Contemporary Orthodox Theology: An Attempt to Characterize. Theologians Orthodox contemporary theologians

From "returning to the fathers" to the need for modern Orthodox theology

The theological current of "return to the fathers" and the desire for dewesternization have become hallmark Orthodox theology. For most of the 20th century, this defined the main paradigm of Orthodox theology to such an extent that it overshadowed all other theological issues. In the published translation of Pandelis Kalaitsidis's article, there is concern about the isolation of Orthodox theology and a call to overcome it in order to achieve the openness of the ecumenical nature of Christianity and the catholicity of human thinking.

"Return to the Fathers"

At the First Orthodox Theological Conference held in Athens in 1936, Fr. George Florovsky, perhaps the greatest Orthodox theologian of the 20th century. and the largest figure in the ecumenical movement in modern Orthodoxy (he was one of the founders of the World Council of Churches, as well as an outstanding member and representative of the Faith and Order Commission), declared the need for Orthodox theology to "return to the fathers" and liberation from the "Babylonian captivity" of the Western theology - a captivity that took place at the level of language, initial premises and thinking. Moreover, he repeatedly returned to this text, using the term "pseudomorphosis" to describe the long process of Latinization and Westernization of Russian theology. Many theologians of the Russian diaspora quickly agreed with his call and even adopted it, especially the emigrant theologian Vladimir Lossky, as well as Archimandrite Cyprian Kern, Archbishop Vasily Krivoshein, Mira Lot-Borodin, Fr. John Meyendorff and others. He has also gained ardent followings in traditionally Orthodox countries such as Greece, Serbia and Romania; Very indicative in this respect is the example of the outstanding Orthodox theologians Fr. Dumitru Staniloe (Romania), Fr. Justin Popovich (Serbia) and Greek theologians of the generation of the 60s. 20th century The theological trend of "return to the fathers" and the desire for de-Westernization have become a hallmark of Orthodox theology. For most of the 20th century. this to such an extent determined the main "paradigm" of Orthodox theology, for many theologians in general turned into the main task, which overshadowed all other theological issues, as well as all the difficulties that have appeared and continue to appear in the modern world, while other theological movements such as the Russian school of theology were gradually lost sight of. Although all this movement personified, no doubt, Fr. George Florovsky, one should not forget or underestimate the most important contribution made by other theologians (for example, those mentioned above) to his crystallization. Their influence reached such significance that many of the opinions that eventually prevailed sharply diverge from the well-known theological views of Fr. Georgy Florovsky (for example, “forward to the fathers”, openness of history, etc.), which thus gives an even more conservative character to the movement, which already by its very nature (“return”) contained such elements.

So, XX century. was an era of renewal of Orthodox theology, which for the first time in many centuries, under the influence of the Orthodox diaspora and ecumenical dialogue, dared to go beyond its traditional territory and start a conversation with other Christian traditions. As a consequence, it attempted to push its identity and self-consciousness beyond the mainstream academic scholasticism and pietism of the late nineteenth century. This transcendence took the form of a "neopatristic synthesis" whose hallmark was the "existential" character of theology, and in whose definition repetition and imitation are opposed to synthesis, so that it simultaneously combines fidelity to tradition and renewal. But, despite its innovative features, it seems that the 20th century - precisely because of how the "return to the fathers" was perceived and thanks to the accompanying program of "de-Westernization" of Orthodox theology - became for Orthodoxy a time of self-closure, conservatism and a static, or fundamentalist, approach. to the concept of tradition, which often began to be equated with traditionalism. So, just as some Protestant Churches still suffer from a certain fundamentalism regarding the understanding of the Bible and biblical texts, the Orthodox Church, for her part, is immobilized, falling into the trap of "fundamentalism of tradition" or "fundamentalism of the fathers", which makes it difficult for her to really search for her pneumatology and blessed dimension. All this does not allow her to be a part of the modern world, or at least enter into a dialogue with it, and deprives her of her inner aspiration to show her creative gifts and strengths.

Indeed, the way in which Florovsky’s “return to the fathers” is characteristically understood in a traditionalist way, as well as the systematization of his theory of “Christian Hellenism” (Hellenism is considered in it as “ eternal category Christian existence”, he “in the Church is not only a historical and transient stage”; this theory internally links Hellenism, the teachings of the fathers and catholicity) - all this contributed to the assertion of the idea that one must constantly seek refuge in the past of the Church, and therefore, in particular, with the fathers - in order to surely remain within the boundaries of truth. Moreover, this variant of "returning to the fathers" seems to have never emphasized the future "together with the fathers" (an idea that Florovsky himself defended both in his writings and in his lectures), which leaves Orthodox theology speechless and confidence in the face of the complexities and challenges of the modern world. Apparently, we Orthodox have enough confidence in the tradition that distinguishes us, because the Orthodox, more than other Christian denominations, preserved the theology, spiritual heritage and piety of the Church intact before its division. Following this view, the Orthodox world is often unable to understand one more purpose and role of theology in the modern world, besides the constant return to the sources and roots, or repetition and "translation" into the modern conceptual language of the writings of the fathers and other church authors, which the past under placed in the treasury of faith by the guidance of the Holy Spirit; in this way a kind of monophysitism is created. It, in turn, leads to condemnation, oblivion and even expulsion of the human mind, because, according to it, there is nothing more to say, since the fathers for all time have said everything that needs to be said: after all, patristic theology is the solution to all problems of the past. , present and future. However, the human mind, like all human nature, was completely accepted by the hypostasis of the Word of God at the Incarnation and deified at the Ascension of the Lord, when He sat at the right hand of the Father.

Indeed, as we noted earlier, Florovsky always emphasized that "returning to the fathers" does not mean repeating or imitating the past, concluded in various forms, nor does it mean running away from history or denying the present and the future. On the contrary, he constantly emphasized and drew attention to the creative return and meeting with the spirit of the fathers, the acquisition of the mind of the fathers (ad mentem patrum) and the creative fulfillment of the future. In the words of Fr. Georgy Florovsky (this is a fragment from an important passage in the last chapter of his classic work "Ways of Russian Theology"):

Orthodox theology can restore its independence from Western influences only through a spiritual return to patristic sources and foundations. But returning to the fathers does not mean leaving the present, leaving history, retreating from the battlefield. The paternal experience must not only be preserved, but also revealed - from this experience one should proceed into life. And independence from the heterodox West should not degenerate into alienation from it. It is the break with the West that does not give real liberation. Orthodox thought must feel and suffer Western difficulties and temptations; it does not dare to circumvent them or hush them up for itself.<...> Under the sign of duty the future opens up to us more truly and deeper, than under the sign of expectations or premonitions... The future is not only something sought and desired, but also something to be created ... Calling inspires us precisely with the responsibility of duty.<...>Orthodoxy exists not only a legend, but also a task<...>The true historical synthesis lies not so much in the interpretation of the past as in the creative fulfillment of the future...

However, the way Florovsky insisted on the timeless and eternal nature of Christian Hellenism, i.e. the need for Greek mental categories to formulate and express the eternal meaning of the Gospel always and everywhere, as well as how he refused to even imagine the possibility of going not “back to the fathers” and “forward with the fathers”, but “beyond the fathers”, to a large extent nullifies the openness of his theology and his future orientation. Florovsky conceived of the "return to the fathers" as creativity and renewal, he could also passionately urge to go "forward with the fathers"; however, it seems that in his work it is the element of "return" that is of greatest importance (primarily due to the way it was understood and interpreted by his followers). The call to “return to the fathers” did more than offer Orthodox theologians a way of thinking about themselves and their identity that would help them survive the horrific upheavals of the 20th century. and survive in it spiritually and intellectually. He gave them an easily digestible slogan and a sense of security and warmth in the midst of a crumbling Christianity.

It should be noted in this connection that the “return to the fathers” movement is not a unique phenomenon that took place only among the Orthodox. As I show in my recent article, the starting point of any church reform was the desire to "return to the roots", and this is exactly what we see in the Protestant world with its dialectical theology, and in the Catholic environment with biblical, patristic movements and movements of liturgical renewal. . In addition, just as all these Western movements are inconceivable outside the context of the complexities and questions asked by modernity, so in the Orthodox diaspora the movements became, in fact, attempts to respond to modernity. It was there that the “return to the fathers” movement first arose, just like its rival, the Russian school of theology, which is represented primarily by the great Russian theologian and priest Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (a former Marxist economist who later became an influential figure in the Russian diaspora in Paris as professor and dean St. Sergius Institute). The difference lies in the fact that while the corresponding Western movements were created within the framework and context of modernity, their Eastern counterpart - the "return" movement, represented by neo-patristics, which prevailed over the Russian school of theology - served as a bulwark of resistance to modernity.

Indeed, these two theological schools followed different or even opposite approaches to solving the problems and questions that modernity poses to Orthodox self-awareness. It seems that the Russian school of theology took a position of acceptance of the world, based on the desire to make Orthodoxy open to the conditions and requirements of modernity, while neo-patristics tended towards a more or less restrained and contemplative approach, calling for a "return to the fathers" and the liberation of Orthodoxy from Western and modernist influences of recent centuries, which as a result prevented Orthodoxy from truly immersing itself in contemporary issues. According to some scholars, the conflict between these two different schools was an example of a dispute between modernists and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives; it was a clash between the orientation of Orthodox theology either "back to the fathers" or "beyond the fathers". However, here is what Christina Stöckl points out:

If, however, we take a closer look at the neo-patristic position, it becomes clear that all these formulations do not fully cover all the issues that were being resolved in those years. The theological dispute between the two schools arose not over whether the Orthodox Church needed renewal after centuries of stagnation and Western influences - there was a consensus on this issue - and not even over whether the Church needed to turn to the world - the view on this was also common for both sides; the dispute was about on what basis this renewal and conversion to the world could take place<...>I propose to consider the Russian school of theology and neo-patristics as two ways to answer the problems and questions of the modern world that Orthodox thought had. The Russian school of theology found inspiration in the Marxist critique of Western capitalism and in romanticism, its ideal was the Church, facing the world, having an active role in modern society. Neopatristic thinkers sought answers to contemporary questions on completely different grounds. Neopatristic theology chose a starting point outside the modern world, namely, the patristic tradition, from which it wanted to extract a conceptual apparatus for addressing the modern world. Consequently, neo-patristic theology offered a basis for a broader philosophical-ontological critique of modernism, and this potential was realized, first of all, by the neo-Palamite direction of this school. Both the Russian school of theology and neo-patristics are different types response to the questions and problems of the modern world, different types of participation in modernity. However, it would be wrong to say that these two approaches comprise the entire spectrum of the response of Orthodoxy to modernity - this was not the case in the 30s. XX century, it is not so now. A wide range of currents within Orthodoxy do not seem to address modernity at all, they simply turn away from it, condemn it, or try to create their own world outside of it.

Thus it becomes clear that the problem of the relationship to modernity and the dilemma of whether to go "back to the fathers" or "beyond the fathers" are of paramount importance for our analysis. The Russian school of theology seems to be more open both to the challenges posed by the modern world and to the recognition of the need for a post-patristic theology. Father Alexander Schmemann describes her theological task as follows:

Orthodox theology must keep to its patristic foundation, but must also go "beyond" the Fathers in order to respond to the new situation created by centuries of philosophical development. And in this new synthesis or reconstruction, the Western philosophical tradition (the source and mother of Russian "religious philosophy" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), rather than the Greek one, must furnish theology with its conceptual structure. Thus, an attempt was made to "transpose" theology into a new "tonality", and this transposition is regarded as a specific task and vocation of Russian theology.

Unfortunately, the connection of this theological trend - especially in the person of Bulgakov - with German idealism and sophiology, as well as the dogmatic confrontation with Lossky and Florovsky that became a reaction to this connection, made this goal a fruitless declaration and for several decades destroyed the possibility of any serious discussion of the potential post-patristic theology within Orthodoxy, which made "return to the fathers" the only acceptable Orthodox "paradigm" for most of the 20th century. with all the consequences of such a monopoly.

The results of the activities of the theological movement "return to the fathers"

The consequences of the “return to the fathers” and the excessive emphasis on the importance of patristic studies that arose under its influence, among other things, are as follows: 1) neglect of biblical studies and a decline in interest in it; 2) an ahistorical approach to patristic theology and, as a result, the exaltation of traditionalism; 3) the tendency towards self-isolation and the almost complete lack of representation of Orthodox theology among the main lines of development of theology of the 20th century; 4) polarization of East and West, encouragement and strengthening of anti-Western and anti-ecumenical attitudes; 5) the weakness of theology's response to the problems and questions of the modern world and, if you look more broadly, the existence of unresolved issues in the relationship between Orthodoxy and modernity.

1. In the Orthodox environment, biblical studies were neglected before; now there is a theological justification for it. Biblical studies came to be considered "Protestant", while patristics and the rediscovery of the tradition of asceticism and spiritual sobriety came to be considered truly "Orthodox" subjects. Despite the flourishing of patristics in the second half of the 20th century. both in the Orthodox diaspora and in traditionally Orthodox countries and the ensuing strengthening of the characteristic theological features of Orthodox “identity”, the question of the role of biblical studies on our theological horizon was still open so much that we Orthodox, as is well known, still we underestimate or even be suspicious of biblical studies and biblical studies, and even consider reading and studying the Bible a Protestant practice that does not correspond to the Orthodox patristic and ascetic spirit. Indeed, in imitation of the old "Protestant" principle of objective textual authority, we often simply replace the authority of sola scriptura with the authority of consensus patrum. In fact, what happens in practice is that the authority and study of patristic texts - the vast majority of which are biblical commentaries - have acquired greater significance and influence than the biblical text itself. Thus, Orthodox theology has ignored the biblical foundations of the Christian faith, the unbreakable bond between the Bible and the Eucharist, the Bible and the Liturgy. Although we justified our Orthodoxy by the fathers, we did not notice that all the great fathers were the most important interpreters of Scripture. It has been forgotten that patristic theology is at the same time inseparably and indivisibly biblical theology, and that the Orthodox tradition, like Orthodox theology, is based on the Fathers and on the Bible at the same time; they are patristic and Orthodox only to the extent that they are biblical.

2. Fatherly theology was o is mythologized, taken out of its historical context, it was treated ahistorically, almost metaphysically. Certain historical circumstances under which the writings of the fathers were written, their constant interaction and dialogue with the philosophy and movements of the "external" philosophy of their era, their scholarship and the free use of the hermeneutic methods of their time - all this was forgotten. And we still have not properly considered this, as it seems, an extremely characteristic example of how the Church takes elements that are initially completely alien to her theological and ontological premises, and fruitfully assimilates and introduces them into her life and theology. Now this "meeting" seems self-evident to us, and we forget the titanic battles that preceded it. Perhaps we have ceased to realize or notice how difficult it was for early Christianity (with its Jewish and generally Semitic roots and origins) to accept and include Greek concepts and categories such as nature, essence, homoousion, hypostasis, personality, logos, intellect, nous, meaning, cause, action, accident, energy, kath' holou, cosmos, etc. But this ahistorical approach to patristic theology is, in fact, a “betrayal” of the spirit of the fathers, since it betrays and does not notice the very core and essence of their thought, that is, an ongoing dialogue with the world, an encounter with the world, acceptance of the historical, social, cultural and scientific context of his time, which is especially well manifested in interaction with the Hellenism of the great fathers of the fourth century. Today - and in this we clearly differ from the courage and breadth of the fathers - the widespread propaganda, popularization and "inevitability" of the call to "return to the fathers" not only made the fathers an obligatory "trick" of the Orthodox "establishment", this call is now also characteristic and inherent in any neo-conservative and fundamentalist version of Orthodox theology. And the constant invocation of the authority of the fathers for any reason - even one that obviously could not exist in the era of the fathers - led to the objectification of patristic theology and to a kind of "patristic fundamentalism" - does this not resemble the biblical fundamentalism of radical Protestants? Finally, this ahistorical approach to patristic thought led to the downplaying of the contribution of Western theology to the movement that rediscovered the theology of the Greek Fathers and freed theology from scholasticism. In fact, it is widely known that since the beginning of the 20th century. Western theology in all its forms follows its own path of repentance and self-criticism and tries to free itself from the shackles of neo-scholasticism and rationalistic theology. Its most prominent representatives are looking for the tradition of the Church, as it existed before the division, and seek a dialogue with the modern world. The rediscovery of the eschatological self-consciousness of the Church, above all in the context of German Protestantism, and movements to renew Roman Catholic theology, such as the return to the fathers movement (the most characteristic examples of which are the School of Fourier in Lyon and the publication of studies on patristics of the series “Sources Chrétiennes” carried out by her the most prominent representatives), the movement for liturgical renewal, the reunification of the Bible and the liturgy, and the social dimension in the theology of the Church are just a few aspects of the drive for liberation and self-criticism in Western theology that have been associated with the so-called. the “nouvelle théologie” movement, without which the Orthodox “return to the fathers” movement would probably not have been possible.

3. Orthodox theology has been so busy - with few exceptions - with the serious problem of liberation from Western influence and "returning to the fathers", in other words, self-knowledge and self-discovery, that it is almost not represented in the most important areas of theological research of the 20th century. and had little to no influence on the creation of the theological agenda. Dialectical theology, existential and hermeneutic theology, theology of history and culture, theology of secularization and modernity, “nouvelle théologie”, contextual theology, theology of hope and political theology, liberation theology, black theology, feminist theology, ecumenical theology, missionary theology, theology of religions and "other" - this whole revolution that took place in the theological science of the 20th century hardly touched Orthodox theology. On the contrary, for a century Orthodox theology has been preoccupied with its own "internal" problems; flight from "Western" influences became one of his main tasks. These theological trends, with the possible exception of ecumenical theology, missionary theology, and the patristic and liturgical renewal movement, do not appear to have influenced Orthodox theology, despite the fact that significant Orthodox theologians have been involved in the ecumenical movement since its inception. The silence of Orthodox theology and its refraining from participating in theological discussion does not seem to have gone unnoticed among modern Western theologians, who have not failed to note the inability of Orthodoxy to express itself in modern language and his incessant appeals to the authority of the fathers and tradition.

4. Judging by the results, it can be said that the "return to the fathers" had a decisive - and negative - impact on the polarization between East and West, on the complete rejection of the West by Orthodoxy and on the encouragement and strengthening of anti-Western and anti-ecumenical attitudes. When we speak of “anti-Westernism”, we do not mean a completely legitimate criticism of the West and its deviations from the tradition of the Church before its division, and not the practice of calmly and restrained pointing out differences, and not discussing examples of the West’s problems and its dead ends. We are talking here about the creation of an on-duty image of the enemy, about one-sided, inaccurate, abusive criticism, which sees in the West only errors, heresies, betrayals and deviations from Christianity (while extolling the East for its fidelity to tradition). This critique, without considering historical facts and creating its own reality, continues to look at relations between East and West as a relationship of constant confrontation, clash, division, erasing in one fell swoop ten centuries of common Christian life and church communion, and forgetting that the catholicity of the Church implies both East and West.

Here we are faced with a significant paradox, which is worth analyzing separately. Fr. Georgy Florovsky, the main champion of the “return to the fathers” and the greatest theologian both within this movement and for the whole of Orthodoxy throughout the 20th century, was nurtured not only by patristic literature, hymnography, and even not only by the Bible, but also by the greatest works of modern Western theology, which he took into account and with whom he was in constant dialogue (A. von Harnack, K. Barth, E. Brunner, I. Congar, A. De Lubak, L. Buyer, E.L. Maxal, R. Bultman, A. Nigren, J.A. Möhler, P. Battifol, J.L. Prestige, G. Kittel, E. Gilson, J. Lebreton, P. Tillich). Moreover, Florovsky was never a supporter of the idea of ​​polarization of East and West, he turned to Western fathers, such as bl. Augustine, in his writings on the Church. He wrote many of his classic works, counting on ecumenical readers or preparing reports for ecumenical conferences. Most importantly, he always easily recognized that the catholicity of the Church cannot exist not only without the West, but also without the East, and that for catholicity both “lungs” of the Church are needed, Western and Eastern, which are like Siamese twins. However, as we noted above, the “return to the fathers” movement was also influenced by other philosophers (Lossky, Staniloe, Popovich, etc.), and fundamental positions, as well as the general line of theological thought, which in the end turned out to be stronger, were in many respects not very compatible with the position of Florovsky - first of all, we are talking about anti-Westernism and anti-ecumenism. The Fathers and their theology have often been regarded as a unique feature and exclusive property of the East, so that the contribution of the West to the rediscovery of the Fathers has been clearly neglected; more than once, however, patristic theology has been used to create old-fashioned and illogical invectives against the West. Thus, Orthodoxy was presented as the owner of the treasures of the true thought of the fathers, rich liturgical experience and mystical theology, while the spiritually exhausted West was deprived of all this and, as a result, was content with scholasticism, pietism, theological rationalism and legalism. As a result, the younger generation of Orthodox theologians have learned not only to use the interpretative scheme of "Orthodox East versus the heretical West", but it has also become commonplace to complacently contrast the best version of Christianity, i.e. Orthodoxy (with the Cappadocian fathers, Maximus the Confessor, the so-called "mystical theology", St. Gregory Palamas, Russian theology of the diaspora, etc.) to a worse version, that is, the West (with its scholastic theology, Thomas Aquinas, the Holy Inquisition, the theology of legalism and pietism, etc.). This is how the modern West is imagined in many Orthodox countries. Despite significant advances in patristics, local church theology, and eucharistic ecclesiology, the West is still viewed through these distorting lenses - for convenience and simplicity, or, more simply, out of ignorance. This intellectual climate has contributed to depriving the younger generation of Orthodox theologians of the right and opportunity to get acquainted with and interact with the fundamental works of Western theology, which for the most part remain untranslated and unknown in the Orthodox world. It turns out that we have forgotten how much the theology of the Russian diaspora, as well as the theology of the “return to the fathers”, owes to the West. In other words, the Orthodox theology of the second half of the XX century. lost a sense of history and the ability to interact.

The situation with another great theologian of the neopatristic movement and the “return to the fathers” movement, with the more conservative and “traditionalist” Vladimir Lossky, is even more complicated in terms of his attitude towards anti-Westernism. The work of this great theologian of the Russian diaspora, and in particular his classic work “An Essay on the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church” (this work, not to mention the influence it had on theologians in the West, was especially authoritative in matters of mystical theology among the younger generation of Orthodox theologians; it served as a source of inspiration for a new awakening of interest in the Corpus Areopagiticum and Palamism, especially among the next generation of Greek and Eastern theologians in general), is in constant dialogue with the Western Christian tradition. Moreover, as Meyendorff notes, this work was positively and fruitfully inspired by the movement towards a patristic revival that was taking place in the Roman Catholic Church in those years:

This book answered the current demand: French Catholicism was going through a period of rediscovery of patristics and liturgy, after the war this movement spread to other countries, developing especially brightly in Germany. Lossky was an Orthodox voice eager to meet this movement and offer the West the enticing riches of Eastern Orthodoxy.

However, Christina Stöckl notes in her study:

Lossky, although he rejected the philosophical and theological language that created much of the Slavophile and Eurasian enmity towards the West, himself often emphasized the doctrinal differences between East and West. It seems that Lossky tried not to draw political and cultural statements from these differences, but some of his students, for example, Christos Yannaras, still came up with bold statements of a political and cultural nature. Lossky's work contains all the elements that have made the perception of modern Orthodoxy in the West both fruitful and problematic; these elements made possible both the view that something new was going on in Orthodox thought and the dismissive view that all this is a repetition of the old song about the exclusiveness of Orthodoxy and Slavophilism, which has already been heard many times.

What is certain, however, is that both the Russian theology of the diaspora and other theological movements of renewal in other Orthodox countries have dawned and developed in dialogue with the West, and not in an atmosphere of fanaticism and self-conclusion of Orthodoxy. And therefore, however strange and seductive it may sound to some, it was the meeting and dialogue with the West that led to the revival of Orthodox theology in the 20th century. and to his liberation from "Babylonian captivity" by Western scholastic and pietistic theology. The opportunities and fruitful difficulties that arose before Orthodoxy through ecumenical dialogue, as a result, brought Orthodoxy out of its small-town isolation and self-sufficiency. It was they who played a decisive role in the formation of the most striking forms of diaspora theology and original examples of synthesis in Greek-language theology, for example, in the theology of personality. Orthodox fundamentalism, which often flourishes in monastic and near-monastic environments, and which considers anti-Westernism and anti-ecumenism to be important components of Orthodox self-consciousness and the most characteristic features of patristic theology, obscures and stubbornly refuses to recognize the truth.

5. Despite the theological interests of Florovsky and other Orthodox theologians who followed him (for example, the incarnation, the historicity of theology and the openness of history, the contextualization of the Gospel message, the catholicity of the Church, including East and West, etc.), and their never lost interest in a creative and rejuvenating appeal to the spirit of the fathers, i.e. to neopatristic synthesis and revival, one has to admit that "return to the fathers" and "Christian Hellenism" as the proposed theological agenda are, in fact, a conservative option, since they refer more to the past of theology than to its present or future. And although the intention of this theological movement is to push Orthodoxy out of inertia and bring it into dialogue with the modern world on the basis of a neopatristic synthesis, this movement itself is in principle absent from the theological agenda that defines the broader historical contours of this dialogue, that is, modernity and late modernity. Of course, it must be remembered that, for purely historical reasons, the Orthodox world did not participate in the phenomenon of modernity. He did not survive the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the religious wars and the Enlightenment, the French or Industrial Revolution, the flowering of interest in the subject, human rights, the formation of a secular nation-state. What is considered to be the core of modernity has not affected Orthodoxy, and it still regards modernity with suspicion. This uncertainty helps to explain the difficulty that Orthodoxy has in dealing with the modern (post-)modern world, and it simultaneously raises the question of whether Orthodox Christianity and (neo)patristic theology had come to an end before the advent of modernity.

Indeed, if we consider the precedent Roman Catholic Church, we will see that scholastic philosophy and theology - when they were introduced in the second half of the 19th century, with neo-Thomism at the head - were conceived, among other things, as a defense against the complexities and problems that the modern era posed to the inflexible theological establishment of Roman -Catholic Church. Therefore, mutatis mutandis, the next question in our case is the main one: did not the famous “return to the fathers”, as it was understood and carried out by several Orthodox theologians, serve as a bastion in which one can hide from the modern era and its problems - itself unwillingly and contrary to the declared goals of the revival? Has it not, therefore, stood in the way of the Word of God in its incarnation and revelation in any of the existing defined social and cultural contexts; has it not hindered the development - in Orthodox theology - of hermeneutics, historical and biblical studies, systematic theology, anthropological and feminist studies, political theology and liberation theology? Hasn't it contributed to turning the entire Orthodox church life into a prisoner of social and semantic structures and practices that existed before the modern era, into a prisoner of the conservative mentality?

One way or another, the era of modernity and postmodernity (or late modernity) and the system of coordinates that they create constitute the broad historical, social and cultural context in which the Orthodox Church is called to live and carry out her ministry; it is here that the Church is called again and again to embody the Christian truth about God, the world and humanity. Of course, modern Orthodox theology, inspired mainly by the spirit of the fathers, in the XX century. re-formulated the beautiful theology of the incarnation, "taking on the flesh." However, his position on a number of issues revolving mainly around various aspects of the phenomenon of modernity, as well as the very core of his church self-consciousness, did not allow this generally remarkable theology to be put into action, made it socially fruitless. Among such issues are human rights, the secularization of politics and public institutions, the desacralization of politics and ethnicity, the overturning of the existing social hierarchy in order to create a more just society, the affirmation of the meaning of love and physicality and the spiritual significance of sexuality, the position of women, social and cultural anachronisms, etc. The usual Orthodox approach to these questions, unfortunately, again confirms the view that Orthodox people are content with theory and cannot achieve anything in practice, or even begin to act; that we prefer to “contemplate” and “observe” rather than act, forgetting or bypassing the fundamentally antinomic and non-traditional nature of the event of the Church and community in it, finding ourselves a calm and safe place within the boundaries of tradition and customs inherited from the past, in comfort traditional society, which in the minds of many of us is equated with the tradition itself. However, theology must finally incarnate, constantly reminding us of the antinomic and idolatrous character of the event of the Church, must seriously take the consequences of the theology of the incarnation and the conclusions from it.

The need for a new incarnation of the Word and the complexities of contextual theologies

If every text has a “context,” and if we agree that the specific and defining context of patristic theology was the then dominant Greek culture and philosophy, then we need to seriously and honestly consider whether we have the same context. today, whether we live and create in the frame of reference of the same culture, or whether we face the complexities and problems of the post-Greek and therefore post-Patrician era. And if this is so, then the next key question is: is it the duty and task of theology to protect or preserve a certain era, a certain culture, a certain language, or, on the contrary, its task and duty is to serve the gospel truth and the people of God at all times and everywhere, in any culture and in any language? Since there is no abstract universal theology, some ahistorical, unchanging, timeless tradition and monolithic doctrine, theology exists only in certain cultural and historical contexts as an answer to specific questions and problems. Therefore, the term "contextual theology" denotes both how the big "theological project" is understood and the methodological frame of reference in which theology is practiced. Obviously, the above analysis suggests an approach - both constructive and critical - that is characteristic of contextual theology. Although this sometimes goes to extremes, contextual theology seeks to emphasize the close connections between text and context and does not let us forget that it is impossible to engage in theology in a purely intellectual and academic way, abstracting from time, history and sociocultural context, pastoral needs and countless different forms of human culture and forms of expression of theological meanings.

Consequently, theology, as a prophetic voice expressing the self-consciousness of the Church, must act, taking into account the antinomic and dual nature of the Church. Just as the Church is not of this world, so theology seeks to express an experience revealed by grace and a transcendent reality that is beyond words, concepts or names and is not grasped by them. Just as the Church lives and goes out into the world, so theology strives for dialogue and interaction with the historical present in every era, adopting its language - the flesh of the thought system of each specific era, the historical and cultural present of this or that time. Theology is not equal to history and cannot be equated with history, but it cannot exist in the absence of history, and more importantly, it can no longer overlook the lessons of history. Without this process of mutual but unmixed penetration and acceptance of the world and history, without a gesture inviting to dialogue, without a gesture of moving towards the world and “bearing witness” to the world, neither the Church nor theology can exist, but neither can the revelation of God, so how the Church exists not for itself, but for the world and for the benefit of the world, "for the life of the world." After all, divine revelation has always taken place within the created world and history, and not in some ahistorical, timeless universe unrelated to the world. As the theologian Panagiotis Nellas (founder of the well-known Greek journal Synaksis) pointed out prophetically in one of his writings more than twenty years ago:

It is impossible to have a true revelation of God without making social, cultural, scientific and other realities the material of this today's revelation. It is impossible for God to call a person to action, to touch him, until he touches precisely our, historically specific flesh; It is impossible for Him to save a person if He does not transform our lives.

Developing the same thought, we can therefore add that a disembodied theology that refuses to engage in conversation with the broad social and cultural realities of its time is simply unthinkable, whether in the era of modernity, postmodernity or late modernity. A theology that does not take upon itself the “flesh” of its time is equally unthinkable, just as it is unthinkable for the Church to isolate itself, not to allow itself to be pulled out of itself towards the world and history, to enlighten them with the light of the Gospel and transform them. So, the Church and her theology cannot achieve anything in the world without noticing the world or not appreciating the world that is around them, just because this world is "un-Christian", because it is not what they would like or would like. comfortable. Similarly, the Church and her theology cannot move and move modern people, modern and late modern people, as long as the Church despises and neglects the modern world, does not see in it the material from which revelation must be created, and the flesh to be received. to myself.

This means that for Orthodox theology there is an urgent need to invent - with the help of the Holy Spirit - new terms and new names ("to create new names", in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian), correlated with today's needs and problems, just as there is an urgent need for a new incarnation of the Word and the eternal truth of the gospel. A theology of repetition, a theology that is content with "returns and origins" or based on "returns to the fathers" and neopatristic synthesis, by definition cannot meet these needs and the manifold complexities and problems of the pluralistic world of the postmodern era. Therefore, what is required is not repetition, eternal denial and silence, which is usually chosen by Orthodoxy as a position in relation to the era of modernity and pluralism, but a creative meeting and a serious theological dialogue with the complexities and problems of modernity and postmodernity - whatever they may be, "reorientation ( modernity) from within,” as His Eminence Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch aptly put it. Will the Orthodox Church be faithful to the renewed God-manhood and the true theology of the Incarnation and, inspired by the vision and experience of the Resurrection, will she accept within herself the tradition, boldness and spirit of the fathers and the great theological syntheses that they created mainly in the Eastern Church? Will it enter into a dialogue and make an attempt (and why not?) of a new synthesis, taking the best that exists in modern times, bringing about the meeting of East and West, which has been talked about for several decades?

Eschatological understanding of tradition

From an Orthodox point of view, the key to understanding the above topics and to finding answers to all these questions can be found in eschatology. Eschatology introduces a moment of active aspiration, perceived in the dimension of the future, combined with a new power of inspiration - these dimensions are so important for the life of theology, and they are so lacking now. After all, in response to the trials and challenges that globalization, cosmopolitanism and internationalism bring, today again the fad of traditionalism and fundamentalism has come with renewed vigor into the life and theology of the Church. While fundamentalism is an escape into the past of pre-modern eras and implies a reversal of the course of history, eschatology is an active and persistent expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God, the new world that we expect. By its nature, eschatology gives strength for a dynamic immersion in the present, a life-affirming openness to the future of the Kingdom, in which one must seek the fullness and essence of the Church. In other words, the Church fundamentally receives her essence not from what she is, but from what she will become in the future, in eschatological time, which, since the resurrection of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, has already begun to illuminate the present and history and influence them. .

In the light of eschatology, even the church tradition itself acquires a new meaning and a new dimension, a perspective full of optimism and hope. In this perspective, tradition is defined not by habits, customs, ideas, or in general by what is inert and stagnant in history, but by a person, Jesus Christ, the coming Lord of Glory. As St. reminds us. Cyprian of Carthage: “The Lord said to us: “I am the truth.” He didn't say, "I am the tradition." Tradition has nothing to do with the past; in other words, it is not constrained by past patterns, by what has already happened. Strange as it may sound, in a true ecclesiological perspective, tradition looks to the future. Its source, first of all, is the coming Kingdom of God, that which has yet to be revealed and manifested, that which the love of the Lord and His providence are preparing for us for the salvation of the world and man. Therefore, the eschatological understanding of tradition corresponds to the definition of faith in St. Paul: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." It is an analogue of the eschatological "memory of the future", the experience of which is expressed in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy: glorious paki coming". And this is so because, as some of the scholia on the Corpus Areopagiticum attributed to Maximus the Confessor assert (although scholars now tend to attribute them to John the Scythopolite), the entire Divine Liturgy is not some eternal celestial archetype or some reality in the realm of ideas, but the eschatological Kingdom to come, the reality of the future, where the true meaning of things and symbols will be found.

Therefore, just as the last events in a person's life are the first in their significance, and eschatology gives the meaning of protology, so the Kingdom of God is the fullness of life and truth, which must fully come true and be revealed at the end of time and which determine and give the meaning of church tradition. The future is thus a cause, not a consequence of the past, since, in the words of Metropolitan John Zizioulas:

The world was created for the eschatological Christ, who will come at the end of time as the unity of the created and the uncreated. According to St. Maximus, the Church experiences this in the Eucharist: in her what will be at the end of time is really present now, the future becomes the cause of the present. During the Holy Eucharist, we travel back in time: from the future to the present and into the past.

Or we can recall the relevant words of the modern Greek theologian Nikos Nissiotis here:

Therefore, the Orthodox Tradition<...>not history, but evidence; it is not a fait accompli of the past, but calls to embody it in the future. Understood from the standpoint of such a Beginning, Tradition is “new,” something that invades the world in order to immediately and forever renew everything in Christ, and then keep it that way in the Holy Spirit through the Church.

Here are the words of Fr. George Florovsky, who initiated the movement of "return to the fathers" and "neopatristic synthesis":

Thus, "tradition" in the Church is not simply the continuity of human memory or the immutability of rites and customs. Ultimately, "tradition" is the continuity of the divine presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit that does not leave us. The Church is not bound by a "letter". The "Spirit" constantly leads her forward. The same Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who "spoke through the prophets," who guided the apostles, enlightened the evangelists, still rests in the Church and leads her to a deeper understanding of divine truth, from glory to glory.

Seen from this perspective, tradition is not a letter that kills, a nostalgic repetition, an uncritical acceptance or maintenance of the continuity of the past, but a creative continuity of the Holy Spirit and an openness to the future, to the new world and the Kingdom of God, which we actively await. In this light, it seems that the patristic tradition in its various forms of manifestation takes on a different meaning and a different perspective, since, in turn, it is judged and studied in the light of the last times and the coming Kingdom of God, while “the return to the fathers is a milestone on an eventful journey towards a wider renewal in the Holy Spirit of Orthodox theology, a renewal that has not yet been completed. And “Christian Hellenism” is one of the varieties, or paradigms, of the relationship of the Church to the world, and not an “eternal category of Christian existence” or an unchanging and timeless force.

Instead of a conclusion

Of course, the main and most weighty question, which naturally arises from all of the above: is it possible for an Orthodox tradition and theology to exist that would not be patristic? In other words, can we talk about post-patristic theology in Orthodoxy (both in the temporal and in the normative sense of the word)? According to prof. Petros Vassiliadis:

Contemporary Orthodox theology in our day has reached a major and decisive crossroads in its historical development. For Orthodoxy of the 20th century. was essentially a period of restructuring of self-consciousness in the course of a new discovery of the "patristic" tradition. Having discovered the quintessence of his uniqueness in its "liturgical" - that is, trinitarian, pneumatological, iconographic, cosmological and, above all, eschatological dimension, now it is time for him to take the next step, that is, to dare to go beyond the traditional "patristic" theology, just like in the same way that the patristic tradition proper went beyond the boundaries of the early Christian tradition, and the early Christian tradition beyond the boundaries of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course, this does not mean that the spirit or even the style of the patristic era should be left behind; it does not follow from this that the modern fathers should reject the Greek philosophical categories that they adopted; it is about moving dynamically beyond them. Indeed, this is truly the heritage of the great fathers of the Church.

Another fundamental question: did the “return to the fathers” and the neo-patristic synthesis succeed? The Russian Archbishop of Volokolamsk Hilarion (Alfeev) does not hesitate to answer this question in the negative, referring, among other things, to one objective difficulty that in no way allowed this undertaking (which Florovsky defended so much) to come to a positive outcome:

In the XX century. the time for such a synthesis has not yet come. However, it can still be achieved if we do not deviate from the path outlined by the theologians of the 20th century.<...>But one more quantitative leap forward is needed in order to build a neo-patristic synthesis on its basis, a leap that we, who have entered the 21st century, can make. Need to find new approach to the fathers, one that will allow us to see the patristic heritage more holistically. I am deeply convinced that the fundamental and integral element of such a new approach should be the logically consistent application of the contextual method in reading patristic texts.

However, the problem with Alfeev’s approach is that although he is critical of the self-protective “protective Orthodoxy” and the romantic and ahistorical vision of patristic theology it generates, and although he even draws an analogy between, on the one hand, the use of ancient philosophy by the Greek fathers , and, on the other hand, by the appeal of modern church philosophy to the philosophy of existentialism, nevertheless, it seems that in the same text he holds an idealizing view of patristic thought and its relation to modernity and the problems of our time. So, for example, he declares: “The works of the fathers never lose their relevance, since they address questions, the answers to which are of key importance for the present and future of mankind”, and this is so, because the confession of the “patristic faith” implies not just the study of the writings of the fathers and an attempt to revive their heritage, but also the belief that our era is no less "patristic" than any other. The "golden age", which began with Christ, the apostles and the early fathers, is preserved to this day in the writings of the Fathers of the Church.

If the Orthodox theology of recent decades has been inspired and renewed by the appeals of a “return to the fathers” and by its liberation from the captivity of academism and scholastic theology, having nevertheless failed to avoid coinciding with the caricature image of traditionalism, patristic archeology, and faith hidden in the trenches of confession, then Today, in the globalized, pluralistic world of the postmodern era, there is an obvious and urgent need for a breath of fresh air to overcome a certain provincialism and self-satisfied isolation in Orthodox theology, to open up the ecumenical nature of Christianity, the challenges of the “other” in faith and the catholicity of human thinking. The prophetic role of theology calls for him to constantly transcend his own limits, constantly transforming and renewing all established forms of expression and creativity - even those inherited from patristic thought - to make a leap similar to that which patristic thought needed to make in comparison with the early Christian system of thought. and perhaps even more daring. Perhaps the time has come for us to realize that fidelity to the patristic tradition, the habitual words "we, following the holy fathers ..." do not simply mean continuity, renewal or a new understanding of the tradition, but rather following the precedent set by the mental leap made by early Christianity and the fathers - going beyond the boundaries of patristic thought where and when it is necessary? "Return to the Fathers" was in the XX century. conceived as a "paradigm shift" in Orthodox theology. The question is, are we now facing the inevitability - and do we need it - of a "paradigm shift" in Orthodox theology? It would take another article to give due attention to this issue, but here I have only been able to state some preliminary considerations.

Faithful to this spirit, we tried not to forget or circumvent patristic thought, but to bring it into dialogue with the complex and provocative questions that the modern and late modern eras pose. I believe that the Holy Spirit has not ceased to endow us with his gifts, and this gives me reason to believe that the Orthodox theology of our time should try to develop its own approach to those issues that patristic thought did not raise - and could not raise. Thus, I hope to find a new road for Orthodox theology, which combines the faithfulness of tradition with renewal and the introduction of the new, by which theology can boast in the Lord of the positive things that it has already offered; however, at the same time, self-criticism and openness to the future will be possible. Above all, however, I call for the creation of a free space for an open-minded dialogue in which all points of view can be expressed and considered, taking into account the diversity of "others" who are the image of the "other" parexcellance - God. By publishing my point of view on the problem of "returning to the fathers" and the need for modern Orthodox theology on the hospitable pages of the magazine St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, I do not pretend to any infallibility of opinions, and therefore discussion and criticism, perhaps, will help me in the most fruitful way in my undertaking, .

Translator's note: Hereinafter, the philosophical and culturological term "modernity", as a designation of a special era in the development of society and its culture, is translated in two ways, depending on the context - sometimes as "modernity", then as "modernity". The choice of option was dictated by considerations of relevance in the context and style of the Russian language, however, the reader is advised to remember that in both cases the English original uses the concept of "modern", which generally means "modern" as a cultural and historical era.

The article was originally presented in German as part of this conference: cf. G. Florovsky, “Westliche Einflusse in der russischen Theologie,” in Procès-Verbaux du Premier Congrès de Théologie Orthodoxe à Athènes, 29 Novembre-6 December 1936, Ham. S. Alivisatos (ed.) (Athens: Pyrsos, 1939), 212-31; the same text can be found in Kyrios, II, nr 1 (Berlin, 1937), 1-22. English translation (T. Bird and R. Hugh): "Western Influences in Russian Theology" in vol. 4: Aspects of Church History (Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 157-82.

G. Florovsky, Western Influences in Russian Theology, Decree. op. passim, cf. ibid., Ways of Russian Theology, part I, transl. by R. L. Nichols, volume 5 in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky(Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979) and part II, tr. R. L. Nichols, vol. 6, in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky(Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987). For the origin and use of the term “pseudomorphosis” in Florovsky’s work, see N. Kazarian, “La notion de pseudomorphose chez Oswald Spengler et Georges Florovsky” (unpublished paper at the international conference “Le Père Georges Florovsky et le renouveau de la théologie orthodoxe au 20e siècle ,” St Sergius Institute, Paris, November 27-28, 2009). Wed critical analysis of the theory of "pseudomorphosis" by Fr. G. Florovsky in Dorothea Wendebourg, “‘Pseudomorphosis’: A Theological Judgment as an Axiom for Research in the History of Church and The-ology,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 42 (1997): 321-42.

Among the Greek theologians, two well-known figures should be noted separately: Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas and Fr. John S. Romanidis. Both of them were outstanding students of Fr. G. Florovsky and representatives of the “neopatristic synthesis” and the “return to the fathers” movement, but each went his own way in the world of modern Orthodox theology. In his writings, Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon (the ecumenical patriarchate) tried to formulate a creative version of the “neo-patriarchal synthesis”, open to the world of modern philosophical thought and dialogue between East and West, constantly speaking about the need for a theological synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions, without which there can be no true catholicity. Churches. (cf. e.g. "Introduction" to his classic Being as Communion, esp. pp. 25-26). In accordance with some interpretations of his ideas, although Zizioulas remains faithful to the concepts of the Cappadocian fathers (for example), “thinks with the fathers about what is outside the fathers” (A. Papanikolaou, Apophaticism v. Ontology: A Study of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, PhD Dissertation, 250. Cf. a more restrained analysis in A. Brown, “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” in Douglas Knight (ed.), The Theology of John Zizioulas. Father Ioann Romanidis in the late 50s - early 60s 20th century opened a new direction in Greek theology and provided a hopeful example of a "neo-patristic" theologian. In his doctoral dissertation (The Ancestral Sin, Athens, 1955), Romanidis rebukes Orthodox theology for its suffocating adherence to academicism and scholasticism, and develops an argument about the alternative found in the healing spirit of Orthodoxy with a thoroughness that has proven his theological insight. However, the publication in 1975 of his book Romiosyne (Romianism) marked a sharp turn in his work, which began to shift from the realm of theology to cultural criticism, ethno-theology and anti-Westernism. Starting from that moment, the opposition of Greek and Latin-speaking "Romanism", on the one hand, and the "Frankish beginning", on the other, began to dominate in the work of Romanidis: he saw endlessly ripening conspiracies in the Frankish beginning, aimed at the destruction of Romanism. The absence of an eschatological perspective, coupled with immanetism in the body of Romanides' writings (the immanetism contained in his theological concept of "purification, illumination and deification") is ideally combined with the attribution of "sacred geography" to Romanism, which manifests itself in it in the form of a sacred kingdom inhabited by the sacred race of Romanides a new chosen people, for whom alone salvation is prepared.

Wed, e.g., e.g. Florovsky. Patristic Theology and the Ethos of the Orthodox Church (English G. Florovsky, “Patristic Theology and the Ethos of the Orthodox Church” in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 4: Aspects of Church History (Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 17. In the words of Metropolitan John Zizioulos (“Fr Georges Florovsky: The Ecumenical Teacher,” Synaxis, issue 64 (1997): 14-15 [in Modern Greek]), “ the main task of theology for him (Florovsky) was “neopatristic synthesis”, which meant, as we shall see, a more profound search for the existential meaning of patristic theology and its synthesis, which requires rare creative powers and the gift of synthesis.”

Compare, for example, the “theological testament” of Fr. G. Florovsky, published by A. Blaine, Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman(Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1993), 154: “That is how I arrived early enough on the idea of ​​what I now call the 'neopatristic synthesis'. It should be more than just a collection of patristic sayings and quotations. It must be a synthesis, a creative reassessment of those revelations that were given to the sages of antiquity. It must be patristic, faithful to the spirit and vision of the fathers, ad mentem Patrum. However, this synthesis must be neo-patristic, since it must address the new era, which has its own problems and demands.

G. Florovsky, “Ways of Russian Theology,” in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 4: Aspects of Church History, 195. Cf. his Ways of Russian Theology, in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 6, 297.

G. Florovsky, “Ways of Russian Theology,” op. cit., p.195. Wed his Ways of Russian Theology, in Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 6, 297.

In a certain sense, the Church itself is Hellenistic, it is a Hellenistic entity - in other words, Hellenism is an unchanging category of Christian existence.<...>let's become more Greek in order to become more catholic, truly Orthodox” G. Florovsky, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” in Procès-Verbaux du Premier Congrès de Théologie Orthodoxe à Athènes, op. cit., 241-42. Wed See also the article “The Christian Hellenism,” Orthodox Observer, no. 442 (January 1957): 10: “Let us be more ‘Hellenic’ in order that we may be truly Christian.” An exhaustive analysis and critique of these Florovsky ideas is contained in my doctoral dissertation, P. Kalaitzidis, School of Theology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008, esp. 173-205 [in modern Greek]. Wed his “L'hellénisme chrétien du Père Georges Florovsky et les théologiens grecs de la génération de '60” (unpublished paper read at an international conference: “Le Père Georges Florovsky et le renouveau de la théologie orthodoxe au 20e siècle”, St. Sergius Institute, Paris, November 27-28, 2009). Wed See also M. Stokoe, Christian Hellenism, a dissertation submitted to partially meet the requirements for a Master of Theology degree (St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, April 17, 1981). According to this researcher, "Christian Hellenism" can be considered a model of contextual theology that meets the needs and expectations of all times and peoples. 61 (2009): especially 144-46.

In this part of the work, I follow the analysis done by P. Vallière, Modern Russian Theology. Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), especially pp. 1-11; and Christina Stöckl, Community after Totalitarianism. The Eastern Orthodox Intellectual Tradition and the Philosophical Discourse of Political Modernity(Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2008), especially pp. 94-104. Wed A. Schmemann, “Russian Theology: 1920-1972. An Introductory Survey, SVTQ 16 (1972): 172-94; R. Williams, “Russian Christian Thought,” in A. Hastings, A. Mason, and H. Pyper (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought(Oxford University Press, 2000), 630-33; M. Kadavil, “Some Recent Trends on the Sacramentality of Creation in Eastern-Oriental Traditions,” in J. Haers and P. D. Mey, Theology and Conversation: Towards a Relational Theology(Leuven & Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2003), especially 324-30; A. Papanikolaou, “Orthodox Theology,” in: E. Fahlbusch and J. M. Lochman (eds), The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI & Leiden: Eerdmans-Brill, 2008), 414-18.

R. Bird, “The Tragedy of Russian Religious Philosophy: Sergei Bulgakov and the Future of Orthodox Theology,” in J. Sutton and W. van den Bercken (ed.), Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Europe(Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 211-28.

Wed similar remarks and bibliographic references in P. Kalaitzidis, “Rudolf Bultmann’s History and Eschatology— The Theory of Demythologization and Interiorized Existential Eschatology: Putting Bultmann in Conversation with Contemporary Greek Theology,” introduction to the Greek edition of the Rudolf Bultmann’s classic work, History and Eschatology. The Presence of Eternity(Athens: Indiktos Publications, 2008), lix [in Modern Greek]. Florovsky's approach seems to be closer to another direction: "The testimony of the fathers is inalienable and belongs internally to the very structure Orthodox faith. The Church is equally devoted to the apostolic preaching and the dogmas of the fathers. Both of them are inseparable from each other. The Church is truly "apostolic". But the church is also "paternal". And only by being "paternal" can the Church continuously remain "apostolic." The Fathers testify to the apostolic character of Tradition. G. Florovsky “Patristic Theology and the Ethos of the Orthodox Church” in the book Collected Works of Georges Florovsky 2nd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1958). Ecumenism II. A Historical Approach, vol. 14 of Collected Works of G. Florovsky(Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1989), 209-10; G. Florovsky, "Ways of Russian Theology" in Aspects of Church History, vol. 4 of Collected Works of Georges Florovsky(Belmont, MA: Nordland, 989), 202-4.

The rise of neo-patristics, which left behind the Russian school of theology after 30-40 years. XX century, was fueled, among other things, by people who converted to Orthodoxy from Western denominations, from those who shared the passion of this movement for the liturgical, ascetic and mystical traditions of the fathers. Wed P. Valliere, Modern Russian Theology. Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theol-ogy in a New Key, op.cit, , 5, 6.

Wed P. Kalaitzidis, Hellenicity and Anti-westernism in the Greek Theological Generation of the 60's, op cit, especially 54, 48 [in Modern Greek].

V. Lossky, Essai sur la Théologie Mystique de l'Église d'Orient (Paris: Aubier, 1944). English translation: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church(London: James Clark, 1957).

Christina Stockl, Community after Totalitarianism, decree. op. 101. Cf. P. Kalaitzidis, Hellenicity and Anti-westernism in the Greek Theological Generation of the 60's, op cit, 51, 530-35 [in Modern Greek].

J. D. Zizioulas, “Ortodossia,” in Enciclopedia del Novecento, Instituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, vol. V, (Roma, 1981), 6.Cf. also P. Kalaitzidis, Hellenicity and Anti-westernism in the Greek Theological Generation of the 60's, decree. cit., especially c.47 [in modern Greek].

cf.p. Kalaitzidis, op cit, 100-101, 104-5 [in Modern Greek]. It is worth noting that the questions raised above regarding the Orthodox Church and the era of modernism were discussed, considered and researched as part of the curriculum at the Volos Academy of Theology of the Metropolis of Dimitrias (Volos, Greece) in the 2001/2002 academic year. The texts of the reports at the conference were published by the publishing house "Indictos" (Athens) in 2007 (in Modern Greek). In addition, the Institute of Theology. St. John of Damascus University of Balamand (Lebanon) organized (together with the Department of Orthodox Theology of the Center for the Study of Religions of the University of Münster in Germany) an international symposium on the theme “Thinking about the era of modernity: to the question of revising the relationship between Orthodox theology and modern culture» December 3-5, 2007 The volume containing the conference materials is in print.

In this paragraph of the article, I use the analysis materials in my book Orthodoxy and Modernity: An Introduction, op. cit., pp. 105-7, 109 [in Modern Greek].

Wed constructive and critical approaches of Orthodox theologians within contextual theology in N. Nissiotis, “Ecclesial Theology in Context,” in Song Choan-Seng (ed.), Doing Theology Today (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1976), 101-24 ; E. Clapsis, “The Challenge of Contextual Theologies” in Orthodoxy in Conversation. Orthodox Ecumenical Engagements(Geneva/Brookline, MA: WCC Publications/Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000), 165-72; Bishop Hilarion Alfeev, “The Patristic Heritage and Modernity,” in Orthodox Witness Today (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2006), esp. pp. 152-65; P. Vassiliadis, "Orthodoxy and Contextual Theology" in book Lex Orandi, Studies in Liturgical Theology, 1st ed. (Thessaloniki, 1994), 139-56 [in Modern Greek]. Interesting reports on this topic were presented at an international symposium held in 1992 in Thessaloniki (Greece) by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Thessaloniki, together with the Bossi Ecumenical Institute, dedicated to the role of Orthodox theology in the ecumenical movement and the dialogue between "classical" and "contextual" types of theology. The texts of the reports were published by the Greek Theological Bulletin Kath'Odon, Volos Academy for Theological Studies, Winter Program 2000-01 (Athens: Kastaniotis Publications, 2003) [in Modern Greek]; P. Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy and Modernity: An Introduction, op cit, 163-78 [in Modern Greek].

Maximus the Confessor (John of Scythopol), Scholia on "On the Heavenly Hierarchy", PG 4, 137 CD. For the attribution of this fragment to John of Scythopolis, see P. Rorem and J. C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite(Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 174.

Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, “The Church and the Eschaton,” in P. Kalaitzidis (ed.), Church and Eschatology, op. op. 42 [in modern Greek].

N. Nissiotis, “Orthodoxy, Tradition and Renewal. The Problem of Cultural Relations between Orthodoxy and Hellenism in the Future,” in the book Orthodoxy, Tradition and Renewal(Athens: Analogio/Efthyni, 2001), 93-94 [in Modern Greek].

P. Vassiliadis, Interpretation of the Gospels (Thessaloniki: Pournaras Publications, 1990), 7 [in Modern Greek].

Note. Ed.: Hilarion (Alfeev), Archbishop of Volokolamsk - until February 1, 2010. After - Metropolitan of Volokolamsk.

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Witness Today (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2006), 153. Cf. in the same book on the use of the context method (p. 157): “I believe that solutions can be found precisely in the consistent use of the principle of contextual reading of sources, which implies the ability of the theologian to explore other traditions in an effort to understand, and not condemn or humiliate them” . Inevitably, the contextual reading of the Fathers is inseparable from the lack of equating tradition with Hellenism/Byzantinism, since tradition includes, in addition to Byzantine, Latin, Syriac, Russian and other traditions (pp. 154-157).

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Witness Toda y, op. cit., 158: “Like the philosophy of antiquity in the time of Clement of Alexandria or Origen, the philosophy of existentialism can serve - and for many has already served - as a "teacher" leading to Christ. Existentialism can be churched just as ancient philosophy was churched by the Greek Fathers in the ΙΙΙ-IV centuries. In addition, the conceptual language of existentialism, which is no doubt closer modern people than the language of ancient philosophy used by the Greek Fathers can be used, if not for the implementation of the "neopatristic synthesis", then at least for the interpretation of its main points in the language of our contemporaries.

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Witness Today, op. op. , 170. Cf. also the following thesis: “The advice of the fathers, I believe, is much more general than the fundamental postulates of Freudianism and can be applied to people living in completely different cultural and temporal contexts” (170).

I will expand on my position on the problem of post-patristic theology at the upcoming international conference “Neopatristic synthesis or post-patristic theology: can Orthodox theology be contextual?” which will be held June 3-6, 2010 in Volos (Greece). This conference is organized by Volos Theological Academy in cooperation with the Department of Orthodox Theology of the Center for the Study of Religions of the University of Münster (Germany) and the Program for the Study of Orthodox Christianity at Fordham University (USA), as well as the Romanian Institute for the Study of Inter-Orthodox, Inter-Confessional and Inter-Religious Interaction (INTER, Romania).

I would like to warmly thank my colleague Nikos Asprulis (MA) for his kind assistance in preparing the final version of this paper.

* (Note per.) Quotations from Russian-language books are given from the following editions: 1) G. Florovsky, “Ways of Russian Theology,” - G. Florovsky, “Ways of Russian Theology”, Paris, 1937; 2) V. Lossky, Essai sur la Théologie Mystique de l'Église d'Orient (Paris: Aubier, 1944) / The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clark, 1957) - V. Lossky, Essay on the mystical theology of the Eastern Churches (despite the huge popularity in Russia, it is written in French, so it’s probably not worth including); 3) Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Witness Today (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2006) - bishop. Hilarion (Alfeev), Orthodox Witness in the Modern World, Oleg Abyshko Publishing House, 2004.

A slightly abridged version of this article was presented at the international congress WOCATI-ETE/WCC organized by the Academy of Theology in Volos (Greece) on June 5, 2008. The text of the article was translated from Modern Greek Fr. Gregory Edwards (except for quotes from the book by P. Kalaitsidis "Orthodoxy and Modernity: An Introduction" [Athens, Indictos Publishing House, 2007], translated by Elisabeth Feokritov).

Translation by A. Avdokhin

Once an important young man, a graduate of a theological academy, approached Father John (Krestyankin), and, introducing himself, by the way, said:

- I'm a theologian!

Father John was very surprised and asked:

How is the fourth one?

- What is the "fourth"? - the academician did not understand.

Father John readily explained:

– We know three theologians in the Church. The first is St. John the Theologian, an apostle and beloved disciple of the Savior. The second is Gregory the Theologian. And the third is Simeon the New Theologian. Only to him did the Holy Church, in its entire two-thousand-year history, decide to adopt the name "Theologian." Are you the fourth?

But still, to whom and how does the Lord send spiritual wisdom? In fact, in order to be a theologian, it is not at all necessary to wear a cassock and graduate from theological academies. "The spirit breathes where it wants!" exclaims the Apostle Paul in astonishment.

Once, with the choir of our Sretensky monastery, we were at Far East at the military base of strategic long-range aviation. After the service and the choir concert, the officers invited us to dinner. This Orthodox service was the first in a distant military town. It is clear that the local people looked at us with interest, as if they were something completely outlandish. Before the meal, we, as usual for Christians, read the prayer "Our Father". A respected general prayed and was baptized with us. Two hours later, towards the end of the feast, the officers turned to him:

- Comrade General! We saw that you were baptized. We respect you. But we do not understand! Probably, you have changed your mind about many things that we have not thought about yet. Tell me, over the years that you lived, how did you understand what is the most important thing in life? What is its meaning?

It is clear that such questions are asked only after people have sat down, in Russian, at a hospitable table. And imbued with trust and goodwill.

And the general, a real army general, thought for a while and said:

– The main thing in life is to keep the heart pure before God!

I was shocked! In terms of depth and theological accuracy, only a truly outstanding theologian, a theologian-thinker and theologian-practitioner, could say this. But, I think, the army general did not know about it.

In general, it happens that our brother, a priest, can be taught a lot, and even shamed, by people who seem to be far from theological sciences.

During negotiations on reunification with the Russian Church Abroad, Archbishop Mark of Germany confessed to me that some incident that happened to him in Russia made him believe that spiritual changes in our country are not propaganda, but a real reality.

Once a priest drove him in his car around Moscow. Vladyka Mark is German, and it was very unusual for him that in the presence of signs on the highway that limited the speed to ninety kilometers, their car rushed at a speed of one hundred and forty. Vladyka endured for a long time and finally delicately expressed his bewilderment. But the priest only grinned at the naive innocence of the foreigner.

What if the police stop? – the lord was surprised.

“The police are fine too! the priest confidently answered the astonished guest.

And indeed, after some time they were stopped by a traffic policeman. Lowering the glass, the priest greeted the young policeman good-naturedly:

- Good afternoon, boss! Sorry, hurry up!

But the policeman did not react to this greeting in any way:

- Your documents! he demanded dryly.

- Come on, come on, boss! - the father was excited. - Don't you see?.. Well, in general, we are in a hurry!

- Your documents! repeated the policeman.

- Okay, take it! Of course, your job is to punish. It's our job to be kind!

To which the policeman, giving him a cold look, said with restraint:

- Well, first of all, we do not punish, but the law. And it is not you who have mercy, but the Lord God!

And then, as Vladyka Mark said, he realized that if the police on Russian roads now think in such categories, then in this country, incomprehensible by the mind, everything has changed again. But apparently not for the worse this time.

The pagination of this electronic article corresponds to the original.

Prot. I. MEIENDORF

ORTHODOX THEOLOGY IN MODERN WORLD *)

In our century, a huge event in the history of Christianity has taken place: the linguistic, cultural and geographical partitions between Eastern and Western Christians have collapsed.

Until fifty years ago, contact between East and West was rare and limited to the formal and scientific spheres. In countries where Orthodox and Catholics tied together their national feelings with those of the Church, there could not be a fruitful dialogue between the churches. Today, this picture has changed dramatically. After two wars and a revolution in Russia, Eastern and Western Christians found themselves scattered throughout the world. This was facilitated by the Russian scattering after the revolution and the movement of other national groups, mainly after the Second World War. Added to this was the maturation of American Orthodoxy. All these factors allowed the Orthodox Church to merge into the mainstream of the ecumenical movement. This is on the one hand. On the other hand, a deeply secularized world has challenged all Christians at the same time, and this challenge has proved impossible to ignore; it requires a serious theological response. Modern youth is indifferent to what spiritual continuity this answer relies on: Eastern, Western, Byzantine, or Latin—the youth seeks only Truth and Life. Thus, our Orthodox theology faces a choice: either

*) Speech delivered on October 17, 1968 in a large audience of St. Vladimir's Theological Academy in New York in connection with the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Academy.

become truly catholic, or disappear altogether. Our theology must be defined as "Orthodox" and not as "Eastern", and for this it must not renounce its "Eastern" roots. There is no question of a so-called "new theology" that breaks with tradition and continuity - on the contrary, the Church needs a serious theology capable of resolving the pressing issues of our time.

The ancient Cappadocian Fathers of the Church are considered great theologians precisely because they preserved the entire content of the Gospel of Christ from the attacks of the Hellenic philosophical worldview. They achieved this by being able, partly preserving and partly discarding this worldview, to understand it and thereby affirm the significance of their theology.

Our modern task is not only to preserve the fidelity of their thought, but, imitating them, turn our face to the questions of our time. History itself has freed us from cultural restrictions, from provincialism and from the psychology of the "ghetto".

How can one define the philosophical world in which we now live and with which we are called to conduct a dialogue? First of all, as a world of paradoxes.

Here is the main statement of the famous Protestant theologian Paul Tillich:

« Against Pascal, I will say: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and Jacob, and the God of the philosophers are one and the same God,” with these words he tries to bridge the abyss that separates biblical religion from philosophy. But further he recognizes the limitations of man in the knowledge of God. He writes: "(God) is a Personality and at the same time the Negation of Himself as a personality." Faith, which for Tillich is no different from philosophical knowledge, “at the same time includes itself and self-doubt: Christ is Jesus—and is His negation. Biblical religion is both an affirmation and a negation of ontology. The task and dignity of human thought is to live serenely and courageously in such tension (antinomy) and be able to eventually find complete unity both in the depths of one’s own soul and in the depths of Divine life.

Modern radical theologians often criticize Tillich for his, in their opinion, exaggerated interest in biblical religion, but nevertheless it is he who expresses in his theology the main humanistic trend to which they all belong: - The highest religious truth is in the depths of a person's soul, and not in the Holy Scriptures.

The mainstream in modern Western Christian thought is essentially nothing more than a reaction against the ancient Augustinian dichotomy, that is, the separation of "nature" from "grace." This division determined the entire history of Western Christianity in the Middle Ages and up to our time. Although he is blessed. Augustine managed to partially fill the formed ontological abyss between God and man with the help of Platonic anthropology, attributing to sensus mentis a special ability to know God, split remained the main theological category both in scholasticism and in the Reformation.

According to the teachings of the blessed Augustine, the Fall so distorted the nature of man that there was nothing left in common between him and God—neither salvation, nor creativity worthy of man. He needs a special “prevenient grace”, which alone can create within him a certain habitus, that is, a “state” in which his actions acquire a positive character. Such relations between God and man become purely external: “grace” bestowed on man by virtue of the “merits” of Christ, who, with His redemptive sacrifice, “satisfied” Divine justice, which condemned man at the fall. The Protestant Reformers abandoned the concepts of "merit" and "good works" but remained true to the original division between God and man; they even strengthened it in their understanding of the gospel as a free gift of God, opposed to the utter impotence of fallen man. Man's final fate is decided only through "grace"(Sola Gratia) and we learn about salvation only through Holy Scripture (Sola Scriptura). The cheap "means of acquiring grace" distributed by the Medieval Church are thus replaced by the proclamation of mercy from the Person of the Almighty Transcendent God.

Barth's Protestant neo-orthodoxy gave new impetus to the Augustinian way of thinking among Protestants. But, in our time, Protestant theology is sharply repelled from Augustinism. Karl Barth himself, in the last volume of his "Church Dogmatics", radically turns away from his former views,

expressed, in the early 1920s, in his interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans. In later writings, Barth affirms the presence of God in creation, regardless of the act of incarnation. Thus, he himself reflects a new mood in theology, one that unites people as diverse as Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin. This is where the more radical but less serious American "New Theology" originated. Hamilton'a, Van Buren'a and Alitzer'a.

Next, we return to the ontology of creation, which underlies the theology of Barth and Tillich. Let us note for the time being the obvious parallelism of their thought with the main propositions and conclusions of the Russian "Sophiological" school. If, as we have noted, some of the last parts of Barth's Dogmatics could be written about. Sergius Bulgakov - the same can be said, for example, about Tillich's Christology, in which he, like Bulgakov, speaks not so much about the miracle of the Incarnation in history, as about the expression of the eternal "God-humanity". This resemblance to Sophiology rests on the common basis of German idealism: if Florensky and Bulgakov were a generation younger, or if their work were known in the West, they would probably have received no less influence and enjoyed no less success than Tillich and Teilhard.

Nowadays, sophiology does not attract much attention of young Orthodox theologians; they prefer to overcome the dichotomy (duality) by following the path of Christocentric, Biblical and Patristic. But in Protestantism the philosophical approach to Christian Revelation prevails. The predominance of this approach coincides with another "revolution" in an area inevitably central to Protestants: the interpretation of the Bible.

Bultmann's and his followers' insistence on dissociating Christian preaching from the facts of history is a new way of subjectifying the gospel.

For Bultmann, Christian faith did not emerge from testimony eyewitnesses of the risen Lord, and quite the contrary: the Christian faith gave birth to the myth of the Resurrection. Therefore, faith is nothing but a natural, subjective function of man, a gnosis without an objective criterion. If, on the other hand, we consider the created order of things to be unchangeable, even for God Himself, on the basis of the premise that any fact not verified by science - such as the Resurrection - ipso facto is not-

historical myth, then the very created order of things is deprived of content, turns into determinism, obligatory for God Himself, Revelation, therefore, must be subordinated to this very order of things created by God. God cannot but follow the laws and principles established by Himself. Consequently, the knowledge of Revelation does not qualitatively differ from other forms of knowledge; Christian faith—to use Tillich’s expression—in this case, only aspiration to the Unconditional, or to the “depth of creation.”

For Tillich, as for Bultmann, the historical Christ and His teaching remain the center of Christian faith: “The material norm of systematic theology,” writes Tillich in his work Systematic Theology, “is the New Being in Jesus as Christ; it is for us the Main Object of interest to us”, The only difficulty is that in Tillich’s worldview there are no objective reasons for the historical Christ to be chosen at the forefront of life, hence the choice is arbitrary. Since Christianity is defined only as a response to man's eternal striving for the Absolute, there is no reason not to find this answer in other teachings, outside of Christ. Such a substitution clearly happened to William Hamilton. He writes that "The theologian is sometimes inclined to think that it is easier to understand Christ not as the Object or Foundation of faith, not as a Person, Event or community, but simply as a starting point, as a platform, in common with love for one's neighbor." "Platform", under the influence of Hegel and Marx, as we know, has turned into a social "concern". And, eventually, Christianity turns into a form of simple left-wing humanism.

Of course, radical humanists like Alitzer-Hamilton-Van Buren are a minority among modern theologians, and the reaction against their ideas is already beginning. But the very nature of the reaction is far from always healthy. Sometimes it comes down to a simple return to traditional authority, that is, to the Magisterium among the Roman Catholics, and to the Bible, to so-called fundamentalism, among the Protestants. Both of these currents require a kind of credo quia absurdum, blind faith, detached from reason, science or modern social phenomena. Obviously, this understanding of authority is no longer theological, and, in essence, expresses the irrational conservatism usually associated in America with political reaction. Thus, rather paradoxically, both extremes in theology identify the Christian

Gospel with the empirical phenomena of life: - sociological, political, revolutionary - of this world. It becomes quite obvious that the old antinomy of "grace" and "nature" has remained unresolved; most likely, it is muted either by a simple denial of everything "supernatural", or by the identification of God with the heavenly Deus ex machina, whose main function is to keep dogmas, societies, structures and authorities intact.

It is clear that the place of Orthodox theology is not in any of these camps. The main task of Orthodoxy is to re-formulate the biblical understanding of the Holy Spirit as the Divine Presence in the world; such a Presence that does not destroy the empirical world, but saves it; Which unites everyone in the same Truth, but at the same time endows everyone with different gifts. The Holy Spirit is the highest Gift of life, but also its Giver, being always above the creature; The Holy Spirit is the foundation of Church Tradition and continuity, and His very presence makes us truly and forever free sons of God. As Metropolitan Ignatius Khazim said this summer at a meeting in Uppsala: “Without the Spirit, God is far from us; Christ belongs to the past, and the Gospel is a dead letter, the Church becomes a mere organization, authority becomes dominion, missionary work becomes propaganda, worship becomes a remembrance, and Christian activity becomes a purely slavish morality.

It is difficult to approach the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the abstract. This is probably why so few good theological works are devoted to the Holy Spirit, and even the Holy Fathers speak about Him either in individual polemical writings or in purely spiritual literature. And yet, without deepening into pneumatology, it is impossible to understand either the Christology of the Church Fathers, or the ecclesiology of the first centuries of Christianity, or even the very idea of ​​salvation.

I will try to show this with five examples that seem to me to be the starting points of the Orthodox witness, which is so important in modern theology.

1. The world is not divine and needs to be saved.

2. Man is a theocentric being.

3. Christian theology is Christ-centered.

4. Genuine ecclesiology is personalistic.

5. The true understanding of God is threefold.

1. The world is not divine

In the New Testament, and not only in the Evangelist John, one hears the constant opposition of the Spirit of truth “Who proceeds from the Father” (Jo. 15:26), “Whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him and does not know Him” (Jo. 14:17)—spirits who need to be “tried whether they are from God” (I Jo 4:1).

The epistle to the Colossians speaks of the entire cosmos as lying in the power of forces, the dominions of the "elemental spirits of the world", contrary to Christ, although "created by Him and for Him." Christianity brought something completely new into the world: it freed the world and the universe from myths. The belief that God dwells in the elements, in the water, in the springs, in the stars, in the Emperor - all this was rejected from the very beginning by the Apostolic Church. And the same Church condemned all forms of Manichaeism, all dualism. The world itself is not evil; its elements must proclaim the glory of God; water can be sanctified, the cosmos can be manipulated; the emperor can become a servant of God. All the elements that make up the world are not an end in themselves, as they were considered by the pre-Christian world, which deified them. Christianity, on the contrary, defines all nature, the entire cosmos to the very depths in relation to the Creator as a created element, and also to man, the Image of God in the world. This is why Orthodox worship (like other ancient Christian liturgies) attaches such importance to the rites of consecration, which include

a) elements of exorcism (“You crushed the heads of the serpents ...” From the Great Blessing of Water, on the day of Theophany);

b) The invocation of the Holy Spirit "proceeding from the Father", that is, "not of the world", and

c) the assertion that in its new, sanctified being, matter, strengthened in God and restored in its original relation to the Creator, will henceforth serve man, whom God created as master of the universe.

Thus, the blessing and sanctification of any substance in the world frees a person from dependence and puts this substance in the service of a person.

Thus, ancient Christianity stripped the elements of the physical world of the mythical veil. A similar task must be performed by modern theology in relation to "Society", "Sex", "State", "Revolution" and other fashionable idols.

The new prophets of secularization are partly right when they say that Christianity is secularizing the world: the liberation of the world from pagan mythology has been a Christian idea from the very beginning - but the fact is that for many modern Western Christians the Church itself must be secularized and replaced by a new idolatry, the worship of the world, and with this man again renounces the freedom granted to him in the Holy Spirit and again falls into captivity to the determinism of history, sociology, Freudian psychology or utopian progressivism.

2. Man is a theocentric being

In order to understand what "Freedom in the Holy Spirit" consists of, let us recall the completely paradoxical statement of St. Irenaeus of Lyon: image of God"(Adv. Haer. 5, 6.1). This excerpt from St. Irenaeus, as well as several others parallel to her, must be regarded not according to the definitions of post-Nicene theology, which would raise too many questions, o ho in its positive content. This positive content runs through the writings of all the Holy Fathers. Man becomes man only through the presence of the Spirit of God in him. Man is not an autonomous, self-sufficient being; his humanity consists, on the one hand, in his susceptibility (“openness”) to the Absolute, to immortality, to creativity in the image of the Creator, and on the other hand, in the fact that God went towards this susceptibility (“openness”) of His creation, and therefore fellowship and participation in the Divine life and glory for man is his natural property.

The later patristic tradition consistently developed the ideas of St. Irenaeus (not necessarily his terminology), which is especially important for his doctrine of human freedom.

According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, the fall into sin consisted in the fact that man fell under the power of cosmic determinism, while earlier, as long as he retained the image and likeness of God and participated in the Divine life, he was completely free. This means that freedom is not opposed to grace, but grace, that is, Divine life itself is not a coercive force that compels us to obey God, and is not an addition to human nature, necessary to increase the price of our

good deeds. Grace is the state that gives a person the reality of freedom: “When they turn to the Lord, then this veil is removed. The Lord is Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, with open face, beholding the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image of glory unto glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord” (And Cor. 3:16-18).

One of the main statements of this text, St. Paul, as well as the anthropology of Saints Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa, lies in the fact that nature and grace, man and God, human reason and the Holy Spirit, human freedom and the Divine presence - all these elements are compatible. Genuine humanity in her work, in true freedom, in primordial beauty and harmony, and manifests itself only when she participates in God or when, according to St. Paul and St. Gregory of Nyssa, it ascends from glory to glory, without exhausting to the end either the riches of God or the possibilities of man.

The current slogan of our day is the assertion that theology must be transformed into anthropology. An Orthodox theologian cannot and must not avoid discussing this issue, provided that from the very beginning an "open" approach to man is laid at the foundation. Modern fashionable "dogmas" about secularism, human autonomy, cosmocentrism, social action must be discarded as dogmas. Many of them, as already mentioned, have deep roots in Western Christianity, which has long been afraid of the idea of ​​human participation in the Divine life (since it usually identifies it with emotional mysticism) and is rather inclined to view man as an autonomous being. This approach is false in its very essence.

Even today, the "prophets" of godless Christianity are first of all mistaken in their interpretation of man.

Modern youth is not "secularistic", they yearn to satisfy their natural need for the "Other", the Transcendent, the "Truth Itself", but they seek this in such dubious ways as the adoption of Eastern religions (Buddhism, etc., drugs and various means that cause hallucinations.

Our age is not only the age of secularism, but also the age of the emergence of new religions, or rather, the substitution of the true religion -

false. And this is inevitable, because man is a theocentric Being: when he is deprived of the True God, he creates false gods.

3. Christocentric theology

If patristic anthropology is correct, then all forms of Christian theology become Christ-centered.

Christocentrism is usually opposed to pneumatocentrism. And indeed, if one adheres to the idea of ​​external redemption based on so-called satisfaction, i.e., when the grace of satisfying God's justice is only externally applied to a person who in other respects has a completely autonomous existence, then the opposition is inevitable. Such a Christology is contrary to pneumatology, since there is truly no place for the action of the Spirit in it.

But since we believe that it is the presence of the Spirit that makes a person truly human, and that the purpose of a person is to restore full communion with God through the Holy Spirit, then Christ, the New Adam, is the only one in whom true humanity was manifested, because He was born in history "of the Holy Spirit and Ever-Virgin Mary" - cannot but be the center of our theology. And this centrality does not limit the role of the Holy Spirit in any way.

Christocentrism in theology today is under heavy attack from Bultmann's interpretations of Holy Scripture. If every appearance is a myth, as soon as it does not follow the laws of empirical science and experience, then the historical Appearance of Christ loses its absolute uniqueness, since His uniqueness is subjective. Nevertheless, "Christocentrism" is still firmly established not only among the remaining supporters of the neo-orthodoxy of Barthianism, but also by Tillich. It seems to "co-exist" in the writings of theologians who, like John McCarey, attempt to reconcile the demythologization of such events as the Resurrection and Ascension with the general classical exposition of theological teaching.

And yet, even among such comparatively traditional or semi-traditional authors, one can notice a clear inclination towards a non-Storian and adoptionist Christology. Tillich, for example, expresses this formally (when he writes that "the man is Jesus

can only be “adopted” by God, but His humanity cannot be “eternal”, or transfigured: for transfigured humanity is deprived of finite freedom and is not free to become nothing but divine”). From this position, the old Western idea clearly shows that God and man, grace and freedom mutually exclude each other. This is Tillich’s residue of that “closed” anthropology, which excludes Orthodox Christology, replacing it with Nestorian: in Christ there are separately man and God.

Already since the nineteenth century, historians and theologians have been engaged in the rehabilitation of Nestorius and his teacher Theodore of Mopsuestsky in the name of human autonomy. This rehabilitation has attracted several eminent Orthodox theologians, who also show a clear preference for this kind of "historicity" of the Antiochian school, which holds that history in general can be exclusively "human" history.

To be the face « historical», Christ was to be not only quite human, but also independently and independent person. Meanwhile, the main statements of St. Cyril of Alexandria that the Son of God Himself became the Son of Mary - who therefore became the Mother of God, and that the Son of God "suffered in the flesh" are presented at best as abuses of terminology or bizarre theology. How can the Logos, that is, God Himself die flesh on the cross if God, by his very definition, is immortal.

There is no need to enter here into a detailed discussion of the theological concepts relating to the doctrine of the hypostatic unity of Deity and Man in Christ. I just want to stress with all my might that the formula of St. Cyril of Alexandria: “The Word suffered in the flesh” is one of the greatest Christian statements about the authenticity of mankind. Because if the Son of God Himself, in order to identify Himself with humanity, in order to "be like us in everything, even to death" - human death - died on the cross, He thereby testified with power beyond our imagination that humanity is truly the most precious, most essential, indestructible creation of God.

Of course, the Christology of St. Cyril in advance suggests the "open" anthropology of the early and later Church Fathers. The humanity of Jesus, being "in-hypostasized" in the Logos, was

no less full of humanity, because the presence of God does not destroy a person. Even more: it can be said that Christ was a more complete man than we ourselves. Here again, quoting Karl Rahner'a (in this matter the closest to the patristic tradition among Western theologians), “humanity is a reality completely “opened” upwards; a reality that reaches its perfection, the realization of the highest achievements of man, when the Logos Himself dwells in the world in it.

It can also be said that a Christology that includes "theopaschism" (that is, the idea of ​​the suffering of God in the flesh) presupposes at the same time "openness" on the part of God.

Thus, only in the background just like that Christology can accept the idea that theology necessarily becomes anthropology and, conversely, that only the true understanding of man - his creation, fall, salvation and final destiny - is revealed in Christ, in the Word of God, crucified and resurrected.

4. Personalistic doctrine of the Church(ecclesiology)

Because the presence of the Holy Spirit in man makes him free and if by grace is meant liberation from predestination, then belonging to the Body of Christ means also freedom. Ultimately, freedom means personal Existence.

Our worship teaches us what a great personal responsibility lies with each member of the Church. The dialogue before the sacrament of Baptism, the development of penitential discipline and communion show private the nature of the participation of members of the Church in Christian life. We are well aware that in the New Testament the word "member" (μέλος ), when he designates Christians as "members of Christ" (I Cor. 6:15) or as "members of one another" (Eph. 4:25), applies only to individuals, never to whole groups, such as, for example, to local churches. The local church, the Eucharistic community is the Body, belonging same to her as a "member", it is exclusively private Act.

It is extremely unpopular to talk about "personal Christianity" and "personal faith" these days, in large part because in the West religious personalism is immediately associated with pietism and emotionalism. Here again we observe the same old misunderstanding of the true participation of man in the Divine

life; either grace is bestowed upon the Church as an institution, or it is some kind of gratuitous gift given by God's omnipotence to all mankind—and then these manifestations of personal communion with God take on the character of pietism and emotional mysticism. Meanwhile, the desire of many Christians to identify their faith with social action, with group dynamics, with politics, with utopian theories of historical development - this desire is devoid of what is at the very core of the New Testament gospel: a personal living experience of communion with a personal God. Sometimes this gospel is distributed by evangelical revivalists or Pentecostals, and then it really pours out into an emotionally superficial form, but this happens because such gospel has no solid foundation either in theology or in ecclesiology.

All of the above imposes a special responsibility on the Orthodox Church, which must realize the enormous importance of the biblical and patristic understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ, and the Sacrament, which reveals the objective presence of God in the hierarchy of the church structure, independent of the personal dignity of its members, but also as communities of living, free individuals with individual and direct responsibility before God, before the Church and before each other. Personal experience acquires both its reality and its authenticity from participation in the Sacrament. But even the Sacrament is given to the community only so that personal experience becomes possible within the community. The paradox between "personal" and "communal" perceptions of the Church is best shown by the great Father of the Church, St. Simeon, the New Theologian, the most "sacramental" spiritual writer of Byzantium. He regards as the greatest heresy the opinion of some of his contemporaries that personal communion with God is impossible. All saints, ancient and modern, can attest that this "paradox" is at the very center of Christian existence. It is through this antinomy of "sacramental" and "personal" that one can find the key to understanding authority in the Church. And again, in this the responsibility of Orthodoxy is quite exclusive.

It is now becoming increasingly clear that the question of authority is not just an external dispute between the medieval East and West, expressed in the struggle between Constantinople and Rome, but that the deepest drama of all Western Christianity lies precisely in this question. The authority of Rome, which for many centuries erroneously considered itself responsible for the Truth and

which has been remarkably successful in educating the members of the Church in the virtue of obedience, while at the same time freeing them from responsibility, is now openly contested (often on false grounds). He has to fight defensively in unprotected positions. It is precisely Orthodoxy that must show the world that the salvation of the Christian faith lies not in external authority, but in spiritual and theological "revival." Will Orthodox theology, which has maintained a balance between authority, freedom and responsibility for the truth, be able to give a convincing answer to the world? If he fails, then it will not be our loss of religious pride, which, like any self-affirmation, is demonic in nature, but the consequences of this for the Christian faith as such will be tragic.

5. The true understanding of God is threefold

When a little earlier we mentioned the Christological formula of St. Cyril of Alexandria: “One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh”, that is, the words sung at each liturgy in the hymn “Only Begotten Son ...”, we argued that this is, first of all, the recognition of humanity as a value important to God Himself, so much for It is significant that for her sake He accepted the pains of the cross. But, in addition, this formula affirms the Personal or Hypostatic Being of God.

All objections to this formula are based on the identification of the existence of God with His essence. God cannot die, said the Antiochian theologians, because He is immortal and unchanging, both by nature and essence: the concept of "the death of God" is such a logical contradiction of terms that it cannot be true - neither in a religious nor in a philosophical sense. At best, this, like the term "Mother of God" when applied to the Virgin Mary, can be a pious metaphor. However, in Orthodox theology, the formula of St. Cyril was accepted not only as a religious and theological truth, but was recognized as the Criterion of Orthodoxy at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553).

God is not bound by the philosophical claims or attributes that our logic ascribes to Him. The patristic concept of hypostasis, unknown to Greek philosophy (it used the word hypostasis in a different sense), is different in God from His incomprehensible, inaccessible to man and therefore not amenable to definition essence. It presupposes the idea of ​​"openness" - imma-

the innocence of God and enables the Divine Personality, or Hypostasis, to become fully human. This condescension of God meets with the "opening upwards" that characterizes man and makes possible the fact that God does not remain "up there" or "in heaven", but that He does indeed descend to the level of the human, mortal state, not to devour man. or destroy, but in order to save him and restore the former communion with Himself.

This “condescension” of God, according to patristic theology, takes place at the level of the personal or hypostatic existence of God. If this happened in relation to the nature or essence of God - as some so-called "kenotic" theories have argued - then the Logos, so to speak, gradually, as death approaches, would become less and less God, and at the moment of death would cease to be God. The formula of St. Cyril, on the contrary, argues that the question: "Who died on the cross?" - it is impossible to answer otherwise than with the word "God", because in Christ there was no other personal being, except for the Logos; and also because death is a personal act. Only Someone can die, not something.

“In the tomb of the flesh, in hell with the soul, like God, in paradise with the thief and on the Throne you were with the Father and the Spirit, fulfilling all the Indescribable” - this is what the Church proclaims in the Paschal hymn: the union in a single hypostasis of the essential features of the divine and human nature, and each of them remains itself unchanged.

The human mind cannot argue against this dogma, referring to the qualities of the Divine essence, because this essence is absolutely unknown and indescribable, and also because our direct knowledge of God is possible precisely because the Face of the Son of God assumed a different nature, not divine, entered into the created peace and spoke to man through the mouth of Jesus Christ, died a human death, rose from a human grave and established eternal communion with man by sending down the Holy Spirit.

“No one has ever seen God. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed” (Jo. 1:18).

It would certainly be too superficial to draw a parallel between the newfangled theological theory of the "death of God" and St. Cyril of Alexandria. The whole context and the whole purpose of theology is completely different in both cases. On the other hand, it is possible and even necessary for Orthodox theologians to

to affirm that God is not a philosophical concept, not an “essence with properties”, not a concept, but that He is exactly Who Jesus Christ is; that the knowledge of Him consists, first of all, in a personal meeting with Him, in whom the apostles recognized the incarnate Logos, and also with the “Other”, Who was subsequently sent to “Intercessor with groans inexpressible” in anticipation of the end. So, in Christ and through the Holy Spirit, we come to the Father Himself.

Orthodox theology does not proceed from proofs of the existence of God and from the conversion of people to philosophical deism; it brings them face to face with the gospel of Jesus Christ and awaits their free response. Their life in the Church is this answer.

It has often been said that the Eastern Fathers, speaking of God, always begin with the three Persons of the Godhead, in order to subsequently prove their “consubstantiality,” while the West begins with the consubstantiality of God, trying later to introduce the concept of the Three Persons. These two strands of theology formed the basis of the ancient controversy about the Filioque, but they also define theological thought in our time. God, in Orthodox theology, is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as Persons. Their common Divine essence is completely unknowable and transcendent, and it is best defined in negative terms. But all three Persons, acting independently, give us the opportunity to take part in Their common Divine life (or energy) by Baptism "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." New life and immortality become a true reality and experience - and this is available to man.

At present, the Orthodox Church is included by an inevitable historical process not only in the so-called "ecumenical dialogue", but, here in the West, at the same time in the mainstream of social evolution.

Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church is unable to control this process. We frankly admit that the Pan-Orthodox Conferences began already after the Local Churches had taken decisive steps towards participation in ecumenism, and when our Churches, priests and laity were already involved in modern social processes. In addition, the entire Orthodox “dispersion” is (“diaspora”) and, especially, the American Church, which is now organic part Western society,

she is in a constant exchange of opinions with other Christians, with atheists and agnostics, whether she likes it or not. We can only reflect on the accomplished fact. At the same time, only a healthy theological revival can help to avoid a new historical catastrophe of Orthodoxy in our generation. I say "a historical catastrophe in our generation" because I believe that the Spirit of Truth will not allow catastrophe in the Church itself, as such, although He, as in the past, allowed catastrophes in individual churches and even in entire generations of Christians. I completely agree with Professor Karmyris *) when he says that those who dismiss theology and replace it with sentimental ecumenism while avoiding the so-called "hard questions" betray the true spirit of Orthodoxy. We just need theology – biblical, patristic and modern, and here we must remember that it was in disputes with the outside world – with Jews, pagans and heretics – that our Holy Fathers, apostles and, finally, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself – worked out their own theology. Let's imitate them.

Here I would like to note that the ecumenical movement itself is going through a period of reassessment of its views, and in this way it is giving new opportunities to Orthodoxy. No matter how grandiose the meetings of church leaders are, no matter how noisy the solemn general meetings are, no matter how clever the plans of church politicians, the average educated Christian is less and less interested in superficial ecumenism. Conservatives avoid these meetings for fear of ambiguity and compromise. The radicals are not interested in them, because, in their opinion, the Church, as an institution, has no real existence, and they frankly expect its liquidation. Therefore, the future can only lie in the understanding by all Christians of the true meaning of the Gospel. The only lasting and significant future lies in Theology and, as I have tried to show in my five examples, it is the Orthodox witness of God and man that is what people are looking for, consciously or unconsciously.

The Orthodox Church and her theology must inevitably define itself in two directions: both as tradition and fidelity to the past and, at the same time, as an answer to the questions of the present.

*) I. N. Karmiris, professor at the University of Athens, delivered a speech on modern Orthodox theology during the same Symposium at St. Vladimir's Academy.

Turning to the present time, the Church, in my opinion, must fight against two dangers:

2) assert itself in its isolation like sects do.

Both temptations are strong, especially in America. Those, for example, who merge Orthodoxy with nationality, by necessity, exclude from membership of the Church and even from the area of ​​church interests everyone and everything that does not belong to their own ethnic tradition. What these two trends have in common is their exclusivity: in the first, relativism, which considers itself, as it were, one of the possible forms of Christianity and, therefore, renounces missionary work, in the second, pleasure - truly demonic - in isolation, in difference, in separation, in superiority complex.

We all know that both these currents are observed in American Orthodoxy. And the role of Orthodox theology is to condemn and destroy them. Theology alone, united with love, with hope, humility, and other features of true Christian behavior, can help us to know and love our Church, in her true catholicity.

The Catholic Church, as we know, is not only "universal". She is truth, not only in that she "possesses the truth," but also in that she rejoices in meeting the truth in others. It exists for all people, not only for those who are fortunate enough to be its members today. It is always ready to serve every success in good. She suffers wherever she sees error and division, and does not tolerate compromise in matters of faith, and at the same time she is infinitely compassionate and tolerant of human weakness.

Such a Church is not the product of human creativity or organization. It simply could not exist if we alone were left to take care of it. Fortunately, we are only required to be faithful members of Her Divine Head, according to St. Irenaeus: “Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace; but the Spirit is the Truth"(Adv. Haer. 3, 24.1).

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2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of the outstanding Orthodox theologian Archpriest Georgy Florovsky, who became the founder of Neopatristics, the dominant trend in contemporary Orthodox theology.

Father Georgiy Florovsky, in his book Ways of Russian Theology (1937), deconstructs the Orthodox academic theology of the 17th-19th centuries. and Russian religious philosophy of the XIX-XX centuries. Deconstruction makes it possible to see that these two types of theological-philosophical thought did not adhere to the norm necessary for it to actually be Orthodox theology. Namely, Orthodox theology should be a development of the tradition of the Church Fathers. The works of the Church Fathers, especially Greek patristics, according to almost all dogmatist theologians, are exemplary theology, a normative expression of Christian dogma. Such a doctrine George Florovsky provides for the existence of a fundamentally unified system of theology of Greek patristics, which, according to Fr. Georgy Florovsky, supposedly it is possible and necessary to reconstruct. Surprisingly, already half a century after Fr. George Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, the work of reconstructing the system of theology of Greek patristics remains unfulfilled, neopatristics continues to develop without such a reconstruction. Also tendentious is the idea of. George Florovsky, that only the system of concepts developed by Greek patristics can be the basis for the construction of Orthodox theology, including modern one. O. Georgy Florovsky nowhere reconstructs this system of concepts and does not prove its advantages. Confidence about. Georgy Florovsky in the normativity for Orthodox theology is precisely the terminology of the Greek Fathers - his personal intuition. Father George Florovsky emphasizes that the conceptual apparatus of theology must be developed, remaining in the system of concepts of Greek patristics. Therefore, the theologian opposes any attempt to reformulate dogmas in terms of modern philosophies. But the very use of the concepts and concepts of modern philosophy has become characteristic of many representatives of neo-patristics, who are trying to rethink philosophical concepts, just as the Greek fathers once did.

What is neopatristics today? The identification of the essential features of neopatristics leads to the conclusion that neopatristics actually turned out to be not the “neopatristic synthesis” that Fr. George Florovsky, but rather a kind of analogue of neo-Thomism.

The first essential feature of neo-patristics, analogous to neo-Thomism, is the systematic appeal to a certain medieval theology, which is considered exemplary. In neo-Thomism, this is the system of Aquinas, and in neo-patristics, Greek patristics. The need for such treatment in these systems is justified in different ways. Neo-Thomists see Thomas's system as an exemplary theology because it is an "eternal philosophy", an ideally grounded and realistic metaphysics. Representatives of neo-patristics also believe that the works of the Greek Church Fathers are an exemplary tradition, i.e. tradition, which must be faithful, on the basis of which it is necessary to creatively develop modern theology. By the way, for many of them, it is not the principles of exemplary theology that are normative, but the “spirit of the fathers”, the “experience of the fathers”: therefore, in fact, neopatristics is not characterized by complete devotion to the concepts and concepts of the Greek fathers, since such fidelity is most likely impossible today.

The second essential feature of neo-patristics, which makes it related to neo-Thomism, is the active use of the concepts and concepts of modern philosophy. These notions and concepts are becoming a new form for expressing the supposedly unchanging content of Orthodox theology. In fact, the use of the concepts and concepts of modern philosophy can significantly change the content of theology, which is obvious in the cases of the systems of V. Lossky, H. Yannaras and Metropolitan John Zizioulas. Preserving the traditional content while using the new philosophical theological methodology is, in general, a difficult task for Orthodox thinkers, and only Fr. George Florovsky and Fr. Dumitru Staniloae. The concepts and concepts of modern philosophy are borrowed by representatives of neo-patristics either directly from the works of Heidegger, Scheller, Hartmann, Sartre, or through the mediation of prominent Protestant and Catholic theologians of the 20th century. The result of such borrowing necessarily becomes the reformation of Orthodox theology by synthesizing the theories and concepts of Greek patristics with the concepts and concepts of modern philosophy. Such syntheses can be productive and contribute to the development of Orthodox theology. They can also be unsuccessful, serve as a reason for the formation of essentially non-Orthodox or even meaningless theologies. Only as an exception in neo-patristics do we meet thinkers who do not use the concepts of modern philosophy. Complete fidelity to the concepts and concepts of objective idealism of Greek patristics was characteristic, for example, of St. Justin Popovich.

The third essential feature of neo-patristics is the constant striving to overcome some of the (often imagined) shortcomings of Greek patristic theory of knowledge of God and to create simpler theories of knowledge of God. Like the efforts of neo-Thomists to overcome the shortcomings of Thomism, such attempts are either relatively successful or completely unsuccessful.

Is neopatristics a developed and influential trend in contemporary theology? If compared with neo-Thomism, then the half-century historical development of neo-patristics has given rise to something not so a large number of works. Orthodox theology is generally more modest than Catholic and Protestant, because the leadership of the Orthodox churches does not pay due attention to the development of theology. Indeed, neo-patristics is the result of the efforts of individual theologians-enthusiasts. This distinguishes it from neo-Thomism, which was and is the result of the efforts not only of philosophers and theologians, but also of the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Church. But the lack of significant institutional support did not prevent neopatristics from becoming the mainstream in modern Orthodox theology, since academic theology also lacked such support.

Neopatristics is a diverse phenomenon from the beginning of its existence. Historically, it so happened that already in the period of its emergence, neopatristics broke up into two currents, between which there is a fundamental difference in methodology, ontology, epistemology, anthropology, and, consequently, in the theory of theognostics - objective idealism and existentialism.

Neopatristic objective idealism, founded by Fr. George Florovsky, tries to use the system of concepts of the thinkers of Greek patristics. This orientation predetermines the inheritance of the main features of the theology and philosophy of Greek patristics. These features are: objective idealism in ontology, intellectual and mystical intuitionism in epistemology, classical psychophysical dualism in anthropology, metaphysics as a way of building knowledge in methodology. According to Bishop Hilarion Alfeev, the need for neo-patristics was intuitively felt by many Orthodox theologians. In fact, about George Florovsky was only able to clearly formulate a theological paradigm new to Orthodoxy, in the spirit of which some theologians had already begun to work. So, independently of Florovsky, the outstanding Serbian Orthodox theologian St. Iustin Popovich, who, with the help of a synthesis of theological concepts of Greek patristics and the language of mystical poetry, was able to most fully express the Orthodox worldview. Within the framework of neo-patristics, other prominent theologians worked - the Greek thinkers Fr. John Romanides and Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos, Orthodox theologians of American origin - Fr. John Baer and John Breck. We note right away that representatives of this trend of neopatristics mostly avoided open criticism of its other trend, Orthodox existentialism, but actually built a personalistic ontology and epistemology, developing personalistic intentions, which were one of the distinguishing features of the Christian Neoplatonism of Greek patristics. At the same time, the personalism of Orthodox objective idealism never develops into existentialism, since the thinkers of this direction - from Fr. George Florovsky and to this day - steadily adhere to the principle of equal fundamentality of the categories of essence and personality, postulate their equality, interdependence and irreducibility to one another.

Vladimir Lossky was the founder of Orthodox existentialism. His teaching became the starting point for the radical Orthodox existentialism of the Greek philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras. This direction is characterized by the same absolutization of the personal element and the leveling of the essential in God and man, as in the philosophy of existentialism. Such features of the teachings of V. Lossky, H. Yannaras and Metropolitan John Zizioulas can be explained by a direct conceptual (and for H. Yannaras also conceptual) dependence on modern Western religious and atheistic existentialism. This dependence causes the Orthodox existentialists to reject the main features of the teachings of the thinkers of Greek patristics in all spheres of theology, which cannot be hidden with the help of assurances of fidelity to the “spirit of the fathers”.

The shortcomings of both directions of neopatristics are not obvious to everyone, but open-minded researchers can still clearly identify them: the objective idealism of Fr. Georgy Florovsky and his followers cannot be the answer to all the vital questions of modern man, and Orthodox existentialism departs from Orthodox dogmas, and sometimes even from Christian dogma. Orthodox theology was in need of a fundamental renewal, and the outstanding Romanian theologian Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, who became the founder of the third trend in neopatristics. His theology is built on the basis of using the achievements of Scheller's philosophical anthropology, Hartmann's ontology, von Balthasar's and Ranner's Catholic theology. O. Dumitru Staniloae managed to express the traditional content of the teachings of Greek patristics with the help of the language and concepts of modern philosophy. But his achievements are especially significant in updating the theory of knowledge of God, in returning to the teachings of the fathers and finding new philosophical and theological justifications for them.

Thus, the neopatristic synthesis that Fr. Georgy Florovsky, still not implemented. And it is not even known whether this will be achieved in the future. But instead of a "neo-patristic synthesis", neo-patristics arose - the dominant current of modern Orthodox theology. And its founder was Fr. Georgy Florovsky.

In the history of Christianity, one of the most significant phenomena is the overcoming in our century of linguistic, cultural and geographical boundaries between Christians of the East and West. Just fifty years ago, communication between us was possible only on a technical scientific level, or in areas where Orthodox and Roman Catholics identified their church affiliation with nationality to such an extent that this made meaningful theological dialogue impossible. The picture has now changed fundamentally in two major respects:

1 . Both Eastern and Western Christianity can now be considered represented throughout the world. In particular, the intellectual witness of the Russian diaspora in the period between the two wars and the gradual maturation of American Orthodoxy after World War II did much to bring the Orthodox Church into the mainstream of ecumenical events.

2 . All Christians are facing the challenge of a united and radically de-churched world. This challenge must be faced as such, as a problem in need of a theological and spiritual answer. For younger generations, wherever they may be, it does not matter on what particular spiritual genealogy this answer depends - Western or Eastern, Byzantine or Latin - as long as it sounds "truth" and "life" to them. Therefore, Orthodox theology will either be truly “catholic,” that is, valid for all, or it will not be theology at all. It must define itself as "Orthodox theology" and not as "Eastern", and this it can do without abandoning its historically Eastern roots. These clear facts of our present condition do not at all mean that we need what is usually called a "new theology" which breaks with Tradition and continuity; but it is undeniably necessary for the Church that theology should resolve "today's" questions, and not repeat old solutions to old questions. The Cappadocian Fathers were great theologians because they were able to preserve the content of the Christian gospel when it was challenged by the Hellenistic philosophical outlook. Without their partial acceptance and partial rejection of this worldview - and above all without "their understanding" of it - their theology would be meaningless.

Our task at present is not only to remain true to their thought, but also to imitate them in their openness to the problems of their time. History itself has taken us away from cultural restrictions, provincialism, the psychology of the ghetto.

I

What is the theological world in which we live and with which we are called to engage in dialogue?

"Against" Pascal I say: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. in the knowledge of God. Tillich also writes: "(God) is both a person and a negation of Himself as a person." Faith, which in his eyes is indistinguishable from philosophical knowledge, "includes both itself and self-doubt. Christ is Jesus and the negation Jesus Biblical religion is both a negation and an affirmation of ontology To live unabashedly and courageously in the midst of these tensions and finally to discover their final unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depths of the divine life - this is the task and dignity of human thought.

Although Tillich is often criticized by contemporary radical theologians for what they see as an over-concern with biblical religion, he expresses the mainstream humanist movement to which they also belong: the highest religious truth lies "in the depths of every soul."

What we see in contemporary Western Christian thought is a reaction against the old Augustinian bifurcation between "nature" and "grace" that has defined the entire history of Western Christianity since the Middle Ages. Although Blessed Augustine himself was able to fill the ontological gap between God and man by resorting to Platonic anthropology, attributing to sensus mentis a special ability to know God, yet the bifurcation, to which he contributed so much, dominated both in scholasticism and in the Reformation. Man, understood as an autonomous being - moreover, a fallen man - turned out to be unable not only to save himself, but also to produce or create anything positive without the help of grace. He needed the help of grace, which would create in him a “state”, or habitus, and only then did his actions acquire the character of “merits”. Thus the relationship between God and man was understood as external to both of them. Grace could be given on the basis of the “merits” of Christ, who, by His atoning sacrifice, satisfied the divine justice by virtue of which man had previously been condemned.

Rejecting the concepts of "merits" and "good deeds", the reformers remained true to the original split between God and man. They emphasized it even more strongly in their understanding of the gospel as a free gift of God, as opposed to the utter impotence of fallen man. Man's ultimate destiny is determined by grace alone (sola gratia), and we know about salvation only through Scripture (sola Scriptura). Thus, the cheap "means of grace" distributed by the medieval Church are replaced by the proclamation of mercy from an almighty transcendent God. Barth's Protestant "neo-orthodoxy" gave a new impetus to this essentially Augustinian intuition of the Reformers. But current Protestant theology reacts strongly against Augustinism. Karl Barth himself, in the last volumes of Ecclesiastical Dogmatics, abruptly changes his original position, best expressed in his Epistle to the Romans, and again affirms the presence of God in creation, regardless of the Incarnation. Thus he himself reflects the new theological mood which we find in persons as varied as P. Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin, and from which the more radical and less serious American "new theology" of Hamilton, Van Buren and Altizer is derived.

Below we will return to the ontology of the creature proposed by the late Barthes and Tillich. We note here only its obvious parallelism both with the main interests and with the conclusions of the Russian "sophiological" school. If, as noted, some parts of Barth's Dogmatics could be written about. Sergius Bulgakov, the same can be said, for example, about Tillich's Christology, which, like Bulgakov's Christology, often speaks of Jesus as the expression of the eternal “God-manhood. The parallel with Russian sophiology, as well as the common basis of both schools in German idealism, is quite obvious: if Florensky and Bulgakov were a generation younger, or if their works were simply better known, they would, of course, share both the influence and success of Tillich and Teilhard. de Chardin.

"Sophiology" at the present time is hardly of interest to young Orthodox theologians who prefer to overcome the split between nature and grace on the paths of Christocentric, biblical, patristic. But in Protestantism the philosophical approach to Christian revelation is predominant. It manifests itself simultaneously with another revolution that has taken place in an area that is absolutely decisive for Protestantism: biblical hermeneutics.

Bultmann's and post-Bultmann's emphasis on the difference between Christians' original Christian preaching and historical facts is another way of subjectivizing the Gospel. In Bultmann's eyes, Christian faith, instead of being caused, according to the traditional view, by witnesses who saw the resurrected "Lord" with their own eyes, is, on the contrary, the real source of the "myth" of the Resurrection. Thus, it must be understood only as a natural subjective function of man, knowledge (gnosis) without an objective criterion. If, on the other hand, on the basis of the assumption that every fact that cannot be scientifically verified (such as the Resurrection) is thereby a historical myth, the created order is recognized as completely unchanged even by God Himself, then this essentially postulates the deification of the created order: determinism, obligatory even for God Himself and therefore consonant with His will. In this case, revelation can only be carried out through this very created order. God can only obey the laws and principles established by Himself, and revealed knowledge is not qualitatively different from any other form of human knowledge. The Christian faith, in Tillich's words, in this case is only a "preoccupation with the Unconditional", or "depth" of the created Being.

In the eyes of Tillich, as well as Bultmann, of course, the historical Jesus and His teaching remain at the center of the Christian faith: “Today the essential norm of systematic theology,” writes Tillich in Systematic Theology, “is the New Being in Jesus, as Christ, our ultimate concern. But the fact is that in the general structure of their thought, Jesus can only be chosen as the "ultimate concern" arbitrarily, for there are no objective reasons for us to choose Him in this place. If Christianity is defined only as a response to the natural and eternal human aspirations of the Ultimate, then nothing can prevent us from finding the answer elsewhere.

Such a replacement clearly takes place, for example, in William Hamilton. “The theologian,” he writes, “is sometimes inclined to suspect that Jesus Christ can best be understood not as an object or basis of faith, not as a person, event, or community, but simply as a place to be; as a point of view. This place, of course, is next to the neighbor: “being for his sake. Thus, Christian love for one's neighbor, transformed into a post-Hegelian post-Marxist "social attitude", becomes Tillich's "ultimate concern", practically indistinguishable from the left wing of humanism.

Of course, extreme radicals like Altizer, Hamilton, and Van Buren represent only a small minority among modern theologians, and there is already a reaction to what they represent. However, by nature, this reaction is far from always healthy. Sometimes it consists in a simple reference to traditional authority: magisterium for Roman Catholics; The Bible, understood fundamentalistically, is for Protestants. Essentially, both require a credo quia absurdum - a blind faith unrelated to reason, science, or the social reality of our time. Obviously, this understanding of authority ceases to be theological and essentially expresses the irrational conservatism usually associated in America with political reaction.

Thus (paradoxically!), both extremes in theology agree that they somehow identify Christian preaching with the empirical causes of the reality (social, political, revolutionary) of "this world." It is obvious that the old antinomy between "grace" and "nature" has not yet been resolved; it is rather repressed, whether by a simple denial of the "supernatural" or by the identification of God with some celestial Deux ex machina whose main function is to keep doctrines, societies, structures, and authorities intact. Obviously, there is no place for Orthodox theology in either of these two camps. His main task at this time may be to restore the basic biblical theology of the Holy Spirit as the presence of God among us; a presence that does not suppress the empirical world, but saves it; which unites everyone in one and the same truth, but distributes various gifts, as the highest gift of life; the presence of God, as the Guardian of church tradition and continuity, and at the same time of Him Who Himself, by His presence, makes us truly and finally free children of God. As Metropolitan Ignatius Khazim said this summer in Uppsala, “God is far away without the Spirit; Christ belongs to the past, the gospel is a dead letter, the church is just an organization, authority is domination, mission is propaganda, worship is remembrance, and Christian activity is a slave morality.

II

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit loses a lot if it is considered abstractly. This seems to be one of the reasons why so few good theological works are written about the Holy Spirit, and why even the Fathers almost exclusively speak of Him either in contingent polemical writings or in writings on the spiritual life. However, neither patristic Christology, nor the ecclesiology of the early centuries, nor the concept of salvation itself can be understood outside the mainstream pneumatological context. I will try to illustrate this point of view with five examples, which also seem to me to be precisely the issues that make the Orthodox witness relevant to the current theological situation. These five examples are the main statements of patristic and Orthodox theology.

1 . The world is not divine and needs to be saved.

2 . Man is a theocentric being.

3 . – Christian theology is Christocentric.

4 . – Genuine ecclesiology is personalistic.

5 . – The true concept of God is threefold.

1. - The world is not divine ". In the New Testament, and, moreover, not only in the writings of the Apostle John, “the Spirit who proceeds from the Father” (), “His world cannot accept Him, as if he does not see Him, knows Him below” (), and “spirits”, which subject to the test "if they are from God" (). In the Epistle to the Corinthians, the whole world is described as subject to forces and dominions, “the elements of the world”, opposing Christ, although “everything was created by Him and about Him” (). One of the most characteristic innovations of Christianity was that it demystified, or, if you like, secularized the cosmos: the idea that God dwells in the elements, in the water, in the springs, the stars, the emperor, was from the beginning and completely rejected by the apostolic Church. But at the same time, this same Church condemned all Manichaeism, all dualism: the world is not bad in itself; the elements must proclaim the glory of God; water can be blessed; space can be dominated; the emperor can become a servant of God. All these elements of the world are not a goal in themselves, and to see them as a goal means exactly what their deification meant in the ancient pre-Christian world; but they are defined in the very depths of their being by their connection with their Creator, as well as with man, the image of the Creator in the world.

Therefore, all the rites of consecration, which Orthodox Byzantine worship loves so much (as well as all the rest - ancient worship), necessarily include:

a) elements of a spell, exorcism (“You crushed the heads of the nesting snakes there” in the rank of the great blessing of water on the feast of the Epiphany);

b) The invocation of the Spirit "proceeding" from the Father "", that is, not from the world;

c) The affirmation that in its new, sanctified existence, matter, reoriented towards God and restored to its original relation to the Creator, will now serve man, whom God has made master of the universe.

Thus, the act of blessing and sanctification of any element of the world "liberates" a person from dependence on it and puts it at the service of a person.

This is how ancient Christianity demystified the elements of the material world. The task of the theology of our time is to demystify "Society", "Sex", "State", "Revolution" and other modern idols. Our contemporary prophets of secularization are not entirely wrong in speaking of the secularizing responsibility of Christians: the secularization of the cosmos was from the very beginning a Christian idea; but the problem is that they secularize the Church and replace it with a new idolatry, the worship of the world: by doing so, man again renounces the freedom given to him by the Holy Spirit and submits himself anew to the determinism of history, sociology, Freudian psychology, or utopian progressivism.

2. – Man is a geocentric being”. To understand what “freedom in the Holy Spirit” is, let us first of all remember the very paradoxical statement of St. Irenaeus of Lyons: “The perfect man consists of the union and combination of the soul that receives the Spirit of the Father, and the mixture of this bodily nature, which is also formed in the image of God” ( Against Heres 5, 6, 1). These words of Irenaeus, as well as some passages of his writings parallel to them, must be evaluated not according to the clarifications introduced later by post-Nicene theology (with such a criterion they give rise to many problems), but according to their positive content, which, in other expressions, is also expressed by the totality of the patristic tradition: what makes a person truly human is the presence of the Spirit of God.

Man is not an autonomous and self-sufficient being; his humanity consists primarily in his openness to the Absolute, immortality, creativity in the image of the Creator, and then in the fact that when he created man, he went towards this openness, and therefore communion and communion with divine life and its glory is “natural” for man.

Later, patristic tradition constantly developed the idea of ​​St. Irenaeus (but not necessarily his terminology), and this development is especially important in connection with the doctrine of human freedom.

This passage from the Apostle Paul, just like the anthropology of St. Irenaeus and St. Gregory of Nyssa, suggests a basic statement: nature and grace, man and God, the human spirit and the Holy Spirit, human freedom and the presence of God "are not mutually exclusive". On the contrary, true humanity in its true creativity, in its true freedom, original beauty and harmony, appears precisely in participation in God, or then, as both the Apostle Paul and St. Gregory of Nyssa proclaim, when it ascends from glory to glory, never exhausting either the riches of God or the possibilities of man.

It has now become commonplace to assert that in our time theology must become anthropology. An Orthodox theologian can and should even accept a dialogue on such a basis, provided that from the very beginning it is accepted "open view" per person. Modern secularism, human autonomy, cosmocentricity or sociomagnetism must first of all be cast aside as dogmas. Many of these modern tenets have, as we have already said, very deep roots in Western Christianity's ancient fear of the idea of ​​"involvement" (usually equated with emotional mysticism), in its tendency to view man as an autonomous being. But these dogmas are false in their very essence.

Even now the prophets of "godless Christianity" first of all misinterpret "man." Our younger generation is not secularist, desperately trying to satisfy their natural longing for the "other," the transcendent One True, by resorting to such ambiguous means as Eastern religions, drugs, or psychedelic slogans. Our age is not only the age of secularism; it is also the century of the emergence of new religions or surrogates of religions. This is inevitable because man is a theocentric being: when he is deprived of the true God, he creates false gods.

3. – Christocentric theology”. If the patristic understanding of man is correct, then theology must be Christ-centered. Christocentric theology, based, as it often did, on the idea of ​​external redemption, "satisfaction," a justifying grace added to autonomous human existence, is often opposed to pneumatology. Indeed, there is no place for the action of the Spirit in it. But if our God-centered anthropology is true, if the presence of the Spirit is what makes a man truly human, if man's destiny lies in the restoration of "communion" with God, then Jesus, the new Adam, is the only man in whom true humanity was manifested because He was born in history "of the Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin", is undoubtedly the center of theology, and this centrality in no way limits the place of the Holy Spirit.

Theological Christocentrism in our time is under heavy attack from Bultmann's hermeneutics. If every phenomenon is a myth, since it does not follow the laws of empirical science and experience, then the “appearance-Christ” loses its absolute uniqueness, because this uniqueness is in fact subjectivized. Nevertheless, Christocentrism is nevertheless asserted with force not only by the adherents of Barth's neo-orthodoxy, but also by Tillich. It also exists in the writings of theologians who, like John McCurry, attempt to reconcile the demythologization of events such as the Resurrection and Ascension with the general classical presentation of theological themes. However, even among these comparatively traditional or semi-traditional writers there is a very clear inclination towards a Nestorian or adoptionist Christology.

For example, Tillich expresses this explicitly when he writes that without the concept of sonship, Christ “would be deprived of His finite freedom; for a reshaped being has no freedom to be anything but divine. In this position, the old Western idea is clear that God and man, grace and freedom, are mutually exclusive; in Tillich these are remnants of a "closed" anthropology that excludes Orthodox Christology.

The rehabilitation of Nestorius and his teacher Theodore of Molsuetsky has been undertaken by both historians and theologians since the last century in the name of human autonomy. This rehabilitation has even found prominent Orthodox followers who also show a clear preference for the "historicity" of the Antiochian school, which postulates that history can only be human history. In order to be a "historical" being, Jesus had to be human not only in its entirety, but also in some way "independently". Cyril of Alexandria's central assertion that the Word Itself became the Son of Mary (who is therefore the Mother of God), or the theopaschite expressions formally proclaimed as criteria for Orthodoxy by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553, appear to them to be at best terminological abuses or "barakko" theology. . How can the Logos, that is, God Himself, "die" on the cross according to the flesh, since God, by his very definition, is immortal?

There is no need to enter here into a detailed discussion of the theological concepts associated with the doctrine of hypostatic union. I would only like to stress with all my might that St. Cyril of Alexandria's Theopaschitian formula, "The Word suffered according to the flesh," is one of the greatest existing Christian assertions of the "authenticity" of mankind. For if the Son of God himself, in order to identify himself with mankind, to become "like us in all things, even unto death" - human death - died on the cross, then he thereby testified with greater majesty than any human imagination could imagine, that humanity is indeed the most precious, most vital and enduring creation of God.

Of course, the Christology of St. Cyril presupposes the “open” anthropology of the early and late Fathers: the humanity of Jesus, although it was incarnated in the Logos, was nevertheless humanity as a whole, because the presence of God does not destroy man. Moreover, one could even say that Jesus was more fully human than any of us. Let us quote here the words of Karl Rahner (who, among modern Western theologians, is closest in this respect to the main current of patristic Tradition): “The human being is a reality completely open upwards; a reality that reaches its highest perfection, the realization of the highest possibility of human existence, when in it the Logos Himself begins to exist in the world. It can also be said that Christology, which includes theopaschism, also presupposes "openness" in the being of God. Thus, it is against the background of this Christology that one can agree that theology is necessarily also anthropology, and vice versa, that the only truly Christian understanding of man - his creation, fall, salvation and final destination - is revealed in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, crucified and risen. .

4. - Personalistic ecclesiology". If the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person frees him, if grace means liberation from slavery to the deterministic conditions of the world, then being a member of the Body of Christ also means freedom. Ultimately, freedom means personal existence.

Our worship teaches us very clearly that being a member of the Church is a highly personal responsibility. Catichization, pre-baptismal dialogue, the development of penitential discipline, the evolution of the practice of communion - all this shows the personal nature of the assumption of Christian obligations. It is also well known that in the New Testament the term "member" (meloz), when applied to Christians as "fellows of Christ" (), or "feast one another" (), refers only to individuals, and never to corporate units, such as , local churches. The local church, the Eucharistic community, is the body, while membership is an exclusively personal act.

It is extremely unpopular to talk about "personal Christianity" and "personal" faith in our time, and this is largely because in the West religious personalism is immediately associated with pietism and emotionality. Here again we see the same old misunderstanding of real participation in divine life: when “grace” is understood either as something bestowed by the institutional Church, or as a kind of gift of God’s just and impartial omnipotence in relation to all mankind. Then the manifestation of personal experience of communion with God becomes either pietism or emotional mysticism. Meanwhile, while many Christians today have a great need to identify their Christian faith with social activism, with group dynamics, with political convictions, with utopian theories of historical development, they just lack what is the center of the New Testament gospel: personal living experience. communion with a personal God. When the latter is preached by evangelical revivalists or Pentecostals, it does often take the form of emotional superficiality. But this is only because he has no basis in either theology or ecclesiology.

Therefore, Orthodoxy bears a special responsibility: to realize the enormous importance of the spiritual and patristic understanding of the Church as a body that is at the same time a “sacrament,” containing the objective presence of God in the hierarchical structure, regardless of the personal dignity of its members, and "a community of living, free individuals", and their personal direct responsibility before God, before the Church and before each other. Personal experience finds both its reality and its authenticity in the sacrament, but the latter is given to the community in order to make personal experience possible. The paradox contained in this is best illustrated by the great St. Simeon the New Theologian, perhaps the most “sacramental” of the Byzantine spiritual writers, who, however, considers the opinion of some of his contemporaries that personal experience of communion with God is the greatest heresy. All the saints, both ancient and new, confirm that this paradox is at the very center of Christian life in this present age.

Obviously, it is in this antinomy between the sacramental and the personal that the key to understanding the authority of the Church lies. And here, too, the responsibility of Orthodoxy is almost unique. In our time it is becoming increasingly clear that the problem of authority is not just a peripheral issue between East and West, expressed in the mid-century dispute between Constantinople and Rome, but that the greatest drama of all Western Christianity lies precisely in this issue. That authority, which wrongly considered itself for centuries the only one responsible for the truth and succeeded with amazing success in educating all members of the Church in the virtue of obedience, freeing them at the same time from responsibility, is now openly called into question. In most cases, this is done for false reasons and in the name of false goals, while this authority itself tries to defend itself from the position of obviously indefensible. In reality, however, salvation can come not from authority, for there is clearly no longer faith in authority, but from a theological “restoration.” Will there be anything to say here to Orthodox theology, which rightly claims to have maintained a balance between authority, freedom and responsibility for the truth? If not, then the real tragedy will not be in the loss of our denominational pride, for self-confidence is always a demonic feeling, but in the consequences that can result from this for the Christian faith as such in the world today.

5. - The true concept of God is trinity ". When we mentioned above the Christological formula of St. Cyril, “one of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh,” the formula that we sing at every liturgy as part of the hymn “Only Begotten Son,” we affirm that it is, first of all, a recognition for humanity values ​​so high for God himself to bring him down to the cross. But this formula presupposes the personal or hypostatic existence of God.

The objections to this formula are all based on the identification of the existence of God and His essence. God cannot die, said the theologians of Antioch, because He is immortal and unchangeable in nature or essence. The concept of "the death of God" is logically such a contradiction of terms that it cannot be true either in a religious or in a philosophical sense. At best, it is, like the term "Our Lady" applied to the Virgin Mary, a pious metaphor. Nevertheless, in Orthodox theology, the formula of St. Cyril was not only recognized as true both in the religious and theological sense, but was also made the criterion of Orthodoxy.

God is not bound by philosophical necessities, nor by the properties given to Him by our logic. The patristic concept of upostasiz, unknown to Greek philosophy (it used the word upostasiz in a different sense), distinct in God from His unknown, incomprehensible and therefore indefinable essence, presupposes in God a certain openness, thanks to which the divine Person, or hypostasis, can become wholly human. She goes towards that “openness upwards” that characterizes a person. Thanks to it, the fact is possible that God does not "abide up there," or "in heaven," but actually descends down to mortal humanity; but not in order to absorb or abolish it, but in order to save and restore its original communion with Himself.

This "condescension" of God, according to patristic theology, takes place in the hypostatic or personal existence of God. If this happened in relation to the divine nature or essence (as some so-called "kenotic" theories have argued), then the Logos, approaching death, would become, so to speak, less and less God and would cease to be Him at the moment of death. St. Cyril's formula, on the contrary, suggests that to the question "who died on the cross?" there is no other answer than "God", because in Christ there was no other personal being than the being of the Logos, and that is inevitably "personal" act. Only "someone" can die, not something.

“In the tomb of the flesh, in paradise with the thief, on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, you were incomprehensible.” This is what the Church proclaims in her Paschal hymn: the combination in a single hypostasis of the main features of both natures - divine and human - and each remains what it is.

The human mind cannot object to this teaching on the basis of the properties of the divine essence, because this essence is completely unknown and indescribable, and also because, if we know God directly, it is precisely because she perceived the Son "other nature" than divine nature, "burst" into created being and spoke through the human mouth of Jesus, died a human death, rose from the human tomb and established eternal communion with humanity, sending down the Holy Spirit. “No one can see God anywhere: the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, that confession” ().

It would obviously be too easy to draw a parallel between modern theologians preaching the "death of God" and St. Cyril of Alexandria. Both the context and the task of theology are quite different here and there. However, it is really possible and absolutely necessary for Orthodox theologians to assert that God is not a philosophical concept, not an “essence with properties”, not a concept, but that He is what He is, that knowledge of Him is, first of all, a personal meeting with Him in whom the apostles recognized the incarnate Word; meeting also with That "Other" Who was sent after as our Comforter in the present expectation of the end; that in Christ and by the Holy Spirit we are raised to the Father Himself.

Orthodox theology does not proceed from proofs of the existence of God, does not convert people into philosophical deism: it places them before the Gospel of Jesus Christ and expects from them a free response to this challenge.

It has often been asserted that when the Eastern Fathers speak of God they always begin with three Persons and then prove that they are consubstantial, while the West, beginning with God as a single entity, then tries also to point out the difference between the three Persons. These two trends are the starting point of the Filioque controversy and they are very relevant in our time. In Orthodox theology, God is Father, Son, and Spirit as Persons. Their common divine essence is completely unknown and transcendent, and its very properties are best described in negative terms. However, these Three act personally and make communion with Their common divine life (or energy) possible. Through baptism "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" new life and immortality become a living reality and experience accessible to man.

III

In our time, by virtue of an inevitable process, the Orthodox Church is drawn more and more deeply not only into the so-called "ecumenical dialogue", but here, in the West, also into the stream of social development. This inclusion, unfortunately, is not a process that the Orthodox Church is capable of directing. We confess frankly: the Pan-Orthodox Conferences, about which Professor Karmyris gave us such valuable information, began after all the local Churches had taken decisive steps to participate in ecumenism, and "after" our Churches, our faithful, priests and laity, had joined in contemporary social change. In addition, the entire Orthodox diaspora, and especially the Church in America, which is already an organic part of Western society, is, whether it wants it or not, in constant dialogue with other Christians, atheists and agnostics. Now we can only reflect on what has already happened. Here Orthodoxy can avoid a new historical catastrophe in our generation only through a healthy theological revival. I say "historical catastrophe in our generation" because I believe that the Spirit of Truth cannot allow the catastrophe of the Church as such, although He can obviously allow, as it happened in the past, the catastrophe of individual Churches or generations of Christians. I fully agree with Professor Karmyris when he says that those who want to put aside theology and replace it with sentimental ecumenism, avoiding the so-called "hard questions", betray the true spirit of Orthodoxy. We really need biblical, patristic, and modern theology. And we should remember that it was in dialogue with outsiders—Jews, Gentiles, heretics—that the Fathers, the Apostles, and even the Lord Jesus Himself developed their theology. Let's imitate them!

Here I would also like to note that the ecumenical movement itself is now going through a period of reassessment of values, which, perhaps, will give Orthodox theology an opportunity to express itself. Whatever happens at sensational meetings between church leaders, whatever noise there is at solemn assemblies, no matter how clever the plans of church politicians, the average intelligent Christian is less and less interested in the superficial ecumenism that all this puts forward. Conservatives turn away from it because it often involves ambiguity and compromise. The radicals are not interested in it because the Church in their eyes has no real existence as an institution, and they openly expect its liquidation; therefore they do not need both ecumenical super-institutionalism and super-bureaucracy. Therefore, the future lies in seeing the significance of the Christian gospel in the world at all. The only healthy and meaningful future is in theology. As I have tried to show in my five examples, an Orthodox witness is often exactly what people are looking for, consciously or unconsciously.

Therefore, it is inevitable for the Orthodox Church and her theology to define itself both as Tradition and fidelity to the past, and as a response to the present. In the face of the modernity of the Church, in my opinion, two very specific dangers must be avoided: 1) she must not consider herself a "denomination", and 2) she must not consider herself as a sect.

Both of these temptations are strong in our position in America. Those, for example, who identify Orthodoxy with nationality, necessarily exclude from among the members of the Church and even from the interests of the Church anyone and everything that does not belong to certain ethnic traditions. What a denomination and a sect have in common is that they are both exceptional: the first is relativistic by its very definition, since it considers itself one of the possible forms of Christianity, and the second because it finds pleasure (really demonic pleasure) in isolation, in separation, in difference and in a superiority complex.

We all know that "both" of these positions are represented in American Orthodoxy. The task of Orthodox theology is to exclude and condemn both of them. Theology alone, of course, combined with love, hope, humility and other necessary components of true Christian behavior, can help us discover and love our Church as the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church, as we all know, is not only "universal". She is true not only in the sense that she has the truth, but also in that she rejoices in finding the truth outside of herself. It is for all people, and not only for those who are its members today, and it is ready to serve without any conditions everywhere any progress towards good. She suffers if there is error or division anywhere, and never compromises in matters of faith, but is infinitely compassionate and tolerant of human weakness.

Obviously, such a Church is not an organization created by human hands. If we alone were responsible for it, it would simply no longer exist. Fortunately, we are only required to be true members of the divine Head of the Church, for, as Saint Irenaeus wrote: “Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace; but the Spirit is the Truth” (Against Heres. 3, 24, 1).