Who is the greatest Orthodox theologian of the last 100 years?

[Anonymous No.18416630]

> The possibility of such a "unifying" and "coherent" knowledge -- which unifies created nature in its personal, relational ec-stasy outside its creaturely limits -- was restored by Christ. We call Christ the "second Adam," precisely because in his person the whole human nature is "recapitulated" -- the organic body of universal nature acquires Christ as its head; humanity is harmonized and summed up in a new mode of existence, incarnate in the personal hypostasis of Christ.

> In their essence Christ's commandments are the Self-revelation of God. Though expressed in seemingly relative terms, whoever would rightly obey them finds himself on the frontier between the relative and the absolute, the finite and the infinite, the determined and the arbitrary. The keeping of these unconstrained prescripts far exceeds our human strength. It is imperative that he Himself, the Almighty Who manifested Himself to us, by His effective abiding within us should lead us into His own sphere of unconditional and absolutely unconditioned Being

> Man is not only a being with physiological, psychological, and social functions, but he is a citizen of God's Kingdom, i.e., his entire life -- and especially its most decisive moments -- involves eternal values and God Himself.

> When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.

> By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization.

> The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life.

Discuss.

[Anonymous No.18416746]

>>18416630
Shouldn’t this be on /his/? Why is this here?

[Anonymous No.18416762]

>>18416746

Because they are writers.

> Philosophical discussion can go on either /lit/ or /his/, but those discussions of philosophy that take place on /lit/ should be based around specific philosophical works to which posters can refer.

I quoted six specific works: "On the Absence and Unknowability of God" by Christos Yannaras; "We Shall See Him as He Is" by Saint Sophrony; "Marriage" by John Meyendorff; "In the Image and Likeness of God" by Vladimir Lossky; "On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ" by John Behr; and "For the Life of the World" by Alexander Schmemann. This is a discussion of philosophers and their works.

[Anonymous No.18417206]

>>18416630
I wonder, is there evidence in the bible to support these claims, or are these authors simply projecting their own personal religiosity onto kike on a stick?

[Anonymous No.18417229]

>>18416630
Dumitru Staniloae.

[Anonymous No.18417801]

>>18416630
orthodox say cucktholics limit the union with God but they do the same.
They say you reach the infinite, but then according to human possibility.
How is that fucking coherent ?

[Anonymous No.18417817]

>>18416630
orthodox theologians are always exoterist with biased opinions. Even if they are more traditional than papist, they stay christians, that is, people who put love above truth.

[Anonymous No.18418044]

>>18416630
So many retards replying here, most of them haven't read a single book by any of these theologians or any of the other names in Orthodox theology.

>>18417206
John Behr and Saint Sophrony are great examples if you want something that is developed with continual reference to the Bible. That's basically their entire theological approach at times -- interpreting the Bible. Someone like Christos Yannaras doesn't really do that. It's more like Yannaras is trying to articulate a radical Christian philosophy true to the writings of the Church Fathers and hesychast apophatics that can operate in the world of modern philosophy. Anyway, yeah there is a great deal of personal insight alive within most theological writing.

>>18417801
Yeah I guess Christianity necessitates a certain degree of what John Milbank calls "theological paradox". I forgot who Father John Behr is quoting when he said this, but he has described hesychasm as the attempt to "enshrine what is bodiless in the body". I mean, I'm not actually sure what you're upset with. This paradox is fundamentally constitutive of Christianity itself: God became man, God died. Truly died. And all life is death unless it is lived as death, so that we may truly live when we die.

>>18417817
Truth is Love because Truth is participatory, Personal. It is like Saint Sophrony said:

> He revealed Himself to us as "I AM", as Person -- Hypostasis. . . . And this living knowledge has delivered us from all the absurdity of intellectual aspiring to some Supra-Personal Absolute, to Pure Being transcending all that is -- in fact, to non-being.

Truth can only be known through participation in the Truth, as personal communion. Hypostasis is a transformative attainment that recapitulates the existential possibilities of universal nature, to speak like de Lubac for a moment. Truth can only be something that hypostatizes, that is to say, brings into existential reality a new mode of existence for human nature. Human beings only exist in their humanity because they participate in the Godhead. Love is the revelation of our limits in confrontation with difference. Incidentally, that's why being made "male and female" is a pair with being made "in the image of God": the image of God is our capacity to disrupt the assimilation of alterity. In a sense, Truth is the knowledge of Being: and we discover it in our communion with the internally present Outside (now my words get sloppy). This is the meaning of the Crucifixion.

>>18417229
What makes him the best?

[Anonymous No.18418052]

>>18416630
They don't have any good theologians. Most of it is midwit sperging and some pretty good apologetics. Jay Dyer is on the level as all of the guys in your pic, and that's not a good thing.

[Anonymous No.18418092]

>>18418052
This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested, but what have you read by Christos Yannaras? Which of Father John Behr's lectures have you listened to? Have you read Saint Sophrony's spiritual autobiography, or even his book on his Spiritual Father?

I'm not myself a big fan of Schmemann, Lossky, or even Meyendorff, because they felt rather entry-level, but I think you're being unfair. It almost feels like maybe you've read some Orthodox quotes online and maybe looked at some stuff by Father Seraphim Rose or something like that. If the Orthodox don't have any interesting theology then why is the West turning to them with ever-greater interest, rediscovering asceticism, apophaticism, and what Continentals might call "material theology" or something like that? There is an increasing number of volumes from the great Western academies every year that are engaged in excited conversation with Orthodox theology. Take that series published by Fordham as an example, or think about John Panteleimon and his stuff about Richard Kearney and the influence it has had, or even Christina Gschwandtner and her stuff on "postmodern apologetics".

[Anonymous No.18418107]

>>18418092
Yannaras concedes everything to Heidegger and thinks this is an epic dab on Catholics and doesn't apply to Orthos. I'm sorry, but you're retarded Yannaras.

Behr is good as apologetics, I had no idea anyone considered him as a groundbreaking and original theologian.

> If the Orthodox don't have any interesting theology then why is the West turning to them with ever-greater interest, rediscovering asceticism, apophaticism, and what Continentals might call "material theology" or something like that?

They're not. They're turning to medieval mystics and neo-platonism.

[Anonymous No.18418121]

>>18418044
This paradoxe is not the problem. One could say, you unite with God by separating totally your ego from Him (that is, denying it). But instead, they just contradict themself :
You become God but you don't, you reach the uncreated in a human way,... and so one.
And then they say catholics limit the contemplation, which they do. They don't do a suprarational paradox, like "Jesus is God and man" by saying "we become God and stay men", instead they say "we become God but in a limited way".
tl;dr : they limit and don't paradoxically admit two nature or point of views.

[Anonymous No.18418129]

>>18418044
Yeah and the iron become like the fire but it does not mean they have some common ground or nature in order to interact with each other.
Even your images refute christians and their limitative "deification". "We are deified and go beyond human nature but according to human limited possibilities".

[Anonymous No.18418160]

>>18418044
>Truth is Love because Truth is participatory, Personal.
Then truth is the achievement of Love. But for saint Paul and christians, love is beyond everything, because they don't have complete knowledge.
>1 corinthians 8-13 : 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

[Anonymous No.18418232]

>>18418107
In Yannaras' book which is most explicitly on Heidegger, the one I quoted in the OP, he explains pretty thoughtfully how figures from the Western tradition (Descartes, Anselm of Canterbury, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Martin Luther, Angelus Silesius, Jacob Boehme, Kant, Fichte, Schilling) failed and, in a Heideggerian sense, turned their back on the Nihil, how they ended up reducing ontology and theology to becoming constitutive of the logos of both Being and God (idolatry). He then goes on to articulate exactly how this doesn't necessarily happen in the apophatic tradition of the Greek East, and even compares the Western "apophaticism of essence" to an Orthodox "apophaticism of the person". Western theology sets up theologia negativa as the choice of the individual intellectual capacity as the basis for one's knowledge of existence (i.e., I come to know what exists as perfect entities, predetermined by the principle of their given essence). This leads to the "failure of reason" that Continentals are going apeshit about nowadays (see Creston Davis, Bruce Ellis Benson, Clayton Crockett, John Caputo, etc). Yannaras explains that Orthodoxy doesn't fall into this pitfall because it takes existence as a fact of accomplished relationships (his whole "relational ontology" thing).

I just really like Fr. John Behr, I'd be willing to discuss other theologians too. And yes they are -- there is undeniable interest in the Eastern tradition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TO_Mc0DehA

Maybe if you won't listen to me you'll listen to him. He has a little bit more clout.

[Anonymous No.18418336]

>>18418232
>In Yannaras' book which is most explicitly on Heidegger, the one I quoted in the OP, he explains pretty thoughtfully how figures from the Western tradition (Descartes, Anselm of Canterbury, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Martin Luther, Angelus Silesius, Jacob Boehme, Kant, Fichte, Schilling) failed and, in a Heideggerian sense, turned their back on the Nihil, how they ended up reducing ontology and theology to becoming constitutive of the logos of both Being and God (idolatry). He then goes on to articulate exactly how this doesn't necessarily happen in the apophatic tradition of the Greek East, and even compares the Western "apophaticism of essence" to an Orthodox "apophaticism of the person". Western theology sets up theologia negativa as the choice of the individual intellectual capacity as the basis for one's knowledge of existence (i.e., I come to know what exists as perfect entities, predetermined by the principle of their given essence). This leads to the "failure of reason" that Continentals are going apeshit about nowadays (see Creston Davis, Bruce Ellis Benson, Clayton Crockett, John Caputo, etc). Yannaras explains that Orthodoxy doesn't fall into this pitfall because it takes existence as a fact of accomplished relationships (his whole "relational ontology" thing).

Yes, I know. That's exactly what I said. But it's a massive cope. Yannaras is an idiot.

[Anonymous No.18418349]

>>18418232
Heidnigger is a nigger.
Modern orthodox are low-punching faggots.

[Anonymous No.18418376]

Is atheism not the default on 4chan anymore?

[Anonymous No.18418387]

>>18418376
it hasn't been the default for a while.
most of the old heads on /lit/ went through the atheism phase years ago, either became Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or some sort of Greek Platonist.

[Anonymous No.18418388]

>>18418336
You're sooooo stupid! Ahhh!!!! It is an argument not a cope! You're! Not! Gonna! Make it!

Engage with meeee!!!!! I want to talk about BOOKS

[Anonymous No.18418438]

>>18418388
One big cope, my dude.

[Anonymous No.18418449]

>>18418438
Burn in hell! Engage with my ideas! Your brain is rotting! You have nothing to say! You words are more useless than camelfarts! Explain how it is a cope, you worm! Tell me how, you pathetic rat! I gave you some little thoughts, now give me more than rabbitshits! What is Yannaras missing? What has he got wrong about Heidegger and the Areopagite? If you don't know then stop acting like you have more to say than you do! Say what you have!

[Anonymous No.18418491]

>>18418232
Are you saying ontology is bad ? Because this whole Heidegger thing is very retarded. Muh there is time and becoming so eternity is not eternal.

>>18418092
If some people are turning to orthodoxy, it's not because of their retarded "theologians" but because of monks. If you seek material theology, stop thinking and pray.

Christians prays and don't think.

Beside personnalism and existantialism are refuted by some orthodox theologians (like Romanides).

[Anonymous No.18418583]

>>18418491
I'm not talking about people converting to Orthodoxy. Obviously autistic debates between academic theologians don't have as much impact on converts as the actual spiritual tradition. But this isn't a church board, it's a literature board -- we are here for the autistic debates. So anyway, what I was actually talking about was the phenomenon of Western academic theologians developing a strictly theoretical interest in Orthodox theology, finding that it holds many things they have always been saying. I'm not saying there's some movement of conversion. But also yeah the lively monastic and ascetic tradition of the Orthodox Church and its influence on its theologians is what makes their theology so unique in many ways. You'll notice I included Saint Sophrony of Essex in my little list.

Yannaras isn't saying "ontology is bad", he's saying that the critical ontological tradition of the West is reductive. Idk what you're talking about "eternity is not eternal", you'll have to contextualize that for me so I understand how it is at all relevant to Yannaras' critique of Western theology.

[Anonymous No.18418667]

>>18418583
>You'll notice I included Saint Sophrony of Essex in my little list.
He is rejected by monks with his ecumenism as well as personnalism and mix-monasteries founding (something forbidden by councils).
And indeed, their theology is respected only because of the monasticism grounding it. "Theologian" only surf on it, and on the fact they are ecumenism so interesting to subvert orthodoxy. Even when they go against catholicism, it's for the wrong reason and it subvert even more the orthodox churches.

I were talking about Heidegger. I didn't read Yanaras but what you say seems pretty anti-metaphysical like always the orthodox thinkers.
>ended up reducing ontology and theology to becoming constitutive of the logos of both Being and God (idolatry)
What's the problem of that ? Where is the idolatry in saying God is the Good ?
"muh God should not be called the infinite, it's not enough personal to say so ! it's too smart for us, we need something more human".

[Anonymous No.18418797]

>>18418449
>I gave you some little thoughts,

You copy and pasted the synopsis from Amazon.

[Anonymous No.18418798]

>>18418667
Sophrony can't be that "rejected", he has been canonized.

Lol you are just being silly now, Orthodox theologians don't say that reducing God to the limits of our cognitive capacities is "too smart for us". They say it denies the reality of God as a spiritualizing presence, which makes spirituality possible. And Yannaras is not anti-metaphysical. In fact, his critique of Western philosophers is that they have killed metaphysics by reducing it to a knowledge of the limits of human reason. Metaphysics, according to both Heidegger and Yannaras, should be more than a critical function of pure reason which works only to mark the limits between phenomena (which remain always unknown to us in their essence, in-themselves) and conceptual truths. Metaphysics is reductive and ultimately anti-metaphysical when it becomes a functional systematization of a priori judgments and the data of experience.

You sound like Kant lol.
> Christ is the personified idea of the principle of the Good, personifizierte Idee des Guten Prinzips

The problem with this is that God is not a synthetic judgment, a primarily logical possibility, a mere concept, regardless of how much it constitutes truth as an immediate relation to moral experience. If God is simply the highest principle on the ladder of value or even the binding principle of the ethical set of values itself, he is still dead as absolute personal otherness.

[Anonymous No.18418807]

>>18418797
What the fuck are you talking about retard???

[Anonymous No.18418946]

>>18418798
>he has been canonized.
The patriarch of constantinople has no autority, he doesn't make or manifest any saints. Yeah some iconoclast too have been officially canonized, it doesn't make them good.

So you are saying western meta-physicians where too stupid and thought God was just a concept or the limit of conceptualization of the mind ?
While I admit there were a problem at some point, I find it very easy. It's not because you give a perfectly working negative definition of God "in-finite" that you limit him to the mind. Instead you deny any limit.
Orthodox on the contrary deny metaphysics everytime they can, because they think it's "rationalist".
With the same criteria then God should not be painted, as it limits him to a painting, or should not be called as it limits him to a name, or symbolized by anything.
Orthodox don't like metaphysics because they want "muh emotions and warmth of existentialism" and they just try to cope about it.


>Christ is the personified idea of the principle of the Good
No, individualized in his human nature. But I don't see what's wrong with that.

So much time I find orthodox refuting the idea God is simple just because it's too transcendant to think like that. "But I want a personnal God", even this idea is very modern, God is not "personnal" in a term we can understand, his incarnation is.

[Anonymous No.18418976]

>>18418946
*personnnal

[Anonymous No.18419008]

>>18418976
I'm not burger

[Anonymous No.18419233]

I've just read the short essay by Yannaras, "Orthodoxy and the West." The attitude of it is something I've always found annoying. A sort of cultural nationalism that's ironically dependent completely on the things they decry. The essay is essentially an extreme reduction of the problems we have in modern society to the author's chosen original sin. It is indistinguishable from the new age idea that we've left behind pagan regard for the earth and need to turn to indigenous belief that preserves it. Many of the arguments are identical. He correctly identifies many of our current issues, of course, but is too blinded by his biases to fashion anything meaningful from them. The whole thing is a rephrased and somewhat inverted version of the Protestant work ethic. His recommendations for what actions the Orthodox ought to take at the end are reasonable, but pretty much disconnected from the rest.
In short, it's cope. The instinct to respond to the many problems of modern industrial society with "Well, we are not Scholastics like you," is understandable, but also completely ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.18419433]

>>18419233
The speculation that Bolshevism was able to take hold in Russia because their Orthodoxy wasn't sufficiently Greek was particularly amusing. That being said, I'm not familiar with any of these authors and I'm interested by your thoughts about them, OP.

[Anonymous No.18419600]

>>18419233
This

[Anonymous No.18419623]

>>18419433
This might make some sense since from a few centuries russia became westernized.

[Anonymous No.18419720]

>>18418946
I am not really trying to call Western metaphysicians stupid, that would be unfair. They were certainly all smarter than me. I just meant to articulate how Yannaras' theology is genuinely different from theirs. I think he's really doing something different.

> It's not because you give a perfectly working negative definition of God "in-finite" that you limit him to the mind. Instead you deny any limit.
Now you're talking. Yannaras says this too. The annihilation of God as a "being" does not seek to annul but to surpass the category of being, of course. Once you put God beyond every limitation and beyond all conceptual absolutization, you also put Him beyond every denial. You have to exclude worldly categories, not transform them into negative definitions. Here Yannaras' recourse to the Areopagite is very helpful.

> It is necessary to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all things. . . . we deny all things so that we may unhiddenly know that unknowing which itself is hidden from all those possessed of knowing amid all beings.

The denial of limits isn't a mental concept, but beauty as an affirmation of life, a presence of personal otherness as the discovery of the horror of being like Job, like a dying man. That's the opening for the event of faith. Life is beyond existence, and unbelief in God gives him a more holy conception than either positive or negative definitions as symbols of the divine existential event. I'm starting to really respect your perspective though, anon.

> With the same criteria then God should not be painted, as it limits him to a painting, or should not be called as it limits him to a name, or symbolized by anything.
But this misses the point of what, for example, icons are for the Orthodox Church. They're not idolatrous symbolic limitations of the divine, they are arenas for the consciousness of nothingness from which human spiritual existence emerges. They are the space for what Maximos the Confessor calls "the arrangement of everything, as projected out from Him". Iconography is not about God coming through beings themselves as existent fact, nor Him coming through the Being of beings, but rather about His coming through the manner in which beings are, so that all things can be seen as testimony to God. The cosmic liturgy, you know?

>>18419233
I haven't read that essay, but I am both a little surprised and very unsurprised by this reading. I think Yannaras' politics are promising when they resist Christianity as an anthropological possibility, rejecting morality as a matter of conforming oneself to externally imposed principles and instead being an expression of one's unique mode of being in freedom, i.e., erotic self-denial. The acceptance of the disclosure of the other as an event that forms your own self-discovery. Yannaras gets corny after a while.

[Anonymous No.18419787]

>>18418349
Any good anti-Heidegger or anti-orthodox polemics you guys like?

[Anonymous No.18420036]

>>18419787
Levinas and Michel Henry have pretty good work against Heidegger, especially the first eight chapters or so of "The Essence of Manifestation". Also, Voegelin addresses Heidegger polemically in "Science, Politics, & Gnosticism". Check that one out. I think some of the guys from the Frankfurt School address Heidegger -- Adorno, Marcuse (probably in Negations) and Benjamin.

Derrida's stuff against Heidegger is interesting. "Of Spirit" comes to mind first. I know Dominique Janicaud has a book on Heidegger but I haven't read it. Same with Jean-Luc Nancy.

[Anonymous No.18420210]

>>18419720
The means to deification have no common measure with God.
So any mean (icons, love/eros, théology,...) can have a lower and a higher meaning. It can designate the end it helps to reach in an analogical way or it can designate the thing in itself, stranger by nature to God.
You can say this of everything, reason and sentiments, (and there Plato makes the distinction, taken up by church fathers, between celestial and terrestrial eros).
Any legitimate symbols (including definition of God's non definition) can be symbols or mode of being, from the manner of what we can reach God.

>consciousness of nothingness from which human spiritual existence emerges
>the arrangement of everything, as projected out from Him
Do you think the nihil is God, and we come from Him ? Because it would typically be one of these metaphysical truth rejected by orthodox.

>The cosmic liturgy
I'm not papist and I don't like Hans Urs Von Balthasar if that's what you mean.

>unbelief in God gives him a more holy conception than either positive or negative definitions
I'm not sure to understand but reversing the point of views isn't that big of a deal. It is a cheap way for theologian to seems smart while subverting the doctrine they are supposed to protect.

Anyway I think what he says is that God is ontological love and scolasticism forgot that and that metaphysics are not the mean of the christian but love (but love of God through metaphysics is something).

tl;dr : he seem to think christianism is love and catholicism forgot that or separated love and metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.18420280]

>>18418491
>Christians prays and don't think.
Nigga that’s retarded

[Anonymous No.18420456]

>>18420280
Yes and no

[Anonymous No.18420485]

>>18419787
I'm not anti-orthodox but you would find some in the papist conservatives milieu