Pavel Gavrilyuk

This introductory chapter consists of twenty-five theses that articulate the rationale behind this Handbook and indicate some of its contributions. Deification studies is a burgeoning field. Often associated solely with the Orthodox East, deification became a central theme in the nineteenth century due to critical work by Ferdinand Christian Baur, followed by Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Opposed to Baur, Matthias Joseph Scheeben made deification central to his theological vision, as did, at the outset of the twentieth century, Ivan Popov and Juan Arintero. The present volume retrieves the theme of deification in a comprehensive manner from Christian Scripture and the Church Fathers to the present day. It does so in a manner geared toward historical, systematic, ecumenical, and interreligious understanding of this central Christian theme. The chapter offers a constructive working definition of deification, focusing on the most prominent “markers” of deification in Christian theological discourses.

The chapter explores analogies between aesthetic and spiritual perception to suggest ways in which the perception of God could be developed similar to the perception of beauty. This chapter draws on Gustave Courbet’s insight that the purpose of art is to discover and make manifest beauty in nature and discusses Claude Monet’s approach to such a discovery by means to returning to a ‘naïve impression’. This chapter argues that far from being simply ‘naïve’, the artist’s way of viewing nature opened the eyes of others to the possibility of ‘seeing more’. For Wassily Kandinsky, Monet’s art occasioned a paradigm shift from realism to abstract art. Kandinsky compared an artist to a prophetic seer who led others to discover the spiritual dimension of art. Similarly, perception of God could be developed through entering the world of experienced perceivers by immersing oneself in scripture and in liturgy.

The chapter argues that the twentieth-century neopatristic theologies were not purely historical exercises, but theologically motivated enterprises. More specifically, Georges Florovsky’s ‘neopatristic synthesis’ was a response to his ‘modernist’ predecessors, such as Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov. The organizing principle of Florovsky’s neopatristics was Chalcedonian Christology. In contrast, Vladimir Lossky’s reconstruction of ‘mystical theology’ had the vision of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palalmas as two focal points. It is argued that Alexander Schmemann’s liturgical theology may be likewise considered as a version of neopatristic theology with the emphasis on liturgical practice, and especially the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist, as the primary locus of theologizing. Thus, neopatristic theology cannot be regarded as a monolithic entity, but as a conglomerate of distinct theological visions, each with their own methods and organizing principles, which took as their inspiration the concept of a ‘return to the Church Fathers’ and creative appropriation of patristic heritage.

This chapter focuses on the distinctive features of Eastern Christianity, it is also important to emphasize that the history of Eastern Christianity, particularly in the first millennium, is closely intertwined with the history of Western Christianity. Many North Americans view Christianity primarily as a Western religion and are familiar only with its Catholic and Protestant expressions, which have dominated the Western world. The chapter discusses the Eastern Orthodox churches, which accept the teachings of seven ecumenical councils. It explores two other forms of Eastern Christianity: the Assyrian Church of the East and the non-Chalcedonian churches. In the fifth century, the western half of the divided empire collapsed under the pressure of war and invasion, mostly by Germanic tribes pushed west by invading Huns from central Asia. The primary form of Christianity that emerged in the eastern part of the Roman Empire is today known as Eastern Orthodoxy.

This chapter discusses four general features of modern Orthodox epistemology of theology—ontologism, apophaticism, integral knowledge, and the noetic implications of theosis—and the contributions of individual Orthodox authors, including Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Florensky, Florovsky, Frank, Khomiakov, Lossky, Solovyov, and Zizioulas. Ontologism is a philosophical stance that subordinates epistemology to metaphysics; apophaticism is an attitude towards the mystery of God with implications for theories of religious language, religious experience, and metaphysics; a theory of integral knowledge challenges one-sided epistemologies developed in modernity; and the idea of theosis indicates human participation in the life of God, which has implications for the process of coming to know God. Gavrilyuk highlights the retrieval by Orthodox neopatristic theologians of important pre-modern epistemological insights as well as their contributions to personalism, reliabilism, and social and virtue epistemology that remain unknown in Western scholarly literature.