Deification and Modern Orthodox Theology: Introduction to Contemporary Debates (Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences / Brill Research Perspectives in Theology) 9004547096, 9789004547094

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BRILL RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

BRP Deification and Modern Orthodox Theology

Theology

Introduction to Contemporary Debates

Petre Maican

Deification and Modern Orthodox Theology

Theology Editor-in-Chief Stephan van Erp (KU Leuven, Belgium) Associate Editors Christian Bauer (University of Innsbruck, Austria) Judith Gruber (KU Leuven, Belgium) David Grumett (University of Edinburgh, UK) Paul Hedges (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University, USA)

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspectives title are listed at brill.com/rpths

Deification and Modern Orthodox Theology Introduction to Contemporary Debates By

Petre Maican

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906157

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Abstract 1 Keywords 1 Introduction 1 Deification as the Pillar of Modern Orthodox Identity 6 Anthropology 11 3.1 The Ontological Premise of Deification 12 3.2 The Dynamics of Deification 14 3.3 The Effects of Deification: Person vs Individual 18 3.4 Gender, Sexuality, and Deification 21 3.5 Celibacy, Marriage, and Homosexuality 26 Tradition and Experience 33 4.1 Personal Experience 33 4.2 Communal Experience as Tradition 41 4.2.1 Dogmas 43 4.2.2 Scripture 51 Trinity 59 5.1 Sophiology 59 5.2 The Uncreated Energies 63 5.3 Eucharistic Personalism 71 Ecclesiology 80 6.1 Trinitarian Ecclesiology 85 6.2 Eucharistic Ecclesiology 88 6.3 Hierarchy in the Church 92 6.4 The Ordination of Women 99 6.4.1 Female Diaconate 100 6.4.2 The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood 102 Conclusion 107 Selected Bibliography 109

Deification and Modern Orthodox Theology Introduction to Contemporary Debates Petre Maican

Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected]

Abstract For a long period of time, Orthodox theology was stagnating. Its reinvigoration in the nineteenth and twentieth century is linked with the development of a sense of identity around the notion of union with God or deification. This research guide aims to sketch that trajectory, while simultaneously testing the extent to which contemporary debates can be subsumed under the heading of deification. After an introduction explaining what counts as modern Orthodox theology, the guide will explore the four main loci linked with deification: anthropology, tradition, the doctrine of the Trinity, and ecclesiology. All sections follow a chronological structure closing with the latest debates inside these areas.

Keywords Orthodox theology – deification – experience of God – Trinitarian theology – Orthodox ecclesiology – Orthodox anthropology

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Introduction

Orthodoxy has the incredible beauty of geometrical forms seen through a kaleidoscope; it is intricate, harmonious, and surprisingly vivid. It is far more pleasurable to hand over the kaleidoscope to another to enjoy the shapes than it is to describe them. It would be even worse to break that magic by giving an account of the mechanics behind them: the mirrors, the optical reflection, the small, coloured pieces of glass. And yet, this is the task of the present essay, to provide a research analysis of modern Orthodox theology, unveiling why and how we got to see the image in front of us while trying to indicate its future development.

© Petre Maican, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547100_002

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The most obvious place to start is the name, Eastern Orthodoxy. Eastern is used to locate the Church on the map, to designate the geographical area in which it has developed before the twentieth century, namely Eastern Europe. The largest Orthodox Churches are found in Russia, Romania and Greece, followed by Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Cyprus. Smaller communities exist in Syria, Jerusalem, Poland, Czech land and Slovakia, Sinai, Finland, China and Japan. The massive emigration from Eastern European countries to the West in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, coupled with the development of local Orthodox communities in places like France and the USA, brought into question the usefulness of the adjective Eastern. Well-known theologians like Andrew Louth (b. 1944) point out that for many who are born and bred in the West, it is quite uncomfortable to be thought of as Eastern, “for there is nothing about them that is Oriental.”1 The second descriptor, orthodox, is fundamental for the perception the faithful have of themselves – that they profess the right faith and worship in the right way – and for how they relate to other Christians. Someone as moderate and ecumenically minded as Kallistos Ware (1934–2022) does not shy away from stating that “The Orthodox Church in all humility believes itself to be the ‘one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’, of which the Creed speaks: such is the fundamental conviction which guides Orthodox in their relations with other Christians.”2 The measure of this orthodoxy is fidelity to the seven ecumenical councils, from Nicaea I in 325 to Nicaea II in 787. This criterion is applied both internally and externally. Internally, it is visible in the reluctance of the Orthodox hierarchy to convene any kind of council that could be interpreted as ecumenical. The Pan-Orthodox Council that took place in Crete in 2016 was contested for a number of reasons, including for trying to be an eighth ecumenical council. Although these oppositional voices came from the fringes and the defence against them was robust, the accusation itself shows the significance of the seven ecumenical councils for the Orthodox collective imaginary. Externally, the seven ecumenical councils function as a marker of identity. From all the Christian communities, the trope goes, only we, the Orthodox, preserved the seven councils. The Churches of the East  – now found mostly in Iran and the USA – accept only the first two. The Coptic, the Syrian, the Armenian, the Ethiopian and the Eritrean Orthodox Churches recognise only the first three (Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, and Ephesus 431). The Roman Catholic Church 1 Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2013), 13. 2 Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 315.

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accepts all seven ecumenical councils, but also adds fourteen more with which the Orthodox do not agree. This rather romanticised and confessional view of Orthodoxy as the church of the seven ecumenical councils, although dominant in most introductions to Orthodoxy, has recently come under scrutiny. Antoine Arjakovsky (b. 1966) argues for a less restrictive and post-confessional understanding of the term orthodoxy. For him, orthodoxy is a way of engaging the world on two axes: the vertical – the relationship with God: revelation, memory, and identity of the community – and the horizontal – that moves from the present empirical reality to the pneumatologically transfigured one.3 Here, orthodoxy is not just right worship or the preservation of the right faith, but also the transfigurative action that follows from the right knowledge ( juste connaisance).4 Arjakovsky takes issue as well with the idea that the cornerstone of the Orthodox faith are the seven ecumenical councils and their dogmatic definitions. He is especially unconvinced by the criterion used for establishing these councils as normative: their reception by the whole Church. The main example used to support the notion of reception is the Ferrara Florence council from 1439, where the representatives of the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches agreed on several dogmatic definitions and consequently the reunion of the two Churches, but that was never put into practice because it was rejected by the Greek and Russian Orthodox communities. Arjakovsky shows the inadequacy of this example by pointing out not only that the rejection of the council was neither universal nor willing  – the Church of Alexandria did not reject the council until 1484 under Turkish pressure – but also that it was mostly a personal rather than a communal act – the rejection took place only through the voice of one of the delegates sent to the council of Constantinople of 1484.5 Arjakovsky, however, is not the only one to adopt such a critical stance regarding the seven ecumenical councils. In his Zernov lecture from 2017, Richard Price goes even further. He highlights that a council cannot be considered normative only because it was accepted by the church. The definitions of the council should also be consistent with the previous patristic testimonies and this is something none of the seven ecumenical councils can easily defend. Let us start with the claims to unique authority made by the ecumenical councils themselves. They claimed above all to define the original and 3 Antoine Arjakovsky, Qu’est-Ce Que l’orthodoxie?, Collection Folio Essais 574 (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 217–21. 4 Ibid., 218. 5 Ibid., 117.

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authentic apostolic faith against heresies that, in their view, were always novel innovations. Writing in the early seventeenth century, Petavius, the greatest patristic scholar up to this date, caused shock when he claimed that Arianism could claim to represent the pre-Nicene tradition just as well as Nicaea could. As for the debates from Ephesus to Constantinople II, no modern scholar would say that Cyrillian Christology simply is the Christology of the first three or four centuries. To proceed to Constan­ tinople III, its argument that the presence in Christ of a distinct human will always obedient to the divine will is the doctrine of the fathers must be said to fail since the fathers by and large (thinking always of Gethsemane) recognized a distinct human will in Christ only as a will that was not naturally obedient. Nicaea II cited numerous patristic texts to show that the great Fathers had not been hostile to religious images, but it was unable to demonstrate that the great Fathers had approved of their veneration.6 So, what is then the pillar of Orthodox identity? While everyone will agree with the importance of the patristic testimony and that of the seven ecumenical councils as points of departure, some reputed scholars like Andrew Louth and Paul Ladouceur (b. 1944) would argue that modern Orthodoxy is born out of the pages of the Philokalia, a collection of ascetic and spiritual texts taken from thirty-six Fathers of the Church ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth century.7 The texts, selected by Nikodimos of Mount Athos (c.1749–1809) and Makarius of Corinth (1731–1805) were first published in 1782 in Venice aiming to serve the faithful as a guide towards purification, illumination and perfection, through inner prayer and the discovery of the inner self that is in the image of God.8 Paul Ladouceur sees in the Philokalia “an Orthodox counterpoint to Denis Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie published between 1751 and 1772, or alternatively as an Orthodox rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781 the year before the Philokalia.”9 I concur with this conclusion for two main reasons. First, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and until 1782, Orthodox theologians limited themselves 6 Richard Price, ‘East and West at the Ecumenical Councils: The Zernov Lecture 2017’, Sobornost 39, no. 2 (2017): 25. 7 Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (London: SPCK, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015), 12, 17–30. 8 Kallistos Ware, ‘St. Nikodimos and the Philokalia’, in The Philokalia, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (Oxford University Press, 2012), 27–28. 9 Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make Things New (Rev 21:5) (London New York: T&T Clark, 2019), xix.

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to repeating formulas of the past or adopting Western forms and ideas.10 Second, the Philokalia brought to the fore the main motif of modern Orthodox theology, deification or union with God. While it was only towards the beginning of the twentieth century that deification crystallised into the organising principle of all theological discussions,11 it was grace to the Philokalia that this notion was present in modern Orthodox consciousness from very early on. In various guises, the notion of deification can be traced back to everything from monasticism, to the spiritual story of the Russian Pilgrim, to the philosophical works of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), or the patristic writings of Ivan Popov (1867–1938). At the beginning of the century, Myrra Loth Borrodine (1882–1954) saw deification as the distinctive feature of the Orthodox theology of salvation in counter distinction to that of Roman Catholic theology.12 Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) strengthened her point by claiming that all the debates surrounding the seven ecumenical councils and their dogmas were meant to preserve the path of the faithful towards deification.13 After the 1960s, deification coagulated as one of the most significant loci for Orthodox theological identity.14 Theologians began to look at almost all aspects of Christian life from the vantage point of deification: Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993) endorsed Orthodox participation in ecumenical dialogue on the basis of the deification of history,15 Aristotle Papanikolaou (b. 1967) argued that the doctrine of deification enables compatibility between the democratic political system and Orthodoxy,16 and, most recently, I have connected deification with the theology of disability.17 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 18–19. See also Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 5 (Belmont, Mass: Nordland Pub. Co, 1979). Paul L. Gavrilyuk, ‘How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology: The Contribution of Ivan Popov’, Modern Theology, 31 August 2021, moth.12741, doi:10.1111 /moth.12741. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, La déification de l’homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs, Bibliothèque oecuménique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), 21–67. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Greenwood: The Attic Press Inc., 1968), 9–10. Norman Russell, Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis, Foundations Series, bk. 5 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 13–31. Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘Coordonatele Ecumenismului Din Punct de Vedere Ortodox’, Ortodoxia 19, no. 4 (1967): 494–540. Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Petre Maican, ‘The Care of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in Romania: Between Politics and Theology’, Political Theology, 2 March 2021, 1–14, doi:10.1080/1462317X.2021 .1893959.

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In the following overview, I would like to use deification as the structuring principle of modern Orthodox theology and test the extent to which deification is relevant for contemporary Orthodox discourse and debates. Is deification truly the vantage point from which all the questions confronting Orthodoxy today are asked and reflected upon – from Orthodoxy’s relationship to modernity, to women’s ordination, to homosexuality – or is deification an identitarian catchphrase that functions as a short-hand for the specificity of Orthodox theology? To answer these questions, I will use the simplest and least controversial definition of deification, namely the human experience of union with God that takes place inside the Church. This definition will also serve as the scaffolding for structuring a large amount of theological material dealing with Orthodoxy. Hence, I will begin the discussion with anthropology, continue with a chapter on the experience of God as Tradition and another about God as a Trinity, and then conclude with a chapter on ecclesiology. Each of these chapters will follow a broadly chronological structure, but since the main task of the book is to provide an overview of current debates inside Orthodoxy the focus will be on the newest research available. Given the limited space at my disposal, several remarks are necessary. First, the analysis will deal mainly with systematic theology, even if at times references will be made to biblical or historical scholarship. I will not deal with political theology, spirituality, or ecumenism, despite some exciting developments taking place there. Second, when identifying trends in contemporary Orthodoxy, I will prioritise theological production in English. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most important are: the practical difficulties in accessing resources in all Orthodox languages (e.g. Russian, Greek, Romanian, Georgian) and the unchallenged supremacy of English in academic scholarship. Finally, to compensate for the broad strokes that will inevitably be applied in dealing with all these topics, an extensive bibliography, including works that are not directly referenced in the text, will be provided. 2

Deification as the Pillar of Modern Orthodox Identity

The doctrine of deification appears early on in the writings of the Greek Fathers. Even when the term is not explicitly used, references to the concept abound.18 In the sixth century, Dionysius the Areopagite put forward the first formal definition of deification, which is “the attaining of likeness to God and 18

Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, The Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.

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union with him so far as is possible.”19 Almost a century later, Maximus the Confessor established firm theological grounding for deification and projected it at the heart of the Byzantine monastic tradition.20 The premises of deification were not contested until the fourteenth century. Barlaam of Calabria (1290–1348) found the idea unrealistic that through ascetic effort humans could participate in God and see God’s divine essence. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) defended the latter position by distinguishing between God’s essence and energies. God is like the sun, nobody can share in the essence of the sun, but only in the energies or the rays of light radiating from it. Similarly, humans are not partaking in God’s essence, which remains unknowable and inaccessible, but in His uncreated energies, which nourish and sustain the creation. Palamas’ response would be proclaimed Orthodox by a series of local councils in Constantinople, the last one taking place in 1368.21 After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the interest in deification receded until the publication of the Philokalia in Greek in 1782 and its translation into Slavonic and Russian. The transformation of deification from a monastic ideal into the pillar of modern Orthodox identity and anthropology is mainly due to the Russian thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Several factors contributed to this process: the renewed interest in monasticism, the spiritual academies, the myth of the divine ruler, and the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) and Vladimir Solovyov. The translation of the Philokalia into Slavonic by Paisy Velichkovsky (1722–1794) in 1793 and into Russian by Theophan the Recluse (1818–1894) between 1877 and 1905, as well as the publication of The Way of a Pilgrim (1881), narrating the account of a peasant’s attempt to practice the hesychast prayer of the heart under the guidance of an elder, made deification known to and desirable for wide audiences. The Russian elites absorbed this ideal through the reading of these texts and the mediation of a series of remarkable monastic figures (e.g., the elders from Optina Pustyn where many intellectuals went, from Ivan Kireevsky (1806–1856) to Dostoevsky to Solovyov, to Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910)).22 Although he did not speak directly about 19 20 21 22

Ibid. Ibid., 296. For the full context see Norman Russell, ed., Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam: Documents Relating to Gregory Palamas, Translated Texts for Byzantinists 8 (Liverpool, [England]: Liverpool University Press, 2020). Ruth Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, First edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 58, http://swbplus.bsz-bw.de/bsz 1682017664inh.htm.

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deification in his novels, Dostoyevsky drew attention to the disastrous consequence of self-deification, especially in Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Possessed (1871–2). In the latter, Kirillov, one of the characters, argued that if the main feature of God is to hold power over life and death, then by committing suicide one can become like God. For Dostoyevsky, this is a self-divinising logic with catastrophic consequences for the person and the nation. A friend of Dostoyevsky, Solovyov was the first to provide a philosophical treatment of deification in his Lectures on Divine Humanity (1878),23 where he equated deification with the term bogochelovechestvo (translated often as divine humanity or Godmanhood) and defined it as the cosmic and historical process through which the world is united with God at the end of time.24 Although sounding somewhat similar to the cosmic deification of creation proposed by some of the Greek Fathers, Solovyov’s vision remained highly indebted to German theosophy and metaphysical Idealism.25 Deification was also present in the political sphere. After Peter the Great decided to abolish the office of patriarch and replaced it with a council run by an Oberprocurator, the tsar started to be assimilated into the role of the patriarch, namely that of being an icon of Christ on earth.26 During the eighteenth century, images, tropes, and liturgical songs that were previously associated with the patriarch were now being used for the tsar. For instance, it became natural “to greet the tsar with the phrase ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ as the patriarch had been greeted during the Palm Sunday rituals, to call the tsar’s throne Tabor, equating him with the transfigured Christ, to celebrate the events of the tsar’s life with ‘high triumphal days’ of the church calendar (with accompanying liturgies and sermons), as the events of Christ’s life were celebrated, and so on.”27 Last but not least, an important contribution to the assimilation of the notion of deification into the theological discourse came from the spiritual 23 24

25 26 27

Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Boris Jakim, Esalen Institute/ Lindisfarne Press Library of Russian Philosophy (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995). Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, 74. The extent to which Soloviev is indebted to the Greek Fathers and/or to German Idealism remains a contentious point between scholars. Jeremy Plinch demonstrates Solovyov’s knowledge of the Fathers, but Paul Gavryliuk is not convinced that Solovyov actually followed the patristic mind in his understanding of deification. See Jeremy Pilch, Breathing the Spirit with Both Lungs: Deification in the Work of Vladimir Solov’ev, volume 25, Eastern Christian Studies (Leuven Paris Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2018); Gavrilyuk, ‘How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology’, 7–8. Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, 74; Gavrilyuk, ‘How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology’, 8. Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought, 65. Ibid., 66.

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academies.28 Spiritual academies saw in deification a vehicle “to accommodate the Christian life to modern values of rationalism, individualism, and moral autonomy” ushered in by the Enlightenment.29 In a recent article, Paul Gavrilyuk (b. 1972) contends that Ivan Popov  – a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy – almost single-handedly made deification the organizing principle of thought in Orthodox theology.30 According to Gavrilyuk, Popov’s interest in deification was stirred by his semester abroad in Germany (1902), where he audited Adolph Harnack’s patristic seminar. Harnack (1851– 1930) dismissed deification as a Greek doctrine that distorted salvation into a physical process without any subjective dimension.31 Returning home, Popov published three seminal articles on deification: “The Religious Ideal of St. Athanasius of Alexandria” (1903–1904), “The Mystical Justification of Ascet­ icism in the Works of St. Macarius of Egypt” (1904–1905) and “The Idea of Deification in the Ancient Eastern Church” (1909). He agreed with Harnack that for the Fathers deification was fundamental for understanding the Incar­ nation, but not that it was limited to the Greek East. Popov gathered evidence to show that deification belonged in equal measure to the Greek and Latin Fathers and insisted on the ethical and subjective dimension of deification.32 Gavrilyuk claims that Popov’s pioneering work impacted almost all the important figures of the Russian Orthodox theology of the past century, including Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), Lev Karshavin (1882–1951), Georges Florovsky (1893– 1979), Myrrha Lot-Borodine, and Vladimir Lossky.33 While Popov might be credited with being the first to speak about deification in a way that is consonant with the doctrine of the Greek Fathers, there is no doubt that the contributions of Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Vladimir Lossky truly transformed deification into the marker of Orthodox identity. Their strategy was to contrast deification with the Western view of salvation, pointing out the superiority of the former. Lot-Borodine argued that Western spirituality followed Augustine’s dictum: “Per Christum hominem ad Christum Deum”,34 that is, to be saved is to imitate the human actions of Christ: his crucifixion, his love for the poor, and justice. By contrast, deification focused on Christ’s 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

See Patrick Lally Michelson, Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914 (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought, 60. Gavrilyuk, ‘How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology’, 8. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 22–26. Lot-Borodine, La déification de l’homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs, 63.

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divinity. Salvation means to be united with God in Christ, to the point where one becomes so saturated with the divine that one begins to irradiate God’s uncreated energies.35 “Little by little, the fleshly cover becomes permeable at the action of the spirit, making visible the incorruptible flame.”36 The East preserved the authentic meaning of salvation, while the West lost it. Lossky took the idea further by restructuring the entire Orthodox theological edifice around deification. For Lossky, all the dogmatic battles that shook the history of the Church throughout the centuries were fought for preserving intact the right path to union with God.37 The fault of Gnosticism, Arianism and Monophysitism was that through their distorted dogmatic statements they promoted a false spiritual road that could have never taken humanity to deification.38 To a certain extent, Lossky continued, this was true also about Western spirituality. Even if the Roman Catholic Church was not heretical and did not lead people astray from deification, the introduction of the Filioque into the Creed still created a specific “Roman” way of union with God.39 Catholic saints speak of the dark night of the soul, while the Eastern ones only of the joy of transfiguration by the uncreated energies. The two traditions have separated on a mysterious doctrinal point, relating to the Holy Spirit, who is the source of holiness. Two different dogmatic conceptions correspond to two different experiences, two ways of sanctification which scarcely resemble one another.40 The idea that deification is the beating heart of Orthodox dogmatics and spirituality turned out to be so powerful that it not only went uncontested in the Orthodox world, but it ended up exerting its influence over other Christian traditions.41 The most famous case is that of the Finnish Lutheran Church, who during the 1970s, after the ecumenical interaction with their Russian Orthodox counterparts, started examining Luther’s doctrine of justification through the 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 65. My translation. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 9–11. The same idea is found in Popov, but Lossky stated it much sharper and to bigger effect. Ivan Popov, ‘The Idea of Deification in the Early Eastern Church’, in Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, ed. Vladimir Kharlamov, vol. 2, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 156 (Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 51–53. See how the same idea is reused in Nellas, 39–40. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 21–22. Ibid., 226–27. Gavrilyuk, ‘How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology’.

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lens of deification.42 With Tuomo Mannermaa (1937–2015) at its head, the Finnish School argued that “Justification, for Luther, means a participation in God through the indwelling of Christ in the heart of the believer through the Spirit.”43 Lutherans were not the only ones to rethink their approach to deification. The Reformed tradition, which once rejected deification in quite harsh terms, warmed up to it, especially due to the contribution of T.F. Torrance (1913–2007).44 Even in Baptist quarters, some showed interest in deification, as an alternative way to speaking about salvation and Christification.45 3

Anthropology

The centrality of the concept of deification, or union with God, in the modern Orthodox discourse on anthropology cannot be overstated. Taken as the ultimate goal of our entire existence, nothing theologically significant can be theorised or said about human beings without even a slight reference to deification. As Panayiotis Nellas (1936–1986) astutely explains, humans can be defined as rational or political animals, as what they feel, eat or produce, but what truly matters is that they were called to be gods.46 To a certain extent, it can even be affirmed that modern Orthodox anthropology is nothing more than an attempt at articulating a link between the constitutive elements of human nature: whether these be politics, gender, economics, or disability and deification. Two stages can be discerned in this process: 1) the conceptual development of deification, from ascetic essentialism (i.e., union with God through the actualisation of one’s nature in relation to God) to Eucharistic existentialism (i.e., union with God is realised through the sacraments and opens up for us a new way of existence); 2) the applicability of deification to practical debates generated by the contemporary context, such as questions of gender, disability, or transhumanism. 42 43 44 45 46

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, ‘What Have Lutherans Learned from Orthodox?: Salvation as Union with God’, The Ecumenical Review 73, no. 1 (January 2021): 31, doi:10.1111/erev.12584. Ibid. Carl Mosser, ‘Orthodox-Reformed Dialogue and the Ecumenical Recovery of Theosis’, The Ecumenical Review 73, no. 1 (2021): 131–51. Corneliu C. Simuţ, ‘Theosis and Baptist-Orthodox Discussions’, The Ecumenical Review 73, no. 1 (2021): 111–30. Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, Contemporary Greek Theologians (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 15.

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3.1 The Ontological Premise of Deification Despite its centrality in Orthodox theology and its incredible influence outside of it, there is still no consensus on how deification is possible or on what it means for the human being who attains it. The attempts to answer these questions are made difficult by the immutable premise of deification: humans become gods by grace, not by nature. Or in other words, deification is real and entails an ontological transformation, but this transformation does not erase our humanity or personal features, nor does it change our natures into that of God. As will be explained more fully later, three main solutions have been proposed so far for this conundrum: the uncreated energies, Sophiology, and relational ontology. Here I will focus on the anthropological side of these systems. The most widespread opinion  – probably because it also holds in high esteem the monastic ideal of the contemplative life – is that deification takes place at the level of God’s uncreated energies. Originating in Gregory Palamas, this view promoted by Lot-Borrodine and Lossky was embraced by several influential theologians like Dumitru Stăniloae, Christos Yannaras (b. 1935) and Panayiotis Nellas. For them, the uncreated energies are synonymous with grace. When deification takes place, humans are not becoming gods by essence but are surrounded by the uncreated energies like the rays of the sun. The saint remains the same without her person being distorted or her nature transformed. The most well-known example of this understanding of deification is taken from the life of Saint Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833), where one of his disciples recounts how he saw the face of the saint surrounded by a light like that of the sun.47 Encouraged by these words, I looked and was seized by holy fear. Imagine in the middle of the sun, dazzling in the brilliance of its noontide rays, the face of the man who is speaking to you. You can see the movements of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, you can hear his voice, you can feel his hands holding you by the shoulders, but you can see neither his hand nor his body – nothing except the blaze of light which shines around, lighting up with its brilliance the snow-covered meadow, and the snowflakes which continue to fall unceasingly.48 47

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As I point out further, Seraphim of Sarov’s conversation with Motovilov is pervasive in modern Russian theological discussion of deification. For the historical accuracy of the vision see Ann Shukman, ‘“The Conversation between St Seraphim and Motovilov”: The Author, the Texts and the Publishers’, Sobornost 27, no. 1 (2005): 47–57. See also Kallistos Ware, ed., Chronicles of Seraphim-Diveyevo Monastery in the Ardatov Region of the Nizhegorod Province: Including the Lives of Its Founders St Seraphim and Schema-Nun Alexandra (A.S. Melgunova), trans. Ann Shukman, (Cambridge: Saints Alive Press, 2018). Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 228–29.

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Maybe a bit surprisingly, references to this passage are also found in the writings of Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), who sought to offer an alternative sophiological account of how the ontological gap between created and the uncreated can be overcome in deification. Bulgakov, who brings together Solovyov and German Idealists with the Fathers of the Church, postulates that the world cannot exist without an ideal counterpart in the mind of God. God could not have created the world without envisaging the outcome. The ontological link between the ideal and the created world is Sophia or the Wisdom of God. The divine Sophia, which is the self-revelation of the Trinity into which everything was planned from eternity, is thrown into nothingness to become the created Sophia. The role of humankind is to transform the world and itself according to the ideas found in the divine Sophia. For Bulgakov, it is not that humankind has a general form (i.e., the universal Adam), but that each individual is created according to a special thought of God for her, which Bulgakov calls “theme.”49 When they act in a way that is consonant with their theme, humans are deified, that is they are fully united with the divine Sophia and surrounded by the beautiful sophianic light as seen around Seraphim of Sarov.50 Deification, then, is the perfect correspondence between the divine and the created Sophia realised in and through the human being. The third option for explaining how the union with God takes place ontologically belongs to John Zizioulas (1931–2023). Zizioulas is unhappy with Palamas’ uncreated energies. He sees them primarily as natural properties of God that give deification an impersonal flavour. “Theosis is not simply a matter of participating in God’s glory and other natural qualities, common to all three persons of the Trinity, it is also, or rather above all, our recognition and acceptance by the Father as his sons by grace, in and through our incorporation into his only-begotten Son by nature”51 For Zizioulas, the locus of union is the person of Jesus Christ, the Logos of God incarnated. As he is very well aware, this hypostatic understanding of deification could be misread as the absorption of the human into the divine. Such fear is groundless, because on the one hand the entire creation already exists in the Logos, while on the other hand personal union promotes otherness and not absorption.52 In the first case, Zizioulas refers to the doctrine of the logoi of creation developed by Maximus the Confessor. Every thing was created by, in, and through the Logos 49 50 51 52

Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Edinburgh: W.B. Eerdmans; T & T Clark, 2002), 96, 114, 144. Sergius Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations, trans. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2013), 439. John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 31, fn. 51. Ibid.

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of God and possesses its own inner logos, which will find its fulfilment in unity with the Logos, according to its nature. In the case of human beings, the unity is realised at the level of tropos or mode of existence; that is by entering into a personal relationship with Christ. “A martyr experiences communion with God, theosis, because, at that moment in which his life is taken from him, he is related single-mindedly to Christ, so all other relationships are subordinated to this one.”53 Thus, deification is the actualisation of the tropos of unity with Christ through a personal relationship with Him. 3.2 The Dynamics of Deification While the ontological ground for deification varies, almost nobody challenges the dynamics behind it. Usually, this dynamic is presented as the distinction between image and likeness, where image refers to the human potential for being deified and likeness to the fulfilment of this potential. Most Orthodox theologians trace the distinction back to the Fathers of the Church, whom themselves read it in the text of Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’.” As Andrew Louth explains, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the Fathers used, the words in the image were rendered “according to the image” – which raised the question: whose image? The answer came from the New Testament, where the Son is considered the divine prototype of humankind.54 Furthermore, in Greek, likeness (homoiosis) describes a process and not a state, hence allowing for the inference that likeness refers to the process of assimilation into the divine.55 To be deified is to fulfil one’s potential in becoming god. However, the content of the image – the divine element in our being of clay that needs to be actualised through the process of deification – remained an unresolved issue for the patristic writers as well as for their modern counterparts.56 The Fathers identified the image of God with various qualities such as intelligence, free will or dominion over nature. Modern Orthodox theologians mirrored the Fathers in their diverse approach to the imago. Lossky read in the lack of patristic consensus a proof for the apophatic character of the image: just as God in His essence is unknowable so His image in us remains

53 54 55 56

John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight, trans. Katerina Nikolopulu (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 114. Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, 146–48. Ibid., 148. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 114; Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, 148–50; Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, 22–23.

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a mystery.57 Bulgakov drew a similar conclusion,58 but, at the same time, emphasised human creativity as an essential aspect of the divine image.59 Developing Lossky’s insights into an existential register, Yannaras insisted that the image of God is not a set of characteristics but a mode of existence.60 Georges Florovsky tended to link the image of God with the human capacity for language.61 Stăniloae shared Florovksy’s position, although he nuanced it to fit in his dialogical framework: the imago consists in the human ability to enter into dialogue with God rationally and consciously.62 Louth argued that the imago lies in our ability to pray,63 while Zizioulas claimed that it should be understood as freedom or self-government. Some Fathers considered that man is already the ‘image’ of God and understood ‘likeness’ to refer to the end of times, while for others ‘image’ refers to the rationality of man. Gregory of Nyssa used it to refer to the human capacity of self-government. The difference is not hugely significant because those Fathers who relate the ‘image’ to the logos and rationality of man understand that the logos of man is his freedom, which is what self-government is. So we fairly represent the patristic tradition as a whole when we see the element of freedom or self-government as the difference between man and the rest of the material creation.64 Some might be inclined to dismiss Zizioulas’s reading of patristic literature as inaccurate and self-serving. While the likes of Lossky, Nellas, and Louth insist on the irreducibility of the image of God to any particular human quality, it is also true that freedom – understood as self-determination – plays a central role in the transition from image to likeness. If humans do not hold the possibility of choosing to fulfil their potential in God, then the critique of Ritschl and Harnack – who saw deification as a mechanical process – would be valid; and, to my knowledge, no modern Orthodox theologian would subscribe to such a view. Just like their forebearers, humans have the choice between accepting 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 118. Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 327–31. Ibid., 330–31. Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, Mass: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), 49. Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, vol. 1, Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, Mass: Nordland Pub. Co, 1972), 27–28. Dumitru Stăniloae, Teologia Dogmatică Ortodoxă, vol. I (Bucureşti: Institutul Biblic şi de Misiune Ortodoxă, 2010), 406–10. Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, 153. Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 95.

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the goal for which they were created (i.e. likeness) or rejecting it. They can follow the spiritual path laid out for them through the Incarnation and accessible in the Church or opt for the fruitless autonomy promised by the serpent to Adam and Eve.65 This choice can be highly demanding, but it is not an impossible one, since for centuries humans have done it. What is up for debate is the way in which this freedom should be exercised in order to attain likeness to God. Trying to synthesise, one could identify three ways in which freedom can and should be used: creative, ascetic, and sacramental. None of them excludes the others: the creative can include the ascetic just as the ascetic can include the sacramental. So, what I am presenting further are rather accents, which are more prominent in some authors than in others. For thinkers like Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948),66 freedom should be used to re-create oneself in relationship with God and others. For Bulgakov, humans resemble God not only in their apophatic character but also in their creativity.67 While they cannot create anything out of nothing, humans still have the possibility of transforming the world and themselves according to the divine plan. This plan is already established in the Trinitarian Sophia and, although predetermined in certain aspects, its realisation allows for an almost infinite number of possibilities. All humans have been allotted a specific theme in the divine Sophia and their freedom consists in interpreting this theme as creatively and uniquely as possible.68 For the sake of brevity, this theme can be understood as a song. Each human being has a song associated with her name, but the interpretation of that song depends entirely on her. Another understanding of freedom is ascetic: that is gaining control over one’s irrational desires. This view has proven to be highly popular among Orthodox theologians, the majority subscribing to it quite gladly. The premise for the ascetic use of freedom is the Fall, caused by the original sin. Before Adam and Eve sinned, humans were structurally in harmony with themselves, God, and creation. Their mind (nous) contemplated God in the creation and their soul gathered all the bodily senses nurturing them with the pleasure of seeing and being around God. All this changed with the Fall. Humans became unable to contemplate God in creation directly and their nous or intellect was 65 66 67 68

Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 143; Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, 57. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (San Rafael: Semantron Press, 2009). For an analysis of deification in this particular book see Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought, 110–39. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 135. Ibid., 134, 139, 143.

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subjugated by bodily pleasures.69 To attain likeness, humans have now to fight and regain a similar state to the primordial one, where they were in control of their irrational desires. Theologians like Lossky,70 Yannaras,71 and John Meyendorff (1926–1992) added a communi­tarian dimension to this ascesis of the body. For them, in their current lapsarian condition, humans are driven by the will to power, the desire for self-affirmation, and their survival instinct.72 Ascesis is the cure to all these individualistic evils because it is a denial of one’s self-will for the love of the other,73 an ecstatic self-transcendence that integrates the one who practices it in the ecclesial community. The aim of asceticism is to transform our impersonal natural desires and needs into manifestations of the free personal will which brings into being the true life of love. Thus, the instinctive need for food, the greed for the individual’s independent self-preservation, is transfigured in the context of Church’s fasting: submission to the common practice of the Church becomes paramount, turning it into an act of relationship and communion.74 The other alternative for using one’s freedom and achieving likeness to God is sacramental. If Yannaras, Lossky, and Stăniloae combine asceticism with participation in the life of the Church, Zizioulas goes a step further and prioritizes the sacramental over the ascetic. Like Lossky and Yannaras, Zizioulas argues that humans are acting constrained by their biology.75 Genuine freedom exists only in the Person of the Father who is not determined even by his own nature.76 He begets the Son and spirates the Holy Spirit not out of necessity, but out of sheer love. Humans cannot obtain this kind of absolute freedom, irrespective of how much effort they put into ascetic practices. They can have access to this freedom only through a special, ontological relationship with 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, 49–59. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 121. Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, Contemporary Greek Theologians (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 31. John Meyendorff, ‘New Life in Christ: Salvation in Orthodox Theology’, Theological Studies 50, no. 3 (September 1989): 493, doi:10.1177/004056398905000304. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 124. Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, 110. John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 42–44. Ibid., 44–45.

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God. This relationship was established at the Incarnation when the Second Person of the Trinity assumed human nature in its fullness and it is strengthened ever since through the Eucharist, where the faithful receive Christ fully,77 this leading to their transformation into divinised beings. In this case, likeness is progression in the freedom of God through the sacraments,78 rather than asceticism. Each of these approaches has been criticised: the creative use of freedom, particularly in Berdyaev, has been challenged for placing humans on the same level with God;79 the ascetic was denounced for misunderstanding mysticism by proposing a nihilistic theology of the will to power, and the sacramental for its lack of reciprocity.80 But none of these critiques escalated to the point of becoming a truly passionate debate with no end in sight. What did do so, however, was the distinction between person and individual. 3.3 The Effects of Deification: Person vs Individual This distinction between person and individual can be read as referring to the effects that the union with God produces on the faithful. Individual refers to the regular human being whose life is fully determined by selfishness and struggle for survival, while person designates the individual who grows out of the shell of self-centredness moving towards communion with God and others. Berdyaev gives a very helpful summary of the difference between the two terms. Individuality is a naturalistic and biological category, while personality is a religious and spiritual one. I want to build up a personalistic but certainly not an individualistic system of ethics. An individual is part of the species, it springs from the species although it can isolate itself and come into conflict with it. The individual is produced by the biological generic process; it is born and dies. But personality is not generated, it is created by God. It is God’s idea, God’s conception, which springs up in eternity. From the point of view of the individual, personality is a task to be achieved. Personality is an axiological category. We say of one man that he is a personality, and of another that he is not, although both are individuals.81 77 78 79 80 81

Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, xv. Ibid., 74. Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, 134. Nikolaos Loudovikos, Beyond Spirituality: Christian Mysticism of Power and the Meaning of the Self in the Patristic Era (Brepols, 2018). Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 65.

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Echoing Berdyaev, Bulgakov connects personality with the absolute subjectivity of the I. For Bulgakov, the human being has a tripartite constitution: body, soul, and spirit. The latter is created in the divine image of the eternal and absolute I of God and then inserted into the human body and soul. The I is not simply the locus of one’s consciousness and self-awareness, but also that of the idea or the theme that God has chosen for each human being to make her existence unique to the whole of humankind.82 Personhood then is the fulfilment of the spiritual idea that exists in each of us in a special way, predetermined by God before the foundation of the world.83 Lossky also distinguishes between person and individual, but he hesitates regarding the meaning of each term. In the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944), Lossky argues that person is someone who denies her natural qualities, her will, and puts herself at the disposal of others.84 In this way, a person becomes a spiritualised upgrade of the individual. Personhood is not about self-assertion, but about service, sacrifice, and communion.85 However, in the essay, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person”, Lossky follows a different approach. Personhood is not only about the human struggle to control and rise above one’s own desires and necessities. Personhood also describes the irreducibility of human life to any set of existential or essential characteristics. To be a person is to possess a spark of the mystery of Being (the imago).86 Yannaras develops this distinction further by adding to it communitarian and sacramental overtones. A person is an individual who is moved ecstatically by her love for the other (eros).87 Since human beings are selfish and greedy in their current lapsarian condition, the realisation of personhood can take place only through interactions that go in the opposite direction, opening up the human being towards others through love, manifested in the self-transcendent act of self-sacrifice. The elevation of this erotic impulse to the heights of personhood is realised in the Church, where the human selftranscending movement is united with that of others and God. The Church, then, does not simply represent a sociological or moral fact or a ‘religious’ manifestation of fallen humanity. The Church is an 82 83 84 85 86 87

Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 96. Ibid., 131. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 121. Ibid., 121–24. Vladimir Lossky, ‘The Theological Notion of Human Person’, in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1975), 120. Yannaras, Person and Eros, 5.

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ontological reality, the existential fact of a ‘new’ human nature, which communes wholly with the Godhead, or which realizes an existential ‘impulse’ opposite to that of the Fall. It realizes existence as love and eros, not as survival as an atomic individual.88 Zizioulas follows the ecclesial side of Yannaras’ thought. For Zizioulas, personhood is not achieved through ascetic struggle, but by being in relationship with a Person, that is with someone free of all necessity, including that of her own nature. This definition applies only to the Father, who in his love shares his personhood with the Son and the Holy Spirit, but also with us through the Incarnation of the Son and the foundation of the Church, where we can share in the body of Christ. Thus, personhood is the overcoming of one’s ‘natural’ limitations (e.g., mortality, sex, social role, ethnicity) by entering into an ontological relationship with the Father and the Son through the Eucharist. It is by finding their place in this relationship that humans become truly unique.89 If biological birth gives us a hypostasis dependent ontologically on nature, this indicates that a ‘new birth’ is needed in order to experience an ontology of personhood. This ‘new birth’, which is the essence of Baptism, is nothing but the acquisition of an identity not dependent on the qualities of nature but freely raising nature to a hypostatic existence identical to that which emerges from the Father-Son relationship.90 Not all Orthodox theologians are convinced by the distinction between individual and person. One of the critiques that should be mentioned, even if only for its length and constancy, belongs to Jean Claude Larchet. Larchet spent around two hundred pages from his Personne et Nature (2011) in order to demonstrate how the distinction between person and individual not only lacks patristic grounding but also carries nefarious consequences for the main Orthodox tenets from Triadology to Christology to anthropology to spiritual life. Regarding the latter, Larchet was especially troubled by the lack of the ascetic dimension of Zizioulas’ project (i.e., the observance of the commandments and a life in accordance to virtues), asking himself if Zizioulas “has the slightest (moindre) idea of what this notion signifies in the Orthodox tradition.”91 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 270. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 111. Ibid., 109. Jean-Claude Larchet, Personne et nature: la trinité, le Christ, l’homme: contributions aux dialogues interorthodoxe et interchrétien contemporains, Théologies (Paris: Édition du Cerf, 2011), 384.

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Another substantial critique came from Nikolaos Ludovikos (b. 1959), who argued that the relationship pattern on which Zizioulas grounds the distinction between individual and person is not reciprocal, but imposed or “dictated.” The Father imposes his personhood upon the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as Christians seem to be called to impose their idealistic construct of humanity upon their neighbour. “We thereby love the other as a kind of open promise, the way young parents love their newborn baby, because they can project everything they like or expect upon him or her, without any resistance. We thereby love others as ‘selfobjects’, in Heinz Kohut’s terminology.”92 Alexis Torrance (b. 1985) defended Zizioulas against all these charges. For him, although Zizioulas is not in terminological continuity with the Fathers, he is nevertheless their conceptual heir.93 He dismissed many of Ludovikos’s points as hyperboles and misreadings of Zizioulas. In fact, reciprocity is at the very heart of Zizioulas’ Trinitarian account and if Zizioulas does not dwell much on the importance of asceticism this is because he wants to distance “himself from any language that might evoke an individualistic, non-ecclesial piety.”94 3.4 Gender, Sexuality, and Deification The past several years saw an increased interest in relating the notion of deification to many of the practical aspects of contemporary life, from gender and homosexuality to disability,95 transhumanism,96 and artificial intelligence.97 Due to the limited space at my disposal, but also because the debates on transhumanism, disability, and artificial intelligence are still in their infancy, I will focus here only on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and deification. I will begin by pointing out how the two main perspectives on gender and 92 93 94 95

96 97

Nicholas Loudovikos, ‘Person Instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position: Person Instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness’, The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (July 2011): 693, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00547.x. Alexis Torrance, ‘Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate: Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology’, The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (July 2011): 701, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00669.x. Ibid., 704. Maican, ‘The Care of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in Romania’; Petre Maican, ‘Overcoming Exclusion in Eastern Orthodoxy: Human Dignity and Disability from a Christological Perspective’, Studies in Christian Ethics 33, no. 4 (November 2020): 496–509, doi:10.1177/0953946819859512. Brandon Gallaher, ‘Godmanhood vs Mangodhood: An Eastern Orthodox Response to Transhumanism’, Studies in Christian Ethics 32, no. 2 (2019): 200–215. David Goodin, ‘On Idolatry and Empathy: An Orthodox Christian Response to the Victimization Fantasies of Westworld’, in Theology and Westworld, ed. Juli L. Gittinger and Shayna Sheinfeld (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020), 91–108.

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sexuality: gender essentialism and complementarianism (men and women form a whole where each fulfils a specific role), and gender neutral (there is no distinction between men and women) are understood in relation to deification. Then, I will explain how these perspectives spill over into the debate on whether marriage and monastic celibacy are equal paths to deification. I will end the section by pointing out how the salvific parity between celibacy and marriage is called into question by the debate surrounding homosexuality and homosexual marriages. One of the influential ideas about gender in Orthodox theology, especially during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, was that humans could be whole only as androgynous beings, that is as beings whose feminine and masculine aspects are fully united. The idea has a long history. It can be found in Plato, in the first chapters of Genesis, and in Jewish and Christian Gnosticism.98 During Romanticism, the androgynous ideal enjoyed a resurgence in Germany and at the turn of the twentieth century, it is found almost all around Europe, including Russia.99 Orthodox theology absorbs much of this ideal through Solovyov’s work and its rendition in the patristic key by Bulgakov. For Solovyov, androgyny symbolizes the plenitude of the human condition. Androgyny was the original state of the human being and it is meant to be her goal. For Solovyov, who takes after the Gnostics, Adam was androgynous until God decided to create Eve from his side. The Fall is a fall into gender and “to remain divided into sexes means to remain on the path to death.”100 The ideal to which humans should aspire is to reunite the masculine and the feminine principles into a synthesis that will retain “their formal individualization but having surmounted their essential separateness and divergence.”101 Bulgakov, who theologically repurposes much of Solovyov’s view, argues that the unity between the masculine and the feminine principles is meant to take place inside the human soul. Each human is constituted by a mix of masculine and feminine elements. The masculine principle is dominant in the souls that are logical, active, and full of initiative, while the feminine is in those that are instinctive, self-surrendering, and “wise with an illogical and impersonal wisdom of simplicity and purity.”102 And although “an andromorphic 98

Olga Matich, ‘Androgyny and the Russian Silver Age’, Pacific Coast Philology 14 (October 1979): 42, doi:10.2307/1316437. 99 Ibid. 100 Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, trans. Thomas R Beyer (Lindisfarne Press, 1985). 101 Ibid., 55. 102 Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 352–55.

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woman produces as ugly an impression as does a gynomorphic man”,103 in its relationship to God the human soul, irrespective of gender, is always feminine, that is passive, inclined to self-surrender, and awaiting to be penetrated by God’s spirit in order to bear fruit.104 The highest expression of this feminine character of the human soul is Mary, the Virgin and the mother of God, who, in her full self-sacrificial submission to God’s will, is the first person to be deified. In his response to second-wave feminism and particularly to Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970) drew extensively on Bulgakov.105 We indeed live in a men’s world where women are marginalised and oppressed, but, Evdokimov believes, feminism does not provide the solution. Of course, women should have full political and social rights and be treated as equals, but the differences between men and women cannot be ignored; they are neither societal constructs determined by biological factors, nor patriarchal ideas impressed upon the collective unconscious throughout the centuries. The masculine and the feminine principles are spiritual archetypes grounded in the life of the Trinity. The Logos of God is the archetype of masculinity – because it contains in itself the seed of everything true – and the Holy Spirit is the archetype of femininity because it creates the maternal state that allows the truth of the Logos to germinate and develop.106 It follows that just as the masculine and feminine divine archetypes are complementing one another in their deifying activity of the world, so should be the case with men and women. To illustrate how this complementarity should work, Evdokimov points to the Deisis icon, where Christ is flanked by Mary, the Mother of God, and John the Baptist. Through her receptivity to God and the humbleness in which she accepts the Logos in her womb, Mary is the ultimate expression of the feminine archetype found in the Holy Spirit.107 The masculine principle of the Logos is represented by John the Baptist, who fully assumes his vocation for witnessing and actively engaging with the world to the point of martyrdom.108 Man transforms creation into a temple for God, while woman  – the temple herself – purifies the work of man through her prayers, taking humanity to the gates of the Kingdom.109 Thus, the fight for social rights is compatible with the equality between men and women found at the heart of the Christian vision, 103 Ibid., 352. 104 Ibid., 353–54. 105 Paul Evdokimov, La Femme et le salut du monde: Étude d’anthropologie Chrétienne sur les charismes de la femme (Tournai: Casterman, 1958). 106 Ibid., 16, 217. 107 Ibid., 221, 236. 108 Ibid., 239. 109 Ibid., 257.

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and it should be supported by the Church, but only up to the point where feminism seeks to preserve the femininity of women and not to transform them into men.110 Confronted with the third wave of feminism of the 1990s, Thomas Hopko (1939–2015) picked up the discussion from where Evdokimov left it. Hopko was sympathetic to the claim that each soul should imitate Mary in her relationship with God as well as to the association between the Holy Spirit and femininity.111 Hopko concedes that both ideas could be interpreted as subordinationist, aiming at keeping women in their place by removing them “from any direct, personal comparison with God the Father and Christ the Son”,112 but he hopes that such an interpretation will be proved wrong by future Orthodox women scholars.113 Hopko, however, is not interested in making this point himself. His goal is to show that deification is open to all and that the requirements are the same for men and women. The lives of the Orthodox saints “demonstrate with incredible clarity” that on the path to deification gender has no specific relevance. “There are no natural virtues common to human beings which belong to one of the sexes, and not the other.”114 The difficulty with such a strong and decisive statement is that it tends to contradict the very reality of human embodiment. If gender does not play any part in the deification process, then why does it exist? Is gender a consequence of the Fall as Solovyov believed? Hopko seems aware of these questions and nuances his position. Everyone is called to attain deification following the same process (i.e., asceticism), but in her own unique way that fits her biological and personal characteristics. For human beings, for whom gender is a necessary attribute, the sexual dimension of being a man or a woman is therefore essentially involved in the manner in which their human – and holy – attributes are personally realized. Thus, again by way of example, we discover that women monastics have often been glorified for being ‘manly’ since living alone in the desert is hardly something that normally would be expected of, or permitted to, women. Some of these monastic women were even compelled to pretend to be men by wearing men’s clothing in order to complete their calling.115 110 Ibid., 178. 111 Thomas Hopko, ‘God and Gender: Articulating the Orthodox View’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37, no. 2/3 (1993): 154. 112 Ibid., 158. 113 Ibid., 159. 114 Ibid., 171. 115 Ibid., 171–72.

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While, to my knowledge, Hopko’s call for the development of the Marial typology found in Bulgakov and Evdokimov did not prove very successful, his claim that deification transcends gender categories resonates quite nicely with more contemporary accounts of women theologians like Spyridoula AthanasopoulouKypriou and Ashley Purpura. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou argues for the compatibility between the genderless character of the process of deification and Judith Butler’s attempt at dissociating gender from biological and social determinism.116 Athanasopoulou-Kypriou points to the writings of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor – where human beings are called to overcome the divisions between created and uncreated, perceptible and spiritual, male and female – as examples of spiritual anthropology that “subverts gender essentialism and the cultural web of stereotypes.”117 Like Hopko, AthanasopoulouKypriou is careful to stress that deification does not entail the erasure of gender and other personal features, but their preservation in Christ. This Christological horizon of liberation from gender stereotypes is important, AthanasopoulouKypriou believes, because it offers a certain direction of development to “the restless fluidity of the postmodern conception of the body.”118 Purpura starts from the same observation as Hopko, namely that “women monastics have often been glorified for being ‘manly’”, but turns it on its head. Her main claim is that whenever women saints are compared to men or praised for their manly feats, the hagiographers are in fact confounding “human gendered expectations, temporal-social conceptions, and the limits of language.”119 Taking up the examples of Eugenia, Pelagia of Antioch, Theodora, and Matrona, Purpura shows convincingly that their manliness was unexpected and subversive for their hagiographers and the public, especially when women assumed positions of authority over men. Although Purpura is under no illusion about the misogyny of certain Byzantine writers and the patriarchal cultural context, she thinks that her reading provides a liberating perspective celebrating non-submissive forms of women’s deification. “Through the very negation of the possibility of a holy woman, these texts reject a singular and generalized way of being holy, and instead acknowledge in dynamic portrayals that God is present, powerful, transformative, and liberating in women’s lives.”120 116 Spyridoula Athanasopoulou-Kypriou, ‘The Eschatological Body: Constructing Christian Orthodox Anthropology beyond Sexual Ideology’, The Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 69, no. 1/4 (2017): 324. 117 Ibid., 330. 118 Ibid., 331. 119 Ashley Purpura, ‘Innovating “Traditional” Women’s Roles: Byzantine Insights for Orthodox Christian Gender Discourse’, Modern Theology 36, no. 3 (2020): 645. 120 Ibid., 661.

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3.5 Celibacy, Marriage, and Homosexuality What should be highlighted at this point is that the two types of deification proposed to women – the complementarian and the monastic – are deeply interwoven with the discussion regarding the place of marriage in the Orthodox tradition. For a long time, Orthodoxy has praised monasticism as the highest way of life and since in monasticism sexuality is meant to be transfigured into desire for union with Christ, marriage tends to be regarded as the lower path to deification where the sexual act is tolerated for the propagation of the species. Much of the complementarian discourse on gender of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was aimed at challenging this view and raising marriage to the same status as monastic celibacy. Recent debates on homosexuality, however, have shifted again the perspective by asking to what extent this elevation of marriage is traditional and how could it justify opposition to homosexual marriages? For modern Orthodox theology, that came into existence once with the publication of Philokalia, which is in essence a selection of writings primarily meant for the use of monastics, seemed rather natural to see marriage as a concession to human weakness. This did not mean that marriage was considered sinful – a robust defence against this position was always to be found – but that marriage did not come with the same spiritual benefits as monastic celibacy. Or as Brandon Gallaher (b. 1972) puts it, “Even if it is an over-statement to claim that Orthodoxy is anti-family, at best it is often suspicious and even patronizing towards family life.”121 Marriage was permitted only with the goal of bearing and raising children. In the Meaning of Love (1894), Solovyov claims that heterosexual relationships and sexual love have a higher goal than procreation; they are as much about personal development through reciprocal self-sacrificial love as they are about the reconstruction of original androgyny. Solovyov proclaims that the basic tenor of any authentic loving relationship is the recognition of the other as having absolute significance for us. This act of recognition forces the self to transcend its egotistic limits and recentre its existence around another human being.122 In this way, the individual begins to realise her own truth, that is to become a person.123 Solovyov is quite adamant that only heterosexual relationships can lead to personhood. Maternal love entails the recognition of the child as absolutely 121 Brandon Gallaher, ‘Tangling with Orthodox Tradition in the Modern West: Natural Law, Homosexuality, and Living Tradition’, The Wheel, no. 13–14 (2018): 61. 122 Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, 45. 123 Ibid.

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significant to the mother, but this relationship is not reciprocal. Children do not think very often of their mothers as more important than their beloved, while in general mothers think of their children as more important than their husbands. Friendship could also be invoked as an example of self-sacrificial love that recognises the incommensurate value of another human being.124 Yet, Solovyov objects that friendship is mostly an exercise in mutual selfadmiration that does not include the mystery of otherness. Heterosexual love teaches us to sacrifice ourselves for someone different from us, someone who – according to the gender stereotype of his day – is either fundamentally active (male) or passive (female). Further, Solovyov argues that it is only in the complementarity of the heterosexual couple that the image of God is restored and the human being attains full personhood. [M]an and his female alter ego mutually fulfil each other, not only in the real but also in the ideal sense, attaining perfection only through reciprocity. Man can restore formatively the image of God in the living object of his love, only when at the same time he also restores that image in himself. However, he does not possess the power for this in himself, for if he possessed it he would not stand in need of restoration; and as he does not possess it in himself, he is obliged to receive it from God.125 Bulgakov agrees that human beings are complete only in a heterosexual relationship, but he rejects the idea that a male or a female individual on their own would be some form of “half-human.”126 He also emphasises the ascetic character of marriage, by distinguishing between erotic and sexual love. Erotic love is the ecstatic transcendence of oneself on which a relationship of “lovefriendship between the male and female principles in man” are established.127 Sexual love is the principle of human reproduction that muddies the waters of an erotic heterosexual friendship. In itself, sexuality is not wrong – it was part of the constitution of the first human beings – but it has lost its initial harmony with the spirit. Before the Fall, sexuality was subordinated to the spirit, but afterwards became autonomous.128 To re-establish the initial relationship between sex and eros, between the reproductive and the spiritual principles, 124 125 126 127 128

Ibid., 47–49. Ibid., 85–86. Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 351. Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub, 2004), 323. Ibid., 324.

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one has to control his behaviour ascetically, that is through monastic celibacy or marriage. Marriage is ascetic in as much as the sexual activity between spouses is regulated and without lust. Through the sacrament of marriage, “conjugal love does not need to be a mere servant of lust”, being transformed into “a benediction of personal love as spiritual friendship.”129 Thus, the ultimate ascetic goal of marriage is the elevation of heterosexual relationships from sexual love to erotic friendship. Yet, despite the support for marriage as a legitimate path to deification, Bulgakov still ranks it lower than monasticism. Chastity, especially virginity, is the ideal established by God for all human beings from their creation: virginity was the natural state of Adam and Eve; it is a part of the image of God, and it is also the eschatological state when the function of, and the need for, reproduction will cease.130 Hence, monasticism, or the struggle to attain chastity, has to be higher than marriage. As Bulgakov himself puts it quite firmly, “The virginity path to chastity is more sanctified than the marriage path, which is a kind of a compromise with sex.”131 The ascetical aspect of marriage becomes of primary concern for Evdokimov, who unlike Bulgakov wishes to demonstrate the full equality between the two paths to deification.132 Evdokimov picks up two elements that in his opinion are constitutive of asceticism – self-sacrifice and transfiguration – and explains how well they refer to marriage. If in the case of monasticism the new human being has to die to her own will and be reborn in a new being whose will harmonises with that of God, in marriage the same process takes place, but in regard to the other. The bride and the groom promise that they will die to their selfishness and be reborn in full harmony with their spouse.133 At the centre of marital ascesis lies the struggle for accepting the love of the other. To love is not just to recognise the absolute value of another human being, but also to allow the other to love you back. The acceptance of the other’s love is something that demands ascetic self-control and spiritual growth.134 For Evdokimov, the monastics are in the same situation as the spouses. They are in love with God and struggle to allow God to love them and to work in them the Christian 129 130 131 132

Ibid., 331. Ibid., 332. Ibid., 333. Michael Plekon, ‘Paul Evdokimov’, in Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction, ed. John Witte and Gary S. Hauk, Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity (New York (NY): Cambridge University Press, 2017), 388. 133 Paul Evdokimov, Sacrement de l’amour: le mystère conjugal à la lumière de la tradition orthodoxe (Paris: Ed. de l’Epi, 1962), 92. 134 Ibid., 95.

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virtues. “The virtues, according to the ascetics, are nothing more than human dynamism triggered by God’s presence.”135 Stăniloae incorporates much of Evdokimov’s insistence on the ascetic-sacrificial side of marriage but tends to connect it more with the concrete life of the couple and its everyday struggles. Marriage is indeed about the recognition of the other as a fascinating mystery, but it is also about one’s availability to love and respect the other even in difficult circumstances, like sickness and poverty. It is the enactment of this almost unconditional commitment that makes marriage ascetical and a genuine path to deification. If the responsibility and love that should govern any marital relationship are taken seriously, then the spouses are going to be transfigured into two radiant presences witnessing God, just as any monastic on the summit of deification.136 Still, Stăniloae considers monasticism an unnatural state of being. Humans have been created male and female and they can attain fulfilment only in a heterosexual relationship. He does not insist on the stereotype of the passive female and active male but on the complementarity of their embodied experiences. Due to its own physiological constitution, each body has its own perception of the world and gender plays a relatively important part in that process. A man will perceive the world differently from a woman,137 so a heterosexual couple will necessarily complement each other. Moreover, by living together, the two will also develop complementarity at the level of their personality. The spouses will learn that when one has moments of spiritual weakness the other has to be strong or that when one gets carried away with enthusiasm the other needs to temper it.138 From this vantage point, monasticism is doubtful. How could the monastics experience all this fullness of being that exists in marriage? Probably, Stăniloae reckons, this is why there is no sacrament for entering monasticism.139 Meyendorff is probably one of the last theologians who could write about marriage without having the topic of homosexuality at the back of his mind.140 While his book on marriage is mostly a historical survey and the ideas found there are not necessarily new, he deserves to be mentioned because he represents the Eucharistic turn in Orthodox theology. Meyendorff does not spend 135 Ibid., 106. 136 Dumitru Stăniloae, Teologia Dogmatică Ortodoxă, vol. III (Bucureşti: Institutul Biblic şi de Misiune Ortodoxă, 2010), 185. 137 Ibid., III:188–90. 138 Ibid., III:190. 139 Ibid., III:185. 140 John Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, 3d expanded ed (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000).

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too much time paralleling monasticism with marriage. He is convinced that many of “the confusions and misunderstandings” surrounding marriage in the Orthodox practice could be eliminated if the connection between the Eucharist and marriage was restored.141 Marriage existed and continues to exist outside the boundaries of the Church. To make a sacramental claim to marriage – that is to make it more than a human practice blessed by the priest – it is necessary to place it against the wider background of the Kingdom of God, of which the Eucharist is part. For Meyendorff, the Kingdom is an eschatological reality that enters the life of the world through the Church. The sacraments consecrate the most important moments of human existence (e.g. baptism to a new life in Christ, growth in the Spirit, the healing of disease, and marriage) transforming them into lived experiences of the Kingdom.142 The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Church par excellence through which all persons are grafted into the body of Christ.143 Baptism is an entrance into the Church; Chrismation is a gift which determines free growth in the Spirit; priesthood is a responsibility for the unity and the building up of the Body; the sacrament of oil bestows a new dimension of existence in the ‘new Adam’, where there is no more disease or death. All these individual aspects of the life of the Body have their center and their fulfillment in the Mystery that makes the Church to be the Body of Christ: the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist. Outside of the Body, there can be no ‘sacraments’.144 This is why, Meyendorff concludes, the Orthodox Church has strong reservations in accepting mixed marriages: if the two spouses cannot share in the Eucharistic chalice and be part of the same Body of Christ, how are their natural affinities and lives going to be transformed by the experience of the Kingdom.145 The attempt to put marriage on the same level, or even higher, than monastic celibacy culminates in the recent debates surrounding homosexuality. Some defenders of heterosexual marriages claim that those who have homosexual tendencies should not seek the blessing of the Church for their sins, but refrain from it by leading a life of chastity. Same-sex desires in themselves are 141 142 143 144 145

Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 51.

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not sinful, but their enactment. Because of the Fall, all humans have sexual desires that are not considered acceptable by the Church,146 including adulterous heterosexual desires.147 It is the act and not the desire that is condemnable. Human beings have been created by God only for finding fulfilment in complementary heterosexual relationships and “same-sex sexual intercourse is not capable of establishing and edifying the psychological, emotional, and spiritual lives of the persons involved.”148 The solution then is the ascetic transfiguration of same-sex desire into love for God and desire for deification. Those who might find this recommendation harsh are reminded that asceticism is in fact demanded from heterosexual Christians as well, who “will do whatever it takes to control their carnal emotions and spiritual lusts.”149 Or as Bradley Nassif puts it succinctly, “the ultimate goal of sexual expression, whether in marriage or celibacy, is to grow in christification (theosis) by worshipping God and honouring the humanity of others through self-giving askesis.”150 Brandon Gallaher showed accurately the main challenge raised by this approach. On the one hand, it begs the question of how Tradition should be interpreted. Homosexuality was indeed condemned by the Fathers, but marriage did not fare very well either. Virginity and chastity were by far preferred to marriage. By placing marriage at the heart of Orthodox life, its defenders alter the very Tradition they claim to protect. On the other hand, if marriage is defined primarily as relational and self-sacrificial, why can this definition not be true of certain homosexual relations? As Gallaher puts it In fact, to me, it seems that committed same-sex relationships are a genuine novum in Christian history  – though the genital acts are of course nothing new. So the question is then does the addition of self-sacrificial love to these sex acts change their ‘unnatural’ character?151 Yet, in my view, the most serious critique of the Orthodox theology of marriage came from John Manoussakis (b. 1972). In the article “Marriage and Sexuality in the Light of the Eschaton”, he agrees with Meyendorff’s premise that a sacrament 146 Thomas Hopko, Christian Faith and Same-Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections (Ben Lomond, Calif: Conciliar Press, 2006), 57. 147 Ibid., 46. 148 Ibid., 35. 149 Ibid., 67. 150 Bradley Nassif, ‘Sexual Paradigms in the Orthodox Church’, The Wheel, no. 13–14 (2018): 104–5. 151 Gallaher, ‘Tangling with Orthodox Tradition in the Modern West: Natural Law, Homo­ sexuality, and Living Tradition’, 61.

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is an eschatological event grounded on the Eucharist, from which all the other sacraments depart. Manoussakis, however, goes against the eschatological and transformational dimensions of marriage. Not only that according to Christ there is no marriage in heaven,152 but, contrary to Solovyov and Stăniloae, Manoussakis holds that marriage is not about the development of personhood through otherness, but represents “a process of homogeneity, exclusive and even polemical of any form of otherness.”153 The goal of marriage is purely political; it helps the state and the nation maintain a strong presence in history and achieve their worldly objectives. Thus, from a Christian eschatological standpoint not infused with political militantism, forbidding homosexual marriages does not make more sense than forbidding any type of marriage and cohabitation.154 Manoussakis’ piece is far from the last word on the topic. The debate is very much ongoing with numerous articles being published right now and with many more expected.155 My intention, however, is not to provide a full overview of the debate, but rather to show to what extent the concept of deification grounds the Orthodox anthropological vision. I think it is safe to say that for anthropology deification can be seen as the main structuring principle, whether we speak of the distinction between person and individual, gender or sexuality. In the person vs individual debate, person is quite clearly the term used to describe the deified state to which the faithful has access either through ascesis or sacraments. Deification also shapes the debates in the case of gender: for one side, union with God presupposes acting by specific gender characteristics or stereotypes, while for the other it means overcoming them. Regarding sexuality, the ascetic 152 John Panteleimon Manoussakis, ‘Marriage and Sexuality in the Light of the Eschaton: A Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Theology’, Religions 7, no. 7 (2016): 4–5. 153 Ibid., 6. 154 Ibid., 11–13. 155 Among those already published: Brandon Gallaher and Gregory Tucker, ‘Eastern Orthodoxy & Sexual Diversity Perspectives on Challenges from the Modern West: Interim Report of the British Council Bridging Voices Consortium of Exeter University & Fordham University, New York on “Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Identity and the Challenges of Pluralism and Sexual Diversity in a Secular Age”’, Interim Report (The British Council Bridging Voices Consortium of Exeter University & Fordham University, New York, 2019); Helena Kupari and Elina Vuola, eds., Gender and Orthodox Christianity, Routledge Studies in Religion (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020). Among those forthcoming: Thomas Arentzen, Ashley M. Purpura, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality, First edition, Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought (New York: Fordham University Press); Bryce Rich, Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female (Fordham University Press).

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understanding of deification is used to support the equal worth between marriage and celibacy and to call into question the legitimacy of homosexual relationships: sexual desires of any kind have to be redirected towards God as the gift of chastity either in a monastery or inside marriage. However, as the reader might have already noticed, despite my attempt at relating these debates with deification, they do not always take place on these grounds. Larchet’s main critique against Zizioulas is not that the distinction between person and individual is wrong because of a different vision of deification, but mainly because he considers Zizioulas’ argument too removed from the testimony of the Fathers. Similarly, the opposition to homosexuality is more often than not justified by appealing to Tradition, a concept as pervasive and important as deification itself. 4

Tradition and Experience

4.1 Personal Experience The Orthodox Church considers itself to be the Church of Tradition par excellence. The most common way of pressing this point is by defining Tradition as the communal and uninterrupted experience of Orthodox Christians across the millennia as expressed throughout the centuries in Scripture, the dogmas of the ecumenical councils, the liturgy and a series of confessions of faith. Since, for Orthodoxy, Tradition is not about the acquisition of intellectual knowledge about the past but about union with Christ in communion with others, in this chapter I will examine this notion from the perspective of deification, that is the path the Church uses to guide the faithful to union with God, which is simultaneously sustained and nurtured by their own personal experiences. Yet, as I will point out further, the congruence between the personal experience of those who live Tradition to its fullest (i.e. the saints who get deified) and the content of Tradition itself remains to be addressed since in some cases the personal opinions of the saints tend to contradict the thrust of patristic writings and even Scripture itself. I will begin by looking at the pre-eminence of personal experience as a source of the knowledge of God, then I will move to discuss the collective experience of the Church, that is its Tradition, and conclude with a discussion on Scripture and its status inside Tradition. As early as the nineteenth century, Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860) was using experiential knowledge to build Orthodox identity in opposition to Western Christianity. For Khomiakov, as for many of the theologians who came after

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him, the West succumbed to the sin of rationalism, that is of transforming knowledge into a set of logical propositions one has to agree with.156 For the East, Khomiakov claims, knowledge is an experience involving the entirety of the human being – from perception to reason to volition.157 He postulates that the material world is just the visible side of a more complex spiritual reality. This reality cannot be known through individual research (whether logical or spiritual), nor through agreement between individuals, but only through the revelation of the Trinitarian reciprocal love in “the holy unity” with each other inside the Church.158 The entirety of this world can be grasped by behaving ethically (i.e. aligning one’s inner self in moral harmony with the self of Christ) and communally (i.e. showing love for the other members of the Church).159 Thus, to know is to be part of a community of love, where “the knowledge of truth rests on the holiness and the mutual love of Christians in Jesus Christ.”160 Pavel Florensky developed Khomiakov’s critique, by arguing that knowledge arising from intuition is more trustworthy than that extracted from rational principles. He takes aim here at the principle of identity (A = A) that grounds much of formal logic. The principle states that each thing has to be identical to itself in order to be rationally true. If the principle is to be held, Florensky argues, then it not only contradicts the diversity of life on earth – no creature is identical with another – but it also means that persons can exist only as long as they are identical with themselves, that is as long as our present self remains identical with our future self.161 Both conclusions are impossible to defend, so the very premises of rational logic must be considered flawed.162 The alternative is intuitive experiential knowledge in all its forms: empirical, intellectual or mystical.163 From a rational point of view, intuitive knowledge is antinomic. An antinomy is formed of two statements which are considered true when taken separately, but contradictory when put together.164 For Florensky, antinomies are specific to religious life and Scripture is full of them. 156 Basile Zernovsky, Histoire de la philosophie russe., vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 216. 157 A.S. Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et Le Protestantisme au point de vue de l’Église d’Orient: Recueil d’articles sur des questions religieuses, Éécrits à différentes époques et à diverses occasions (Lausanne: Benda, 1872), 51. 158 Ibid., 241. 159 Ibid., 134; Zernovsky, Histoire de la philosophie russe, 1:217. 160 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et Le Protestantisme, 107. 161 Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23. 162 Ibid., 24. 163 Ibid., 21. 164 Ibid., 109.

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In the letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul provides one of the best examples of antinomy, when he speaks almost at the same time of free will and predestination. On the one hand, human beings are free to act either in a way that is praiseworthy and that will lead them to communion with Christ or one that is sinful and abhorrent to God and bring them eternal punishment. On the other hand, the eschatological fate of each person has been predetermined before the creation of the world. Some will get into heaven and others into hell, according to God’s will. For Florensky, both statements are true in themselves, but only when placed next to one another do they raise logical difficulties.165 The apparent contradictions of these antimonic statements are a consequence of our lapsarian condition. As fallen creatures, we suffer from the limitation of our reason and the fragmentation of our knowledge. Antinomies point to a holistic view of reality to which we will have access either in the eschaton or in this life, if, through ascetic struggle, we manage to get as close as possible to tasting the eschatological union with God. Hence, the saint has better access to the whole of reality than a scientist, because, “In this mind, the healing of the fissures and cracks has begun; the sickness of being is being cured; the wounds of the world are being healed. For this mind itself is the healing organ of the world.”166 A friend of Florensky’s, Sergius Bulgakov also claimed that religious experience is a valid form of knowledge. In Unfading Light (1917), he is concerned with rejecting the Kantian reduction of religion to ethics.167 It is true that, as Kant says, God cannot be known through our reason because He is not just another concept of our mental universe, but, Bulgakov asserts, this is because religion is an independent realm of thought, possessing its own special organ and its own logic whose epistemological door is mystical experience.168 Just as aesthetic or ethical experiences cannot be pinned down rationally, but they necessarily postulate the existence of a special inner organ enabling them to distinguish between good and evil or beautiful and ugly, so mystical experience reveals the existence of an inner organ for the knowledge of God.169 This

165 Ibid., 120. 166 Ibid., 118. 167 Sergius Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations, trans. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2013), 46–48. This can be also read as a reaction to Solovyov. See Brandon Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, First edition, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016), 45–69. 168 Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 59–61. 169 Ibid.

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organ becomes particularly discernible in the lives of “religious geniuses”, that is of saints and prophets.170 Like Florensky, Bulgakov considers the knowledge resulting from mystical experience to be antinomic. Since God is not an object or a concept, but a being outside our rational framework, whenever we think of God and try to place God inside a logically fluent narrative, we are confronted with antinomic statements. When we say that God is the cause of the world we transform Him into an immobile principle. At the same time, it is undeniable that God is the cause of creation because He brought it into existence.171 Antinomies, such as this one, remind us of God’s transcendence and the fundamental role of personal experience in any attempt at knowing Him. “Lived alogical or supralogical experience precedes gnoseological experience (in Kantian senses), in which, unattainably for thought, the matter is already given which generates thinking, and all this grey mass of experience gradually is overcome and assimilated by thinking.”172 The fundamental relevance of the personal experience of God for theology and its antinomic character receive their most enduring and well-known form in Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Unlike Florensky and Bulgakov, Lossky is keen to present these ideas as emerging directly from the exegesis of patristic authors like Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palamas and use them polemically against Roman Catholic theology.173 Lossky identifies the Orthodox experience of God with the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius distinguishes between two types of knowledge of God: the cataphatic and the apophatic. The cataphatic states facts about God (e.g., God is good or God is omnipotent), while the apophatic refuses to admit these statements as sufficiently apt for describing God. From the apophatic perspective, God is more than good and more than omnipotent. Dionysius is not the first to coin the terms nor the distinction between apophatic and cataphatic knowledge,174 but according to Lossky, Dionysius is the first to think of apophaticism as knowledge through experience. For him, Dionysius does not see the relationship between the apophatic and cataphatic as another language game where any affirmation about God has to be denied to keep the mind away from creating idols. This kind of apophaticism was already 170 171 172 173

Ibid., 48–50. Ibid., 197–99. Ibid., 148–50. See Brandon Gallaher, ‘The “Sophiological” Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (August 2013): 278–98, doi:10.1017/S0036930613000136. 174 Michael Craig Rhodes, ‘On Contradiction in Orthodox Philosophy’, in Logic in Orthodox Christian Thinking, ed. Andrew Schumann (Frankfurt, Paris: Ontos-Verlag, 2013), 86–87.

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preached in the second century by Clement of Alexandria, and Lossky qualifies it as “geometrical analysis” where the mind seeks to delete all the dimensions of the object of knowledge to reduce it to one single feature.175 Authentic apophatism, the one that Dionysius proposes, refers to the experience of the gap between our comprehension and the nature of the reality we are trying to comprehend. It can be achieved only after one has abandoned all concepts that mediated her relationship with God.176 “Consequently, theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being, as an experience which surpasses all understanding.”177 The influence of Lossky’s view that apophatic experience is the epistemological royal path of Orthodox theology can hardly be overstated. However, neither should the contribution of other theologians who developed and amplified it be downplayed. One of the most prominent figures is the Greek theologian Christos Yannaras. Yannaras draws an important distinction between the apophatism of the essence, belonging to the Western tradition, and the apophatism of the person, belonging to the Greek Fathers. For him, Western theological tradition is characterised by a highly abstract approach to knowledge. The object or the encountered reality is classified according to its characteristics and its essence grasped through conceptual reasoning.178 This is how after a long process that started with Scholasticism and ended up with Leibniz,179 God was replaced with the notion of “conceptual necessity.”180 In this context, apophaticism serves only as a cautionary tale showing the relativity of any statements about God and the limits of human knowledge.181 By contrast, for the Greek Fathers knowledge springs out of the relational experience. The world and the persons I encounter are known through the relationships they have with me rather than through their essence.182 These relationships are multifaceted and “no intellectual definition (whether conceptual or verbal) can ever exhaust the knowledge afforded us by the immediacy of relationships.”183 This is particularly true when it comes to God. God is not an object whose essence can be grasped through logical reasoning, but a person 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

Vladimir Lossky, À l’image et à La Ressemblance de Dieu (Aubier Montaigne, 1967), 13. Ibid., 7. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 38. Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, trans. Haralambos Ventis, 2nd ed. (London; New York: T & T Clark International, 2005), 29. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 28. Yannaras, Person and Eros, xiv. Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 29.

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who is discovered only in relation to another person. To know God means to experience God through a personal relationship with Him. Here, apophaticism is not about the limits of our reason, but about the conscious refusal to reduce the person of God to conceptual formulations.184 Apophatism is the very experience of our communion with God.185 However, not everyone accepted Lossky’s or Yannaras’ apophaticism unreservedly. As early as the 1970’s, the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae denounced Yannaras for not giving enough credit to cataphatic theology.186 Stăniloae’s critique stems from what might be called a logocentric outlook on the cosmos. If the world is the creation of the Logos understood as Reason or Rationality and creatures are logoi, which through their inner rationality relate to that of the universal Logos, then it seems counterintuitive to praise apophatism and ignore cataphatism. The two must be complementary. The knowledge of God obtained through reason needs the experience of God in order to understand better the relation of the world with the Logos, while the experience of God needs to be expressed in rational words and concepts in order to be shared with others.187 For Stăniloae, the experience of God makes the world transparent to God’s presence and teaches human beings not to run away from the world, but to contemplate it in relation to God’s rationality. To rephrase one of the examples used by Yannaras, a painting does not simply make the author present, but it also mediates our relationship with her. Of course, having a personal relationship with the painter gives us better and more informed access to the painting, but it does not make the painting irrelevant. Examining the painting through the lens of our personal experience of the painter can help us evaluate how accurately the painting expresses her personality, what emotions are expressed, and to what end. Another critique Stăniloae raises against Yannaras’ apophaticism is that the knowledge of God should not be separated from Scripture and Tradition. A non-Christian can learn about the existence of God from the rational study of creation in the same way she can learn from the apophatic experience of the presence of God. In neither case, however, will she be able to access the basic truths of faith revealed in Scripture and Tradition: the existence of God as a Trinity or that Jesus Christ is God and man at the same time.188

184 185 186 187 188

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 91. Stăniloae, TDO, I:116, fn. 1. Ibid., I:117. Ibid., I:118.

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Nonetheless, Stăniloae considers that the knowledge of God through personal experience should not be limited to the apophatic and the cataphatic categories. Human beings also establish and develop a personal knowledge of God through the events taking place in their own lives, in their failures or successes, in their illnesses or healings, or through the moral dilemmas they face in concrete situations. This experiential knowledge increases our intimacy with God because it invites God to look at our desires and vulnerabilities. In this knowledge I no longer see God only as the creator and the providential guide of all things, or as the mystery which makes himself visible to all, filling all with a joy which is to a greater or lesser extent the same in all cases; but I know him in his special care in regard to me, in his intimate relations with me, in his plan whereby, through the particular suffering, demands, and direction that he addresses to me in life, he leads me in a special way to the common goal.189 Towards the turn of the new millennium, the centrality of apophaticism in Orthodox theology began to wane. In part, this was due to the considerable influence exerted by the Eucharistic vision of John Zizioulas. Zizioulas agrees with the importance of experiential knowledge,190 but he challenges both the apophaticism and the asceticism associated with it. If, for Lossky, the experience that leads to the knowledge of God is apophatic and primarily accessible through personal ascesis, for Zizioulas, the knowledge of God is affirmative, communal, and liturgical. The very first line of his Lectures on Christian Dogmatics (2008) reads: “Theology starts in the worship of God and the Church’s experience of communion with God.”191 More precisely, for Zizioulas, the source of the knowledge of God is the Eucharist, where the believer is united with Christ through the Holy Spirit.192 In the introduction to Being as Communion (1985), he draws a direct correlation between the development of the notion of person in the early centuries and the Eucharistic experience of its proponents. Only those Fathers of the Church who were bishops and oversaw the Eucharistic celebration were able

189 Ibid., I:144. English translation from Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, trans. Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer, vol. 1 (Brookline, Mass: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005), 118. 190 Jean Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight, trans. Katerina Nikolopulu (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 7. 191 Ibid., 1. 192 Ibid., 13; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 84 (epub).

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to overcome the metaphysical pitfalls of Greek philosophy and understand that God can be known as a Person through a communion of love.193 By dislodging apophaticism from its central position in epistemology and locating the knowledge of God in the Eucharist, Zizioulas created the necessary space for the re-evaluation of the role of reason inside the Orthodox system.194 One such attempt is the edited volume Logic in Orthodox Christian Thinking (2013). There, the authors seek to demonstrate that formal categories of logic are essential to the Orthodox discourse. Most chapters deal with the role of logic and the type of logic employed by the Church Fathers: Palamas (Swinburn; Rojek), Dionysius (Lourié, Knepper), or their stoic influences (Schumann), but there are also two dedicated to Florensky (Rhodes; Foltz). I will refer here to Rhodes’ essay because it seems to me paradigmatic of the overall Orthodox approach to logic. In “On Contradiction in Orthodox Philosophy”, Rhodes seeks a synthesis between cataphatic and apophatic logic. Drawing on Floresnky, he argues that Orthodoxy has its particular logic, which in the current language of analytical philosophy would be called paraconsistent, that is, it can accept as simultaneously true two contradictory propositions.195 What is specifically Orthodox is the solution, namely, to rise above the contradictions through the experience of the mystery of love. Florensky gestures toward mystery. Not just any mystery though. The mystery Florensky sees as distinguishing a true contradiction from its false cousins induces silence; it gets one to the point of being speechless. Not just speechless. Lack of speech is understood in terms of prayer and worship, and in terms of ineffability. Moreover, that sort of mystery must be akin to hope. But again, Florensky has a particular kind of hope in mind. The only hope that matters is his concern. If inconsistency is to be tolerated in isolation, then it must provide hope in the face of death. The source of that hope must be love that is victorious over the enemy of being: death. Thus, measuring mystery in Orthodox thought requires not just critical evaluation of the logic of propositions; but also, and most essentially requires love.196 193 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 16–17. 194 Zizioulas himself speaks of “ethical apophaticism” (Communion and Otherness, 112), the expression aiming to convey that no human being can be defined from a particular set of characteristics or actions. 195 Rhodes, ‘On Contradiction in Orthodox Philosophy’, 83. 196 Ibid., 100.

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What Rhodes does very well in this quote is to illustrate the uneasiness Orthodox feel towards rational categories. Rhodes proves that Florensky’s logic is convergent with the latest developments in analytic philosophy, but rather than maintaining that logic is after all at the heart of Orthodox theology, he prefers speaking about the importance of transcending these categories through experience. The mystery of hope and love is the ultimate solution to all rational incongruities. To summarise, it can be said that from its early stages Orthodox theology rejected rationalism or the attempt of speaking about faith in rational categories that follow obediently the laws of logic. What mattered was the personal encounter with God. This encounter can be intuitive, apophatic, take place in everyday events, or at the Eucharistic celebration, but it has to be experiential, in as much as it has to be a personal encounter with God that leads to the mystery of deification. 4.2 Communal Experience as Tradition At this point, it is worth mentioning that no Orthodox theologian would declare personal experience to be more important than communal experience. The latter is always higher than the former, no matter how holy the person is. To say the opposite would mean to support a form of spiritual individualism, which to my knowledge, no Orthodox theologian would be happy to do. Orthodoxy remains a communal endeavour where the knowledge of God is revealed inside the Church through mutual love. As I will explain in more detail later, this position – that knowledge is born out of the love for each other – belongs to Khomiakov. In the polemical context of the nineteenth century, Khomiakov sought to define Orthodox Christianity in counter distinction with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. He claimed that for both of them the knowledge of faith was imposed by an external authority, either that of the Pope or of human reason itself. The Orthodox, however, received the knowledge of God through the reciprocal love found inside the Church. “Neither God, nor Christ, nor his Church is an authority, which is something external. They are the truth; they are the life of the Christian, his interior life; more alive than the heart that beats in his chest and the blood that runs through his veins: but they are his life only inasmuch he lives the universal life of love and unity that is the ecclesial life.”197 Khomiakov received his fair amount of criticism, but despite it, no theologian would venture to uphold the contrary, namely that the communal experience 197 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et Le Protestantisme, 40.

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of God is not one of the main features of the Orthodox Church.198 This experience is called Tradition and it “is not a book which records a certain moment in the development of the Church and stops itself, but a book always being written by the Church’s life, Tradition continues always and now not less than before; we live in tradition and create it.”199 We find similar statements in other influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, including Georges Florovsky, Dumitru Stăniloae and John Meyendorff. For Florovsky, “Loyalty to tradition does not mean loyalty to bygone times and outward authority; it is a living connexion with the fulness of Church experience.”200 Meyendorff also insists that “Orthodox witness is traditional, in the sense that it is consistent not only with Scripture but also with the experience of the Fathers and the saints, as well as with the continuous celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection in the liturgy of the Church.”201 Stăniloae phrases it in the same vein but emphasises the loving and experiential character of Tradition. “Tradition, which may also be described as the identity of the knowledge of Christ, consists in the continuous experiencing of his love, a love ever the same, yet always new, which surpasses all knowledge and limit. Nor can it be experienced except through a simultaneous experience of love among all the faithful (saints), which is to say, in the Church.”202 The communal experience of God that is kept alive in Tradition has been expressed in various forms throughout the centuries: Scripture, the dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils, liturgical texts, the dogmas of later councils, the writings of the Fathers, the symbolic confessions of faith made between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Orthodox hierarchy against the Roman Catholic or Protestant traditions,203 and icons. Usually, the elements on this list appear in the order of their importance. Scripture is first, followed by the 198 Rowan Williams, ‘Tradition in the Russian Theological World’, in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall Allen Poole, First edition, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 645–59. 199 Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 27. 200 Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, 1:46. 201 John Meyendorff, Living Tradition: Orthodox Witness in the Contemporary World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), 7. 202 Stăniloae, TDO, I:60. English translation Stăniloae, The Experience of God, 1:146. 203 The Replies of Jeremias II to the Lutherans (1573–81); The Confession of Faith by Metrophanes Kritopoulos (1625), The Orthodox Confession by Peter of Moghila, in its revised form (ratified by the Council of Jassy, 1642). The Confession of Dositheus (ratified by the Council of Jerusalem, 1672), The Answers of the Orthodox Patriarchs to the

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dogmas of the ecumenical councils, then liturgical texts, which are more relevant than the later councils, but less relevant than the dogmas, and the Fathers being more important than the symbolic confessions of faith but less important than the dogmas of the councils. For most Orthodox theologians, however, the ranking remains more or less up to debate, depending on their own theological presuppositions. Kallistos Ware places the Nicene Creed above the decrees of the councils of Jassy or Jerusalem,204 because, like Florovsky, he considers them to reflect more Roman Catholic categories than the patristic heritage. Stăniloae has a similar approach, excluding completely from his systematic theology the confessions of faith from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.205 Sometimes there are even dissonances between the ranking of the elements on the list and their actual relevance for the writings of Orthodox theologians. Although Scripture is placed at the top, in reality, very few theologians would feel comfortable starting their discourses from Scripture. The majority will begin from the dogmas of the ecumenical councils or certain writings of the Fathers and for this reason, I will discuss dogmas first and then move to Scripture.206 4.2.1 Dogmas The consensus is that dogmas are one of the highest expressions of the ecclesial experience of God. As Stăniloae explains, dogmas are the result of the dialogue between Christ and his Church. They synthesise God’s relationship with creation and human beings on their path to deification.207 Their paradoxical nature – as in the case of Chalcedon – captures the “essential contradictions” of the mystery of life208 and their conciseness invites all the faithful to deepen their inexhaustible meaning. Moreover, due to the movement of history towards its eschatological fulness in Christ and of the theological reflection that has accumulated during the centuries, Stăniloae believes that today we have a richer and

204 205 206 207 208

Non-Jurors (1718, 1723); The Reply of the Orthodox Patriarchs to Pope Pius IX (1848); The Reply of the Synod of Constantinople to Pope Leo XIII (1895). Ware, The Orthodox Church, 203. Kallistos Ware, ‘Foreword’ to Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, trans. Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer, vol. 1 (Brookline, Mass: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005), xvii–xviii. John Behr, ‘Faithfulness and Creativity’, in Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West: Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, eds. John Behr, Andrew Louth, and Dimitri E. Conomos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 159–77. Stăniloae, TDO, I:95,97. Ibid., I:98.

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more complex understanding of the ecumenical dogmas.209 This way, he puts a positive twist on the impact of historical and cultural conditions on our present understanding of these doctrinal statements, without necessarily endorsing John Henry Newman’s (1801–1890) view of the development of doctrines. In fact, no Orthodox theologian agrees directly with the idea of doctrinal development.210 Vladimir Lossky and Andrew Louth would question even Stăniloae’s position because it entails that today we have access to a fuller experience of God than the Fathers of the Church or the Christians of the first centuries. If development means that there is a historical advance in Christian doctrine, making our understanding of the faith more profound than that of the Fathers, at least in principle, then such a notion of development cannot be accepted as a category of Orthodox theology. We shall not advance beyond the faith of the Fathers, nor shall we advance beyond the faith of the apostles.211 Daniel Lattier, one of the Orthodox scholars who dealt with this topic recently, considers that Louth’s rejection of the development of doctrine does not take into account the antinomy between the infinite aspect of God’s revelation and that of finite human knowledge. If we accept that humans can never know God fully, but they constantly advance in their knowledge of God, it follows that the same should be true for the Church as it advances towards the eschaton.212 While Lattier might be right and more attention needs to be paid in the future to the notion of doctrinal development, an adjacent question has continued to provoke ongoing debates for almost a century, namely: Is it acceptable

209 Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘The Orthodox Conception of Tradition and the Development of Doctrine’, Sobornost, 5, no. 9 (Summer 1969): 652–62. 210 Daniel J. Lattier, ‘The Orthodox Rejection of Doctrinal Development’, Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 20, no. 4 (November 2011): 389–410, doi:10.1177/106385121102000408. This statement is true only if we do not count Vladimir Solovyov among theologians but among the philosophers as is often done, since Solovyov supported doctrinal development. See Vladimir S. Solov’ev, Le développement dogmatique de l’église, trans. François Rouleau, (Paris: Desclêe, 1991). 211 Andrew Louth, ‘Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?’, in Orthodoxy & Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Valerie R. Hotchkiss and Patrick Henry (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 55. 212 Lattier, ‘The Orthodox Rejection of Doctrinal Development’, 401.

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or even possible to transpose the dogmas of the Church in the language of contemporary philosophy, whether German Idealism or existentialism? Around the turn of the twentieth century, the answer was a resounding “yes.” Russian intellectuals of all stripes sought to bring back religion to the centre of public and cultural life.213 They embraced a diversity of approaches that in some cases tested the limits of orthodoxy and were in opposition to the Church. This eclectic movement received the name the Russian Religious Renaissance,214 but, despite the incredible number of people covered by this label, contemporary Orthodox theologians refer usually to only three of its most prominent members: Sergius Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Nikolai Berdyaev. Their position is well summarised by Bulgakov Dogmatic theology does not stop at the specific dogmas; it is much broader and therefore must inevitably be supplemented from sources other than the clear and obligatory dogmatic definitions. This “supplementing” happens on the basis of the living tradition of the Church, the analysis of dogmas, and the study of doctrines.215 In the case of Florensky and Bulgakov, this meant engagement with, and theological development of, Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophical system, deeply steeped in German Idealism. In the case of Berdyaev this meant the fashioning of a Christian existentialist personalism. After the end of the Second World War, the tide changed and the “yes” of the Russian Religious Renaissance was replaced by the resounding “no” of the Neopatristic synthesis spearheaded by George Florovsky. Florovsky was highly unhappy with how Berdyaev, and especially Bulgakov, did theology.216 Instead of taking the Fathers and the Tradition as normative, they consider them as optional and restrictive and sought “the cultivation of spiritual freedom 213 Paul L Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. 214 Nicolas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 215 Sergius Bulgakov, ‘Dogma and Dogmatic Theology’, in Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time: Readings from the Eastern Church, ed. Michael Plekon (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 68. 216 For the complicated relationship between Florovksy and Bulgakov see Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 114–58; Brandon Gallaher, ‘“Waiting for the Barbarians”: Identity and Polemics in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky’, Modern Theology 27, no. 4 (October 2011): 659–91, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0025.2011.01707.x.

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and creativity.”217 At the first-ever congress of Orthodox theologians in 1936, Florovsky presented his vision. In a programmatic paper entitled “Patristics and Modern Theology”, he complained that Orthodoxy has been influenced too much by Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies.218 To find its own voice, Orthodoxy should return to its patristic roots and recover the mind of the Fathers.219 Of course, this did not mean the lavish repetition of the past, but the rekindling of patristic creativity.220 Florovksy was convinced that the mind of the Fathers could be recovered through the acceptance of Christian Hellenism as a form of philosophia perennis that can never be surpassed or translated into modern idioms.221 ‘[M]odern philosophy’ must be examined first of all from within the catholic self-consciousness of the Church. It would be precisely ridiculous to check Christian doctrine by some Kantian or Hegelian criterion, or by that of Lotze, Bergson and somebody else. What is required is not a new language, or any new glorious visions, but only a better spiritual sight which would enable us again to discern in the fullness of the catholic experience as much as our spiritual fathers and forefathers did.222 For a series of reasons – some of which have little to do with theology223 – Florovsky’s Neopatristic synthesis imposed itself as the legitimate way of doing theology throughout the entirety of the Orthodox world. This vision had the advantage of being endorsed by first-rate scholars like Vladimir Lossky, Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983), John Meyendorff, Christos Yannaras, 217 Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 125. 218 Georges Florovsky, ‘Patristics and Modern Theology’, in Proces-Verbaux Du Premier Congres de Theologie Orthodoxe a Athenes (Athens: Pyrsos, 1939), 239. 219 Gavrilyuk does not miss to point out the similarities between Florovksy’s programme and that of Adolf Harnack. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, ‘Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis and the Future Ways of Orthodox Theology’, in Orthodox Constructions of the West, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Fordham University Press, 2013), 102–24, doi:10.5422/fordham/9780823251926.003.0007. 220 Florovsky, ‘Patristics and Modern Theology’, 240. See also Georges Florovsky, ‘Revelation, Philosophy and Theology’, in Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings, ed. Brandon Gallaher and Paul Ladouceur (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 115–27. 221 Florovsky, ‘Patristics and Modern Theology’, 241–42; Gavrilyuk, ‘Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis and the Future Ways of Orthodox Theology’, 201–19. 222 Florovsky, ‘Patristics and Modern Theology’, 241. 223 Gavrilyuk, ‘Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis and the Future Ways of Orthodox Theology’, 247–54.

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Dumitru Stăniloae, John Zizioulas and Kallistos Ware, all of whom assented to its first premise, but not to its second one: modern Orthodox theology must be first and foremost patristic, but not necessarily Greek. In the past decades, however, the Neopatristic synthesis was intensely scrutinised. Brandon Gallaher noted that Florovsky’s fear of Western influences was to a certain extent a rhetorical artifice since the very scaffolding of his programme had been influenced either directly or indirectly by Western philosophical or theological trends, from German Romanticism to Idealism to Roman Catholic ecclesiology.224 Paul Gavrilyuk highlighted the epistemological vagueness of Florovksy’s call for recovering the mind of the Fathers,225 while Pantelis Kalaitzidis (b. 1961) cautioned forcefully against its manifold consequences for contemporary theology: from the “idolatrisation” of the Fathers and their elevation to the same status as Scripture, to the identification of the Byzantine past in all its socio-political particularities with divinely revealed truth, to the retreat in an idealised past and lack of interest in any of the pressing issues of the contemporary world.226 The defenders of the Neopatristic synthesis rejected many of these critiques directed against Florovosky’s vision. Sergey Horujy (1941–2020) argued that Florovsky’s method could be improved by discarding its Hellenistic focus and infusing it with the ascetic epistemology of hesychasm. “I would compare the role of hesychasm, with its strict methodology, in Orthodox spiritual life and the sphere of the experiential Orthodox theology to that of genetic code in biological life. By introducing the experience of hesychast practice into its core, the modern configuration of neopatristic synthesis substantially concretizes its interpretation of the Living Tradition.”227 A more recent and comprehensive defence of Florovsky’s method came from Alexis Torrance. Torrance pointed out that Florovsky has recognised openly many of his Western influences (contra Gallaher).228 He praised “the relative flexibility of Florovsky’s programme” for being able to “even hold up Solovyov, Bulgakov, Florensky, and Berdyaev as examples of this approach”,229 and noted, 224 Gallaher, ‘“Waiting for the Barbarians”’. 225 Paul Gavrilyuk, ‘The Epistemological Contours of Florovsky’s Neopatristic Theology’, Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, no. 1 (2017): 11–24, doi:10.2143/JECS.69.1.3214949. 226 Pantelis Kalaitzidis, ‘Du « Retour Aux Pères » à la nécessité d’une théologie Orthodoxe moderne’, Istina 56, no. 3 (2011): 227–51. 227 Sergey S. Horujy, ‘The Concept of Neopatristic Synthesis at a New Stage’, Russian Studies in Philosophy 57, no. 1 (2 January 2019): 27, doi:10.1080/10611967.2019.1545972. 228 Alexis Torrance, Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ, Changing Paradigms in Historical & Systematic Theology  – Cloth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 5. 229 Ibid., 6.

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contra Kalaitzidis, that the appeal to “the experience of the saints and the living Body of Christ through history” is not “a frightened coping mechanism that betrays the inability to engage or embrace the contemporary context, even if in some cases it takes this form”,230 but is an inherently Orthodox attitude. Any new methodology that seeks to depart from Florovsky’s framework will have difficulties in being accepted as Orthodox. To a certain extent, Torrance is right in many of his replies to Florovsky’s critics – Florovsky cannot be held responsible for the misuse of his writings – but what Torrance fails to acknowledge are the wider concerns underlying these critiques: the construction of an Orthodox identity through opposition to the West (Gallaher), the lack of valid criteria for what constitutes a genuine return to the Fathers (Gavrilyuk), and the rise of “patristic fundamentalism” in the Church (Kalaitzidis). It’s been an interest for some time among firstclass theologians in developing a positive account of Orthodox identity. This is quite a pressing matter for those living in the West and for whom the opposition East-West does not hold too much ground. Andrew Louth warns that “to define oneself over against another group almost invariably involves adopting their categories and struggling to understand oneself in alien terms, leading to heated internecine arguments over purity, and so forth.”231 The collective volume Orthodox Constructions of the West (2013) argues similarly.232 A remarkable number of scholars examined the negative stereotypes associated with the West in modern Orthodox theology.233 They sought to show not just the nuances behind the stereotypes, but also how certain Western categories were assimilated by Orthodox theologians.234 230 Ibid., 7. 231 Andrew Louth, ‘Orthodoxy and the Problem of Identity’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12, no. 2 (May 2012): 100, doi:10.1080/1474225X.2012.711568. 232 George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2013). 233 See for instance Marcus Plested’s chapter on the Byzantine reception of Aquinas. Marcus Plested, ‘“Light from the West”: Byzantine Readings of Aquinas’, in Orthodox Constructions of the West, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, First edition, Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 58–70. 234 Sarah Coakley, ‘Eastern “Mystical Theology” or Western “Nouvelle Théologie”?: On the Comparative Reception of Dionysius the Areopagite in Lossky and de Lubac’, in Orthodox Constructions of the West, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Fordham University Press, 2013), 125–41; Radu Bordeianu, ‘(In)Voluntary Ecumenism: Dumitru Stăniloae’s Interaction with the West as Open Sobornicity’, in Orthodox Con­ structions of the West, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Fordham University Press, 2013), 240–54.

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The increasing influence of rigorist groups inside Orthodoxy is another challenge faced by the Church and for some, like Kalaitzidis, it is a direct consequence of the Neopatristic synthesis with its insistence on the Fathers as the main criteria for the divine truth.235 Whether there is a direct correlation between the Neopatristic synthesis and the rise of rigorism is difficult to establish, but it is almost sure that the idolatrisation of past and contemporary Fathers practised by these groups stretches to its limits Florovky’s programme. The reason for this is that rigorists do not distinguish very well, sometimes at all, between Tradition – the essence of the theology of the Fathers – and traditions – the socio-cultural context of the Fathers or Christian national folklore. To take just a minor example, in a lecture on Orthodoxy facing the challenges of modernity, Constantine Cavarnos (1918–2011) claims among other things that priests should not shave their beards because wearing one is part of the Tradition.236 In his defence, Cavarnos quotes Leviticus 21:1,5 (cf. 19:27) and the teachings of the eighteenth-century Greek saint Kosmas of Aetolia.237 Cavarnos believes that he is on the right side of the argument because the interdiction for priests to shave their beards is found in Scripture and because he corroborated this passage with the testimony of a saint, someone who experienced God so intimately that he had access to a higher knowledge of divine mysteries than other regular faithful. Almost none of the major Orthodox theologians would agree with Cavarnos.238 Even the defenders of the Neopatristic synthesis would insist that the believers should be able to discern “between the essential, unchanging, 235 I follow here Makrides in using the term “rigorist” instead of “fundamentalist” (Vasilios N. Makrides, ‘Orthodox Christian Rigorism: Attempting to Delineate a Multifaceted Phenomenon’, Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society – J-RaT 2, no. 2 (11 July 2016): 216–52, doi:10.14220/jrat.2016.2.2.216). I chose to do so not only because the latter is contested in certain scholarly quarters, but also because the charge of fundamentalism can be used as a delegitimization strategy. “Even the most rigorist and sectarian among the Orthodox communion decry the term, preferring to selfdefine as guardians of an unchanging holy tradition, which to their eyes is the lone acceptable version of Christian life.” Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos, eds., Fundamentalism or Tradition: Christianity After Secularism, Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 7. See also, Davor Džalto and George E. Demacopoulos, eds., Orthodoxy and Fundamentalism: Contemporary Perspectives (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022). 236 Constantin Cavarnos, Orthodox Tradition and Modernism, trans. Patrick Barker (Etna, California: Centre for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1992). 237 Ibid., 28–29. 238 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Tradition as Reason and Practice: Amplifying Contemporary Orthodox Theology in Conversation with Alisdair Macintyre’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2015): 92.

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divine deposit of faith and the many customary, culturally relative arrangements which also attach themselves to the historic church but which the church is free to alter because they are human products.”239 They would also show Florovsky’s opposition to such a limited theological understanding of his method and argue together with Kallistos Ware that “true Orthodox fidelity to the past must always be a creative fidelity; for true Orthodoxy can never rest satisfied with a barren ‘theology of repetition’, which, parrot-like, repeats accepted formulae without striving to understand what lies behind them.”240 The example of priests with beards might seem minor, but it represents the best introduction to the pitfalls deriving from the flexibility of the Neopatristic, for instance, the legitimation of the teaching on the afterlife toll houses. According to this teaching, after its separation from the body, the soul ascends towards Christ surrounded by angels and demons who dispute over it. The angels want to take the soul to heaven, so they play the role of advocates, while the demons play that of prosecutors, keenly waiting to drag the soul down to hell. The process takes place in several stages, each corresponding to a particular passion or sin.241 To pass from one stage to another, the soul must pay its way out to demons by using the good deeds from its life on earth as currency.242 The popular imaginary compared these stages with toll houses and the demons with tax collectors. For its supporters, like Jean-Claude Larchet (b. 1949), Hierotheos Valchos (b. 1945), and Seraphim Rose (1934–1982), this teaching is found in the majority of the Fathers (e.g., Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory the Great) as well as in some modern Orthodox theologians and saints (e.g., Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807–1867) and Theophan the Recluse). Their opponents, like Paul Ladouceur, Andrew Louth and David Bentley Hart (b. 1965), claim that the death toll houses are either Mediterranean folklore or even worse utter heresy.243 In his review of Jean Claude Larchet’s book, Louth draws the already mentioned distinction between Tradition and traditions or local folklore to point out that although the teaching is present in the Fathers it 239 Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov; Orthodox Theology in a New Key, 1. publ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 379. 240 Ware, The Orthodox Church, 206. 241 Jean-Claude Larchet, La vie après la mort selon la tradition orthodoxe, Théologies (Paris: Les Ed. du Cerf, 2001), 99. 242 Ibid., 100. 243 Others who also oppose the teaching on death toll houses, but without calling it heresy, are: Eirini Afentoulidou, Paul Ladouceur, and Stephen Shoemaker. See Eirini Afentoulidou, ‘On the Toll Houses Again: A Byzantinist’s Thoughts’, Public Orthodoxy, 20 May 2019, https:// publicorthodoxy.org/2019/05/20/tollhouses-byzantinists-thoughts/; Stephen Shoemaker, ‘Aerial Toll Houses, Provisional Judgment, and the Orthodox Faith’, Public Orthodoxy, 17 October 2017, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2017/10/17/toll-houses-review/#more-3682.

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should not be taken seriously as part of the faith of the Church.244 Ladouceur insists on the reductionist aspect of the book that restricts the richness of the Orthodox teaching about the afterlife to a theology of the toll houses and argues that it ignores the fact that no council ever sanctioned this vision.245 Hart is even more trenchant. He argues that the death toll houses are contrary to Scripture itself because Christ came precisely to save us from all these intermediary stages and beings that could hinder our direct access to God.246 Of course, they are all right in their critiques, but at the same time, it should be acknowledged that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reject this teaching on the methodological bases of the Neopatristic synthesis. First, the teaching on the toll houses is part of the teachings of the saints, that is, of those who have had the highest experience of God inside the Church. Second, the death toll houses are not found in the writings of isolated or marginal saints, but in a significant proportion of them. Third, they are not just the repetition of the past, but the product of a symbolic pedagogy of the Fathers, who, distinguishing the signs of the times, used the death toll houses to respond to the needs of the faithful.247 The only way to challenge fruitfully this teaching is, as Hart does, by appealing to Scripture. Yet, even this appeal is more complicated than it looks at first sight because of the ambiguous position of Scripture in Orthodox theology. Theoretically, every Orthodox theologian would put Scripture at the heart of Tradition. In reality, however, experience, either personal or as consensus patrum, takes precedence.248 4.2.2 Scripture Positioning themselves between the Roman Catholics and Protestants in the debate over the importance of Scripture, the Orthodox reject both sola Scrip­ tura and the equality between Tradition and Scripture.249 They argue that 244 Andrew Louth, ‘Review of La Vie après la mort selon la tradition Orthodoxe by Jean-Claude Larchet’, Sobornost 27, no. 1 (2005): 112. 245 Paul Ladouceur, ‘Orthodox Theologies of the Afterlife: Review of “The Departure of the Soul”’, Ancient Faith Ministries, 18 August 2017, https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxy andheterodoxy/2017/08/18/orthodox-theologies-of-the-afterlife-review-of-the-depar ture-of-the-soul/. 246 David Bentley Hart, ‘Nor Height nor Depth: On the Toll Houses’, Public Orthodoxy, 5 August 2019, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2019/05/08/hart-on-the-toll-houses/, last accessed 4th of April 2022. 247 Louth, ‘La Vie après la mort selon la tradition Orthodoxe by Jean Claude Larchet’, 9. 248 Maybe with a few notable exceptions, such as Andrew Louth, John Behr and Savvas Agourides, Orthodox theologians consider Scripture to be subordinate to Tradition. 249 Ware, The Orthodox Church, 204, 207–8; John McGuckin, ‘Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective: The Tradition of Orthodoxy’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 47, no. 1–4 (2002): 302.

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Tradition lies higher than Scripture because the selection of the books inside the canon is derived from the experience of the early communities.250 Besides, Scripture is not just the product of the living experience of the Church, but also the expression of the specific individual experiences (i.e., the Apostles’). In the Orthodox perspective, what established the Church was not the gospel as such, but the original acts of revelation experienced by specific men and women drawn together by the Spirit to form the early Church. The gospel as a saving message has intrinsic power but no voice of its own. There could be no gospel apart from Mary Magdalene, Peter, James, Paul, Barnabas and the others who proclaimed the good news. The opponents of Jesus, who put him to death as a religious and political troublemaker, were not about to advance his cause in the world. The ones who did proclaim him were the apostles and others who experienced the decisive acts of revelation and were thrust forward by the outpouring of God’s Spirit.251 Of course, the experiences of the Apostles and those of the communities were influenced by the socio-cultural milieu, but this does not mean the historical critical method should be fully embraced. Most theologians would agree that the insights coming out of this method could help the faithful gain a better understanding of Scripture, but only as long as they do not call into question the Tradition.252 Hilarion Alfeyev (b. 1966), for instance, rejects outright Rudolf Bultmann’s attempt to demythologise Scripture – that is to read it in an existential key.253 For him, the very idea that Scripture contains myths stands in contradiction with anything the Fathers have left us. A more thorough critique of the historical critical method comes from John McGuckin (b. 1952) who examines it from the perspective of Tradition as the lived communal experience of the Church.254 First, he challenges the hermeneutical presupposition of historical criticism – that there is a gap of understanding between contemporary readers and the ancient authors of Scripture. 250 Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity: Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church, vol. 2 (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 20. 251 Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, ‘Scripture and Tradition in the Church’, in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff, First edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 25, doi:10.1017/CCOL9780 521864848.002. 252 Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, 15–18; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 208–9; Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity: Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church, 2:39. 253 Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity: Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church, 2:39. 254 McGuckin, ‘Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective: The Tradition of Orthodoxy’, 295–326.

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He claims that for the Orthodox this gap does not exist. The Orthodox Church lies in direct and living continuity with the Church of the first centuries. Hence the reader will feel at home with the biblical text as long as Scripture is read inside the Church and is sustained and nurtured by its common and sacramental experience.255 Second, McGuckin is unhappy that the historical critical method treats Scripture like any other religious text that is in need of being deciphered through academic ‘objectivity’. For him, the birth of the historical critical method coincides with the nineteenth-century academic debates surrounding the scientific nature of theology. Trying to preserve biblical scholarship in the academic curriculum, many German scholars turned to Scripture as an object of historical study.256 This hermeneutical strategy could not be further away from that of the Church, where Scripture is interpreted for the sake of fostering individual and communal spiritual growth.257 Although to my knowledge no Orthodox biblical scholar would fully disagree with McGuckin, some would have a more positive understanding of the historical critical method, praising it for the freedom it provides from various constraints (e.g. patristic, spiritual or ecclesial).258 John Fotopulous (b. 1967) makes quite a convincing case in favour of the historical critical method when he claims that the literal meaning of the scriptural text sought by biblical scholars should be the foundation of other ethical, spiritual, or dogmatic reading, “to serve, at a minimum, as a kind of marker for other kinds of biblical interpretation, even when those interpretations go beyond or away from the

255 Ibid., 308–11. See also Bruce Beck, ‘Unbinding the Book: Toward a Restoration of a Patristic Orthodox Hermeneutic of Scripture’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2019): 188–89. 256 McGuckin, ‘Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective: The Tradition of Orthodoxy’, 300–301. 257 Petros Vassiliadis, ‘Reading the Bible from the Orthodox Church Perspective’, The Ecu­ menical Review 51, no. 1 (January 1999): 27, doi:10.1111/j.1758-6623.1999.tb00376.x. 258 R.W.L. Moberly, ‘Toward an Integrative Reading of the Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190948658.013.38; John Fotopoulos, ‘Orthodox Chris­ tianity, Patristic Exegesis, and Historical Criticism of the Bible’, in The Oxford Hand­book of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190948658.013.30; Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, ‘Toward an Orthodox Hermeneutic’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), 303-C19.P106, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190948658.013.36; James Buchanan Wallace, ‘Modern Orthodox Biblical Interpretation’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/97801 90948658.013.25.

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literal sense.”259 Fotopulous does not wish to challenge patristic or spiritual exegesis, but rather to integrate it into a wider context. One of the most innovative attempts at such an integrative exegesis comes from John Behr’s (b. 1966) commentary on the gospel of John.260 The commentary is divided into three parts. The first is dedicated to matters of historical criticism about the identity of the author of the gospel, the second is exegetical, exploring key themes relating to incarnation, embodiment, and revelation, while the last engages the gospel through the phenomenological lens provided by the French philosopher Michel Henry (1922–2002). The conclusion is simultaneously exegetical – the gospel should be read apocalyptically, from the ultimate goal of our eschatological existence in Christ – and existential – the reading of Scripture should be done in order to encounter the living Christ in the text and the Tradition. As Behr explains at length The site of the theologian, then, is undoubtedly historical, but also inescapably exegetical and phenomenological: standing, as John the theologian, at the foot of the cross – the definitive Apocalypse of God, unveiling the Scriptures and ourselves  – patiently and dialogically or symphonically learning to hear the Word of God addressed in the present to us, so as to encounter Christ both in the opening of the Scriptures, by chewing its cud, and in the reception of the life-giving flesh of Christ as our flesh, by sharing in his pathos, and also in, or even as, ourselves (just as John puts on the identity of Christ), so taking our part in a history of witnesses to this encounter and a tradition of such theology, which makes claims about creation, human beings, and the work of God, or rather the particular work of God that is the human being, and also makes claims upon its hearers, so bringing all under the sign of the cross and oriented by the vision of the glory of God that it offers, that is, the living human being.261 Behr’s approach as well as his conclusions are in many ways novel for Ortho­ dox theology, but the last part of the quote stressing the importance of the encounter with the living Christ in Scripture remains very much in line with McGuckin’s experiential understanding of biblical exegesis. Usually, this view translates into interpretative priority given to the exegesis made by the members 259 John Fotopoulos, ‘Orthodox Christianity, Patristic Exegesis, and Historical Criticism of the Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), 330. 260 John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology, First edition (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2019). 261 Ibid., 331.

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of the ecclesial community with a high moral and spiritual life (i.e. the saints of the Church)262 and indirectly tends to perturb the frail balance between individual and communal exegesis. It is often said that the Church exists as a worshipping community with Scripture at its centre, infusing all its services and prayers.263 The way in which the biblical text is used in these services is an interpretation in itself, but one which according to some theologians, such as Petros Vassiliadis (b. 1945), has been validated by the experience of the faithful throughout the centuries. For him, the dynamics between interpretation and truth is one of reception. There might be multiple interpretations of Scripture in the Church, but we should pay attention only to those that have passed the test of time and became part of the life of community. The liturgical hymns illustrate this dynamic perfectly. The hymns contain the right interpretation because they are sung during the Eucharistic liturgy – the moment when the community comes together to experience salvation in Christ – and their interpretation has not been challenged for centuries. Thus, these interpretations are true because they correspond to the experience of the Eucharistic community. “The lex credendi depends on the devotional experience and vision of the church. Confession, therefore, and witness through the Bible, comes only as the natural consequence of the Eucharistic communion experience of the local communities.”264 This rather romanticised vision of the interplay between the legitimacy of the hermeneutics and communal experience is not shared by everyone. Examining the interpretation of biblical theophanies in liturgical hymns, Bogdan Bucur argued that hymnographers read scriptural passages solely from a Christological perspective, without any concern for the context or the complexities of the original text. This brings their interpretations closer to previous attempts at evacuating the exegetical difficulties found in Scripture by rewriting its text into a coherent narrative.265 262 Stylianopoulos, ‘Scripture and Tradition in the Church’, 26; Beck, ‘Unbinding the Book: Toward a Restoration of a Patristic Orthodox Hermeneutic of Scripture’, 163. 263 Ware, The Orthodox Church, 203. Illustrating this point, Ephraim Lash adds Biblical references to the prayer which introduces the Lord’s Prayer in the Liturgy of Saint Basil. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Worship’, in The Cambridge Com­ panion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff, First edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35, doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521864848.003. 264 Vassiliadis, ‘Reading the Bible from the Orthodox Church Perspective’, 26. See also John Anthony McGuckin, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture, First edition (Malden: Blackwell, 2011), 104. 265 Bogdan G. Bucur, ‘Exegesis of Biblical Theophanies in Byzantine Hymnography: Rewritten Bible?’, Theological Studies 68, no. 1 (February 2007): 112, doi:10.1177/004056390706800105.

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Eugen Pentiuc (b. 1955) defended the hermeneutical choices of the hymnographers. For him, their intention was not to transform Scripture into a coherent and harmonious whole, but to rearrange it in a way that will allow the faithful to rediscover its richness and become co-creators of meaning whenever they hear the hymns sung.266 Pentiuc compares this exegetical approach to the collage technique used by cubist artists like Picasso. Although daring at first sight, a comparison between liturgical exegesis and cubist art might prove helpful. Similar to a cubist painter who creatively mixes cubes and other geometrical and abstract forms while using the “collage technique” to assist the beholders in reconstructing reality in their own ways, the hymnographer combines bits and pieces of scriptural material while using hapax legomena and rare words or phrases as “hermeneutical pointers” to assist the hearers or readers in reconstructing salvation history in their own ways. If this analogy with cubism proves to be correct, then liturgical exegesis may be considered as a precursor of postmodern “reader-centred” approaches to Scripture.267 This reader-centered approach proposed by Pentiuc, however, makes the question of legitimacy even more pressing. If, starting from the liturgical hymn, the faithful are to interpret the text of Scripture according to their own sensibilities, then what is the value of their interpretation? Are all interpretations equal or can some be misleading? The answer turns again to the question of holiness. Due to their holy way of life and intimacy with God, saints are credited with having fuller access to the right understanding of the biblical text than the rest of us, including biblical scholars. This view is illustrated by McGuckin in the article, Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective, where despite articulating three hermeneutical principles (i.e. consonance with the Tradition of the Church, desire for accepting apostolic and patristic authority, and desire to interpret the text for the benefit of the community),268 he insists that none of them, makes sense if the interpreter is not on the path to holiness. He starts with a large quote from Athanasius’ On the Incarnation – stating that a correct interpretation of Scripture can come only from a pure soul, who lives a 266 Eugen J. Pentiuc, Hearing the Scriptures: Liturgical Exegesis of the Old Testament in Byzantine Orthodox Hymnography (New York (NY): Oxford University Press, 2021), 306. 267 Eugen J. Pentiuc, ‘The Bible in Orthodox Christianity: Balancing Tradition with Modernity’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), 18, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190948658.013.1. 268 McGuckin, ‘Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective: The Tradition of Orthodoxy’, 311–21.

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virtuous life modelled after that of the saints. He continues with a reference to a passage expressing the same idea in Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, and ends on a highly spiritual note: “In other words, the communion with the Holy Spirit who inspires the text is a fundamental precondition for the authentic ‘opening up’ of the sacred book. Without that, there may be many levels of historical and morphological comment possible on the biblical text; but no exegesis properly understood.”269 Perhaps the most remarkable pitfall of this experiential approach is that those who fulfil these conditions, such as charismatic leaders or saints, can go beyond the text of Scripture. Due to their special relationship with the Holy Spirit, the saints can clarify and even add to Scripture. This idea is stated quite vigorously by Hilarion Alfeyev, who after quoting from Mark the Ascetic, John Chrysostom, and Simeon the New Theologian, concludes that The above words of the Fathers of the Eastern Church by no means deny the necessity of the reading of the Holy Scriptures, nor do they lessen their significance of them. Rather, the quoted authors express here the traditional Eastern Christian understanding that the experience of communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit is higher than verbal expression of this experience, whether it be Holy Scripture or any other authoritative written source. Christianity is a religion about contact with God, and not about a literary knowledge of God, and Christians are by no means ‘people of the Book’.270 A similar position is formulated by Larchet in his discussion of the death toll houses. He agrees that Scripture does not mention this teaching, nor, for that matter, almost anything about what happens to the soul after death, but then he points confidently to the Fathers. Since they, who were “inspired and authorised by the Holy Spirit”,271 judged it useful to articulate this teaching, then it has to correspond to “an immutable truth.”272 Even the Ecumenical Patriarchate seems to subscribe to this position. In its recent document on social matters, For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (2019), the authors appear to endorse Alfeyev and Larchet’s position, albeit less directly. In the section, Science, Technology, The 269 Ibid., 312–13. 270 Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity: Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church, 2:30–31. My italics. 271 Louth, ‘La Vie Après La Mort Selon La Tradition Orthodoxe by Jean Claude Larchet’, 9. 272 Ibid., 125.

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Natural World emphasising the importance of ecology, we find the following quote from Amphilochios of Patmos, “Do you know that God gave us one more commandment that is not recorded in scripture? It is the commandment to love the trees.”273 Of course, the section does not rely solely on Amphilochios’ testimony; there are references to Scripture and other saints, but the very presence of this saying confirms that inside Orthodoxy the personal experience of God receives, if not a higher standing than Scripture, at least one that is high enough to allow it to complement the biblical text itself. Of course, this exegesis through ascesis has to be measured against Tradition and confirmed by the pleroma of the Church, but if a significant number of saints are mentioning the same teaching then it has to be accepted as authentic. For instance, if we agree with the authors of the document on the social teaching of the Church, chances are that we will also be forced to agree with the existence of toll houses in the afterlife. Even if they are not mentioned in Scripture, as long as they are described in the works of various saints, they can be considered legitimate. It could be objected that there is a distinction to be drawn between dogma and theologoumenon and that as long as the teaching on the death toll houses is not promoted to the status of dogma there is no reason to worry about it. To me, this objection is somehow moot. The main reason I raised this point was not to discuss the relationship between dogmas and theologumena, but the tension between the interpretation of Scripture provided by some saintly figures and the Tradition of the Church, especially Scripture. What I wanted to show was that when deification becomes the main criterion for evaluating theology, there is a high risk that the opinions of charismatic elders are taken as direct revelations from God, without critical reflection. This is neither something new, nor a uniquely Orthodox phenomenon, but an issue that is rarely acknowledged inside Orthodoxy. Reading Tradition through the lens of deification – as I tried to do here – brings this issue into focus with greater sharpness than ever before and forces us to consider not just the formal steps one has to undertake towards union with God (the personal ascetical or eucharistic experience and the adhesion to the same dogmas) but also the way in which the experiences of these saints converge with Scripture.

273 John Chryssavgis et al., ‘For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church’, 20 March 2020, para. 78.

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Trinity

One of the fundamental statements regarding deification is that it can never be grounded on anything else than the Trinitarian dogmas as they were established at the first two ecumenical councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). Any alteration or addition could at best produce a different spirituality – this is what Lossky claims about the Filioque – or at worst endanger the deification of the faithful – as is the case with Arianism. This strict adherence to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed does not entail a repetitive and atrophied Triadology, but quite the opposite; it nurtures genuine creativity. The chief stimulus for this creative engagement with the dogma of the Trinity came from the need to explain how human beings can be deified by partaking in the divine nature (2 Ptr 1:4). For the overwhelming majority of modern Orthodox theologians, deification is neither metaphorical nor ethical, but real. Humans are truly called to participate in God’s nature without losing their creaturely specificity. For this realistic view to make sense, however, divine nature or ousia and its relationship with creation has to be clearly laid out. Three attempts have been made so far: the Sophiology of Bulgakov, Lossky’s uncreated energies, and the personalism of Zizioulas. For Bulgakov, God’s ousia is the same as the divine wisdom or Sophia and deification is the realisation of the convergence between the created and uncreated Sophia; for Lossky, God’s nature remains inaccessible in itself, while deification takes place through God’s uncreated energies; and for Zizioulas deification is access to God’s personhood through participation in the divine-human hypostasis of Jesus Christ through the Eucharist. 5.1 Sophiology For Bulgakov, particularly in his late writings, there are two pressing and interrelated Trinitarian concerns: how can one speak about the ousia of God in less abstract terms and what is the theological meaning of Sophia, the wisdom of God, which is depicted in certain Russian icons and in whose honour magnificent cathedrals have been built (e.g., the one of Constantinople).274 As Bulgakov sees it, ousia functions more as “a kind of ideological starting point” for Trinitarian discourse.275 It is a Greek philosophical term with no biblical roots or intelligible content for the life of the faithful. If God’s nature will 274 Sergius Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993), 2. 275 Ibid., 25.

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remain a distant abstraction, Bulgakov fears that we will be faced with the rise of the “pernicious heresy” of a god without nature. The solution to avoid the growth of this heresy is quickly at hand: the identification of ousia with the biblical notion of the wisdom of God or Sophia.276 Bulgakov is aware that some of the Fathers of the Church read the scriptural occurrences about Sophia as referring to the second person of the Trinity, the Logos of God, but he claims that this exegesis is misleading. Divine attributes cannot be in the possession of one Trinitarian person alone. It is not just the Logos who is wise, nor just the Father who is creator, nor just the Spirit who is vivifying. They are all wise and participate in the creation and vivification of the world. Hence, Sophia has to describe their common nature or ousia.277 To a certain extent, Sophia is to God what humanness is to every human being, the common ontological substratum. The difference between the two ousias is that Sophia describes a living reality and not an abstract set of characteristics.278 In Sophia, God loves himself with a love that is unknown in the human realm, a love that is not prideful infatuation, but self-renunciation and self-forgetfulness.279 This sophianic love is hypostasised differently by each of the persons of the Trinity. The Father, who is the principle of the Trinity, hypostasises Sophia by going out of himself and giving birth to the Son, who is the fulfilment of the Father’s ecstatic love. The Father possesses Himself fully and transparently in the Son, while the Son possesses himself as the image of the Father.280 Or to put it in terms of self-sacrificial love, the relationship between the Father and the Son is defined by two acts of complete selfrenunciation: that of the Father who gives of himself in order to beget the Son and that of the Son who accepts being begotten by the Father.281 By proceeding from the Father to rest on the Son, the Holy Spirit fulfils this reciprocal, self-sacrificial love. This act [the procession] determines not only the relation between the Father and the Holy Spirit but also the relation between the Father and the Son. This hypostatic relation is their mutual love. The Holy Spirit 276 Ibid., 26. Vladimir Soloyov is the first to identify Sophia with the divine ousia, something that Bulgakov will take from him in his late sophiology. See Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, 58. 277 Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 27–28. 278 Ibid., 34. 279 Sergiĭ Bulgakov, The Lamb of God (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2008), 91. 280 Ibid., 86–88. 281 Ibid.

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loves the Son, for He ‘reposes’ upon Him; and together with Him, in an inseparable dyad with Him, the Holy Spirit reveals the Father and loves the Father as the source of love, the First Cause. The Holy Spirit Himself does not reveal the Son to the Father or the Father to the Son, but He unites Them in the reality of the divine nature.282 Nonetheless, the focus is not on the relationship of the Trinitarian persons with Sophia, but on that of creation with Sophia. For Bulgakov, the world is brought into existence through the creation of a primordial matter from which everything else is fashioned afterwards. This primordial matter is endowed with a universal soul: the created Sophia, which is a living reflection of its celestial counterpart. Its role is to move the cosmos towards the realisation of its ideal form laid out by God from eternity and serve as the ontological substratum for deification. Creation and human beings in their materiality are grafted into the divine life, through the intermediation of two similar, almost identical substances: the divine and the created Sophia. From an ontological standpoint, what drives Bulgakov’s Sophiology is the gulf between nothingness and immortality. If the world and human beings are made out of nothing, as the traditional teaching holds, then it is difficult to see how our bodies and the material world could participate in God, without a substance that will mediate this ontological gap. The question is as old as Christianity itself, but Bulgakov thinks he can provide a proper answer by reinterpreting sophiologically the doctrine of creation out of nothing proposed by Athanasius the Great in the fourth century. Athanasius opposes the Platonist view of a demiurge god, who moulds the world from pre-existing matter. If God cannot create the matter he needs, then God is not truly omnipotent and he is no different from any human carpenter or artisan. Bulgakov agrees but puts his own spin on this teaching. According to him, creation out of nothing describes the kenotic and self-emptying act of God’s love that enables the space for the existence of the world as a reality autonomous from God, while remaining in God.283 This space, on which the world is grounded, is the barren nothing of the Greek philosophy (ouk on) out of which no being can emerge. But God, through a miraculous act, transforms the ouk on into mē on or the non-manifestation of being.284

282 Ibid., 88. 283 Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 385–87. 284 Ibid., 231–32.

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The link between God and creation, constituting the ground of deification, is Sophia. After the transformation of the nothingness of ouk on into the nothingness of potentiality of mē on, God infused the me on with his wisdom or Sophia, that is with the forms into which he wants them to grow and develop and the vital energy to arrive at them. That every being has its archetype or paradigm in God’s wisdom is nothing new. This teaching appears in many of the Greek Fathers and receives its most well-known form in the writings of Maximus the Confessor, where these prototypes are called logoi or rational principles. Bulgakov diverges from Maximus in that he places these principles not in the Logos, but in Sophia and insists that Sophia is the living force that unites and pushes the world to God. Since wisdom is not an attribute of the Son alone, but of the whole Trinity, all the eternal principles of the world have to be found in the divine Sophia and not in the Logos. These principles are not “deprived of vital concreteness and power of being”,285 but become real and are actualised through the mediation of created Sophia. To a certain extent, it can be said that Sophia is similar to a genetic bank that holds all the information on how an organism could potentially develop and act in the future.286 Still, the actual development of the created Sophia, from an DNA chain into a concrete being takes place through a process of hypostatisation or subjective self-awareness. To grasp the meaning of this concept it is better to place it in the context of patristic anthropology. For most of the Fathers, human beings have a tripartite constitution: body, soul, and mind (nous) or spirit. The body is the bridge that connects us with the mineral and vegetal part of creation; the soul animates and unifies the body, coordinating all its members and movements, and the nous or the spirit – the main characteristic distinguishing humans from animals – refers broadly to rationality. In Bulgakov, the nous or “the spark of Divinity” that God implants into every human translates into subjective self-consciousness.287 Hypostatisation refers then to the process through which individuals unite and transfigure all the dimensions of their existence (nature and soul) in a unique and self-conscious manner.288 Bulgakov applies the same scheme at the cosmic level. Created Sophia is the soul of the world that unites and animates the materiality of the cosmos in the same way the human soul animates the body,289 and, also just like the human soul Sophia awaits to be hypostatised through the self-consciousness of an I. 285 Ibid., 217; Sergius Bulgakov, ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity: Scholia to the Unfading Light’, trans. Brandon Gallaher and Irina Kukota, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, no. 1–2 (2005): 31. 286 Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, 75. 287 Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, 122–24. 288 Bulgakov, ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity’, 18. 289 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 79.

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What is different in the case of created Sophia is that there is no single I that could fulfil this process, but a network of individual angelic and human hypostases, the only creatures to have a self-conscious I that could do it.290 It is in this sense that Sophia’s hypostaticity depends on the realisation of a universal self-consciousness of the pan-unity of creation in God. To the created consciousness Sophia presents herself, as the substance of the world, in the cosmic aspect, which hypostasizes itself in man. God has Sophia by himself or in himself, as his own revelation; the creature has her above itself as its own ground, as its own highest nature or home, as the internal law or norm of life.291 Deification then is realised not just through the common ontological substratum of Sophia, but also as a great collective self-awakening, where each angel and human enlightens and raises the material world to a state of consciousness that would be otherwise inaccessible on an ontological level.292 Bulgakov’s sophianic discourse was as controversial as it was enthralling. His detractors accused Bulgakov of Gnosticism and teaching doctrines without foundation in the Tradition of the Church.293 His admirers pointed out the creativity of his system and welcomed his search for new ways of approaching old theological issues. But no matter what one thinks about Bulgakov, there is little doubt he put an indelible imprint on the development of Orthodox Trinitarian thinking in the following century. Bulgakov’s fundamental intuitions, such as the need for a better explanation of what the nature of God is or how the union between two separate natures could work in the act of divinisation, will stimulate the reflection of many subsequent theologians. 5.2 The Uncreated Energies Although Lossky opposes Bulgakov on a host of points and proposes a Trinitarian theology that might seem to be in contradistinction with that of Bulgakov, he shares many of the latter’s concerns, such as the relationship between nature 290 For Bulgakov, Sophia’s main quality is precisely its hypostatizability, the capacity to be hypostatised in a multitude of hypostases. Bulgakov, ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity’, 38. 291 Ibid., 37. 292 This is not to say that Sophiology exists in abstract. There is a strong Christological dimension to deification in Bulgakov, this is well developed in The Lamb of God and The Comforter, but because of the limited space at my disposal and the wealth of nuances in Bulgakov’s Christology I have chosen not to engage with it. 293 See Bryn Geffert, ‘The Charges of Heresy Against Sergii Bulgakov: The Majority and Minority Reports of Evlogifs Commission and the Final Report of the Bishops’ Conference’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, no. 1–2 (2005): 47–66.

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(ousia) and hypostasis or person, the definition of the divine nature, and our possibility of participating in it. Unlike Bulgakov, who develops his theology much in dialogue with German Idealism, Lossky is suspicious of philosophy and draws predominantly from patristic sources, particularly Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas. As we will see further, Lossky argues that divine nature is unknowable to us, God being accessible only through his uncreated energies. Humans do not become gods by nature, but by partaking in God’s uncreated energies. What gives coherence to this scheme is the personalist framework Lossky develops for it. A person can be described according to her features and even according to her actions, but she can never be known or encountered fully, there will always remain something apophatic about her. Being in communion with a person means being in communion with her energies and not her nature. When discussing the distinction between ousia and hypostasis, Lossky is not concerned with its abstractness nor does he consider the Trinitarian dogmas of the first centuries as unfinished, as Bulgakov does. Lossky is impressed by the genius of the Fathers who changed the meaning of two synonyms in order to preserve the antinomic character of the Trinity. As pointed out previously, for Lossky Christian theology is apophatic, that is it is grounded in the experience of God through prayer and contemplation. It is impossible to capture this experience and the knowledge of God derived from it otherwise than antinomically,294 that is as two statements that are each true, but contradictory when held together.295 The dogma of the Trinity represents the summit of antinomic thinking, including not one but two antinomies. First, it circumscribes the fundamental truth about God as one in three Persons, a truth beyond any human arithmetic that is “accessible only to that ignorance which rises above all that can be contained within the concepts of the philosophers.”296 Then – and this is important for Lossky’s anthropology – the trinitarian dogma preserves the right balance between person and nature and their irreducible character. For this purpose, the Fathers transformed the meaning of two synonymous words, ousia and hypostasis. Lossky explains that before the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century the terms ousia and hypostasis were synonymous. Ousia appeared in Aristotle’s categories, meaning essence or that which makes a thing what it is, while hypostasis was used in common language to describe something which

294 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 49. 295 See Gallaher, ‘The “Sophiological” Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism’. 296 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 49.

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subsisted in itself.297 In fact, the two words were used interchangeably. The Fathers, starting with Athanasius, infused them with new meaning; ousia was used to describe the essence of things and hypostasis referred to their specific existence. This distinction, foreign to the Hellenistic spirit, took a while to be accepted throughout the Christian world. The Latin West was reticent because hypostasis was translated as substance and was perceived as supporting a God with three essences; the Greek East was not convinced by the term persona, because they understood it as a mask or an appearance, which could mislead the faithful into Sabellianism, where the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were modes or manifestations of the same God.298 The two reconverted words retain the main antinomic mystery of the Trinity, namely the relationship between nature and person. As we saw in Florensky, antinomic thinking requires balance; it requires that both statements are upheld simultaneously as true. If one of them is preferred to the other, then the entire theological mystery collapses into philosophical rationalism. Lossky agrees. For him, the antinomy at the heart of the Trinitarian dogma – that between nature and hypostasis – should be guarded against such rationalistic tendencies. Nature and hypostasis are equally important. Lossky even identifies two contemporary teachings that endanger this fragile balance inside the Trinity: the Sophiology of Bulgakov – seen to prioritise hypostasis over nature – and the Western doctrine of the Filioque, prioritising nature over person. Lossky reproaches Bulgakov, arguing that his view of the Trinity can be “conceived as an internal revelation of the hypostases of the ‘Tri-hypostatic subject’ in the common nature.”299 Per Lossky’s reading, Bulgakov’s statements that God is pure spirit and that the spirit is revealing itself through nature means that the Trinitarian persons are revealing themselves in their common nature (divine Sophia), without being determined themselves by their common ousia. Nature becomes an instrument for the self-manifestation of the person. The other imbalance that preoccupies Lossky is the one that has already been accepted for centuries by Western Christendom: the Filioque. For Lossky, the Filioque runs the opposite danger to Bulgakov: it gives priority to nature over person. Lossky grounds this critique on the remark of the Catholic theologian Théodore de Régnon, namely that Latin trinitarian thought moves from 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid., 50–51. 299 Vladimir Lossky, ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine’, in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1975), 93.

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nature to person, while the Greek Fathers start the other way around, from person to nature.300 Lossky agrees that both approaches are legitimate in themselves, but only as long as the latter does not raise the divine ousia over the three hypostases. And, in his opinion, this is precisely what the Filioque does. The procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son arises from the overemphasis on the common nature of the three persons.301 Instead of thinking the Trinity from the perspective of its origin (i.e., the person of the Father), the Scholastic West started inquiring into the relationships between the Trinitarian persons. The Scholastics wanted to know how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other and conceived these relations as ‘relations of opposition’. Since it was accepted that the Holy Spirit is common to both the Father and the Son and a “‘relation of opposition’ can only be established between two terms”,302 it made sense to argue that “the Holy Spirit should proceed from the Father and the Son, since they represent a unity.”303 This reasoning is wrong not because it is false, but because it lifts the common essence above the persons. [T]he origin of the persons of the Trinity therefore is impersonal, having its real basis in the one essence, which is differentiated by its internal relations. The general character of this triadology may be described as a pre-eminence of natural unity over personal trinity, as an ontological primacy of the essence over the hypostases.304 Although Lossky accepts the logical coherence of the Scholastic argument,305 he firmly rejects it on account of its consequences: the depersonalisation of the Trinity and the transformation of the Christian God into the rational God of philosophers.306 Lossky believes that thinking of the Trinity in the neat and logical terms of relations of opposition could at some point turn into believing “that each person of the Trinity could be regarded as the cause of the other two”, which “would amount to a new relativization of the hypostases, transforming them into conventional and interchangeable signs of three diversities.”307 Moreover, Lossky insists, if the procession of the Holy Spirit is accepted as a rational requirement for retaining divine simplicity, then God is lowered to 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307

Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 57–58. Lossky, ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine’, 76. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 79–80. Ibid., 73.

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the rank of an object, fitted to be studied and explained by philosophy.308 The apophatic God of the Greek Fathers cannot be captured in human concepts and cannot be reduced to logical formulae. To do so conflicts with Scripture and the testimony of the patristic tradition, where the personal character of the Father is proclaimed.309 In Lossky’s view, the only relations capable of preserving the mystery of the Trinity and the antinomic balance between nature and person are those of origin: the Father begets the Son and spirates the Holy Spirit. Focusing on the common origin of the Trinitarian persons (i.e. the Father), these relations emphasise the personal character of the Godhead. It is the Father who bestows his nature to the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it is the way in which the Father does this that distinguishes the hypostases. The generation of the Son is different from the procession of the Holy Spirit and the Father is different from the latter two because he is unbegotten.310 The relations of origin express the “hypostatic diversity of the Three” without attempting to define the hypostases according to their relation to one another,311 thus embracing the apophatic mystery of the Trinity. An attentive reader cannot miss that Lossky himself is promoting a sort of imbalance inside the Trinity when he describes the Father as the principle of the Godhead. Lossky assumes this move and argues that the monarchy of the Father is the way of preserving the antinomy between nature and person.312 If the person of the Father begets the Son and spirates the Holy Spirit, then the idea of an abstract nature from which the Persons of the Trinity appear is excluded and the personal principle of God is affirmed. Nature does not exist without being hypostatised, without a person. This is why, for him, although the monarchy of the Father sounds asymmetrical, it remains the best way to capture the idea of a personal God.313 Lossky’s contribution to Orthodox Trinitarian thinking went beyond his insistence on the monarchy of the Father and the disparaging of the Filioque. His robust defence of the distinction between God’s essence and his uncreated energies also left an indelible mark on how Orthodox theologians perceive God’s nature and deification. The concept of uncreated energies emerged in Byzantium during the fourteenth century, when Barlaam the Calabrian and Gregory Palamas clashed over the claim of Athonite monks that, at a 308 309 310 311 312 313

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 83. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 59. Lossky, ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine’, 79. Ibid., 83. Ibid.

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certain stage of their spiritual development, they can see God’s uncreated light. Barlaam was struck by this statement as a physicalist representation of God and denounced the monks as heretics. Palamas defended them by drawing a distinction between God’s essence and his energies. In his essence, God is unknowable and inaccessible, but he can be known through his energies. The light the monks saw was the light of God’s uncreated energies, the same as that of the grace that works the deification. The distinction proved controversial from the beginning because it seemed to run contrary to divine simplicity. God’s nature was cut in half with one side inaccessible and another that could be known and participated in. However, the Orthodox Church ended up accepting Palama’s position: first, through a series of local councils, whose anathemas against the anti-Palamites were incorporated in the liturgical calendar in 1352,314 and then through the support of some of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century (i.e., like Lossky, John Meyendorff, Christos Yannaras, Dumitru Stăniloae), who proclaimed this distinction as the superb synthesis of centuries of patristic and Orthodox teaching. To explain what divine energies are in a way that would not cause misunderstandings, Lossky begins by delineating them: the uncreated energies are not secondary effects of divinity, nor external acts of God’s will, as the creation of the world, nor the divine essence watering down to earth. They are overflows (debordements) of divinity surrounding the Trinitarian communion like the rays of light surrounding the sun.315 The rays are not the sun’s essence, but neither are they separated from it. As each ray contains in itself the plenitude of the sun, but not the sun’s essence,316 so each uncreated energy possesses the fulness of God having the same properties as God. Although in a certain sense, they are external to God – shining forward from his nature – the uncreated energies are not dependent on the existence of an external reality such as creation. The latter is the result of God’s will, while the former are natural processions of God towards the outside. They exist simply by the virtue of God’s own essence. To a certain extent, the uncreated energies can be assimilated to the attributes of God. They are not to be defined in the manner of Scholastic theology – as philosophical concepts imposed upon God by human rationality – but rather 314 Russell, Gregory Palamas, 21. 315 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 73. 316 Vladimir Lossky, ‘The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas’, in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1975), 55–56.

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as living and dynamic forces that reveal a part of the “unknowable darkness hidden by the abundance of light”,317 as in the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite. Lossky insists that the attributes of God are common to all three persons. They all originate in the Father and are communicated through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Father is the possessor of the particular attribute, the Son is the manifestation of the Father, and the Spirit is the one who manifests it.318 “The Father is True, the Son is the Truth, and the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Truth.”319 Still, since the attributes are linked to the energies of God which go forth from him towards the world, they cannot be applied to describe the inner life of the Trinity. “We never say, for example, that the Son proceeds by the mode of the intelligence and the Holy Spirit by the mode of the will. The Spirit can never be assimilated to the mutual love of the Father and the Son.”320 Whatever we can say about God refers to his relationship with us and not his internal life. Lossky is highly aware of the contested nature of this distinction, especially of the claim that it destroys divine simplicity, but he is not convinced by the legitimacy of this criticism. First, Lossky charges that divine simplicity is only another rational concept into which humans try to fit God. It is well known that in theology philosophical approaches do not work and they are not going to work. The foundation of the Christian faith, the dogma of the Trinity, runs contrary to the notion of divine simplicity and any philosophical notion for that matter. God is simultaneously One and Tree. The only way to express this reality in a way that is graspable for humans is antinomical because only an antinomy accepts the limitations of human knowledge allowing for two contradictory propositions to be taken as true. The teaching of the uncreated energies is another antinomy, claiming on the one hand that there is a distinction to be made between God’s essence and his energies and on the other hand that there is no fragmentation in God.321 Second, Lossky believes that in the case of this distinction, the benefits outweigh the critiques: only by accepting it can one speak coherently about deification as the goal of human life. To make this point, Lossky returns to the dilemma that Palamas posed to his adversaries: if you reject the uncreated energies then you will have to accept either that deification is union with a 317 318 319 320 321

Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 80. Ibid. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 75.

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created reality (i.e., grace) but not with God himself or that it is unmediated union with God’s own ousia and in this way, we become gods according to nature. In the first case, we are not united with God, but with a creature, while in the second case we are losing our human nature veering towards pantheism. Those who take seriously the testimony of Scripture, Lossky believes, cannot find any of these options acceptable. Properly understood, deification is partaking in the divine nature while retaining our hypostasis and creatureliness.322 In Lossky’s opinion, only the acceptance of the essence-energy distinction can explain how humans can be truly one with God without losing their created nature. Just as the rays of the sun act on human nature, but do not change it, so the glory of God transforms our humanity while preserving its personal and creaturely specificity. The distinction between the essence and the energies, which is fundamental for the Orthodox doctrine of grace, makes it possible to preserve the real meaning of St. Peter’s words ‘partakers of the divine nature’. The union to which we are called is neither hypostatic – as in the case of the human nature of Christ – nor substantial, as in that of the three divine Persons: it is union with God in His energies, or union by grace making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God. In deification we are by grace (that is to say, in the divine energies), all that God is by nature, save only identity of nature, according to the teaching of St. Maximus. We remain creatures while becoming God by grace, as Christ remained God in becoming man by the Incarnation.323 Lossky thinks that what he summarizes here is not his understanding of deification, but the authentic understanding of this doctrine that has been defended by the Orthodox Church throughout the centuries. Deification is the ultimate goal of theology and the yardstick of genuine orthodoxy: “the constant preoccupation which the Church has had to safeguard, at each moment of her history, for all Christians, the possibility of attaining to the fullness of the mystical union.”324 The distinction between essence and energies only comes to support this struggle in a modern context, where the rationalistic and gnostic temptations lurk in the background, as illustrated by Western scholasticism and Bulgakov’s Sophiology. 322 Ibid., 74–75. 323 Ibid., 87. 324 Ibid., 9–10.

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Anyone who takes even a minimal interest in contemporary Orthodox theology will notice how deeply ingrained Lossky’s ideas are in the mainstream discourse. It is almost impossible not to hear someone or read somewhere that Orthodox Triadology differs from that of the West because it starts from the person and not from the essence. Dumitru Stăniloae, Christos Yannaras, John Zizioulas and Richard Swinburn (b. 1934) are all using it in their works as an unassailable premise. The notion of uncreated energies continues to be highly popular. After Lossky’s premature death in 1958, numerous Orthodox theologians took it upon themselves to defend the Palamite essence-energy distinction (e.g., Kiprian Kern (1900–1960), John Meyendorff) and integrate it into complex personalist systems (e.g., Christos Yannaras, Dumitru Stăniloae). While still highly appreciated, the concept of uncreated energies tends to lose its hegemonical status in front of John Zizioulas’ alternative vision, where they are marginal if not inexistent. 5.3 Eucharistic Personalism Given the formulation of the doctrine: one substance and three persons, Zizioulas admits that the West is right in approaching the unity of the Trinity from the common substance. But, he warns that to elevate it to the ground of unity is highly misleading.325 To start theologising about God from His substance rather than personhood implies that Trinitarian communion is the product of necessity and not of free love. Zizioulas claims that if love is a property of the divine substance, then God is constrained to love because otherwise he would not be God. For the Trinity to be a true communion of love, it has to be grounded on a free act of self-giving, transcending the limitations of one’s nature. This act can come only from the person of the Father.326 For Zizioulas, the Cappadocians place the unity of the Trinity in the person of the Father, “who is ‘the cause’ both of the generation of the Son and of the procession of the Spirit.”327 As a person, and not because of his substance, the Father wills freely to exist and to bring forth the Son and the Holy Spirit. Moreover, Zizioulas adds, for the Cappadocians, there is no substance without a concrete hypostasis.328 Substances do not float in thin air, they exist only in particular forms. The divine substance could not have existed prior to the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is the Father who, through his 325 326 327 328

Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 40. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 41. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 140; Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41.

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will to beget the Son and spirate the Holy Spirit, is the cause and the principle of unity in the Trinity.329 Aware that the primacy of the person of the Father over the divine nature might be misinterpreted, Zizioulas clarifies that to consider the Father as the source and principle of Trinitarian unity does not introduce causality or primacy in the Trinity. When the Cappadocians supported the monarchy of the Father, they did not argue for causation, nor for a temporal interval between the moment when the Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit. The Father is the arche because he gives the Son and the Spirit their otherness, by placing them in a specific relationship with himself (i.e., as Son and Spirit).330 What Zizioulas means by this claim – and this represents the main thread of his entire theology – is that personhood equals otherness, which in turn equals being in relationship. To be a person is not about unique psychosomatic characteristics, but about the manner in which one engages in this relationship with others. Every human being can be described in reference to her various attributes: blue eyes, dark hair, expert in modern art. Some of these combinations are restricted to a limited number of individuals, but none of these combinations is unique. It is more than likely that the same characteristics (blue eyes, dark hair, expert in modern art) apply to at least a dozen people. True uniqueness, Zizioulas insists, is found in the subjective aspects of our relationships. If, for instance, I see an athlete on the cover of a magazine, that athlete will represent for me the sum of her physical attributes, but if I happen to know her face to face and have established a relationship of friendship with her, then I will think of her as my friend the athlete or the friend with whom I fought over the latest political issues. Her uniqueness will be given by the parameters of our relationship, not by the list of his physical or mental characteristics. Zizioulas applies this view of personhood to the Trinity, arguing that the names Father, Son and the Holy Spirit describe not how God is in himself, but the extant relationship between the three persons, what makes them unique in regard to each other. The person is the identity born of a relationship and exists only in communion with other persons. There cannot be a person without relationship to other persons, so if all the relationships which constitute a person disappear, so does that person. We cannot refer to a person without relating them to something else. Therefore, ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ denote 329 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41. 330 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 129–30.

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unique persons. Yet, if the Father was without relationship to the Son, there would be no Father, and if the Son was without relationship to the Father, there would be no Son.331 Still, despite the relational nature of personhood, not any type of relationship can be posited about the Trinity, as for instance, the Filioque. For Zizioulas, what we know for sure about the immanent Trinity is that the Father is unbegotten, the Son is the only-begotten and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, without being another Son. The Filioque adds an intra-trinitarian relationship that does not exist in the Eastern Tradition but can be tolerated if properly interpreted, that is if the term procession is understood as meaning ‘sent out’ and not ‘originating in’. The Holy Spirit cannot originate in the Son in the same way He originates in the Father. Zizioulas asserts that at some point throughout the first centuries a mistranslation from Greek took place. The two verbs referring to the role of the Holy Spirit inside and outside the Trinity (i.e., ekporeuetai and pempetai) were translated into Latin through the same verb “to proceed.” In fact, the two terms are describing two different realities: ekporeuetai speaks of the ontological relationship between the Father and the Spirit, while pempetai means being sent out, explaining the relationship between the Spirit and the Son within the economy of salvation.332 To accept that the Spirit is caused also by the Son would destabilise the Trinity since its unity rests on the person of the Father who initiates it.333 If the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son and the Father, then the Son becomes a second principle in the Trinity and this means we will have to accept two centres of unity – two persons who can originate a third – rather than a triunity. Zizioulas insists, however, that the Filioque is not contentious theologically, if we accept the difference between ‘proceeding from’ and ‘sent by’. It is fine to say that the Spirit depends on the Son in the economy, but it is an entirely different thing to maintain that this relates to the eternal life of God. We cannot talk about any Filioque in the eternal Trinity because the Father is the sole cause of the Spirit. Nonetheless, the Greek Fathers make a distinction that allows a role for the Son in the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit.334 331 332 333 334

Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 58. Ibid., 80–81. Ibid., 79. Ibid.

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It is not just this moderate view of the Filioque that distinguishes Zizioulas from Lossky, but also his rejection of the uncreated energies as obscuring the Christological character of deification. For Zizioulas, deification is a matter of personal relationships and not of energies. The difference between the two approaches lies in the fact that energies are flowing naturally from the person and are not the product of her free decision. If energies surround God like the rays of the sun, then they put us only indirectly in relationship with a personal God. An authentic, deiform relationship is realised only between two persons willing to engage with each other. Hence, energies only obscure the personal character of deification.335 Moreover, Zizioulas insists that if like the rays of the sun the energies radiate upon creation and are equally accessible to all humans, then it becomes possible to attain deification through ascetic practices without any direct connection with the Incarnation. The consecrated hesychast practice of praying unceasingly using Jesus’ name could challenge or at least temper this stance, but, at the same time for Zizioulas, its form is not too different from spiritual practices found in other religions.336 What makes Christianity unique is the centrality of the Incarnation which reveals God as free, personal, and directly involved in human history.337 The uncreated energies hide Christ as the mediator between God and creation.338 For Zizioulas, deification is achieved in the person of Jesus Christ. Two concepts from the theology of Maximus the Confessor are key here: logoi and mode of existence. Maximus is one of the Fathers of the Church who has a very strong sense of the cosmos and its relationship with Christ. Since, according to Colossians 1:16, everything was created in, by, and for the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos of God, Maximus can infer that each creature bears the imprint of its creator. This imprint is manifested in the inner rationality that establishes the characteristics, mode of existence, and differences between creatures. Maximus calls this inner rationality logos. The word ‘logos’, coming from a long philosophical and Christian tradition speaking about the intelligible character of creation, allows Maximus to establish a direct link between creation and God. The logoi originate and are sustained into being by the Logos, in whom they will eventually find their fulfilment in the eschaton when the entire creation will be deified. Zizioulas draws two conclusions from here. The first is a simple syllogism: if the Logos of God is the Second 335 336 337 338

Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 29. Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 32. Ibid., 42–43. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 28.

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Person of the Trinity and deification is union with the Logos, then deification, even that of creation itself, is personal.339 The second conclusion is that for the union between God and creation to take place, Incarnation is indispensable. Creatures can participate in God only if God makes accessible to them his divine hypostasis. And this happens through the Incarnation when the Logos assumes human nature in its totality.340 If the path to deification opened through the Incarnation is to be real rather than ethical or psychological, then it is necessary to articulate an ontology capable of supporting a Chalcedonian type of union with Christ, that is without confusion or division. Zizioulas rejects any ontologies that would eliminate the differences between the created and uncreated, absorbing the former into the latter. He also rejects contemplative ontologies, where human beings are united with God through the contemplation of the principles of creation or the uncreated energies, because – even if they preserve the difference between God and creation – they marginalise Christ’s hypostasis. His own ontology is based on another Maximian distinction, that between logos and tropos or mode of existence. The way in which Maximus employs the term tropos is not always consistent and this has led to a remarkable number of scholarly studies aiming to elucidate its meaning, usage, and relevance. The point on which all commentators agree is that tropos describes the freedom that each intelligent creature (i.e., angels or humans) has for acting in accordance with its own nature, that is with the logos regulating its existence. Maximus claims that after the fall humans started to behave contrary to the logos of their nature. They became selfish, arrogant, and sought pleasure in the material world, instead of the spiritual realm of divine contemplation. For our tropos to be in harmony with our logos, we need to practice asceticism, imitate the virtues of Christ, and attend regularly to the services of the Church. Zizioulas does not retain the same meaning for the practice of asceticism and the imitations of Christ’s virtue as Maximus but focuses on tropos, which he redefines as the mode of existence permeated by love that is common to both God and humans. As we saw previously, for Zizioulas it is important that we understand that the Trinity exists as a free community of love. The same is true for humans, who have been created in God’s image. Deification, then, is the convergence between these two modes of existence in love; a convergence that preserves the differences between God and creature.

339 Ibid., 23. 340 Ibid.

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[I]n every being there is a permanent and unchangeable aspect and an adjustable one. In the Incarnation, the logos physeos remains fixed, but the tropos adjusts being to an intention or purpose or manner of communion. In other words, the love of God bridges the gulf of otherness by affecting the changeable and adjustable aspect of being, and this applies equally to God and the world: God bridges the gulf by adjusting his own tropos, that is, how he is, while created existence also undergoes adjustments not of its logos physeos but of its tropos.341 The kind of love Zizioulas has in mind does not refer to a feeling or disposition of the soul or the way humans love one another, but to the eros used by Dionysius the Areopagite to describe the desire for communion between God and humans. Human love, Zizioulas claims, is generally based on physical or intellectual attraction and not on the uniqueness of the other.342 Eros moves us towards the other in order to affirm her indispensable character as a unique person; it is the gift bestowed on the other for herself and not out of our selfinterest.343 The exemplar of this erotic love is found in the begetting of the Son by the Father. The word monogenetos, used in the gospel of John (Jn 1.14–18; 3.16) to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son “does not mean simply the ‘only begotten’ but also the ‘uniquely loved one’.”344 As can be noticed fairly easily, Zizioulas replaces the bridge concepts of uncreated energies and Sophia with that of love. This replacement, however, does not spare him the same challenge, namely, how could the created and the uncreated love become ontologically one? Ethically, it is fairly easy to envisage that humans can imitate God’s Trinitarian love through their actions, but there are quite a few steps to take for this imitation to turn into a realistic account of deification. Replying to an article in which Zizioulas argued against the natural immortality of the soul, or for that matter of any element in the human constitution that could be considered immortal, Philip Sherrard asked how could a created being lacking any immortal spark transcend itself to the point of being united with God. “A person cannot pull himself up by his own shoestring”, as Sherrard put it.345 Zizioulas accepted the premise; it is indeed God’s love for humans and not that of humans for God that produces deification, but he argued that the uncreated and the created love are united through the 341 342 343 344 345

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 71, fn. 161. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 272.

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idiomatic communication (communio idiomatum) characteristic of Christ’s hypostasis. The human and the divine natures exist in Christ without confusion and without division, exchanging the properties of their respective natures: immortality, capacity for suffering, love. The human nature that is fully integrated into the person of Christ becomes the market place where this miraculous exchange between the created and the uncreated love of God happens. There is only one gate of access to Christ’s hypostasis and his deifying love and this is baptism. The beginning of a new life, baptism raises the believer above her biological state. Instead of loving one’s family, as social and biological love dictates, one begins to love the stranger as her own family; instead of loving the other for her aesthetic qualities, one learns to love the ugly and the marginalised; instead of loving one’s ethnic group, one loves all human beings with equal intensity.346 The uncreated love received at baptism provides the capacity “to love without exclusiveness and to do this not out of conformity with a moral commandment.”347 One of the particularities of Zizioulas’ vision is that deification, the union of the created with the uncreated love in Christ, is purely Eucharistic. Although Zizioulas is well aware that more often than not, the members of the Church behave in a way that is not consistent with the lofty divine love in which they partake in the Eucharist, he resists any attempt of filling this gap between ideal and practice with ethics or ascetics. Ethics is an inferior stage of love; it is a matter of what ought to and what ought not to be done that has nothing to do with the loving encounter between Christ and the faithful in the Eucharist. Those who experience the love of Christ will automatically fulfil the ethical commandments. Zizioulas rejects asceticism for the same reason; it does not help us attain deification or virtues.348 Virtues belong to Christ who infuses them into us, while deification is God’s gift rather than a consequence of human efforts. Only in the Eucharist does the believer encounter Christ fully 346 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 60. 347 Ibid., 57. 348 This approach to ethics proposed by Zizioulas here, the so called “ethical apophaticism” has been recently criticised by Alexis Torrance and myself as inadequate for dealing with practical matters. Torrance was wary the concept might be perceived as “quasi escapist” while I decried it as a carte blanche for abuses against persons with intellectual disabilities. Alexis Torrance, ‘The Category of “Ethical Apophaticism” in Modern Orthodox Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 17 January 2021, 1–16, doi:10.1111 /ijst.12459; Petre Maican, ‘Signposts for an Eastern Orthodox Inclusive Anthropological Ethics’, Scottish Journal of Theology 75, no. 1 (February 2022): 43–54, doi:10.1017/S0036 930621000818.

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and she becomes “the whole Christ and the whole Church.”349 Ascesis might lead to union with Christ, but in the Eucharist we are certain we are united with him. Thus, Zizioulas affirms quite emphatically: “There is no theosis outside the Eucharist.”350 To summarise, for Zizioulas humans are not deified through the uncreated energies of God, but through their incorporation into Christ’s hypostasis. This incorporation takes place through Baptism and is strengthened through the Eucharist, entailing a change in our human mode of existence or tropos, but not an alteration of our nature. Humans remain creatures, although of a different kind; they become ecclesial beings united with one another in Christ through love. This love is not determined by biological necessity, it is not the love for one’s family or ethnic group, but the uncreated love of God. To me, it would seem fair to say that contemporary Orthodox scholarship is concerned with the reception of these Trinitarian models, either through the critical appraisal of each of them or through comparative studies (the usual pairings are Bulgakov with Lossky and Lossky with Zizioulas). Much has been made so far of the interpretative frameworks used by Bulgakov and Zizioulas. In 1936, Lossky denounced Bulgakov’s Sophiology as foreign to the spirit of Orthodoxy.351 Through this action, Lossky was embraced in some circles as the true defender of Orthodoxy and Bulgakov has been cast in the role of the modern heretic par excellence. The charge of heresy has been vigorously contested in an impressive number of scholarly works.352 Brandon Gallaher went as far as to point out that Lossky himself uses modern concepts foreign to his sources, particularly Gregory Palamas (i.e., antinomy), and that even his apophaticism is indebted to the Russian sophiological tradition he condemns.353 Although Zizioulas has been closely associated with Florovsky’s neopatristic synthesis – and in this way spared the charge of heresy – he was not spared criticism. Since the publication of Being as Communion, one of the most recurrent critiques Zizioulas received was that his exegesis of the Cappadocian Fathers is anachronistic, projecting existentialist categories into fourth century 349 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 61. 350 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 85. 351 For a brief overview of the debate and the primary and secondary literature see Gallaher, ‘The “Sophiological” Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism’, 285 fn. 27. 352 Geffert, ‘The Charges of Heresy Against Sergii Bulgakov: The Majority and Minority Reports of Evlogifs Commission and the Final Report of the Bishops’ Conference’; Antoine Arjakovsky, ‘The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov and Contemporary Western Theology’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, no. 1/2 (2005): 219–35; Rowan Williams, ‘Bulgakov’s Christology’ (Building the House of Wisdom: Sergii Bulgakov – 150 Years After His Birth, Fribourg, 2021). 353 Gallaher, ‘The “Sophiological” Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism’.

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texts.354 Other points were also raised: John Behr questioned the level of abstraction found in Zizioulas’ system and cautioned that it loses touch with the Christocentrism of Scripture.355 Alexis Torrance rejected Zizioulas’ claim that the uncreated energies do not allow for a strong Christology by pointing out how Gregory Palamas links them with Christ’s hypostasis.356 One of the most well-known of Zizioulas’ defenders, Aristotle Papanikolaou, claimed that Zizioulas’s existentialist reading of the Cappadocians is legitimate because it attempts to make relevant “traditional Christian dogmas to contemporary questions and concerns.”357 Papanikolaou also sharpened Zizioulas’ attack on the uncreated energies by contending that this distinction begs the question of “whether participation in the divine energies is something less than participation in the triune personal existence of God.”358 A promising departure point for a new understanding of the Trinity and human deification can be found in Gallaher’s Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (2016). Although a comparative study, Gallaher’s conclusions prove, in my view, innovative for Orthodox theology. For Gallaher, the notion of election provides a better understanding of the relationship between freedom and necessity in God, in two ways. The first is that “in which, God eternally and freely gives Himself to man by electing Himself as man in Christ.”359 The second is intra-trinitarian, that is “the hypostases in free self-giving love elects the Other as its very own and receives its own election by the Other.”360 It is not simply that the notion of election is marginal in modern Orthodox discourse, and if engaged constructively, Gallaher’s work could open fruitful avenues for ecumenical dialogue with certain strands of the Protestant tradition, but, more importantly, for an account of deification that would be less ontologically charged than those of Bulgakov, Lossky, and Zizioulas.

354 Lucian Turcescu, ‘“Person” versus “Individual”, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (October 2002): 527–39, doi:10.1111/1468-0025.00202. 355 Behr, ‘Faithfulness and Creativity’, 176. 356 Alexis Torrance, ‘The Energy of Deification and the Person of Jesus Christ in St Gregory Palamas’, in Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology, by Alexis Torrance (Oxford University Press, 2020), 152–96, doi:10.1093/oso/9780198845294.003.0005. 357 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Is John Zizioulas an Existentialist in Disguise? Response to Lucian Turcescu’, Modern Theology 20, no. 4 (October 2004): 604, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0025.2004 .00269.x. 358 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God’, Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (July 2003): 377, doi:10.1111/1468-0025.00227. 359 Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology, 238. 360 Ibid.

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While in the previous chapter I decided to organise the discussions on Tradition around the notion of deification, here this was not the case. Deification is at the heart of Bulgakov, Lossky, and Zizioulas’ understanding of God as Trinity and of God’s relationship with the world and the human being. To a certain extent, it can be said that for them any discussion about God is indissolubly intertwined with that of deification. Sophiology, the uncreated energies, and the Eucharist are just ways in which deification is conceptualised. Of course, as it was obvious throughout the chapter, none of these options is perfect, but all of them have their advantages: a cosmic overview of the human relationship with God (Bulgakov), a robust explanation of the hesychast spirituality (Lossky), and a strong communitarian sense (Zizioulas). What happens, however, is that all of these systems come part and parcel with a specific vision of the ecclesial community (e.g., Lossky’s insistence on prayer and spirituality will set the boundaries of the Church beyond those of the Eucharistic community), a vision that in some contemporary ecclesiological debates will prove either inadequate or irrelevant. 6

Ecclesiology

With this chapter on ecclesiology, I reach the last term of the definition of deification proposed at the beginning of this essay, namely the human experience of union with God inside the Church. Ecclesiology, however, is more than the medium of one’s personal experience, it is its summit. Deification is not an individual task to be achieved or an individual experience to be pursued, but a communal one. To be deified is to become part of the body of Christ, since as Khomiakov puts it: “nobody is redeemed alone.” This tension between the communal and the individual aspects of deification, already discussed in the chapter on Tradition, will reappear here, although this time in a polemical form directed against other Christian traditions. I will follow the same chronological path as previously. I will begin with Khomiakov’s claim that Orthodox ecclesial experience (sobornost) is superior to that of Roman Catholics and Protestants, because it is grounded on the mutual love of the faithful for one another in Christ and not on external authority, be it the Pope or human reason. Then, I will follow throughout the twentieth century the development of the two main ecclesiological paradigms, the Trinitarian and the Eucharistic, and conclude with more recent debates on the role of hierarchy in the Church and ordination of women. If modern Orthodox theology springs forth from the Philokalia, modern Ortho­ dox ecclesiology begins with the writings of Alexei Khomiakov. Khomiakov did not just put the bases of Orthodox ecclesial self-understanding – by arguing

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that ecclesial unity resides in the harmony between faith and reason  – but he also defined for centuries to come the stereotypical way in which some of the Orthodox will understand the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, that is as dominated by rationalistic tendencies and with little or no interest in spiritual life. Khomiakov made these claims about Roman Catholics and Protestants in the tumultuous years of the mid-nineteenth century, when much of the Western world despised, misread or misinterpreted Orthodoxy.361 In 1848, pope Pius IX sent the Epistle to the Easterners calling all Orthodox bishops to recognise him as their spiritual leader. In 1853, when the Crimean war (1853–1856) broke out opposing the Russian Empire to a coalition of France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, the archbishop of Paris, Marie-Dominique Sibour, called the war against Russia holy. The Orthodox are the heretics who did not receive the Filioque.362 Khomiakov wrote into this highly charged context with the declared aim of defending Orthodoxy and dispelling the misunderstandings surrounding it. He first dismissed the charge of heresy as unfounded; it was the Roman Catholic Church that changed the Creed unilaterally acting against the decision of an ecumenical council. Then, he set out to prove the superiority of Orthodoxy over Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. For Khomiakov, this superiority is primarily moral. The Orthodox Church is not held together in unity by obedience to an external authority – be it the pope or human reason – but by the love of its members. “Papal unity is completely exterior, without living content; the protestant freedom of reason is a completely external freedom without real content.”363 In his reading, Roman Catholics are united by their blind obedience to the authority of the pope, whom they consider infallible. This obedience transforms the faithful into passive subjects,364 who cannot express their opinions on matters of faith. Instead of remaining adopted sons of God, Christians are reduced to “hirelings and slaves.”365 Hence, he concludes that the unity of the Roman Catholic Church is superficial, arising only from the acceptance of the bishop of Rome as “an involuntary oracle” of the divine.366

361 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et le Protestantisme, 65 fn. 1; William John Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years: Containing a Correspondence Between Mr. William Palmer Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and M. Khomiakoff, in the Years 1844–1854 (London: Rivington, Percival, 1895), 93. 362 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et le Protestantisme, 95–96. 363 Ibid., 65. My translation. 364 Ibid., 38. 365 Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, 1:64. 366 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et Le Protestantisme, 38.

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The same fault is found in Protestantism. These communities are also held together by appeal to an external authority, only in their case this authority is human reason. Khomiakov claims further that when Protestants debate Roman Catholics they are employing only syllogisms and make no reference to spiritual life.367 Since these syllogisms are not easily accessible to the majority of the faithful, they have to be imposed upon them by the pastors. In this respect, Protestant pastors are similar to the Roman Catholic hierarchy.368 To illustrate this point, Khomiakov provides an anecdote. Once, when he was travelling throughout Germany, he had a pleasant and lovely conversation with a Lutheran pastor. One of the questions he asked the pastor was why he was a Lutheran and not a Calvinist. The pastor provided highly intellectual grounds for his position. Yet, when the servant came in with a glass of lemonade, Khomiakov took the opportunity to ask him the same question. The servant did not know what to say and this allowed Khomiakov to score his point about the importance of tradition inside the Church. The pastor could only assure Khomiakov that this is an interesting insight and that he hoped this kind of religious ignorance will disappear later through “the lights of science.”369 Khomiakov concluded that the Lutheran Church – like the Roman Catholic – is divided between those who teach (ecclesia docens) and those who need to listen (ecclesia discens) and that what brings these two sides together is deference to human reason. By contrast, there is no such distinction in the Orthodox Church. On matters of faith, all the members of the Church are equal, the bishop having to learn from the peasant because they are all united with God through their love for each other in the Holy Spirit. For Khomiakov, the Church is the revelation of the love between the Trinitarian persons that is made accessible to the faithful as an objective reality through the Holy Spirit.370 Dominated by passions, most humans can approach the Trinity only as an external belief that can be at best logically acceptable. The Holy Spirit transforms this external belief into faith – not through syllogistic reasoning – but by raising the entire being into the revelation of the living truth.371 “Faith is thus the Holy Spirit putting its seal on belief, a seal on which the human being cannot get his hands on at will, isolated as she is in her subjectivity, she cannot get her hand on it at all.”372 367 368 369 370 371 372

Ibid., 42–43, 64. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 29–30. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 241. My translation.

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Khomiakov insists as well on the moral aspect of faith. Faith is not just a personal encounter with God through illuminated reasoning; it is a commitment to mutual love in Jesus Christ.373 Human reason cannot recognise the truth without being given a moral law that will bring her unity with others and the grace of God.374 The Holy Spirit does not instil in the believer the desire for an individualistic affirmation of faith, but the desire for reciprocal love in Christ. The Church is more than the sum of believers who receive the Holy Spirit; it is “an organic unity, whose living principle is the divine grace of mutual love.”375 The reciprocal love established through participation in the Holy Spirit enables everyone inside the Church to have an opinion and even teach on matters of faith. On the hierarchical ladder, there is not much of a difference between a bishop and a layperson.376 Every word is legitimate when spoken with love because love is the mark of the Holy Spirit. Every word inspired by a sense of authentically Christian love, of living faith or hope, is a teaching. Every act stamped with the Spirit of God is a lesson. Every Christian life is a model and an example. A martyr dying for the truth, a judge rendering justice not for people but for God, a labourer whose humble toil is accompanied by a constant elevation of thought towards the creator – live or die to bestow a lofty teaching upon their fellow human beings. And when it is necessary, the Divine Spirit will place on their lips words of wisdom that the savant or theologian will not find.377 This unity of all faithful in the Holy Spirit allows Khomiakov to provide a theological explanation for one of the main particularities of the Orthodox Church, its existence as a confederation of autonomously ethnic communities (e.g., Greek, Russian, Romanian). What might appear as an ethnic fragmentation of the Church and raise doubts about its unity is, for Khomiakov, a testimony to a more perfect type of unity in plurality.378 The Greeks and the Russians are not tied together by an external authority, but by the Holy Spirit, who guides and helps them agree with each other in Christ, regardless of their nationality and 373 374 375 376 377

Ibid., 284. Ibid., 107, 385. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 50. English translation from Boris Jakim and Robert Bird, trans., On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader, Esalen-Lindisfarne Library of Russian Philosophy (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 60. 378 Khomiakov, L’Église Latine et Le Protestantisme, 398.

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social condition.379 Genuine ecclesial unity resides in the free and reciprocal love inspired by the Holy Spirit and not in a dry and impersonal submission to authority. This communal unity in freedom and love came to be known as sobornost or fellowship in togetherness and very quickly established itself as one of the distinctive marks of Orthodox ecclesial self-understanding. Sobornost renders in Slavonic the Greek catholicos (i.e., universal) from the original version of the Nicene Creed, where the Church is defined as one, holy, universal, and apostolic. Khomiakov defends this translation by pointing out that the universality of the Church does not refer to its geographic or ethnographic boundaries (i.e. the Roman Church or the Roman oecumene), but to its mode of existence as a world communion supported by mutual love.380 Despite its conceptual vagueness,381 sobornost was powerful enough to inspire the reform of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the twentieth century,382 and even to influence the Orthodox approach to ecumenism and ecumenical unity. During the 1970s, Dumitru Stăniloae considered the ecumenical dialogue another form of sobornicity, one that opens up to other Christian confessions with the hope that they will reach the goal of together-unity in faith and love under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.383 In recent years, however, it seems to me that the notion of sobornost has lost much of its cache. This might be the case partly because the energies of Orthodox theologians are invested now in anthropological debates, partly because the lofty ideal proposed by sobornost was called into question by the crude reality of ecclesial politics, from the refusal of some Orthodox Churches to attend the Pan-Orthodox council (2016) to the schism between the Russian and the Ecumenical Patriarchate over the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church. This succinct summary of Khomiakov’s theology fulfils simultaneously two functions. First, it provides the reader with the foundations of Orthodox ecclesiology, since no matter how critical one’s position is or has been towards Khomiakov, there is no doubt that he was taken into account by almost 379 Ibid. 380 Ibid., 398–99. 381 Andrew Louth, Sobornost’ in the Orthodox Theology of the 20th Century: An Overview of Trends, 2021, accessed 10 May 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8cFEgbSohc. 382 Sobornost’ in the Discourse of the Russian Church in the 19th–Early 20th Centuries, 2021; Ruth Kolosova Alison, ‘Sobornost: Its Concept, Praxis and Reception by Chuvash Orthodox Christians of the Volga-Kama Region in the Early 20th Century’, Sobornost 42, no. 1–2 (2020): 58–92. 383 Stăniloae, ‘Coordonatele Ecumenismului’; Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘Sobornicitatea Deschisa’, Ortodoxia 23, no. 2 (1971): 165–80; Viorel Coman, ‘Learning Ecumenically From Each Other: “Open Sobornicity” and “Receptive Ecumenism”’, Perspectief, no. 34 (2016): 35–43.

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everyone who came after.384 Second, this overview guides the discussion to the two areas of ecclesiological reflection that have been developed at length during the twentieth century: the relationship between the Church and the Trinity and that of the Church as a loving and Eucharistic community. 6.1 Trinitarian Ecclesiology Lossky is one of the main proponents of what has been called Trinitarian ecclesiology. The reasons for his interest in the relationship between Church and Trinity are multiple, but it seems to me that one of the most important is Lossky’s desire to give an ecclesial account of deification. For him, the Church is more than the revelation of God’s love in the world, it is also the place where humans share in Trinitarian love by being incorporated into the hypostasis of the Son and deified by the Spirit. To make this point, Lossky distinguishes between the fixed aspect of the Church, its Christological scaffolding, and the dynamic or pneumatological one. The Christological aspect refers to the salvific work the Son of God realised through the Incarnation – when he reestablished human relationship with God and recapitulated in his hypostasis the entire human nature. This hypostasis is now accessible to all through the sacraments. Lossky, however, posits a gap between sharing in the sacraments and deification. The sacraments are objective means of grace, but deification entails a personal ascetic effort to acquire the Holy Spirit. To use an illustration with biblical overtones, the action of Christ in the Church can be likened to that of a builder who lays the foundation of a house and builds it up to the point where people can live in it, but without decorating the rooms. The sacraments are the keys to these rooms. The Holy Spirit fulfils the function of an interior designer, who refines and diversifies, seeking the best solutions for every room according to the taste and personality of each tenant.385 This particularity of Lossky’s Trinitarian ecclesiology, where the Son and the Holy Spirit act separately from each other, originates in his opposition to the Filioque. If the Trinitarian dogma is necessarily reflected in ecclesial life, then Filioque, which for Lossky means the subordination of the Spirit to the Son, entails the subordination of the entire Church to the pope, the vicar of Christ. To remain true to its own teaching, where there is no mention of the relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit, Orthodox ecclesiology should place the two persons on the same footing, assigning them independent roles. The 384 See Kallistos Ware, ‘Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, no. 2–3 (May 2011): 216–35, doi:10.1080/1474225X.2011.603975. 385 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 180.

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view of the Holy Spirit as attaching people to Christ and facilitating their mystical union with Him is subordinationist. The work of Christ concerns human nature which He recapitulates in His hypostasis. The work of the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, concerns persons, being applied to each one singly. Within the Church the Holy Spirit imparts to human hypostases the fullness of deity in a manner which is unique, ‘personal’, appropriate to every man as a person created in the image of God.386 Lossky’s distinction between the economy of the Son and that of the Holy Spirit did not go unchallenged. One of the most important critiques – not for its influence at the time, but rather for its contemporary impact – came from the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae.387 Stăniloae agreed with Lossky that the Church reflects the life of the Trinity, but he did not believe the apophatic approach to the relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit was viable. For Stăniloae, Lossky proposal was inadequate, because it approximated the Filioque. To say that the Son unites the faithful with Christ and the Holy Spirit helps them attain deification in a personal way means to forget the personal character of the Son and the Holy Spirit and reduce them to divine principles.388 A new perspective was needed and Stăniloae gladly undertook the task. He argued that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love uniting the Father with the Son, but instead of tracing this view to Augustine, he supported it by appealing to traditional Orthodox sources (i.e., Gregory Palamas) and logic.389 If the Holy Spirit does not bring together the Father and the Son, then the Trinity is not complete and there can be no reason why we should speak of only three

386 Ibid., 166. 387 Florovksy also makes a similar critique. Georges Florovsky, ‘On the History of Ecclesiology’, in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, ed. Richard Haugh, vol. 14 (Nordland Publishing Company, 1972), 9–17. 388 Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Sobornicity of the Church’, in Theology and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 66. 389 For Augustine as the source of Gregory Palamas see Reinhard Flogaus, ‘The Use of Saint Augustine in the Heysichast Controversy’, in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2008), 63–80. For Stăniloae’s sources see Viorel Coman, ‘Le Saint-Esprit comme liaison de l’amour éternel entre le Père et le Fils un cas de « sobornicité ouverte » dans la théologie orthodoxe moderne’, Irenikon 89, no. 1 (2016): 25–52.

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divine persons and not of four.390 If, however, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, abides on the Son, and is sent back to the Father as a gift from the Son, then the circle is closed and the Trinity is shown to be perfect in the love of all persons for each other. Like Lossky, Stăniloae believes that the ecclesial role of the Holy Spirit is a reflection of the Trinitarian one. Just as the Holy Spirit unites the persons of the Trinity while preserving their specificity, so the Holy Spirit unites the faithful with each other inside the Church.391 [The Holy Spirit] is the keystone between the different Persons, and he is also the living force of unity among the faithful and between the faithful and the Holy Trinity. Coming to rest from all eternity upon the incarnate Son, the Holy Spirit after the incarnation also comes to rest upon the personal humanity of Christ and then upon all who are united with Christ through faith. But through this coming-to-rest upon Christ he unites the faithful not only with Christ and among themselves in Christ, but also with the Father as sons of the Father together with Christ.392 Quite recently, Stăniloae’s approach has been hailed as a balanced synthesis between Christology and pneumatology, capable of solving many of the issues underlying contemporary Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiologies.393 Taking a comparative approach, Viorel Coman (b. 1985) examined the main Trinitarian ecclesiological models of the past century, placing Yves Congar (1904–1995) and Walter Kasper (b. 1933) next to Lossky, Zizioulas, Florovsky, and Stăniloae. Coman critiqued Florovsky and Zizioulas for subsuming pneumatology to Christology and Congar and Kasper for overemphasising pneumatology to the detriment of Christology. In his view, Stăniloae strikes the right balance between the two because he emphasises the reciprocity between the Son and the Holy Spirit both in the Trinity and in that of the Church. “[T]he Church is the place where the presence of the Holy Spirit strengthens Christ’s presence. But the Church is equally the place where Christ’s indwelling in human beings with his deified body is an act of deification and pneumatization of all those who make up the Body of Christ.”394 390 Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘Trinitarian Relations and The Life of The Church’, in Theology and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 23. 391 Stăniloae, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Sobornicity of the Church’, 65. 392 Ibid., 67. 393 Viorel Coman, Dumitru Stăniloae’s Trinitarian Ecclesiology: Orthodoxy and the Filioque (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019), 2–3. 394 Ibid., 203, 217.

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6.2 Eucharistic Ecclesiology An alternative vision of the Church comes from the so-called Eucharistic or communion ecclesiology. Often summarised under the dictum, “Where the Eucharist is there is the Church of God”,395 this ecclesiology focuses on the doxological aspect of Christian communitarian practice. This does not mean that the Trinitarian model ignores the liturgy or the communal aspect of the Church, but that it does not single out the Eucharist as the locus of ecclesial being. If Khomiakov’s ecclesiology was born out of the desire to defend Orthodoxy against the attacks of Roman Catholics, Eucharistic ecclesiology sought reconciliation with the same Church, around the notions of bishop and Eucharist. In an article published during the Second Vatican Council, where he served as an official ecumenical observer, the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Afansiev (1893–1966) argued that both Churches can be considered full ecclesial bodies and share the Eucharistic chalice if they are willing to give up the universalist ecclesiology of Cyprian of Cartage. For Afanasiev, Cyprian of Cartage broke with tradition when he claimed that each local community is a branch or a subdivision of the universal church and that whenever the branch disagrees with the universal Church it loses its ecclesial status and becomes a heretical gathering.396 This corporate understanding of the Church did not exist before. Each local community was considered a full church, because it had the body of Christ whole on its altar. The constitutive element of the Church was not the agreement or disagreement over doctrinal or juridical issues with other Christian communities, but the Eucharistic assembly presided over by a bishop. Churches could not see eye to eye on many topics and still be in communion. For instance, during the debate over the date of Easter Polycarp of Smyrna and Pope Anicetus were on different sides, but they never ceased communion. Pope Anicetus even allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his church.397 Afanasiev claims that the moment when a community separates itself from other Christian communities does not coincide with its loss of ecclesial character. The community that breaks away remains “the Church of God despite its isolated situation.”398 What changes is the reception of its actions, including 395 Nikolaĭ Afanasiev, ‘Una Sancta’, in Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time: Readings from the Eastern Church, ed. Michael Plekon (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 14. 396 Ibid. 397 Ibid., 21. 398 Ibid., 18.

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the sacraments, by other communities.399 The same is true about the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches; they remain fully Churches in their Eucharistic assemblies.400 The divergences between them are mostly juridical in nature (i.e., primacy and infallibility) and, from the perspective of Eucharistic ecclesiology, they do not hinder intercommunion.401 More than twenty years later, Zizioulas reconfigured Afanasiev’s ecclesiological outlook by adding an ontological and an eschatological dimension to it.402 As I explained already, for Zizioulas the Eucharist is at the heart of the Church because it is the source of human transformation and deification. Unlike Lossky, for whom deification is achieved through ascetic efforts, for Zizioulas deification is primarily a gift from above received through the sacraments, particularly Baptism and the Eucharist. To emphasise the ontological transformation brought by the Eucharist, Zizioulas draws a very famous distinction between biological and ecclesial hypostasis. The biological hypostasis is limited and determined by the laws of nature and death. To rise above it, humans have to be put in relationship with a being who is utterly free and immortal. This being is the Trinitarian God and the relationship that lifts humans above their actual state begins with the bath of Baptism – as the starting point for our transition from biological to ecclesial hypostasis – and is sustained through the Eucharistic blood and body of Christ. The Church is eschatological in as much as it is an event where the future is made present and fulfilled. In chapter three of Being as Communion, Zizioulas claims that the role of the Son is to assume history and that of the Spirit is to lead Christians beyond history by bringing to them the last days or the eschata.403 The Spirit fulfils this role when it gathers the community around the Eucharistic chalice. There, the bishop, the priests, and the deacons reflect iconically the eschatological image of Christ surrounded by apostles and martyrs.404 Or to put it differently, the Eucharistic assembly is eschatological not only because it is the work of the Holy Spirit, but also because it enacts an apocalyptic typology. At a practical level, this entails that the diocese and not the parish is the full Eucharistic assembly. If the bishop is an icon of Christ, and by this he is 399 400 401 402

Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 24, 26. See Zizioulas evaluation of Afanasiev in John Zizioulas, ‘Eucharistic Ecclesiology in the Orthodox Tradition’, in L’ecclésiologie eucharistique, ed. Jean-Marie van Cangh (Bruxelles: Académie internationale des sciences religieuses, 2009), 187–202. 403 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 131. 404 Ibid., 222–23.

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irreplaceable as the head of the assembly, then the Eucharist is less authentic when it is celebrated without his presence. For Zizioulas, this is the case almost every Sunday, where in the majority of parishes we find only the priest as the head of the assembly. The priest is not an icon of the eschatological Christ and by assigning him the role of substitute for the bishop the ecclesiological bases of Orthodoxy are shattered.405 The creation of parishes has broken the eschatological character of the Eucharist.406 Many theologians and faithful, especially in the English-speaking world, eagerly subscribed to Zizioulas’ version of Eucharistic ecclesiology. Just as many, however, spared no criticism. The most relevant criticisms were made from the perspective of Trinitarian ecclesiology. In an article entitled “Does the Eucharist Make the Church”, Calinic Berger argues that the distinction Zizioulas draws between the economy of the Son (i.e., becoming history) and that of the Spirit (i.e., liberating humanity from history) follows Lossky’s attempt to separate the external activities of the two Persons of the Trinity.407 This is problematic from a spiritual point of view. If the Holy Spirit remains independent of the Son and only acts to gather the faithful for and during the liturgy, then any action made outside the Eucharistic assembly is spiritually and ecclesiologically irrelevant. For instance, fasting or praying with someone or even helping those in need could be considered, at best, good deeds for the person who does them, but they would not have an ecclesial character. Berger argues further that the best way to avoid restricting the Church to the Eucharistic assembly is to follow Stăniloae’s Trinitarian ecclesiology. For Stăniloae, the Holy Spirit comes from the Father to abide on the Son. This abiding is something continuous and not occasional, which entails that all those who are baptised are united with Christ through the Holy Spirit even outside the liturgy. In this way, their acts of prayer or ascesis outside the Sunday gathering remain acts of the Church. This critique has been restated recently in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic by several theologians, Viorel Coman, Brandon Gallaher and Richard 405 Ibid., 251. See also the critique of Erickson’s critique of Zizioulas on this point “it is alarming to learn that the Church suffers from a disruption in its most vital structures so serious that for most of its historical existence (presumably since the third or fourth century) it has only been able to hope for restoration of proper wholeness.” John H. Erickson, ‘The Church in Modern Orthodox Thought: Towards a Baptismal Ecclesiology’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, no. 2–3 (May 2011): 144, doi:10.1080/14742 25X.2011.571417. 406 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 250. 407 Calinic (Kevin M.) Berger, ‘Does the Eucharist Makes the Church?: An Ecclesiological Comparison of Stăniloae and Zizioulas’, St Vladimirs’s Theological Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2007): 28–29.

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Rene.408 Coman pointed out that in many countries the lockdowns did not allow for Eucharistic gatherings to take place, sometimes even for months. If Eucharistic ecclesiology is right and the sole ecclesial act is the reunion of Christians on Sundays, then we will have to ask what happens to the Church when these gatherings are not possible. Does praying online with the other members of the community count as an ecclesial act? Although Coman does not phrase the question this way, Gallaher and Rene are more trenchant asking it directly: What does it mean to attend a liturgical service? Is virtual communion possible? Might we obtain absolution through confessing our sins to one another? Might someone become a member of the Body without even entering a physical church? In short: where and what is the Church?409 Zizioulas’ ecclesiology, however, has its defenders as well. Aristotle Papaniko­ laou is one of the most prominent. He acknowledges that Eucharistic ecclesiology has its own weaknesses, but he considers it to make “most sense for understanding what it means to be a ‘Church’.”410 Papanikolaou does not think that Berger is right in questioning the Trinitarian basis of Zizioulas’ position. He is more worried by the implications of Zizioulas vision for the relationship between the Church and the world. The main concern is that at some point the eschatological dimension of this vision could be employed as a countercultural weapon. Instead of going out towards the world to “eucharisticize it”, the faithful might be tempted to retreat behind the walls of the Church, where

408 Viorel Coman, ‘What Ecclesiology for the Pandemic? A Plea for a Trinitarian Model of the Church’ in Pastorația Și Filantropia Creștină În Vreme de Pandemie: Șansă, Povară Sau Normalitate Identitară?, eds. Teofil Tia and Adrian Podaru (Cluj Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2021), 311–34; Brandon Gallaher and Richard Rene, ‘Orthodox Apocalypse: Judgment and Hope for Orthodoxy in the Time of Coronavirus’, Public Orthodoxy, 2 June 2020, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/06/02/orthodox-apocalypse -coronavirus/. See also the interview with Zizioulas about his ecclesiological stance and the pandemic. John Zizioulas, ‘The Church without the Eucharist Is No Longer the Church’, Public Orthodoxy, 27 March 2020, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/03/27 /church-without-eucharist/. 409 Gallaher and Rene, ‘Orthodox Apocalypse’. 410 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Whose Public? Which Ecclesiology?’, in Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges and Divergent Positions, ed. Stoeckl Kristina, Gabriel Ingeborg, and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Bloomsbury T  &  T Clark, 2017), 237, doi:10.5040/9780567674173.

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the eschaton is already being realised.411 Thus, one of the goals of Orthodox theologians today should be that of developing a Eucharistic ecclesiology that encourages the Christian impulse of deifying the world. 6.3 Hierarchy in the Church Another recent area of interest in ecclesiology has been and continues to be that of hierarchy and its legitimacy. Modern Orthodox theologians have not called into question the three offices of deacon, priest, and bishop, but they have challenged the view that the ordination transforms the receiver, elevating him ontologically above the laity. One of the most prominent theologians to reject this view was Nicholai Afanasiev. Afanasiev traced the belief in ordination as ontologically altering to the fourth century when the Church was being incorporated into the administrative apparatus of the Roman Empire. For the Church, this process produced two significant changes: the principles of Roman law were introduced in the ecclesial life and the notion of consecration emerged.412 Afanasiev considers the idea of consecration not only against the Tradition of the early communities but also theologically inaccurate, because it deprives the laics of the gifts of the Spirit.413 According to him, all Christians are priests and co-celebrants in the liturgy through baptism. The early Church, Afanasiev claims, did not distinguish between clergy and laity, because it was fundamentally a lay movement. Christ himself was not a Levite and he was called priest “after the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrew 7:17).414 Baptism unites the faithful with Christ, giving them a share in his priesthood. Each and every one of them becomes a cleric, that is God’s possession, and just as the Levites did not receive their share in the conquest of the Holy Land, so Christians do not receive their share in this life, being only pilgrims to the city of God.415 That everyone receives the fullness of grace and is a priest does not mean that everyone can celebrate the Eucharist. In a liturgical context, Afanasiev talks about charisms. Everyone is a priest, but not everyone is called to fulfil certain functions.416 The most important function is that of the bishop-priest 411 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Integrating the Ascetical and the Eucharistic: Current Challenges in Orthodox Ecclesiology’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, no. 2–3 (May 2011): 181–85, doi:10.1080/1474225X.2011.571408. 412 Nikolaĭ Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, ed. Michael Plekon, trans. Vitaly Permiakov (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 60–61. Scribd e-reader. 413 Ibid., 64. 414 Ibid., 49. 415 Ibid., 53. 416 Ibid., 167.

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who presides over the Eucharistic assembly. The person who assumes this position does it not because he was consecrated and ontologically changed, but because he was called to it. It was not the charism of the priesthood, which God has granted to every member of the Church, but the charism of the presidency that distinguished presiders from the rest of the Church. The Eucharistic assembly is the assembly of the royal priesthood under the presidency of one of this priesthood who has the charism to preside.417 To a certain extent, Zizioulas follows in Afanasiev’s footsteps. He agrees with the royal priesthood of all the baptised, but not with the equivalency between bishop and priest, nor with the functional nature of ecclesial hierarchy. If for Afanasiev the bishop and the priest fulfil more or less the same function (i.e., heads of the Eucharistic assembly and administrators of the community), for Zizioulas they differ significantly. The priest is subordinate to the bishop and is authorised to carry the liturgical duty only in his absence. The priest can celebrate the Eucharist solely on the antimison that bears the signature of the local bishop.418 Moreover, Zizioulas insists that the bishop is not just an overseer of the liturgy, his role being first and foremost relational. As mentioned above, for Zizioulas the Eucharistic celebration has a strong eschatological dimension. The assembly is gathered every Sunday by the Holy Spirit according to the apocalyptic image of Christ surrounded by apostles and martyrs. The bishop who reflects Christ iconically becomes the intermediary between the celestial and the earthly communities.419 He unites the faithful not only among themselves and with Christ, but also with the other communities who existed in the past or exist in the present.420 This relational understanding of the role of the bishop enables Zizioulas to take the middle path in regard to the impact of ordination. Ordination does not elevate the receiver ontologically over his flock, but neither leaves him unchanged. For Zizioulas, the primacy of the bishop over the assembly can be compared with the primacy of the Father over the other persons of the Trinity. The Father receives a primacy of honour without being ontologically different from the Son and the Holy Spirit.421 At the same time, Zizioulas claims that 417 418 419 420 421

Ibid., 261. Zizioulas, ‘Eucharistic Ecclesiology in the Orthodox Tradition’, 197. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 219. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 223–24.

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ordination does affect the person who receives it. The seal of the relational mission imprinted upon the bishop through ordination is something he will continue to carry even in the eschaton.422 One of the main questions this iconic-relational understanding of the hierarchy avoids is the failure of the bishop in fulfilling his relational role. What happens if instead of uniting people with Christ, the bishop is a divisive figure, someone who collaborates with fascists or, even worse, someone who supports a heresy? If the Church is the place where the Eucharist is celebrated by a bishop, then would not a morally questionable bishop challenge the very existence of the Church? If, for Afanasiev, the failure of the bishop cannot invalidate the Eucharist because the people in the church are concelebrants – the bishop is there only to preside over the assembly – this is not the case for Zizioulas, unless, of course, he would limit the bishop’s presence to a performative role, as in a piece of theatre. An answer to this question comes from Nikolaos Ludovikos. Although he criticises Zizioulas for restricting the Church to the Eucharistic table and ignoring the Church’s inner consciousness of following Christ through history,423 Ludovikos remains convinced of the relevance of Eucharistic ecclesiology for today as well as the need for hierarchy inside the Church. The moral failures of the bishops, Ludovikos argues, can be overcome by adopting a consubstantial understanding of charisms. Like Zizioulas, he perceives the Church as an eschatological event, whose main purpose is the unification of the entire creation with Christ through the Spirit. The Church does not have a pre-existing structure but comes to life at each liturgy according to the image of our ultimate unity in Christ. For the realisation of this eschatological unity, each faithful receives a special charism at baptism. This charism is then strengthened by imitating one of the divine energies manifested by Christ in the Church.424 However, and in my reading, this is the original element of Ludovikos’ proposal, the charisms are not separate elements constituting a whole, but the Church exists fully in each of them. This does not mean a confusion of charisms, but their consubstantiality.425 Just as the persons of the Trinity are consubstantial with each other and yet different, so the charisms of the Church are consubstantial with each other in their ecclesiality. To use an example, charisms are comparable to the bricks used to build a physical church. Yet, by 422 Ibid., 226. 423 Nikolaos Loudovikos, Church in the Making: An Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality, trans. Norman Russell, Twenty-First Century Greek Theologians, volume 1 (Yonkers, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015), 99–100. 424 Ibid., 51. 425 Ibid., 49.

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laying the bricks row by row we are not bringing the Church into existence. The Church precedes the bricks and is found entirely in each and every one of them. Thus, when the hierarchy fails to fulfil its role, the Church is not affected. Any faithful who preserves and develops his or her charism keeps the unity of the Church and its truthfulness to Christ. The saints – whether clergy or laity, women or men – are in fact carrying the whole Church on their shoulders until the hierarchy is again capable of exercising its function truthfully. A holy hermit, then, or a charismatic layperson, by preserving the whole Christ consubstantially within himself and therefore also the truth of the other charisms, including even that of the bishop, could maintain the truth of the Church’s unity. He was able to do this, of course, not by standing in place of the bishop, but by creating the spiritual conditions, through praying or speaking, whereby the bishop could function once again in a charismatic manner, manifesting in turn the unity of the Church’s truth in a way uniquely appropriate to his office. The consubstantial communion of the charisms never implies their interchangeability (that would mean the death of consubstantiality); it implies their mutual revivification in the Holy Spirit.426 Ludovikos’ concern with the ecclesiological consequences of bishops’ ethical failures is shared by Asley Purpura. Purpura asks: how would it be possible for the faithful to feel part of the body of Christ when their bishop is either morally questionable or completely absent from the liturgical life – as in the case of parishes run by priests and where the bishop rarely sets foot?427 However, she is not interested to know whether the Church leaves the building when this happens, but what is the theological justification for hierarchy as an “essential part of Christian existence” and who or what legitimates its power.428 To address these questions, Purpura chooses not to reject the notion of hierarchy as a Byzantine construct that destroys the balance of power between clergy and laity, as Afanasiev did, but to examine the writings of three Byzantine theologians who believed hierarchy to be an intrinsic part of ecclesial life: Maximus the Confessor, Niketas Stethatos, Nicholas Cabasilas.429 What she 426 Ibid., 55. 427 Ashley M. Purpura, God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium, First edition, Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 3. 428 Ibid., 6. 429 The discussion of kenosis and authority in Purpura is echoed in John Chryssavgis and John Behr, ‘Contemporary Ecclesiology and Kenotic Leadership: The Orthodox Church

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aims to demonstrate is that “ecclesiastical hierarchy is determined and validated by the cooperative divinizing activity, real communion with divinity, and participative manifestation of the divine image among humanity.”430 For these three Byzantine theologians, Purpura explains, God is the only source of power. No human being possesses power nor can she bestow power upon another. In the Church, the acquisition of power is negotiated “through relational exchanges whereby humans either participate in or reject the power of God through divine likeness.”431 It should be noted that for Purpura participation in God’s power is not iconic, but existential. Purpura agrees with Zizioulas that the role of the bishop is to communicate God’s power to the faithful, but for her this role is not fulfilled when the bishop imitates the eschatological image of Christ surrounded by Apostles and martyrs around the Eucharistic table, but when he acts in a way that reflects God’s own manner of giving away his power, that is kenotic self-abandonment.432 Thus, in order to be legitimate, the hierarchy has to embrace the same kenotic attitude as Christ. The conclusion has two consequences: first, the legitimacy of the bishop does not reside in the apostolic succession, nor the ethnical or jurisdictional belonging,433 but in the personal imitation of Christ. As long as the bishop communicates Christ’s kenotic power to the faithful, then he truly has authority over them. Second, since hierarchy is legitimate spiritually and not iconically, women can also be ordained as priests and bishops. If the power of Christ is transmitted to those who participate in him through their behaviour and not based on their function in the Eucharistic assembly, it can be assumed that the women who participate in Christ through their self-sacrificial life also hold hierarchical authority over men. The question that must be asked of the past and present is: Does the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its visible order and structure and how it administers to its participants reflect the image of God? Or, is the visible ecclesiastical hierarchy a vestige of the past and concerned with identity maintenance and power in ways that are secondary and subversive to the hierarchical end of divinization? A similar challenge is made historically

430 431 432 433

and the Great Council’, in Primacy in the Church: The Office of Primate and the Authority of Councils, ed. John Chryssavgis, vol. 2 (Yonkers, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016), 899–916. Purpura, God, Hierarchy, and Power, 9–10. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 177.

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and at present to every individual in a position of hierarchical (especially ordained) authority.434 A more radical take on the relevance of the hierarchy for the Church comes from Cyril Hovorun (b. 1974). In his books, Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology (2017) and Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness (2015), Hovorun goes on a quest for establishing the authentic self of the Church. As he sees it, the ecclesial self is a system of coordinates that connects the Church back to Christ.435 Throughout history, these coordinates have been hidden behind various constructs that lead to the autonomisation of the Church from Christ. Whenever this happened (i.e., the Church established its own self independently from Christ), its doctrine and ethics were compromised. “They supported bad regimes, blessed and legitimized political words and deeds incompatible with Christianity.”436 There are two main elements that, for Hovorun, obscure the ecclesial self: the notion of autocephaly on ethnic grounds and that of hierarchy. Given the limited space, I will focus here only on the latter. Hovorun distinguishes between hierarchy and ministries. Ministries, including liturgical, pastoral, and administrative offices have always been part of ecclesial life.437 Throughout the centuries, ministries took various forms, but all of them were contextual and not sacred. Hierarchy, or the ranking of the ministries and jurisdictions in the Church, did not exist until the fifth century.438 Like Afanasiev, Hovorun argues that the early Church did not have hierarchies and that the hierarchisation of ministries only reflects the socio-political realities of the Roman Empire. After the fourth century, the clergy is elevated to the status of imperial administrators and this places them in a superior position creating a gap between them and the laity.439 From here to the identification of the Church with “the narrow confines of its hierarchical orders and jurisdictions”440 is just one step. When undertaken, the Church becomes a simulacrum, losing “its focus on the kingdom of God as its original destination and identity.”441 The best thing to

434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441

Ibid. Cyril Hovorun, Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness, 2015, 2–3. Ibid., 150. Cyril Hovorun, Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017), 145, 183. Ibid., 50–51. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 191. Ibid.

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do at this point is to deconstruct and reimagine the hierarchy in line with the original goal and meaning of the Church.442 Still, Hovorun is aware that even the original elements of the Church, such as the ministries, can be used abusively. He takes here the example of the ordination of the bishop. Nowadays most people would agree that the election of the bishop by the laity could keep in check their authoritarian tendencies. Yet, in the third and fourth centuries when this practice was relatively widespread, Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus complained that it lead to populism and encouraged corruption, with the candidates bribing the electors. When the role of the laity in the election of bishops diminished, there were other important voices, like that of John Chrysostom, who were unhappy about it.443 What can be a solution today can become a problem tomorrow. The solution then is to constantly call into question and “refocus on what belongs to its [Church’s] nature and to reframe its structures in accordance with their original meaning.”444 Although Hovorun’s deconstructive project might seem either too vague or a step too far for some readers, his endeavour is highly significant because it shows how much the understanding of hierarchy changed in Orthodox theology. If Afanasiev was somewhat of a pioneer in contesting the ontological distinction between clergy and laity as arbitrary, once the inadequacy of this distinction was accepted, theologians began to search for a justification for the existence of hierarchy in the Church. Zizioulas saw the hierarchy as the structure on which the Church is brought to life by the Spirit at the Eucharist; a structure that reflects the image of Christ surrounded by Apostles and martyrs. Ludovikos partially retained Zizioulas account. Hierarchy is the structure on which the Eucharistic event is built, but being a bishop, a priest or a deacon corresponds to a charism, in the same way being a monastic or a lay person is a charism. Due to the consubstantiality between charisms, whenever a bishop fails to act consonantly with his charism, the monastics or the lay persons who continue to act in accordance with their charism preserve the Church and its unity with Christ. For Purpura, hierarchy is justifiable mainly on ethical grounds. Inside the Church, one can have hierarchic authority over others only if he or she participates in the power of God. This power is not bestowed upon him by the laity and neither by the clergy but is attained through personal surrender to God and kenotic actions. Finally, Hovorun challenges the presence of hierarchy. For him, hierarchy is a Byzantine invention that can have 442 Ibid. 443 Ibid., 188–89. 444 Ibid., 191.

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some advantages, but because it does not belong to the nature of the Church, it should be deconstructed and reconstructed whenever it fails to reflect the relationship between Christ and the Church. 6.4 The Ordination of Women Closely linked with the discussion on the role and nature of hierarchy is the debate surrounding the ordination of women to the priesthood. The question arose in the 1970s during the ecumenical bilateral dialogues the Orthodox had with the Lutheran and Anglican Churches who wanted to ordain women to the priesthood.445 The initial reaction coming from important theologians, like Alexander Schmemann, Thomas Hopko, and Kallistos Ware was a resounding “No.”446 Even Elizabeth Behr-Sigel – who is now considered the champion of women ordination in the Orthodox Church – was a bit sceptical in her keynote speech at the first international conference of Orthodox women held in 1976 in Romania.447 Since then, not only have some theologians changed camps (i.e., Kallistos Ware), but the debate itself has been refined, coagulating around two distinct but related questions: Is it possible to ordain women to the deaconate, and is it possible to ordain women to the priesthood? These questions deal with two distinct realities: female members of the deaconate has precedents in the early Church and Byzantine history, while ordination to the priesthood does not?448 The supporters of female deacons need to clarify what the nature of the diaconate in the early Church was, if the tasks of the deaconesses were liturgical or otherwise, and if their ordination was the same as that of their male counterparts or just a blessing. The ordination of women to the priesthood has to overcome other obstacles. It has to explain in what way the ordination of women does not contradict the scriptural passages speaking of the subordination of women to men in the Church; why no woman has been ordained to the priesthood in two thousand years, and how 445 Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Kallistos Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, Risk Book Series, no. 92 (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2000), 11–12. 446 Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983). 447 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, ‘Elizabeth Behr-Sigel’s Trinitarian Case for the Ordination of Women’, in Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 254. 448 Discussions about the revival of the order of deaconesses also took place in the Russian Empire during the early twentieth century. See Nadezhda Beliakova, ‘Women in the Church: Conceptions of Orthodox Theologians in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, in Orthodox Christianity and Gender: Dynamics of Tradition, Culture and Lived Practice, eds. Helena Kupari and Elina Vuola (London: Routledge, 2021), 47–62.

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could women priests resemble Christ or the Father in their liturgical function. In this section, I will begin by presenting an overview of the debate on female deacons and then move towards that surrounding the ordination of women to the priesthood. 6.4.1 Female Diaconate Since the Orthodox theological discourse is oriented towards Tradition and historical precedence, the main argument for the ordination of women to the deaconate emphasises the existence of deaconesses in the Early Church and the Byzantine Empire up until the fourteenth century, when the Patriarch Athanasius I (1303–9) called for their abolition.449 In an article on the topic,450 Karras surveys the most significant sources mentioning deaconesses in Byzantium: among them we find John Chrysostom, the decision of the ecumenical councils, which set a minimum age for deaconesses, Justinian’s legislation, which speaks about the number of deaconesses for Hagia Sophia and Blachernae and promulgates laws for enforcing their chastity, and even toponyms, a neighbourhood in Constantinople is called “of the Deaconess.”451 Still, those who reject women ordination are not convinced by the evidence. The existence of women deacons does not prove that they were part of the clergy nor that they fulfilled any liturgical function. Valerie Karras and Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald give a positive answer to the first objection, but not to the second.452 Women deacons were part of the clergy because their ordination rite is almost identical to that of male deacons. The decisive proof for Karras is that women deacons received the Eucharist at the altar, with the rest of the higher clergy.453 Still, Karras accepts that the ritual differences between the ordination of women and men to the deaconate show that “the female deacon in the Byzantine Church did not perform the public liturgical functions of the male deacon in the Divine Liturgy.”454 Unlike male deacons, women were not given the ripidion to fan the Eucharistic gifts, did not wear the orarion the same way, and, after receiving the Eucharist at their ordination, they returned 449 Valerie A. Karras, ‘Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church’, Church History 73, no. 2 (2004): 276. 450 Karras, ‘Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church’. 451 Ibid., 274–75. 452 Karras, ‘Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church’; Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, ‘The Eucharistic and Eschatological Foundation of the Priesthood of the Deaconess’, in Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 325–63. 453 Karras, ‘Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church’, 308. 454 Ibid., 306.

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the chalice to the altar instead of communing the laypeople in the church as male deacons did.455 This conclusion reframes the question. Rather than asking if the Church should ordain deaconesses (they existed and they thrived without being perceived as endangering Christian tradition), one has to ask whether the ordination of deaconesses for non-liturgical tasks will be acceptable for the Orthodox Church? Given the weight of Tradition in intra-orthodox debates, the expected answer would be yes. Laurence Farley (b. 1954), however, sees things differently.456 For him, the revival of the order of deaconesses should be prohibited because it represents an emotional slippery slope against which no theological argument can stand. Even if the ordination of women to the deaconate would be non-Eucharistic and simply pastoral, it will become a springboard for the ordination of women to the priesthood because the emotional impact of seeing women in liturgical vestments will in the end convince the laity that women priests are something normal and not against the Tradition of the Church. Orthodox laity – themselves an order in some sense, with chrismation functioning as a kind of ordination  – know that readers are different from deacons and priests. But what matters emotionally is not such cerebral knowledge, nor even whether or not the reader wears a particular vestment while reading. What matters emotionally to the mass of the Orthodox faithful is the assigned place of a person during the Liturgy. The sight of a woman standing vested within the altar would utterly overwhelm whatever theology might have been absorbed about the differences between the ministries of reader, subdeacon, and deacon.457 In response to such worries, Carrie Fredrick Frost replies that the revival of the order of deaconess will not lead automatically to the ordination of women to the priesthood, but to a better and more informed debate on the topic grounded on “the church’s actual experience of women in ordained ministry”,458

455 Ibid., 305–8. 456 Lawrence R. Farley, Feminism and Tradition: Quiet Reflections on Ordination and Com­ munion (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012). 457 Ibid., 155. 458 Carrie Frederick Frost, ‘A Flourishing Diaconate Will Ground  – Not Predetermine  – Conversation about Women in the Priesthood’, in Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 378–80.

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as opposed to the present one which is driven too much by “abstract ideas and speculations (or fears).”459 6.4.2 The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood Since the role of deaconesses was non-Eucharistic and there is no precedent for women priests, the debate for and against the ordination of women to the priesthood requires another approach. One option is the appeal to Scripture, especially the first three chapters of Genesis, which speak about the creation of Adam and Eve and their banishment from the garden of Eden. The first chapter places the creation of the human being in the framework of the creation of the world; the second provides a more detailed account of how humans came into existence and why gender differentiation exists, and the third describes Adam and Eve’s disobedience to the divine commandment and their punishment. For some, Eve’s curse (i.e., that she is always to be attracted to her husband and ruled by him (3:16)) might be a robust enough reason to reject women’s ordination. Since women should obey men, they cannot hold any authority position where they can rule over them. Such a thing might happen in the secular world, where women now have more rights and responsibilities than ever, but not in the family or in the Church, where God’s path should be followed.460 Kallistos Ware questions the relevance of this reading of Genesis from the perspective of the history of salvation. If Adam and Eve were equal in heaven and Eve’s submission is a consequence of the Fall, then why would this consequence still be of relevance for the Church today? The main teaching of the Church is that through his sacrifice Christ washed away the sins of our forefathers and all of us receive this cleansing through baptism. In this case, the subordination of women to men “does not form part of the unfallen ‘order’ of creation, and so we have to ask how far this kind of subjection continues within the redeemed community of the Church.”461 Karras takes Ware’s point a step further when she rhetorically asks why certain Orthodox jealously guard some of the consequences of the fall and not others. “Why is male domination of women considered ‘God-ordained’ by persons who have no theological opposition to receiving treatment for cancer or using machinery to avoid manual labor?”462 459 460 461 462

Ibid. Farley, Feminism and Tradition, 109–13. Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, 74. Valerie A. Karras, ‘Orthodox Theologies of Women and Ordained Ministry’, in Thinking Through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars, ed. Aristotle Papaniko­ laou and Elizabeth H. Prodromou, The Zacchaeus Venture Series, v. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 143.

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Seeking to reply to these objections, Farley shifts the focus from the third to the second chapter of Genesis; the submission of woman to man is not a consequence of the Fall, but part of God’s initial plan. For Farley, this is proven by the creation of Eve as the companion and helper of Adam and by Eve being named by him. In ancient Jewish culture, the act of naming is one of authority and by naming all the animals that were brought to him, Adam asserted his dominion over them.463 The same is true in the case of Eve. Farley holds that the Fall only clarified the nature of this subordination; that is “a desire for protection brought on by her new weakness, and consequently his ‘rule’ over her is that of a dominion of protection in a now hostile world.”464 Other Scriptural texts used in this debate come from the New Testament (1 Corinthians 11: 3–11 and 14: 34–36, 1 Timothy 2: 8–15 and 1 Peter 3: 1–7) and mention in one way or another the submission of women to men in the Church. For those against women ordination, the most obvious passages interpreted in their support are 1 Corinthians 14: 34–36, where Paul tells women to remain silent in the Church and that if they have questions they should wait to arrive home to ask their husbands, and 1 Timothy 2: 8–15, where Paul forbids women to teach in the Church or to hold any authority over their husbands. In her reply to these objections, Behr-Sigel insists on the gulf between Paul’s equalitarian ecclesiology – where through baptism all distinctions of gender, class, and ethnicity are overcome in Christ – and the injunctions that place women in an inferior position to men. For her, interpretation of Paul should prioritize his larger overall ecclesiology and not seldom statements occurring only in very specific contexts.465 The second option for engaging in the debate is to focus on theological anthropology. Those opposing women ordination consider that although women are ontologically equal to men, they have a different role to play inside the family and the Church. To underline the equality entailed in this complementarity, Farley quotes the same passages from Basil the Great  – the same that were used by Behr-Siegel and Kallistos Ware. What he is arguing, however is rather different, the acknowledgement that the differences between sexes wired into 463 Farley, Feminism and Tradition, 31–32. 464 Ibid., 36. Paul Ladouceur argues that the hierarchical reading of Genesis two is a nonsequitur. The creation of Eve after Adam does not imply Adam’s superiority. Paul Ladouceur, ‘The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood: A Theological Issue or a Pastoral Matter?’, in Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 398. Scribd e-reader. 465 Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Le Ministère de la femme dans l’Église, Théologies (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 72.

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their bodies. Women give birth and as such make for good mothers, while men being physically stronger can better protect themselves and their children.466 These differences are acknowledged by the ecclesial communion where the priest is meant to assume the role of the father, protecting his spiritual family. It would be impossible for a woman to supplement a man in this role because she herself requires protection.467 Those in favour of women’s ordination do not minimise the importance of the biological distinctions between men and women, but they do not consider them an obstacle to ordination. If women and men are ontologically equal but biologically different, there is no reason to exclude them from the priesthood. They will exercise this role in a manner that is consistent with their biological particularities and personality traits, just as they exercise the roles of doctors or teachers.468 Thus, rather than focusing on gender one should be preoccupied with the vocation of the person and her spiritual life. As Ware explains: If there are no fixed differences between the sexes apart from the obvious physical ones, then it is inappropriate to speak of ‘women’s ministry’, as if it were a different sort of thing from ‘men’s ministry’. Different individuals, that is to say, will have different vocations, but these vocations cannot be specified in advance simply on the basis of gender. No woman, so it could be argued, should be excluded from the ordained priesthood simply because she is a woman; like a man, she should be judged by the Church on her personal suitability for this particular ministry.469 Ware’s position is supported by Kyriaki FitzGerald, who in her interpretation of the Byzantine rite for the ordination of deaconesses emphasises that priesthood is a call from God that has to be discerned by the community.470 This call is not dependent on the gender of the person, since, as the prayer of the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the deacon shows, there is no ontological fault in either the male or the female ordained.471 466 Farley does not agree with Paul Evdokimov – who believes these biological differences warrant for two different types of spiritualities (i.e. men are closer to the Son and women closer to the Holy Spirit) – but holds that there is only “one single spirituality – that of repentance and faith in Christ” Farley, Feminism and Tradition, 134. 467 Ibid., 98. 468 Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, 77. 469 Ibid. 470 Karidoyanes FitzGerald, ‘The Eucharistic and Eschatological Foundation of the Priesthood of the Deaconess’, 328. 471 Ibid., 333.

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The third and maybe the most important approach to the debate is the iconic one. Those against women ordination follow a simple syllogism, namely that in the liturgical context the priest acts as an icon of Jesus Christ and since Christ was a man then the priest should also be a man. Those in the opposite camp contest the reasoning from at least two perspectives: soteriological and ecclesiological. Soteriologically, to think of Christ simply as a male would mean to limit his salvific work to men alone, something incompatible with the teachings of the Fathers and the Tradition of the Church. According to Ware, although the maleness of Christ is significant theologically, the Fathers always insisted that Christ recapitulated in himself the entirety of humankind, male and female. Even the liturgical texts of the Feast of Circumcision, a very male-centred feast, are more concerned with Christ’s full humanity than with his maleness. Redemption is about Christ being human and not about Christ being a man. Thus, considering maleness an indispensable condition for representing Christ iconically would undermine the logic of salvation and leave the false impression that only men are saved.472 From an ecclesiological standpoint, those in favour of women ordination disagree with the iconic character of the priest. The priest is not there to represent Christ, but the community.473 Following Afanasiev, Behr Sigel argues that all Christians share in the priesthood of Christ through baptism.474 She even insists that according to the Philokalia all faithful can celebrate an inner liturgy in associating themselves with Christ’s eternal sacrifice.475 Public liturgy locates priesthood inside the community in the special charism of order that is bestowed by God upon the person and discerned together with the community.476 It is true that at a certain point during the liturgy the priest acts in persona Christi, but at others, he acts as well in persona ecclesiae. For Ware, the latter should take precedence over the former not just because it is consistent with the royal priesthood of all believers, but also because the moment when the priest acts in the name of the community is the most important of the entire liturgy; that of the consecration of the Eucharistic gifts.477 Moreover, the argument continues, if we admit that the priest stands for the community – even just for several minutes – then we will have to admit that symbolically he occupies the position of a woman. In Scripture and much of 472 Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, 87. 473 Behr-Sigel, Le Ministère de la femme dans l’Église, 142; Karidoyanes FitzGerald, ‘The Eucharistic and Eschatological Foundation of the Priesthood of the Deaconess’, 330. 474 Behr-Sigel, Le Ministère de a femme, 147. 475 Ibid., 147–48. 476 Ibid., 148. 477 Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, 85.

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the patristic sources, the Church is almost always feminine, this symbolic representation culminating with the identification of the Church with the Virgin Mary.478 So, if we are talking about iconic symbolism, then we either accept that it is more legitimate for the priest to be a woman or that this role contains both masculine and feminine features, in which case the iconic argument does not hold. Farley defends the iconic argument, not in reference to Christ, but to God the Father. Although he agrees with the royal priesthood of all believers and that the priest receives his ministry from Christ through the people,479 Farley holds that the priest is not primarily an icon of Christ, but of God’s paternal love and protection for his people. In a word, women cannot be priests, because priests are fathers. A priest is primarily a representative. To declare gender irrelevant would mean to make that representation iconic, without iconic significance, and miss the whole point. A man can represent God the Father to his family precisely because he is a father. The iconic significance is central to the role.480 Now, if this statement is to be taken as true, it is not very clear why Farley states that the maternal role of the community can be fulfilled by both genders. He admits that the Christian community over which the priest manifests his paternal role has been symbolically represented in Scripture and Tradition as maternal.481 Yet, for him, this maternal role can be assumed without any issues by both men and women.482 In fact, it seems that with the exception of priesthood – which in Farley is the ground of all Christian communities – all the other ministries are non-gender specific.483 The debate is far from ending, but what I find remarkable is how its most contentious point revolves around the notion of experience. It would be wrong for women to assume the role of the priest not simply because they will challenge some well-established norms, but because, by doing so they will impact the experience of the community. While the way in which this will happen is not clearly articulated, it is implicit in the iconic argument that the relationship of the community with God will be different if a woman takes on the mediator role. 478 Ladouceur, ‘The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood: A Theological Issue or a Pastoral Matter?’, 400–403. 479 Farley, Feminism and Tradition, 101–2. 480 Ibid., 98. 481 Ibid., 122. 482 Ibid., 123. 483 Ibid., 124.

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This conclusion brings us face to face with an important question that in my view has not been posed sharply enough: whether the male heterosexual experience is normative for the deification of the community and to what extent can women or persons with other sexual orientations participate in this experience. If we postulate that the experience of deification is genderneutral, then it becomes difficult to reject women ordination. Not only that, but women have access to the same experience as men, but they can mediate in the same way the experience of the Eucharistic community. If by contrast we argue for different experiences, then we might be confronted with a situation where these experiences will never meet, not even in Christ, especially if the deifying experience is defined as masculine. Current ecclesiological debates have been hard to fit fully into the framework of deification. While the Trinitarian ecclesiology and the Eucharistic ecclesiology in Zizioulas’ version can be credited to a certain extent with a certain concern for deification, this is not the case with Afanasiev’s version – he is more interested in ecumenical unity and the resurrection of the ancient life of the church than deification – nor with the debates surrounding women ordination and the role of hierarchy. This does not mean that the framework of deification fails in everything practical, but that it represents a work in progress. Its centrality to Orthodox theology has just been affirmed several decades ago and to make of it the centre of all Orthodox reflection takes time. 7

Conclusion

Any attempt at providing an overview of modern Orthodox theology is fraught with a number of difficulties from the very beginning: some languages cannot be mastered, some areas of reflection have to be put aside, and even vital parts of systematic theology need to be overlooked (e.g. Christology). Despite all this, however, such an overview seemed to me manageable and useful. It seemed manageable as long as I was focusing on only one concept and useful if the concept proved to be relevant for Orthodox identity. To me, deification was the right choice, especially since, to put it in postmodern terms, deification can work as the metanarrative that gives coherence to Orthodox theology. My survey then, aimed to test the suitability of this metanarrative in the case of contemporary hot topics, including homosexuality and the ordination of women. The results were mixed. In some areas, like Trinitarian theology and anthropology, deification seemed fundamental. The desire of some Orthodox theologians to show marriage to be the equivalent of ascetic monasticism – where the monastic is the very image

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of deification – or the rejection of homosexual relationships on the grounds of the sexual abstinence required for deification are just a case in point. Similarly, the three Trinitarian approaches discussed are all deeply concerned with the how of deification. It is not possible to speak of the Trinity without taking into account the impact it will have on the union of the faithful with God. The answered varied according to the emphasis of each author, but none departed from this concept. However, deification did not seem to fare well in ecclesiology. Of course, the systems proposed by Bulgakov, Lossky, and Yannaras all had an ecclesiological dimension, but when it came to the role of hierarchy within the church, of charisma, or the ordination of woman the concern for deification was hardly there. It is difficult to say why these debates seem to intersect only vaguely with deification, but one can speculate that this has to do with the fact that deification is a personal achievement rather than a communitarian one. Orthodox theologians know what personal deification should look like – the image of Seraphim of Sarov surrounded by uncreated light appears numerous times in modern theological treatises  – but, to my knowledge, they do not agree on what a deified community should look like. Finally, the third chapter, where I wanted to deal with Tradition in the broader frame of the knowledge of God, provided the most complex case. The knowledge of God is personal, experiential, and apophatic. It is accessible through the Church (Tradition, dogmas, Scripture, liturgy) but it goes beyond all these elements. The deified person (i.e. the saint) arrives to such an intimate knowledge of God that he or she can even complement Scripture. This view seems to be accepted by almost everyone in the Church. In the case of the toll houses, the appeal to deification as a source of knowledge comes from rather traditionalist circles, but when talking about ecology, the same argument is made from the opposite side. Thus, here deification appears to be used implicitly in order to legitimate certain hermeneutical options. Yet, for me, an unexpected conclusion emerged while writing this essay, the pervasiveness and the ambiguity of the notion of experience. From the nineteenth century onwards, Orthodoxy built its sense of identity not necessarily around the concept of deification, but around the idea of a qualitatively different experience of God than that of other Christian traditions, whether this is the experience of the individual saint or the local community. The major Trinitarian systems of the twentieth century were designed to show that this Orthodox experience of God could actually take place. While all of them contested the solution proposed by the other, none of them contested the possibility or the realism of the experience. Ecclesiology developed on the same premise: the Church is the place where the authentic experience of God is

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possible. The disagreement arose only over the locus of the ecclesial experience: the Eucharistic chalice or the everyday ascesis of Christian life. Even the debates surrounding hierarchy and women ordination can be subsumed into debates about the right mediation of divine experience to the community. Could a hierarchy that does not help the faithful experience Christ as kenotic love be legitimate? Could women mediate Christ’s presence in the same way as men? In anthropology, the way in which the experience of God affects the human being is still under debate. Do the saints become persons or do they remain individuals? Is the Eucharistic experience enough to elevate the faithful to a different ontological state than their non-Christian neighbours? Even matters like sexuality and marriage are discussed through the lens of experience. Could the experience of God in marriage be equal to that of monastic celibacy? Those who say yes have to explain not just the similarities, but also the way in which the experience of God is different in a homosexual marriage. In my opinion, irrespective of whether we would like to keep deification as a central concept of Orthodox theology or not, the notion of experience will have to be better defined in the near future. It will have to be explained what we mean by it, whether it is differs according to gender, role in the hierarchy, ethnic background, and whether it can be described using sociological tools. This is not simply a methodological desiderata that I have, but something that I think Orthodox theologians will have to deal with in order to be prepared to deal with the even harder questions raised by the advent of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and disability studies. For instance, it would not be long before someone will ask whether artificial intelligence can experience God or what would be the impact on one’s spiritual life if he or she manages to transfer his or her mind and consciousness into a machine. Or a more pressing question: are persons with profound intellectual disabilities experiencing God and deification the same way we do and what would this mean theologically? To me these are some of the questions Orthodoxy will have to deal in the near future. Whether it will do so or not is another issue that will depend on a number of factors including the awareness of such developments in the majority of Orthodox countries. Selected Bibliography Afanasiev, Nikolaĭ. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Edited by Michael Plekon. Translated by Vitaly Permiakov. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Afanasiev, Nikolaĭ. ‘Una Sancta’. In Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time: Readings from the Eastern Church, edited by Michael Plekon, 3–30. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

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Afentoulidou, Eirini. ‘On the Toll Houses Again: A Byzantinist’s Thoughts’. Public Orthodoxy, 20 May 2019. https://publicorthodoxy.org/2019/05/20/tollhouses-byzan tinists-thoughts/. Alfeyev, Hilarion. Orthodox Christianity. Vol I: The History and Canonical Structure of the Orthodox Church. Vol. II: Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church. Vol III: The Architecture, Icons, and Music of the Orthodox Church Trans. Basil Bush. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011. Alfeyev, Hilarion. Le Nom grand et glorieux, la vénération du nom de Dieu et la prière de Jésus dans la tradition orthodoxe. Trans. Claire Jounievy, Alexandre Siniakov and André Louf. Paris: Cerf, 2007. Alfeyev, Hilarion. ‘Orthodox Theology on the Threshold of the 21st Century: Will There Be a Renaissance of Russian Theological Scholarship?’ Ecumenical Review 52, no. 3 (2000): 309–25. Andreopoulos, Andreas and Harper Demetrios eds. Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 2020. Arentzen, Thomas, Ashley M. Purpura, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality. Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Arjakovsky Antoine. ‘The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov and Contemporary Western Theology’. St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, no. 1/2 (2005): 219–35. Arjakovsky Antoine. Essai sur le père Serge Boulgakov. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2006. Arjakovsky Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal. Trans. Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Arjakovsky Antoine. Qu’est-ce que l’orthodoxie? Collection Folio Essais 574. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. Arjakovsky Antoine. Towards an Ecumenical Metaphysics.: The Principles and Methods of Ecumenical Science, 2022. Athanasopoulos, Constantinos, and Christoph Schneider, eds. Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou, Spyridoula. ‘The Eschatological Body: Constructing Christian Orthodox Anthropology beyond Sexual Ideology’. The Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 69, no. 1/4 (2017): 323–32. Baker, Matthew. Faith Seeking Understanding. NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021. Baker Matthew and Speidell Todd. T.F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy: Theology in Reconciliation. Wipf and Stock, 2015. Bamford, Nicholas. Deified Person: A Study of Deification in Relation to Person and Christian Becoming. Plymouth, UK; Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2012.

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Modern Orthodox identity is deeply interwoven with the notion of deification or union with God. For some theologians, deification represents the lens through which most, if not all, theological questions should be engaged. In this volume, Petre Maican undertakes the task of critically examining the extent to which deification informs the main debates inside Orthodox theology, focusing on four essential loci: anthropology, the Trinity, epistemology, and ecclesiology. Maican argues that while deification remains central to anthropology and the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity, it seems less relevant in the areas of ecclesiology and complexifies the Orthodox approach to Scripture and Tradition. Petre Maican is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Eastern Christian Studies of Radboud University (The Netherlands). He holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from the University of Aberdeen and an M.Th. and B.Th. from the University of Bucharest in Romania. Since his graduation, he has worked as Teaching Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and Postdoctoral Researcher at UCLouvain, Belgium. He has published extensively in the areas of ecumenism, ecclesiology, and disability theology. Theology is edited by Stephan van Erp.

ISBN: 978-90-04-54709-4

ISSN 2468-3485 brill.com/rpths