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ISSN 0266-7177
REVIEW ESSAY:
THE ORTHODOX DOGMATIC
THEOLOGY OF DUMITRU
STǍNILOAE
ANDREW LOUTH
Dr Andrew Louth
Department of Theology, Abbey House, Palace Green, Durham, DH1 3RS, UK
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
254 Andrew Louth
Ioan Ica in the Festschrift for Fr Dumitru’s ninetieth birthday (which turned
out in the event to be a Denkschrift):3 it runs to fifty pages, and includes
hundreds of items. It also reveals why, despite such a prodigious out-
put, Fr Dumitru’s name is not well-known outside his native Romania.
For Fr Dumitru had a deeply practical understanding of the role of the
theologian, who is to interpret the times for the benefit of his fellow-
Christians. So, whereas the list of theological articles runs to 210 items,
the items of journalism, especially in Telegraful Român, which he edited for
many years, runs to twice that: precisely 420. Such ephemeral—‘epiousial’
might be a better word—writing is not likely to find readers from another
country, or even in another period: but that should not disguise its
importance, especially when one considers the ‘interesting times’ (to use the
terms of the Chinese curse) through which Fr Dumitru lived. Another
massive part of his work, which is by its nature of little interest outside
Romania, is his work of translation: 29 volumes are listed, plus 4 ‘in the
press.’ First comes his translation of Androutsos’ Dogmatics of the Eastern
Orthodox Church (1907; Stǎniloae’s translation, 1930). The importance of this
translation was not intrinsic, for as he translated it (as a doctoral student in
Athens in the later 1920s), he came to feel the inadequacies of this ‘scholastic’
approach to Orthodox theology: a legacy of the resistance to the pro-
testantising influence of the Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril Loukaris in the
seventeenth century by such as Peter Mogila and Dositheos of Jerusalem (on
whom Stǎniloae was writing his Athens doctoral thesis), both of whom
had links with what is now Romania. Like Fr Georges Florovsky—and about
the same time—this led Staniloae to turn back to the springs of Orthodox
theology: the Greek Fathers. It is to the recovery of this—and making it
available to his fellow-Romanian Christians, not just to scholars—that the
bulk of Fr Dumitru’s labour of translation was devoted. Between 1946 and
1991, there appeared the twelve substantial volumes (typically of about
400 pp. each) of the Romanian translation of the Philokalia. It is based on
the Philokalia of the Holy Ascetics, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy
Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, and published in Venice in 1782 (the
Slavonic translation of the Philokalia, the Dobrotolubiye, has links with
Fr Dumitru’s homeland, for it was in that part of Moldavia that is now in
Romania that St Paissy Velichkovsky spent the latter years of his life). But
unlike the English translation, which is nearing completion,4 Fr Dumitru did
more than translate the texts compiled by the two Athonite saints and
update Nikodimos’ introductions. From the very beginning, he supple-
mented substantially the texts of the original Philokalia, and in addition
to providing his own introductions, Fr Dumitru accompanied the texts
with commentaries. Each element of this conception—the choice of the
Philokalia itself, its supplementation, and his commentary—is significant
for Fr Dumitru’s conception of the renewal of Orthodox theology in the
modern world.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
Review Essay 255
‘Philokalia’ itself means love of the beautiful, and exalted, the excellent,
understood as the transcendent source of life and the revelation of
Truth. It is through such love that, as the subtitle of the original edition
puts it, ‘the intellect is purified, illumined and made perfect’. The texts
… show the way to awaken and develop attention and consciousness, to
attain the state of wakefulness which is the hall-mark of sanctity. They
describe the conditions most effective for learning what their authors
call the art of arts and the science of sciences, a learning which is not a
matter of information or agility of mind but of a radical change of will
and heart leading man towards the highest possibilities open to him,
shaping and nourishing the unseen part of his being, and helping him to
spiritual fulfilment and union with God. The Philokalia is an itinerary
through the labyrinth of time, a silent way of love and gnosis through
the deserts and emptinesses of life, especially of modern life, a vivifying
and fadeless presence. It is an active force revealing a spiritual path and
inducing man to follow it. It is a summons to him to overcome his
ignorance, to uncover the knowledge that lies within, to rid himself of
illusion, and to be receptive to the grace of the Holy Spirit who teaches
all things and brings all things to remembrance.5
material, there was need to make explicit the coinherence of the mind and
the heart, of theology and prayer, that the Philokalia presupposes. But the
importance of commentary on the Fathers goes further even than that for
Fr Dumitru: it is his preferred way of interpreting the Fathers in the
twentieth century. This can be most clearly illustrated from the example of
St Maximos. For, on the one hand, of all the Fathers St Maximos is perhaps
the one from whom Fr Dumitru draws his deepest inspiration and, on the
other, his commentaries on Maximos are more available in the West: his
introductions and notes on the Mystagogia and the Ambigua have been
translated in Greek,8 and most recently his notes have been appended to a
French translation of the Ambigua (in this French edition the notes run to
165 pages, compared with 272 pages of the text, which is printed in much
larger type).9 It is only in this century that Maximos has been restored to
Christian consciousness: and that recovery is far from complete. The first
great work on Maximos was Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Kosmische Liturgie
(1941), a work of characteristic genius that makes Maximos a key figure in
Balthasar’s interpretation of the nature of the divide between Eastern and
Western Christendom (and in the expanded 1961 edition the key to the gulf
between Asia and ‘das Abendland’). That was followed by the careful work
of the Benedictine, Polycarp Sherwood, and the Swedish Lutheran scholar,
Lars Thunberg, and, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a group of French Cath-
olics, mainly Dominicans, who found Thomist features in the great Byzan-
tine theologian. Fr Dumitru is familiar with all this scholarship, and has
drawn from it, but his approach is different (of those mentioned, he is per-
haps closest to Thunberg). For Maximos presents his thought in an essen-
tially unsystematic way (in this he is simply typical of the Fathers, for whom
systematic presentations are almost invariably introductory, for example
St Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration or St John Damascene’s Ex-
position of the Orthodox Faith). Virtually all of it is either occasional—responses
to questions about passages in the Scriptures and the Fathers (the Ambigua
are notes on ‘difficult’ passages from St Gregory the Theologian, and on one
difficult passage from Denys the Areopagite)10—or catechetical—‘centuries’
of brief thoughts as a help to prayer and living the Christian life (it is these
that found a place in the original Philokalia). There is a ‘system’ there, but it
is heuristic rather than exhaustive, open not closed. Fr Dumitru’s engage-
ment with Maximos’ thought respects this, and he finds commentary the
best way of pursuing this: commentary of a paragraph or so—sometimes
a page—that elucidates significant themes by drawing attention to other
discussions elsewhere in Maximos’s work, and to later reflection in Ortho-
dox Fathers (in some ways not unlike Maximos’ own commentary on the
Fathers, though Maximos’ commentaries are sometimes brief treatises). Such
commentary consists of a re-thinking of Maximos’ thoughts: a re-thinking
that is inevitably, if it is to be re-thinking, not repetition but an engage-
ment with contemporary concerns. In these commentaries Maximos is not
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
258 Andrew Louth
reduced to some system, whether imposed on him or deduced from him, nor
is he simply seen as the convergence of one or more currents of late antique
thought (Neoplatonism, Evagrianism, ‘Macarianism’, or whatever). Rather,
he is found to be the source of insights into our engagement with God in the
world, fostered by the Church and the life of prayer: the commentaries are
to help the reader benefit from these insights.
Fr Dumitru’s Teologia dogmaticǎ ortodoxǎ is the fruit of his lifelong
engagement with the Greek Fathers, as well as a life devoted to teaching
theology in Orthodox theological seminaries, first in Sibiu from 1929 to 1949,
and then until his retirement in 1973 in Bucharest (apart from the five years
from 1958–63, when he was imprisoned by the Communist authorities, or as
he preferred to put it, ‘when he simply carried his cross, which is the normal
condition for any Christian: there is no need to talk about it’). It was pub-
lished in 1978, when he was 75. From what has been said about the essen-
tially unsystematic nature of patristic theology, it might appear something of
a paradox to publish a Neo-Patristic dogmatic theology: this is doubtless
partly why Fr Dumitru holds the field alone. It does not seem to me that
the completion of the work simply dispels the paradox (as Achilles over-
takes the tortoise by simply walking). There is the danger that Fr Dumitru
will be drawn back into the constraints of the ‘systematic’ that he sought to
avoid by turning to the Fathers.12 The structure of his Orthodox Dogmatics
holds no surprises (though, as we shall see, there are more than a few
surprises when one explores some of the nooks and crannies within the
structure). The first part is on ‘Revelation as the source of the Christian
faith, and the Church as the organ and the medium of realizing the truth of
revelation and letting it bear fruit’ (translating the headings that appear
in the German, though not in the English, translation), which includes
Revelation, ways of knowing God, the doctrine of God and his attributes,
and the doctrine of the Trinity (this is volume 1 of the English translation);
the second part is on ‘the world as the work of God’s love, which has been
brought into being to be deified,’ meaning creation (including the creation of
the angels), fall, and providence (parts one and two form volume 1 of the
German translation, and the Romanian original); the third part concerns
‘Jesus Christ as person and the work of salvation he accomplished through
his assumption of human nature;’ the fourth part discusses ‘the fulfilment
of Christ’s work of redemption,’ devoted to work of the Holy Spirit, and in-
cludes discussion of the ‘theandric constitution of the Church,’ the priest-
hood and the notes of the Church, and the personal appropriation of the
salvation in the Church through the work of the Holy Spirit and human syn-
ergy (parts three and four form volume 2 of the German and the original);
the fifth part is ‘On the Holy Sacraments,’ and the sixth part on ‘Eschatology
or the doctrine of the future life’ (parts five and six form volume 3).
Fr Dumitru does not agonize about the structure of his dogmatics, as Barth
did, and that is perhaps because nothing much hangs on the structure: it
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
Review Essay 259
does not clothe a system. But there are some structural points worth noting.
First, in his treatment of creation, Fr Dumitru starts with the human person:
this is untraditional, but I am sure it is deliberate (he has a good deal to
say about the angels later on: contrast Barth, who also deals with human
creation first, but for whom the section on the angels, and demons, is clearly
an appendix). It is bound up with an important insight he derives from
St Maximos, and states for the first time only a few pages into his dog-
matics. Fr Dumitru recalls the traditional (patristic, and classical) idea of
the human person as a microcosm, but goes on to say that, according to
Maximos,
the more correct way would be to consider man as a macrocosm,
because he is called to comprehend the whole world within himself
as one capable of comprehending it without losing himself, for he is
distinct from the world. Therefore, man effects a unity greater than the
world exterior to himself, whereas, on the contrary, the world, as cos-
mos, as nature, cannot contain man fully within itself without losing
him, that is, without losing in this way the most important part of
reality, that part which, more than all others, gives reality its meaning.
The idea that man is called to become a world writ large has a more
precise expression, however, in the term ‘macro-anthropos’. (E, 4)
This highly characteristic appropriation from St Maximos (which is echoed
in St Gregory Palamas’ conviction that the human being is more perfectly in
the image of God than the angels because of his greater complexity)13 both
places the personal at the centre of Fr Dumitru’s doctrine of creation and
gives the personal cosmic significance.14 Secondly, it is interesting to note
that Christ’s work of redemption is presented in terms of Christ’s threefold
office as Prophet, Priest and King. Fr Dumitru declares that it is patristic
(without any references), but it was only with Calvin’s Institutes that the
notion of Christ’s threefold office assumed the structural significance with
which he invests it.15 There is nothing wrong with an Orthodox borrowing
from Calvin, though it would be gracious to admit it: Fr Dumitru, however,
was probably borrowing from earlier Orthodox dogmatics. But it is this
dependence on the structure of earlier Orthodox dogmatics (which bor-
rowed their structure from Catholic and Protestant models) that may con-
ceal dangers. Such dangers emerge, it seems to me, in his treatment of the
seven sacraments. For the idea of seven sacraments, distinct and set apart
from other sacramental acts, is a Western idea that only emerges in the
twelfth century. It was only accepted by the Orthodox under pressure from
the West, explicitly by the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos after the
Council of Lyons (1274), and in reaction against Protestant influence by such
as Dositheos and Peter Mogila. In the West, it was bound up with the notion
of Dominical institution and the mystique of the number seven. It is made
easier in the West by the clear separation of baptism and confirmation.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
260 Andrew Louth
NOTES
1 Even in Rowan Williams’ survey of modern Eastern Orthodox theology in David Ford
(ed.), The Modern Theologians, vol. 2 (Oxford: Blackwells, 1989), pp. 152–70, he is barely
mentioned.
2 The German translation, by Hermann Pitters, is published as Orthodoxe Dogmatik, 3 vols.
(Ökumenische Theologie 12, 15, 16, Solothurn and Düsseldorf: Benziger Verlag/Gütersloh:
Gütersloh Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 1984–95: ISBN 3-545-24209-9/24210-2/24307-9
[Benziger], 3-579-00175-2/00176-0/00182-5 [Güterloher Verlagshaus])[= O]. The first
volume (in fact the first half- volume of the Romanian original, to which the German
volumes correspond) of the English translation, by Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer, is
published as The Experience of God (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994; ISBN
0-917651-70-7)[=E]. Vol. 1 of the German translation is now out-of-print, and I am indebted
to the librarian of the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, England,
for a long loan of their copy.
3 Persoanǎ ss i comuniune, ed. M. Pǎcurariu and Ioan I. Icǎ, jnr. (Sibiu: Editura ss i tiparul
Arhiepiscopiei ortodoxe Sibiu, 1993)[=Festschrift]. For the bibliography see pp. 20–67.
4 The Philokalia. The Complete Text, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios
of Corinth, translated from the Greek and edited by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and
Kallistos Ware, 4 vols so far (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979–95).
5 Philokalia I (1979), pp. 13–14.
6 Originally published in French (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1944); English transla-
tion: London: James Clarke, 1957.
7 See the English translators’ introduction to the Philokalia: I (1979), p. 15.
8 Mystagogia tou hagiou Maximou tou Homologétou, and Philosophika kai theologika érotémata,
tou hagiou Maximou tou Homologetou, vol. 1, translated by I. Sakales with introduction and
notes by D. Stǎniloae (Epi tas pégas 1, 4; Athens: Ekdosis Apostoliké Diaconia, 1973,
1978).
9 Saint Maxime le Confesseur, Ambigua, translated by E. Ponsoye, introduced by J.-C. Larchet,
commentaries by Fr Dumitru Stǎniloae (Collection l’Arbre de Jessé, Paris–Suresnes:
Les Éditions de l’Ancre, 1994).
10 For an introductory discussion of the nature of such commentary by Maximos, see my
‘St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor: the Shaping of Tradition’, in
The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine. Essays in honour of Maurice Wiles, eds. Sarah
Coakley and David Pailin (Oxford, 1993) pp. 117–30.
11 As Olivier Clément reports: Festschrift, pp. 82–3.
12 Since writing this I have learnt from A Romanian friend (I. I. Icǎ, jnr) that Fr Dumitru was
working under considerable constraints in producing his Orthodox Dogmatics. In 1976 the
Romanian Orthodox Church as had been granted grudging permission by the ideological
committee of the Communist Party to publish a handbook of Church Dogmatics. Stǎniloae
was obliged to produce a book that would look to the censors like a dogmatic handbook.
My remarks should therefore be read less as criticism, than as comment on the inevitable
consequences of trying to pour the new wine of the neo-Patristic synthesis into the old
bottles of the traditional dogmatic structure.
13 See Gregory Palamas, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 62–4 (ed. R.E. Sinkewicz, Studies and
Texts 83, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1988, pp. 154–8).