The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion

The modern Orthodox debate over Augustine, mapped across its full range and from both sides. At one pole stands the sharp critique of Fr John Romanides, who held Augustine’s theology to mark a deep and damaging deviation from the patristic mind, a reading sharpened by Vladimir Lossky’s account of the Filioque; at the other stand the appreciative and revisionist readings of Fr Seraphim Rose, the Orthodox Readings of Augustine scholars (Demacopoulos, Papanikolaou, and others), and Andrew Louth, who receive Augustine as a genuine Father whose errors are real but limited and whose distance from the East has been overstated. This file lays out the positions even-handedly, names their proponents, and identifies what divides them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

A Genuinely Open Question

The place of Augustine is one of the genuinely contested questions of contemporary Orthodox theology — not a settled matter on which a deviant minority dissents, but a real and ongoing debate among serious, faithful Orthodox theologians who agree that Augustine is a saint and disagree, sometimes sharply, about how much of his theology the Church can own and how grave his errors are. This file maps that debate. Per METHODOLOGY.md §4, it presents the positions with named proponents and without taking sides; the reader should come away knowing the range of responsible Orthodox opinion, not a verdict.

The Critical Pole: Romanides and the “Franco-Latin” Critique

The most forceful modern Orthodox critique of Augustine is associated with Fr John S. Romanides (1927–2001), the Greek-American theologian whose work made Augustine the hinge of a sweeping account of the divergence of West from East. In The Ancestral Sin (originally his 1957 doctoral thesis) and in his later writings, Romanides argued that Augustine’s theology represents a fundamental departure from the patristic and biblical mind on a series of linked points: his doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt (against the Greek “ancestral sin” of inherited mortality); his eudaimonistic and philosophical conception of God and beatitude, drawn from Neoplatonism; his doctrine of the Filioque and his essence-first Trinitarianism; and his loss of the patristic distinction between the divine essence and energies, which Romanides held left Augustine unable to articulate the experience of theosis and the vision of the uncreated light (Romanides 2002; and his Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine).

For Romanides, Augustine’s errors are not isolated blemishes but a system — a “Frankish” or “Franco-Latin” theology, as he provocatively framed it, that the Carolingian and scholastic West built upon Augustine and that diverged structurally from the Orthodox theology of the uncreated glory. In this reading Augustine is the fountainhead of the theological estrangement of West from East, and while Romanides did not deny his place in the calendar, his assessment of Augustine’s theology is severely negative. This critique, in various forms, has been influential in certain Greek and convert Orthodox circles and represents the sharp end of the spectrum.

A related but distinct critical line runs through Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), whose The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) located the deep root of the East–West divergence in the Filioque and in the Western (Augustinian) tendency to begin Trinitarian theology from the one essence rather than the Father’s monarchy (Lossky 1957; see Augustine and the Filioque). Lossky was more measured than Romanides and did not make Augustine the villain of a historical drama, but his framing reinforced the sense of Augustine as standing at the headwaters of a theologically problematic Western trajectory.

The Appreciative Pole: Rose, the Revisionists, Louth

At the other end of the spectrum stand those who receive Augustine warmly and judge the critical tradition to have overstated both the gravity and the systematic coherence of his errors.

Fr Seraphim Rose (1934–1982), in The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church (1983), wrote expressly against the harsh line he associated with Romanides and his followers. Rose did not whitewash Augustine — he treated the doctrine of grace and predestination as real errors — but he insisted that Augustine is a saint who must be venerated, that his errors are the limited mistakes of a holy Father (not a poisoned system), and that the proper Orthodox posture is the traditional one: honor the saint, correct the error, “venerate the saint and avoid his mistakes” (Rose 1983/2007). Rose’s irenic, pastoral approach — defending Augustine’s sanctity against zealot disparagement while conceding his theological faults — has been the most widely read Orthodox position and stands as a deliberate counterweight to the Romanides critique (see Blessed Augustine).

The most significant recent development is the scholarly revisionist reading gathered in Orthodox Readings of Augustine (2008), edited by George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies center. The contributors — drawing on the broader scholarly reassessment of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology by Lewis Ayres and Michel Barnes, who dismantled the “De Régnon paradigm” that had pitted a unity-first Augustine against the Persons-first Cappadocians (see De Trinitate) — argue that the polemical Orthodox picture of Augustine rests substantially on caricature; that Augustine is closer to the Greek Fathers on the Trinity than the critics allowed; that the Filioque charge against him is complicated by his own careful qualifications and by Maximus’s Letter to Marinus; and that the East and West share far more than the “two theologies” narrative permits (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2008). This school does not deny the real divergences (notably on grace and the Fall) but resists making Augustine the symbol of an essential East–West opposition.

Andrew Louth (b. 1944), the Orthodox patristic scholar, occupies a characteristically balanced place: deeply versed in the Greek tradition and clear about the genuine differences, he has nonetheless argued against the tendency to treat Augustine as alien to Orthodoxy, stressing the common patristic ground and the danger of reading the later schism back into the fifth century (Louth 2007; and his contributions to the reassessment). Louth represents the mainstream scholarly Orthodox view: Augustine is a Father of the undivided Church whose distinctive emphases must be weighed honestly but who cannot be excised from the patristic inheritance.

What Divides the Positions

The debate, stated fairly, turns on three linked questions:

Are Augustine’s errors a system or a set of limited mistakes? Romanides reads them as a coherent and deep deviation (a whole theology); Rose and the revisionists read them as real but bounded faults within an essentially orthodox and holy Father.
How alien is Augustine to the Greek patristic mind? The critical pole stresses a structural opposition (essence-first vs Persons-first; guilt vs mortality; philosophy vs experience of God); the appreciative pole, armed with the Ayres/Barnes reassessment, stresses the common Nicene and pro-Nicene ground and treats the opposition as overdrawn.
How much is the picture of Augustine shaped by the later schism read backward? The revisionists argue that much of the hostile Orthodox image of Augustine is a retrojection of the Photian and post-1054 polemics onto a fifth-century Father who never knew them; the critics reply that the seeds of the later divergence are genuinely present in Augustine himself.

A Fair Resting Point

What can be said without taking sides is this. The whole spectrum agrees that Augustine is a saint of the Orthodox Church, venerated as Blessed Augustine, commemorated 15 June. The whole spectrum agrees that he made real theological errors on grace, predestination, and the Fall, and stands at the headwaters of the Filioque the East rejects. The spectrum disagrees about the gravity and coherence of those errors and about how far Augustine is to be read as alien to or continuous with the Eastern tradition — from Romanides at the critical pole through Lossky’s measured framing to Rose’s pastoral defense and the Fordham revisionists’ scholarly rehabilitation at the appreciative pole. The Orthodox reader is heir to the whole of this debate, not to one side of it, and the honest course — which is also the course of METHODOLOGY.md §4 — is to know the positions, weigh them under the guidance of the Church and one’s spiritual father, and venerate the saint while holding his contested doctrines up to the consensus of the Fathers.

References

Romanides, John S. The Ancestral Sin. Trans. George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr Publishing, 2002 (orig. Greek 1957); and Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983; rev. 2007.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
Ayres, Lewis. Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007.