Formation at Cernăuți and Abroad

Stăniloae took his doctorate in theology at Cernăuți in the late 1920s and then studied in Athens, Munich, Berlin, Paris, and Constantinople; there, moving beyond the German academic manner in which he had been trained, he discovered the Greek Fathers and the manuscripts of St Gregory Palamas — the encounter that would reorient his whole theology. This file follows that formation.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Doctorate at Cernăuți

After his schooling in Transylvania, Stăniloae completed his theological studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Cernăuți (Chernivtsi), in the province of Bukovina that had come to Romania in 1918 (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, introduction). Cernăuți was, in that period, the most Western and academically German of the Romanian theological faculties, its method shaped by the manuals and the historical-critical scholarship of the German-language universities to which Bukovina had long looked (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the character of the Cernăuți faculty).

His doctoral work was devoted not to a speculative dogmatic theme but to a subject at the intersection of Church history and Romanian identity: the seventeenth-century Patriarch Dositheos (Dositheus) of Jerusalem and his connections with the Romanian Lands, whose presses at Iași had served the wider Orthodox world (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction, on the subject of the doctoral thesis; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). [Disputed: the doctorate is dated 1928 in some accounts and 1929 in others; the sources agree it was awarded at Cernăuți in the late 1920s for the study of Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem and the Romanian Lands (see Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, and Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).] The choice of subject already shows the instinct that would mark his career: Orthodox theology understood as the shared inheritance of the whole Eastern Church, with Romania as a living participant in that inheritance rather than a provincial backwater.

Study Abroad

Around the doctorate, and in the years that followed, Stăniloae received scholarships that took him to study in a remarkable succession of centers: Athens, then Munich and Berlin in Germany, Paris, and Constantinople (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, listing the centers of his study abroad; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction). The itinerary maps the two poles of the Orthodox theological world of the 1920s: on one side the German academic tradition of Byzantine and patristic scholarship (Munich and Berlin), and on the other the living centers of Greek Orthodoxy (Athens and Constantinople), with Paris — already becoming the capital of the Russian émigré theological renaissance — between them.

In Athens he deepened his Greek and his acquaintance with the Byzantine and patristic sources at first hand. In Germany he encountered the rigorous methods of Byzantine studies — the editing of manuscripts, the historical reconstruction of doctrine — that the German universities had brought to a high pitch (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). It was in the German libraries and, above all, in his access to the manuscript remains of the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy that Stăniloae found the material that would occupy him for the next decade.

The Turn to Palamas

The decisive event of these years was Stăniloae’s discovery of St Gregory Palamas. Trained in the historical-critical and manual-based dogmatics of Cernăuți, he came, through his study abroad, to the conviction that the vital sources of Orthodox theology lay not in the Western-style manuals but in the Greek Fathers and in the hesychast tradition that Palamas had defended — and that this tradition had been largely neglected, even within Orthodox academic theology, which had absorbed too much of the scholastic and pietist idiom of the West (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s turn from the manual tradition to the Fathers and to Palamas; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the Palamite reorientation).

He set himself to study the manuscripts of Palamas directly, much of whose work was then still unpublished, and this labor issued in his pioneering monograph Viața și învățătura Sfântului Grigorie Palama (The Life and Teaching of St Gregory Palamas), which appeared at Sibiu in 1938 and included Romanian translations of some of Palamas’s texts (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, dating the Palamas study to 1938; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the monograph). The book was one of the earliest modern scholarly studies of Palamas anywhere, predating the influential Western rediscovery of Palamite theology by two decades — a point developed in the section on his Palamism (see Stăniloae and Palamism).

From Student to Professor

Stăniloae’s academic career began at the Theological Academy at Sibiu (the “Andreian” Academy founded by Metropolitan Șaguna), where he became a professor and, in time, its rector, teaching dogmatic theology and building the patristic foundations of his later work (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, introduction, on the Sibiu period; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6). He was ordained to the priesthood — he would be “Părintele” (Father) Dumitru for the rest of his life, a married priest and professor rather than a monastic (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on his ordination and priestly status). [Disputed: the year of his ordination to the priesthood is given with minor variation in the biographical literature (commonly the early 1930s); the sources agree that he was ordained during his Sibiu professorship (see Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000).]

The Sibiu years were the seedbed of the two great projects of his life. It was at Sibiu that he published the Palamas study of 1938, and it was at Sibiu, in 1946, that he brought out the first volume of the Romanian Filocalia — the beginning of the forty-five-year translation-and-commentary project that would carry the hesychast and Philokalic tradition into modern Romania (see The Filocalia Translation). In 1947 he moved to Bucharest, to the chair of dogmatic theology at the Orthodox Theological Institute of the University of Bucharest, where he would spend the rest of his teaching career — interrupted, in the 1950s and early 1960s, by imprisonment (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the move to Bucharest in 1947; see Imprisonment at Aiud).

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: the Cernăuți faculty and its German-academic character; the doctorate on Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem; study in Athens, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Constantinople; the turn from the manual tradition to the Fathers and to Palamas; the 1938 Palamas monograph; Sibiu; the move to Bucharest in 1947.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (Introduction: the doctoral subject; the Palamite reorientation; the Sibiu professorship and rectorship; ordination and priestly status.)
  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. Viața și învățătura Sfântului Grigorie Palama [The Life and Teaching of St Gregory Palamas]. Sibiu, 1938. (The pioneering monograph, with translated texts, that issued from his study of the Palamas manuscripts.)