Abstract
The Neo-Patristic movement’s program to liberate Orthodox theology from the influences of Western scholasticism is one of the many reasons that explain the consolidation of anti-Western feelings in some Orthodox circles today. Although the basic principles of the Neo-Patristic movement could represent, if misunderstood, a source of inspiration for the fundamentalist groups, this article argues that the position of the Neo-Patristic direction vis-à-vis the West cannot be reduced to its efforts to free theology from scholastic influences. To support this argument, the article turns to Dumitru Stăniloae, a leading Neo-Patristic figure, and shows that his theological program has been guided by two main axes: on the one hand, the quest for an authentic restauratio patristica in Orthodoxy, which frees theology from Western scholastic influences and restores the ethos of Eastern Christianity; one the other hand, a genuine interest to engage himself in a constructive dialogue with contemporary Western theology.
Introduction
The Eastern Orthodox Church has been one of the main protagonists of the 20th-century ecumenical movement 1 and has always proclaimed the need for conversation and dialogue among various Christian denominations. Unfortunately, over the last decades, the same Church has experienced – especially in the monastic milieu – a rapid growth in the number of those who adopt anti-Western and anti-ecumenical feelings. The vehement opposition of the so-called fundamentalist groups against the ecumenical openness of the document titled ‘Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World’ 2 issued by the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, which was gathered in Crete/Greece in June 2016 after more than 50 years of intense preparation, 3 is an example of this anti-ecumenical phenomenon, which seems to attract more adherents today. The impact of this phenomenon should neither be exaggerated nor considered as marginal. In the last years, it has stirred up a great deal of ecclesial problems and conflicts in all the European countries with a majoritary Orthodox population: Russia, Romania, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. This is all the more worrying given that even theologically educated people, clerics and lay people alike, have started embracing anti-ecumenical and anti-Western attitudes. In a recently published article, Paul Ladouceur defines as ‘ecumenoclasm’ the anti-ecumenical theology of the Orthodox fundamentalist groups which shows opposition to the Council of Crete. 4
It is not my intention to discuss in this article all the factors that have led to the development of anti-ecumenical and anti-Western feelings in the Orthodox Church over the last decades. Pantelis Kalaitzidis from Volos Academy and Vasilios Makrides from the University of Erfurt have already enumerated and presented them in detail in their articles. 5 In this article, I only refer to the agenda of the Neo-Patristic Movement and its attempt to ‘de-Westernize’ Orthodox theology as one of the many possible explanations which lies behind the rigorist rhetoric embraced by these fundamentalist groups. In doing so, I subscribe to Kalaitzidis’ statement that the Neo-Patristic movement’s theological discourse led to a stronger ‘polarization between East and West’ in some Orthodox circles, as well as to ‘the cultivation and consolidation of an anti-western and anti-ecumenical spirit’. 6 Yet I argue that even though the agenda of the Neo-Patristic movement could function as a source of inspiration for the conservative and anti-Western discourse of some Orthodox Christians, there are also neglected elements of receptive ecumenism in the program of this movement; once brought to the fore, these elements might counter this anti-ecumenical spirit which draws inspiration from the Neo-Patristic agenda. At the same time, such elements of receptive ecumenism show that the Neo-Patristic movement’s position toward the West must not be simply equated with its efforts to liberate Orthodoxy from the Roman Catholic scholasticism.
This article is divided in two main parts: the first section offers a brief presentation of the Neo-Patristic Movement in 20th-century Orthodoxy: its architects, agenda, theological directions, and characteristics; the second part concentrates on concrete examples of receptive ecumenism in the work of the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993), one of the main representatives of the Neo-Patristic direction in modern Orthodoxy. The choice of Dumitru Stăniloae is all the more interesting as he spent almost his entire academic career behind the Iron Curtain and has been less exposed to ecumenism than all the other representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement from the Russian Parisian diaspora. In addition to that, this choice is also motivated by the fact that today his theology is misused by the fundamentalist groups in order to promote their extremely conservative agenda.
The Neo-Patristic movement in 20th-century orthodoxy
The 20th-century Neo-Patristic movement and its legacy have extensively been researched by scholars and theologians over the past decades: Paul Gavrilyuk, Paul Ladouceur, Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Brandon Gallaher, Ivana Noble, and Andrew Louth are among the most important contemporary academics who devoted books and articles to the Orthodox movement which pleaded for a patristic-oriented approach in Eastern Christian theology. 7 Given the growing literature on the Neo-Patristic movement in Orthodoxy, this section limits itself rather to some general remarks on the subject.
In the immediate centuries following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire under the invading army of the Ottoman Turks (1453), Orthodox theology had been experiencing dramatic changes in its style and ethos. After having been for centuries an interrupted source of ‘intellectual power and spiritual strength’, 8 the Orthodox Church had now entered into a process of ossification or petrification. As a matter of fact, both the lack of a theological vitality and the decline of the educational system in the East forced Orthodox students to seek theological training in Western universities. In doing so, they have served – consciously or unconsciously – as vehicles of negative changes in Orthodoxy, in the sense that the language, the presuppositions, and the categories of Latin Scholasticism that prevailed at that time in the West were quickly adopted by the Orthodox East. As a result of that, Orthodox academic theology became overly intellectualistic and arid, while losing all its connections to Church’s spirituality and life. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) often used words such as ‘the pseudomorphosis’ of Orthodox thought or ‘the Babylonic captivity of Orthodox theology’ in order to describe this long process of Latinization of post-Byzantine theology and spirituality. According to Florovsky, the notion of ‘pseudomorphosis’ – a geological term borrowed from Oswald Spengler – describes that the style of Orthodox theology has been changed under the influence of Western Scholasticism, while its doctrine has remained the same. 9 Even though Russia has never shared the tragic destiny of all the other Orthodox territories, the ‘Latinization’ of its own system of theological education has been the immediate consequence of the Church reforms of Peter the Great (1672–1725).
It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that Eastern theologians became aware of Orthodoxy’s need for a decisive break with the arid, over-speculative, and rigid Latin scholasticism which was permeating their theology, ecclesiology, ethics, and spirituality. It was primarily the merit of the Russian theologian Georges Florovsky who offered a vision of how Orthodoxy could renew itself and recover its sense of independence from the Western scholastic patterns of thought. As such, at the First Congress of Orthodox Schools of Theology, which was held in Athens in 1936, Florovsky, who lived at that time in France and taught at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, argued that Orthodoxy would renew and liberate itself from the influences of Western scholasticism only if it returns to the Fathers of the Church. 10 For Florovsky, ‘reviving the patristic style is the very premise of theological renaissance’. 11 In his understanding, as Alexander Schmemann observed, ‘the tragedy of Orthodoxy is viewed precisely as a drifting away of the theological mind from the very spirit and methods of the Fathers’ in favor of scholasticism. For this reason, ‘no reconstruction or new synthesis are thought possible outside a creative recovery of that spirit’. As a matter of fact, ‘the style of Patristic theology is the only solution for contemporary theology […] Hence the emphasis on the permanent and eternal value of Hellenic categories for Orthodox theological thought’. 12 Florovsky’s call for a ‘return to the Fathers’ has been so widely shared by his colleagues that the search for a Neo-Patristic synthesis in theology reached the point of dominating the Orthodox scene in the second half of the 20th century ‘that to many it became virtually synonymous with modern Orthodox theology’. 13 Several aspects need to be considered when looking at the Orthodox Neo-Patristic approach to theology:
The Neo-Patristic movement must not be seen as a uniform and indistinct whole, but as consisting of different directions, all of them united by their common goal: a restauratio patristica in 20th-century Orthodox theology. One can identify three main directions 14 within the Neo-Patristic School of Theology: (a) a historical-patristic-ecclesiological direction shaped by Georges Florovsky 15 and John Meyendorff (1926–1992); 16 (b) a mystical-Palamite-philokalic direction represented by Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), 17 Dumitru Stăniloae, and John Romanides (1928–2001); 18 and (c) a Eucharistic-liturgical-eschatological direction developed by Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966), 19 Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983), 20 and John Zizioulas (b. 1931). 21 Even in their references to the Fathers of the Church, the Neo-Patristic theologians manifested different affinities: Lossky favored Dionysius the Areopagite, Stăniloae showed deep appreciation for Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, Zizioulas remained indebted to the Cappadocian Fathers, and Afanasiev was largely influenced by Ignatius of Antioch.
When one reads Florovsky’s writings, it becomes clear that the Neo-Patristic turn in Orthodoxy was never envisioned by him as (a) a theology of repetition (less exploratory and constructive), a theology of escapism (avoidance of present reality and its problems for an idealized past) and (b) as patristic fundamentalism (attachment to the letter of the patristic writings and neglect of their spirit). For the Russian theologian, a restauratio patristica in theology does not involve a servile repetition of the Fathers of the Church but an organic continuation of the patristic endeavor by a creative incorporation of their spiritual experience into our own lives: ‘“To follow” the Fathers does not mean just “to quote” them. “To follow” the Fathers means to acquire their “mind,” their phronema’. Or, as Florovsky pointed out, it is important to recover the ‘mind of the Fathers’, but ‘not as an archaic manner or pose, and not just as a venerable relic, but as an existential attitude, as a spiritual orientation’. 22 To what extent Florovsky’s desiderata have adequately been fulfilled by the other architects of the Neo-Patristic movement remains still a question of debate for scholars and theologians. It is true, however, that in some Orthodox circles, which have misunderstood Florovsky’s ideas, the Neo-Patristic agenda encouraged the development of both a patristic fundamentalism and a theology of repetition, which, as Paul Gavrilyuk emphasized, ‘still paralyzes Orthodox efforts in the area of biblical studies, political theology, moral theology, as well as science and religion, to name only a few examples’. 23 It is also true that today a whole new generation of Orthodox theologians, especially those living in the West, find inspiration in the Neo-Patristic theology and go in the opposite direction to that adopted by the fundamentalist groups. 24
If misunderstood, the basic principles of Neo-Patristic movement might generate anti-ecumenical and anti-Western feelings. Its constant emphasis on Orthodoxy’s need to liberate itself from the Latin scholasticism, as well as its insistence on Hellenism as the perennial philosophical category of Christian existence, might (and actually did) induce a tendency toward ecclesial triumphalism and isolationism, as well as toward suspicion with regard to the West and to everything that could affect the ‘purity’ of Orthodox theology and spirituality. Yet, this was not the aim of the Neo-Patristic program as envisaged by Florovsky and by most of the theologians who subscribed to his call for a patristic turn in 20th-century Orthodoxy. First of all, with rare exceptions, 25 none of the architects of the Neo-Patristic renewal in Orthodox theology were in fact anti-ecumenical and anti-Western: neither Georges Florovsky nor Vladimir Lossky, Dumitru Stăniloae, Nicholas Afanasiev, Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff or John Zizioulas. For example, Georges Florovsky played an important role in the emerging ecumenical movement. He functioned as a delegate to the initial meetings of the Faith and Order Commission and was one of the founders of the World Council of Churches (Amsterdam, 1948). 26 Lossky, Stăniloae, Schmemann and Meyendorff were also ecumenically committed theologians. Zizioulas was very active in the ecumenical dialogues, as a secretary of the Faith and Order Commission (WCC), as well as a co-chair of the commissions for the theological dialogue of the Orthodox Church with the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. 27 In a letter to his father from 1956, Vladimir Lossky affirmed that ‘I have always been a “Westerniser” […] I could never have lived or worked in Russia, whatever the régime; I am too deeply rooted in the West, in France in particular’. 28 Second, the interaction of the representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement with Western theology cannot be simply reduced to their efforts to liberate Orthodoxy from the influences of Latin scholasticism. There was also a keen interest on the side of Orthodox theologians not to remain hermetically closed to a genuine dialogue with their contemporary Western colleagues. It is important to note that both Florovsky and Lossky developed good relationships with the representatives of the French Catholic Ressourcement or Nouvelle Théologie: Yves Congar (1904–1995), Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), and Jean Daniélou (1905–1974). 29 As with their French Catholic colleagues, the representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement fought to dethrone the influence of Scholasticism upon theology; nevertheless, they did not reject Western theology as a whole, even though in their writings one can find a valid criticism (from an Orthodox point of view) of some of the Roman Catholic doctrine and practice, which is constructive and beneficial for an authentic dialogue. The fact that the Neo-Patristic turn in theology as envisioned by Florovsky did not seek to give rise to any anti-ecumenical and anti-Western sentiments becomes even more striking if one reads the final chapter of his monograph The Ways of Russian Theology, where he points out that ‘independence from the non-Orthodox West [i.e. Latin Scholasticism] need not become estrangement from it. A break with the West would provide no real liberation’. He goes on by saying that the task of Orthodox theology ‘is not to abandon’ the Western tradition ‘but to participate in it freely, responsibly, consciously, and openly. The Orthodox theologian must not, and dares not, depart from this universal circulation of theological searching’. 30
I will now turn to Dumitru Stăniloae’s theology and show, more specifically, that his position toward Western theology, as that of other representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement, cannot be simply resumed to the task of liberating Orthodoxy from the influences of Latin scholasticism. His interaction with the West is much more nuanced than that, for his theology shows openness toward its genuine theological and spiritual values. Paul Murray’s concept of ‘receptive ecumenism’, which invites Churches to let their theology be primarily guided by the question ‘What do we need to learn from other Christian traditions?’, dates back from as recent as 2006. 31 However, it is not an exaggeration to claim that in the writings of Stăniloae one can find elements of receptive ecumenism, for the practice of receiving from other Christian traditions has, in a form of another, always existed in the Church.
Dumitru Stăniloae: elements of receptive ecumenism in the agenda of the Neo-Patristic movement
Dumitru Stăniloae 32 is the most important Romanian theologian of the past century and a prominent voice of the Orthodox Neo-Patristic movement. As metropolitan Kallistos Ware once remarked, Staniloae ‘occupies a position in present-day Orthodoxy comparable to that of Karl Barth in Protestantism or Karl Rahner in Catholicism’. 33 Stăniloae is the author of an impressive theological corpus of 1150 titles: more than 20 books, 33 translations and hundreds of articles. 34 His most important publications are as follows: The Immortal Image of God (1987), 35 Spirituality and Communion in the Orthodox Liturgy (1986), 36 Orthodox Spirituality (1981), 37 Orthodox Dogmatic Theology in 3 volumes (1978–1979), 38 Jesus Christ and the Restoration of Humankind (1943), 39 and The Life and Teaching of St. Gregory Palamas (1938). 40 Unfortunately, with the exception of a very few articles and books which have been translated into English, French or German, Stăniloae’s writings have largely remained unknown outside Romania and the Orthodox Church.
Stăniloae is one of the few representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement whose theological corpus spans over a great variety of topics: (a) the complementarity between apophatic and cataphatic theology; (b) the dynamic relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and the Church; (c) the Holy Trinity: structure of supreme love; (d) the rationality of creation as grounded in the divine Logos; (e) person and communion; (f) the saving work of Christ as the basis of human deification; (g) the Church as imago Trinitatis; and (h) the inaugurated eschatology as a foretaste of the transfigured cosmos. As for his theology as a whole, I consider that two main axes guide Stăniloae’s approach: the first is the quest for an authentic restauratio patristica in Orthodoxy, which frees its theology from Western scholastic influences and restores the theological ethos of Eastern Christianity;
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and the second is a genuine engagement in a constructive dialogue with contemporary Western theology in order to absorb some of its most important achievements. As Donald Allchin pointed out, though he [Stăniloae] could be severely critical of aspects of Western theology, he was always ready to learn and to receive from the traditions of Western Christianity. He had no doubt of the centrality of Orthodoxy in the Christian world and he sought constantly to articulate the fullness and balance of the Orthodox vision of faith. But for him that vision was always an open and inclusive thing, never something closed and exclusive.
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Unfortunately, most of the scholars who have explored Staniloae’s theology have focused on the first guiding axis of his theological approach, and thereby neglecting his willingness to let himself and his works be enriched (receptive ecumenism) by the thought of other Christian denominations. In what follows, I will indicate two main areas in Staniloae’s theology where elements of receptive ecumenism are more likely to be found.
Ecclesiology
The doctrine of the Church 43 is one of the structuring themes of Stăniloae’s theology. In spite of this, the bibliographical list of the Romanian theologian includes no monograph or treatise dedicated to ecclesiology. It is in a series of articles and book chapters where one can find most of what Stăniloae had to say about the doctrine of the Church. 44 Generally speaking, Stăniloae’s ecclesiology can be divided in two main stages: (a) 1938–1964: he has attempted an explanation of what the Church means by constantly portraying it as the Body of Christ and the extension of the Incarnation; (b) 1964–1993: Stăniloae has shifted from a predominantly Christological approach to ecclesiology toward a more Trinitarian inspired vision, which elucidated even a synthesis between the Christological and the pneumatological dimensions of the Church. After 1964 Stăniloae’s ecclesiology has not minimized the centrality of Christ for the Church, as his article titled ‘La centralité du Christ dans la théologie, dans la spiritualité et dans la mission orthodoxe’ 45 demonstrates. In fact, the presentation of the Church as the Body of Christ was integrated by him into an elaborate Trinitarian ecclesiology.
But where exactly in Stăniloae’s ecclesiology can one detect elements of receptive ecumenism? Such elements are found particularly in his early reflections on the sacramental nature of the Church. The theme of the Church’s sacramental nature is a central motif in Stăniloae’s ecclesiology, flowing from his theology of the Church as Christ’s Mystical Body. As the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church is the realization and continuation of Christ’s saving work into the world and for the world. By virtue of this, the whole life of the Church has a sacramental character totally dependent upon Christ. Whoever investigates the theme of the Church as sacrament in Stăniloae’s writings ought to pay attention to several articles written by the Romanian theologian in the 1950s and 1970s, 46 as well as to the third volume of his Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, published in 1979. 47 Even though the foundation of Stăniloae’s reflections on the Church as sacrament is found primarily in the theology of the Greek Fathers, his views on the topic under discussion benefited significantly from the encounter with the sacramental ecclesiology of the Roman Catholic protagonists of the movement for liturgical renewal: 48 Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) and Odo Casel (1886–1948). Crucially, almost half of the total number of footnotes of the article titled ‘The Nature of the Sacraments’ (1956) contains references to these two Roman Catholic theologians and to their reflections on Christ as a sacrament par excellence, as well as on the Church’s sacramentality and its relation to the particular sacraments. More concretely, Stăniloae refers to Odo Casel when he speaks of the Church’s sacraments as the continuation of Christ’s acts in the world after Pentecost, 49 or when he develops the idea that the First Ecumenical Council’s doctrinal definition of Jesus Christ as both human and divine allows for created reality to become a symbol or sacrament, which not only represents the uncreated or the divine but contains it. 50 In a similar way, Stăniloae concurs with Matthias Scheeben when he portrays Christ’s human nature as the gate or medium through which God’s divine life is poured out into the world, 51 or when he defines Christ as the basic or primordial sacrament (das Urmysterium/Ursakrament) 52 and the Church as the derived sacrament, whose vocation is to extend the original sacrament throughout time and space. 53
These are a few meaningful examples of Stăniloae’s willingness to remain in dialogue with Western theology and let his work be enriched by the reflections of his Roman Catholic colleagues. But the doctrine of the Church is not the only domain where Stăniloae shows openness to Western theology. Although infrequent, references to other Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jürgen Moltmann, just to name a few of them, are also to be found in other books and articles of Stăniloae on different topics that the sacramentality of the Church. As a brief illustration, the Christological section of Staniloae’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (vol. II) contains a sub-chapter titled ‘Transcendental Christology’, where the Romanian theologian adopts and reflects upon Karl Rahner’s idea that the need for Christ is inscribed in the spiritual constitution of the human being. 54 Even though the hermetically sealed world of the communist Romanian gave Stăniloae limited access to Western theology and its latest developments, the fact that his writings are punctuated by allusions to Roman Catholic and Protestant colleagues indicates a form of receptive ecumenism which acknowledges the need of Orthodoxy to resist any temptation of ghettoization and isolation from the larger circuit of theological ideas.
Trinitarian theology
The doctrine of the Trinity has not played an important role in Stăniloae’s corpus right from the beginning of his theological career in the 1930s. Especially noteworthy is the absence of any solid engagement with the doctrine of the Trinity in his publications which had come out before 1964. There are several factors that could explain the Trinitarian turn in Stăniloae’s theology: first, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in Stăniloae’s theology is one of the positive results of his involvement in the discussions on the filioque that were taking place at that moment among Christian theologians, and second, Stăniloae’s interest in the Trinity as the framework for the Christian understanding of all ecclesial life and spirituality is to a certain extent connected with the renewed emphasis on the doctrine of the Triune God in the documents of the World Council of Churches, as well as in the works of individual theologians of different Christian traditions, including Orthodoxy.
Several publications of Stăniloae explore the Orthodox understanding of the central mystery of Christianity and its implications for theology, ecclesiology, and spirituality: ‘The Holy Trinity, Structure of Supreme Love’ (1970), 55 ‘Recent Catholic Studies on the Filioque’ (1973), 56 ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Its Relation to the Son, as the Basis of Our Deification and Adoption’ (1981), 57 and ‘The Holy Trinity: The Creator, the Savior, and the Eternal Goal of All Christians’ (1986). 58 In addition to these articles, Stăniloae’s bibliographical list on the Trinity also includes several book chapters 59 and a short monograph entitled The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love (1993). 60 There are two major aspects in Stăniloae’s Trinitarian theology which disclose elements of receptive ecumenism:
Stăniloae’s willingness to incorporate into his theology a Western Trinitarian motif: The Holy Spirit as the eternal loving bond between the Father and the Son.
Since the time of Augustine, Western theology has perfected a Trinitarian model which incorporates several psychological analogies to understand with great precision the logic of the intra-Trinitarian relationships. But the most famous and distinctive of these analogies is the triad of ‘amans’, ‘amatus,’ and ‘amor’, which depicts the Spirit as the common ‘love’ or ‘gift’ of the Father and the Son. 61 Augustine’s understanding of the Holy Spirit as the loving tie between the Father and the Son has had a profound influence upon the trajectory of Western theology, especially in the context of the filioque debates: the Spirit is the common love between the Father and the Son for it proceeds from both of them. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1172) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) are, undoubtedly, the most well-known Western Medieval theologians who explored the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of Augustine’s triad of ‘amans’, ‘amatus’, and ‘amor’.
As for Eastern Christianity, its opposition to the filioque and its preference for a more apophatic approach to the doctrine of the inner Trinity have impeded theologians to speak of the Holy Spirit as the loving bond between the Father and the Son. In the Byzantine world, Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) was the first Orthodox theologian whose non-filioquist approach to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity ‘found a place for Augustine’s “love” analogy’, as Edward Sieciensky rightly noticed. 62 The Orthodoxy of Palamas’ doctrine of the Trinity has never been questioned by any of the subsequent Byzantine theologians; yet, his legacy has unfortunately passed into oblivion. After a long period of neglect, the Palamite theology has started to receive significant attention in the Orthodox Church only in the last century. And it was primarily the merit of the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae for the Palamite renaissance in 20th-century Orthodox theology. Drawing heavily upon the Trinitarian reflections of the 14th-century theologian, Stăniloae himself has incorporated the Augustinian pneumatological motif into his writings. In so doing, Stăniloae – as Gregory Palamas – has consciously absorbed Augustine’s ‘love’ analogy into his Orthodox pattern, without subscribing though to the doctrine of the filioque:
The Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father alone and rests in the Son. The Son is therefore the eternal resting place of the Son. In proceeding from the Father in order to rest in the Son, the Spirit communicates the Father’s love to the Son; 63
The Holy Spirit equally shines out from/is manifested through the Son toward the Father, as the Son’s loving answer to the paternal love; the act of procession is different from the act of manifestation. 64
The Spirit – the third Person of the Trinity – not only ‘keeps the other two Persons from immersing themselves in each other’, but is the ‘loving tie formed between the Father and the Son’. 65
Without entering into detail, it is important to mention that Stăniloae’s willingness to reflect on the doctrine of the Trinity in light of Augustine’s ‘love’ analogy was beneficial in many ways. Just to give a single example, in the context of the debates on the filioque, Stăniloae’s thinking entered much easier into dialogue with Western theology, for it moved 20th-century Orthodox theology from silence concerning the subject of the eternal link between the Son and the Holy Spirit toward the articulation of a solid immanent relationship between them. In this sense, Stăniloae’s Trinitarian theology has been instrumental in bringing the East and the West much closer on the path toward a final solution to this pneumatological controversy. It is no surprise to see that Stăniloae’s article presented at Klingenthal colloquium on the filioque (1979), ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and His Relation to the Son, as the Basis of Our Deification and Adoption’, stood as one of the most insightful sources of inspiration for the final version of the common Memorandum, as Michael A. Fahey observes. 66 In a similar way, Stăniloae’s Trinitarian theology transpired equally in the Munich document (1982) of the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church. 67
Stăniloae’s willingness to read back from the economic Trinity (God ad extra) into the immanent Trinity (God ad intra).
In terms of Trinitarian theology, some differences between Est and West, as Duncan Reid rightly pointed out, are but the visible symptoms of two different theological approaches of the relationship between the ‘immanent Trinity’ and the ‘economic Trinity’. 68 There is agreement among Christian theologians and scholars that the doctrine of the Spirit’s eternal origination from both the Father and the Son is inextricably bound with Western preference for a perfect correspondence between the ‘inner’ and the ‘economic’ Trinity, i.e., between the Trinitarian processions ad intra and the missions ad extra: the sending of the Spirit into the world by Father and the Son is an indicative of the Spirit’s eternal procession from both of them. 69
The Orthodox teaching on the Trinity, however, takes great care to emphasize that God in Godself is always greater than what is revealed to us in the economy of salvation. In other words, even though the ‘economic Trinity’ is the ‘immanent Trinity’, the ‘immanent Trinity’ is not exhausted in the ‘economic Trinity’. There is always more to God than has been communicated to us in the events of the salvation history. Based on the fact that God reveals Godself to us freely, Orthodox theologians claim that there is always a certain distinction, yet not separation, between what has been revealed of the Trinity and the inner Trinity. Consequently, the lack of a perfect symmetry between God a se and God pro nobis makes Orthodox theologians reluctant to take the missions as indicatives of the inner acts of origination in God. Stăniloae is, however, but an exception, for he was willing to introduce ‘economic motifs’ into the inner Trinity, that is, to read back from the ‘economic Trinity’ into the ‘immanent Trinity’: In this revelation of itself the Trinity also draws our attention to certain premises about the intrinsic relations between the divine Persons. The theological teaching on the inner reality of the Holy Trinity is based on these indications and on the bond which joins the eternal relations between the divine Persons together with their saving activity.
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However, by describing the connection between the functions of the Son and the Spirit in the economy of salvation and their roles in the life of the Trinity, Stăniloae holds on to a distinction at the level of the inner Trinity between relations of origin and relations of communion, manifestation or perichoresis. For Stăniloae, the sending of the Spirit into the world by the Son, along with Christ’s empowerment by the Spirit, mirror the eternal relationship of communion between the Son and the Spirit, and not their relations of origin. As a matter of fact, the Spirit’s sending into the world by the Son and Christ’s sending into the world by the Spirit to carry out his messianic task are not a reproduction of the acts of hypostatic origination in the Trinity but a reflection of their Trinitarian communion. The same Spirit who abides eternally in the Son descends upon Christ and empowers Him to accomplish His mission. The same Spirit who eternally shines forth from the Son is sent into the world by God’s Incarnate Son to complete His salvific role.
On the one hand, in linking the economic roles of the Son and the Spirit with the divine Persons’ eternal relationships of communion, Stăniloae preserves the transcendence of the acts of origin in the Trinity. On the other hand, in speaking of the economic relationships between the divine Persons as an indicative of their immanent relationships of communion or perichoresis, Stăniloae avoids the criticism raised by Western theologians such as Dorothea Wendebourg and Catherine M. LaCugna against the basic principles of Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity: that Orthodox Trinitarian theology (1) tends to isolate the divine Persons of the Trinity from the mystery of salvation and (2) introduces a split between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity, as long as the economic missions have no ontological ground in the immanent Trinity. 71
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, several aspects need to be emphasized:
First of all, this article was intended to show that even though the Neo-Patristic movement that has taken place in Eastern Christianity in the 20th century advocated the need of Orthodoxy to escape the captivity of Western scholasticism, its project cannot be simply reduced to the efforts of Orthodox theologians to free theology from the negative influences of Roman Catholicism. The interaction of the Neo-Patristic movement with the West is much more complex than it might appear at a first sight, for Orthodox theologians showed themselves both willing to enter into dialogue with their Western colleagues and to be enriched by their theological acquisitions. Such an interaction of Orthodox theology with the West shows that there are elements of receptive ecumenism in the program of the Neo-Patristic school which challenge any attempt to develop an anti-ecumenical and anti-Western discourse on the basis of the main principles of the movement’s agenda.
Second, the fact that most of what we called today as the 20th-century Orthodox theology has not been developed in a vacuum but has emerged as the result of mutual interaction between the representatives of the Neo-Patristic movement and Western theology, should save Orthodoxy of any form of isolationism and triumphalism. Generally speaking, in Orthodox circles today, one can very often find that theologians are rather inclined to emphasize how Eastern theologians have positively influenced the 20th-century agenda of Roman Catholicism (I have in mind the revitalization of the Eucharistic and Trinitarian foundation of the Church in Western theology) than to also analyze the opposite movement: the impact of 20th-century Western theology upon Orthodoxy. It is therefore time to seriously ask ourselves not only ‘What have we taught to our Christian brothers in the past century?’ but also ‘What have we learnt from them?’ There should be but little doubt that Orthodox theologians have benefited from Western theological scholarship in numerous ways. Some elements in Stăniloae’s theology are but an exemplification of such a claim.
Third, the mutually enriching interactions between the architects of the Neo-Patristic movement and Western theologians in the past century show that Orthodoxy today cannot self-define itself by simply opposing others but can only do so through establishing a connection with them. Before anything, this task should have priority in Orthodoxy today, especially since in the last decades, as I have showed in the introduction, there is a growth in the number of those who adopt and promote anti-Western and anti-ecumenical feelings. In addition to that, the new realities of the contemporary world require an active cooperation between Orthodox and Western Christians. As John A. Jillions emphasized, contemporary Western theologians are often the first to tackle issues that sooner or later also affect Orthodox believers in ‘traditional’ societies. In fact, they lead the way in reflecting theologically on how to live in secular, democratic, and pluralistic societies and by wrestling seriously with the tensions between tradition and the needs of the present. 72 As a matter of fact, it is imperative to abandon the polemical tone against the West which tends to dominate in some Orthodox circles and opt for creative debates, discussions, and collaborations, for Orthodoxy could learn a lot from other Christian traditions. As the Orthodox historian and theologian John Meyendorff once said, ‘if we refuse to learn, to listen, to be concerned with the life and beliefs of other Christians, we will not only miss much ourselves, but we will also be unfaithful to Christ’s commandment of love’. 73