Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology

241 Pages·2011·10.16 MB·English

by  Aidan Nichols

Light From the East
Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology
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Aidan Nichols, O.P.
Light From
the
East
Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology
Sheed & Ward
London
Copyright © 1995 by Aidan Nichols. First published 1995, this edition
1999. ISBN 0 7220 5081 3. All rights reserved. Typeset by Waveney
Typesetters, Norwich. Printed and bound in Great Britain for Sheed &
Ward Ltd, 14 Coopers Row, London EC3N 2BH by Biddies Ltd,
Guildford and King's Lynn.
Contents
Page
PREFACE Vi
I Introduction i
II Vladimir Lossky and Apophaticism 21
III John Meyendorff and neo-Palamism 41
IV Sergei Bulgakov and Sophiology 57
V John Romanides and neo-Photianism 74
VI Panagiotis Trembelas and Orthodox Christology 91
VII Nikolai Afanas'ev and Ecclesiology 114
VIII George Florovsky and the Idea of Tradition 129
IX Alexander Schmemann and Liturgical Theology 146
X Panagiotis Nellas and Anthropology 170
XI Christos Yannaras and Theological Ethics 181
XII Paul Evdokimov and Eschatology 194
CONCLUSION 205
NOTES 2O6
FURTHER READING 229
INDEX 231
Preface
I have been greatly helped in my own Christian life, and
reflection on that life, by the treasures to be found in the
dogmatic theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church during the
last hundred years.
It is in the hope of sharing those treasures more widely that I
have written this book. Its title translates Abbot William of St
Thierry's phrase orientate lumen as found in his Golden Epistle: its
wider bearings are charted in P. McNulty and B. Hamilton,
Orientale lumen et magistra latinitas: Greek Influences on Western
Monasndsm, 900-1100 (Chevetogne 1963). The cover image is
from a fresco of the Transfiguration of Christ (a favoured theme
of modern Orthodox iconography and writing) in the Refectory
of the Pontifical Russian College, Rome, to whom grateful
acknowledgment is here made.
Blackfriars, Cambridge
Feast of St Catherine of Siena, 1994.
I
Introduction
My hope is that this book will achieve two things. In the first
place, it will identify a variety of dogmatic issues, problems or
ideas, raised or discussed by Eastern Orthodox theologians but
of equal importance to Catholic theology as well. In other words,
we shall be encountering dogmatic themes and ideas which either
can be integrated into Catholic theology - to be, so to speak,
'repatriated' in the Catholic tradition, which is their proper home,
or which, conversely, may stimulate from the Catholic side a
critical response — a critical response that itself may help Catholic
dogmatics to discover its own mind on various issues. In this
sense, I am writing as a dogmatic theologian committed to the
Catholic Church.
But in the second place, the aim of this book is to discover,
through looking at the work of modern Orthodox dogmaticians,
the character of the Eastern Orthodox tradition itself. And in this
sense, as written by a Roman Catholic, this study is, rather, a
contribution to ecumenics, the understanding, by a member of
one confession, of the tradition of another.
In principle, an introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy might take
any one of a number of forms. For instance, it could be an
introduction to the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It
might be argued that the present state of a community can only
be explained by its past. To understand the Orthodox Church is
to understand how it has become what it is. The religious
awareness of the Orthodox is, certainly, very largely a matter of
memory. In reading the New Testament, in reciting the Creed,
they remember the story of their Church, the apostolic and
2 Light From the East
patristic Church, the Church which never ceased to speak of
Jesus Christ in the Greek language used by the Gospels them-
selves. In this way, Church history can be a privileged means of
access to the inner truth of a Christian confession. As for an
individual so for a Church, your history makes you what you are.
An example of an introduction of this kind would be the late
Alexander Schmemann's The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy1
- a book conceived precisely as an introduction to the Orthodox
Church for the general reader, as its preface tells us.
This approach has definite strengths, some of which I have
indicated; but it also has serious weaknesses. The Church
historian is not in a good position to comment on the specifically
theological dimension of a Church - the distinctive ideas or
principles which govern its way of looking at the Christian faith.
At best, the historian of doctrine may chronicle for us how and
when specially Eastern Orthodox emphases in Christian thought
came forward. But he is not well placed to evaluate their lasting
significance. This, as he recognises, is the proper task of the
theologian.
Let us turn then to a second possibility. This would be to
concentrate on the lived experience of the Orthodox Church
today as a believing community. The Orthodox Church as it
appears on the ground, in its parishes, monasteries, dioceses.
Here the aim would be to abstract both from history and from
theology, and to concentrate instead on the human reality of the
Church, in a quasi-sociological perspective. This is the approach
found in Mario Rinvolucri's study, Anatomy of a C/iurc/i.2 Rinvo-
lucri concentrates on the Church of Greece, but looks at it, in
effect, as the classic example of Orthodoxy as a whole. The
strength of this approach is the fact that it is highly concrete. It
gives us a very good impression of what it feels like to live
within the organisational and liturgical framework of the Ortho-
dox Church. But can a Christian tradition be described without
doing justice to the doctrinal vision that tradition has produced?
To understand Orthodoxy we need to understand its dogmatic
structure as that is reflected in the writings of its theologians.
Introduction 3
A third possibility might be an amalgam of the approaches I
have suggested so far. This would be a combination of the
historical approach, as in Schmemann, with the sociological
approach as in Rinvolucri, spiced with a dash of the theological
approach, which is the perspective from which I have been
criticising these two authors. An example of such an amalgam
approach would be Timothy Ware's best-seller The Orthodox
Church^ or John Meyendorff s book, with the same title, published
in translation at London the year before.4
With Ware, now Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, we have a bit of
everything and therefore, perhaps, the best of all possible worlds.
His book is divided into two sections - an historical first half, and
a second half consisting of a summary of present day Orthodox
teaching along with thumb-nail sketches of the various local
churches which make up the Orthodox family of communion.
Since this is clearly the fullest approach, surely it is also the most
satisfactory?
Probably it is. Nevertheless, I am not going to adopt it here.
For one thing, if I did so, I would be in danger of simply
reproducing Bishop Kallistos Ware's book. Certainly, I could not
write a better one. For another thing, I would have to repeat too
much of the material already offered in my earlier book, Rome
and the Eastern Churches.5 And thirdly, the approach I am propos-
ing has the merit of being somewhat original in the sense, at
least, that so far as I am aware, no alternative book (in English)
is available which adopts it in a systematic way.6
The approach found here, then, is to concentrate on contem-
porary Eastern Orthodox theology, arranged in terms of major
individual figures and the great themes with which they have
been especially associated, and seen as a reflection of the
distinctive mind of the Orthodox Church today. In this, I cannot
altogether rule out references to Church history since Orthodoxy
is a deeply traditional Church, for which continuity with tradition
is supremely important. Nor can I rule out what might broadly be
called sociological references, references to the way theological
ideas are put into practice or not, in the Orthodox Church today.