Pavel Gavrilyuk

The paper discusses the problem of Orthodox‐Catholic disunity by naming non‐theological and discussing theological issues behind the issues in bilateral dialogues between the Churches. The main theological issue is the absence of agreement on which doctrinal differences should or should not count as church‐dividing. The author argues that the concept of the ‘hierarchy of truths’, introduced by Vatican II's Unitatis Redintegratio is a promising heuristic tool for distinguishing the doctrines that pertain to the ‘fundamental Christian faith’ and other important doctrines that do not have the same authoritative status. The author proposes that the agreement on the ‘Nicene faith’ could function as a sufficient condition for the Eucharistic communion between the two Churches on two grounds of the use of the Creed in the rites of initiation and the liturgy. The author subsequently articulates three potential objections to his proposal, responds to these objections, and finishes the paper with what could be called a ‘Nicene Formula of Reunion’. The proposed Formula includes a commitment to seeking an increasingly greater convergence on doctrinal and ecclesiastical issues on which there is continuing, although not church‐dividing disagreement.

The article explains that the ideology that fuels Russia's war against Ukraine was produced within the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church and had Kirill Gundiaev, the Patriarch of Moscow, as its major proponent. The ideology of the so‐called “Russian World” denies to the Ukrainian state a right to independent existence. This ideology also postulates a clash of civilizations between the Holy Rus’ as a defender of the traditional Christian values and the secular West. The most recent pro‐war statements of Patriarch Kirill are analyzed in light of this dichotomy.

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.

Modern theological engagements of deification have undergone two major paradigm shifts. First, the study of deification shifted from the periphery of theological discourse to its center. For Adolf von Harnack, deification was a pagan import that fatally corrupted and distorted the Gospel message of salvation. In response, the positive retrieval of the concept of deification belongs to the early years of the twentieth century. By the 1910s, in Russian religious thought, and, by the 1930s, in much Roman Catholic theology, deification became a magnet concept attracting much attention. The second important shift has to do with how deification is characterized. Recent studies question the exclusively “Eastern” character of deification and draw attention to the engagements of this theme in Latin patristic and later Western Christian sources. Reassessing the evidence for these two major shifts, the Handbook comprehensively explores the points of convergence and difference on the constitutive elements of deification in different traditions, and offers a foundation for ecumenical and interreligious dialogues. The Handbook’s Part I analyzes the cultural and scriptural roots of deification; Part II explores the most significant historical contributions to the understanding of deification in the early, medieval, and modern periods; and Part III develops systematic connections.

The paper explores a connection between discernment and spiritual perception. The discussion proceeds in four main steps. First, discernment as a practice underlying most Christian practices is introduced. Second, a distinction is made between judgment and perception, and it is argued that discernment involves both. Third, the concept of spiritual perception is introduced and the models of such perception are briefly discussed. Finally, drawing on John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent, a connection is established between discernment and spiritual perception.

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.

In contemporary scholarship, deification is so universally assumed to have been an abiding feature of the Eastern Orthodox tradition that it strains historical imagination to conceive of a time when the idea of deification would have been largely forgotten. This article demonstrates that the rediscovery of deification as a structurally indispensable concept of patristic thought was made by the Russian patristic scholar Ivan Popov in a trilogy of essays published in 1903-1909. The article considers different cultural registers within which the deification motif surfaced in the nineteenth century: the Greek Philokalia and its Slavonic and Russian editions, Dostoevsky's prophecy about the self-divinization of humanity in revolutionary socialism, the Spiritual Diary of St. John of Krondstadt, and Vladimir Solovyov's concept of Godmanhood. While these sources held a great potential for the theoretical development of deification, the importance of deification for Orthodox theology was not appreciated in nineteenth-century Orthodox academic theology. The situation changed dramatically after Popov (who briefly studied with Harnack in Germany) published his essays arguing for the centrality of deification in patristic thought, providing a detailed analysis of the concept in the fourth-century patristic authors (dwelling at length on Athanasius and the Macarian Homilies), and offering a taxonomy of the two main types of deification: realistic and idealistic. This article discusses Popov's influence on Pavel Florensky, Sergei Epifanovich, Lev Karsavin, Georges Florovsky, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, and Vladimir Lossky.