How Neo-Thomism Affected 20th Century Trinitarianism (Part Three): First Case Study -- The Construction of Eastern and Western Trinitarianism
An East and West Within The Other.
As of late in Trinitarian
theology, it has become increasingly common knowledge that the typical
heuristic of dividing Trinitarian theologies between cardinal directions—the
East starting with the persons, namely the Father, while the West begins with
the one divine essence only to proceed to the persons—is untrue, and often
blinds us to the common complex of problems and traditions both East and West
were working within.[1] Already in 1999
amidst the furor of Trinitarian revival reaching all corners of the theological
world, Richard Fermer could write, for example:
A thorough study of the Cappadocians would have to admit
that a variety of strategies are employed and concepts used by them, to
safeguard the Trinitarian unity … A first question that must be asked of the
Gunton/Zizioulas approach is why they privilege or select certain concepts and
strategies (principally koinonia) above others.
If Gunton and Zizioulas have yet to explain why they select certain
concepts from the Cappadocians and not others, they also have to fully
elucidate why they appear to reduce the concept of ousia (essence/substance) found in the Cappadocians, to the concept
of koinonia (communion).[2]
That they select concepts this way is largely due to the story
Gunton and Zizioulas each tell regarding the scope and shape of Trinitarian
theological history.[3] The selection of these motifs as
representative of Cappadocian thought occurs against a background which assumes
the East is oriented more fundamentally around an ontology of communion and
persons (as it begins with the Persons of the Trinity), which can serve as a
balm and corrective to the sterile “monism” of Western Trinitarianism catalyzed
(if not outright invented) by Augustine.[4]
Even earlier than Fermer’s essay, in 1995 Michel René Barnes had argued
convincingly that this division was the historiographical legacy of French
historian Theodore de Regnón.
Barnes says tersely that “the publication of [his] work in
1892 made de Régnon the most influential and yet least known of Catholic
historians of doctrine,”[5]
and “the paradigm has become the sine qua
non for framing contemporary understanding Augustine’s theology.”[6] Or as Kristen Hennessy puts it de Regnón’s “Études became the hidden spine
supporting English textbook accounts of Trinitarian development.”[7]
Barnes notes with even more force, “[Modern theologians] need the de Regnón
paradigm to ground the specific
problems they diagnose,”[8]
which becomes even more problematic because systematic theologians who use the
paradigm, “show no awareness that the paradigm needs to be demonstrated, or that it has a history [emphasis
added].”[9]
To know exactly what possibilities the loss of the cliché of
the distinction between Latin and Greek models of Trinitarian theology opens
up, first requires understanding how the existence of the contrasting paradigms
has served as a necessary presupposition for modern theology. How is the modern understanding of
Trinitarian theology predicated on the opposition dramatized (fictionalized?)
in the Greek and Latin epitomes? We are
almost at the point where we can say that modern theology, needing the
doctrinal opposition between “Greek” and “Latin,” Trinitarian theologies, invented it. [Emphasis added]. Forensically then, what was (is) that
need? Rather than treating de Régnon’s paradigm as a description of fourth-
and fifth-century Trinitarian theologies, we should imagine it as a symptom or
a structural prerequisite of modern thinking about Trinitarian theologies. [Emphasis added].[10]
The key, then, is to know what these interests and
structural prerequisites are. Given our thesis,
the reader will not be surprised to see the neo-Thomist movements of the 19th
century as playing a hand. It is thus
important to note that not only is the East-West division a misreading of the
tradition, it is in fact, as Kristin Hennessy has argued, a misreading of De
Regnón. De Regnón proposed his thesis
precisely against the emerging
rigidity of the neo-Scholastic environment of theology by pointing to the
complementarity of East and West: “contrary to the narrow, divisive ‘de Regnón’
paradigm that later arose de Regnón himself sought to bring a rapprochement in
light of the persistent mystery of the Trinity and the failure of any single
system—even neo-Thomism, to express this mystery fully.”[11]
His heuristic division of East and West (whatever the validity we may attribute
to it, even apart from distortions of later interpreters), was meant to speak
of their ultimate harmony.
In fact, as a sort of Rahner before Rahner, de Regnón opines
that the stark separation of treatises “On the One God,” and “On the Triune
God,” and the wooden schematization of the latter as a sort of geometry of the
processions in neo-Thomism, was causing a decline in Trinitarian piety.[12]
The later misunderstanding that de Regnón is talking about a stark separation
of East and West is in part due to de Regnón’s own sloppiness about how he used
the terms “Latin” and “Greek” (by Greek, he meant Patristic, both Latin and
Greek—thus including Augustine; and by Latin he meant the later medieval
Scholastics. Even on a charitable account
this seems to be asking for trouble).[13] On the other hand his remarks that the
neo-Thomist historians of dogma “jostle all other theologians to fit them to
[their version of] Thomas’ thought,” became ironically true to his own division
between Latin and Greek theologians, where the neo-Thomist reading of Aquinas
as creating a stark division between the treatise “On the One God” and “On the
Triune God” was read into an author trying to mitigate that very distinction
and spread abroad into the twentieth-century Trinitarian renaissance as a
whole.
While it is still a point of
contention (to put it mildly)—and indeed one can ask if today this is a felicitous way of structuring dogmatic theology—the
sharp division between the treatise on the “One God” and on the “Triune God”
was never Aquinas’ intention.[14]
For Aquinas both are in fact part of the single treatise, De Deo. The contention that
Aquinas grounds his discourse in
natural philosophical speculation, in order to found (and indeed as many have
charged, consequently cripple) the later doctrine of the Trinity (now either
losing its distinctiveness, overwhelmed by God’s simple, single substance, or
the by becoming imprisoned by the philosophically established details of the
first treatise) is itself due to interpretations that rely not only on later
interpretive changes made by Thomistic commentators, but in general changes to
the broader culture of theology as to what constitutes the proper boundaries of
theological exposition itself. As many
have pointed out, the question of “starting with” the One or the Three is
historically speaking not so much a matter of a philosophical versus a
theological “starting point.” That it has
become a question of a philosophical verse a more “properly theological”
starting-point itself has a history (more on this in a later section).
While there are multiple strands to
be told in this history, one of the most important for our purposes is the
insistence of the Catholic church that the proper course of resistance to modernism
of all shades was to develop a properly Thomistic
philosophy. After Leo XIII puplished
the encyclical Aeterni Patris
essentially solidifying the angelic doctor with the prestige of defender of the
church, Fergus Kerr notes ironically that the defense against modernism “kept
very much to the same canons that we find in the Enlightenment.” Which is to say this recommendation of Thomas
wanted to exercise a “unitary and ahistorical form of reasoning.”[15] This is ironic as it foisted a very
historically particular interpretation upon the Angelic Doctor. From there, the spread of the paradigm became
even more ironic. The sad state of
revolutions in Russia around the turn of the twentieth-century had caused a
great diaspora, including many Russian “émigré theologians” as their exilic
status was rather euphemistically called, who ended up in Paris.[16]
Dislocated, these Parisian exiles associated
with what came to be known as the “neo-Patristic” synthesis—with Fr. Georges
Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky as its two most notable proponents—sought in
Patristic theology not just a chance to regain cultural identity in a time of
exodus, but also to help slough off what Florovsky called the “pseudomorphosis”[17]
of Russian religious consciousness by its “Babylonian captivity” in the West.[18] In partial response to this need, the De
Regnón paradigm was adopted, especially by Lossky, in order to bolster Eastern
distinctiveness. Curiously, however, the
explicit and extensive reliance upon De Regnón that occurs in Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
is observed by Barnes to disappear in its English translation:
Out of the 43 footnotes in [chapter 3], 12 refer to de
Regnón. Yet in the 1957 English
translation of the original French work, all the citations to de Regnón are
missing. … [W]hat, in the original, were Lossky’s footnote references to
passages in de Regnón’s Études, become,
in the English translation, footnote references to the Cappadocian texts
originally discussed by de Regnón. There
is more at work here than a slip of the translator’s pen: there is in fact the
appropriation of de Regnón’s paradigm by modern Neo-Palamite theology, coupled
with a hesitation, if not embarrassment, at acknowledging its Roman Catholic
(indeed, Jesuit) origins.[19]
Barnes undoubtedly goes too far here in his conspiratorial tones
of a “neo-Palamite”
erasure of “embarrassing” Jesuit sources.
And for his part Lossky admits that Eastern and Western approaches to
the Trinity are complementary, much as de Regnón did.[20] Nonetheless the footnotes referencing de
Regnón do indeed disappear, leaving the English translation notes appearing to
spring newborn from Cappadocian primary sources. In addition to this, a recent essay by Sarah
Coakley has demonstrated just how indebted Lossky’s polemic against Western theology (in the guise
of neo-Thomism) was to the thoroughly Western
context of Lossky’s education in Paris under the doctoral supervision of
Etiénne Gilson. “To put it boldly,” she
writes, “what Lossky and the burgeoning proponents of the Catholic nouvelle théologie shared was—despite
Lossky’s distractingly polemical anti-Western and anti-Thomist
rhetoric—arguably more than what divided them.”[21]
What they shared, for our purposes, was “a
loathing of the rigid and rationalistic rendition of Thomas in the Catholic
seminary textbooks of the post-Aeterni
Patris era; second, there was a shared reconsideration of the importance of
the Greek patristic, and especially negative, theology traditions for a renewal
of thinking about the metaphysics of revelation.”[22] Indeed, even Lossky’s reading of Dionysius
which he polemically turns against (the neo-Thomist interpretation of) Aquinas
was itself influenced by scholarly developments amongst the French
patrologists.[23] Coakley summarizes:
What animates this critique [by Lossky of the West]? … On
the one hand, Gilson’s teaching and writing … as carefully turning a critical,
historically enunciated, spotlight on the supposition of the Roman textbooks
that a form of modern, rational philosophy could supply a foundation for revelation in Thomas’ thought. … On the other hand,
Karl Barth (whom Lossky certainly knew about from his friend Florovsky) had of
course been announcing for some time an even more ardent resistance to the idea
that secular philosophy could in some sense ground
revelation. In short, this first,
and crucial plank of Lossky’s ‘construction’ of Eastern theology (its
insistence of the strict incompatibility of Neoplatonic philosophy and
authentic Christian revelation [and its strict apophaticism over and against
Western rationalism]) can, I think, only, and best, be understood against this
particular Western backdrop. … The
notion of the West that Lossky then puts forth as the unacceptable alternative
to his Eastern view, is— I would suggest— equally revealing of his own Western,
Parisian context of the 1930s and ’40s. For it is hard, again, to read this
anti-Western polemic without at least some echoes of the emerging Catholic
resistance in France to rigidly rationalistic readings of Thomas and to the
myth of a pure nature that could exercise itself in the pre-revelatory building
of philosophical foundations for faith.
We might therefore say that Lossky’s critique represents the reverse
side of his elevation of Dionysius to the status of Eastern archetype. The fatal flaw of Western Christian thought,
for Lossky, is always in some measure the submission of its theology to philosophical categories of substance …[24]
The point of all this for our
purposes, is to note that Lossky’s often polemical turning of Eastern and
Western theologies against one-another is in part indebted to certain Western
trends of scholarship with which Lossky was interacting. And more importantly, that what Lossky took
to be the essential features of the West he opposed (and of Aquinas and
Augustine in particular) was taking the post-Aeterni Patris neo-Thomist interpretations of the tradition (which,
as De Regnón felicitously put it, “jostle all other theologians to fit them to
[their version of] Thomas’ thought,”) at face value. Thus the irony doubles: not only is Lossky’s
repudiation of the Western tradition (in particular its philosophical
“rationalism” and foundationalism when it comes to the treatise “on the One
God”) itself part of a Western self-critique, Lossky’s own representation of
the distinctive features of Eastern tradition in part gain their sharpness
precisely by taking certain features of neo-Thomist interpretation of de
Regnón’s schema of what characterizes the Western tradition at face value.[25]
Or, we might put it in slightly
broader perspective: Lossky (and Florovsky) were interpreting (and rejecting)
the options of “theism” in the Western tradition in terms that were being
represented by post-nominalist strands of Augustinian and Thomistic
interpretation,[26]
which were in a variety of ways reading nominalist theology back into the
figure of Thomas—and even more broadly, into the Western tradition at large
(often through largely philosophical figures like Descartes).[27] This can be taken in (at least) two
senses. The first is that nominalism is
itself simply rejected by Eastern theologians as an unfortunate Western legacy—for
example God’s absoluteness is seen to have a tendency to overrule his economy
as Triune due to emphasis on God’s absolute power. But just so, when Eastern theologians react
to this, it encodes in its own reaction the (dubious) assumption of the fact
that post-nominalist theistic discourse was the only authentic idiom left to
the West.
Or put otherwise, the
“distinctiveness” of an Eastern position is here gained in the neo-Patristic
synthesis by juxtaposing itself to a fictional Western “Other” which it needs
to define itself. A second sense of
covert Western influence, may be seen in the rejection of the so-called “Sophiological”
movement by Florovsky and Lossky (and the corresponding juxtaposition of their
own ideas), because of its over-reliance upon German Idealism.[28] This pedigree of Idealism is not an entirely
alternate strand within Western theology, however, but itself constitutes an
“answer” to voluntarism that itself hinges upon the terms and spectrum of
thought voluntarism itself set in contradistinction to much of the Christian
tradition that came before.[29]
Thus in this first sense a very
“Western” self-interpretation (however contestable) is inscribed into a
self-consciously alternating “Eastern” interpretation that is rebelling against
it. Thus the East rejects the West’s
“theism” in the sense that it is simply equated with a variety of nominalism,
or it rejects the West insofar as it is equated with Idealism—which is itself from
one angle seen as an “answer” to nominalism whose response is still inflected
by the problem it seeks to address.
Beyond this dichotomy, as Coakley pointed out, even the rebellion
against this “Western” polarity of nominalism-Idealism is not entirely
“Eastern,” but is implicated in a variety of complex ways by an emerging
“Western” minority report representing by French Catholic scholarship
contemporaneous to the emerging neo-Patristic movement. To add a final layer of historical irony to
this period, if the narrative of Michael Allen Gillespie is to be believed,
voluntarist theology mediated through the German Idealism of Fichte and Romanticism,
found itself at the heart Russian Nihilism.
As such it became the theoretical backbone to the revolutionary
Bolshevik political upheavals that dislocated the Parisian émigrés westward,
and drove them to search for an Eastern identity in part by an interpretation
of the de Regnón paradigm, itself harrowed (though much less literally) by
nominalist mutations of a later Western tradition.[30]
Another, similar search for Eastern
identity, occurred amongst the famous and highly influential so-called “class
of the 1960’s” in Greece.[31] When the Greek state was founded in the
1830’s after 400 years under Ottoman Turk rule, theological curricula amongst
the new Greek Universities was nearly non-existent, and so Western models and
textbooks were imported into seminaries as a convenient option. A period of dry-academic scholasticism
(including, as it happens, widespread neo-Thomistic influence) followed from
these importations, however.[32] The class of the 1960’s—including such
notables as John Romanides, Christos Yannaras, and John Zizioulas—much as the
Russian émigré theologians before them, turned to the Greek Fathers not just
for the sake of identity, but also to solidify a sense of rebellion against the
lifeless coda of the neo-Scholastic syllabi they had been subjected to.[33] Indeed Romanides’ doctoral advisor was the
neo-Patristic theologian Georges Florovsky—under whom Zizioulas studied as
well—so the parallel between the Parisian exiles and the Greek class of the
60’s is more than a mere analogy.[34] It is with the “1960’s” class that the
Eastern and Western differences in Trinitarian methodology becomes a systematic
point of emphasis, especially with John Zizioulas.[35]
Barnes has demonstrated that Lossky
almost exclusively relied on de Regnón for his analysis of how physis and energia functioned in the Cappadocians, and that Lossky erroneously
supposed these constitute “the fundamental categories of Cappadocian theology,”[36]
in essence making them Palamites by anticipation. Romanides ran with this
neo-Palamite reading of the Cappadocians, and indeed the East as a whole, which
utilized this distinction to emphasize the reality of Divine-human
communion. The Western emphasis on
divine simplicity—which Romanides explicitly blames Augustine for—means for
Romanides “that there can be no bridge between the ontological orders, God and
creation.”[37] As Romanides writes:
Augustine himself does not appear to have accepted this
(essence/energies) distinction. Speaking
about the procession of the Holy Spirit, he makes a clear confusion between
essence and energy in God. The
identification of essence and energy in the West led the Western theologians to
articulate the thought that God is ‘pure
energy.’ The articulation of the above thought is also due to other
philosophical presuppositions of Augustine, such as his faith concerning
knowledge of the essence of God. [This
identification makes theosis impossible and accounts for why] in the
theological tradition of the Franks, beginning with Augustine, there is no
doctrine of deification.[38]
[1] An entire volume has, for example, been dedicated to
liberating interpretations of Gregory of Nyssa from this paradigm. Cf. Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2003).
[2] Richard M. Fermer, “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a
Methodological Paradigm,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie no.41, (1999):144-145.
[3] The list of modern theologians employing the East/West
division to some effect in their theology is vast. As examples cf. Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the
Gospel (Reprinted. Eugene: Wipf and
Stock, 2002), 118-120; John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood
and the Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) 88; John
Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian
Dogmatics ed. Douglas H. Knight (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 66; John
Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness:
Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark,
2006) 34; Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2nd
ed. (New York: T&T Clark) 30-56; Catherine LaCugna God For Us, 369; David Brown, The
Divine Trinity (Illinois: Open Court, 1985); David Coffey, Deus Trinitas:The Doctrine of the Triune God
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[4] This is not always the case, for where some use the
West/East distinction, others transform it into terms of a more general
monotheistic vs. Trinitarian paradigm.
In the words of Aquinas expert Gilles Emery, “Chronique de theology
trinitaire (V)” (translation taken from Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian
Theology (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 199n.6): “The history of theology
shows that it is under the aspect of Trinitarian faith that monotheism becomes
a question for theology.”; Miroslav
Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as
the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1998),
210n.87 turns Trinitarian theology against a monotheistic tradition aligned
with the doctrine of simplicity. Cf.
Volf’s mentor, Jürgen Moltmann, The
Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Trans. Margaret Kohl
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 197: “It is only
when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes
the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven, [emphasis
added] and his divine patriarchs in the world, that earthly rulers, dictators
and tyrants cease to find any justifying archetypes any more.” And further: “what does this
characteristically Christian answer [of the Trinity] mean in relation to those
other concepts of God . . . [which is to say, God is Trinity] not as supreme
substance and not as absolute subject, but as triunity, the three-in-one?”
(10), cf. esp.149-150; Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as
the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1993), 215, where he pulls no punches and states that “the God of
classical theism,” is “a god of the pagans. ”
Indeed, the Father’s merely “baptized Aristotle” (Ibid., 20-22); Cf. the very
helpful essay by Randal E. Otto, “Moltmann and the Anti-Monotheism Movement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology
vol.3 no.3 (2001): 293-308. This is
further complicated by those who take the “East-West” paradigm but specify it
within a higher order, taking only a handful of Eastern theologians as truly
exemplary of their respective cardinal direction. Cf. Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 1997), 239n.74 where he comments, “Western theologians
[who want to defer to the East] tend to follow Gregory of Nazianzus, while the
most important representative of Eastern Orthodox theology advocate the monarchia following Basil the Great and
Gregory of Nyssa.” This general trend of
Western deferral to Eastern thought as supposedly specifically represented by
Nazianzus as against the other two Cappadocian Fathers, owes much to the
particularly influential reading of the tradition by T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical
Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988)
e.g. 321.
[5] Michel René Barnes, “De Regnón Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies, 26 (1995): 51.
[6] Michel Rene Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian
Theology,” Theological Studies, 56
(1995): 238.
[7] Kristin Hennessy, “An Answer to De Regnón’s ‘Accusers’: Why
We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard
Theological Review 100, no.2 (2007): 180.
[8] Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology”
238.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Michel R. Barnes, “The Fourth Century as Trinitarian
Canon,” in Christian Origins: Theology,
Rhetoric, and Community, ed. Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (London:
Routledge, 1998), 61.; Cf. David Bentley Hart, “The Mirror of the Infinite:
Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia
Trinitatis.” Modern Theology
vol.18 no.4 (October 2002): 54: “The
notion that, from the patristic period to the present, the Trinitarian
theologies of the Eastern and Western catholic traditions have obeyed contrary
logics and have in consequence arrived at conclusions inimical each to the
other … will no doubt one day fade away from want of documentary evidence. At
present, however, it serves too many interests for theological scholarship to
dispense with it too casually.” [Emphasis added]
[11]Hennessy, “An Answer to de Regnón’s Accusers”: 181; cf. 183:
“Although de Régnon never names his targets—he directs his barbs toward ‘modern
theologians’ en masse—he laments practices that proceed from the neo-Thomist
revival then under way. Brief but potent, these critiques of ‘modern
theologians’ suggest how wary de Régnon was of the theological tendencies of
his time and point us toward viewing his Etudes
as a conscious response to the dangers he perceived.”
[12] Ibid, 185n.25.
[13] Ibid., 187f.
[14] Cf. Peter Phan, “Systematic Issues in Trinitarian
Theology,” in Peter Phan, ed. The
Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 15: “While historically inaccurate if applied to the great theologians
such as Augustine and Aquinas, [Rahner’s criticism of the separation of
treatises] hits the target when aimed at neo-scholastic textbooks that were
widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries prior to Vatican Council II
(1962-1965)…”
[15] Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century
Catholic Theologians (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 2.
[16] Michael Plekon, “The Russian Religious Revival and Its
Theological Legacy,” in in Mary Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Theology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 203, cautions that we must not
overemphasize this East/West clash so that we overlook that renewals in Eastern
thought were already happening pre-Revolution and encounter with the West.
[17] Andrew Louth, “Is the Development of Doctrine a Valid
Category for Orthodox Theology?” in Valerie Hotchkiss & Patrick Henry,
eds., Orthodoxy and Western Culture: A
Collection of Essay Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday (New
York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 2005), 45-63; For more, cf. Ivana Noble, “Tradition and
Innovation: An Introduction to a Theme,” St.
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly vol.59 no.1 (2015): 7-15; Brandon
Gallaher, “’Waiting at the Gates for the Barbarians’: Identity and Polemicism
in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky,” Modern Theology vol.27 no.4 (2011): 659-691.
[18] Andrew Louth, “The Patristic Revival and Its Protagonists,”
Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Theology,
188.; Cf. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, “Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis and the Future
Ways of Orthodox Theology,” in George E. Demacopolous and Aristotle
Papanikolau, eds., Orthodox Constructions
of the West (New York: Fordham University, 2013), 102-125.
[19] Barnes, “De Regnón Reconsidered,” 57-58.
[20] On this, cf. Aristotle Papanikolau, Being With God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 181n.101.
[21] Sarah Coakley, “Eastern ‘Mystical Theology’ or Western
‘Nouvelle Theologie,’? On the Comparative Reception of Dionysius the Areopagite
in Lossky and de Lubac,” in George E. Demacopolous and Aristotle Papanikolau,
eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West (New
York: Fordham University, 2013), 126.
Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, “Ex
Occident Lux? Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox Theology,” Modern Theology vol.20 no.1 (2004): e.g. 23: “It has perhaps become
more common in recent years to regard Augustine as the main Western
counterpoint to Orthodox teaching, rather than Aquinas. The complaints lodged against both, however,
are much the same.” This earlier polemic
against Aquinas “no doubt owes something to the situation of Russian theology
in the Paris emigration, as a displaced minority in a traditionally Catholic
country, whose theological life at the time was dominated by neo-Thomistic
interpretations of the common doctor.
But it led, in any event, to objections against Aquinas which have
become ecumenically commonplace” (24).
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 128.
[24] Ibid., 128-130.
[25] This must be nuanced—Lossky did later in his career know
full well the difference between Aquinas and later “school” neo-Thomism. Cf. Papanikolaou, Being With God, 169n.82: “It is important to note that Lossky’s
review [Sobornost {1950}: 295-297] of
E.L. Mascall’s Existence and Analogy
contains a rare praise of Aquinas: ‘Indeed, since the publication of the latest
books of M. Etienne Gilson, there can be no doubt about the authentic Thomism
of S. Thomas and his immediate predecessors, a thought rich with new
perspectives which the philosophical herd, giving in to the natural tendency of
the human understanding, was not slow in conceptualizing, and changing into
school Thomism, a severe and abstract doctrine, because it has been detached
from its real source of power.’ Lossky
knew the difference between the thought of Aquinas and neo-Thomism, and his
main contention was with neo-Thomists of his time … The review also indicates a
willingness to see a possible rapprochement
between Gilsonian Thomism and his own Palamism … This small but significant
review clearly evinces recognition on Lossky’s part of the affinities between
Aquinas and Palamas, a point that is completely absent in his extant works.”
[26] Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism
and Modern Theology (New York: Cross Roads, 2000); Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 174-178: “The
disintegration of the synthesis into an order of pure nature separate from one
of grace had been foreshadowed by Averrhoist philosophers, yet in the end was
mainly the work of those who had led the resistance against Aristotelianism,
namely, the nominalists…[Thus though] theologians did not begin to treat the
concept of pure nature as a concrete, independent reality until the sixteenth
century … [and] despite its philosophical appearance, this concept was deeply
rooted in late nominalist theology.”
[27] Cf. Dupré Passage to
Modernity, 88: “Descartes has redefined the ultimate ontological principles
in function of the epistemic order,” and this is precisely because “to render
the idea of God serviceable [to his project] Descartes had to overcome the
problem created by late nominalist theology—namely, that of a totally
unpredictable God…for a moment the French philosopher reminds us of Augustine’s
self-examination before God. But only for
a moment, because Descartes’ introspection reverses
[emphasis added] the traditional order from God to the soul…God has to be
proven, and to be proven on the basis of the prior certainty of the self.”
(116-118).
[28] As Gallaher, “Identity and Polemic,” 679, rightly puts it:
“Critics of modern Orthodox theology need to go beyond the all too common
stereotype that while Bulgakov was beholden to idealism and sundry tainted with
Western sources, Florovsky’s theology was a creature merely of the Fathers. …
Florovsky’s theology is also very much a development of German Idealism as is,
one should add, much of the contemporary Orthodox theology built on its
foundations.” In particular Gallaher
notes Florovsky’s reading of the Father’s is indebted to categories emphasized
by Schelling.
[29] That Hegel, for example, can be understood to be working
within the post-nominalist legacy has been recently argued by Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von
Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity Vol. 1: Hegel.
(New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2014), e.g. 169: O’Regan notes that
Hegel explicitly at many points considers his philosophy as “predicated on the
overcoming of theology or ontotheological voluntarism, and thus of
nominalism.” This opposition, says O’Regan,
still works within the confines left in the wake of nominalist discourse and so
“encourages the false opposition of a God whose relation to the world is
defined by decree and a divine dependent upon the world that it grounds, in and
through which it actualizes itself.” (207).
[30] Cf. Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 135-174.; cf. 174: “The Russian revolution has been called the god that
failed. This mistaken conclusion is the
consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of the theological and
metaphysical essence of the revolutionary movement in Russia. The Russian revolution is in fact the story
of the god who triumphed, but this god was not the god of light who inhabits
cities of aluminum and glass, but a dark god of negation who lives within the
secret souls of the Bazarovs and the Rakhmetovs of the world, and enters into
actuality in the form of Nechaev, Lenin, and Stalin. What we discover in the afterglow of this
great event is that the fire the new Prometheus brings down to earth is not the
hearth flame that is the center of the home but a conflagration that consumes
civilization. The fiery heart of Blake’s
demonic destroyer when liberated from its animalistic shell does not assume symmetry
and humanity of its own but remains the formless force of chaos, an essentially
negative will. At the end of modernity, the dark God of nominalism appears enthroned
within the bastion of reason as the grim lord of Stalin’s universal terror”
[Emphasis added].
[31] Athanasios N. Papathanasiou, “Some Key Themes and Figures
in Greek Theological Thought,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Orthodoxy, 218-232.
[32] Pantelis Kalaitzidis “The Image of the West in Contemporary
Greek Theology” in Orthodox Constructions
of the West, 142ff.
[33] George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Augustine
and the Orthodox: ‘The West’ in the East,” in George Demacopoulos and Aristotle
Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Readings of
Augustine (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 27f.
[34] Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West,” 144. For the influence of
Lossky on Greek theology (which was mixed), cf. Aristotle Papanikolau,
“Personhood and its Exponents in Twentieth-Century Orthodox Theology,” Cambridge Companion to Orthodoxy,
232-245.
[35] Democopoulos and Papanikolaou, “Augustine and the
Orthodox,” 36-37.
[36] Barnes, “De Regnón Reconsidered,” 54.
[37] Democopoulos and Papanikolaou, “Augustine and the
Orthodox,” 29.
[38] John Romanides, An
Outline of Orthodox Patristic Dogmatics, trans. G. Dragas (New Hampshire:
Orthodox Research Institute, 2004), 37-39.
[39] Democopoulos and Papanikolaou, “Augustine and the
Orthodox,” 29.
[40] Basilio Petra, “Christos Yannaras and the Idea of Dysis” in
Orthodox Constructions of the West,
161ff. Zizioulas intends to distance
himself from this appropriation by Yannaras.
Cf. Being as Communion, 45n.40.
Nonetheless it is questionable how far he actually does this.; On
“Onto-Theology” cf. See: Merold Westphal, Overcoming
Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (n.l.: Fordham
University Press, 2001).
[41] Cf. S.J. McGrath, The
Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (New
York: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 88-120, 208-257. For example 13-15: “The context of the young
Heidegger’s turn to Luther was the reactionary neo-Scholasticism of early
twentieth-century Catholic theology. Leo
XIII’s 1870 encyclical Aeterni Patris declared
Thomas Aquinas the philosopher for
the Catholic Church. Pius X’s 1907
encyclical Pascendi foreclosed as
‘modernism’ most efforts to integrate the insights of modern philosophy,
science, and historiography into Catholic theology … It seemed to the young
Heidegger that the Catholic hierarchy was dictating in advance what must be
true and false for philosophy … The neo-Scholasticism inspired by the
Counter-Reformation, the political revolutions of the nineteenth century, and
the papal pronouncements of the early twentieth century was rigid,
formulaic…This textbook scholasticism [Heidegger rejected] was the same monster
against which both Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner railed … Heidegger’s
difficulties with neo-Scholasticism would quickly deepen into an objection to
medieval philosophy itself … Heidegger’s [philosophy] is intended to break with
every medieval ontology [so understood].”
And cf. 91: “Heidegger has no sympathy for the Thomist analogia entis. His decisive departure from Scotus, the
rejection of an infinite mode of being, does not break with the Scotist project
of maintaining a univocal notion of being.”
It should be noted McGrath argues that Heidegger’s critique grew beyond
this origin, however, and cannot be limited to an instance of mere
misunderstanding. Cf. Kerr, After Aquinas, 89: “When Heidegger
rejected the exposition of the distinction between essence and existence that
he found in contemporary neo-Thomism, however, he did so, according to
Balthasar, on the ground that essence was conceived by these Thomists as
something to which existence might or might not be related. These neo-Thomists had, however,
misrepresented Thomas.”
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