessity in its epistemology and ontology on its own, they will become prepared to start thinking of the breakthrough beyond its boundaries by appealing to open epistemology, aiming to identify the ultimate references of the actual content of scientific knowledge in the otherness of the world.

The gradually growing self-awareness by the scientific mind of its limitedness rooted in a monistic view of the world should lead in the long run to an under­standing of the difference between science and theology, for theology’s primary aim is to transcend the world and affirm in an apophatic way the things that are not sub­ject to ordinary grasp. Science and theology thus stand as two different philosophi­cal systems: (1) ontological monism of the world in science and (2) ontological dualism between God the creator and the world in theology. This points out from a different perspective that any straightforward mediation between science and theol­ogy is philosophically problematic and brings us back to the problem of the relationship between theology and philosophy. As we have seen in the previous section, this problem constitutes a special issue. Science, as a counterpart in the dialogue with theology, cannot enter this dialogue in a “pure scientific” mode; it will be inevitably interpreted in a wide cultural, linguistic, and social context, in a way that puts the global perception of science into metascientific perspective. Philosophy thus plays the role of a linguistic and conceptual mediator between the rational patterns of science and the open-ended apophaticism of theology. The mediation between science and theology can be attempted, therefore, only from within theol­ogy, and, as will be argued later, can be achieved as a mode of theological knowledge or, in broader terms, as a mode of Christian religious experience. Such a mediation can employ any possible philosophy within its capacity to mediate between dualism and monism, as well as by being not an a priori set of logical rules but an open- ended epistemology following the ways of apophaticism.201

In this chapter, we formulated an epistemological formula for mediation between science and Orthodox theology based on the assumption that the domain of theol­ogy, as a cognitive expression of belief in God, is broader than the domain of science, which explores a subdomain corresponding to the created world. That is why the mediation between science and theology is in fact an inseparable part of the undivided experience of personhood as communion with being and God. The task is to make the experience of mediation between science and theology clearly formulated in categories of thought; the apophaticism of the Orthodox theology grants us the freedom to employ any philosophical ideas and schemes to develop the methodology of mediation.

* * *

116

Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, p. 308.

117

Evagrius Ponticus On Prayer, 61 [ET: p. 62].

118

Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) Orations 27.3, 28.1 [ET: Norris, pp. 218 – 219, p. 224]. Compare with St. John the Klimakos’s affirmation that “the climax of purity is the beginning of theology.” Scalara Paradisi 30 [ET: p. 108].

119

Evagrius On Prayer 61 [ET: p. 57].

120

On the notion of cosmic liturgy in Maximus, see Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, pp. 397 – 398.

121

Maximus the Confessor Four Hundred Texts on Love 2.26 [ET: p. 69].

122

Maximus the Confessor Two Hundred Texts on Theology 1.83, 2.15 [ET: p. 132, p. 141].

123

Gregory Palamas The Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defence of Those Who Devoutly Practise a Life of Stillness [ET: p.421 ].

124

Vasileos, Hymn of Entry, pp. 22 – 23.

125

See “Theology,” in the glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

126

One should mention the difference between the words participation and communion that was developed by the Greek Fathers. Participation was used only in the context of creatures in their relation to God and never was applied to God’s relation to the created. Communion represents a more general notion. It was used to express the truth of God’s being as communion of love. Communion has deep ontological connotations, for to participate means to take part in something that is separate and prior with respect to the agency participating, whereas to commune means to be involved in one’s own othernness, which con­stitutes one’s very existence. In other words, communion is an existential and ontological category, whereas participation represents knowledge, or only an epistemological dependence. See, e.g., Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 94.

127

See Allchin, “The Appeal to Experience in the Triads of St. Gregory Palamas,” pp. 323 – 328.

128

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 2.19.1 [ET: ANF, p. 385]; see also 4.38.4 [ET: ANF, p. 522].

129

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 4.18.5 [ET: ANF, p. 486].

130

Peter of Damaskos, Twenty Four Discourses [ET: p. 277]. The question of truth in theology – that is, what makes us sure that the theological experience is true – can thus be considered as an ontological ques­tion. Truth of theology is guaranteed by the fact that theology through its function in the church’s tradi­tion creates reality in the same way that God reveals himself to us. Theology that is not ontological, that is, whose mode of existence is nonhypostatic, is just an illusion and a fallacy.

131

Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies 3.24.1 [ET: ANF, p. 458].

132

Reference to this feature of the eucharist can be found in the first canonical documents of the church, such as Didache and Apostolic Tradition. For a full discussion of this issue, see Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 81 – 82, p. 118, ch. 4, 5.

133

V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, pp. 8 – 9.

134

T. Ware, The Orthodox Church, p. 215.

135

Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 15.

136

Yannaras, “Theology in Present-Day Greece,” p. 207.

137

Torrance, Theological Science, p. 39 (emphasis added).

138

Diadochos of Photiki On Spiritual Knowledge 7 [ET: p. 254].

139

As we have seen before, this experience includes prayer, katarsis, communion (eucharist), and charisma.

140

“Discussion of theology is not for everyone Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry.” Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) Orations 27.3 [ET: Norris, p. 218].

141

Gregory the Theologian argued that theology can be pursued by those persons who combine the Christian faith and Greek paideia; theology “is not for all men, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing, purification of body and soul.” Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) Orations 27.3 [ET: Norris, p. 218].

142

V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 16.

143

See Clement of Alexandria Strom. 2.4 [ET: pp. 349 – 351].

144

Augustine Epistolae 120.

145

Torrance, Theological Science, p. 36.

146

We discuss the difference between the spiritual intellect (nous) and the reason (dianoia) later. See the glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

147

Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West, p. 152. Compare with Clement of Alexandria (knowl­edge requires an ultimate presupposition, which is faith) or with Augustine (one should believe in order to understand).

148

Isaac the Syrian Homilies 51 [ET: p. 243].

149

Isaac the Syrian Homilies 51 [ET: p. 243, p. 246].

150

Isaac the Syrian Homilies 51 [ET: p. 246].

151

Isaac the Syrian Homilies 51 [ET: p. 250].

152

Athanasius of Alexandria De decretis 2 (P.G. 25.41 lc) [ET: p. 367].

153

See, e.g., Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 16, p. 150.

154

Florovsky, “The Lost Scriptural Mind,” p. 14.

155

Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” p. 109.

156

Zizioulas, Being As Communion, p. 117.

157

Zizioulas, Being As Communion, p. 118.

158

V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 15. Florovsky conveys the same message: “Apart from life in Christ theology carries no conviction and, if separated from the life of faith, theology may degenerate into empty dialectics, a vain polylogia, without any spiritual consequence”. Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” p. 108. The academic theology can be characterized as disincarnate faith, which constitutes the matter of opinion and subject of vain discussions.

159

Torrance, Theological Science, p. 9.

160

Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” p. 108.

161

Basil the Great Letters 7 [ET: p. 115].

162

For a more precise explanation of the difference between dianoia and nous, see the entries for the terms reason and intellect in the glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

163

See, e.g., McMullin, The Inference That Makes Science.

164

Maximus the Confessor Two Hundred Texts on Theology 1.8 [ET: p. 115].

165

Glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

166

In chapter 4, we will mark the limit of the reason by investigating the boundaries of rational rea­soning exercised in its attempt to catch the divine from within the world. We will see that the rationality based on the execution of syllogism in theology must be replaced by antinomial-like structures of com­prehension, which lead the reason ultimately to silence, that is, to a humble acceptance of its own limits.

167

Glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

168

Maximus the Confessor Various Texts on Theology 3.31 [ET: p. 215].

169

Maximus the Confessor Various Texts on Theology 3.31 [ET: p. 276].

170

Maximus the Confessor Two Hundred Texts on Theology 1.9 [ET: p. 116]. Compare this affirmation with a similar thought of Clement of Alexandria in chapter 2.

171

See Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 105.

172

Maximus the Confessor Four Hundred Texts on Love 4.50 [ET: p. 106].

173

Maximus the Confessor Four Hundred Texts on Love 4.50 [ET: p. 106].

174

V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 18.

175

The word economy (economia) stands for the Greek οικονομία, literally, “housekeeping” or “household management,” that is, the activity of God in the created world.

176

Florovsky, “St. Athanasius’ Concept of Creation,” p. 52.

177

We discuss later the concept of the uncreated energies and their link to the concept of the logoi employed in the theology of St. Maximus the Confessor. It is through immanent aspect of the logoi that one receives the manifestation of God in the created world, and it is the transcendent aspects of the logoi that link all the logoi in the Divine Logos and that constitute the principle of being for the immanent logoi.

178

See V. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 15.

179

See Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, ch. 2.

180

This correlates with a Kantian vision: that the truth of the appearances of things subsists in their spatial and temporal forms, which, according to Kant, form a frame of the integrated transcendental expe­rience and the last resort, and guarantor, of truth. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 194.

181

See, e.g., Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, chs. 7,8.

182

This constitutes the essence of the so-called eucharistic ecclesiology, which has been developed by J. Zizioulas.

183

On the elaborate exposition of the concept of the tradition in Orthodoxy, see, e.g., Florovsky “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church.” On the importance of the presence of the Patristic mind in the church, see Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers.” See also V. Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions”; and Meyendorf, Living Tradition.

184

See Zizioulas, Being As Communion; see also McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church.

185

The relationship between science and theology is often described in modern sources by using such words as consonance, compatibility, consistency, conflict, and confrontation. See, e.g., Russell et al., eds., John Paul II on Science and Religion. One finds different classifications of the relationship between science and reli­gion, which are made under different headings. See, e.g., Barbour, “Ways of Relating Science and Theology.” See also Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science; and Drees, “A 3 X 3 Classification of Science-and-Religion.”

186

Hilary of Poitiers The Trinity 1.15 [ET: pp. 15 – 16].

187

The term contemplation (Gk. Ѳеоріа) is defined in the glossary of Palmer et al., eds., The Philokalia.

188

See Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 78.

189

Maximus the Confessor Various Texts on Theology 1.94, 3.33 [ET: p. 186, p. 217].

190

Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, p. 21.

191

Latin, docta ignorantia.

192

Despite the historical dimension of theology as teaching and thinking in terms of space and time, theology understood Patristically, as silent gnosis or communion with God, transcends history and space-time. Thomas Torrance uses the term divine dimension, which makes sense of any creaturely expressions of the theological teaching, and opens us to a special form of rationality where we can conceive the foun­dation to our divine affinity. See Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation.

193

V. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 42.

194

V. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 42.

195

V. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 106 (emphasis added).

196

V. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 106.

197

Compare Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, pp. 179 – 180.

198

It is worth noting that theological treatment of science does not necessarily mean a theistic inter­pretation of scientific facts and theories; the latter would take place if we were to develop a natural theol­ogy. The treatment proposed deals rather with a methodological evaluation of science in general from a theological perspective. This differs crucially from what is called “the philosophy of science,” not only because of the difference in epistemological schemes of philosophy and theology but also because of dif­ferent purposes of the evaluation of science.

199

The simplest illustration of this principle is the very possibility of science. To exercise science, one should believe at least in the existence of the reality of what is investigated. This is, rather, a metaphysical belief. If one wishes to maintain the line that scientific research has a purpose, this purpose can be derived ultimately only from the reality of what is investigated. This implies that nature itself has a purpose. The last inference is definitely theological in origin.

200

On the role of philosophical principles in forming scientific theories, see, e.g., McMullin, The Inference That Makes Science; Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality; Chalmers, Science and Its Fabrication; Gillies, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century; and Newton-Smith, Rationality of Science. On the social determination of scientific knowledge, see, e.g., McMullin, ed., The Social Dimensions of Science. An interesting paper written by famous quantum physicist W. Heisenberg, “Scientific and Religious Truth,” offers some valuable insights on how the ideologies of particular societies influence the choice of scientific paradigm of the time.

201

J. Polkinghorne, in his Belief in God in an Age of Srience, argues that the dialogue between science and theology demands more involvement of theologians. This is quite coherent with our view of science as a mode of religious experience. It is not enough to reflect on scientific theories in order to claim whether this experience can enhance theology or vice versa. One should attempt the theology of science, which would be methodologically similar to philosophy of science in its function, but fundamentally dif­ferent in its particular conceptual realization.


Источник: Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition / A.V. Nesteruk - Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 2003. - 287 p. ISBN 0800634993

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