Method and Sources

Stăniloae’s theology is “neo-patristic”: a return to the mind of the Fathers not to repeat them but to think with them about the present. This file sets out his method and the four wells from which he draws — Scripture, the Fathers, the liturgy, and the lived experience of the praying Church — and the way he brings the Fathers into conversation with modern philosophy.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Neo-patristic Method

Stăniloae belongs to the movement that Georges Florovsky named the “neo-patristic synthesis”: the conviction, formulated among Orthodox theologians in the 1930s, that the renewal of Orthodox theology lay in a return to the Greek Fathers, over against the “Western captivity” of the post-medieval Orthodox manuals, which had borrowed their categories from Latin scholasticism and Protestant pietism (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 4 on Florovsky and the neo-patristic program, and ch. 6 on Stăniloae as its Romanian exponent; see Among the Neo-patristic Theologians). But “return to the Fathers” did not mean, for Stăniloae, mere repetition. It meant acquiring the mind (phronema) of the Fathers so as to do in the present what they did in their own time — to think the faith afresh, from its sources, in engagement with the questions of the age (Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on Stăniloae’s creative, non-repetitive patristic method).

This is what distinguishes Stăniloae’s use of the Fathers from a florilegium or a proof-text method. He does not simply assemble patristic citations; he re-thinks the classical doctrines from within, so that his dogmatics is a genuinely constructive work in a patristic key (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the constructive character of Stăniloae’s patristic theology; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, Paternoster, 1999, on Stăniloae’s creative appropriation of the Fathers).

The Fathers: Maximus, Palamas, and the Ascetics

Certain Fathers are load-bearing for Stăniloae. Foremost is St Maximus the Confessor, whose vision of the cosmos held together by the divine logoi (the inner principles of created things), converging on the incarnate Logos, underlies Stăniloae’s whole theology of creation as gift and of the human person as the mediator who gathers and offers the world to God (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Maximus as central to Stăniloae; see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology). Second is St Gregory Palamas, from whose distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the participable divine energies Stăniloae takes the framework for holding together the transcendence of God and the reality of deification (see Stăniloae and Palamism and St. Gregory Palamas). Third is the whole ascetic and hesychast tradition of the Philokalia — Diadochus of Photike, the Macarian writings, Mark the Ascetic, and the rest — which Stăniloae had translated and annotated, and which supplies the experiential substance of his dogmatics (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the Philokalic and Maximian sources; see The Added Commentary).

The Four Sources

Stăniloae’s theology can be described as drawing on four interwoven sources.

Scripture is the first: revelation, for Stăniloae, culminates in the person of Christ, and the whole of dogmatic theology is an unfolding of what is given in the scriptural revelation of the Trinity and the incarnation (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, trans. Ioniță and Barringer, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, vol. 1, on revelation and Scripture; see Holy Tradition).

The Fathers are the second: the tradition through which the Church has faithfully received and articulated the scriptural revelation, and the school in which Stăniloae learns to think (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6).

The liturgy is the third, and one of the most distinctive features of his method. Stăniloae reads dogma as it is prayed — treating the hymns and prayers of the Church’s worship as authoritative theological sources, since the faith the Church confesses is the faith it prays (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the liturgical grounding of Stăniloae’s theology; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on liturgy as a source; see The Divine Liturgy). Doctrine, worship, and spiritual life form for him a single fabric.

Experience is the fourth: not private religious feeling, but the ecclesial experience of God given in grace and described by the ascetic tradition — the lived knowledge of God that the dogmas guard and express, and from which the English title The Experience of God is drawn (Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, on experience as a theological source in Stăniloae; see The Experience of God).

Engagement with Modern Thought

What keeps Stăniloae’s neo-patristic method from being merely archaeological is his readiness to bring the Fathers into conversation with modern philosophy. He engaged the personalist and dialogical philosophy of his century — thinkers of the “I–Thou” such as Martin Buber, and the broader currents of existentialism and phenomenology — using their analyses of intersubjectivity and of personal existence to articulate the patristic theology of the person, while criticizing their limits from the standpoint of the Trinitarian faith (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s engagement with modern personalism and dialogical philosophy; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the philosophical dialogue in Stăniloae; see Person, Communion, and Deification). [Disputed: how far Stăniloae’s personalism is genuinely patristic and how far it imports modern (Buberian, existentialist) categories is a real question in the scholarship — some read him as translating the Fathers faithfully into a modern idiom, others as reading modern personalism back into them (see Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, and Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the guide reports both readings without adjudicating).]

This engagement is disciplined by the priority of the sources: modern philosophy furnishes questions and, at times, vocabulary, but the answers are drawn from Scripture, the Fathers, the liturgy, and the experience of the Church. The result is a theology that is at once deeply traditional and unmistakably of the twentieth century — the mark, for Stăniloae, of a genuine neo-patristic synthesis rather than a mere patristic revival (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6).

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 4 on Florovsky and the neo-patristic synthesis; ch. 6 on Stăniloae’s constructive patristic method, the centrality of Maximus, the liturgical grounding of his theology, and his engagement with modern personalism.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (Stăniloae’s creative, non-repetitive patristic method; the Philokalic and Maximian sources; liturgy and philosophy as elements of his theology.)
  • Bartoş, Emil. Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. (Creative appropriation of the Fathers; experience as a theological source; the debated question of the patristic vs. modern character of his personalism.)
  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 1, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God. Trans. Ioniță and Barringer. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994. (Revelation, Scripture, and the knowledge of God.)