What almost always passes for Orthodox theology among English-speaking Orthodox these days is actually just a branch of the larger Orthodox picture. Indeed, it tends sometimes to be rather sectarian.
The Orthodox Church is an ancient castle, as it were, of which only two or three rooms have been much in use since about 1920. These two or three rooms were furnished by the Russian émigrés in Paris between the two World Wars. This furniture is heavily neo-Palamite and anti-Scholastic. It relies heavily on the Cappadocians, Maximus, and Gregory Palamas (who are good folks, or course). Anything that does not fit comfortably into that model is dismissed as Western and even non-Orthodox.
Consequently, one will look in vain in that theology for any significant contribution from the Alexandrians, chiefly Cyril, and that major Antiochian, Chrysostom. When these are quoted, it is usually some incidental point on which they can afford to be quoted.
Now I submit that any Orthodox theology that has so little use for the two major figures from Antioch and Alexandria is giving something less than the whole picture.
Likewise, this popular neo-Palamite brand of Orthodoxy, though it quotes Damascene when it is convenient, never really engages Damascene’s manifestly Scholastic approach to theology.
Much less does it have any use for the other early Scholastic theologians, such as Theodore the Studite and Euthymus Zygabenus. There is no recognition that Scholasticism was born in the East, not the West, and that only the rise of the Turk kept it from flourishing in the East.
There is also no explicit recognition that the defining pattern of Orthodox Christology was formulated in the West before Chalcedon. Pope Leo’s distinctions are already very clear in Augustine decades before Chalcedon. Yet, Orthodox treatises on the history of Christology regularly ignore Augustine.
Augustine tends to be classified as a Scholastic, which he most certainly was not.
But Western and Scholastic are bad words with these folks.
In fact, however, Augustine and the Scholastics represent only other rooms in the larger castle.
For this reason I urge you, as you can, to read in the Orthodox sources that tend to get skipped in what currently passes for Orthodoxy. For my part, I believe the Russian émigré theology from Paris, which seems profoundly reactionary and anti-Western, is an inadequate instrument for the evangelization of this country and the world. I say this while gladly recognizing my own debt to Russian émigré theology.
– Father Patrick Henry Reardon (All Saints’ Orthodox Church, Chicago), an excerpt from an e-mail to an inquirer that’s been making the rounds in the Orthodox and Catholic blogospheres
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I do, I confess, take exception to the claim [by Fr John McGuckin] that [my] book [The Beauty of the Infinite] ‘is not Orthodox theology’. Of course it is. Admittedly it does not much resemble the sort of ‘neo-Palamite’, ‘neo-patristic’ books which have dominated Eastern theology since the middle of the last century, when the great ressourcements movement that has done so much to define modern Orthodoxy was inaugurated. But Orthodox theology has taken many forms over the centuries – mystical, scholastic, mystagogical, idealist, neo-patristic, even ‘Sophiological’ – all of which have been perfectly legitimate expressions of the Eastern Church’s mind. And frankly, I think that the theological idiom to which Orthodox theology has been confined for the last fifty years or so has largely exhausted itself and has become tediously repetitive. It has also, to a very great extent, done much to distort the Orthodox understanding of the traditions of both East and West.
– David Bentley Hart, Scottish Journal of Theology, 60(1): 95-101 (2007).
This is a life-line! I was coming to despair of the possibility of a Catholic-Orthodox rapprochement but this is really encouraging. Thank you so much.
Something I have been saying for years is this: pretending that there is ONE Orthodox theology and that Byzantine Scholastics never existed will never make that the truth.
You might find this article by Fr. Pat interesting as well. http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=11-05-019-f
Thanks for these quotes. They articulate better than I can several thoughts which have lately coalesced in my mind and have lead (as Fr Patrick indicates) to this depressing conclusion: that modern American Orthodoxy has bought into the notion that it is a denomination.
One of the problems of western christians has been the tendency to follow a limited number, indeed single, voices. Thus Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin. It would be a mistake for the Orthodox Church to go down that road, especially as the west is beginning to rediscover the Orthodox fathers. They all have a place.
“One of the problems of western christians has been…”
It always has to come back to that, doesn’t it?
This is a perennial temptation on all sides throughout church history. The Non-Chalcedonians come to mind, with their extreme reverence for Saint Cyril of Alexandria.
Music to my ears! I believe that Western Christendom needs to understand Palamism and engage with it constructively if progress towards unity is to be made. Since such a movement is underway already among Western theologians (and since it may well be carried to an excessively reverential point in some cases) it is SO good to read Orthodox theologians pleading for a less monolithic understanding of their own tradition. Polla ta eti!
James W.
Who do Catholics read? (in no particular order)
Augustine
Chrysostom
Anselm
Lombard
Abelard
Aquinas
Bernard of Cl.
Von Balthazar
Rahner
Kung
Wojtyla
Ratzinger
Gilson
Mauritain
Lonergan
de Lubac
MacIntyre
Courtney Murray
Dulles
Chardin
Chesterton
Newman
Ligori
Hippolytus of Rome
Loyola
Irenaeus
Bonaventure
Cyprian
Cyril of Alex.
Gregory of Nazianzus
Gregory of Nyssa
Pachomius
Origen
Justin Martyr
Ignatius of Antioch
and innumerable other patristic, medieval, post-Reformation and modern sources…
Just to name a few from my own background. Catholic theologians are anything but over reliant on too few sources. Catholic theologians are the best educated and most prolific body of theological scholars in the world.
Your comment is just completely uninformed.
The theological limitations of a tiny, resource limited, and thoroughly fragmented Orthodoxy in the US cannot be blamed on “the West.”
That said, I am pleased to read this post which, if headed (a very big if), may provide some greater avenues for East West theological discussion. To dialogue, one must first know ones own tradition thoroughly.
When Fr. Reardon speaks here of the theology of Russian émigrés in Paris between the world wars being “profoundly reactionary and anti-Western,” I suspect he has Fr. Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky particularly in mind. It should be remembered that Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, whose prayer is featured on the sidebar of this blog, was also part of that émigré generation.
It may be that that generation embodied the sort of theological diversity and creative encounter with the West that Prof. Hart would like to see in contemporary Orthodoxy. At the same time, it was not diversity as such or for its own sake that those writers pursued; they were trying to keep the Orthodox faith alive at a time when, in the country of their birth, serious efforts were being made to wipe it out. The encounter with the West brought about serious and creative reflection about what in fact the Orthodox faith is, that is, the inheritance they wished to preserve and the truth they wished to live.
Something similar, I would suggest, occurred in thirteenth-century Byzantium. Part of the multiplicity Hart sees in Orthodox history consists of diverse answers to the question of whether or not the spiritual inheritance of Eastern Christianity is compatible with that of the Christian West. Both in the thirteenth century and in the twentieth, it is the non-compatibalists who eventually win out. Surely part of the task that faces present-day Orthodox Christians, if we want to live in the truth and not merely be intelligent parrots, is to reexamine that winning out, i.e., to be critical about our own history.
Most interestingly, several have argued quite convincingly that St Gregory Palamas read (in translation) and made use of St Augustine’s de Trinitate when writing the Triads. A similar argument has been advanced by Meyendorff of the dependence of Cabasilas’ “The Life in Christ” on Anselm and Aquinas as well as Augustine.
Fr J,
Some of those are not Catholic Theologians! Luther is more orthodox than Kung for a start…
Christian – well beside the point! We do read them, there writings are studied and taught – sometimes for their positive value, sometimes to dissect and see where they went wrong.
But the point was that there is wide diversity in what informs Catholic thought and contradicts James W’s broad sweeping indictment “One of the problems of western christians has been the tendency to follow a limited number, indeed single, voices.”
What do you think?
Theological schools are not the same as the defined deposit of faith–there can be no opinion here. But the body of defined dogma is rather miniscule in comparison to theologoumena, or theological explanations. Sophiaism is a theological position fraught with many unsound opinions, which tends not to reflect the mind of the Orthodox Church. But then one has to await the ordinary magisterium of the Orthodox Church to comment on it.
I guess I can applaud Fr. Patrick in his attempt to get we Orthodox to appreciate the vast treasure of Orthodox theology, but I am reluctant to pretend that we Orthodox are somehow poverty stricken by our veneration of Palamite insights into the mystery of God.
As a seminarian I can say most assuredly that we are regularly exposed to the varied growth of Orthodox theology and even to an appreciation of the theological and historical influences on both East and West. Fr. Patrick seems to be under the mistaken notion that we Orthodox are somehow ignorant of these writers and their works. He may even believe we are ignorant of Western theologians. If these are notions he holds, he is very sadly mistaken, as well as other critics of the “poor, beknighted Orthodox.” The serious and extensive theologican education I am currently experiencing is quite different from the image left by fr. Patrick and others.
I also am thrilled to see this dialog occur and to see the fruit of harmony that can result from this work.
I guess my nagging reluctance to agree with Fr. Patrick totally stems from living in the broken theological world of Evangelicalism so long thart I am quite happy to convalesce in one of the “rooms” of the castle for a while. While I am confident that there is much more that unites us than divides us, that which does indeed divide us is not illusionary and it will not be overcome by any other than robust and frank theological work and prayer.
For Fr. Patrick to, in my humble opinion, chastise all of Orthodoxy in the West as too influenced by Russian emegres is really nothing more than him making the same mistake he accuses others of making. For me, I will be happy to learn Orthodoxy at the feet of Fr. Schmemann and Fr. Lossky as well as St. Gregory and dear, blessed Augustine.
“For Fr. Patrick to, in my humble opinion, chastise all of Orthodoxy in the West as too influenced by Russian emegres is really nothing more than him making the same mistake he accuses others of making.”
Gosh, I don’t recall chastising or accusing anyone.
Nor — contrary to what some of our correspondents seem to think — did I have in mind to make Orthodoxy more palatable to Western Christians.
Nor, for that matter, to encourage ecumenical dialogue between East and West.
None of these (good) things was on my mind.
I intended, rather, to point out what appears to me a widespread failure among Orthodox Christians to appreciate the wealth of Orthodox theology.
The problem is real. For instance, I have lost count of the critics who impugn my own adherence to the Orthodox faith every time I quote Augustine or Hugh of St. Victor.
If our correspondent can speak of “dear, blessed Augustine,” he does not breathe the same air, I think, as Lossky or Romanides.
If this means that seminary training has improved, I am glad to learn of it.
‘When Fr. Reardon speaks here of the theology of Russian émigrés in Paris between the world wars being “profoundly reactionary and anti-Western,” I suspect he has Fr. Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky particularly in mind.’
I’ve read a good bit of Florovsky, and he’s never struck me as either reactionary or anti-Western. I haven’t read much Lossky. Actually, Fr. Patrick has encouraged me personally to read as much Florovsky as I can.
Thank you very much for posting, Father Patrick!
I think the Russian emigres were reacting to the resurgence of neo-scholasticism in Catholic theology, particularly in France and Germany.
They weren’t the only ones as the history of Catholic theology in that period shows.
The ressourcement movement was definitely a reaction to neo-scholasticism, again in France and Germany.
What was insightful and cogent back then is now somewhat dated.
In a sense, neo-Palamism is as dated as Neo-Thomism.
Excellent points, Procopius.
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This post seems to express one facet of the conclusion I have come to as a Lutheran. I recognize that the catholicity of Lutheranism is deficient when compared to Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. However, as expressed in this article, there are areas in which the latter churches appear to be deficient in their catholicity as well. To join either church, I am forced to proclaim a belief that it is “the” church in which the fullness of the faith is found.
Because of concerns such as those raised in this post, I cannot make that proclamation about Orthodoxy, and for various reasons, I cannot make that proclamation about Roman Catholicism either. So, I remain where I am.