Theology Today

In this article, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I presents a “definition” of theology as gift from God and communion in the church. Surveying some of the leading representatives and writers in the Eastern Orthodox spiritual tradition, especially from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries (some of these direct predecessors in the ecumenical throne), but also drawing upon contemporary and liturgical sources, Patriarch Bartholomew introduces this issue by exploring fundamental characteristics and criteria of traditional theology in a modern world, emphasizing continuity and personal experience.

This essay examines the varied contributions to the wider church of Orthodox Christianity's three kinds of monastics: solitaries, those living in community, and those of the middle path (partly in community and partly solitary). Unlike western monastics, eastern monks never specialized in intellectual pursuits, instead supporting themselves by manual labor and dedicating themselves to prayer and spiritual struggle, a struggle whose benefits extend not only to each individual monk but to the whole body of the church. While monastics seek to live out their baptismal covenants in an ultimate commitment to God, monastic spirituality nonetheless represents the same Christian life to which all the baptized are called.

This article comprises a spiritual exploration into the life of prayer from a Christian Orthodox perspective. The author, a well-known writer on spirituality, describes the importance and power of prayer, as well as the living trinitarian God whom we address in prayer. Here, he underlines the personal and authentic elements of the praying person, while clarifying issues such the “presence” or “absence” of God in prayer. Emphasis is placed on the heart as the sacred treasury and point of encounter with the living God. Finally, the author also examines such matters as the length and rule in the practice of prayer.

Orthodox liturgical worship reached its present form by the fifteenth century, a remarkable synthesis of architecture, art, and ritual. Its gradual development from the fourth century was influenced by a number of factors: the adoption of Christianity by the Roman empire, doctrinal definition, eastern religious sensibility, and monasticism. Because of historical circumstances, Orthodoxy became a liturgical presentation of Christianity closely bound up with ethnic and national identity. Impressive though the final synthesis is as a tradition of worship involving the whole human person, in some respects further developments might be appropriate in light of the contemporary context of Christianity.

The experience of the orthodox icon both requires and produces a specific outlook on art, creativity, and religion. As in the teaching of the church, everything earthly—all creation—is viewed in perspective with the divine plane. Life thus becomes, on the one hand, a search for the invisible God and, on the other, an effort to “make ready the paths” for his incarnation within the visible. Any true creativity must function along these same guidelines and must exceed human self-expression. When human life itself becomes such creativity, the universe is made whole again within the synergy of three types of “image:” the forms of the material world, humankind as a living icon, and the uncreated Image of God.

In the period from the sixth to the eighth century, Byzantine spirituality came to assume its characteristic form. The one who called himself Dionysios the Areopagite, St Maximos the Confessor, and St John of Damascus all played a crucial role in articulating this spirituality, at the center of which is the divine beauty calling all of creation back to itself: A beauty, expressed in creation and the human fashioning of created, material reality, that is the radiance of God's love, which can be perceived only through our purified senses.