Person, Communion, and Deification

Stăniloae’s theology of the person is one of his most influential contributions: the human being, made in the image of the Triune God who is a communion of love, exists fully only in loving communion with other persons and with God, and is fulfilled in deification (theosis). This file traces the movement from the Trinity through the person and intersubjectivity to theosis.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Trinitarian Ground

Stăniloae’s personalism is rooted in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. God is not a solitary monad but an eternal communion of three persons united in perfect love — a truth Stăniloae expresses in the title of one of his shorter works, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love (Stăniloae, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love, trans. Roland Clark, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, Paternoster, 1999, on Stăniloae’s Trinitarian personalism). Because love requires more than one person, the very being of God is inter-personal; the divine persons are constituted in their mutual self-giving. Stăniloae sometimes describes the Trinity as the ground of a “supreme intersubjectivity” — the perfect communion of persons that is the origin and pattern of all created personal existence (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s Trinitarian personalism and the notion of intersubjectivity; Stăniloae, The Experience of God, trans. Ioniță and Barringer, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, on the Trinity as communion of love).

Because the human person is made in the image of this God, personhood is iconic of the Trinity: to be a person in the image of God is to be made for communion, so that the human being realizes its nature not in isolation but in the giving and receiving of love (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, on the human person as image of the Trinity; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on the imago Dei as call to communion).

The Person as Being-in-Communion

From this follows Stăniloae’s central anthropological claim: the person is being-in-communion. Over against every individualism that would define the self by what separates it from others, Stăniloae holds that persons exist only in relation — that the “I” is constituted in encounter with the “Thou,” and comes to itself only in love (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the relational and dialogical structure of the person in Stăniloae; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, on Stăniloae’s relational personalism). To be a person is to be open, to give oneself, to receive the other; the fullest personal life is the fullest communion.

Here Stăniloae draws on the dialogical philosophy of intersubjectivity — the “I–Thou” tradition — while grounding and correcting it in the Trinitarian faith (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the engagement with dialogical philosophy; see Method and Sources). Human intersubjectivity, the web of relations in which persons become themselves, is for Stăniloae a created reflection of the divine communion, and it points toward its own fulfilment in communion with God (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, on human communion as image and path to divine communion). [Disputed: whether Stăniloae’s relational personalism is a faithful rendering of the Greek Fathers or owes an unacknowledged debt to modern (Buberian and existentialist) personalism is debated in the scholarship; the guide reports the reading of him as a patristic personalist (Louth) alongside the more critical reading (elements in Bartoş) without adjudicating (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999).]

Love and the World

The theology of the person joins Stăniloae’s theology of creation (see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology). Because the world is God’s gift, and a gift is a movement of love from one person toward another, the material creation is itself the medium of the dialogue of love between divine and human persons. Persons commune not in a vacuum but through the world, which they give and receive as the token and content of their love (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, The World: Creation and Deification, on the world as medium of personal communion; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on gift, love, and communion). Human labor, culture, and speech are, rightly understood, ways of gathering the world’s meanings and offering them in the exchange of love — the person’s eucharistic vocation.

Deification (Theosis)

The consummation of the person-in-communion is theosis — deification, the participation of the human person in the uncreated life of God by grace. This is the goal toward which Stăniloae’s whole theology is ordered, and the subject of the major critical study of his work (Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, devoted entirely to deification in Stăniloae; see Theosis). Deification does not dissolve the human person into God nor abolish the distinction between Creator and creature. Following the essence–energies distinction of St Gregory Palamas, Stăniloae holds that the human person is united to God’s uncreated energies — truly sharing the divine life and glory — while God’s essence remains forever transcendent and imparticipable (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, on deification through the divine energies; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, on the Palamite structure of Stăniloae’s doctrine of theosis; see Stăniloae and Palamism).

Crucially, deification for Stăniloae is not depersonalizing but the very opposite: the deified human being is more, not less, a person, because to be united to the God who is communion of love is to be perfected in personal communion — with God and, in God, with all others (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on deification as the fulfilment of personhood in Stăniloae; Stăniloae, The Experience of God, on theosis as the perfection of the person in love). Theosis is thus the meeting-point of all Stăniloae’s themes: the person made for communion, the world offered in love, the transcendent God truly participated through his energies. The end of the human story is a communion of deified persons, sharing the life of the Trinity, within a transfigured creation.

See Also

References

  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vols. 1–2. Trans. Ioniță and Barringer. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994, 2000. (The Trinity as communion of love; the person as image of the Trinity; the world as medium of personal communion; deification through the divine energies.)
  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love. Trans. Roland Clark. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012. (The Trinity as the eternal communion of love, the ground of personhood.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: Trinitarian personalism and intersubjectivity; the relational structure of the person; deification as the fulfilment of personhood; the debated relation to modern personalism.)
  • Bartoş, Emil. Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. (Trinitarian and relational personalism; the Palamite structure of deification; the central study of theosis in Stăniloae, both appreciative and critical.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (The imago Dei as call to communion; gift, love, and communion.)