The Orthodox Church: Back to Progress

Context

The history of Romania is no stranger to change—quite the contrary; change runs deeply in its DNA. From their ontogenesis at the frontier of the Roman and Byzantine worlds, Romanians faced countless invasions, of different ‘barbarians’ all dreaming to reach and grab the riches of these empires. After the fall of Byzantium and up until modern times, Romanians found themselves at the crossroads between the Ottoman, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires, alternately ruling parts of Romania. ⁵

However, none of these political changes from the last millennium have touched the heart of Romanian identity as profoundly as the instauration of communism in the mid-20th century. Communism raised the meaning of change to a new level, by attempting to transform the very fabric of Romanian society, which was in its essence deeply religious, agrarian and patriarchal. ⁶ The communists crusaded precisely against all these features. ⁷ Society had to leap forward from an agricultural existence to an urban and industrialized one, where women and men worked in factories for the common good, and where religion—seen as a hindrance to progress—was crusaded against. ⁸ To enact this vision, private agricultural lands were confiscated and placed in state-controlled cooperatives; new cities and massive industrial plants were built, sometimes with the use of forced labour from dissidents and prominent religious figures. Every element of what might be called ‘traditional’ was crushed in order to make room for a new vision. ⁹

The speed and ferocity of this change were among the main reasons why Romanians had the feeling their history had been brutally interrupted; ¹⁰ and why, after the fall of communism, this nostalgia turned into revolutionary zeal. In the aftermath, Romanians sought to erase all the signs of their communist past. Confiscated lands were returned to their rightful owners, state owned companies were sold to local or foreign investors, and religion returned to the public square. ¹¹ Romanians were keen to reconnect with their history, to start again from the same place where the communists interfered. The main effect of this ressourcement has been an idealization of the pre-communist past, and implicitly of the Orthodox Church, which proudly highlighted its prominent role in Romania’s history, and presented itself as an opponent to the communist regime. ¹² The result was as expected: the Orthodox Church increased its visibility in the public sphere and so did its attendance. New monasteries and churches were built and spiritual life flourished. ¹³

The ascendant trend in Church attendance and popular religiosity continues even today, more than 20 years after the fall of communism. ¹⁴ Now there is a further boost with the emergence of postmodern, secular and pluralist society. Confronted with the societal blueprint of Western democracy, some Romanians avoid engaging directly with the values and benefits of democracy, ¹⁵ seeking refuge in an ideal image of the past. To sustain their option in evading the challenges of the present reality, some people turn towards the Romanian Orthodox Church, which they see as the counterweight to everything modernity promotes, from the development of new technologies, to human rights and ethnic or religious diversity. What seems worrying is that parts of the hierarchy and clergy are encouraging this overlap between Orthodoxy and an antiquated, anti-modern existence. ¹⁶ At a first glance, such an attitude might seem to fit Orthodoxy well—after all, Orthodoxy prides itself on being the only Church which preserved, unaltered, the true faith of the Apostles ¹⁷ —but to consider that the preservation of the Orthodox faith entails the preservation of a socio-historical context is a misunderstanding. ¹⁸

Such a confusion has to be challenged because it runs contrary to one of the central tenets of Orthodox identity: deification. At the basis of this notion lies the idea of progress, of a constant movement of human beings towards union with God. As I will explain further, this progress is not simply individual, but also cosmic. The entire creation advances towards unity with God. And this motion takes place in and through history. Thus, to wish to return to an ideal past means to work contrary to the Orthodox vision. Change might be challenging to deal with, but it is part of God’s plan for the redemption of humankind and has to be grasped.

The Progression of Creation into God

For those unfamiliar with the richness of deification, the positive understanding of the cosmos and its history underlying this concept might come as a surprise. The goal of this section is thus to explain why deification is defined as a progressive movement to God and presupposes a hopeful outlook on human history. In this sense, I will turn to the first millennium of the Church’s history, to its struggle to transform the Hellenistic culture of antiquity into a fertile soil for Christianity. I will focus here on a single point of the debate between Greek and Christian thought: time. While Greeks had a cyclical understanding of history, infused with the nostalgia for the lost paradise, Christians were looking forward to the end of time, when Christ will come again. The appropriation of the Greek model, for example, in the work of Origen, challenges not only the singularity of the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ, but also the possibility of deification, which is the nexus of Orthodox spirituality. ¹⁹ I will argue that the eschatological confidence in the future—presented by Maximus the Confessor—is the only solution for preserving the uniqueness of the incarnation and understanding of deification as a personal union with Christ.

One of the many challenges facing Christianity following Paul’s decision to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles had been that of making Jewish patterns of thought comprehensible for a Greek audience. Among the many points where the Greeks and the Jews diverged was their understanding of history. For Greeks, as for many antique cultures, time was cyclical, receiving its meaning from a constant attempt to return to an original golden age (illo tempore) when everything was perfect. ²⁰ This yearning for the primordial state was manifested in rituals aimed at repositioning the celebrant, back into the same relation with God as she had before the initial unity had been broken. ²¹ History had nothing to offer to the Greeks outside of various ritualistic recipes to help them return to the initial state of perfection.

The Jewish approach to history was at the opposite pole to that of the Greeks. For Jews, time was clearly delimited by a beginning and an end. In between these two moments, God revealed Godself in and through history to the Chosen People to guide them towards their eschatological destiny. Each historical event was not just the expression of ‘the wrath of God,’ but more importantly a word uttered by God and necessary for final salvation. ²² History, in its succession of calamities, from wars to famines to earthquakes, was not meaningless. Instead, it was raised to significance. ²³ Rather than returning to the perfection of the past, the Jews expected perfection to happen in the future, through history.

For Christians brought up in a Greek milieu it was important that the gap between these two distinct interpretations of history be closed. The most influential synthesis, attempted as early as the third century, belonged to the Alexandrian theologian Origen, ²⁴ and echoed closely the Greek frame of mind. Like most Greek thinkers, Origen understood the primordial state of the cosmos as perfect. ²⁵ In the beginning, God created a finite number of spiritual beings through the mediation of the Logos, or the Son of God. ²⁶ All these beings were equal and lived in harmonious contemplation of God through the Logos. ²⁷ At some point, little by little, these spirits became satiated with God and ‘cooled off.’ ²⁸ In proportion to how much they ‘neglected’ God, each spirit received a bodily cover. The spirits who lost focus for an instant received thin angelic covers, while those who spent more time looking away from God ended up as demons with thick garments. The ‘lukewarm’ spirits received human bodies. ²⁹

In order to help the spirits trapped in human bodies to return to their original state, the Logos of God decided to become human by uniting himself with the only spirit that remained steadfast in the contemplation of God, namely Jesus. ³⁰ However, since the incarnation represented a return to an original state, it could not carry an ontological significance—human nature was not improved through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. The incarnation was rather a pedagogical act of God. ³¹ Christ revealed to human beings their initial state as pure spirits, and through his passion and resurrection he showed them how to regain it: by spiritualizing their bodies. ³²

Origen’s cosmology raised significant theological issues. First, if the initial state was perfect and humans have still been able to fall from it, then there is no guarantee that this fall will not happen ad infinitum; ³³ furthermore, there is also no guarantee that when another fall takes place, Jesus’ spirit will remain pure. ³⁴ Second, since the incarnation of the Logos only shows the path to a state of impersonal perfection, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about redemption in terms of deification, or personal union with Christ. Third, by considering that history, the human body and the plurality of existence are consequences of sin, Origen encourages a negative attitude towards the world in its most essential aspects. ³⁵

Despite these pitfalls, it is hard to underestimate the attraction Origen’s system exercised on Christian circles. This attraction had its source not only in the imaginative way Greek patterns of thought—common to Platonism and Gnosticism—were used, but also in Origen’s skilful scriptural exegesis binding his arguments together. ³⁶ It was for this latter reason that the Church needed 400 years to develop a proper counter-narrative. The final form of this counter-narrative came from a Palestinian monk, Maximus the Confessor. Maximus chose not to challenge Origen overtly, but to reposition his exegesis within a more Christocentric frame. ³⁷ The cornerstone for this reconfiguration of Origen’s worldview was the critique of his nostalgia for a perfect past. ³⁸ Perfection, Maximus argued, is not something that happened, but something that will happen. The entire cosmos, including human beings, was not created perfect, but with the view to reach perfection through history. ³⁹ In this sense, Maximus explained that the whole creation contains some initial seeds of rationality called logoi, which like the seeds of a plant will grow and reach maturity through time. ⁴⁰ In the case of human beings, their inner logoi can attain fulfilment only in cooperation with human will. ⁴¹ The direction in which these internal rationalities of creation develop is none other than the unification with their source, the Logos of God. ⁴² The cosmic movement is driven not by nostalgia, but by the desire to attain deification and stability in Christ. ⁴³

For Maximus, the motion of the world towards God has been interrupted by the Fall in two ways: by weakening the human will to follow God’s plan; and by obscuring the developmental plan of God for each creature. Hence, the incarnation of the Logos becomes more than a performative pedagogical action (revealing the true purpose of the motion of history); it also becomes ontologically essential by repositioning the creation on its path to unity and by taking it to a new level. Resurrection is not a return to an anterior state, but a pre-taste of the ultimate fulfilment of creation, where all beings reach a new depth of their existence. ⁴⁴

To Orthodox ears, this hasty sketch of Maximus’s system will be easily recognizable. The reason for this familiarity is that the framework of the Orthodox spiritual life is grounded on Maximus’s vision. If we as Orthodox speak today about redemption as union with God in Christ, and if we understand it not as a solitary renunciation of one’s body, but as participation in Christ’s body through the attunement of our will with that of Christ, this is due to Maximus’s critique of the nostalgic foundations of Origenism. ⁴⁵

The main implication to be drawn from this debate is that Orthodoxy should not perceive history as deceitful. History and movement are not all about decay and falsification, but about the natural tendency of the world to reach for union with God, or deification. God manifests Godself through time in Jesus Christ, and through time moves the world closer to union with him. Hence, the enthusiasm of some parts of the Orthodox world towards a return to or preservation of a historical status quo—be it that of the Apostolic Church, the Church of the first century, or that of pre-communist Romania—is not theologically justified but betrays an Origenist tendency to dismiss history as irrelevant. It is the eschatological openness towards history depicted by Maximus that needs to permeate the Orthodox approach to contemporary events. Witnessing the patristic heritage of faith does not mean restoring the purity of the original faith, nor to engage in a quest for the historical Jesus. Rather, it means trying to understand the movement of history as revealing more and more about God’s providential plan for creation.

Criteria for Discernment

What I have done thus far has been to highlight how the nostalgia for a perfect past represents a theological dead end. The notion of deification, so central to Orthodox spirituality, has meaning only if we understand history as the advancement of creation in God and human experience in time as the chance for positive development in union with Christ.

Still, since Orthodox Christians believe that the deification of creation awaiting at the end of time will happen synergically, the question here is how do we know which current political or social events to endorse in order to help creation reach its final goal? A concrete answer comes from the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae.

Stăniloae’s voice is important for this discussion not only for his interest in the theology of Maximus the Confessor, nor simply for his influence on the Romanian theological landscape. What gives depth to his testimony is that his life spans one of the most tumultuous parts of Romanian history. He was born in Transylvania in 1903, when Transylvania was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and not part of Romania. He lived through the reunification of Transylvania with Romania (1918); the search for national identity and the shift of the country towards fascism (1930–46); the period of communism (1948–89)—when he was imprisoned for ‘mysticism’; the fall of communism and the transition to a liberal democracy (1990–93). Thus, for Stăniloae, history and change are more than cheap words.

To discern the relationship between historical events and God’s plan for the world, Stăniloae establishes three main coordinates of creation’s movement to God, which can be used as criteria to evaluate contemporary history. These coordinates are: mastery over creation, greater knowledge of God, and perfect social relations. ⁴⁶ Despite their Marxist undertones, I will seek to demonstrate that these criteria derive from a very robust sacramental understanding of deification. In this respect, I will begin by highlighting how the union with God in deification becomes a sacrament in Stăniloae. Then I will proceed to explain how each of the coordinates that define the progression of creation in God stems from this sacramental vision of deification. Finally, I will explain how these criteria are to be applied to one of the most dramatic changes Stăniloae experienced in his life: the institution of communism.

For Stăniloae, the notion of the deification of the cosmos proposed by Maximus is best conveyed through the concept of sacrament. ⁴⁷ In a broad sense a sacrament is, for Stăniloae, any union between God and human beings mediated by material creation. ⁴⁸ In a narrower sense, sacraments are those services of the Church where the human being is united with God in Christ through the elements of creation consecrated by a priest. ⁴⁹ The convergence between the ‘natural’ sacraments and those of the Church, Stăniloae thinks, will happen at the end of time when the entire creation will become a transparent medium for interpersonal relationships between human beings and God. ⁵⁰

Nevertheless, willing to capture the synergic spirit of Orthodoxy, Stăniloae emphasizes that humans are also responsible for the eschatological deification of creation. Christians in particular are called to enable the sacramental potentiality of the cosmos by transforming its materiality into a bond of communion between people. ⁵¹ For Stăniloae, the best example of how this fulfilment of creation into a sacrament functions is provided by the Eucharist. The bread and wine brought to the altar by the believers represent the effort humans are called to put into transforming the world into a communal space for sharing, ⁵² or to use Stăniloae’s favorite terminology, the vocation of the human being is to transform the world into a gift for God. ⁵³ This effort is then sanctified by God in the Eucharistic transfiguration to two effects: to reconfigure the elements of the cosmos (the bread and the wine) into unity with their Logos creator; and to transform them into the bond of union between the members of the congregation and God. ⁵⁴ By sharing the Eucharist, the members of the Church are not only individually united with Christ, but also strengthened in their love for one another. ⁵⁵ Thus, all of history is a transformational process in which creation has to become a sacramental gift of love for others in Christ, through the concerted action of God and human beings.

It is from this Eucharistic example that we can see how the three coordinates defining the advancement of the cosmos to God are extracted. The reconfiguration of the raw material of creation into bread and wine for communal sharing is translated by Stăniloae into mastery over creation. For some, this very notion might seem questionable, especially at a time when humanity is confronted with an unprecedented ecological crisis, much of which can be considered a consequence of the dominant position of humanity over nature. For Stăniloae, however, the misuse does not have to take away the proper use. The ecological crisis is not caused by human dominion over, or intervention in, nature. He maintains that the ecological crisis is a spiritual one generated by greed. ⁵⁶ After the Fall, humans have forgotten that the purpose of their superiority over creation is to transform it for the collective good and not for their personal gain. ⁵⁷ Hence, as long as new technologies facilitate interpersonal relations and help individuals become members of a universal community, they have to be encouraged since they are part of God’s plan to lead the world to fulfilment.

The second feature that marks the eschatological movement of creation is that of greater knowledge of God. In opposition to Origen’s satiety, Stăniloae sees deification as an endless process whereby God reveals the mysteries of divine love to human beings in ever new ways. ⁵⁸ There is no possibility that human beings will complete their knowledge of God and get bored. ⁵⁹ However, this knowledge of God presupposed by deification can never be purely spiritual—it will always be mediated. As finite beings, humans can know God only through the materiality of creation. Not even in the eschaton will God reveal Godself in a direct manner. What will happen then will be that the universe will become transparent to God for the human mind. ⁶⁰

The revelation of God through creation is possible because of the divine logoi deeply embedded in it. Stăniloae appeals here to Maximus’s notion of logoi of creation. Each creature has been endowed with a certain developmental plan, an internal rationality of its own. ⁶¹ The eschaton represents the moment when this developmental plan attains its fulfilment. ⁶² The entire cosmos is nothing less than the material shape of God’s thoughts. ⁶³

From this overlap between creation and God’s thought, Stăniloae can legitimize not just the development of natural sciences but also the theological dialogue with them. To discover more about the structure of the universe is to find out more about God’s purpose for creation. Thus, Stăniloae can see the modern sciences as simultaneously a valid source for theological growth and another proof that God works in history, even outside the limits of the Church, to help humanity reach its ultimate goal. ⁶⁴

Moreover, Stăniloae insists that the knowledge of God is not something to be achieved in solitude, but only in community. ⁶⁵ The progression into God coincides with a deepening of the love of the neighbour. The more advanced in the knowledge of God, the closer humans are to their brothers and sisters, in whom they recognize more clearly the face of Christ. ⁶⁶ This communitarian dimension of knowledge means that in the eschaton the personal union with God will be doubled by the integration of the individual into a universal fraternity. ⁶⁷ Finally, this is the ultimate purpose of the entire life of the Church—to create and sustain a community of people who share not only the same Eucharist, but also the same joys and sorrows. ⁶⁸ This understanding of the relationship between the members of the Church as being built on reciprocal and indiscriminate love is expressed in the third feature of human progress towards God: the perfection of social relationships. All humankind, to use another of Stăniloae’s metaphors, is called to advance into God like a human chain, taking one another by the hand. ⁶⁹ This movement is possible not through a miraculous intervention of God, but through human involvement. Only when the structures of love, peace, and justice—which underlie this vision of universal brotherhood—will be put in place through human effort, will God take humanity beyond its fragmentation and transform it into a catholic community of love. ⁷⁰

It comes as no surprise that this vision of the eschaton as communal love leads Stăniloae to find some similarities between communism and Christianity. In an article published in 1963 and entitled ‘Community through Love’ (‘Comunitate prin Iubire’), ⁷¹ Stăniloae explains not only that the Church and the society are two interwoven realities influencing each other but also that the Church and the communist model of society have a lot in common. Both believe that a perfect society is one that uses the world’s resources for the benefit of all, that the relationships between the members of society should be dictated by love, and that when a mistake is made it should be discussed openly and in an approach that is full of self-repentance. The members of the Church, Stăniloae claims, should endorse the communist regime since rarely in history had the eschatological vision of the Church had the potential to be implemented in the life of human society. ⁷²

It could be argued that this article was written under pressure from the communist establishment and represents a compromise Stăniloae made in order to get on with his life under the new regime. This argument gains even more traction if we consider that the year of publication coincides with the year of Stăniloae’s release from the communist prison. Yet, such a ‘defence’ of Stăniloae would represent a misreading of his theological opus. Stăniloae’s world-view—although it carries strong similarities with communist ideals—is consistent throughout his work. The statements Stăniloae makes in the article do not contradict any point in his system. For Stăniloae, God calls us constantly to deification, which is not an individual act, but a communal one, that can be achieved through human transformation of creation into a bond for interpersonal love. The realization of this eschatological union in love of fellow humankind is the responsibility of the Church whose members have to lay the foundation for this vision.

However, the reason for highlighting that Stăniloae’s vision shares some communalities with communist doctrine is not meant to prove that Stăniloae endorsed the regime. The purpose of this discussion is rather to show that Stăniloae engages with communism the same way Maximus has engaged with Origen: not by refuting it all, but by pointing out how even the most dramatic changes in history can be reconfigured into opportunities for the advancement of creation towards unity with God. By dealing with communism within the frame of Maximus’s theology of history, Stăniloae gives the Orthodox Church an example of how contemporary changes can be broached. The Church has to face history and engage critically with it. ⁷³ It has to endorse those elements that correspond to its eschatological vision, while at the same time providing a critique of the motivations, or of the means of implementing these structures. This is no excuse for the crimes the communists have committed, or for the repression and fear they instilled. None of these actions were Christian, nor were they initiated by the Romanian Orthodox Church. Yet, it is the call of the Church, even in the case of such tragedies, to be able to discern which elements can be transformed into stepping stones for helping the world advance into the eschaton and which do not. As co-worker with God for the fulfilment of the entire cosmos, the Orthodox Church is called to join God’s action and transfigure the chaos generated by evil into the building blocks for deification.

For this reason, I think that the Orthodox Church should discourage any attitude that would place it in opposition to society, or that would aim to lock the Church into a certain moment of its historical development. Such a statement does not entail that the past is to be ignored or that everything new has to be accepted as God’s will. The past is as essential for the Church as the future and the present. Yet, as Stăniloae explains, the heritage of the Church does not have to be viewed as a sealed vacuum. It has to be reinterpreted, actualized, and enriched, in the same way as the entire universe has to be reconfigured by human intervention in order to reach union with God. ⁷⁴

So what Stăniloae teaches us—in relation to the attitude of the Church vis-à-vis postmodern society—is that the Orthodox Church is summoned to engage in a positive and constructive manner with today’s pluralist society. This engagement does not have to be one of total acceptance, but it needs to use as its guidelines the three main coordinates of the movement of creation to deification. By following this specific eschatological vision, the Church might at times find itself in disagreement with wider society, but these divergences do not have to be overstated. The heritage of the Orthodox Church demands that it retains its eschatological optimism and is able to see which aspects of any historical change can be employed for the transformation of the entire creation into a sacrament of God’s love.

Conclusions

What I have argued in this article has been that the conservative attitude of parts of the Orthodox Church, in the face of historical change, is unsustainable in the context of the Orthodox tradition, as well as in dramatic contexts such as the era of Romanian communism. To cling to a particular historical context in the life of the Church and to seek solely for reasons to return to the past in order to refuse engagement with the present means to ignore the main doctrine of Orthodox spirituality: deification. The only option for the Orthodox Church in its relation to history is to understand it eschatologically, in the light of the ultimate union between God and creation through history. To help the world reach this ultimate state, the Church is called to act. It is asked to discern which elements of history can be used in order to fulfil its eschatological vision and support its growth.

It is true that this is not an easy task. Even the criteria for discerning the movement of history, enunciated by Stăniloae, can be misinterpreted and fitted into one agenda or another. However, the purpose of this article was not to support any political or social ideology, but rather a more modest one. We simply wanted to show that in the light of its heritage the Orthodox Church is called to do two things: to evaluate what a pluralist model of society constructively offers in relation to the Church’s eschatological goal and to explain to its members that Orthodoxy is not a refuge from the changes of history, but rather that its vocation summons it to be at the forefront of all these developments.