Influence on Contemporary Theology

Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae’s influence has grown rather than diminished since his death in 1993: through the generations of Romanian clergy and theologians he formed, through the ongoing English translation of his Dogmatics as The Experience of God, and through his central place in the study of modern Orthodox thought. This file traces that influence.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

Formation of a Church’s Theology

The most immediate and massive of Stăniloae’s influences is on the Romanian Orthodox Church itself. As professor of dogmatic theology at Sibiu and then, for decades, at the Theological Institute in Bucharest, he taught generations of Romanian priests, bishops, and theologians, and through the Filocalia he shaped the spiritual formation of the whole Church (Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on his formative role; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6). His textbooks and his Dogmatics became foundational for Romanian theological education, and his synthesis of dogmatic and spiritual theology set the tenor of Romanian Orthodox thought for the later twentieth century and beyond (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on his influence on Romanian theology). It is difficult to overstate how much of the theological self-understanding of the modern Romanian Church bears his imprint.

Through Translation

Beyond Romania, Stăniloae’s influence has spread chiefly through translation, and above all through the English The Experience of God, translated by Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer and published by Holy Cross Orthodox Press from 1994 onward in a series of volumes completed over roughly two decades (see The Experience of God). Because the translation appeared after his death and continued for twenty years, Stăniloae’s English-language influence has actually grown posthumously: each new volume brought his systematic theology to a wider readership, so that he became better known in the English-speaking world in the decades after 1993 than he had been in his lifetime (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the posthumous spread of his work through translation). Shorter works — Orthodox Spirituality, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love, Theology and the Church, and others — have extended this reach (see The Stăniloae Corpus).

His theology has also been carried by his interpreters and by scholarship. Kallistos Ware’s advocacy, Charles Miller’s introduction, Emil Bartoş’s critical study, and Andrew Louth’s treatment in his survey of modern Orthodox thinkers have all helped to establish Stăniloae as a standard reference point in the study of contemporary Orthodox theology (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000; Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, Paternoster, 1999; see His Standing Among Theologians).

Themes That Have Taken Root

Certain of Stăniloae’s themes have proved especially fruitful and have entered the wider conversation of Orthodox and even ecumenical theology.

His theology of creation as gift and his development of the Maximian vision of the world’s rationality have contributed to contemporary Orthodox reflection on cosmology, the human vocation within creation, and, increasingly, ecological theology, where his picture of the human being as the priest of creation who offers the world back to God has been found suggestive (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the fruitfulness of Stăniloae’s theology of creation; see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology).

His theology of the person and communion has fed the broad current of Orthodox personalism that has been so prominent in recent decades, and stands alongside the work of others who have made the person and communion central to Orthodox theology (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; see Person, Communion, and Deification). His reading of Palamas and of deification has contributed to the ongoing recovery of Palamite theology and to the centrality of theosis in contemporary Orthodox self-understanding (Bartoş, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology, 1999; see Stăniloae and Palamism and Theosis).

Perhaps most pervasively, his insistence on the unity of dogma and spiritual experience — the conviction that theology and the life of prayer cannot be separated, embodied in the very fact that the same man produced both the Filocalia and the Dogmatics — has become a model for a way of doing theology that many after him have sought to follow (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on this as Stăniloae’s exemplary contribution; see Method and Sources).

A Living Influence

Stăniloae’s influence is thus not merely historical but living. His works are still being read, taught, translated, and debated; his themes are still generating new theological work; and his example — the scholar-priest-confessor whose theology was inseparable from his prayer and his suffering — continues to command respect. For the Romanian Church he is a father in the most literal sense, “Părintele Dumitru,” the teacher of its teachers; for the wider Orthodox world and for Western students of Orthodoxy he is one of the indispensable modern theologians (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000). His legacy, still unfolding, is treated further in the guide to his corpus (see The Stăniloae Corpus).

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: Stăniloae’s formative role in Romania; the posthumous spread of his work through translation; the fruitfulness of his themes — creation, person, Palamism, the unity of dogma and experience.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (His formative influence on Romanian theology; the introduction of his thought to English readers.)
  • Bartoş, Emil. Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology: An Evaluation and Critique of the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999. (His contribution to the recovery of deification and Palamite theology.)