| LOSSKY A sharper sense of what the «Neo-patristic» synthesis might amount to emerges from the slender patristic œuvre of Vladimir Lossky. He died young, in his mid-fifties, his massive work on Meister Eckhart, which he would have submitted for his doctorat ès lettres, being published posthumously. 364 His Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, published in 1944 (when Lossky was barely thirty years old), has become for many virtually a handbook of the Neo-patristic synthesis. Lossky begins by tackling what he means by »mystical theology» (though Lossky " s term, «la mystique», here translated »mysticism», is not perhaps quite the same thing): The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology ; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church ... To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically ... There is, therefore, no Christian mysticism without theology ; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism ... Mysticism is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence. 365 Mysticism and theology relate as experience and theory. But experience of what? Ultimately of God, but that is not where Lossky begins: he begins by speaking of «personal experience of the divine mysteries», the term »mysteries» being precisely ambiguous, designating both the sacraments of the Church and also mysterious – that is, unfathomable – truths about the Godhead. That double meaning is no chance homonymity; the two meanings are closely related for Lossky, because the mysterious truths about God – his existence as a Trinity of love, his creation of the world, his care for the world and his redemption of it, preeminently in the Incarnation – are truths that we experience and celebrate in the divine mysteries, or sacraments, of the Church. This is what gives Lossky " s presentation such a different orientation from what is normally associated with mysticism in the West: it is not detached from dogma, but rooted in the dogmatic truths of the Christian tradition; it is not indifferent to church organization, hierarchy and sacraments, but rooted in the structured life of the Church ; it is not individualistic, but rooted in the experience of the eucharistic community. |
| And again; dogmas do not exhaust the experience of the Church; just as Revelation is not exhausted in the words or the «letter» of Scripture. In dogmatic definitions the Truth of experience is only determined and protected, but not exhausted. The experience and faith of the Church are fuller and wider than its dogmatic word. There is much to which the Church witnesses even to the present day in images, symbols, and similes, in symbolic theology. Probably this will exist to the end of time, i.e., to the last passing over from here to the beyond (see St. Gregory the Theologian). From the very beginning the Church was given the fullness of Truth. But it is only gradually and «in part» that this fullness is being expressed. In general all our knowledge here, is always a knowledge «in part.» The exhaustive fullness will be revealed only in the beyond, in the Second Advent, in the «meeting with Our Lord.» From here proceeds the dogmatic incompleteness of the Church’s witness; this is also caused by the Church being «in a state of pilgrimage,» " in via»; that it is still being «completed and maketh increase» (Eph. 4:16). The human spirit and reason are still «increasing.» The historical aims of the knowledge of God, of understanding Revelation, are still facing us. There is much that is still to be accomplished. However the incompleteness and the inexhaustibleness of our knowledge here does not weaken its truth, its finality, the impossibility of replacing it; does not deprive it of the finality which has been attained. Within the limits of Church experience there are many mysteries for us to contemplate, mysteries for which no dogmatic words have been found so far. Here there is scope for «theological opinions» and research. There can also exist freedom in the understanding of established dogmas. Of course there is no room here for subjective arbitrary mental choice. Theology must always remain vital, intuitive; it must be nourished by the experience of faith, and must not be split up into autonomous isolated dialectic conceptions. Once more we want to remind you that the dogmas of faith are the truths of experience and of life – therefore they can he unfolded through no logical synthesis and analysis, but only through spiritual life, through actual participation in the fullness of Church experience. A lawful «theological opinion» can he attained not through any logical deduction, but only through direct vision, and this again can only be attained through strenuous prayerful effort, through a striving after the Spirit, through personal spiritual growth, through living communion with the constant Catholic experience of the Church. |
| One should admit, however, that articulating the experiential dimension of theology is not a prerogative only of the modern Orthodox theologians. The Scottish theologian T. Torrance, in his arguments for the objectivity of theological knowledge, talks about the dialogical dimension of theology as participation in the relationship with God: “Theological knowledge is not reflection upon our rational experience or even upon faith; it is reflection upon the object of faith in direct dialogical relation with that object, and therefore in faith – i.e. in conversation and communion with the living God who communicates Himself to us in acts of revelation and reconciliation and who requires of us an answering relation in receiving, acknowledging, understanding, and in active personal participation in the relationship He establishes between us.” 137 Lossky, Yannaras, and Torrance affirm that the key element of the proper approach to, and understanding of, theology is personal experience. This experience, received as a gift of grace, is active since it assumes participation, communion, and transfiguration, which lead ultimately to a vision of God. Theology implies personal involvement and personal experience in a way the other subjects do not. As theologians, we cannot be detached from – and objective (in an ordinary sense of this word) with respect to – what we study. If we remain outside the subject, we cannot understand it properly; in the words of Diadochos of Photiki: “Nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him.” 138 To theologize truly, one must be part of the experience. 139 Given this view, is it possible to teach theology, and if so, what are the means of doing so? Despite its purely experiential and mystical nature, theological teaching, as the exposition of Christian faith, must be expressed through language. What, then, is the foundation for theological teaching as an expression of the church’s mystical experience in words? How is this teaching possible at all? |
| The angle of viewing God changed: traditionally academic theology viewed God as “object” (to address, to pray to, to entreat, etc.) but now the question arose: what are the conditions on which God may address the human? By the second part of the 20 th century, when the ill period of behaviourism (reducing mental phenomena to physiological reactions of the organism) was over, religious experience has become now legalized academically and, as Father Vladimir put it, “a quite respectable” component of studies in various areas from neurophysiology to philosophy. Religious themes are now present in academic science. There emerged even the problem “with the negative sign”, namely, how can theologians avoid following the lead of conditions imposed from outside, for instance, yielding to the logic of substantiations present in natural sciences. Moving from history to inner aspects of the problem, Father Vladimir gave special attention to the observance of balance between theory and religious practice. It is necessary to become aware of and bring it home to the scientific community the right understanding of the subject of theology – God as He is revealed to us by the faith of the Church. The very faith of the Church and the 2000-year experience have become an important element of Christian theology. There is a need for balance between the collective and the individual, when a personal prayer supports the common liturgical prayer. Each Christian should grasp in his or her personal experience what has been accumulated by the experience of the Church throughout her history. Archpriest Vladimir also pointed to the balance between the charismatic (personal authority) and the hierarchal (hierarchal authority) as quite a pressing problem in today’s practice of the Orthodox Church. The second day of the conference was opened with a session on “Mystical events in religious life and mental health”. Vasiliy G. Kaleda, D.M.Sc., MHRC deputy director, senior researcher in endogenic and affective states, professor at the St. Tikhon Orthodox University Chair of Practical Theology, in his paper on “Religious experience and mental health in studies of Russian psychiatrists”, noted that problems related to the mental sphere have a biological, social and spiritual nature. Therefore, specialists – theologians, psychiatrists and psychologists – should learn to view a mental disorder holistically. |
| The Patriarch was given the question, “Your Beatitude, you are one of the genuine witnesses of the great miracle of the descent of the Holy Fire. You are directly present during it. I would like to know how it happens. What was your first impression when you witnessed this miracle? What does a person experience? And please describe the process [of receiving the fire].” Patriarch Theophilos’ answer consisted of two parts. In the first part, he spoke of the ritual aspect; therefore he used the words “ceremony” and “representation”. What is a ceremony? The word “ceremony” is from the Latin “ caerim o nia” , religious rite, religious worship , and in this context refers to the ritual procedures observed at religious or formal occasions. And the concept of “representation” also indicates the external aspect of an action. During any sacrament, baptism for example, besides the concrete action of the grace of God, there is the visible ritual aspect, i.e., “ceremony, representation”. Having spoken of this ritual aspect, Patriarch Theophilos then speaks of the spiritual side of this event: “Now the second part of your question; this pertains to us personally. This is an experience which, if you please, is analogous to the experience which a person has when he receives Holy Communion. That which happens then [at Holy Communion] is parallel to the ceremony of the Holy Fire: sometimes a particular experience is not possible to explain, or to express in words.” Deacon Andrei gave a completely arbitrary interpretation of the Patriarch’s words “ceremony” and “representation”, ignoring his following words (about the spiritual side) which convincingly show that the primate of the Jerusalem Church is speaking of the genuineness of this grace-filled event: “This is an experience which, if you please, is analogous to the experience which a person has when he receives Holy Communion.” The Patriarch’s meaning is utterly clear, because in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, we receive the genuine Body and genuine Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. |
| In addition to the essence-energies distinction, an additional antinomy is foundational for theology: God as Trinity. The goal of theology is not to explain how God is Trinity but to express the antinomy. The patristic categories of ousia and hypostasis are given in the tradition in order to express what is common and incommunicable in God as Trinity. The trinitarian categories, however, also provide the foundation for an understanding ofpersonhood that is defined as irreducible uniqueness to and freedom from nature. Lossky was also a vehement opponent of the filioque, which he interpreted as the natural result of the rationalization of the doctrine of the Trinity. Beginning in the 1960s, the work of Lossky and Florovsky had a significant influence on a group of young theologians in Greece, most notably Nikos Nissiotis (1925–86), Christos Yannaras (b. 1935), and John Zizioulas (b. 1931). Elements of Lossky’s theology, such as apophaticism, the essence-energies distinction, and the theology of personhood, are evident in Yannaras’s major work of 1970, Person and Eros. The most influential of these theologians is John Zizioulas, who synthesized the Eucharistic theology of Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) and Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) with the theology of personhood of Lossky, via Yannaras. Zizioulas, like Bulgakov and Lossky, affirms the principle of divine-human communion as the starting point of all theology, but unlike Lossky’s emphasis on the ascetic, mystical ascent to God, Zizioulas argues that the experience of God is communal in the event of the Eucharist. According to Zizioulas, early Christians experienced the Eucharist as the constitution of the community by the Holy Spirit as the eschatological body of Christ. This experience of Christ in the Eucharist is the basis for the patristic affirmation of the divinity of Christ and the Spirit and, hence, of the affirmation of God as Trinity. Zizioulas’s emphasis on the experience of God in the hypostasis, or person, of Christ has at least two implications. First, it is a noticeable break with the virtual consensus in Orthodox theology on the use of the essence-energies distinction for expressing Orthodox understandings of salvation as the experience of the divine life. Second, it is the foundation for what Zizioulas calls an “ontological revolution,” insofar as it reveals God’s life as that which itself is constituted in freedom and not necessity. If the Eucharist is the experience of God, and if such an experience is for created reality the freedom from the tragic necessity of death inherent to created existence, then God exists as this freedom from necessity, even the necessity of God’s nature, since God gives what God is. The freedom of |
| The Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky reminds us that the eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church... Far from being mutually opposed, theology and mysticism support and complete each other. One is impossible without the other. If the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith, theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone... There is, therefore no Christian mysticism without theology; but above all, there is no theology without mysticism. Mysticism is... the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence. 133 Bishop Kallistos Ware talks about the danger of separating mysticism from theology: “Just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, ‘academic’ in the bad sense of the word.” 134 It is worth stressing again that theology in its spoken or written form is able to create an environment such that every person can experience God, but it does not provide any direct means of this experience. The direct experience comes only from personal participation in ecclesial and liturgical life. The modern Greek Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras develops a similar thought. The Eastern Christian tradition of theology has a different meaning than that in the West today: to the former, theology is the gift of God, the fruit of interior purity of the Christian’s spiritual life, based mostly in living the church’s truth empirically, that is, through what is experienced by the members of the church body directly. The language, terms, and expressions were introduced to express the ecclesial experience, but the verbal and written word about God is intrinsically linked to the vision of God, with the immediate vision of the personal God. 135 Theology therefore is not a theory of the world (that is, a metaphysical system) but is “an expression and formulation of the Church’s experience… not an intellectual discipline but an experiential participation, a communion.” 136 |
| First, the author does not give a single entire “death” experience from start to finish, but gives only excerpts (usually very brief) from each of fifteen separate elements which form his “model” of the “complete” experience of death. But in actual fact the experiences of the dying as described in this and other recent books are often so different in details one from the other that it seems to be at best premature to try to include them all in one “model.” Dr. Moody’s “model” seems in places artificial and contrived, although this, of course, does not lessen the value of the actual testimonies which he gives. Second, the author has joined together two rather different experiences: actual experiences of “clinical death,” and “near-death” experiences. The author admits the difference between them, but claims that they form a “continuum” (p. 20) and should be studied together. In cases where experiences which begin before death end in the experience of death itself (whether or not the person is revived), there is indeed a “continuum” of experience; but several of the experiences which he describes (the recalling of the events of one’s life in rapid order when one is in danger of drowning; the experience of entering a “tunnel” when one is administered an anesthetic like ether) are fairly commonly experienced by people who have never experienced “clinical death,” and so they perhaps belong to the “model” of some more general experience and may be only incidental to the experience of dying. Some of the books now appearing are even less discriminating in their selection of experiences to record, including “out-of-body” experiences in general together with the actual experiences of death and dying. Third, the very fact that the author approaches these phenomena “scientifically,” with no clear conception in advance of what the soul actually undergoes at death, lays him open to numerous confusions and misconceptions about this experience, which can never be removed by a mere collection of descriptions of it; those who describe it themselves inevitably add their own interpretations to it. The author himself admits that it is actually impossible to study this question “scientifically,” and in fact he turns for an explanation of it to parallel experiences in such occult writings as those of Swedenborg and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, noting that he intends now to look more closely at “the vast literature on paranormal and occult phenomena” to increase his understanding of the events he has studied (p. 9). |
| Photo: http://www.patriarchia.ru/ I would like to speak a little about the quality of modern life. The information factor determines the characteristics of our life. Many things have changed in human society especially following the appearance of mobile communication and the Internet. People use these tremendously convenient inventions. We are witnessing the acceleration of scientific and technological progress, the development of educational system, and the enlargement of people’s horizons, because information has become practically widely available. People do not have to visit libraries and flip through voluminous encyclopedias or read monographs. With just one click you get a fast, perhaps easy, but clear, answer to a question you ask. On the other hand, all such phenomena have dangerous sides. This immersion in the information world – the virtual world – has a certain danger of deficit of a real human communication. It is easy to imagine the following picture: young people are sitting in one room, looking at their tablets, and are practically not communicating with each other. If anyone asks another person a question, the later will only shrug. What is he or she doing? He or she is communicating via social network. There is no real conversation, no interest in it. However, communication via social network arouses interest. What is happening, if we are exchanging real conversation for virtual communication? We neglect an extremely important aspect of our life, which is a personal experience of a real conversation in person. Communication in person brings such a valuable experience like nothing else. We know that sometimes we lack this experience in dealing with some issues concerning organizing a family life. Let us be honest to ourselves; we often connect our lives with certain people, with whom we probably should not. We do that because we lack experience and knowledge. If there is no experience in communication, we are incapable of seeing what is in the eyes of a person. Indeed, personal communication passes not merely rational message, but also emotional and spiritual. |
| La tradición oriental jamás ha distinguido netamente entre mística y teología, entre la experiencia personal de los misterios divinos y el dogma afirmado por la Iglesia. Las palabras que, hace un siglo, dijo un gran teólogo ortodoxo, el metropolitano Filareto de Moscú, expresan perfectamente esta actitud: «Ninguno de los misterios de la más secreta sabiduría de Dios debe parecernos ajeno o totalmente trascendente, sino que, con toda humildad, debemos adaptar nuestro espíritu a la contemplación de las cosas divinas». Dicho de otro modo, al expresar el dogma una verdad revelada que nos aparece como un misterio insondable, debemos vivirlo en un proceso durante el cual, en vez de asimilar el misterio a nuestro modo de entendimiento, será preciso, por el contrario, que cuidemos de un cambio profundo, de una transformación interior de nuestra mente, a fin de hacernos aptos para la experiencia mística. Lejos de oponerse, la teología y la mística se sostienen y se complementan mutuamente. La una es imposible sin la otra: si la experiencia mística es una fructificación personal del contenido de la fe común, la teología es una expresión, para la utilidad de todos, de lo que puede ser experimentado por cada cual. Fuera de la verdad guardada por el conjunto de la Iglesia, la experiencia personal estaría privada de toda certidumbre, de toda objetividad; sería una mezcla de lo verdadero y de lo falso, de la realidad y de la ilusión: el «misticismo» en el sentido peyorativo de la palabra. Por otra parte, la enseñanza de la Iglesia no tendría ninguna influencia sobre las almas si no expresara en cierto modo una experiencia íntima de la verdad dada, en diferente medida, a cada uno de los fieles. No hay, pues, mística cristiana sin teología, pero sobre todo no hay teología sin mística. No es casualidad que la tradición de la Iglesia de Oriente haya reservado especialmente el nombre de «teólogos» a tres escritores sagrados, el primero de los cuales es san Juan, el más «místico» de los cuatro evangelistas; el segundo, san Gregorio Nacianceno, autor de poemas contemplativos; y el tercero, san Simeón, llamado «el nuevo teólogo», cantor de la unión con Dios. La mística es, pues, considerada aquí como la perfección, la cumbre de toda teología; como una teología por excelencia. |
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