What is Theology? What is Orthodox Theology?
Fr. Andrew Louth
"What is theology?" We first need to avoid a trap set by the word itself. There are lots of areas of knowledge designated by the suffix -logy: biology, anthropology, psychology, psephology, geology... I've lost count of the number of times people have asked me what I am a professor of, and in response to my saying "theology" have responded by saying how fascinating it must be to study rocks, and the formation of continents, and so forth!
There is the danger of setting theology down alongside all these academic disciplines— mostly sciences—and assuming that theology is one of them, the difference being the object of our study: we study God, other scientists study the phenomenon of life, or what it is to be human, or the mind, of the process of voting,... or rocks. If we lazily grant this assumption, then we are well on the way to all the problems that beset modern theology: its academic nature and the consequent gap between the "pew and the pulpit," as our Protestant friends put it, together with the array of specializations that make up academic theology, about which Fr John spoke: biblical theology (split up into Old Testament, New Testament, and even Intertestamental), historical theology and/or church history (again split up by period), dogmatic theology, systematic theology, moral theology, and so the list goes on—specializations that quickly become autonomous, as if moral theologians need know nothing about the New Testament! But, in fact, the term theology, theologia, is a good deal older than the other -ologies. Theologia, and the related terms theologos ("theologian"), theologein (the verb—whatever it is that "theologians" do) go back to Plato, who seems to have coined the word, and it means speaking—uttering a logos—about God or the gods.
The early Christian use is interestingly specific: the most common use of theologos is to designate one of the scriptural authors, only gradually extended to designate anyone else, and then very restrictively, so that it is only regularly applied to Gregory "the Theologian" and Symeon "the New Theologian" in the Orthodox tradition. To speak truly of God is a rare grace, and to call Gregory or Symeon a theologos is to make a claim in no way commonplace: it is to set them alongside the scriptural authors, alongside John the Theologian, par excellence. And then there is the famous remark of Evagrios: "If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly, you will be a theologian." To speak truly of God requires true prayer, for it is only in true prayer that one really knows God, and only one who knows God can speak of him. Almost a millennium later, St Gregory Palamas has something very similar to say to Barlaam, when he affirms: "It is not safe for those who do not know how to speak to God to speak about God."
To think too easily that theology just means the "study of God" is, then, to run into all sorts of possible misconceptions. This was something that the theologians of the Russian emigre tradition were very much aware of, as they sought to articulate their understanding of theology in a western context in the last century.
It is interesting—it was perhaps an advantage—that none of them— Fr Georges Florovsky, Fr Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky— were products of the theological academies of Russia, and Florovsky, as we all know, very deliberately turned his back on the tradition of the theological academies, consigning them to what he called the "Babylonian Captivity of the Russian Church," and sought to return to the more authentic tradition of the Fathers. Despite the well-known differences between these emigré theologians, they had a great deal in common. They all shared the "personalism" of nineteenth-century Russian thought: the understanding that the "person" (which they often called ipostas, the Russian version of the Greek hypostasis) was distinct from the "individual," the fate to which humankind seemed to be committed with the breakdown of traditional societies and the advance of modern industrialization; Soviet "collectivization" treated humans as interchangeable (and disposable) individuals, whereas communities fostered the growth of persons. Also, and not unrelated, they all had an understanding of theology as based on encounter with God. In the West they discovered that, although official western theology, the debased scholasticism of the Catholic seminaries, as well as the tired liberalism of Protestantism, was something hard to stomach, there were those in the West who shared their sense of the way theology needed to go, though our emigres were perhaps more aware of what they had in common with their Roman Catholic friends than with the Protestants (Barth, in particular, could have made a good ally, but few Orthodox theologians knew enough to make the connection).
Florovsky's Ways of Russian Theology was intended to clear the ground for the new approach to theology that he came to call the "neo-patristic synthesis." In that work he recounted the errant wanderings of Russian theology to the point where it needed to be recalled to the "patristic style and method" which had been "lost."
This "patristic theology must be grasped from within," he declared. Florovsky spoke of "intuition" as well as "erudition," and argued that to regain this patristic way of thinking, or phronema, "Russian theological thought must still pass through the strictest school of Christian Hellenism." Lossky was to echo Florovsky in this, and though they both thought that Bulgakov was a kind of misbegotten progeny of the "Babylonian captivity" (in captivity now not so much to arid scholasticism as to the all-too-fertile imaginings of German Idealism, with its roots in gnosticism and esotericism), in truth, Bulgakov shared many of their concerns, though perhaps had more of a sense of what was needed if Orthodox theology was to speak in the West with a voice not too forbiddingly alien (I am not suggesting that he solved this problem, but he was certainly aware of it).
There is, then, a deep tradition of genuine reflection about the nature of theology, and in particular, Orthodox theology, on which we can and must draw in our new situation. But we are in a new situation; things have changed and in a variety of ways our problems are different from those faced by the great theologians of the Russian emigration. These differences are both internal and external, both concerned with who we Orthodox are, and what are the challenges presented us by the world in which we live and to which we belong. The question of who we are is becoming more and more pressing. There are now Orthodox theologians whose intellectual training is wholly or mostly western: Metropolitan Kallistos is a fine example, but the same is true in a different way of Frs Schmemann, Meyendorff, and Bobrinskoy. They are not Russian theologians who find themselves in the West, but people of Russian descent, educated in the West, and therefore with an intellectual formation that is genuinely western. It is, it seems to me, becoming difficult to be clear what constitutes Orthodox theology and who is an Orthodox theologian. At the conference in the spring of 2007 at Fordham University on the Orthodox Readings of Augustine, the issue of what counts as Orthodox theology was publicly—and somewhat acrimoniously—aired. Is an Orthodox theologian a theologian who is Orthodox? Or are there theologians who are Orthodox whose theology is scarcely Orthodox? (Or even: are there theologians who are not Orthodox, but whose theology is? For instance, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams?) Another ingredient in the mix that makes up this issue is that, since the time of the period entre deux guerres and immediately after, the Orthodox voice in the West is much less exclusively Russian. There are now plenty of other voices—Greek, Serbian, Romanian—and since the collapse of the Soviet Union we can now hear the voices of those who are not emigres and encounter the West in a very different way. It is still striking, however, that many of these newer voices—for example, to stick to an older generation and avoid a multitude of names, Fr Dumitru Stäniloae, Fr Justin Popovich and Christos Yannaras—still seem to share an understanding of theology as outlined above: marked by personalism, theology as rooted in encounter with God, and also the importance of the Fathers. The world of Orthodox theology is now peopled with a diversity of voices that was less true (or less evidently true) of the last century. The question of what defines an Orthodox theology, or Orthodox theology, is one that is going to demand some attention.
How could we define Orthodox theology? A theology that is faithful to Scripture and the OEcumenical Councils? That would, however, scarcely distinguish Roman Catholic theology from Orthodox theology. To expand this base by adding the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341,1351, and 1368—as Lossky did explicitly, and others have done implicitly—looks a little artificial, while to include the "symbolic books" of the seventeenth century would seem to reduce Orthodoxy to a denomination, which I think any Orthodox would repudiate.
I have no definitive answer, but I have some suggestions for discussion.
First, who is a theologian? Not primarily academic theologians. According to the Divine Liturgy, it is the bishops who have the grace "rightly to divide (define? discern?) the word of Your truth," not theologians, however learned. Another fundamental definition of theologian that we have already quoted (and we Orthodox do quote this all the time) is that of Evagrios, who equated the state of pure prayer with theology. These are the primary meanings of the term "theologian," so, I would suggest, that it doesn't matter that much how we define academic theologians; they aren't that important!
But let me suggest some criteria for genuinely Orthodox theology:
First, Orthodox theology, like the life of the Orthodox Christian, is focused on the Paschal Mystery. The paschal mystery, and its celebration both Sunday by Sunday and pre-eminently in the paschal vigil, is something we are so conscious of that we are sometimes tempted to say that it is distinctively Orthodox—as if the resurrection was not central to any form of Christianity. But within Orthodoxy it is very prominent, and for those who have made a pilgrimage to Orthodoxy the experience of the paschal vigil, the contagious joy of that occasion, is usually an important milestone. And so it should be. It is here, as we contemplate the death and resurrection of Christ—the sorrowful joy, matching the "joyful sorrow" of which St John Climacus speaks as marking the ascetic life—that we come to understand who Christ is. There are a multitude of ways of expressing this, all of them falling short of the mystery, but let me take one, picking up a central theme in Fr John's lecture yesterday. It is here that we learn what is meant by being able "to call upon the God of Heaven as Father, and to say: Our Father..." In the Garden of Gethsemane, we hear the Lord calling on God as Father: "Abba, Father, let this cup pass, yet not what I will, but what you will." Then, on the cross, the Lord calls out: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing,"
"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." And finally, in the Garden of the Resurrection, the Lord speaks to the weeping Magdalene of "My Father and your Father, my God and your God"— extending to us participation in the mystery of being children of the One we call Father and who is our Father. What holds the whole paschal mystery together is Jesus' prayer to his Father as Father, his prayer to the One who created everything and in whose hands are all the issues of life and death as "Father," however dark and humanly desperate things seemed to be. It was the conviction of St Máximos the Confessor that this prayer to the Father was a prayer both human and divine, the expression of both his human and divine will, that led him to resist to the point of death any attempt by the Byzantine Emperor and his compliant hierarchs to fudge the reality of Christ's experience in the Garden and on the Cross.
A second criterion is that Orthodox theology is apophatic. This was the conviction of all the great Orthodox theologians of the last century, though we need to note that they did not all mean the same thing when they spoke of theology as apophatic, and they all thought that apophatic theology means a lot more than simply a theology that privileges the moment of negation: it is more than a qualifier, "Of course, the reality is all much more than this." For Lossky, it meant that the human intellect, encountering God, is not just conscious of its frailty, but more fundamentally challenged to its very depths by an act (or state) of "the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God": a metanoia in which "knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries." Fr Stäniloae saw in the apophatic dimension of theology the pressure of experience, an experience that could never be fully grasped and expounded. While for Christos Yannaras, the apophatic dimension of theology, which he called an "apophaticism of the person" as opposed to an "apophaticism of essence." expresses the inexhaustibility of personal knowledge—and there is no other knowledge of God than personal knowledge—and "leads Christian theology to use the language of poetry and images for the interpretation of dogmas much more than the language of conventional logic and schematic concepts."
Thirdly, what about academic theology as such: the theology taught in seminaries and universities, and expressed in learned journals and monographs? Here the situation is interestingly complicated. There are Orthodox journals, and Orthodox presses, and Orthodox Faculties, but a lot of Orthodox theology finds expression in journals not exclusively Orthodox, university presses, and many Orthodox theologians belong to faculties in secular universities (or "public" universities, as we call them in England), or in confessional universities, Catholic or Protestant, and often enough not in faculties of theology (which often enough have been transmogrified in faculties of religious studies), but faculties of philosophy, or history, or some other discipline. Academic theology tends to "borrow" the approach of another discipline—history, or less commonly philosophy (it is striking how few Orthodox theologians would be regarded as systematic theologians by their academic peers). Florovsky reflected on the role of the Christian historian as theologian in a famous paper, interesting written originally as a contribution to the Festschrift for the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich: "The Predicament of the Christian Historian." In it he made the important point, which relates to his "personalism" noted above, that the Christian historians approach to history is concerned not with "objects," but with "subjects," it is a personal engagement with persons, not an impersonal survey of events and happenings. This is not the point to explore this further, but I would like to use it as a springboard for my final remarks, which concern less the place of Orthodox theology in the world of secular learning, but the place of Christian theology (Fr Georges spoke of the predicament of the "Christian" historian, not simply the "Orthodox" historian).
It seems to me that the importance of there remaining a Christian voice within an increasingly secular academe, and one that Orthodox must face if they are not to allow themselves to be enclosed in a ghetto (something against which Fr Chad Hatfield has spoken challengingly), is that there is a dimension beyond the disciplines of human learning and science that Christian theologians, whatever their academic "specialism," must bear witness to. We are faced by a multitude of problems: problems concerning the environment, profound bioethical problems, especially those concerned with the beginning and end of earthly life, economic and political problems, problems concerned with justice, a justice that is to mean fairness not just between the different classes, but between nations and continents, all these problems raised in a context of relativist post-modernism, globalization and consumerism. It is too easy for these problems to be seen simply as questions of human management, so that all we need to do is work out a human solution and impose it—an approach that is likely to lead to a sense of being utterly overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the issues, which itself will lead to despair, or an ostrich-like attempt to ignore them, or a temptation to adopt draconian solutions that will undermine the very humanity that we feel to be at threat, or to a kind of hubris that imagines that, of course, we shall devise techniques, for the human is in control, now even in control of the process of evolution itself.
The Christian has to try and see that all these problems take on a different dimension if we can see the universe as created by God, and all existence, including our existence, as a gift, a gift to be received in thanksgiving. Earlier, when speaking of the different valencies of apophatic theology, I might have mentioned the theologian who introduced the term "apophatic" into Christian use, namely Dionysios the Areopagite.
One of the implications for Dionysios of his apophaticism is that when we speak of God, we are not describing an object more or less accurately, but rather we are praising the One to whom we owe everything. The fundamental attitude to existence on the part of the Christian is to be one of praise and thanksgiving, eucharistia, the very name of the central Christian sacrament: an attitude of thanksgiving, not suspicion, or resentment, or simply world-weary acceptance. That attitude will foster an approach to the problems faced by humanity that is not caught between despair and hubris, but is rather marked by humility and confidence, a confidence inspired not by ourselves or our resourcefulness, but by a recognition of God as Creator, and a creator who cares for his creation.
With such an attitude, our responsibility will be no less, but if we realize that God is creator, preserver, redeemer and sustainer, we shall look for signs of his love in the cosmos, and find it in the cosmic cross, expressing that love, which the Fathers saw as reaching out through the universe, from the heights to the depths, from the furthest East to the furthest West, as was symbolized in the ceremony performed over the last few days in the lowering and raising of the Cross to each of the four points of the compass, as we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross. Our responsibility for the world in which we live will be no less, for though we realize that all does not depend on us, for we are not creators, our conviction is and remains that upholding all is the love of God, to which we respond with a response of love, as we contemplate the mystery of God’s love revealed in the Cross.
Source: St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly Vol.51 No.4 (2007) 435-444.
