EASTERN ORTHODOXY

The beginnings of philosophical theology in early Christianity may be traced to the works of the Apologists of the second century ce. Justin Martyr (c.100-c.165) and Athenagoras (second century) defended the Christian worldview by appealing to reason and revelation. The attitudes of the early Fathers towards Greek and Hellenistic philosophies ranged from outright rejection (e.g., Tertullian, Hippolytus, Jerome) to selective integration (e.g., Justin, Clement of Alexandria and the Origenist tradition). It is indisputable that the categories and presuppositions of later Platonism, Stoicism and to a lesser degree other philosophical schools of late antiquity played a signi cant role in the development of early Christian theology. However, the normative assessment of this in uence continues to be a subject of lively debate among the theologians and historians of doctrine. In contrast to largely critical assessments of Hellenism that prevailed in German historiography of the twentieth century, Georges Florovsky (1893-1979) saw ‘Christian Hellenism’ (i.e., the synthesis of revelation and Hellenistic philosophies which came to its fruition in Byzantium) as constitutive of Orthodox teaching. Florovsky went so far as to claim that Russian theologians, notably Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), Nikolai Berdiaev (1874-1948), and Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), took the wrong turn by abandoning the normativity of Hellenism and embracing modern metaphysical and epistemological projects, especially German Idealism (Florovsky 1937). Other Orthodox theologians, such as John Meyendorff (1926-92) and Alexander Schmemann (1921-83), unlike Florovsky, did not stake as much upon the purist retention of Christian Hellenism. Rather, they saw the categories of Greek philosophy as neutral tools that in principle could nd their functional equivalents in contemporary philosophical conceptuality. It may be useful to compare this debate among Orthodox patristics scholars to the one on the status of Aristotelian philosophy among the neo-Thomists. The debate about the status of Hellenism in Orthodox theology has more than purely historical interest. Most present-day Eastern Orthodox theologians work with the tacit assumption of enduring continuity between patristic and contemporary Orthodox modes of theologizing. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that the Eastern Orthodox tradition has not suffered from two crises that disrupted the intellectual history of the western Church: the barbarian invasions of the early Middle

Ages and the Reformation. The intellectual shift associated with the transition from the age of the Fathers to the age of the Schoolmen in the West was, comparatively speaking, inconsequential for the East. Its politically tumultuous past notwithstanding, the Christian East experienced no crisis of authority comparable in depth to the one endured by the Christian West during the Reformation and Enlightenment. Strikingly, neither the political dominance of Muslims in the Middle East, nor even the confrontation with militant atheism during the twentieth century, had precipitated equally dramatic changes in the dominant patristic paradigm of Orthodox theology. The Eastern Orthodox Church is commonly described as the Church of the seven Ecumenical Councils (Ware 1993). This statement means that all Eastern Orthodox theologians take the core teachings of these councils – the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian de nition, the de nition about the two wills in Christ, and the de nition concerning the veneration of icons – as supremely authoritative (although they may disagree on the meaning and function of these statements in the modern context). More broadly, the description ‘the Church of the seven Ecumenical Councils’ implies that the tacit epistemic commitments of the Orthodox theology are pre-modern: the appeal to the tradition (or, more precisely, to the divine revelation as enshrined in the tradition of the Church) has priority over the appeals to reason and experience. It is the conciliar mind of the Church, not the autonomous mind of an individual theologian, nor the Bible, nor the pope, that is the nal court of appeal in doctrinal matters. The principle of sobornost’ (conciliarity) plays a pivotal role in resolving doctrinal disputes (Khomiakov 1907). The Orthodox theology also reveals its pre-modern character in that most Orthodox theologians assume the supernaturalist view of the world to be true without offering any formal arguments in support of this assumption. It is revealing that natural theology has never gained in Eastern Orthodox thought the distinctive, if contested, place that it came to occupy in the philosophical theology of the West since Scholasticism. Negatively, the pre-modern character of Eastern Orthodox theology may be viewed as a sign of its backwardness. It is telling, for example, that the Russian Orthodox Church in more than a thousand years of its existence did not put forth a single dogmatic statement. This is a sign of a remarkable resilience to change, especially when compared to an impressive doctrinal fecundity of western Christian communions in the same period. One could object, however, that the progress in theology and philosophy, unlike that in natural sciences, is not measured by the number of new theories that are put forth in a given historical period. Hence, the Orthodox Church’s reluctance to endorse new dogmas as universally binding upon all faithful – what one might call its dogmatic reserve – far from being an indicator of the Church’s theological infertility, may be attractive for several reasons. One advantage of such dogmatic minimalism is that it provides a broader range of acceptable theological options and offers new opportunities for seeking doctrinal unity in ecumenical dialogue. Furthermore, given the postmodern disillusionment with the Enlightenment project, many western theologians have turned to the Eastern Fathers and contemporary Orthodox theology,

seeking remedies for the intellectual wounds in icted by modernity. Some western thinkers – for example, the representatives of the resourcement movement – are compelled by the unapologetic supernaturalism of the Fathers. Others appeal to the patristic paradigm in order to free contemporary theology from its captivity to the Enlightenment epistemologies (Abraham 1998; Milbank et al. 1999). Given the high status accorded to patristic heritage by the Orthodox, it is useful to map the types of Eastern Orthodox philosophical theology according to their engagement with the intellectual and spiritual heritage of the fathers. Narrowing this survey to the developments since the mid-nineteenth century, one may distinguish two main patterns of such an engagement: retrieval and modernization. The retrievalist project, commonly referred to as neopatristic synthesis, has a uni ed set of assumptions (discussed below). In the modernizing project the questions raised by the Enlightenment and German Idealism determined the extent and the manner in which the thought of the Fathers was engaged.