Among the Neo-patristic Theologians

Stăniloae is counted among the great neo-patristic theologians of the twentieth century, alongside Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, who called Orthodox theology back to the mind of the Greek Fathers. This file situates him within that movement, marks what he shared with it, and draws out his distinctives — his liturgical and Philokalic rootedness, his constructive rather than polemical temper, and his openness to modern thought.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Neo-patristic Movement

The “neo-patristic synthesis” was the program, formulated in the Orthodox theological world of the 1930s, of renewing Orthodox theology by a return to the Greek Fathers. Its great herald was Georges Florovsky, who at the First Congress of Orthodox Theology at Athens in 1936 called for a recovery of the “mind of the Fathers” and a liberation of Orthodox theology from what he called its “Western captivity” — the pseudomorphosis by which post-medieval Orthodox theology had borrowed its forms from Latin scholasticism and Protestant scholasticism alike (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 4, on Florovsky and the neo-patristic synthesis). The other towering figure was Vladimir Lossky, whose The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) presented Orthodox theology as inseparable from mystical experience and made the apophatic way, the essence–energies distinction, and deification central (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 5, on Lossky and The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church).

Stăniloae is rightly counted a member of this movement and, in the judgment of many, the theologian who carried its program to its fullest systematic realization: where Florovsky wrote programmatically and historically, and Lossky in essays and lectures, Stăniloae produced a complete dogmatic theology built from the Fathers (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae as the fullest systematic realization of the neo-patristic program; Ware, foreword to Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, on his stature). He shared the movement’s core convictions: the priority of the Greek Fathers, the centrality of Palamas and the essence–energies distinction, the goal of deification, and the refusal of a merely academic, “Western” theology cut off from the life of prayer (see Method and Sources).

Working Apart from the Paris School

Yet Stăniloae’s relation to the movement was also distinctive, beginning with his location. Florovsky and Lossky belonged to the Russian émigré world centered on Paris — the diaspora of intellectuals scattered by the Russian Revolution, gathered around the St Sergius Institute and, in Lossky’s case, in dialogue and dispute with it (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, chs. 4–5, on the Paris émigré context). Stăniloae, by contrast, worked in Romania, within the continuous life of a national Orthodox Church, first at Sibiu and then at Bucharest — not in exile but at home, and not primarily in French or Russian but in Romanian (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s Romanian setting, distinct from the émigré world). He reached many of the movement’s positions independently and early — his Palamas study of 1938 is contemporary with, or ahead of, much of the Paris-based Palamas revival (see Stăniloae and Palamism).

Distinctives

Several features distinguish Stăniloae’s neo-patristic theology from that of his better-known contemporaries.

Liturgical and Philokalic rootedness. More than Lossky’s, Stăniloae’s theology is grounded in the liturgy and in the ascetic-hesychast tradition of the Philokalia, which he had spent decades translating (see The Filocalia Translation). His “return to the Fathers” was not only a matter of reading the dogmatic and mystical theologians but of immersion in the practical, ascetic Fathers of the prayer of the heart, which gives his theology its distinctive experiential and eucharistic texture (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the Philokalic and liturgical grounding that distinguishes Stăniloae).

A constructive rather than polemical temper. Lossky’s neo-patristic theology often defined Orthodoxy over against the West (notably in the controversy over the Filioque and created grace). Stăniloae, while firmly Orthodox and a critic of what he saw as Western errors, is generally read as more irenic and constructive — more interested in building a positive theology of gift, person, and communion than in drawing polemical contrasts, and more willing to engage Western and modern thought as a partner in dialogue (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s constructive and dialogical temper). [Disputed: how sharply Stăniloae differs from Lossky in his stance toward the West is a matter of interpretation — some read him as markedly more open and ecumenically engaged, others note that he too maintained strong critiques of Western theology; the guide reports the difference as one of emphasis and temper rather than of fundamental principle (see Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, and Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, Paternoster, 1999).]

Openness to modern philosophy. Stăniloae engaged the personalist and dialogical philosophy of his century (the “I–Thou,” existentialism, phenomenology) more freely than Florovsky’s austere patristic historicism would have countenanced, using it to articulate the patristic theology of the person while subordinating it to the sources (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999, on the modern philosophical engagement; see Person, Communion, and Deification and Method and Sources). His theology of creation, developed from Maximus the Confessor, is also fuller and more central than in either Florovsky or Lossky, giving the material world and the human vocation within it a positive theological weight that is among his most original contributions (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the centrality of creation in Stăniloae; see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology).

His Place

The upshot is that Stăniloae belongs unmistakably to the neo-patristic movement while standing somewhat apart from its dominant, Paris-centered, Russian-émigré form. He is its Romanian and its most systematically complete representative, and arguably the one who best fused the two things the movement most wanted to hold together: rigorous fidelity to the Fathers and living engagement with the present (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, assessing Stăniloae’s place in the movement; Ware, foreword to The Experience of God, vol. 1). His standing in the wider reception — East and West — is treated further in the section on his reception (see His Standing Among Theologians).

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 and the Athens Congress of 1936; ch. 5 on Lossky and The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church; ch. 6 on Stăniloae as the fullest systematic realization of the program, his Romanian setting distinct from the Paris émigré world, and his distinctives — Philokalic and liturgical rootedness, constructive temper, openness to modern philosophy, centrality of creation.)
  • Bartoş, Emil. Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. (Stăniloae’s modern philosophical engagement; his stance toward Western theology.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. Foreword to Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 1. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994. (Stăniloae’s stature among modern Orthodox theologians.)