Contemporary Orthodox Theology
ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 silenced a long and vibrant intellectual tradition within Orthodox Christianity. It would take nearly 400 years before a revival occurred in 19th-century Russia, which then saw the emergence of an intellectual tradition that was rooted in the Orthodox theological and liturgical tradition, but that also sought to engage modern philosophical currents streaming into Russia, especially German idealism. From this particular trajectory emerged what is referred to as the Russian school. The best-known and most influential scholar of the Russian school is Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853–1900), considered to be the father of Russian Sophiology. Two ideas were central to Solovyov’s thought: the humanity of God (bogochelovechestvo) and Sophia.
Solovyov’s concept of the humanity of God is related to the Orthodox dogmatic principle of the divine-human union in Christ. Solovyov, however, was far from a dogmatician. His philosophy attempts to express the Orthodox principle of the divine-human union in Christ in critical engagement with the categories of German idealism. The humanity of God forms the basis for Solovyov’s attempt to conceptualize a God who is both transcendent of and immanent to creation. Solovyov expresses this particular understanding of the God-world relation with the concept of Sophia, and by so doing gives birth to the Sophiological tradition of the Russian school. God is Sophia, which means that God eternally relates to creation, and creation itself (that is, created Sophia) is a movement of reconciliation towards divine Sophia. More than any other contemporary Orthodox theologian, Solovyov attempted to develop the implications of divine-human communion for a political theology and for a theology of culture.
Although the thought of the Russian school bears the stamp of Solovyov’s Sophiology up until the 1917 Revolution, it was Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871–1944) who advanced the most sophisticated development of Solovyov’s thought. Bulgakov was more conversant than Solovyov with the eastern patristic tradition, and his Sophiology is expressed explicitly in the idiom of the traditional theological dogmas and categories of the Orthodox tradition. The most developed form of Bulgakov’s Sophiology appears in his dogmatic trilogy On Divine Humanity (O bogochelovechestve, 1933–45), the first English translation of which would only appear nearly sixty years later.
Unlike Solovyov, Bulgakov’s Sophiology is more explicitly trinitarian and appropriates traditional trinitarian language. The Trinity is the Father’s self-revelation in the Son, who is the objective content of the Father’s self-revelation. According to Bulgakov, the self-revelation of the Father is not complete until the content that is revealed in the Son is actualized as life by the Holy Spirit. Sophia is identified with the homoousion of the Trinity, but particularly as the ousia hypostatized as the selfrevelation of God. As such, it is more than simply what the persons possess in common, but the very trinitarian being of
God. As the very being of God, Sophia must necessarily refer to God’s relation to the world, and not simply to the intra-trinitarian relations, because, for Bulgakov, the self-revelation of God in the Logos and the Holy Spirit is the revelation of all that God is, and included in “all that God is” is God’s relation to creation and humanity.
For Bulgakov, the relations between the trinitarian persons are best understood in terms of kenosis, as a movement of selfgiving and self-receiving that has the capacity to overflow and reflect itself in the creation of the world. Anticipating later liberation theology, Bulgakov argues that the crucifixion of Christ reveals the kenosis of each of the persons of the Trinity, which includes the co-suffering of the Father with the Son. Always participating in the divine Sophia, the world as created Sophia is moving toward the unity of all in God’s life, which is given in and made possible by the kenosis of the Son and completed by the Holy Spirit.
Sophiology did not survive in the Orthodox world in any influential form past Bulgakov. Its demise was partly due to the explicit refutation of Sophiology by Orthodox thinkers in the Russian diaspora whose own understanding of Orthodox theology would come to be known as the Neopatristic school. Although this school has roots in the translations of the eastern patristic texts made in Russia, it is most associated with Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) and Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky (1903–58). Florovsky framed the debate with Russian Sophiology in terms of the relation between theology and philosophy. He coined the phrase “Neopatristic synthesis,” asserting that theology must be rooted in the language and categories of the eastern patristic texts.
For Lossky, however, the debate with Sophiology was not primarily about the relation between theology and philosophy; it was about conceptualizing the transcendent and immanent God. Both Bulgakov and Lossky share a similar starting point in theology: the principle of divine-human communion, that is, theosis. They both agree that divine-human communion is not simply the goal of the Christian life but the very presupposition, the first principle, in all theological thought. Their debate over the relation between theology and philosophy is really a disagreement over the implications of the affirmation of divine-human communion.
For Lossky, much like Bulgakov, the divine-human union in Christ is the starting point for theological thinking about God. Insofar as this union is one between two opposites, between what is God and what is not God, it is beyond the grasp of human reason, whose capacity for understanding is restricted to created reality. While human reason functions on the basis of the law of non-contradiction, the incarnation demands that theology be antinomic, that is, it must affirm the non-opposition of opposites. Theology’s function is to give expression to the divine-human communion in Christ, which reveals the antinomic God, the God who is radically immanent in Christ and whose very immanence reveals God’s radical transcendence. Its purpose is not to attempt to resolve the antinomy through reason but to stretch language so as to speak of the divine-human communion in Christ in such a way that it might guide a person toward true knowledge of God, which is mystical union with God beyond reason. Theology is apophatic, by which Lossky means two things: that language is inadequate to represent the God beyond all representation, and that true knowledge of God consists in experience of God and not in propositions rooted in human logic.
The affirmation of the God who is beyond being, and yet radically immanent to creation, is the basis for the essence- energies distinction. The essence of God refers to God’s transcendence, while the energies refer to God’s immanence and the means for communion with God. True knowledge of God consists in participation in the energies of God, which are uncreated. The crystallization of the essence-energies distinction can be traced back to the medieval hesychast St. Gregory Palamas. Lossky, together with Florovsky and John Meyendorff (1926–92), represented the essence-energies distinction as uniquely characteristic of, and central to, Orthodox theology. Its centrality has since been affirmed by virtually every 20th-century Orthodox theologian, including the Romanian Dumitru Staniloae (1903–93), the most famous outside the Russian and Greek orbits, and it is the reason why Orthodox theology today is often referred to as Neo-Palamite. The distinction was also used in polemics against neo-scholastic understandings of created grace.
In addition to the essence-energies distinction, an additional antinomy is foundational for theology: God as Trinity. The goal of theology is not to explain how God is Trinity but to express the antinomy. The patristic categories of ousia and hypostasis are given in the tradition in order to express what is common and incommunicable in God as Trinity. The trinitarian categories, however, also provide the foundation for an understanding ofpersonhood that is defined as irreducible uniqueness to and freedom from nature. Lossky was also a vehement opponent of the filioque, which he interpreted as the natural result of the rationalization of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Beginning in the 1960s, the work of Lossky and Florovsky had a significant influence on a group of young theologians in Greece, most notably Nikos Nissiotis (1925–86), Christos Yannaras (b. 1935), and John Zizioulas (b. 1931). Elements of Lossky’s theology, such as apophaticism, the essence-energies distinction, and the theology of personhood, are evident in Yannaras’s major work of 1970, Person and Eros. The most influential of these theologians is John Zizioulas, who synthesized the Eucharistic theology of Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) and Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) with the theology of personhood of Lossky, via Yannaras.
Zizioulas, like Bulgakov and Lossky, affirms the principle of divine-human communion as the starting point of all theology, but unlike Lossky’s emphasis on the ascetic, mystical ascent to God, Zizioulas argues that the experience of God is communal in the event of the Eucharist. According to Zizioulas, early Christians experienced the Eucharist as the constitution of the community by the Holy Spirit as the eschatological body of Christ. This experience of Christ in the Eucharist is the basis for the patristic affirmation of the divinity of Christ and the Spirit and, hence, of the affirmation of God as Trinity.
Zizioulas’s emphasis on the experience of God in the hypostasis, or person, of Christ has at least two implications. First, it is a noticeable break with the virtual consensus in Orthodox theology on the use of the essence-energies distinction for expressing Orthodox understandings of salvation as the experience of the divine life. Second, it is the foundation for what Zizioulas calls an “ontological revolution,” insofar as it reveals God’s life as that which itself is constituted in freedom and not necessity. If the Eucharist is the experience of God, and if such an experience is for created reality the freedom from the tragic necessity of death inherent to created existence, then God exists as this freedom from necessity, even the necessity of God’s nature, since God gives what God is. The freedom of
God from the necessity of God’s nature is the meaning of the patristic assertion of the monarchy of the Father; the Father “causes” the Son and the Spirit and, in so doing, constitutes God’s life as Trinity through a movement of freedom and love. With the doctrine of the Trinity, for the first time, otherness, relation, uniqueness, freedom, and communion become ontologically ultimate.
This understanding of divine-human communion in the life of the Trinity through the hypostasis of Christ also grounds Zizioulas’s theology of personhood. Person is an ecstatic being, that is, free from the limitations of created nature; it also a hypostatic being, that is, unique and irreducible to nature. This freedom and irreducibility is possible only in relation to God the Father through Christ by the Holy Spirit, because it is only in the eternal relations of love that one is constituted as a unique and free being, that is, a person. Zizioulas maintains the building blocks of Lossky’s theology of person, but with a new emphasis on relationality and in a decidedly non-apophatic approach. Zizioulas’s theology of personhood is the organizing principle for this theology, and it is evident in his theology of ministry, his ecclesiology, and his theology of the environment.
At least three central issues face Orthodox theology in the immediate future. One is the centrality of the essence-energies distinction for expressing the transcendence and immanence of God, as well as the compatibility of this distinction as the language of divine-human communion with the language of the Trinity. A second issue is the question of the patristic interpretation of hypostasis and whether the contemporary Orthodox theology of personhood, which is arguably one of the most distinctive contributions of modern Orthodox theology, is a logical development of patristic thought, or not. Finally, the revival of Russian
Sophiology, especially that of Bulgakov, and its impact on the engagement of Orthodox theology with non-theological currents of thought must be further studied. The Russian school was actively engaged in social issues, and its influence is evident in the work of Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891–1944), who died in a German concentration camp because of her work in protecting Jewish victims of the Nazis; also in the work of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005), who wrote extensively on gender issues and on women’s ordination. Issues of engagement in social action have been noticeably absent, however, in the Neopatristic school. The challenge for Orthodox theology is to retrieve what is best in the Russian and Neopatristic schools in order to produce a theology that is simultaneously mystical and political.
SEE ALSO: Berdiaev, Nikolai A. (1874–1948); Bulgakov, Sergius (Sergei) (1871–1944); Deification; Eucharist; Filioque; Florensky, Pavel Alexandrovich (1882–1937); Florovsky, Georges V. (1893–1979); Holy Spirit; Holy Trinity; Humanity; Incarnation (of the Logos); Khomiakov, Aleksey S. (1804–1860); Logos Theology; Lossky, Vladimir (19031958); St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359); Solovyov, Vladimir (1853–1900); Sophrony, Archimandrite (1896–1993); Staniloae, Dumitru (1903–1993)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Giannaras, C. and Yannaras, C. (1991) Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
Lossky, V. (1997) The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press.
Papanikolaou, A. (2006) Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human
Communion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Valliere, P. (2000) Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Williams, R. (2005) “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” in D. F. Ford (ed.) The Modern Theologians, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 572–88.
Zizioulas, J. (1997) Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press.