The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology

For Stăniloae the created world is God’s gift to humanity and the medium of a dialogue of love between God and the human person; creation is “rational,” bearing the divine logoi that the human being is called to read and offer back. Alongside this cataphatic vision he sets a rich apophatic theology, distinguishing the apophaticism of intellectual negation from the deeper apophaticism of direct experience. This file treats both.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

Creation as Gift

At the center of Stăniloae’s theology of creation is the category of gift. The world, for him, is not a neutral stage nor a mere object of use; it is given by God, and its very being as gift discloses the love of the Giver and calls for a response (Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, whose title names this theme; Stăniloae, The Experience of God, trans. Ioniță and Barringer, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, vol. 2, The World: Creation and Deification, on creation as gift). Because a gift is given by one person to another and looks for a response of gratitude and love, the structure of creation-as-gift is inherently dialogical: the world is the “word” God speaks to humanity, and human history is the ongoing dialogue of love between God and the human person carried on through the medium of the world (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, on the world as the medium of a dialogue between God and humanity; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the dialogical structure of creation).

This transforms the meaning of the material world. Matter is not opposed to spirit nor a lower reality to be escaped; it is the gift through which persons — divine and human — commune. The human person is called to receive the world as gift, to understand it, to work it, and to offer it back to God in thanksgiving — a movement that Stăniloae, following the Fathers and the Liturgy, understands as fundamentally eucharistic (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, on the human offering of the world; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on the eucharistic and dialogical cosmology of Stăniloae).

The Rationality of Creation

Closely joined to this is Stăniloae’s teaching, drawn from St Maximus the Confessor, on the rationality of creation. Every created thing has its logos (Romanian rațiune) — an inner principle, meaning, and purpose given it by God — and all these logoi are grounded in and converge on the divine Logos, the Word of God incarnate in Christ (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s appropriation of Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi; Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, on the rationality of the created world). Creation is therefore intelligible through and through — a vast structure of meanings addressed to a rational creature who can read them.

The human person is the one in whom this rationality becomes conscious and vocal. Made a microcosm and a mediator, the human being gathers the meanings of created things, brings them to speech and thanksgiving, and offers the world back to God, thereby uniting the creation and leading it toward its fulfilment (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the human being as mediator gathering the logoi; Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, on the human vocation within creation). The “rationality” of creation is thus not a cold mechanism but a relational reality: the world is rational because it is a communication between persons, a gift laden with meaning that asks to be received and returned. Stăniloae uses this vision to affirm the goodness and lasting value of the material world and its destiny — with humanity — for transfiguration and deification, not for annihilation (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2, Creation and Deification, on the deification of the cosmos; see Person, Communion, and Deification).

The Two Apophaticisms

Against this luminous, cataphatic (“positive”) vision of a world full of the meanings of God, Stăniloae sets an equally strong apophatic (“negative”) theology. God, the giver of the world, infinitely transcends the world; no created concept can capture him, and the more truly he is known, the more his incomprehensibility is felt (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, on apophatic theology; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, Paternoster, 1999, on Stăniloae’s apophaticism).

Stăniloae’s distinctive contribution is to distinguish two levels of the apophatic. There is, first, an apophaticism of negation — the intellectual recognition that God transcends all our concepts, expressed by denying of him the limitations of created things. But beyond this there is a deeper, positive apophaticism of direct experience: the immediate, supra-conceptual awareness of the presence of the living God given in prayer and contemplation, which is not the absence of knowledge but a knowledge fuller than concepts can hold (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1, on the apophaticism of experience beyond the apophaticism of negation; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s distinction between negative and experiential apophaticism). This second apophaticism is where Stăniloae’s dogmatics joins the hesychast tradition of the Filocalia: the “experience of God” that the ascetic Fathers describe is precisely this positive, apophatic knowing of the God who exceeds all speech (see The Added Commentary and The Experience of God).

The Balance of Cataphatic and Apophatic

The two sides — the world full of meaning and the God beyond all meaning — are held together rather than opposed. Because God is transcendent (apophatic), the world’s meanings are gifts that point beyond themselves to their inexhaustible source; and because the world is a genuine communication of God (cataphatic), the apophatic silence is not emptiness but the overflow of a personal presence too full to be contained (Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1, on the mutual bearing of cataphatic and apophatic theology; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, on the balance in Stăniloae’s doctrine of God). The essence–energies distinction of St Gregory Palamas provides the framework: God’s essence remains forever beyond participation and comprehension (the ground of apophaticism), while his uncreated energies are truly communicated in and through creation and grace (the ground of the cataphatic experience of God) — the pattern that governs Stăniloae’s whole theology of creation and deification (see Stăniloae and Palamism and St. Gregory Palamas).

See Also

References

  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 1, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, and vol. 2, The World: Creation and Deification. Trans. Ioniță and Barringer. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994, 2000. (Apophatic and cataphatic theology; the two apophaticisms; creation as gift and dialogue; the rationality of creation and the logoi; the human being as mediator; the deification of the cosmos.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (Creation as gift; the dialogical structure of the world; the guiding theme from which the book takes its title.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: the eucharistic and dialogical cosmology; the appropriation of Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi; the human mediator; the distinction of negative and experiential apophaticism.)
  • Bartoş, Emil. Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. (Stăniloae’s apophaticism and doctrine of God; the balance of cataphatic and apophatic.)