Author: Rev. prof. Dumitru Stăniloae (Member of the Romanian Academy)
Keywords: Holy Trinity, Son of God, creation, redemption, Saint Athanasius, Saint Maximus the Confessor
Abstract:
The present article brings before today’s readers in a concise and accessible form some of the most beloved themes in the Father Stăniloae’s work: the relationship between God the Father and His Son, understood here especially as Image, Wisdom, Active and Creative Word of God and others. This time he prefers to found his Christology of the theology on Saint Athanasius and that Saint Maximus the Confessor. The article is more like an essay, with only few citations, though well-structured. Besides defining very concisely the creation and redemption of the world, and rather extensively the deep relation between the Son and the Father, in the same time father Dumitru has built some arguments against the old heresy of Arianism, pantheism, rationalism, which heresies culminated in the modern atheist existentialism that has promoted the absurdity of life and a nihilist worldview. Here are some of the father’s words: „It is strange that Sartre, after the impressive development of Science, who discovered world rationality, has coined the theory of the world absurdity. How can this be explained? From the fact that the Western thought, especially beginning with Descartes, has reduced knowledge to the world of objects. When Descartes said: «Cogito ergo sum», he saw only the self as subject of mediation and the objects that can be known by reason. He did not think of the relations between man and his fellows. But the former can less be known by reason, as through love and this type of knowing is the one that give sense and richness of life to the loving subject, which the objects’ rational knowledge cannot give. For this reason, since 14th century, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Calist, said: «I love, so I exist». Detesting this knowledge of one’s fellows through love, Sartre said the other are his inferno. Actually, the absence of love among people is the one which brings darkness and the torment of hell among them”.
(Republished from Ortodoxia XXXV (1983), nr. 2, pp. 168-176)
Pages: 16-26