Nesteruk, Alexei V.-The Universe As Communion - Towards A Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and Science-T & T Clark (2011)

THE UNIVERSE AS COMMUNION
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THE UNIVERSE AS COMMUNION
TOWARDS A NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS OF THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE
Alexei V. Nesteruk
Published by T&T Clark
A Continuum imprint
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writing from the publishers.
Copyright © Alexei V. Nesteruk, 2008
Alexei Nesteruk has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.
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Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
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To the memory of
Professor Thomas F. Torrance
CONTENTS
Preface xi
Introduction: The Delimiters of the Dialogue between Theology

and Science – Tradition, Neo-Patristic Synthesis
and Phenomenology 1
Chapter 1: A Neo-Patristic Ethos in the Dialogue between

Theology and Science 11
FLOROVSKY’S APPEAL TO A NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS
IN THEOLOGY 11
NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 14
A NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS AND THE REINTEGRATION
OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 18
DISINTEGRATION BETWEEN EAST AND WEST AS SEEN
THROUGH A DIFFERENT ATTITUDE TO SCIENCE 21
METANOIA IN THE COLLISION OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE:
THE RELEVANCE OF A PATRISTIC INSIGHT 24
METANOIA IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OR HOW TO
IMPLEMENT AN ESCHATOLOGICAL ATTITUDE 36
THE EXISTENTIAL REINTEGRATION OF HUMANITY AS
THE CENTRAL THEME FOR A NEO-PATRISTIC
SYNTHESIS OF THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 42
THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE AS
A REFUSAL OF THE NATURAL ATTITUDE 47
WHY DOES A NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS OF THEOLOGY
AND SCIENCE REQUIRE AN ECCLESIAL DIMENSION? 51
viii Contents
Chapter 2: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Existential

Phenomenology: The Lines of Convergence 60
NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS AND HELLENISM 60
A NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS AS THE ‘ANTICIPATION’
OF THE PAST 67
HISTORY, HELLENISM AND TELEOLOGY IN HUSSERL 75
HEIDEGGER ON TRADITION AND HELLENISM 88
HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY: OBLIVION OF BEING,
ABANDONMENT OF GOD 94
NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS AND EXISTENTIAL
PHENOMENOLOGY — AN OUTLINE OF INTERACTION 100
Chapter 3: Theology and Phenomenological Attitude: The Human

Condition, Existential Faith and Transcendence 106
INTRODUCTION 106
THEOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND FAITH: FROM
PATRISTICS TO PHENOMENOLOGY 109
THEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 122
PARTICIPATION, INCARNATION AND EXISTENTIAL FAITH 128
FROM APOPHATICISM OF INCARNATION TO EXISTENTIAL
FAITH AND QUEST FOR EXISTENCE 137
THEOLOGICAL ATTITUDE: TRANSCENDENTAL REDUCTION
AND METANOIA 144
FROM THE NATURAL ATTITUDE TO ESCHATOLOGY 149
THE SPIRIT IN THE INCARNATION AND THE SPIRIT-LIKE
INTENTIONALITY 154
SPIRIT-LIKE INTENTIONALITY IN PHENOMENALIZATION
OF BIRTH: THE CHRISTIAN TYPOLOGY 158
THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THEOLOGY
AND SCIENCE: WHY THEIR SYNTHESIS NEEDS AN
ECCLESIAL DIMENSION 161
Chapter 4: The Dialogue between Theology and Science:

Human-Centred as Opposed to Nature-Centred 167
INTRODUCTION 167
SUBJECTIVITY AND EXISTENCE 170
HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSE AND THE NATURAL ATTITUDE 173
PARADOX OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY 175
Contents ix
THE PARADOX OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND THEOLOGY 178

HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY IN THE BACKGROUND OF
SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY 184
NATURE AND MATHEMATICS 188
MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION 192
FROM MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE TO THE WORLD
OF PERSONS 201
THE WORLD OF PERSONS AND THE MEETING OF SCIENCE
AND THEOLOGY: A SYNTHESIS 205
THE PARADOX OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND THE
INCARNATION 208
FROM ETHICAL INDIVIDUALISM IN KNOWLEDGE
TO ECCLESIAL WISDOM 211
Chapter 5: The Universe as Communion: Apophatic Cosmology,

Personhood and Transcendence 220
INTRODUCTION 220
FROM THE PARADOX OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY
TO PRESENCE IN ABSENCE OF PERSONHOOD 222
FROM THE PRESENCE IN ABSENCE OF PERSONHOOD
IN SCIENCE TO PERSONHOOD AS COMMUNION 226
IDENTITY OF THE UNIVERSE: ITS UNKNOWABILITY AND
THE DEPOSIT OF PERSONHOOD 229
IDENTITY OF THE UNIVERSE AS AN ENHYPOSTASIZED
INTEGRITY OF PERSONAL BEING 235
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE AS ITS IDENTITY? 239
COHERENCE IN COSMOLOGY AS ITS APOPHATICISM 244
THE BIG BANG AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF BIRTH 247
THE BIG BANG AS THE TELOS OF COSMOLOGICAL
EXPLANATION 250
FROM THE SUBSTANCE OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE VISION
OF GOD THROUGH ONTOLOGICAL REPENTANCE 254
WITHDRAWAL OF GOD AS THE AUTHENTICITY OF
TRANSCENDENCE 261
CONCLUSION: TRANSCENDENCE IN COSMOLOGY? 264
Bibliography 267
Index 277
PREFACE
This book project represents, in a certain way, the continuation and extension
of ideas on the dialogue between theology and science in the perspective of
Eastern Orthodox Christianity which were formulated in my previous book
Light from the East: Theology, Science and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition
(Fortress Press, 2003). In that book the mediation between theology and
science was based on a simple comparison of premodern theological views
with contemporary scientific ideas without any recourse to the internal life of
human subjectivity from within which the sense of communion with God and
the world is disclosed. The issue of the differing intentionalities within the
same subjectivity, as a source of tension between theology and science, has
not been addressed. The motivation for the present book is to consider the
dialogue between theology and science in the framework of the phenomeno-
logical analysis in order to understand further the sense of the continuing
embodiment of the human spirit in the world through faith, knowledge and
technology. By keeping fidelity to the living tradition and theology of the
Church Fathers, while bringing their teachings to the new light, the whole
project acquires the features of a new synthesis of premodern theological
convictions (drawn from patristic sources) with postmodern philosophical
methodology (with an accent in existential phenomenology) of appropriating
scientific ideas. The aim of the book is not to establish the facts of the case but
rather to explore the ways of manifestation of being-in-the-world through
studying the relationship between theology and science. These ways are exis-
tential possibilities which signify not abstract potentialities of experience but
life in its historical concreteness. The stance of engaging contemporary scien-
tific narrative with ecclesial theology follows not from an academic curiosity,
but from the existential necessity of adjusting to the rapidly changing condi-
tions of the world due to scientific and technological advance. The ideal of
responsibility for all natural creation which was so vigorously advocated by
the Fathers of the Christian Church must be reinstated to its proper place in the
overall progress of humanity which, by its vocation, stands in the centre of all
creation between the universe and God.
I would like to express a deep feeling of gratitude to my son Dmitri who
helped me with this book in many existential ways, and, in particular, for
xii Preface
assistance with creating computer graphs. My colleague and friend George

Horton was the first critical reader of the book and I am grateful to him for
his enormous contribution in shaping the final text. Some ideas of the book
were taught through courses at the University of Portsmouth and at summer
schools on science and theology at St Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute
in Moscow. In this respect I would like to thank Christopher Dewdney and
Alexei Bodrov for support and fruitful discussions. The ideas of the book were
directly and indirectly discussed through conferences and meetings with many
friends and colleagues, among whom I would like to thank Antonio Samons,
Adrian Lemeni, Peter Coleman, John Bowker, Celia Dean-Drummond,
Argyris Nicolaidis, Wolfgang Achtner, Bishop Basil (Osborne) of Amphipolis,
Br Christopher Mark and Fr Andrew Louth. The final stage of the research
project has been generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation
(grant #11921) to which I express my gratitude.
Introduction: The Delimiters of the Dialogue
between Theology and Science – Tradition,
Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Phenomenology
Western Europe was the place where modern science originated and where the
first ‘clashes’ between science and theology occurred. It is recognized, how-
ever, that Eastern Christianity constitutes a different historical experience of
the relationship between theology and science: it has genuine historical distinc-
tiveness, originating in differences between Byzantine and Latin Churches,
which can be traced back to the fifth century. This ‘seed’ difference has initi-
ated a long-range division in development of Christian theology and philosophy
in the East and West, which still has many overtones including the attitude
towards the dialogue between theology and science. In order to heal this divi-
sion, and to prevent any further confessional and jurisdictional fragmentation
in the dialogue between science and Christian theology, the author appeals to
patristics as that historical and theological background which is common to all
Christian Churches. The objective of the book is to advance the dialogue
between science and theology by using ideas of the early Church Fathers (who
defended Christian faith in the conditions of an agnostic and atheistic environ-
ment similar to the present) and contemporary ecclesial theologians through a
new synthesis of their theology with modern philosophy and scientific ideas.
Patristics is employed here, however, in a mode of the so-called ‘Neo-Patristic
Synthesis’ advocated by one of the leading Orthodox theologians of the twen-
tieth century Georges Florovsky1 and followed by some theologians in the
Russian diaspora, Greece and Romania. One of the dimensions of this new
synthesis is to rearticulate the fact that the Greek patristic contribution is
important for the catholicity of faith and existential implications not only in
the Orthodox context, but also in Western Christianity. In the context of
the ongoing dialogue between science and religion in the West it is vitally
important to make the position of Eastern Christianity on the dialogue heard
1. Georgyi Vasilievich Florovsky (1893–1979) was one of the most influential Orthodox
theologians in the twentieth century. A comprehensive account of life and work of Florovsky
can be found in Blane, A. (ed.) (1993) Georges Florovsky. Russian Intellectual and Orthodox
Churchman, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
2 The Universe as Communion
and understood as contributing some unique and different ideas. This will
strengthen the religious pluralism in the discussion on science and theology in
the West and East, as well as tolerance in religious discourse. At the same time,
the Orthodox contribution to the dialogue will help combat militant atheism
which can originate from the exaggeration of some scientific achievements and
lead to an understanding of the place of science in the context of the overall
spiritual progress of humanity. The ultimate aim and ambition of the book is
to provoke the dialogue between science and Christian theology not only as
a purely academic enterprise, but also to incorporate it into existential con-
texts of contemporary humanity in order to face the consequences of the
scientific and technological invasion in the very core of the human condition.
The interpretation and evaluation of science on the basis of humanity’s spiri-
tual achievements is the primary objective of this monograph.
The realization of this objective implies an invitation for contemporary
theology to work with a view to a synthesis between Eastern and Western the-
ologies, the synthesis which, historically, had been already in existence during
the early patristic period: the dialogue between science and Christian theology
should follow a similar route, adjusting factual ecumenicity of science to the
catholicity of Christian faith. The dialogue between science and theology, if it
pretends to be free of inter-denominational differences, will have to follow the
historical example of the early Church in the way it reacted to the Hellenistic
philosophy and natural sciences of the time. Thus it seems plausible to defend
a view that the dialogue should develop in the context of a ‘new patristic
synthesis’ in order to reactivate the forgotten cosmic philosophy of the Greek
Fathers and their existential theology. This new synthesis is envisaged as
a mixture of premodern and postmodern exploration: its premodern character
includes the invocation and recovery of a patristic ethos in which theology is
inconceivable without its mystical overtones and ecclesial communion, whereas
its postmodern dimension, as the reader will see, comprises the phenomeno-
logical method of relating ecclesial theology to science through analysis of
structures of human subjectivity. Thus the synthesis does not seek to establish
facts of the case with respect to the relationship between theology and science
but rather to explore this relationship as a possible mode of experience or
being-in-the-world. Then, to address the problem of religion and science
implies not to follow the way of abstract academic research, but to articulate
it as the ontological problem of incarnate existence.
In the background of all varieties of the dialogue between theology and
science which takes place in the West, one admits that what is missing is the
qualification and evaluation not of pre-existing forms of this dialogue, but its
essence. It is one thing to discuss the existing historical forms of this dialogue,
but it is a completely different thing to enquire into the very cause of this
dialogue, the very existence of the problem of science and religion and the
underlying tension between them. This could give the impression that there
must be some frame of thought which suspends all contingent historicity and
approaches the problem from an a priori chosen, ad hoc, philosophical position.
Introduction 3
In order to avoid this impression our emphasis will be built on the conviction
that the dialogue between science and theology has sense only as an existential
issue, that is, as originating from within the immediate needs of humanity.
Hence the initial stance of any dialogue must begin from an enquiry about that
particular mode of the human condition which led to the existence of the
contraposition of religion and science and, as a result, to the whole range of
speculations on how to relate them. If this immediate existential dimension
of the dialogue disappears either from theology or from science, then all sorts
of ways of ‘combining’ science and theology, in order to establish a reasonable
model of their co-existence, has sense only as an abstract and empty game of
the reason with no existential and spiritual consequences. One can produce
many sophisticated schemes of the dialogue still without understanding why
the separation between religion and science (as two modes of the same human
subjectivity in the world) takes place and why there is an incessant urge in the
human psyche to reconcile them. In order to address this question the whole
discourse on science and theology must transform to a ‘meta-level’ where the
problem of theology and science will be grasped in its historical entirety as
well as in its soteriological necessity. Seen along these lines the problem of
theology and science becomes a problem of disunity in the human spirit, that
disunity which the human soul painfully attempts to overcome. Historically
this disunity was contemplated independently and differently by theologians
and philosophers.
It is known that Orthodox theology was never heavily engaged in discussions
with science, because, according to this theology, science, seen as a human
enterprise, that is, as the specific and concrete realization of existential events,
could not contradict the facticity and contingency of every personal existence
(even less could it control it). Science could not, and still cannot, justify its own
facticity as a particular mode of human subjectivity, that very subjectivity
in whose horizon science is acting. Orthodox theology was not afraid of any
scientific developments and their application, simply because all scientific
achievements could not address the mystery of the incarnate subjectivity,
which is, in a way, a major preoccupation of theology. Even in the case when
the human reason attempted to proclaim its alleged self-emergence from some
pre-existent and impersonal stuff of the universe, theology remained silent in
its wisdom of the ontological origin of things in the universe as articulated
through the events of personhood, whose irreducible and transcendent origin
is inexplicable by any science and, according to theology, is sustained by the
power of the Other, God-creator, the Father of all humanity. It is then not
accidental that Orthodox theology is called existential theology: it gives prior-
ity to concrete personal (hypostatic) existence (expressed through the intensity
and immediacy of a particular moment), as the ultimate ontological ground
for all other aspects of reality. This existential dimension in theology can be
traced back to early Greek patristics, which was largely forgotten for a long
period of time and interest in which slowly rises nowadays among scholars in
theology and science.
However, the existential ideal of patristic theology experienced a certain loss

in the course of history. According to G. Florovsky, Orthodox theology in the
twentieth century was in a state of existential crisis which could be described
as the separation of abstract theologizing from liturgy, and the loss of a sense
of tradition as adherence to Greek patristics, understood as post-Christian
Hellenism. In other words, the Church’s consciousness was lost in academic
theologizing which stopped theology from rethinking in modern terms the
split between Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as between monasti-
cism and secularity in the Church’s existence that indirectly contributed to the
disintegration of the overall human spirit into religious and scientific modes.
Here one could pose a reasonable question: can academic theology, devoid of
links with ecclesial experience of God and its affinity to the tradition and
ascetic achievements of the Fathers, engage adequately and meaningfully with
modern science without its own renewal? The response seems to be, inevitably,
negative. For the dialogue to be possible one should revert to theology’s roots
in tradition and address the existential crisis by referring theology to the imme-
diate life of humanity. For achieving this Florovsky advocated, since the 1930s,
for a ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis’ in theology by proclaiming it to be the task and
aim of modern Orthodox theology. This implied the recovery of the mind of
the Fathers as an existential attitude and spiritual orientation, and being faith-
ful to Christian Hellenism (as the first synthesis of secular philosophy and
living faith) incorporated as the eternal category of Christian existence.
It is amazing that approximately at the same historical period, when Florovsky
made his appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis, there was a tendency in philo-
sophical circles to criticize science and scientific philosophy for the loss of its
existential dimension, for the diminution of humanity and its values, for for-
getting about the foundations of its facticity and roots in philosophical tradition
seen as the distinctive feature of humanity, its entelechy. Edmund Husserl
qualified the crisis of the European sciences as being linked to the oblivion of
its roots in the tradition of the human spirit which is essentially the European
spirit and which is a privileged bearer of the teleological value of Greek
(pre-Christian) philosophy. One of the features of this crisis is the inability
to account for science’s facticity, that is, its sheer possibility as a mode of the
human condition. Since this issue still remains unresolved, one can argue that
no constructive engagement of science with theology would be adequate and
meaningful without accounting for the problem of science’s facticity. Thus for
the dialogue between science and theology to be intelligible, one should clarify
the meaning of science by reverting to its roots in the tradition of the human
spirit and referring to it as a mode of existential events.
It is interesting to see that historically Florovsky and Husserl, quite indepen-
dently, asserted the value of the European tradition as being intrinsically
Greek, although Hellenism in their thought differed considerably, being a post-
Christian Hellenism of the Fathers in Florovsky and a pre-Christian Hellenism
in Husserl (and to some extent in Heidegger). We see thus that both Florovsky,
in his appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis in theology, and Husserl, with his
Introduction 5
project of disclosing the foundations of science, attempted to enquire about

theology and science, correspondingly, on the level of their essence and in both
cases the reference to this essence was found in humanity and its telos (‘infinite
tasks’) that had been formulated for the first time when the European philo-
sophical spirit was created and by the Greeks and later sanctified in Christian
patristics. The presence of these infinite tasks in the historical advance can be
called tradition. For some tradition can mean the appeal to the dead antiqui-
ties of the past which are kept artificially at present. The past in this view is
but a sediment, merely a transmitted acquisition which we silently accept as
a matter of course without being aware of its historical nature. In this case the
followers of postmodernity will be tempted to dismiss any appeal to the tradi-
tion not only on the grounds of its complete irrelevance for the present, but
also as a stumbling block for the mind preventing progress towards new ideas.
For cautious thinkers the issue will lie in a different plane: tradition will be
mostly associated with the historicity of any intellectual discourse, so that tra-
dition will be treated as a specific and concrete context reflecting the evolving
character of any intellectual endeavour within the overall process of develop-
ment of humankind which has its own implicit teleology. In this case the
acquisitions of the past can be revitalized and reinstated from their sedimen-
tary condition by referring them to the very motives that originally instituted
and determined their further formation. In some sense the whole picture of
reality that is articulated by humanity in the course of history bears the sense
of tradition, that is, this picture is an accumulative result of many generations
of human insights formed when faced with the world. Briefly, tradition is that
unique and cumulative way of progressing in history which outwardly mani-
fests the incarnation of the human entelechy in the world and which drives
humanity to a certain telos, hidden from an immediate grasp, but present in
the human heart in its paradoxical absence. Thus a neo-patristic appeal in the-
ology and science aims to reinstate both theology and science to their proper
inseparable position in the entelechy of humanity.
To advocate the relevance of patristic thought for the dialogue with science
in a modern age of unrestrained postmodernity is a difficult enterprise. Since
the dialogue as such is a quite recent achievement in humanity’s effort to
restore the unity of its disintegrated spirit, this dialogue needs to learn from
what can be called tradition, understood in a wide intellectual sense. Indeed
the dialogue between science and religion, as it exists in the West, is character-
ized by various schemes and classifications that discuss whether scientific
theories and theological ideas and views are compatible or not, whether
there is consonance or dissonance between them. In these classifications both
science and theology are ascribed a similar epistemological as well as socio-
historical status, that is, they are considered as uniform fragments of the
human socio-historical condition, which can be simply related and compared
within some arbitrary frame of mind. The dialogue between science and religion
thus can lead to anything, depending on the ideological, cultural or simply intel-
lectual position which is taken by this or that thinker attempting this dialogue.
Then the value of such a ‘dialogue’ as related to truth is unclear and its essence
is obscured, for it does not address the issue of the meaning of science and reli-
gion in the perspective of the overall evolution of the human spirit, its ultimate
goal in understanding and realizing the place and destiny of humanity in the
universe. Thus the dialogue between science and theology acquires the sense of
dealing with truth when it is treated as an encounter of two traditions of the
human spirit, the traditions which in their apparent fragmentation follow
some common teleology that the dialogue between science and theology
attempts to articulate.
Tradition in theology means that theology is not an ingenious accomplish-
ment of an individual religious philosopher, and it is not a simple cumulative
result of generations of religious meditation; it is the integrity of religious
experience within the Church, its intrinsic Catholicity that is affirmed through
the interaction of the human spirit with the Spirit of God. For theology tradi-
tion is not only ‘repetition’ of those religious events that are commemorated
liturgically; it is not only reciting the texts and passive reading of the Fathers
of the Church. It is rather the process of the constant invocation of the
presence of God in the Church and in the world, the invocation which (in its
‘monotonic’ uniformity with the past), carries out an ontological element of
hypostasization of the reality of the Church as well as its theology. To be in
tradition means to be in the trait of the specific and concrete Christian way of
life, which is an ontological (existential and not only psychological) modality
of those who follow Christian faith. It is through the efficacy of the past in the
present of religious experience, that theology cannot take the arbitrary forms
and developments which postmodern thinking would like to promote. The
past of the Christian experience is contained and implied within our present,
that is history is not something exogenous to our perception of God here and
now, but intrinsically incorporated in the way we affirm and commune with
God. In fact, when Christianity appeals to the Apostolic and patristic tradition
it does not mean just intellectual and passive meditation upon the lives and
thoughts of our ancestors in faith, rather it means communion with them as if
they were actually present among us. This is communion with the persons
through whom we advance our experience of God. However, the experience
of God through the Fathers in this context is not only an individual affair: no
true experience is possible if it is devoid of the communal, ecclesial dimension.
Tradition in a wide sense can be understood not as a dead and static condi-
tion, but as a living tradition, which forms the existential modality of humanity.
Any hypothetical attempt to find a way out from tradition is in vain for, if it
were to be found, it would imply an exit from the existential modality of
humanity, that is, transformation of humanity into something that is not
human (that is, inhuman). This is the reason why tradition understood in this
sense is implicitly present behind all our actions and comprehensions. Being a
living tradition it is an evolving tradition: it faces challenges from the evolving
humanity which sometimes is driven by unintentional and impersonal dra-
matic urges. It is in this sense that the presence of tradition is a constant
Introduction 7
reminder to us that human subjectivity should involve itself in its own reassess-
ment through positioning itself in tradition. However, what is popularly called
the renewal or revival of tradition is not an exit from this tradition, it is rather
the acquisition of new ideas within the same tradition, but in the context of the
present age. One can assert even stronger that the appeal to tradition in our
age is necessitated by the internal developments in the human condition that
require one to rethink them in the overall historical context of humanity, to
look at them from the perspective of the teleological tasks of the human spirit.
Assessing in this perspective the meaning of the contemporary science–
religion dialogue, it seems doubtful that this dialogue is meaningful outside of
the traditional and historical aspect of theology, as well as the philosophical
tradition of science. As we have already mentioned, there are different schemes
of the dialogue which can be offered in the conditions of postmodernity but
none of them carry any intrinsic necessity. They are just arbitrary findings of
the liberated discursive mind which pretends to see itself as being freed from
any traditional forms of thoughts and flying above and beyond all scientific as
well as theological limits. In its pretence to be ‘objective’ and ‘dispassionate’
this mind forgets that its very ability to transcend the immediately given and
place itself in a metascientific and meta-theological discourse is ultimately con-
nected with the place of this mind in the overall development of the human
spirit in which the split between scientific and theological intentionalities
represents, not simply a historical fact, but rather the fundamental antinomy
of God’s revelation in the world, the antinomy endorsed by the very fact of the
Church’s complicated position, as being in this world but not of this world.
In view of what has been said so far, to try an approach to the dialogue
between science and theology in a contemporary postmodern age by extract-
ing it from the overall spiritual context of God’s revelation to man in the world
seems to be very adventurous, if not to say naïve. While placing theology and
science at the same intellectual level, the mystical and ecclesial dimensions
of theology are being eliminated and reason assumes ascendancy over both
science and theology.
The dialogue between science and theology thus can hardly be conceived
from outside the Church tradition, the tradition which is active through the
constant action of the Spirit of God upon history and which, in non-ecclesial
terms, can be understood as the breaking of the telos of the human spirit in
history. The dialogue between theology and science then becomes a painful
attempt of the human spirit to detect some common teleological features in its
fragmented tendencies.
The appropriateness of invoking phenomenological philosophy for the task
of a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science follows from a special posi-
tion which phenomenology occupies in the landscape of the transition from
the philosophy of modernity to that one of postmodernity. It is known that the
major characteristic feature of modernity was to proclaim the autonomy of
reason in science, philosophy, politics etc. This was a major contrast with the
ancient and medieval philosophy in which reason was understood as being
indissolubly linked with the manifestation of things and whose findings had
sense only in the context of attainment of truth. It is because of the loss of this
ideal of truth that modernity, with its promise for the ultimate triumph of the
self-enclosed reason, eventually deviated considerably from its exercise of
reason in the service of knowledge and evolved into the exercise of a will to
power. When this ‘evolution’ of modernity became seen and understood, one
can say that the era of postmodernity was inaugurated. It is through this
understanding of postmodernity, which in an academic realm reveals itself
with great force in the humanities, that one can anticipate the growth of inter-
est in the dialogue between science and theology in the West: it is not so much
the question of service to knowledge that is at stake here, but rather a question
of ideological and even political domination and struggle. It is in this sense that
the dialogue between science and religion as it takes place in most of Western
varieties is a typically postmodern enterprise. Then the reader can also antici-
pate that what is advocated in this book is rather a different attitude to this
dialogue, for it is mostly concerned with the question of truth: what is the
truth of the dialogue between theology and science and whether this truth can
be established through a synthesis which contains premodern elements through
which the overcoming of the voluntarism of postmodernity can be rethought
as the new incarnation of premodernity, understood as allegiance to truth
which is not a human construction but rather is humanity’s destiny, its telos.
It is in view of the task of advancing a post-postmodern (but also a new
premodern) synthesis of theology and science, that phenomenology can serve
an ideal role, because it breaks out of modernity and effects the restoration of
intellectual and spiritual convictions that drove ancient and medieval theol-
ogy, philosophy and science. Like patristic theology and premodern philosophy,
phenomenology understands reason as progressing towards truth, that is, there
is a hidden teleology of reason. Through its detailed account of the intention-
alities of human subjectivity as directed towards truth, as well as through a
strong conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the concrete living con-
ditions, (so that the centre of disclosure of truth returns to concrete hypostatic
beings), phenomenology allows one not only to reappropriate and advance
ancient theological and philosophical ideas but to deal with epistemological
issues of the modern science, thus manifesting itself as an ideal tool in creating
a synthesis between traditional theology and modern science.
The general aim of employing phenomenology in the dialogue between sci-
ence and theology is to address the most unsatisfactory issue of epistemological
(or even ontological) uniformity between science and theology that was pre-
sumed in the dialogue between them. Treated phenomenologically, the dialogue
in its various forms in the West is exercised in rubrics of the natural attitude
of the human mind by comparing the realities that are advocated by science
and the convictions of theology as if they could exist independently of the
living presence of persons, which, is the ultimate centre of articulations about
the world as well as about experience of God, and hence the initial and basic
point of departure in the dialogue between science and theology. Theology in
Introduction 9
a patristic sense means the experience of the living presence of God through
communion which is potentially gifted to man in the very fact of existence,
so that in the background of this existence and presence, all articulations of
outer things (including scientific ones) receive their meaning and interpretation.
In view of this the methodology of mediation between science and theology
will assume the re-evaluation of science and the revelation of pre-scientific
contexts which provide some delimiters of science as well as point towards its
ultimate foundation. The dialogue between theology and science will imply
not a simple comparison of scientific theories and practices with the worldly
implications of religion, but most of all a clear understanding that science itself
is only possible as a mode of experience of the world granted to humanity
through the living communion with God.
Phenomenological philosophy identifies pre-predicative structures of scien-
tific experience with what it calls the life-world, as the medium of immediate
indwelling of human subjectivity. The structures of the life-world can then be
related to theological articulations of the human condition. If the work of
revealing the presence of human subjectivity in scientific theories were done,
then all features of scientific theories could be traced as reflecting the essence
of the phenomenon of humanity. For both science and theology, the ultimate
reference of their developing insights is the transcendental subject, hypostatic
humanity, which paradoxically, being limited in its physical and biological
incarnation, that is, being contained by the universe as a part, at the same time
contains the whole universe in its insight by the power of reason and grace.
Thus, one can conclude that science and theology can be related through the
fundamental existential fact of their inherent unity in the phenomenon of
humanity, but this comparison is not trivial because outwardly the scientific
and religious spirit is in a state of split.
While science with its naturalistic and rationalistic logic attempts to estab-
lish the objectivity of knowledge, thus involuntarily concealing the structures
of the life-world, theology, on the contrary, is mostly concerned with the artic-
ulation of the life-world, as existence-in-situation, not departure from it. The
means of such an articulation, however, are quite different in the two cases.
The human condition as manifesting the created image of God present in the
world, if articulated theologically, is not centred around the ‘natural’ (physi-
cal, biological, psychological) core of the world (as it happens in science) but
is rather affirmed through a personal participation–communion of human
beings in the Divine. The opposition between the truth of theology and the
truths of science is rooted, in most cases, in the disconnection of their truths
from the idea of communion. In ontological (existential) terms, both science
and theology have a common ground of truth, a common source of ontologi-
cal otherness, which is God, whose being is revealed through the very fact of
human existence as communion. The split between theology and science can
be overcome if both of them are reinstated to their proper relational status in
communion seen in a cosmic dimension. The constitution of nature in science,
as well as the affirmation of the presence of God in the world through religious
experience, originates from the same source, as products and correlates of

conscious acts as modes of participation–communion. It is through this articu-
lation of nature by human incarnate subjectivity that nature manifests itself as
a particular mode of relationship between man and God. Science thus reveals
itself as a mode of experience of God and the Eucharistic expression of human
relationship to God. The revelation of the implicit para-Eucharistic dimension
in contemporary science (as another characteristic of science’s inherence in
humanity) points to the ultimate source of theology and science, that is, to the
human-created subjectivity, made in the image of God. It is here that phenom-
enology could serve as an efficient intellectual tool for explicating humanity’s
presence behind modern scientific discourse and thus relating science to
theology.
Chapter 1
A Neo-Patristic Ethos in
the Dialogue between Theology and Science
A theology which is concerned to emphasize the destiny of mankind and the mean-
ing of history cannot avoid facing the world in which men actually live out their
lives. Orthodox theology has therefore become – together with Western theology –
a theology of the world, returning through this aspect to the tradition of the Eastern
Fathers themselves who had a vision of the cosmos recapitulated in God. From this
point of view the most important problem for the Orthodox theology of tomorrow
will be to reconcile the cosmic vision of the Fathers with a vision which grows out
of the results of the natural sciences. . . . Theology today must remain open to
embrace both humanity and the cosmos; it must take into account both the aspira-
tions of all mankind and the results of modern science and technology.
Fr Dumitru Staniloae (1980) Theology and the Church, pp. 224, 226.
Florovsky’s Appeal to a Neo-Patristic Synthesis in Theology
The tradition of the Church is often called Apostolic and patristic. However
what makes the historical position of those who live in the twenty-first century
similar to that of the Fathers of the Church is that we live in the same historical
reality, that is, after Christ, in which the Fathers lived and proclaimed their mes-
sage about Christ. It is in this sense that our age can still be considered as the age
of the Fathers and an appeal to the tradition as the guideline for modern theolog-
ical development means effectively the appeal to a new patristic synthesis, the
synthesis of our own age.1 In the twentieth century, when the Orthodox Church
1. It is worth reminding the reader that what is generally known as the ‘patristic’ period cor-
responds to that historical era when fundamental Christian doctrines were fixed by the Fathers
of the Church in a series of Church councils. The patristic period as understood within the
Orthodox Christianity is often extended far beyond these ‘official’ historical limits until at least
fourteenth century, the century of St Gregory Palamas. In a sense, however, the patristic era never
ended: ‘In the eyes of Orthodoxy the “Age of the Fathers” did not come to an end in the fifth
century, for many later writers are also “Fathers”. . . It is dangerous to look on “the Fathers” as
a closed circle of writings belonging wholly to the past, for might not our own age produce a new
Basil or Athanasius?’ (Ware, K. (1997) The Orthodox Church, New York: Penguin, p. 212).
in Soviet Russia faced persecution and destruction and when the whole ideal of
a Christian nation collapsed in the fratricidal civil war, Russian religious thinkers
and theologians attempted to understand not only the underlying nature of such
a historical catastrophe, when the symphony between Church and the state had
been terminated, but also the meaning of the Orthodox Church and its theology
in new historical conditions, when a kind of decoupling between religious iden-
tity and ethnicity took place. ‘What is the Church?’, and ‘What is its theology?’
– these are questions which Russian religious figures attempted to comprehend
while in exile from Russia. It is through the prism of historical reassessment and
critical introspection upon the immediate past, that the revival of Russian theo-
logical thinking took place along the lines of two dominant directions: ecclesiology
with its preoccupation to clarify the question ‘What is the Church?’, and another
existential question which is closely linked to ecclesiology, namely ‘What is the
human person?’ (for it is only in the Church that persons become authentically
themselves).2 As we argue later, this latter question constitutes one of the major
problems of a neo-patristic synthesis in theology, so that our attempt to involve
science into the dialogue with theology along the lines of the same trend is intrin-
sically existential and ecclesiological.3
Referring to the historical realities of the Russian Orthodox theology before
the revolution of 1917, Florovsky admits that theology experienced an exis-
tential crisis by being alienated from the mystical life of the Church, by being
essentially a form of mental exercise and having relevance only for esoteric
circles around the Church:
Theology remained an enclave within the organism of the Church. As it developed in

an artificial milieu and in isolation, it became and remained a school discipline, more
and more a matter that is taught, less and less a quest for truth or profession of faith.
Theological thought gradually lost the faculty to apply itself to the live pulsations of
the Church. It could not any more find the way to its heart. It attracted neither the
attention nor the sympathy of large social and popular circles of the Church.4
2. This was the main thesis of Bishop Kallistos of Dioklea’s lecture ‘Orthodox theology in
the New Millennium: what is the most important question?’ delivered at the Summer School
of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge in July, 2003 (unpublished).
3. A neo-patristic synthesis does not pretend to build any accomplished and fixed anthro-
pology, thus following a long tradition of the Christian East which never had any obligatory
(to the faithful) system of views about man and cosmos. The Eastern theological attitude was
very relaxed to the systems of knowledge based on secular science and philosophy, giving
thus an unrestricted freedom in unveiling the human condition and abstaining from any
attempt to treat the ever-evolving debate about the human condition as the truth in the last
instance. The intrinsic apophaticism towards anthropology guaranteed freedom to science
and philosophy to express views about humanity without exhausting them entirely. The
major stance of Christianity about the divine image in man can only be commented and
supplemented by advances in science and philosophy, but it can never be abolished and
reduced to any fixed conceptual expression.
4. Florovsky, G. (1975) ‘The ways of Russian theology’, in Aspects of Church History
(Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 4), Belmont: Nordland, p. 187).
A Neo-Patristic Ethos 13
If theology was alienated from the life of faith and mystical experience of
God within the Church itself, one must not wonder that theology was alien-
ated from the social life altogether, and it was completely insensitive to those
developments in the sphere of the human spirit which took place in philosophy
and science. Theology was not up to date, not only because of loosing its
ability to apply itself to the live pulsations of the Church, but even less was it
able to react to the live pulsations of the secular spirit. However the impact of
theology on the ever-evolving reason of human history can only be achieved
‘when theology shall return to the depths of the Church and lighten them from
within, when reason shall find its centre in the heart, and when the heart shall
mature through rational meditation.’5 In the same way as the reason, devoid
of the light of the spiritual intellect and of the heart, cannot attain the clarity
of truth in its own tendencies and its own historicity, the heart itself, devoid of
the rational reflection upon its own movements and experiences, cannot make
itself manifest to the public life of the Church; for what it (heart) lacks is
exactly that which was called ‘theology’ in a patristic age, that is, theology as
demonstrated faith.
For Florovsky the lack of this maturation of the theological heart through
rational meditation was associated with the oblivion of patristic tradition and
it is here that one can see the origin of his thesis that the goal of theology must
be linked to acquiring back the style and methods of the Fathers. However the
acquisition of what Florovsky calls ‘Patristic mind’ is not a sheer acquaintance
with ancient texts and extraction of relevant quotations for modern argu-
ments; it is rather the possession of the theology of the Fathers from within.6
The acquisition of ‘Patristic mind’ is thus the developing of a faculty of intu-
ition which is capable of recognizing in the Fathers the true witness and
ever-present testimony of the Church, which survived all cataclysms of the
Church history, as well as history in general,7 that is, to recognizing the under-
lying Reason (logos) in the development of the Church consciousness, the
Reason which forms its telos. This means that the return to the past in terms
of the Fathers’ heritage means not the repetition of their sayings as borrowings
from the past, but rather the restoration of the spirit of the Fathers as guiding
us to the future. The reintegration of our mind with the spirit of the Fathers
implies also the restoration of our catholicity with the Fathers as that universal
communion which can effectively validate the claim for the authority and truth,
attained in the living tradition, in the midst of the contemporary postmodern
5. Ibid., p. 191.
6. Ibid., p. 191.
7. ‘Our contemporary world, atheistic and ridden with unbelief, is it not comparable in a
sense with that pre-Christian world, renewed with all the same interweaving of false religious
trends, sceptical and anti-God? In the face of such a world, theology must all the more
become again a witness. The theological system cannot be a mere product of erudition; it
cannot be born of philosophical reflection alone. It needs also the experience of prayer, spiri-
tual concentration, pastoral solicitude.’ (ibid., p. 207.)
cultural environment. However, the return to the Fathers must be creative.

This implies that ‘one has to reassess both the problems and the answers of the
Fathers’ with an element of self-criticism. ‘We must not only retain the experi-
ence of the Fathers, but moreover develop it while discovering it, and use it in
order to create a living work,’8 and this, according to Florovsky ‘brings us
to the concept of a Neo-patristic Synthesis, as the task and aim of Orthodox
theology today’.9
It is evident that the ethos of a neo-patristic synthesis is to involve theologi-
cal thinking into a historical process understood not as a contingent flux of
events and happenings in human society, but as the theanthropic process which
is determined by Biblical events such as creation, the Incarnation, Resurrection
and Pentecost, whose telos is the union with God. This means that all particu-
lar modalities of the Church life and its theology, in spite of the fact that they
can appear (to some non-ecclesial consciousness) as historically contingent
and archaic, in their depth, have a very important meaning, for all of them
were effectively sanctified by the action of the Spirit of God upon different
stages of human history. The manifestation of this sanctification, its historical
incarnation, is the Church’s worship, its Eucharistic ontology as making the
Church existent and alive. In patristic times theology was inconceivable with-
out worship and it is as worshippers that the Orthodox always stayed in the
tradition of the Fathers;10 this is the reason why ‘they must stand in the same
tradition also as “theologians”. In no other way can the integrity of Orthodox
existence be retained and secured.’11 It follows that this is also the reason why
a neo-patristic synthesis must be considered as the task and aim of Orthodox
theology not only with respect to its own development but also with respect to
its interaction with the world of contemporary philosophical and scientific
thought.
Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Orthodox Theology in the Twentieth Century
The appeal of Florovsky for a ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis’ was followed in the

twentieth century by some Russian Orthodox theologians abroad, such
as Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorf, Kiprian Kern and to some extent
8. Ibid., p. 200.
9. Florovsky, G. (1975) ‘Patristic theology and the ethos of the Orthodox Church’, in
Aspects of Church History, p. 22. (See also Williams, G. H. (1993) ‘The neo-patristic synthe-
sis of Georges Florovsky’, in A. Blane (ed.), Georges Florovsky, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, pp. 287–340).
10. The Fathers were ecclesial beings: they proclaimed their witness in ecclesial context,
and that is why they were Orthodox in a genuine sense of the word. (See Yannaras, C. (1998)
Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
pp. 151–3).
11. Florovsky, G. ‘Patristic theology and the ethos of the Orthodox Church’, p. 22.
Alexander Schmemann. All those who studied and developed old patristic
ideas can be considered as the Fathers of the Church, for they contributed
towards that patristic heritage that is extended in time and has a mode of per-
petual existence, as has the Church itself. That is why those contemporary
theologians of Orthodox Church, who dwelt a lot on the writings of the
ancient Fathers, and who created their own individual and unique experiential
way of communicating with God, must be studied and understood in order to
continue the never-ending line of ecclesial fullness and tradition. It is in this
sense that the tradition affirms itself as a never-ending and ‘living tradition’
and the age of the Fathers has not ended in the past. Those ascetics of the
Orthodox Church, who always lived in the mind of the Fathers through
worship and liturgy and never lost their affinity to the Fathers’ mind, give us
a contemporary ‘practical’ example of their own patristic synthesis, which
should be studied. It is in this respect that one should point towards the
thoughts of St Silouan the Athonite, expressed in writings of his pupil Archi-
mandrite Soprony (Sakharov),12 in order to see what form the acquisition of
the mind of the Fathers can take in modern spiritual life.
In spite of the fact that a neo-patristic appeal originated from within the
Russian theological school the advocacy for a ‘theological turn’, under the
slogan ‘back to the Fathers’, made Florovsky a distinctively pan-Orthodox
theologian who transcended his primary national theological affiliation. The
pan-Orthodox nature of this appeal was a characteristic movement forward
(in theological development of the twentieth century) through going back to
the Fathers, who were bishops and belonged to the Orthodox Church at
large, being its common denominator and universal heritage. Florovsky’s
appeal for a neo-patristic synthesis was shared and advanced by J. Zizioulas
(Metropolitan of Pergamon),13 C. Yannaras,14 G. Mantzaridis,15 P. Nellas16
and others.
12. See, for example, Sakharov, S. (1973) The Monk of Mount Athos, London and
Oxford: Mowbrays.
13. Zizioulas was influenced by ideas of Florovsky and other Russian Orthodox
theologians. See a comprehensive discussion of his debate with Florovsky in McPartlan, P.
(1993) The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue,
Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 7–10, 212–39. Zizioulas’ major books are (1997) Being as Com-
munion, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, and (2006) Communion and Otherness,
London and New-York: T&T Clark.
14. There are few English translations of C. Yannaras’s books which are relevant to our
discussion. See, for example, Yannaras, C. (1996) The Freedom of Morality, Crestwood:
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; (2004) On the Absence and Unknowability of God, London
and New-York: T&T Clark; (2005) Person and Eros (in Russian), Moscow: Rosspain.
15. See, for example, Mantzaridis, G. I. (1984) The Deification of Man. St Gregory
Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
16. See, for example, Nellas, P. (1997) The Deification of Man. Orthodox Perspectives
on the Nature of the Human Person, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Patristic heritage received its further clarification through the works of a

French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément17 as well as a famous Romanian
theologian Fr Dumitru Staniloae.18 In the Anglo-Saxon world the major study
of the mind of the ancient Fathers in different aspects of their theology and
spirituality relevant to the problems of the modern age has been carried out by
Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Dioklea. Definitely one must not forget about many
purely academic patristic scholars who study the Fathers of the Church because
of philosophical, historical and linguistic interest. Here one has to add a word
of caution that the dispassionate study of patristics (i.e. not from within the
fullness of faith) can be an interesting, but adventurous enterprise. Such a
study of the Fathers would not necessarily mean the acquisition of their mind
and the living communion with them. Hence the study of patristics as an aca-
demic discipline is a valuable aspect of the Church history, but it definitely
does not reach the goal of a neo-patristic synthesis to transform human-created
mentality and transfigure intentionality in the spirit and manner of the Fathers.
The thought of Florovsky that theology must be renewed and reverted to its
roots in the Fathers means exactly that it cannot be detached from the experi-
ence of the Church and, in all its attempts to reach out to the contemporary
world, an ecclesial dimension must be preserved as a constant factor of any
theologizing.
Florovsky through his advocacy for the restoration of the patristic mind also
influenced and inspired some famous non-Orthodox theologians of the twen-
tieth century who contributed to the study of the Eastern Fathers and helped
to bring their ideas to the light of the Western theological and philosophical
thought. I want just to mention such Roman Catholic thinkers as Henry de
Lubac19 and Jean Daniélou,20 as well as Hans urs von Balthasar.21 A special
place in this short list belongs to Thomas Torrance, who emphatically advo-
cated the importance of our understanding of the Greek and Latin Fathers in
order to bring more clarity in our ‘scientific age’ in some basic theological
issues (such as the Incarnation, for example) and their importance for the
17. See, for example, Clément, O. (1976) Le Christ Terre des Vivants, Collection Spiritu-
alité Orientale, n. 17, Begrolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellfontaine; Clément, O. (2000) On
Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, London: New City.
18. See, for example, Staniloae, D (1980) Theology and the Church, Crestwood:
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
19. A comprehensive survey of de Lubac’s thought and writings as related to the
polemics with J. Ziziouolas can be found in McPartlan, Eucharist Makes the Church.
20. See, for example, his book on St Gregory of Nyssa, (1954) Platoinisme et théo-
logie mystique, Paris: Aubier.
21. See, for example, his book on St Gregory of Nyssa, (1995) Presence and Thought.
Essays on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco: Ignatius Press; and
on St Maximus the Confessor, (2003) Cosmic Liturgy. The Universe according to Maximus
the Confessor, San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
dialogue with science.22 The very fact that these non-Orthodox thinkers
crossed over historical boundaries of their denominational theology and appealed
to the roots of the united Christian doctrine advocates for the outstanding
necessity of the unified synthesis in Christian theology based in its patristic
foundations.
A neo-patristic synthesis became timely in the twentieth century because it
was accompanied by the rediscovery of heritage of St Maximus the Confessor,23
St Gregory Palamas24 as well as the main source of Orthodox spirituality, the
Philokalia.25 A special note must be taken with respect to the Oriental (Syrian)
patristics whose many documents became accessible to general study and
translated (partially) into European languages only recently. It is also timely to
pay more attention to what can be termed ‘Russian Patristics’ (as referred to
numerous spiritual writings in the pre-revolutionary Russia as well as more
recent literature which in spite of being in existence at the time of Florovsky
was not appreciated either by the Russian theologians or known to the Western
religious thought).26 One should reassert that the whole ethos of the neo-patristic
appeal was to affirm with a new force that theology in its proper patristic
understanding is inseparable from worship, that is, from experience of prayer
and liturgy. Florovsky called this the acquisition of the ‘patristic mind’: to see
theology in the living context of faith which supplies all theological intellectual
22. See, for example, his books (1997) Space, Time and Incarnation, Edinburgh:
T&T Clark; and (1997) Divine Meaning, Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
23. The research on St Maximus the Confessor, including translation of his works in
European languages, intensified in the last decades. Here, first of all, one should mention an
outstanding book of Thunberg, L. (1995) Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthro-
pology of Maximus the Confessor, Chicago: Open Court, as well as a book of Louth, A.
(1996) Maximus the Confessor, London: Routledge. See also a book of P. M. Blowers and
R. L. Wilken (2003) On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Selected Writings from
St Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. One must also mention
an intensive research on St Maximus by a French scholar J.-C. Larchet; see, for example, his
book, (1996) La Divinisation de l’homme selon Saint Maxime le Confesseur, Paris: Les
Editions du Cerf. See also the latest research on St Maximus’ Christology by D. Bathrellos
(2004) The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature and Will in the Christology of St Maximus the
Confessor, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
24. See, for example, Kern, K. (1996) Anthropology of St Gregory Palamas (in Russian),
Moscow: Palomnik; Meyendorf, J. (1998) A Study of Gregory Palamas, Crestwood:
25. The English translation of this collection was undertaken very recently and four vol-
umes have been published so far: Palmer, G. E. H., Ph. Sherrard, and K. Ware (eds) (1979–95)
St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, The Philokalia: The
Complete Text, 4 vols, London: Faber.
26. The spiritual literature reflecting the Russian tradition is enormous, so that there is
no point even to try to review it here. However, one must point towards proper theological
development which was undertaken by late Fr Sergei Bulgakov, whose works are starting to
be translated into English only recently.
expositions by the immediate experience of God, without which any theology

transforms into an ‘empty dialectics, a vain polylogia, without any spiritual
consequence’.27 The crucial point for Florovsky was to argue for the integrity
of theological thinking which included not so much citations and dispassion-
ate reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, but, an active participation
through communion with the Fathers as persons in their experience of God
and life; this communion through the centuries can only be achieved within
the integrity of the worshipping and Eucharistic experience of the Church as
a factor of its perpetuality and existence.
. . . it can be contended [that] the ‘age of the Fathers’ still continues alive in the
‘Worshipping Church’. Should it not continue also in the schools, in the field of
theological research and instruction? Should we not recover ‘the mind of the
Fathers’ also in our theological thinking and confession? ‘Recover’, indeed not as
an archaic pose and habit, and not just as a venerable relic, but as an existential
attitude, as a spiritual orientation.28
However the recovery of a spiritual orientation in a style and manner of

the Fathers means, in fact, a change of the spirit of modern theologizing from
passive study and simple learning to a constant invocation of that Spirit who
guided the Fathers and who allows us to enter communion with them. It is
through this communion with the Fathers in the Spirit that contemporary
theologizing can acquire a reliable and novel path towards its future through
its reference to the tradition, which is not a relic and dead sediment of the out-
going past, but a spiritual anticipation of the past as the constant presence of
the Spirit.
A Neo-Patristic Synthesis and the Reintegration of the Human Spirit
A neo-patristic synthesis has to deal with the situation when East and West are
split and the Church experiences an antinomy between heavenly aspirations
and empirical life. It is in these conditions that a synthesis of theology and
science attempts also to reintegrate the split between faith and knowledge.
Hence the reason why one of the dimensions of a neo-patristic synthesis is to
rearticulate that the Greek patristic contribution to theology of Christian
Church is necessary for the catholicity of faith and existential implications of
the Christian doctrine and ecclesial institution not only in Orthodox context,
but also in the Western Christianity for which the Greek way of thought was
27. Florovsky, G. (1972) ‘St Gregory Palamas and the tradition of the Fathers’, in Bible,
Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 1),
Belmont: Nordland, p. 108.
28. Florovsky, ‘Patristic theology and the ethos of the Orthodox Church’, p. 21.
cut off since the East and the West followed their different and autonomous
historical paths.29 This attempt implies, in fact, an invitation to contemporary
theology to work with a view to a synthesis between Eastern and Western
theologies, the synthesis which, historically, had been already in existence
during the early patristic period.30
Indeed for Florovsky an attempt to find a synthesis between East and West
is not a meaningless correlation or artificial unification of two existing
views, but rather the overcoming of the disintegration of the Church’s mind.31
This mentioned reintegration implies not only the revival of Greek patristic
thought as valuable for contemporary theology, but also that contemporary
Orthodox theology must take into account the development of Western
theology. Florovsky writes: ‘Breaking away from the West does not bring about
true liberation. Orthodox thought has to feel the Western difficulties or temp-
tations and bear with them; it may not usurp the right to bypass or brazenly
ignore them . . . Orthodoxy must encounter the West creatively and spiritu-
ally.’32 A similar thing can be said about all intellectual achievements of
Western civilization, philosophy and science in particular, which seem to have
deviated from the ethos of Christian spirituality.33 It is so easy to alienate
oneself from Western thought (including all forms of the contemporary dia-
logue between science and theology), but it is much more difficult to contemplate
all its problems in order to transfigure them on the grounds of Orthodox
Christian testimony. However in order to keep Orthodoxy indeed Orthodox,
that is, to avoid any possible accusation of Westernisation of the Orthodox way,
29. It is worth mentioning that the split between East and West, which is usually treated
as a break of communion between Eastern and Roman Church in the eleventh century,
is only a short-hand notion of much more deep processes through which the unity of
Christendom has been broken in the realm of thoughts and habits as well as though the disin-
tegration of experience of faith long before the communion split (see Florovsky, G. (1961)
‘The quest for Christian unity and the Orthodox Church’, Theology and Life, 4, 197–208,
(2005)‘The problems of Christian unification’, in I. Evlampiev (ed.), Christianity and Civili-
sation (in Russian), St Petersburg: Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy, pp. 495–511).
This effectively implies that the split or disintegration of the united spirit of Christian civiliza-
tion must be referred to the differences between East and West not only in theological terms,
but also in terms of underlying cultures, languages, philosophical attitude as well as political
formations. This can also mean that the difference between Greek and Latin patristics as well
as between Eastern and Western Christian traditions can reflect the natural diversity in the
expression of faith which did not necessarily have to lead to the disintegration between East
and West. One should remember that during the whole millennium two traditions were
getting on with each other within the united Church.
30. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 26.
32. Florovsky, G. (1975) ‘Western influences in Russian theology’, in Aspects of Church
History (Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 4), Belmont: Nordland, p. 181.
33. Compare with some similar assertions of Yannaras in Elements of Faith, pp. 160–4.
Orthodox theology must preserve its independence from Western influences,

which can only be achieved if it reverts to the patristic sources and founda-
tions.34 It is through neo-patristic synthesis, an authentically new theological
synthesis, that ‘the centuries old experiences of the West must be taken into
consideration and studied with more attention and sympathy that our theolo-
gians did thus far’35 while the independence of Orthodox theology can be
preserved. The same is true with respect to science, so that a neo-patristic syn-
thesis of theology and science will have to take into account, what philosophers,
scientists and technologists have done so far, with more attention and sympathy.
It could be suggested that the reintegration of the scientific mind, in its
factual ecumenicity with the divided theological mind, could contribute to the
overall Christian reconciliation. In the same sense as Florovsky affirms that
the divided parts of the Christendom cannot be understood without each
other, one can conjecture that science and theology as two modes of the same
disintegrated spirit cannot be understood without each other, that is, be self-
explanatory. Indeed, as Florovsky writes,
East and West are not independent units, and therefore are not ‘intelligible in
themselves’. They are fragments of one world, of one Christendom, which in God’s
design, ought not to have been disrupted. . . . An attempt to view Christian history
as one comprehensive whole is already, in a certain sense, a step in advance towards
the restoration of the broken unity.36
It could be argued that an authentic dialogue between science and Christian

theology should follow a similar root adjusting factual ecumenicity of science
to the catholicity of Christian faith. In other words if the dialogue between
science and theology, as often happens in the West, pretends to be an all-
encompassing enterprise free of inter-denominational differences, it must
follow the historical example of the united early Church.37 Can then a scientific
34. Florovsky, ‘The ways of Russian theology’, in Aspects of Church History, p. 200.
A similar conclusion can be made from Yannaras’ analysis of the Western deviation from
Orthodoxy (see his Elements of Faith, pp. 154–7).
36. Florovsky, ‘Patristic theology and the ethos of the Orthodox Church’, pp. 29–30.
37. One should never interpret Florovsky’s appeal to the reintegration of Christian
Church’s spirit as a straightforward ecumenism. One can only make some parallels with the
so-called ‘ecumenism in time’ (as the restoration of the common spirit of the past), but not
with ‘ecumenism in space’ (See Florovsky, ‘The quest for Christian unity and the Orthodox
Church’ pp. 200–1). One can add to this that because of a very different and sometimes
negative attitude of Orthodoxy with respect to modern Western science and technology, that
one can doubt any hopes to use science as an ‘ecumenical reference’ in order to reconcile
Eastern and Western theologies. Science itself in such a view is not only not ecumenical, but,
in fact, itself the deviation from the united human spirit. However, Orthodox theology should
take into account all those trends in the dialogue between science and theology in the West in
order to incorporate them into the fabric of ecclesial fullness.
view of reality and a Christian world view be seen as fragments of one world,
of one God’s design which in spite of being different does not have to divide
the fullness of reality? If yes, then an attempt to view both theological history
and the historical context of science as one united whole will be a reasonable
step to the dialogue between science and theology which aims to restore the
disintegrated modalities of the human spirit. However, this could only be
achieved through the reference of both science and theology to the common
roots of their different traditions, as they are seen in the past.
Disintegration between East and West as Seen through

a Different Attitude to Science
Now we would like to discuss the split between East and West through its
implication in science and technology, by contraposing a modern stance with
respect to them as it exists in the West to that allegedly lost approach to
the natural sciences which was in existence in the Christian world before the
formal split in the Church and before the rise of what is generically called
scholasticism.38
The difference between Eastern and Western Christianity, which is described
by Florovsky as the disintegration of the common Church’s mind, has another,
more specific context which can be described as a particular (sometimes very
negative) attitude of Orthodoxy to the West, where the West stands for a short
form of describing a basic human attitude to the world as it has developed
during recent centuries in Western Europe and America after the rise of the
positive sciences and technology. In its deep foundation this attitude goes back
not only to the era of scientific revolutions and cultural Renaissance, but even
further in history to those intellectual and social structures of the Medieval
West which manifested their difference with the Byzantine East. In fact, one
can descend even further in the early patristic period and detect some seed-like
differences in attitude to the world and the natural sciences in Greek and Latin
theology, which, in a way, contributed to the fragmentation of the common
spirit of the Christian Church later.39 The important point we would like to
38. Here one should exercise an extreme caution in articulating this link (in particular,
the link between scholasticism and the rise of modern science), for any simplified view of the
progress and development of Western Christendom and the scientific and technological civili-
zation of the West is untenable (Bonner, G. (1970–71) ‘Christianity and the modern
world-view’, Eastern Churches Review, 3, 1–15 (7)). The topic of the deviation of the West
from Orthodoxy was extensively discussed in the nineteenth–twentieth centuries by Russian
philosophers, beginning with A. Khomyakov and continued by N. Berdyaev and V. Zenkovsky.
In the West the major expositors of such a critique were C. Yannaras and Ph. Sherrard who
have been already mentioned in the text. It is worth also to point to two other Greek thinkers
who approached this topic systematically, namely, J. Romanides and G. Metallinos.
39. See, for example, my (2003) Light from the East, Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
pp. 13–40 and references therein.
articulate here is that the progress of the sciences and consequent rise of tech-
nology in Western Europe was linked to theological development, or, more
precisely, to the differentiation in religious experience of Christians in the West
and the East.
The rise of the Western modernity is often associated with the names of
Descartes and Galileo, whose contribution to the Western philosophical and
scientific thought is considered as one which shaped modern technological
civilization and initiated the split of that intrinsic unity of theology and science
that existed before. However Descartes’ thought can be treated as a conse-
quent development of those intellectual ideas which have their origin in the
Western scholasticism.40 What stands here for scholasticism is an ambition
to secure control and access to truth by means of intellectual effort to outline
the boundaries between man’s capacities to comprehend the created realm
and its creator and the transcendent reality of God. In fact, as we mentioned
before, the roots of what was later called scholasticism and can be found
back in St Augustine.41 This fact, from our point of view, indicates that
the hidden theological differences between East and West and their impli-
cations with respect to the natural sciences, which were amplified by Descartes
in the seventeenth century, had already existed as far back as the fifth
century.
From a historical point of view here is a serious problem: why Western
Christian civilization developed an approach to the natural sciences in the
twelfth–thirteenth centuries that was radically different in comparison with
what had been in Orthodox Byzantium, and why the whole Greek patristic
heritage was effectively neglected and lost. This issue is still waiting to be
addressed in serious historical research. There are a few papers which have
tried to tackle this historical problem.42 Once again we are not prepared to
address the whole grandeur of this problem in this book. What we accept here
40. It is enough to make a reference to Heidegger, who pointed that Descartes was
philosophically dependent upon scholasticism and employed its terminology (Heidegger, M.
(1962) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 46).
41. When discussing the very basic Cartesian formula cogito ergo sum, which instituted
ego, as cogitatio, at the origin of all science, it is historically paralleled with the text of
St Augustine in City of God, bk. XI, ch. 26, as well as to some other texts, including The
Soliloquies, bk. 2, ch. 1. More references can be found in the footnotes to (1948) ‘The
soliloquies’ in Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. 1, New York: Cima Publishing Company,
pp. 382f. See also Marion, J.-L. (1999) On Descartes’s Metaphysical Prism, Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 129f.
42. See Lindberg, D. (1986) ‘Science and the early Church’, in D. C. Lindberg and
R. L. Numbers, (eds) God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christi-
anity and Science, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 19–48; my Light from the
East, pp. 13–40; also Sherrard, Ph. (1991) The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into
the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, Suffolk: Golgonooza, (1992) Human Image:
World Image, The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology, Ipswich: Golgonooza.
as a methodological and historical fact is the not-infrequently made link

between a theological development in the West (as being in a split from that
one in the East after the eleventh century) and that particular appropriation of
science and technology (as a consequent result of developments in the Western
theology). It is because of this link that the problem arises for Orthodox
theology to appropriate science and technology along the same lines as it has
been done in the West. This problem sometimes is labelled as the problem of
‘Orthodoxy and the West’.43 In this very formula (‘Orthodoxy and the West’)
one observes another dimension of that disintegration of the united mind
of the Church and of the human spirit in general; Orthodoxy is contraposed to
the West not only in terms of ecclesial realities, but to a widespread attitude to
reality, which is based on the needs of this earthly life and biological survival
with help of science of humanity without any reference to the other-worldly,
transcendent dimension of humanity, which Orthodoxy maintains with great
force through its insistence on the centrality of personhood and personal com-
munion with God as forming existential events, seeing and participating in the
world through a different spiritual intentionality towards modalities of life
which assumes an immediate contact with realities of the world perceived as
God’s creation, so that communion with God is sustained through the mun-
dane practice of work and life, thus being effectively that cosmic–Eucharistic
process which gives humanity its ‘daily bread’. On the other hand, being essen-
tially Eucharistic, life occurs in a constant presence of the age to come through
the implicit thanksgiving invocation of the Kingdom of God. The world and
nature are real as those natural limits where people indwell, although their
tangible reality is never taken as it is in itself, that is, its truth is related to that
God, who, being transcendent and not limited by these realities, reveals him-
self directly to his humanity in response to a prayerful invocation through
labour and life. If, now, one turns to the study and exploration of nature
(which was often accompanied by curiosity for the beauty and harmony as
well as the praise for its creator) one observes that the Fathers of the ancient
Church never detached this study and exploration from their theological
stance, that this exploration had sense only if it was sanctified by faith in
God, who sustained all purposes and ends of created things. It is in this sense
that the sciences as well as secular philosophy were used for the purposes of
exploration of the environment, and it was always implied that they never
transgressed the boundaries of the present world and were lifted up to the
level of theology in order to predicate things beyond this world and this age.
Theology, as experience of faith, was always thought as the pillar and ground
of knowledge and its implications, forming thus a ‘special subject matter’
which cannot be fully apprehended by methods of the positive sciences and
discursive philosophy. It is here, at this point, that Orthodoxy claims that
43. See, for example, Yannaras, C. (1973) ‘Orthodoxy and the West’ in A. J. Philippou
(ed.), Orthodoxy: Life and Freedom, Oxford: Studion Publications, pp. 130–47.
Western Christianity, by adopting discursive thinking (detached from experi-

ence of faith and sanctifying power of the spiritual intellect nous), as its
basic theological method, subordinated the realities of the Divine to rational
philosophy, thus transgressing the limits of its applicability and, de facto,
fitting the Gospel message and the Divine revelation into the norms of the
human philosophy. Here is where the basic Eastern Orthodox objection to
that which is generically known as scholasticism can be seen: one cannot sub-
ordinate realities of the Divine to the limits of the discursive reason.44
Metanoia in the Collision of Faith and Knowledge:

The Relevance of a Patristic Insight
The major antipathy of the Orthodox to scholasticism is the ambition of

the latter to push human discursive reason too far, beyond the limits of its
applicability and predicate things which are beyond reason’s grasp. Theology
functions under the assumption that, if reason attempts to go beyond the
sphere of its legitimate domain in the world, this reason must be changed in a
sense of being transformed or even transfigured under the pressure of given-
ness of those realities it attempts to grasp. This transformation or transfiguration
of reason, or the ‘change of mind’, is called metanoia and it is the lack of this
metanoia in scholastic thinking that was the major concern of Orthodox
theologians.45 In order to clarify the meaning of this transforming attitude in
the life of those who practise contemplation and who attempt to see the world
according to its ‘proper meaning’, let us appeal to St Isaac the Syrian (Ninevech)
who gave an illuminating account of different stages of knowledge and its
relation to faith through which one can grasp the meaning of metanoia.
Isaac makes a clear distinction between what in his times was called simply
‘knowledge’ and that insight in the foundation of all things which leads to
God. He writes: ‘accurate designations can only be established concerning
earthly things. The things of the world-to-be do not possess a true name, but
only simple cognition, which is exalted above all names and signs and forms
and colours and habits and composite denominations.’46 In this passage St Isaac
44. Sherrard, together with other Orthodox writers, points towards St Augustine, who
was the first to make the disjunction of faith and reason, whose consequences were felt
throughout the whole history of the West: ‘The divorce of revelation and reason, metaphysics
and science, implicit in the philosophy of St Augustine and fully recognised in that of
Scholastics, both indicate to what extent the theoretical basis of the Christian realisation
was weakened in the West by the nature of much Western medieval theology itself, and also
prepared the ground consequently for the whole revolution of thought which was so to
modify Western society and culture.’ (1995) The Greek East and the Latin West, Limini:
Denise Harvey, p. 155.
45. Ware, K. (1970–71) ‘Scholasticism and orthodoxy: theological method as a factor of
schism’, Eastern Churches Review 3, 16–27 (21–7).
effectively separates knowledge (in the sense of the sciences and discursive
philosophy as related to the realm of empirical or intelligible things (created
things)) and theologia (as a direct experience of God) whose ‘subject matter’
refers to the age to come, to that eschatological reality which is not yet here,
but which is always expected through faith in it. Theologia always ‘works’
within the condition when its ‘subject matter’, that is, God, is present in actual
absence, whereas science approaches the world within the conviction that the
world is present in presence. It is in this sense that any knowledge based on the
abilities of the unsanctified, secular reason and philosophy is fundamentally
incomplete, because it lacks the transforming presence of the age to come.
Here metanoia implies freedom of expression of the Divine by using earthly
images without any risk of confusing these images with that eschatological
‘reality’ which is intended by the reason but which is effectively beyond its
grasp.47 This cognitive situation constitutes the apophatic framework of
Orthodox theology: on the one hand it refuses to exhaust knowledge of the
Divine in rubrics of the discursive reason, on the other hand it accepts the free-
dom of our expression of experience of God (through music and poetry, for
example), the God who is present among us in his actual absence. According
to St Isaac the Syrian the change of mind happens when ‘the influence of the
spirit reigns over the mind that regulates the senses and the deliberations’ and
hence ‘freedom is taken away from nature which no longer governs but is
governed’ under the pressure of the age to come.48
Metanoia, implied by St Isaac, also entails overcoming the fear accompany-
ing any earthly knowledge: ‘As long as a man uses the means of knowledge,
he is not free from fear . . .,’49 and in another passage ‘Fear always accompa-
nies doubt, and doubt examination, and investigation means, and means
46. St Isaac the Syrian (1923) ‘Homilies’, in A. J. Wensinck (tr.) Mystical Treatises by
Isaac of Nineveh, Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, p. 114.
47. As an example, we use spatial ideas in order to point towards intelligible world as
being beyond space and time whereas we cannot use these ideas in order to describe the
essence of this world. The same is true about the Divine: we say that God is beyond space and
time, but this effectively means that space and time are used as pointers only not being able
to be applied to the Divine themselves. See further discussion of this issue in Torrance’s
Space, Time and Incarnation.
48. St Isaac the Syrian, ‘Homilies’, p. 115.
49. Ibid., p. 243, see also p. 244. It is interesting to parallel this link between knowledge
and fear, articulated by St Isaac, with another link between science and fear of death, which
was picked up by S. Bulgakov thirteen centuries later. Fr Sergei made a contraposition
between the outer world and the world of life, that is, living beings. The outer world is
modelled by the mechanistic science which deprives humanity of freedom and hope for
transcendence. Thus the mechanistic picture of the world induces fear of the dead entities,
the fear of the ‘kingdom of death’. Science then (as part of knowledge) ‘orients us in this
kingdom of death and that is why it acquires in itself some deathly features’. (Bulgakov, S.
(1993) Philosophy of Economy (in Russian), Moscow: Nauka, p. 207 (author’s translation)).
knowledge. . . .’50 In modern parlance, one can understand what Isaac meant
by saying that knowledge is always associated with fear: a human being is
living in an external world of nature which it can hardly comprehend and this
uncertainty of living creates fear; the aspiration for knowledge of the world
means the hidden and deep desire to understand nature in order to control life
in it. Knowledge in this sense eliminates fear but the very impulse of knowl-
edge comes out of fear. Science and technology acquire a cosmic dimension
and links to the core of the human condition in which humanity always
attempts to run away from fear of existence and in order to avoid an allegedly
spiritual crash of humanity by technology one needs faith to overcome fear.
Certainly St Isaac did not think in these terms, but he was aware about the lim-
its of knowledge and potential danger of knowledge if it is enclosed in itself and
this is the reason why his attitude to knowledge was very reserved: ‘Knowledge
is not to be rejected, but faith is superior to it. And if we reject, we do not reject
knowledge . . . but the distinctions in a variety of classes in which it moves itself
in opposition to the glory of nature, so that it becomes cognate with the class
of the demons.’51 While knowledge out of fear can become demonic, it can also
be sanctified when ‘it is united to faith and becomes one with it and is clad by
its influence with fiery impulses so that it blazes spiritually and acquires the
wings of apathy and is lifted up from the service of earthly things towards the
place of its creation . . . .’52 Thus metanoia, required to transform earthly knowl-
edge to the level of things from the age to come, is the acquisition of faith and
placing knowledge in the context of faith, so that it is this faith which shows to
knowledge the reality of the ‘future perfection’.53 It is through faith that we are
directed to the unattainable things of the age to come. In St Isaac’s words:
When knowledge elevates itself above earthly things and above the thought of
service and begins to try its impulses in things hidden from eyesight . . . and when
it stretches itself upwards and clings to faith by thinking of the world to be and love
of the promises and investigation concerning the hidden things – then faith swallows
knowledge, gives a new birth to it. . . .54
Faith in the realities of the age to come is that indispensable mode of meta-
noia, which places the vision of all things explored by the sciences in the
context of their purpose and end which is linked to the destiny of humanity
itself. Faith as the transforming attitude to life and knowledge assumes the
development of a different intentionality in human spiritual life when soul,
50. St Isaac the Syrian, ‘Homilies’, p. 245.

51. Ibid., p. 246.
52. Ibid., p. 246.
53. Ibid., p. 246.
54. Ibid., p. 250 (emphasis added).
and its analytical part – mind, aspire towards what is present in this mundane
world, but present in absence. Christians believe that the Kingdom of God was
inaugurated by Christ, but Christ left us with memory of his events which are
lived through liturgically, rather than physically. This means that the Kingdom
of God is present in the faithful heart, but it is present in absence. The age to
come is near to us through the realized eschatology of the Eucharist, but it is
present to us in its actual empirical absence. Metanoia in knowledge, or, in
different words, its sanctification and transfiguration, demand something sim-
ilar to that shift from the natural to philosophical attitude which is advocated
by phenomenological philosophy in a different context: indeed the reality of
things available to the senses and mind has a very limited and incomplete
character, because there is something else in their meaning which is beyond the
surface of appearance. To go beyond this surface one needs to see things in
their logos-constitution, that is, that constitution which gives them sense and
the foundation of existence. However such a vision can only be achieved if the
very human subjectivity, responsible for all knowledge, questions itself, that is,
places the very process of knowledge and its application in the context of con-
stant enquiry as to where it comes from and what its meaning is. This shifts the
attitude of the mind towards eschaton, seen as the destiny of humanity through
which all stages of knowledge receive their interpretation. Thus the eschato-
logical attitude to knowledge, as a mode of metanoia, is not preoccupied too
much with the past stages of knowledge and its possible deviation from the
wisdom of religion – this is an unavoidable fact – but rather it is concerned
with the cosmological sense and destiny of this knowledge as related to the
destiny of humanity. This point becomes especially important in the context of
the problem of technology (as extension and application of knowledge) as it
stands with respect to Orthodoxy and vice versa.
The image of technology as that mode of the human activity which over-
whelms human life, subordinates it to the logic of the inhuman machine, or,
and this is even worse, escapes human control and threatens human sover-
eignty, was a popular topic of philosophical and theological discussions since
the early twentieth century.55 However, one of the strongest claims with respect
to the problem of technology was made by Orthodox thinkers, who asserted
that ‘it is technology, with its particular stance and character, which constitutes
the basic theological problem in the encounter between Orthodoxy and
the West.’56 This contraposition of technology, based on achievements of
55. It is enough to make a reference here to such names as Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger
and Jaspers who developed this topic and launched a large scale discussion which, in a way,
continues up to this day. Many great physicists of the twentieth century, such as Einstein and
Heisenberg expressed their warning about the possibilities of the uncontrolled expansion of
technology. The indication that this discussion is still going on is the recent appearance of
some interesting research in the French speaking world. See, for example, a recent translation
of a book of Janicaud, D. (2005) On the Human Condition, London: Routledge.
Western civilization on the one hand, and the Orthodox perception of life and
its endorsement by theology on the other, contributes in a different way to
the disintegration of the united spirit of the Christian Church as well as of the
united spirit of humanity in general. The problem of technology becomes that
particular dimension of the dialogue between science and theology which pro-
vides the most difficult point for the Orthodox. It is enough to remind the
reader about strong negative views on science and technology which were
advocated in the beginning of the twentieth century by the Russian Orthodox
philosophers and theologians such as S. Bulgakov,57 Berdyaev58 and later by
Sherrard, who used such terms as ‘dehumanisation of man’ and ‘desanctification
of nature’59 in order to express the fundamental deviation (by means of modern
science and technology) from the ways the cosmos was explored in early
56. Yannaras, ‘Orthodoxy and the West’, p. 136. See also p. 138. It interesting here to
point out that the critique of technology in some cases becomes a central issue not only within
Orthodox religious thinking but in some secular philosophies. If, for example, one aims to
advocate a culture which takes its stance on the personal values of communities, in opposition
thus to the depersonalizing tendencies of creating a new technologically based human being
with an inevitable atomizing among the members of society, then the sought counter culture
‘comes closer to being a radical critique of technocracy than any of the traditional ideologies’
(Roszak, T. (1972) The Making of a Counter Culture, Reflections on the Technocratic
Society and Its Youthful Opposition, London: Faber and Faber, p. 206). Thus the challenge
of technology has an inevitable and universal character regardless to what particular system
of human values is adopted. One can infer even more by saying that all negativity which tech-
nology bears through interaction with humanity expresses in negative terms something about
humanity itself, its way of development and destiny. This means that any criticism of technol-
ogy and attempt to model a counter culture, based on opposition to it, are not taking the
challenge of technology to deepen insights about humanity and its interaction with the uni-
verse. The solution of the problem of technology cannot rely on any utopian nostalgia about
the past pre-technological state of the world that some romanticizing souls can experience.
57. Bulgakov built his negative attitude to science on the basis of a criticism of its funda-
mental fragmentation in describing reality and limited capacity of comprehending the world
as living nature. The mathematical universe expels living subjects by converting it into the
kingdom of shadows and ‘subjectless’ objects: ‘science exercises the intentional murder of the
world and nature, it studies the corpse of nature . . .’ (Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy,
p. 199 (author’s translation)). Bulgakov realizes the fundamental paradox of science: on the
one hand science transforms the world into a lifeless mechanism; on the other hand, ‘science
itself was produced by life, being a form of self-determination of subject in object’ (ibid.,
p. 205). If science is abstracted from its foundation in human subjectivity, it becomes no more
than an ingenious tool whose ultimate sense remains utterly obscure.
58. Berdyaev’s rejection of scientific method is connected to his inherent personalism.
He argues that the person is lost in the mechanistic universe and enslaved by the mechanism
of nature. The liberation of person means the overcoming of its slavery to nature. This can
only be achieved in the ways of religious freedom that are available to persons as those
centres of active and creative self-articulation of the world through whom the very science
becomes possible. See, for example, Berdyaev, N. (1944) Slavery and Freedom, London:
Centenary, p. 96, (1989) Philosophy of Freedom (in Russian), Moscow: Pravda, p. 65.
59. Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, pp. 63–122.
Christian societies.60 This harsh judgement about technology by the Orthodox

makes it a priori impossible to develop a constructive dialogue with contem-
porary science and this shows the vanity in all attempts to reintegrate the
broken spirit of humanity if this negative attitude perseveres. One then feels
that there must be some change in attitude to technology. It cannot be treated
only through its face value. Some delicate movement of thought, similar to a
theological apophaticism, must be applied to the very interpretation of science
and technology. This means that when Sherrard, for example, uses his accusa-
tions against science and technology as ‘dehumanising’ and ‘desanctifying’
activities of humanity, these very accusations must be taken cautiously with a
degree of a healthy apophaticism, namely, that the very negativity about tech-
nology conceals the ultimate truth about it, which cannot be revealed only
through ethics and ecology, but needs to appeal to the fundamentals of anthro-
pology understood in a cosmological and ontological sense.61 It is true that the
mathematical picture of the universe makes it impossible to articulate person-
hood and every individual incarnate existence, as well as that technology
creates an environment full of anonymous, impersonal forces which enslave
humanity not only to biological but also to a socio-psychological necessity.
However, this is the given state of affairs at present and the task of Orthodox
religious experience and theology is to reflect upon this not so much in a
mood of denial and nostalgia for a pre-technological era, but rather to contem-
plate the inevitability of a technological world in a spirit of humility. The
question for the Orthodox is rather ‘What is technology?’, if it is seen from
the point of view of human destiny? But it is this aspect of the problem, which
usually remains unaddressed.62 Science and technology thus should acquire
anthropological dimensions: one needs to attempt to have such a new image
of humanity in which the whole power of science and technology would enter,
as part of its inevitable and also eschatological definition. Then science and
technology could occupy their proper place in that spiritual body of humanity
60. See books of Sherrard cited above, Yannaras’ paper ‘Orthodoxy and the West’
together with the response to it in Bonner, ‘Christianity and the modern world view’, and
a comment of Ware, ‘Scholasticism and Orthodoxy’.
61. Let us point out to the famous paper of Heidegger, M. (1978) ‘Question concerning
technology’, in D. F. Krell (ed.), Heidegger’s Basic Writings, London, Routledge, pp. 308–41,
in which technology played a twofold function of oblivion and manifestation of being
together.
62. Olivier Clément writes in this respect: ‘Christian thought, having cursed, at least in
Western Europe, humanism and technology in the twenties [of the twentieth century], blessed
them in the sixties. Under pressure of “new Churches” which took their roots in those coun-
tries where the industrialisation was a necessity, it hurries to exalt “development,” it celebrates
in a technical specialist a liturgy in which the accomplishment of creation takes place. With all
this, Christian thinking does not go beyond ethics and does not pose the problem of the spiri-
tual and cosmic meaning of machine. This gives to all exhortations of the Christian authorities
a purely verbal character, so that there is a certain incapacity to grasp man with all his real
problems.’ (Clément, Le Christ Terre des Vivants, pp. 129–30 (author’s translation)).
which, in its historical projection, can have even more new varieties;63 as a
result the negativity in attitude to technology has sense only apophatically:
technology cannot be grasped within that particular form of the human sub-
jectivity which is responsible for its very emergence.64 The image of science and
technology is always partial and incomplete, so that it can be symbolic and
even idealistic. Their true meaning can only be unfolded through the passage
of time, when the very presence of scientific and technological achievement
will be incorporated in the fabric of history which will be its ultimate judge.
But this historical judgement will have to not only interpret science and
technology, but also purify them from all which inevitably comes with them in
the course of their historically contingent and unforeseen development. This
purification is what Christians call exorcism – the expulsion of evil.65 This is
a difficult point because it implies not a literal or mechanical expulsion, but
63. One must realize that technology effectively extends the human body thus extending
the boundary of humanity’s contact with the world. In this, technology, as an extended body
of humanity, provides new capacities for knowledge and new capacities for truth. One can
make an even stronger claim that technology through extension of the body extends the very
human subjectivity beyond those limits which existed a generation ago so that technology has
anthropological and, as a result, a cosmological dimension. The boundary line between what
classical philosophy labelled as subject and object is in a state of a constant move, so that what
is meant by ‘nature’ is somehow dependent on that which is meant by human subjectivity.
(See an interesting discussion of this issue in the papers of Heelan, P. (1972) ‘Nature and
its transformations’, Theological Studies, 1, pp. 486–502, and (1977) ‘Quantum relativity
and the cosmic observer’, in W. Yourgrau and A. D. Breck (eds), Cosmology, History and
Theology, New York: Plenum Press, pp. 29–37).
64. W. Heisenberg, in his assessment of technology admits the human incapacity to grasp
its meaning: ‘Technology no longer appears as the result of a conscious human effort to extend
man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process in which man’s organic
functions are increasingly transferred to his environment.’ (Heisenberg, W. (1958) The Physi-
cist’s Conception of Nature, London: Hutchinson Scientific and Technical, pp. 19–20). It is
this extension of the body of humanity that must be understood as a cosmic–anthropological
process which has some eschatological meaning. To understand it, one has to transcend the
concreteness of the historical situation and to place the whole of the technological develop-
ment in the context of the infinite tasks of humanity, its ultimate destiny, whose sense cannot
be exhausted by discursive understanding but is always open to the action of the overall
human spirit.
65. Here one can make a direct reference to patristics, namely to St Isaac the Syrian, who
asserted that knowledge itself is not sufficient to grasp and cast out evil: ‘What help can
human knowledge afford in manifest struggles against invisible natures and incorporeal pow-
ers and many things of this kind? Thou seest how weak the power of knowledge and how
strong the power of faith is’ (Homily 51, p. 245). St Isaac believes that knowledge can help
in maintaining a cautious relation to nature in a sense of not harming it. At the same time
one needs faith in order to be able to expel evil from nature as well as from knowledge which
pertains to this nature: ‘But look at the power of faith; what does it command its sons? In my
name shall they cast out devils and shall take up serpents . . .’ (Cf. Mk 16.17) (ibid.). Thus
faith is to purify knowledge through a creative exorcism.
the overcoming of that feeling of the tragic inevitability of the end in personal
existence that comes with scientific views and which is perceived by so many
people around. It is in this attitude of tragic inevitability that the lack of
fullness of life cannot overcome its destiny and become transfiguration and
deification. In order to avoid a crash caused by technology, to survive in its
‘flood’, whatever we have in technology must be related to that humanity
which is incorporated into the living communion with God and which watches
and studies nature through the eyes of the Spirit. It is this communion in com-
munity which allows man to avoid illusions in observations of nature and
overcome evil through a deep respect for all creatures of God. As O. Clément
writes: ‘A Christian, if his life is rooted in mysteries of Christ through prayer,
“the art of arts and the science of sciences”, has a key of true scientific objec-
tivity and technological perspective, which serve the true man and true world.’66
Life through Divine mysteries places thus science and technology in the Eucha-
ristic and worshipping context when truth about the world and its knowledge
is revealed through communion with the age to come. This gives a clue of
how to escape from a fruitless rhetoric of negativity with respect to science and
theology which creates that very tension which the dialogue between them
attempts to avoid.
From what we have argued at length one can conclude that there is no point
in comparing the Orthodox treatment of scientific discourse with that one in
the West, because in this case the Orthodox position will represent no more
than an interesting and even exotic aspect of the effectively Western world-
view veiled by the language of poetry and mysticism pertaining to the Orthodox
ethos.67 For many in a contemporary world, including the Orthodox them-
selves, these views will seem to be some beautiful, although narrow, confessional,
utopian ideas. All this requires, from the Orthodox, not only to transcend the
naivety and triviality of those forms of the dialogue between science and theology
which dominate in the West, but also to transcend its own one-sided position
and to develop an approach which does not exist yet. One can only regret
in this context that Orthodox theology did not offer anything serious either
about treatment of science and technology or any advance in a properly theo-
logical direction which takes on board scientific and technological advance
as that fact of modern life and the human condition which cannot be denied.68
66. Clément, Le Christ Terre des Vivants, p. 146.

67. According to P. M. Gregorios, the West has a special mission given to it by God – to
bring technology to full flower, ‘to make a world of global communication and interaction
possible and to sharpen theoretical understanding of this world and of human thinking and
acting’ (Gregorios, P. M. (1987) Science for Sane Societies, New York: Paragon House,
p. 200). It follows from here that a negative attitude to technology present in the Orthodox
world manifests no more than another split in the common mind of the Christian Church. All
mystical overtones of Orthodoxy which attempt to distance its stance on science and technol-
ogy from that one of the West are not productive, because they do not deal seriously with a
new state of the technological world as a new theological problem, which did not exist before.
This transcending implies that the dialogue will have to take place not simply
from within the established reality of its present forms, but from the direction
of the eschaton, whose intended essence is, paradoxically, ‘reminiscent’ of that
historical past, when the Church was united and the acute split with the secular
intellectual encounters did not exist.
What does this eschatological direction mean practically? First of all, it is
concerned with the very understanding of theology. Orthodoxy insists that
theology is not an academic discipline, but as the way of life and experience of
God in the context of ecclesial reality, be it a local Church and parish in the
world, or monastic community. If theology, which is engaged in modern dis-
cussion with science, does not follow the spirit of apophaticism69 in experience
of God and predicates the Divine by using the discursive mind with no clear
existential and spiritual reference to life, it becomes a vain intellectual exercise
of talking about the inarticulate, when the human mind pretends to be a ruler
and judge of affairs which are beyond its comprehension.70 The dialogue with
science in this case turns out to be an interesting interdisciplinary and intellec-
tual enterprise with no clear spiritual and soteriological objectives. It contributes
to a contemporary postmodern trend of speculating about the truth and
68. The possibility that the development of science and technology can be seen through
the ‘infinite task’ of the human spirit through its telos and eschatological destiny was largely
ignored by Orthodox theologians. Science and technology have never been considered as
those God-gifted means to humanity to transform its vision of itself and of the world into a
kind of fulfilling prophecy. Science makes it possible to advance the human ability to articu-
late good or evil, so that there is an intrinsic ambivalence in the scientific progress anyway.
It is important, however, that humanity spiritually advances together with science. This
means that a scientific expression of human being-in-the-world represents a kind of experi-
ence of the Divine, but without hope to exhaust this experience and to make a judgement
about the ground of its possibility and truth. Science accentuates the destiny of humanity to
search for the lost unity with God. Here it is quite difficult to deny the presence of the actions
of the Spirit upon humanity: ‘The Eastern patristic view is that man becomes fully human in
learning to coordinate head and hand, both being controlled by the heart, which is the center
of one’s being, which in turn is guided and directed by the spirit of God in community.
Science-technology is a sort of head–hand coordination, and leads humanity to greater matu-
rity, and complexity of personality and society, as well as conceivably human brain evolution.
The actual failure of Eastern Orthodox theological reflection in recent centuries has been the
failure to take this seriously. There have been but few Orthodox thinkers who have ade-
quately studied the complexities of modern technological civilisation and then proceeded to
write Orthodox theology’ (Gregorios, Science for Sane Societies, p. 74 (emphasis added)).
69. That is, it does not pretend to exhaust truth about God by means of concepts and
discursive thinking in general, by accepting humbly that God is unknowable although open
to participation and communion.
70. The meaning apophaticism will be discussed in Chapter 3. For an immediate reference
see Lossky, V. (1957) The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke,
pp. 23–43. For the advanced exposition of apophaticism, relevant to this study, see in
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God.
meaning of things from within a particular fragmented social and cultural

context with no respect to the tradition and under the suspicion that all knowl-
edge, based in cognitive faculties in man which do not fit the discursive mind,
is inadequate.
Thus, in order to reinstate this dialogue to proper ontological and soterio-
logical status, Orthodox theology must observe its proper traditional sense as
the theology of the living Church, where the Church is understood in a cosmo-
logical context as the multihypostatic consubstantiality of all those who lived,
who live and will be living. This means in turn that theology itself can only be
understood in the context of the constant building of the Church as the Body
of Christ, because it is through liturgical action in the Church, that the invoked
eschaton sustains the reality of the Church and all its theological aspirations.
Thus the ecclesiality of theology secures its eschatological orientation and
therefore brings eschatology into the dialogue with science.
If theology is exercised in the way suggested by a neo-patristic synthesis, it
is capable of transcending a stereotypical formula of a negative assessment of
the West, its scientific progress and technology. The objective of such theology
is not to evaluate and judge, but to transfigure the vision of science into pro-
phetic and para-Eucharistic activity in order to reveal in science the presence
of the gift of God to humanity to explore the world and thus praise God for
his good creation. As P. M. Gregorios writes: ‘Eastern patristic tradition would
not be negative in its attitude to the development of science and technology,
but would, on the contrary, encourage science-technology as a necessary
development in the growth of historical man in process of Theosis. This assim-
ilation and control of science and technology would be part of the way
humanity grows – in Christ, no less.’71 The growth of historical man means
that by exploring matter of the world and transforming it in accordance with
intellectual power and wisdom, humanity ‘awakens’ matter to its original
indwelling in the Spirit, thus contributing through this transfiguration to the
overall theosis of the universe.72 But science and technology ‘should not be
made the sole way of knowing, and it does not lead, in any case to any ultimate
71. Gregorios, Science for Sane Societies, p. 74. For patristic writers, such as St Maximus
the Confessor, theosis is linked to mediation in man between divisions in man’s present
(fallen) condition. In this sense the mediation between theology and science can be under-
stood as a particular mode of the same mediation between divisions in the human spirit.
72. One can use the words of Bulgakov about the action of the Holy Spirit on matter in
order to illustrate that the exploration of matter effectively means its sanctification and spiritu-
alization: ‘Matter melts, as it were, losing its inertia and impenetrability; it becomes transparent
for the spirit and spirit-bearing. It stops being unconscious and becomes conscious. It is brought
into the life of the spirit, which “conquers” nature. Thus, the life of the spirit slumbers in
matter, and it must be awakened.’ And then he adds: ‘Technology and man’s technological
conquest of nature represent an initial form of this awakening.’ (Bulgakov, S. (2004) The
Comforter, Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, p. 346.)
verities . . . Divorced from love and wisdom, science/technology becomes an

enemy of humanity.’73 Divorced from metanoia (and ontological repentance)
science can become a demonic tool either in the sense of imposing on human-
ity a kind of slavery to its totalitarian inevitability in the civilized society, or,
alternatively, it can lead to the spiritual usurpation of a person by imposing a
belief into the overall control of life by some impersonal forces of the universe
following in themselves the logic of the non-human.74
The eschaton, realized in the theology of the worshipping Church (which,
as we said before, was always faithful to the patristic tradition in terms of
worship and liturgy) and thus determining the telos of spiritual development
of humanity in historical realities and concreteness of space and time, is also
present in scientific research which is a mode of manifestation of the overall
human spirit. However the presence of this telos becomes detectable and dis-
closed to the human mind only through the action of the Holy Spirit upon the
whole process of knowledge. The Spirit responds to those para-Eucharistic
invocations which an attentive mind performs in scientific enquiry. From this
eschatological perspective, when theology and science manifest themselves as
spirit-bearing modes of the human condition, both of them exhibit kinship of
immediate intentions and propensities of life. The historical split between
theology and science reflects the historical ambivalence in the human fallen
constitution as well as the split of the common mind of the Christian church.
This is the reason why the task of the mediation between theology and science
is closely linked to the objective of reintegration of the Christian spirit as well
as to overcoming of postlapserian divisions in the human condition.
By making an assessment of Florovsky’s appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis
as a step towards the reintegration of the fragmented Christian mind as seen in
the eschatological perspective, one can suggest, by analogy, that science and
theology are not just two different ‘blocks’ of insights and convictions, but
their difference grew out of the common historical ground which can be under-
stood eschatologically as having been a particular incarnation (in history) of
their hidden common telos. Let us remind the reader that far back Clement of
Alexandria taught that philosophy and the sciences do cooperate in truth, and
that it is existential faith in that something exists at all, which makes possible
not only theology (as demonstrated faith), but also philosophy and science.
Then the differentiation between theology and science which gradually hap-
pened in the European Christian context and took an acute form, represents
not only a social or cultural divergence but the divergence in the human spirit,
that is, what Florovsky called the disintegration of mind. However, there is
still a common teleology which is present behind this visible disintegration
which makes it possible to refer the fragmented parts of the human experience
73. Gregorios, Science for Sane Societies, p. 75.

74. Here we mean, for example, a famous idea of ‘the lure of the cosmos’ (cosmic
temptation) which was criticized by Berdyaev in his Slavery and Freedom, pp. 93–102.
(i.e. theology and science) to one common source. As an example, one can
refer to Max Planck who drew a geometrical analogy in attaining scientific
research on one hand, and accumulation of religious experience on the other,
with two parallel lines, which have a common point of intersection, infinitely
distant from ourselves, that is, being in the age to come.75 Science and religion,
as differing forms of experience, are united eschatologically through the unity
of their intrinsic teleologies pertaining to the human condition, the unity which,
while being historically split in itself, is brought into existence by the will of an
invisible origin. In this sense, the difference between science and religion and
their contraposition in reflective reason is not a defect of history, but, on the
contrary, a moment inherent to this history. The difference between scientific
thought and a theological perception of the world through God’s presence
consists in that religious thought requires greater faith and spiritual and moral
experience.
The very tendency of overcoming the ‘historical’ split and reconciling science
and theology is intrinsically eschatological, because it is driven by the Holy
Spirit. It is in the same sense, when Florovsky asserts that ‘the East and the
West can meet and find each other only if they remember their original kinship
in the common past,’76 that one can suggest that science and theology can meet
each other if they realize their original kinship in the tradition of the human
spirit. But, once again, this meeting point, as an intentional process of the
human spirit is driven from the future by the logic of the invisible origin,
through the action of the Holy Spirit upon history. A neo-patristic appeal of
Florovsky then receives its further interpretation: the aim of acquiring the
mind of the Fathers and establishing the common historical ground of Eastern
and Western Christianity in its united past, becomes an eschatological neces-
sity for the unification of the broken spirit of the Church as well as the broken
spirit of humanity in their exploration of the world (through research) and con-
templation of the Divine presence (through religious experience and theology).
In other words, a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science reveals itself
as that eschatological intentionality of the human spirit which transcends all
negativity and possible dialectics in relations between Orthodoxy and the West
thus establishing a relationship between theology and science on the level of
the infinite tasks of humanity, driven by the Holy Spirit from the future age.
The realization of these infinite tasks requires exactly a change of mind, that
is, that fundamental metanoia which has been lost in the theological discourse
in Western Christianity and whose loss resulted later in the collisions of the
ambitious rational mind with the tradition, worship and style of life of the
Christian society of the past. The bringing back of the eschatological dimension
into the very heart of the scientific and philosophical approach to the world
75. The Orthodox appropriation of this view can be found in Shakhovskoi, J. (2003) On
the Mystery of Human Life (in Russian), Moscow: Lodiya, p. 15.
forms that metanoia which implies the transforming presence of the things of
the age to come which make the spirit of a scientist or philosopher Eucharistic
and ascetic. For this person the fullness of action and life ‘here and now’ signi-
fies the sacrament of the immediate moment, when every movement of the
attentive mind and any realized enquiry into the nature of things acquires its
sense through the teleology of the human spirit, as the realization of that
existential destiny which is linked to the full realization of humanity through
communion with God and love to Him. Ultimately metanoia in the science-
religion project requires scientists and theologians to restore their self-image
distorted by the sheer domination of technology in the core of the contempo-
rary human condition in order then to restore the world-image as the medium
of man’s communion with God. In a way, knowledge of earthly things, which
is attained in science, needs to be sanctified through faith, repentance and love.
Metanoia in Scientific Research or How to Implement

an Eschatological Attitude
Science and technology makes human life dependent on its own advance while
having no power of foreseeing its outcomes. On the one hand a world domi-
nated by technology tends to increase the sense of alternative futures that are
available to humanity; on the other hand it tends to decrease our sense of con-
trol over this technological future and our ability to outline the infinite tasks
independently of technological necessities. It was claimed that technology is
going out of control so that the vision of the future in a technological age
is vague and often depicted grey and sorrowful. Eschatology is present in this
uncertain future as a doomsday intuition.77 However, this intuition reflects not
so much the problems of the technological world but rather the problems
of moral self which is involved in advancing this world. For some advocates of
Christian ethics this observation was sufficient in order to attempt to reject
outright contemporary technology for the sake of preservation of Christian
values.78 The naivety of this rejection is pretty obvious: technology permeates
all layers of contemporary Christian civilization, including the Orthodox
one.79 The exit from technology is inconceivable and utopian.80 However,
one should take into account that indeed, technology makes its adherents
‘transcendent-vision-blind’81 in a very special and even paradoxical sense.
In other words, contemporary scientific culture and all sorts of technological
77. See on the anticipation of the doomsday syndrome, Leslie, J. (1996) The End of the
World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, New York: Routledge; and Rees, M.
(2003) Our Final Century. Our Final Century, A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error,
and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century – On Earth and
Beyond, London: W. Heinemann.
78. A bright example of this rejection in modern Orthodox literature is Ph. Sherrard who
has been already mentioned in the text. (See also in this context a book of Ellul, J. (1980) The
Technological System, New York: Continuum, pp. 10–16.)
79. As we pointed out earlier, the negative attitude to technology can be traced back
to a much deeper problem of Christianity and culture (or civilization in general) which has
been in existence since the very emergence of Christianity in midst of the Hellenistic world.
However, it is here that the historical lessons must be taken seriously of how that ancient
culture experienced the creative transformation under the pressure of the sword of the Spirit
which dissected this culture. For Christians, with all their suspicion and intrinsic hostility to
the pagan culture of their time, it was a real challenge to exercise a kind of plasticity in order
not to lapse to pre-historical state, but to reshape and transfigure ‘the cultural fabric in a new
spirit’ (see Florovsky, G. (1974) ‘Faith and culture’, in Christianity and Culture, (Collected
Works of Georges Florovsky 2; Belmont: Nordland, pp. 9–30 (25)). In a similar way one can
suggest that in order not to lapse to the pre-technological state Christianity must exercise a
similar plasticity in reshaping and transfiguring the modern ‘scientifico-technological stance’
in a spirit similar to that one which was used for Christianization of Hellenism.
80. ‘Eastern Orthodox theology cannot revert to any lazy romanticism which wants to
backtrack to a pre-technological era to find peace and tranquillity. [It] must go through this
process of scientific technological development, but keeping two things in mind: (a) it is not
a final stage, where the universe yields all its mystery to human curiosity through science-
technology, but it merely opens up one aspect of reality in such a way that the human capacity
for creation of good and evil is enormously enhanced; and (b) it is a knowledge and skill
which have to be mastered and brought under control before they overwhelm and destroy us.
In other words, Eastern Orthodox theology would take a positive attitude towards science
and technology without being overimpressed or mesmerised by it.’ (Gregorios, Science for
Sane Societies, p. 75.) In more recent discussions it was admitted that science, although a
major aid in human knowledge, is not all-powerful: ‘although science sheds light on a part of
history, it cannot however explain all the history’ (Staune, J. (ed.) (2005) Science et quête de
sens, Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, p. 323). Contemporary science is indispensable in our
quest for meaning although science will not, by itself, be able to provide the answer to this
quest (ibid., p. 330).
81. This is an expression of P. M. Gregorios from his (1987) The Human Presence:
Ecological Spirituality and the Age of the Spirit, New York: Amity House, p. 100. (See also
his (1988) Cosmic Man. The Divine Presence. The Theology of St Gregory of Nyssa, New
York: Paragon House, p. 225.) One must admit here that this claim about the lack of tran-
scendence in scientific research and scientific philosophy was pronounced long before in the
twentieth century as a reaction to scientism and extreme rationalism of science. V. Zenkovsky
wrote in 1952 that ‘in all cultural spheres the abolition of all the transcendent, all that makes
our thought to be able to appeal to the Absolute as the First Reality, and to that what links
us with it, takes place.’ (Zenkovsky, Russian Thinkers and Europe, p. 312 (author’s transla-
tion)). ‘The very infinity in scientific advance and unusual technological achievements which
follow from it, make any aspirations towards other-worldly reality unnecessary and in a way
abolish them. All that which is unknowable today, that which is beyond the natural order,
does not it turn out to be accessible to scientific analysis? Does not all the transcendent gradu-
ally become immanent and the very idea of the ‘absolute beginning’ is thereby converted into
a category of our mind . . . ?’(ibid., p. 315.) M. Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism
expressed a similar thought about the lack of ability to transcend: ‘How can the human being
at the present stage of the world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god
nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which
alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains
closed as a dimension if the open region of being is not cleared and its clearing is near
to humans.’ ((1998) ‘Letter on humanism’, in W. McNeill (ed.), Pathmarks, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 239–76 (267)).
tools making human life comfortable (although very non-independent from

these tools) diminishes human ability to be attentive to those unusual experi-
ences and revelations which cannot be explained or imitated by science and
technology.82 Technology based in science represents in itself a kind of tran-
scendence of the originally natural things. But this is a transcendence of another
kind. Things produced by technology loose the fullness and autonomy of exist-
ence and do not have the power of a reality independent of man and his
spiritual acts. Then it seems to be even more paradoxical that one type of a
spiritual activity, that is transcendence from the natural, which is realized in
technology, modifies human spiritual and corporeal life to such an extent that
it stops not only genuine communion with originally created nature, but also
stops another mode of transcendence towards the non-worldly thus making
human beings ‘transcendent-vision-blind’.83 All human knowledge which does
not follow the logic of rationalism and realism are considered as unimportant
if not irrelevant. Thus technology and its overall ideology stop humans from
transcending the daily occurrence and the surface of appearance. It is this
disregard for transcendence which leads to lack or complete oblivion of the
eschatological attitude to science.
However, one must not think that those philosophers and theologians
who criticize science and technology and the whole Western attitude to life, in
their negation of technology, achieve anything positive and significant towards
transcending. In fact they confess a nostalgia with respect to ‘security’ and
‘assurance’ in that pre-technological state of affairs in the world which, as it is
82. P. M. Gregorios comments in this context ‘Science is not as objective a system of

knowledge as we once thought it was. It is an option that we have chosen and which has
given birth to the impressive reality of Western scientific-technological, urban-industrial
civilisation. We are part of that system: it is our creation. We have chosen to limit our percep-
tion to the scientifically explicable, and despite the challenge of many phenomena which
could have told us that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system we have
gone ahead, hoping that all mysteries can be reduced to problems and puzzles soluble by
intelligent conceptual investigation.’ (Human Presence, p. 100. Emphasis added.) One can
also find a similar claim, namely that technocracy entails ‘the myth of scientific objectivity’,
in research on sociology of science. (See, for example, Roszak, The Making of a Counter
Culture, chapter 7).
83. R. Ingarden gave an interesting interpretation of how technology-like-transcendence
can lead to spiritual modification in human life making him potentially blind to the transcen-
dence in a religious sense: ‘. . . cultural products can gratify man’s aspirations to a life elevated
above nature only under the condition of his extraordinary spiritual activeness, and they fall
back into total oblivion as soon as man loses the will to transcend his simple, inborn nature,
and surrenders the creative activeness of his consciousness. Nonetheless, they are not merely
present to man, who opens himself, as it were, to objects of this sort and tries to understand
them; they also affect him and sometimes deeply modify his spiritual life, and also, to some
extent, his corporeal life.’ (Ingarden, R. (1983) Man and Value, Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, p. 19.)
believed, had been more stable and peaceful, which was not threatened by
ecological problems and possible technological disasters, and in which the
world seemed to be unchangeable and ‘eternal’. However, the paradox which
is present in this vision is that history itself is abolished because it looses the
sense of direction and the goal. The very nostalgic attempt to avoid the impact
with modern science and technology represents an ahistorical illusion which,
de facto, denies the intrinsic teleology which drives science and technology. On
the other hand, one must admit that scientists, who promote technological
progress, themselves understand well the goals and eschatological meaning of
technology.84 It is important to assert once again that the very attempt to deny
an eschatological dimension in science and technology by scientists themselves
creates an obstacle to the feeling of the existential eschatological presence, as
being invoked in a liturgical-like fashion through exploration of the world and
fusion of humanity with nature in a sense of continuing embodiment of human
subjectivity in nature.85 In view of this, the objective of Christian theology is
not to criticize and judge science, but to reveal and revive in its development
that sought eschatological presence which will allow to a Christian to rethink
the meaning of the ambivalence of science and technology in human life, as a
mode of suffering, as that struggle for the Divine love, which is always open to
humanity in the perspective of the age to come. For a Christian, science and
technology is that cross of hardship, doubts and contradictions, which one
has to carry in order to achieve the perception of the eschatological presence
in the passage of modern life. Science and its applications in technology, while
making life easier, lure humanity which wants to believe that its tomorrow is
secure and reliable. In this it stops in humans the access to transcending as a
leap towards experience of eschatological presence.
It follows from what we have just discussed that eschatologism implies tran-
scendence, but not in a sense of futurology, as prognostics of the future from
the given present, but as remembrance of the future (or, conversely, anticipa-
tion of the past) by seeing things not through a natural passage of time, but
through an anxious expectation of the age to come from where the sense of
things, their purposes and ends will shine through. This, by using the words of
D. Staniloae, ‘demonstrates that we cannot understand nature and the meaning
of science and technology without recognizing a high human destiny, the
84. See in this respect Heidegger’s paper ‘The question concerning technology’. There are
some other, and more mundane, overtones of this discussion in the context of a question
whether technology threatens to overcome our humanity: see, for example, Janicaud, On the
Human Condition.
85. The tragic aspect of being a Christian is to perceive constantly the eschatological
presence in the natural conditions where life wants to be happy and comfortable. In a way
the very essence of that eschatological presence is to remind us constantly that the goal of our
earthly existence is not here and now but in the future age. Past, present and what we call sta-
bility of tomorrow have meaning in so far they are seen in the perspective of the age to come.
calling of man to find his fulfilment in God’.86 It is this destiny which safe-
guards man against all fears of technology: ‘It is called upon to deliver man
from the feeling that he is crushed by technology, just as the Gospel and the
teaching of the Fathers delivered him from the feeling that he was at the discre-
tion of certain capricious spiritual beings who made use of nature in an
arbitrary way.’87 P. M. Gregorios expressed a similar thought, while reflecting
upon patristic heritage.
Man who exercises lordship over creation without reference to his communion
with God and to his contingent existence dependent upon God as Creator, is dis-
torted man . . . Man is not master of the world of his own. He can become truly
master of the creation only by being related to the Creator as image of manifest
presence. This means that we will need to develop a ‘science’ and ‘technology’ that
will keep our relationship with the other pole of our existence – with our Creator
and our archetype, God.88
Thus one can suggest that technology must be appropriated by Christianity

in a different way by subjecting technological development and the alternative
futures it suggests to the scrutiny of the transforming presence of the age to
come. It is exactly this presence that is missing in all sorts of ‘end-of-the-world’
eschatologies. The eschatological transformation of the attitude to technology
implies the transformation of perception of time such that time is not seen any
more as unfolding from the past through its branching into alternative futures
and carrying with itself all inevitabilities of the present human conditions and
lost hopes for physical survival, but, on the contrary, that perception of time
which is unique and comes from the eschaton, so that the very contemplation
of the past is seen now as the specific and concrete anticipation of the future
age along the lines of the infinite tasks of humanity. This means that science
and technology must be turned towards their proper place in the infinite tasks
of humanity and its destiny, rather than to be treated as a part of the process
of gradual self-subjugation and adaptation to the necessities of nature (although
in its technological extensions). Then and only then the existing schism between
theology and science can be overcome by reverting to its roots from the histori-
cal past (which is haunted by hostility and suspicion) to the common telos
of theology and science which is inherently present in the core of the human
condition and which drives science and theology to the realization of the
destiny of humanity.
The realized eschatology of the science–religion dialogue directs attention
not so much to the origin of things in the past of the universe and human history,
but appeals to see these sought origins through anticipation of the past, that is,
to treat the origins of things through the telos of their explanation, which
86. Staniloae, Theology and the Church, p. 225.

87. Ibid.
88. Gregorios, Cosmic Man, p. 225.
points towards the age to come. For example, one can be fixed on the idea that
there was an evolutionary beginning of all humankind which could potentially
‘explain’ the facticity of the human race. However, by approaching this origin
through the repentant heart, that is, through the metanoia, one could see that
phenomenality of this origin will never be disclosed fully to us, but whose
incessant presence in our quest for the mystery of our existence, will always
form a telos of all our explanations, as an attempt to understand humanity’s
destiny. A similar thing can be said about the origin of the universe: the
so-called Big Bang, which usually depicted as something physically real in the
past of the universe, in fact, functions in human consciousness as a telos of all
cosmological explanations. Cosmology, incapable of explaining the contin-
gency and facticity of the present universe attempts to explain it away by
extrapolating all forms of matter and things in the universe back in time to the
singular undifferentiated state in which ‘all was in all’, and claims that this pri-
mordial, although, non-phenomenal ‘being’, was allegedly responsible for the
facticity of everything in the world. For an attentive spiritual soul, however,
metanoia of the heart invoked by the Spirit from the age to come, directs one
to a different treatment of the origins of the universe by pointing out that its
phenomenal facticity, its givenness to us, whose comprehension is always to be
attempted trough the movement of the human spirit to the future, through the
anticipation of the allegedly existent past in the telos of all sorts of explana-
tions. It is in this sense that cosmology loses its sense as an archaeology of the
physical universe and acquires more the features of archaeology of the human
spirit searching for the ground of its own facticity. What happens here is the
combination of our desire to commemorate the past origin of the universe
(anamnesis) through scientific exploration, with the invocation of the age to
come (epiclesis) which inevitably accompanies that commemoration if it
attempts to unfold the mystery of our existence and our destiny in the context
of everyday eschatological presence.89 Thus remembrance, past and history are
not abolished but rather defined through the invocation of the Holy Spirit
89. This situation in modern understanding is similar to that ambivalence which condi-
tioned the thought of the Fathers of the Church who used categories applicable to this world
(such as ‘remembrance’) in order to express their perception of the age to come: ‘remem-
brance of the future’. The culmination of this ethos of the Church as being existent in history
but not of history takes place in the celebration of the Liturgy in the invocation of the
Kingdom in the anaphora: ‘Bearing in remembrance, therefore, this commandment of salva-
tion, and all those things which came to pass for us; the Cross, the Grave, the Resurrection on
the third day, the Ascension into Heaven, the Sitting on the right hand, the Second and glori-
ous Coming again’ (Hapgood, I. F. (ed.) (1996) Service Book, Englewood: Antiochian
Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, p. 104). Here the suspension of ordinary temporal order
takes place which expresses the presence of the future age. Contemporary cosmology which
unconsciously follows a similar path of anticipation of the pre-temporal past makes effectively
a liturgical act of invoking the future age of knowledge of the universe, from which the past
and present of the universe will be seen not in a sense of construction but rather in a sense of
dilation between two parentheses which manifest the alpha and omega of human existence.
which is always an eschatological act. It is here that we see the presence of an

intrinsic Eucharistic ethos in all modalities of science whose unfolding in his-
tory is driven by its hidden telos, whose meaning cannot be known directly,
but whose eschatological presence is achieved every time that one invokes the
questions about our ultimate origin and destiny. Thus the end of time for
which all hope, determines the origin, but not vice versa.
The Existential Reintegration of Humanity as the Central Theme

for a Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and Science
It is not difficult to infer from our discussion so far that all dimensions of the
disintegration in the modalities of the human spirit, observed as a split between
East and West, between heavenly aspirations and mundane experiences,
between theology as experience of the transcendent and science as the pre-
occupation with the actualization of the potentially possible, follow from a
major and tragic split present in the human person, namely the split between
heart and reason, action and thought, communion and being. This split, which
accumulated in the course of history and accompanied all other splits in the
human spirit, which we have already described, constitutes the major problem
not only through its obvious symptom – the split between theology and science
in the postmodern world – but also represents a serious problem for theology
proper, which advocates the integrity of the human condition in its proclama-
tion of the truth of life through the healing mediation between all moral
divisions in humanity and the world in order to achieve its ultimate transfigura-
tion and unification with their other-worldly source. For example, when theology
is treated in the modern secular educational system as a purely academic disci-
pline, that is, with no reference to the living experience of God in the
worshipping Church and prayers of devoted monks, one has an obvious mani-
festation of the detachment of reason from heart, thought from action and
communion from being. This situation can create a twofold impression: on the
one hand, an inexperienced person can assume that to become a Christian it is
enough to read and study spiritual and theological books without making
a personal effort and living through trial to enter communion with God (this
person can doubt the validity of the Church’s experience of communion with
God thus denying its hierarchy and tradition); on the other hand, the alleged
theological discourse can be seen as one out of many equal approaches to
deal with realities of life and the world and, thus, can simply be brought into
comparison with science in rubrics of arbitrary fictions of reason. This last
impression, realized in modern Western trends of the dialogue between science
and theology, as we have already mentioned earlier, leads to production of
multiple, different, methodologies and schemes which compare theology and
science as uniform terms of a constructed logical relationship. This unsatisfactory
situation devoid of any existential truth, points towards that which is tragically
missing here, namely the communal search for God in the human heart.
Paradoxically, this situation can also be revealed in modern academic theology

when it incorporates uncritically and ‘mechanically’ in its apparatus new ‘sci-
entific’ ideas in order to evidence about God, resembling thus a Gnostic
approach to God through knowledge (thought), not communion (action). Using
the language of the previous section, one can reaffirm that any knowledge
directed towards ultimate reality requires metanoia as a change of reason
enlightened by heart. Thus metanoia on the level of the human condition
implies the reintegration of reason with heart. In other words, the wholeness
of humanity, according to the Biblical teaching, must be reinstated in a way
such that both theology and science will be related to existential events in
which human beings enter communion with the other, be it things created by
God, or God himself. Does the contemporary dialogue between science and
theology in its attempt to unify reason and faith reach this goal?
In order to respond to the last question, first of all let us have a look at what
a neo-patristic synthesis advocates. It claims that patristic theology is relevant
and appropriate in the contemporary world because it has an essentially exis-
tential character. Florovsky asserts that ‘the Fathers were wrestling with
existential problems, with those revelations of the eternal issues which were
described and recorded in Holy Scripture. [It] would make a suggestion that
St Athanasius and St Augustine are much more up to date than many of our
theological contemporaries,’90 and this is the reason why ‘what we need in
Christendom “in times such as this” is precisely a sound and existential
theology.’91 However the existential nature of theology for which Florovsky
appeals in the context of a neo-patristic synthesis does not simply mean deal-
ing with issues of life and death in a mundane sense, it does not mean dealing
with the question of better or worse, but it asserts theology as a mode of being
which itself is preoccupied with personal existence, fullness of life as an event
of communion with the Other through prayer and exercise of virtue. To be a
contemporary theologian of a ‘patristic kind’ means to live in faith, following
God’s will92 (with respect to this, a particular theologian is a unique and
irreducible event of existence), and carrying out the task of a neo-patristic
90. Florovsky, G. (1972) ‘The lost scriptural mind’, in Bible, Church, Tradition: An East-
ern Orthodox View, Belmont: Nordland, pp. 9–16 (16).
91. Ibid., p. 15. It is interesting to compare this thought about longing for existential the-
ology with what Edith Stein wrote in 1929 in her famous imagined dialogue between Edmund
Husserl and Thomas Aquianas promoting essentially an idea similar to that of Florovsky that
in the twentieth century people were going back to the Fathers of the Church, such as St
Thomas’s: ‘Ours is a time that is no longer content with methodological deliberations. People
have nothing to hold on to and are looking for purchase. They want a truth to cling to, a
meaning for their lives; they want a “philosophy for life”. And this they find in Thomas’
(Knowledge and Faith, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 27).
92. In St Maximus the Confessor’s words to carry out the Divine will means to have under-
standing of Divine wisdom and through the holy way of life to make oneself fit to receive
the Holy Spirit’s indwelling and deifying presence. See First Century of Various Texts 73
(Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 180).
synthesis as proclamation of truth about the Word of God.93 ‘The theologian

must speak to living beings, address himself to living hearts, he must be full of
attention and love, conscious of his immediate responsibility for the soul of his
brother, and in particular for the soul that is still in the dark.’94 J. Meyendorf
refers to Greek Fathers in order to draw a parallel between the situation which
Christianity faced in the first centuries of the first millennium and the task
which Christian theology faces in our contemporary society.
[T]he Church needs theology to solve today’s problems, not to repeat ancient solu-
tions to ancient problems. The Cappadocian Fathers are great theologians because
they succeeded in preserving the content of the Christian Gospel when it faced the
challenge of the Hellenistic philosophical world view. Without their partial accep-
tance and partial rejection of this world view, but first of all without their
understanding of it, their theology would be meaningless.95
Theology must become dialogical in order to talk about God in dialogue

with living human beings, the dialogue which is inherently in God and with
God. Theology as thought can never be detached from an existential action.
Seen along these lines, a neo-patristic synthesis should thus imply the under-
standing of the contemporary stream of thought, be it philosophy or science,
from the perspective of communion events. Orthodoxy exists in the world
which is dominated by scientific ideas and technological applications and
where the human reason is tempted to believe in its sovereignty and power to
control all aspects of being. It is in this sense that modern science challenges
theology and religion in general, and Orthodoxy in particular. It challenges the
religious mind which is sanctified by heart and inseparable from it, that is, it
attempts to split the integrity of human persons to whom the reality of things
is given in existential events where there is no separation between communion
and being. Then the defence of the Christian stance on the meaning and value
of human life, as well as their further articulation in face of technical progress,
should assume that the rationality that underlies the intellectual development
of humankind and its technological overtaking of the world, must be dispas-
sionately contemplated through the mind as if it would be placed in the heart,
that is, as relevant and valuable only from within the very fact of existence of
persons for whom their being is existentially inseparable from communion. As
a result, some aspects of scientific and technological progress will have to be
rejected; some others will have to be accepted. Scientific and philosophical
ideas cannot just simply enter a fruitless dialectical dispute with theology;
rather they should be involved and sanctified into the ‘logic’ of existential
93. Florovsky, ‘St Gregory Palamas and the tradition of the Fathers’, p. 108.
94. Florovsky, ‘The ways of Russian theology’, p. 207.
95. Meyendorf, J. (1978) Living Tradition, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
p. 168.
events of human beings as well as ecclesial realities of the ever-building Church

of Christ which articulates these events and discloses their meaning. One can
ask about this sought logic of existential events: what is this, what is meant
by this term? First of all, this is a change of attitude to the world and to the
fact of human life, such that the sense-forming unfolding of empirical and
theoretical experience in science and philosophy, as well as a historical mode
of religious experience of prayer and ecclesial communities, are to be referred
to the immediate life of human transcendental subjectivity. As we mentioned
previously, in all modern forms of the dialogue between theology and science,
as it exists in the West, the prevailing approach is based on the so-called natural
attitude of the human mind within which both theology and science are posi-
tioned as outward activities of human subjectivity, whereas this subjectivity is
taken for granted and is not subjected to any introspection and analysis. It was
easy in this approach to reveal the differences between theology and science as
they are given to humanity in its historical appearance. However, an attentive
mind can immediately enquire why those differences lead to any tension
between theology and science if both of them flourish from the same centre:
incarnate human subjectivity. It is by referring theology and science to imme-
diate existential events that one can try to find the common root for both
theology and science.
This implies that Orthodox theological anthropology will necessarily have
to study men in conditions such as they are. Without studying humanity in its
being-in-the-world, theology cannot offer to man a step into the way of spiri-
tual transformation about which the Church is teaching; this is the reason why
theology is interested in that knowledge about man, which is accumulated by
contemporary science and anthropological concepts, that have been developed
by philosophers in the last century.
However, a neo-patristic synthesis is not to follow the logic of a vague uni-
fied synthesis of Christian life and thinking with some modern ideas. This kind
of synthesis would result in another intellectual monstrosity with no existential
consequences. What is important is that all philosophical and anthropological
stances in modern Western theology and philosophy will have to be met with
a grain of scepticism in a positive, but at the same time an apophatic sense.
This means that different components of a synthesis will have to be treated as
different ways of expressing the human condition in the world, bearing in
mind that these different ways are all intrinsically present in the unity of the
human spirit, that unity which constitutes humanity’s entelechy. In many ways
the achievements of the Western thought with respect to human existence must
be taken into account only in the sense that its ideas tell theology exactly what
the meaning of life is not and what the sense of the human condition is not.
It does not mean that Orthodox theology judges or rejects achievements of
Western philosophy and anthropology; on the contrary, it takes all of them as its
own problems which have to be known and addressed in order to find another
way forward. Theology takes here a kind of outer stance, transcending thus
the Western trend of thought from the very starting point. However this keeps
Orthodox theology away from a naïve hope of finding an all-encompassing

synthesis of thought in one particular historical period. This synthesis can only
be thought as an eschatological task which can be attempted in this age through
the action of the realized eschaton in ecclesial existence. It is only in this, very
specific, sense that one can hope that the sciences whose meaning, being dis-
closed through theology and ecclesial life, will have to ‘acquire’ more existential
features, that is, to be seen not as abstract ideas and exotic theories about the
outer world, but as those activities of the human subjectivity in the world,
which are intrinsically linked to the spiritual aspirations of humanity and its
Eucharistic expressions as well as to its destiny in a deep religious sense.
Theology with all its faithfulness to the living tradition of the Church has to
evolve in order to become existential not only in abstract philosophical terms
as being imbued with anthropological issues, but existential in the sense that
its fundamentals, that is, the Church’s definitions and dogmas, become a true
guidance for people living in the contemporary, secular culture.96 The articula-
tion and further development of Christian anthropology, which is deeply
rooted in the very practice of mystical and ecclesial life, becomes thus an inde-
pendent and indispensable task of a neo-patristic synthesis. This development
can only be successful if the spiritual heritage which we find in the writings of
the Fathers and which for many centuries has been implicitly implemented by
the ‘practical’ ascetic anthropology of monks will become available for study
by everyone. Thus ascetic practice will have to be ‘inserted’ into the discourse
about the human condition and the anthropology of a neo-patristic synthesis
will have to imply that no serious understanding of humanity and no explana-
tion of the meaning of its existence will be complete unless it involves religious
experience as participation in the ineffable mystery of that who can say ‘I am
Who I am.’ In the same way as the supreme existential mystery of the Sinaite
revelation cannot be objectified and understood apart from participation in the
speech of God, existence in the created world (i.e. the existence of the universe
as well as human beings in it) can only be understood through an ontological
modality of humanity which can be expressed as existence-participation and
which is impossible to define logically for it carries in itself some objective
uncertainty. Here we see again that genuine anthropology must be apophatic:
in all its attempts to grasp the mystery of the facticity of the existence of a
human person, the actualization of the very event when a human person is
born (i.e. the event of incarnation) in the midst of physical and biological
nature can only be accounted for through the Biblical reference, which speaks
about the creation of man not as a result of an impersonal interplay of chance
and necessity in nature but as an act of personal relationship with God, which
places all other sorts of questioning about existence aside.
96. For further discussion see, for example, J. Zizioulas (1999) ‘The Orthodox Church
and the Third Millennium’, www.balamand.edu.lb/theology/ZizioulasLecture.htm (accessed
9 March 2008).
The Dialogue between Theology and Science as a Refusal

of the Natural Attitude
As we mentioned already, any comparison of what science affirms about reality

from within its natural attitude, with those visions of reality from the perspec-
tive of the Divine, which correspond to a consciousness that suspends all
judgement about the existence of things as if they exist outside God and out-
side human subjectivity makes no sense. If a scientist treats theological ideas in
the same naturalistic way as he treats scientific ideas, then the essence of theol-
ogy as an experiential, existential mode of humanity is distorted to such an
extent that any further ‘dialogue’ can have meaning only as a mental exercise
with no existential and spiritual consequences at all. Yet a scientist cannot
change his attitude, for if he does so he ceases to be a scientist. At the very least
he becomes a philosopher. This leads us to ask: can an engagement of science
with theology take place at the level of a scientific discourse that maintains the
natural attitude? Sadly, we must say that it probably cannot.
The centrality of the human subject for the dialogue between theology
and science manifests itself through the simple, almost naïve observation that
scientific realities, as mental creations and cultural achievements, represent
themselves as varieties of the human experience in the world, an experience
whose intentionality is directed towards outward nature and whose limits are
set by what is usually called ‘natural reason’. But this experience is a human
experience in the same way as theology is the experience of God addressed to
man. Thus there are two types of experience that meet each other in the same
humanity. What then is the goal of the dialogue between theology and science?
For a theologian it would be natural to argue that the essence and objective of
establishing a relationship between theology and science is to relate two differ-
ent types of experience in the same human subjectivity, and that the division
and internal split that we observe in the tension between science and theology
today, is not something that was implanted in the nature of man as originally
created, but rather represents a continuation of the event in biblical history
that we call the Fall. The human divine image has been distorted and its integ-
rity lost, but intrinsically human beings are still unified creatures, having a
kind of archetypical memory of their likeness to God. Therefore the process of
restoration of unity in what is meant to be related in man, that is, unity between
the scientific vision and the experience of God, has as its ultimate goal the
return of humanity to God and its entry into union with God through the
removal of all divisions in creation (St Maximus the Confessor). This restora-
tion is not a cultural or academic necessity, but rather an ascetic and spiritual
imperative that follows from the present human condition and is implanted in
the teleology of the human spirit.
Does such a vision of the problem of the dialogue between science and theo-
logy diminish the role of scientific picture of the world and man? – not at all.
On the contrary, scientific theories become extremely important and useful
instruments in demonstrating just how human subjectivity, incarnate in the
world, affirms itself through the exteriorizing tendencies of its ‘natural’ attitude.
The universe, which science represents to us as something somehow different
from us and devoid of our influence and presence, embodies in fact the articu-
lated words and thoughts of humanity. By studying what science is saying
about nature, we study ourselves, namely how our own consciousness attempts
to express the mystery of its own existence by projecting this mystery on to the
outer world. If science is to be involved in dialogue with theology, it is impor-
tant to look carefully at how this science is defined and limited by the structures
of human thought and by the human condition in the universe. This approach
does not devalue science, but rather affirms it as an existential mode in its
specific incarnate condition and it is definitely not a task for the scientist
himself. It is a task for those who can, while exercising their consciousness,
overcome the natural attitude and perform a phenomenological reduction of
all facticity in science. It is at this stage that phenomenological philosophy can
offer help as a methodological tool enabling us to elucidate those contexts in
which the sciences function and which are, nevertheless, not reflected at all by
the sciences themselves.
Phenomenology helps to identify the meaning of the sciences as a pre-
philosophical form of thought, and hence their inherent partiality in judgements
about reality as a whole. Each partial science stretches towards its philoso-
phical limit in attempting to express some particular opinion about the whole
of reality. Phenomenology articulates this partiality of opinion about the
whole and its relationship to those views that are appropriate to the whole.
Phenomenology, by being indifferent to the truth or falsity of science’s claims
about reality, clarifies its partiality and its underlying ‘natural’ attitude, and
thereby discovers in the sciences various contexts that the sciences are unable
to identify themselves. Whereas phenomenology clarifies the meaning of science
by referring it to the context of historical consciousness as it functions in the
world, that is, to the living, embodied subjectivity with its pre-scientific experi-
ence of immediate indwelling in the world (the intensity of the immediate
instance of hypostatic existence), theology can proceed even further by articu-
lating the structures of the life-world by focusing on the destiny of man in his
relationship with God, and seen as that disclosure of the human ability of
transcendence which is being given in the very phenomenon of humanity in a
characteristic way of presence in absence which implies the presence of that
non-natural attitude to the contemplation of being which is called faith. Faith
thus represents our existential conviction that reality as such is bound up with
the existence of humanity, whose presence in the universe makes this reality a
very special one. Here faith manifests itself not just as religious belief or the
highest capacity of contemplation, but as the reflection and manifestation of
our existence in the world as such. In modern words: ‘if Christian faith has a
meaning for us, it is because our existence is permeated through and through
by faith in the broad existential sense of the word. Faith in this sense is a
general and fundamental constituent of human existence, like participation,
or giving in exchange, or the communion. . . .’97 When the sciences articulate

the outer ‘material’ world, they in fact believe in its existence, and this belief is
a different way of expressing that human beings are not disembodied souls,
but integrities permeated by the material (which human subjectivity constitutes
in turn as its own corporeality). Belief in existence is not simply an empirical
approach to the sensible world; it is an underlying intuition which is always
present at the background of all sensible experience and which cannot be phe-
nomenologically reduced to something more basic. This belief is not passive
but rather creative, when existence becomes unfolding.
As a result, the revealing of the context of faith within which the sciences
work means that traces of existential faith must be found everywhere, that is,
in all scientific articulations of the universe. This leads to the conclusion that
every possible approach to the material world (as related to God the Creator
and articulated by human beings) is intrinsically imbued with living faith, with
the result that without this faith (i.e. without taking into account the specific-
ity and concreteness of the human condition in the universe), any alternative
abstract intellectualist approach to the worldly realities is devoid of existential
meaning and can correspondingly be qualified as non-human.
One now anticipates that there must be a certain shift in the dialogue between
theology and science. If scientists, who are working within the natural atti-
tude, attempt to engage with theology, without metanoia, that is, a change of
mind, they automatically transform the whole of theology into a set of views
and formal teachings that are also perceived from within the natural attitude
as only facts of natural history and human convictions. But for a theologian or
religious thinker this approach is unacceptable, because theology, interpreted
from within the ‘natural’ attitude, loses its existential meaning and its tran-
scendent and mystical origin in communion with God. Such a ‘theology’ (if it
can be called such) inevitably becomes immanentist and worldly. If the move-
ment towards an engagement between theology and science takes place from
within the natural attitude, the whole enterprise becomes just a strange mental
exercise involving the comparison of things that are both posited by the tran-
scendental consciousness as existing outside and independently of itself, devoid
of any inward existential meaning and being only abstractions of the mind,
either scientific or pseudo-theological. It is not hard to see that any attempt of
the straightforward mediation between theology and science leads ultimately
to the identification of the ‘natural’ attitude in science with the philosophico-
theological attitude of faith. However, there is no simple non-philosophical
form of reconciliation between these attitudes in the human subjectivity, and
thus no naïve and simple dialogue between theology and science is possible,
97. Dondeyne, A. (1958) Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith,

Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, p. 94.
unless the issue of the human transcendental subjectivity becomes a central

theme of this dialogue.98
We can therefore see that the foundation for a relationship between theology
and science can only be found in the depths of the human subject. The search
for this relationship is itself a manifestation of the integrity of our actual expe-
rience of incarnate existence in the world. The meeting of theology and science
takes place within rubrics of human experience, and therefore the fundamental
ground for mediation between them is the internal life of human subjectivity
as it faces the world through its own personal incarnation in it. Since the
particular forms of the functioning of human consciousness and the higher
faculties of contemplation must leave traces everywhere, that is, in scientific
theories as well as in theological teachings, the goal of mediation between the-
ology and science can be understood as the re-discovery of human subjectivity
as the centre of manifestation and disclosure of the universe in its paradoxical
ambivalence of being container (as the centre of disclosure) of the universe and
contained by it and revealing thus its transcending character. The objective of
this stage of mediation with respect to science is to look at its theories as they
develop in order to learn more about how the human consciousness consti-
tutes itself for itself when it faces the world. It is here, that one can envisage a
change in the ‘natural’ intentionality directed towards the objects of the ‘outer’
world such that it transforms towards the intentionality of the self, where
consciousness directs it activity towards itself and towards its foundation. As
a result, the whole scientific enterprise could come to be seen as contributing
towards the constitution of this self. In the spirit of the phenomenological
approach, that consciousness which works in the intentionality directed to the
self, ‘deconstructs’ scientific theories (as anonymous manifestations of its own)
in order to find the human subjectivity present behind all of them, adopting
a neutral and dispassionate stance with respect to what these theories assert.
In this case the mediation between theology and science acquires a deeper
sense as a disclosure of the dialectical split of intentionalities in the human
spirit, (apparent as historically divided attitudes to the world), in their intrinsic
teleological unity pointing towards the same Holy Spirit who animates them
while it acts upon the fullness of humanity.
Thus, the ‘phenomenological turn’ in the problem of theology and science,
as briefly outlined earlier, leads one to understand that the major and most
difficult point in this dialogue is the dual position of humanity in the universe
expressed as finite and local embodiment of humanity in cosmic stuff on the
one hand, and its unlimited ability to transcend the locality of its body through
knowledge across the universe, on the other. This is the problem of the origin
of humanity, not in a trivial biological sense but as its own metaphysical origin,
as incarnate hypostatic consciousness.
98. See Nesteruk, A. (2004) ‘Human transcendental subjectivity: the central theme in the
dialogue between science and Christian theology’, Sourozh: A Journal of Orthodox Life and
Thought, 97, 1–15; 98, 34–48.
Once again one can realize that one of the central issues in the dialogue
between science and theology becomes the problem of the human transcen-
dental subjectivity acting in the world, that same human subjectivity which is
responsible for bringing theology and science to their intrinsic unity in the
human spirit. But human subjectivity, according to the Fathers, resembles
the divine image, which was recapitulated by Christ. It is in the historical
Incarnation of Christ that we have the only viable pointer towards under-
standing the mystery of human incarnate existence, the mystery which underlies
all our understanding of the world through science and its relation to our
experience of God; this is the reason why the cosmic philosophy of the Fathers,
being essentially Christocentric, can thus provide a reference to the point of
mediation between science and theology.
But the divine image in humanity enables it to live in the Community of the
Spirit in spite of the fact that the transcendent-vision-blindness is developing
through a phenomenal growth of the civilization pole of our existence. To deal
with this situation one needs metanoia at the very basic level of the Divine
image in man. Then, and only then, will a new attitude to science and technol-
ogy must bear in itself more witness to Faith, Love and Hope. In progressing
towards this ‘new’ science, as P. M. Gregorios wrote, ‘we may find the whole
neglected patristic heritage of the Church to have a necessary first priority of
claim on our attention.’99
Why Does a Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and

Science Require an Ecclesial Dimension?
It is important to realize that according to the Orthodox view any study of the
patristic tradition in general or of particular Fathers, if it takes place only from
a historical and sociological perspective and without any attempt to establish
communion with the Fathers in the Spirit, splits the unity of the tradition and
atomizes the Fathers’ thought. This implies that, from a theological point of
view, such an isolated and fragmented use of the Fathers’ writings in order to
make them conform to one’s egocentric and arbitrary views constitutes a kind
of ‘heresy’; for without the spirit of repentance and asceticism, the writing
of the Fathers are inevitably split into pieces of fiction and hence amended.
Florovsky insisted that ‘it is misleading to single out particular statements of
the Fathers and to detach them from the total perspective in which they have
been actually uttered, just as it is misleading to manipulate with detached
quotations from the Scripture. To “follow” the Fathers does not mean just “to
quote” them. “To follow” the Fathers means to acquire their “mind”, their
phronema.’100 So, in order to implement the appeal ‘back to the Fathers’ one
99. Gregorios, Cosmic Man, p. 226.

100. Florovsky, ‘St Gregory Palamas and the tradition of the Fathers’, p. 109.
should not only study the Fathers’ books but also imitate their life, that is, to
live in the Holy Church and to participate in its Mysteries, to overcome the
depersonalizing tendencies of modern society and become persons worthy of
being called the members of the Body of Christ.101
Then the challenge of a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science is not
to treat some contemporary scientific views by using the ideas of the Fathers,
but to bring science into the heart of theology, whose proper place is in the
Church for which theology is her voice.102 Science, involved in dialogue with
theology, will have to become a different way of expressing the Christian per-
ception of being, contained in the formula of the Sinaite revelation ‘I am Who
I am’ (Exod. 3.14). Christians contemplate being as being of Someone; there is
no impersonal being at all, for if there is no personal origin, there is no being
at all. This implies that the universe of beings, as opposed to non-being, exists
only in that one, who can affirm: ‘I am Who I am.’ Science if it wants to be
involved in the dialogue with theology must become capable of contemplating
the universe as inherent in the person of God, so that cosmological mathemati-
cal constructions are to lose their meaning as outward and impersonal
objectifications made by human subjectivity, and, on the contrary, express the
presence of the image of the Person of God in the world revealed to the created
humanity. But this requires a radical metanoia that implies, first of all, that
human beings will treat themselves not as impersonal physico-biological crea-
tures whose life is driven by dispassionate scientific laws and who are doomed
to decay and die, but as those agencies in the universe who possess in their
inner essence the image of the Personal God, the image of Christ and the
life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit and who through their communion with
God establish harmony and sense of life. Science can become existential only if
human beings, who are creators of science, affirm themselves as being the cen-
tre of hypostatic existence through the intensity of a particular instance and
through the events of communion with the Personal God of Christian faith;
God ‘reveals himself by the light of a knowledge which is not a meaning or
concept, but a name and a person, Jesus Christ’.103 By entering our dialogue
with the hypostasis of Christ we also begin to comprehend the matter of
the world which is the realization of the command of God ‘Let there be light.’
It is through this light of Christ present in the world and sustaining our exis-
tence, as well as in the light of knowledge, that science becomes possible at all.
Thus understood, science can be reinstated to its proper status in communion
with God – Jesus Christ,104 or saying the same in a different way,
the truth of the world is for the Church is inseparable from the knowledge of God,
and the knowledge of God inseparable from the person of Christ, and the person of
101. Hierotheos (Metropolitan of Nafpaktos) (1995) A Night in the Desert of the Holy
Mountain, Levadia-Hellas: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, p. 72.
102. Ibid., p. 68.
103. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 41 (emphasis added).
104. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 120; Nesteruk, Light from the East, p. 2.
Christ from the command of the Word at the beginning of time and in the depths
of our hearts, inseparable from the light of the knowledge which raises us to life, to
our adoption by God.105
The treatment of science as a mode of the human condition opens a way

to a dialogue between science and theology which is different in comparison
with those existing forms of the dialogue which attempt to ‘find’ God through
science. Even if scientific theories are used to predicate God by means of nega-
tive affirmations of the created, the only thing which would be achieved along
this way of ‘theologizing’ is the silence of the discursive mind with respect to
the living God of faith. But this ‘silence of mind’ of a philosopher-theologian
does not always constitute the fulfilment of the contemplation of God in the
ascetic and mystical sense, although it approaches to the ‘boundaries’ of God’s
vision as if it is exercised through mystical life. This is another reason why,
even if science is placed into the context of academic, philosophical theologiz-
ing, the fullness of the dialogue with theologia, as mystical experience of God,
will not be achieved.
It can be easily envisaged, however, that this idealized involvement of science
into the mysticism of Christian theologia can hardly be achieved if the dialogue
between science and theology is exercised in the contemporary secular world
which is distanced from any sort of monastic ideal to an enormous extent. This
implies that even when we argue for a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and
science we must be aware of the fundamental limits imposed on our effort to
engage science with theologia if the whole enterprise is expected to be accessible
to the wider academic and ecclesial communities and communicated in such
words and writings which will enable a media for general discussion. What are
these limits? Essentially they are limiting abilities to imagine and speak about
God, ‘present in absence’ from within creation, on the grounds of discursive
reason and rational thinking in general. Science of the objective can attempt to
approach the ‘boundary of the world’ in order to imitate a ‘transcending jump’
beyond it in the hope of looking at the world from ‘outside’ (while remaining
embedded in the world) by imitating the mind of God who created this universe.
But will these transcending efforts lead us to that God who can say ‘I am
Who I am?’ One can also suggest that these limits in the dialogue between
science and theology exist intrinsically as limiting characteristics of those
intentionalities of human consciousness which are involved in the articulation
of the world (through science). However, clarity about the nature of the limits
of engagement of theology with science can only be achieved if one positions
the mediation between them in the background of a wider experience of God.
In this respect Fr Sophrony (Sakharov) writes:
Many theologians of the philosophical type, remaining essentially rationalists, rise

to suprarational or, rather supralogical spheres of thought, but these spheres are
105. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 42 (emphasis added).

not yet the Divine world: they lie within the confines of human-created nature and
as such are within reach of the understanding in the natural order of things. These
mental visions cannot, it is true, be circumscribed within the framework of formal
logic, since they go beyond into the domain of metalogic and antinomic reasoning,
yet for all that they are still the result of the activity of the reason. The overcoming
of discursive thinking is proof of high intellectual culture but it is not yet ‘true faith’
and real divine vision. People in this category, who often possess outstanding
capacities for rational reflection, come to realise that the laws of human thought
are of limited validity, and that it is impossible to encircle the whole universe within
the steel hoops of logical syllogisms. This enables them to arrive at a supramental
contemplation, but what they then contemplate is still merely beauty created in
God’s image. Since those who enter for the first time into the sphere of the ‘silence
of mind’ experience a certain mystic awe, they mistake their contemplation for
mystical communion with the Divine. The mind, it is true, here passes beyond the
frontiers of time and space, and it is this that gives it a sense of grasping eternal
wisdom. This is as far as human reason can go along the path of natural develop-
ment. At these bounds where ‘day and night come to an end’ man contemplates a
light, which is, however, not the True Light in which there is no darkness, but the
natural light peculiar to the mind of man created in God’s image’.106
One can conjecture that any scientifico-philosophical ascension to God, if it

pretends to find the true and living God of Christian faith, should be comple-
mented by something else, namely by ascetic experience and purification of the
heart, which is capable of making a distinction between the glimpse of God as
it is present in the natural light of human mind and the True and Uncreated
Light of God who can say ‘I am Who I am.’ This implies that if one wants to
use science in order to ‘find’ God, one should see behind scientific abstractions
about the world the presence of that intellectual and spiritual force in humanity
which is capable of making the world the object of investigation where the traces
of the Divine can be found, that is, to discover the presence of the natural light
of the human mind made in the Divine image. The way to God, then, if one
steps into the rational and philosophical investigation of the world and man,
is to find the presence of the Divine image in all the mind’s constructions and
articulations of the world.
It is in this sense that science and scientific activity in general must be
approached not from the point of view of analysing the content of its theories,
but rather by making a kind of ‘deconstruction’ of theoretical notions and
concepts in order to reveal and analyse the structures of human intentional
consciousness whose correlates are interpreted by science in terms of the objec-
tive world, as well as to reveal its integrating capacity to sustain the presence
of the Divine image in it and convey this image to the world through its poten-
tial transfiguration. When we mention the presence of the Divine image in
human subjectivity we assume that it is because of this presence that human
106. Sakharov, The Monk of Mount Athos, pp. 101–2 (emphasis added).
subjectivity does not create a chaotic image of reality, it contains in itself a

kind of grace of shaping this reality harmoniously and beautifully. The pres-
ence of the image is not something ad extra to humanity at the background of
the tension between theology and science but theology and science themselves
are manifestations of God’s image and cannot be abstracted from the human
condition. The coherence of the world as it appears through conscious articu-
lation in human subjectivity is a contingent fact, but this contingency is of
Divine origin: it is present as the natural light in human consciousness, as a gift
of grace to be in co-ordination with the whole world and able to express this
co-ordination by making the world inherent in the hypostasis of humanity.
Since in phenomenological thought, it was understood that if the world is
treated as a correlate of concatenated conscious acts of transcendental subjec-
tivity and which, that is the world, is present in human consciousness as a mere
contingent fact, then the constitution of our world is not entirely inherent in
acts of consciousness as such, but also dependent on a certain ‘gift’ or ‘grace’
which makes it possible for the multihypostatic subjectivity to act as nomina-
tives of disclosure and datives of manifestation with respect to that which is
called the world: ‘the subjectivity is indeed the ground of the being of the
world, but is not sufficient ground of its being; the constitution of the world is
not genuinely that work of the finite subjectivity,’ it requires ‘grace’.107 But this
‘grace’ definitely points out towards something which is beyond the imma-
nence of consciousness embedded in the world, that is, strictly speaking, to the
non-worldly dimension (i.e. to the dimension which imitates in subjectivity a
kind of other-worldly interiority), from where the link between consciousness
and what it tackles as an object of its intention and thematization, is effectively
actualized in its created contingency. The modes of knowledge which allow
one to reveal the beauty and harmony in a good creation of a good God are
not something inherent in the sphere of the transcendental subjectivity; the
knowledge is in us but not from us. Human beings experience knowledge as a
particular existential mode through the presence of the light of Christ in their
consciousness.108 In this case whatever the human mind asserts as ‘nature’ or
107. Kockelmans, J. (1994) Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, West Lafayette: Purdue

University Press, p. 329. Even the founder of phenomenology himself, despite his reservations
with respect to the notion of God, had to introduce a thought about ‘the constitution of the
world as the product of a real and genuine Absolute, God’ (ibid.).
108. St Maximus the Confessor expressed this thought by saying that in spite of the fact that
‘God transcends all the power and strength of the mind and leaves no kind of trace for the mind
to experience,’ the light of Christ, his ‘white garments teach, in a divinely fitting way, at one and
the same time both the magnificence that lies in creatures proportionately to the logoi according
to which they have come into being and the mysterious revelation found in the understanding of
the words of Holy Scripture, so that the written power in the Spirit and the wisdom and knowl-
edge manifested together in creatures are displayed together for the knowledge of God’ (Ambigua
10–31a, in A. Louth (1996) Maximus the Confessor, London: Routledge, p. 128).
‘the world’ by its very ontological constitution contains the light of Christ:
patristic writers asserted this differently, namely that nature receives its mean-
ing, purpose and end in Christ.109
It is then not difficult to realize that if subjectivity withdraws (willingly or
unwillingly) from this grace (the Divine image), the whole harmony of the
world collapses into the chaos of sense impressions and figments of the imagi-
nation. Theology, contrary to many modern scientific abstractions about
other world, is always concerned with our world, where the grace of the Spirit
is available. This is the reason why, from a theological point of view, any
speculation about a universe without human beings constitutes no more than
a speculation about the universe without grace and, as such, is devoid of
any theological content and meaning. It can form no more than a pointer
towards possible intelligible worlds whose existential meaning is not clear to
us. In the words of V. Lossky,
the mysteries of the divine economy are thus unfurled on earth, and that is why the
Bible wants to bind us to the earth.110 [. . .] it forbids us to lose ourselves in cosmic
immensities (which our fallen nature cannot grasp anyway, except in their aspect of
disintegration), [. . .] it wants to win us from usurpation of fallen angels and bind
us to God alone. [. . .] In our fallenness we cannot even place our world amidst
these spiritual immensities.111
How similar is this theological assertion to the stance of existential phenom-

enology that the world which is articulated by humanity is essentially the
human world. Our knowledge about this is present in the light of Christ of our
mind, which is that tantalizing grace which preserves our consciousness from
slipping into nothingness on the non-human (or inhuman).
But the presence of grace in human subjectivity is that invisible factor of
the human condition which makes human beings united in their comprehen-
sion of their creaturely consubstantiality, as well as contemplation of their
fundamental irreducibility to the natural and worldly because of their multi-
hypostasicity, that is, their multivaried created capacities and distinctive tasks
through personal orientedness of God-Jesus which is symbolized by the idea of
the ‘cross’.112 Every human being is established as an event of relationship and
adoption by Christ through bearing one’s own ‘cross’.
109. This conclusion corresponds to the views of the Fathers for whom the meaning and
interpretation of nature were inconceivable outside of Christ. See in this respect Wallace-
Hadrill, D. S. (1968) The Greek Patristic View of Nature, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, pp. 117–22.
110. That is, to our universe [AN].
111. Lossky, V. (1997) Orthodox Theology, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
p. 64.
112. See in this respect Zenkovski, V. (1988) ‘The principles of Orthodox anthropology’,
Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement, 153, 5–20; 154, 67–91 (85–9).
In view of what has been discussed so far one can affirm that the performance
of mediation between theology and science is possible by the way of disclosing
the presence of the natural light of human mind in scientific theories by ‘revers-
ing’ their content to the structures of human subjectivity, which exhibits the
presence of ‘grace’ through its ability to be the dative of manifestation and nom-
inative of disclosure. But having detected the presence of this natural light of the
human mind as an ultimate ground of knowledge, the engagement of theology
with science is still to take place;113 for the cessation of naïve empirical thinking
and acquisition of the apophatic convictions about inaccessibility of God through
the natural attitude only prepares the ground for entering the next, more chal-
lenging stage, in search for the personal God-Christ. This search is based on the
personal experience of and the direct participation in God through prayer and
liturgy, that is, entry to the communion of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which,
if treated phenomenologically, brings us to a different (in comparison with a
scientific) mode of affirmation of the human condition in the world. Here the
transcendental subjectivity reveals itself through incarnate personal and ecclesial
(catholic) forms of the intentional participation (not correlation) in God through
the Church’s mind and with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is exactly through this
implicitly and explicitly present ecclesial (catholic) dimension of the human exis-
tence that the hypostatic mode of the natural light, that is, the personal presence
of Christ in every human being can be articulated.
By revealing the presence of the natural light of the human mind behind the
‘screen’ of all objectifications that take place in scientific theories, these same
theories can receive their existential interpretation as related to the world of
immediate indwelling of humanity through which their relationship to theol-
ogy and religious life will be magnified. But this treatment will implicitly accept
and reject something in these theories. What is important, however, is to try
to understand and justify the choice of methods which will approach science
and its appropriation by theology suitable for the purposes of a neo-patristic
synthesis. The logic of this choice must be faithful to the tradition of the
Church, but it also must survive possible accusations of old-fashioned fideism
which postmodern thinkers can raise. But this implies that any theological
perception of science and its modern context must resign itself to the fact that
science is present in modern civilization in such a form regardless of whether
it is good or bad. The function of theology in this case is to make articulate
those spiritual intentions which drive humanity in its scientific and technologi-
cal advance, as well as the extent to which these intentions diversify from, or
are akin to, that which theology advocates about the place of humanity in the
universe and its ultimate function as a mediator between creation and God.
113. There is no smooth ‘intellectual’ transition from the cosmic wisdom which is open
to the natural light of human mind in its fallen state to the Divine Wisdom of theologia,
which requires the purification of the heart that is effectively the recreation of the natural
light in the mind of Church.
Then the tradition, for which we have advocated since the beginning of this
chapter, should constitute itself as interplay between theology and science and
it is in this constitution that a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science
will reveal itself. One is tempted to repeat the question: how can this be achieved;
how can the tradition, preserve itself through appropriation of historical nov-
elties, which seem to be in total disjunction with what the tradition asserts, as
an indispensable core of its historic functioning. Here the analogy with the
phenomenological approach to history comes to mind. For phenomenology
history manifests the life of consciousness, so that the very idea that the world
is articulated through human consciousness means, by definition, that the
world is articulated from within human history. But history is understood here
as a constitutive process of the human ratio and not only as sediment of dead
facts and ideas. History is the context of all articulations of the world. Christi-
anity adds to this that history is not only the context of Christian faith which
was initiated two thousand years ago; rather it is the constant permeation of
all meanings and actions of Christian civilization through the action of the
Holy Spirit who transfers to this history some teleological (eschatological)
intentionality. This implies that consciousness as such, being incarnate in his-
tory, is driven, in its open-ended unfolding through history, by the Holy Spirit,
so that an appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis (made in the beginning of the
twentieth century) is not an accident of historical development of theology,
but rather is the necessity which originates in depths of intentions and will of
the Holy Spirit which are revealed to the mind of the Church and its theolo-
gians. If, in our pursuit for a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science, we
follow the ways and logic of the Holy Spirit, we realize that the methodology
of this synthesis does not exist a priori. It will reveal itself only through the
living engagement of theology and science under the guidance of the Holy
Spirit, that is, community of the Spirit, the Church. But this living engagement
must manifest that the dialogue between theology and science is not some
artificial subject introduced in the interdisciplinary academic and ecclesial
context, but a necessity following from the will of the Holy Spirit acting
upon civilization and contemplated as an incessant urge to reintegrate the
broken created spirit of humanity. We hope, thus, that in response to our quest
for a neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science, the Holy Spirit will
provide us with indications and intuitions of how to engage in and accomplish
this task. Yes, indeed the Spirit always teaches us that he is the One who is
present behind all dispensations and gifts available to humanity (1 Cor. 12.4).
Theology and science are these gifts of the same Spirit, so that there is an
intrinsic unity of theology and science as two different modes of human sub-
jectivity which is animated by the Spirit. This entails that to contrapose science
to theology, appears to be a sheer fallacy of that consciousness which pretends
to convince itself that in science it does not need any grace from God in order to
co-ordinate itself with the whole world.
One can admit, however, that if someone’s mind is deprived of grace and
cannot see the presence of God in the world then it can exalt science to the
level of ultimate and independent truth, so that any mystical and contempla-
tive entries into the reality of that same consciousness which draws the picture
of the world, and devoid from grace, will be blocked. But they will be blocked
only on the level of discursive thinking which, by the nature of its ambition,
pretends to dismiss all intentionalities of human subjectivity which follow dif-
ferent transcending patterns. This means that the power of the Holy Spirit,
through which the natural light of the human mind is latently present in all
human beings, is always ready to reveal itself if consciousness is willing to
reassess itself along the logic of the Spirit. And a first step in this reassessment
is to recognize that whatever science is treating as its objective reference, as the
world of things, particles and properties, is deeply inherent in the immediacy
of existential events through which human subjectivity reveals itself as a dative
of all manifestation and the nominative of disclosure. Humanity, being in the
world through living in the world, and, thus, being contained by the world,
holds the world in front of itself by integrating all its structural levels in a
single consciousness. That is why by being a part of nature, which science
describes as an independent from its inward existence in human insight,
humanity paradoxically contains nature inwardly through fusion of knowl-
edge and insight. This is the paradox which, being comprehended by humanity,
makes humanity distinctively different from any other forms and species of
biological existence, and through this paradox, which reflects the situation of
the created humanity in the world, the Holy Spirit provides humanity with the
move towards the awareness of the transcendent, transcendent in an absolute
sense, not only of the images of the empirical, visible world, but the awareness
of the transcendent ground of consciousness, the transcendence which is not
logical and abstract, but living and ontological. It must be understood, however,
that this transcendence does not imply any disregard or disrespect of science and
of those empirical and intelligible realities it deals with. The objective of tran-
scending is to relate scientific ideas about reality, as well as the very variety of
contingent phenomena which are studied by science, to the wholeness of the
process of conscious being in the world, the wholeness, whose meaning can
only be attempted to be understood with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Chapter 2
Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Existential
Phenomenology: The Lines of Convergence
Theologians of Christian antiquity were in a constant dialogue with philosophy of

their age. While appealing to the Fathers we should learn from them how to con-
duct such a dialogue. It is necessary for contemporary theologians to enter a similar
dialogue with contemporary philosophical thought. Perhaps one should develop a
new theological language and this, certainly, does not mean to become unfaithful to
Church’s dogmatic teaching; on the contrary this new language will facilitate to
such an expression of this teaching, which allow for this dialogue to take place.
Metropolitan Filaret (2004), The Way of the Life-Asserting Love, pp. 44–5.
Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Hellenism
Patristic theology represents a synthesis of Gospel message with Hellenistic

culture, being thus not an abstract trans-cultural and trans-historical dogma-
tizing of the living experience of God, but, actually, transforming this experience
in the specific and concrete historical and geographical context of the surround-
ing world where Hellenism was a major factor of civilization. The meeting of
mystical Christianity with classical culture resulted in ‘an excellent achievement
of Greek reason which, without betraying Christian truth and the apophatic
knowledge of this truth, remained absolutely consistent with the demands for
philosophical formulations, thus actualizing a radical break in the whole his-
tory of philosophy.’1 In what sense, then, should the synthesis of theology and
science which we advocate keep its faithfulness to the inherent Hellenism of
patristic thinking? On the theological side the answer to this question could
1. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 19; see also pp. 153–4. Literature dealing with the
meeting of Christianity with Classical culture is enormous. See, for example, Daniélou, J.
(1973) Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Pelikan, J.
(1993)Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the
Christian Encounter with Hellenism, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Neo-Patristic Synthesis 61
come from the direction of tradition, that is, the dialogue but must take into
account its historical dimension. But the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox
Church is Hellenistic. In Florovsky’s words: ‘Hellenism, so to speak, assumed
a perpetual character in the Church; it has incorporated itself in the very fabric
of the Church as the eternal category of Christian existence.’2 Florovsky means
here not the ethnical Hellenism, but that Hellenism of dogma, liturgy and
icons which all point to the age to come (Hellenism which encodes the telos of
created humanity). In the same way as Classical Greek philosophy inaugurated
the new age of human history as the history of the unfolding ratio, Christian
Hellenism inaugurated the entrance of the Word of God into the world through
His theology, contributing thus a certain witness to His entry in the Spirit. In
the same way as the philosophical problems and ways of thinking pertaining
to Hellenistic philosophy are indispensable for any Western European philoso-
phizing (perennial philosophy), Hellenism in Christian theology, liturgy and
icons forms an indispensable core for the Christian tradition. This is the reason
why any alleged de-Hellenization of the Church in its theology, liturgy and
iconic images would break the living tradition and will make theology devoid
of its original catholicity and ecclesial fullness. Hellenism of Christian theol-
ogy is inherently historic because it deals with events of sacred history. The
message of Christ entered the world in the context of historical realities of the
Roman Empire and the challenge of the Fathers was to proclaim their witness
of the Gospels in the context of the Hellenistic culture. In spite of seemingly
historical contingency of this fact, if it is contemplated outside the Christian
mind, the message about the entrance of the Word of God into the world in
human words through and by means of Hellenistic categories seen in the con-
text of sacred history cannot be considered as a mere historical contingency.
For the hidden necessity of Hellenism in Christian theology is ultimately pro-
nounced by the events themselves, that is, by the Incarnation, Resurrection
and Pentecost as taking place in the midst of the Roman Empire where the
Bible itself was read in Greek language. The seeming contingency of the
entrance of Christianity in the Hellenistic context cannot be properly accounted
for without seeing in this entrance the free action of the Holy Spirit who ‘blows
where He wills’ (Jn 3.8). If the condescension of the Logos of God into the
world was revealed to humanity in contingent rubrics of geographical space
and historical time, that is, in the midst of the Roman Empire and Greek philo-
sophical culture at some particular stage of its development, this only means
that any outward appearance of this happening is subordinated to the logic of
the non-worldly realities, that is, to the intentions and will of the Divine, which
suspends any temporality and empirical contingencies of this event and makes
the presence of Hellenism in Christian theology to be the meeting with the
logos not yet identified by the Greek classical mind with the Incarnate Logos –
the Word of God, the meeting which was silently initiated by the Holy Spirit

and later confirmed in the Pentecost. Indeed it is exactly this meeting that
makes patristic theology historical in its essence, that is, as linked to the event
of the condescension of God into the World. As Florovsky writes,
All the errors and temptations of a Hellenization forwarded indiscreetly . . . cannot

possibly weaken the significance of the fundamental fact: the ‘good news’ and
Christian theology, once and for all, were expressed from the start in Hellenistic
categories. Patristics and catholicity, historicity and Hellenism are joint aspects of
a unique and indivisible datum.3
Hellenism, considered in its outward appearance as a historical form of phi-

losophy, that is, Greek philosophy, has for the life of the Church much deeper
significance: in fact, Hellenism entered the very essence of ecclesial experience,
and shaped this experience so that its hypothetical removal from all expres-
sions of the Church life would mean the distortion of the continuity and
charismatic dimensions of the ecclesial experience as such. This would entail
in turn that in all contemporary acquisitions of philosophical and scientific
ideas by the theological mind, Hellenism still must be present as the underlying
and forming core of this mind to which all modern forms of philosophical the-
ology and scientific metaphysics must refer. Even beyond theology and faith
the contemporary philosophical mind and scientific rationality are all indebted
to Greek thought in a very non-trivial sense by being the origin and inaugura-
tion of a new era in the history of humanity, the era in which humanity detaches
itself from its embeddings in the natural ‘history’ and constitutes itself as the
history of unfolding consciousness preoccupied with the question of place and
meaning of humanity in the world, that is, with the question of existence and
being.
Thus, Hellenism for the Church and its theology is not some archaic experi-
ence of thought or sediment of the ancient European tradition but the living
experience of those who witnessed and affirmed the message of Christ in the
context of Greek culture and philosophy. In this sense, the constant presence
of Hellenism in the consciousness of the Church is not a blind and dogmatic
tribute to the tradition understood naively as sheer historical reverence, but, in
fact, the ever-present communion with the Fathers who by the grace of the
Holy Spirit transmitted through centuries their experience of Christ in terms of
Hellenistic categories and ideas.4
Christian Hellenism and patristic theology not only used and acquired those
forms of thought which had been developed by the genius of Plato and Aristotle,
but, in fact, they sanctified Greek philosophy through the action of the Spirit,
making it an indispensable part of the human condition through articulating
its meaning and its very possibility, as well as human rational thinking as
related to and founded in God, by showing that the very question of being and
3. Ibid., pp. 195–6.

human existence can only be comprehended in the context of the living faith
in that God who had shown himself in the midst of the Hellenistic world.
One can thus see that the reason why Hellenism taken out of its context in
the Christian tradition and considered as a unique and original way of European
thinking, proclaiming its freedom and independence from anything else,
that is, the ideal of Hellenism as it was promoted by the Renaissance, such
Hellenism, seen in a reverse historical perspective, corresponds to what can be
characterized as its pre-Christian, that is, not yet sanctified stage at which the
very essence of Hellenistic philosophy and its foundation were not yet seen.
Florovsky affirms: ‘Turning away from Christian Hellenism is by no means
moving ahead, but backwards, toward the dead ends and the perplexities of
the other Hellenism, the one that had not been yet transfigured, and from
which there was no escape but through Patristic integration.’5 One then can
see that the very fact that the patristic ethos represents the transfiguration of
pre-Christian Hellenism, as being acted upon by the Holy Spirit, brings one to
the perception that, by virtue of this touch with the age to come, Christian
Hellenism is intrinsically eschatological. This means that the logical necessity
of a neo-patristic synthesis follows not from an anachronistic longing for
allegedly dead and irrelevant antiquities, but from the new disclosure of that
intrinsic eschatology which pertains to this particular moment as being acted
upon by the Holy Spirit.
Since the appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis implies far more than the repeti-
tion and quotation of patristic sources, that is, calls for the restoration of the
living communion with the Fathers of Christian Church, the acquisition of
4. The perception of the living communion with past thinkers is also typical for philoso-
phy as an ongoing endeavour of human thinking which dates back to some initial insights
which formed basic issues for this thinking. It was articulated by E. Husserl for whom to exist
as a philosopher meant to strive for a desire to establish the universal insight found in classic
Greek philosophy, becoming, in a way, the beginners of philosophy in a sense that all new
philosophers will be led to reproduce previously discovered truths through their own insight,
and, therefore, to reproduce true beginners of philosophy in themselves, that is, to enter a
kind of communion with those beginners. A philosopher of the past in this sense can only be
understood because a contemporary reader of his works can enter into the philosopher’s
mind through the personal ‘cogitation’ as if this cogitation was communion with the past
philosopher. It is in this sense the entry in such communion would mean not only to investi-
gate some particular philosophical ideas, but to acquire the feeling of the unity of history as
history of ideas, the unity which originates in the intentional interiority that is constitutive of
philosophers of the past. (See on this issue, for example, Husserl, E. (1960) Cartesian Medita-
tions. An Introduction to Phenomenology, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 1–6; Jaspers, K.
(1982) Weltgeschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, Munchen: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, p. 117;
Sindoni, P. R. (1977) ‘Teleology and philosophical historiography: Husserl and Jaspers’, in
A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology, Dordrecht: D.Reidel
Publishing Company, pp. 281–99 (286).
5. Florovsky, ‘The ways of Russian theology’, p. 197.
their mind in the Spirit, there is a fundamental difference between the ‘return’
to Hellenism in theological thought, as the core and datum of communion
with the living persons of the Fathers, on the one hand, and the ‘return’ to the
Greek abstract philosophical thought, that is, placing oneself in the impersonal
frame of mind of Greek philosophers before Christ, on the other.
One must mention that for Florovsky the presence of Hellenism as a perpet-
ual factor in Orthodox theology was also associated with a ‘Byzantine standard’
of all theologizing. It is according to this standard that Florovsky, in his book
The Ways of Russian Theology represented the history of this theology from
an angle of its conformity to ‘Byzantism’, criticizing thus Russian theology for
any deviation from the Greek way in favour of the Western influences. In a
kind of a theological manifesto, published by a friend of Florovsky and his
spiritual colleague, Florovsky reaffirms his deep adherence to Hellenism by
saying that
salvation came ‘from the Jews’, and has been propagated in the world in Greek
idiom. Indeed, to be Christian means to be Greek, since our basic authority is for-
ever a Greek book, the New Testament. The Christian message has been forever
formulated in Greek categories. This was in no sense a blunt reception of Hellenism
as such, but a dissection of Hellenism. The old had to die, but the new was still
Greek – the Christian Hellenism of our dogmatics, from the New Testament to
St Gregory Palamas, nay, to our own time. I am personally resolved to defend this
thesis, and on two different fronts: against the belated revival of Hebraism and
against all attempts to reformulate dogmas in categories of modern philosophies . . .
and of alleged Slavic mentality . . . 6
Florovsky effectively denies the value and the possibility for Christian the-
ology to follow along the diverse lines of expression of experience of God in
conformity with particular historical and ethnical features of communities.
Here he opens himself to a possible criticism. J. Meyendorf, for example, in his
introduction to the Ways of the Russian Theology asks a reasonable question
about the legitimacy of the normativity of the ‘Byzantinism’ in theologizing
and whether the very Byzantine way of theologizing must be subjected to fur-
ther criticism.7 In recent years, even within Orthodoxy itself, a voice was raised
in favour of understanding of Christianity as the unity of diverse traditions,
whose specificity is outlined by the factors of ethnical, cultural and linguistic
order and that Christianity cannot be reduced to ‘Byzantism’ or Christian
Hellenism.
One can agree with this view as long as the immediate experience of God
and its personal reflection in language is involved. However, if one finds it
6. Blane, A. (1993) ‘A sketch of the life of Georges Florovsky’, in A. Blane (ed.), Georges
Florovsky, pp. 11–217 (155).
7. See, for example, J. Meyendorf’s preface to Florovsky, G. (1983) The Ways of the
Russian Theology (in Russian), Paris: YMKA press.
possible to think about the integral experience of Christian faith reflected in

documents and written heritage available not just for historical study and
casual reading, but as something which contributes towards the overall eccle-
sial fullness, available to Christians worldwide, then, there is a necessity to
express the different experience of faith in a language which is better adjusted
for the needs of contemporary society.
Let us say two words about ‘Russian patristics’. As long as it is concerned
with the experience of Russian mystics and ascetics, the appropriateness of its
linguistic expression as linked to a cultural and historically traditional envi-
ronment does not cause any doubt. However that sheer mysticism in the
writings of the ‘starcy’ (elders) that are so admired in the long-time Orthodox
lands, sometimes are not understood and appreciated in that part of the
Christian world, which because of natural or other reasons lost its affinity to
mysticism and contemplation, and for whom the enlightenment should come
through a thorough explanation of what is meant by mystical experience, spiri-
tual warfare and spiritual growth; but this explanation, which is a challenging
task in itself, must use those categories of thinking and acting which are
universally understood by all in the modern world. This is the language of
notions and concepts, the language based in a particular orientation of con-
sciousness towards the world, the language of the same Greek philosophy
which is inherent in all European philosophizing and which developed and
shaped contemporary civilization. It is important to realize that Hellenism in
this context has, so to speak, eschatological character because the presence of
the saving telos was first revealed to humanity in the context of the Christ-
event and later expressed through the language of the Greek culture.
One can also agree with Florovsky that there is no point of reformulating
dogmas by using contemporary philosophical language, because dogmas are
only the delimiters of faith and express mysteries which cannot be fully and
exhaustively verbalized at all – this constitutes the essence of the Orthodox
apophaticism. However, the essence of this apophaticism, the meaning of its
underlying mysticism can and must be explained in accessible language to a
wider Christian audience and to non-Christians in order to make it practical.8
8. Filaret (Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk) writes in this respect that ‘in its missionary
service Church must take into account not only specific languages which are used by it, but
also languages of the modern world. This is the reason why one of the urgent problems is
the problem of theological language. And here the Holy Fathers of the Church can help
us. . . . They in the course of their preaching transfigured the language which pertained to
their epoch by enriching it by a spirituality. As a result a new language emerged which became
the language of the European culture. The same task is before the Church today. Its fulfilment
depends on the extent to which theological interpretation of specific “theological topics” will
provide spiritual and religious education, preaching and ecclesial guidance in those languages
and materials which will allow the Church to realize its missionary vocation.’((2004) The
Way of Life-Asserting Love (in Russian), Kiev: Duh i Litera, pp. 34–5).
The triviality of the via negativa of the Westernized apophaticism9 must be

replaced by a careful exposition of the meaning of faith as a shift from the nat-
ural attitude of the dominating epistemological paradigm to a transfigured
intentionality of human subjectivity that allows one to comprehend fully the
meaning of the presence of God in his actual absence.
Here, it seems that Florovsky, in spite of his visionary anticipations of the
intrinsic teleology of the human spirit in Christian Hellenism, did not realize
that it was philosophy of his own age that independently revealed the impor-
tance of Hellenism of the European humanity as its entelechy. And even if
contemporary secular philosophy does not speak about Christ, it is concerned
with the teleology of the human spirit and humanity’s destiny, which point
towards the transcendent, although, inarticulate and impersonal. This philoso-
phy, in its incapacity to reach Christ, needs to be helped through Christian
sanctification. By objecting to the use of the language of modern philosophy in
questions of dogma, Florovsky, perhaps, meant exactly this, that philosophy
as it is not sufficient to address existential issues and thus must be sanctified
from within religious consciousness and brought to the service of theology, as
a further way of expressing the experience of God in the modern context, with
no risk of sinking in abstract definitions and mental substitutions for faith.
The Orthodox, if they confess apophaticism not as a popular and exotic trend
of negative saying about things which cannot be seen and adequately expressed,
but as freedom from a fear of being captured by conceptual definitions, can
accept any philosophy and any experience of God from within the world,
while being faithful to the Church tradition and its liturgy. Patristic theology
was formed at the meeting of the Christian experience of God with Greek phi-
losophy, that meeting where philosophy was not denigrated or abolished, but
assimilated. It is in our Neo- Patristic Age that the experience of the Fathers of
the early Church can be used to lay the foundation of our attitude to philosophy
and science, as well as to all other forms of the human experience of living –
they must not be abolished and dismissed, but assimilated. However, the ways
of this assimilation, as we now understand after the discussion about the role
of Hellenism, are not arbitrary and indiscrete. One cannot simply say that any
philosophy can be employed for the purpose of the neo-patristic synthesis,
even if we accept a formula of V. Lossky that ‘there is no philosophy more
9. What is meant here is the way of affirming God in terms of negations of the worldly
aspects of existence. For example: ‘God is not the universe.’ This approach cannot be consid-
ered as theologically meaningful and accomplished because it leads to the abstraction of God,
that is, philosophical God with no personal features. This is the reason why in the Christian
East ‘via negativa’ was always considered in the context of antithetical dialectics (St Maximus
the Confessor) where both negative and positive definitions explain themselves and point
towards the fundamental limitedness of the human capacity to subject God to any discursive
definitions. See further Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, p. 86.
or less Christian.’10 This thought can easily be understood in the context of

apophaticism, which stops any philosophy from transgressing its own bound-
aries and making claims about the Divine. However, this very apophaticism,
its methodology and philosophical expression originated and later embedded
in Greek thought. This means that the alleged freedom in theology from any
particular philosophy was, nevertheless, stated within the rubric of Hellenistic
thought. This points up once again that Hellenism is intrinsically present in the
major rules of Christian theologizing even if the very theological formulae do
not reflect upon this fact and do not make it explicit. The very language of
Orthodox theology, either dogmatic or liturgical, is intrinsically Hellenistic
and this fact cannot be denied.
Coming back to the Florovsky’s objection to the use of modern philosophy
in theology, one can, probably, refine his objection: we cannot use those phi-
losophies that are not adherent to traditional Hellenism and that do not allow
one to express the content of their theories in the language and logic which are
ultimately derived from those perennial ideas which were drawn by the Greeks.
It seems logical to conclude that a similar situation must occur in the dialogue
with science: the commonality of languages in theology and science can only
be achieved through their references to the common ancestry in the Greek
mentality which has survived through more than 20 centuries in European
philosophy, science as well as in Christian theology. However, it is a real chal-
lenge for modern science to identify in itself the presence of that human spirit
which ascends from ancient Greece. To uncover this hidden telos of Hellenistic
antiquity in modern science and its philosophy one needs to employ, as a
methodological tool, not an arbitrary philosophy, but the philosophy which is
capable of doing this. And this philosophy, as has been claimed since the
1930s, is phenomenology.
A Neo-Patristic Synthesis as the ‘Anticipation’ of the Past
According to Florovsky, ‘to return to the Fathers does not mean to retreat
from the present or from history; it is not a retreat from modernity or from the
field of battle. It means much more – it is not only a preservation and protec-
tion of patristic experience but also the very discovery of this experience and
the bringing of this experience into life.’11 He writes about the discovery of the
old experience. To be more precise what is meant here is its rediscovery, but the
rediscovery means a new look at this experience from within the modern age.
10. Lossky, The Mystical Theology, p. 42. See more on this issue in my Light from the
East, pp. 65–7.
11. Florovsky, ‘Western influences in Russian theology’, p. 181.
However in order to save the content of this experience from any dilution in
modernity and accusations of irrelevance, this experience must be related
to the invisible, invariant, core that can not be corroded and changed in the
course of time, that is, to something which transcends the spatiality and tem-
porality of all historical events. In other words the experience of the Fathers
must be treated, not in their particular ancient form, but in its intransient
content as communion with the Age to Come. This means that to acquire the
Fathers’ mind means to comprehend them as beings who granted to humanity
their experience of communion with eternity. Then one can anticipate why, in
order to aspire to the Age to Come one has to descend back to history, more
precisely, to those historical events witnessed in the writings of the Fathers in
which the Age to Come had been inaugurating itself. One has to appeal to the
past in order to have an insight into the ‘future’. Thus the rediscovery of the
past experience, as an existential intention, means its anticipation, that is,
a spiritual process which is directed to the future.
It is from this perspective that one can respond to a naïve, but just question,
which mundane thinking can pose: in what sense is the ‘concept’ of a neo-
patristic synthesis not merely a contingent fact of history and how can one
avoid the accusation that the intentional appeal to patristic ideas has a fideistic
flavour and serves some particular ideological interests? The very tone of such
a question implies that there are historical varieties of different attempts to
express the experience of God and the whole issue of religion (and its interac-
tion with science). Hence a particular choice in favour of patristic ideas must
have a very special justification in order to escape possible criticism from
historical relativists, and this, in turn, implies that in the very ethos of a neo-
patristic appeal must be encoded its treatment of history as not simply an
endless chain of facts and events. In other words, there must be some intrinsic
features which make the events, associated with the Fathers of the early Church
not simply historical, but trans-historical. This stance with respect to history
implies a theological attitude because consciousness positions itself as distinct
to the worldly and hence historical, understood as a temporal flux and as a
sequence of natural events (i.e. distinct from the worst sense of historiology,
which blocks humanity’s access to those primordial sources from which our
experience of the world as well as categories and concepts have been genuinely
drawn). Thus one sees that the overcoming of doubts about ‘historical legiti-
macy’ of a neo-patristic synthesis assumes the transformation of mind which
searches for the origins of the traditions of the human spirit not through the
prism of consecutive events but through their relatedness of their efficacy in
creating some cultures that have ramifications in the present. The logic of this
synthesis assumes such a change of mind (metanoia) in which all sorts of banal
historical thinking are suspended. One can rephrase the same thought by using
phenomenological means: the invitation to a neo-patristic synthesis either in
theology, or in theology and science, as a part of the acquisition of the mind of
the Fathers, assumes the suspension of the natural attitude of the human mind,
when human subjectivity exposes itself to that trans-temporal and trans-spatial
source of wisdom, which enters history in response to the human invocation.
In a way, a possible neo-patristic methodology implies that the acquisition of

the mind of the Fathers, and the entry into communion with God through their
mind, requires one to make, as its initial step, the reduction of the natural and
historical.
A neo-patristic appeal attempted to remind theologians that one must not
mix up the ‘natural history’ of the world with the spiritual history which is
proper and unique to the human condition. The spiritual history as an intrinsic
but hidden intentionality of human incarnate subjectivity consists of testimo-
nies of the past and acts of the spirit, in which the inquiring mind interprets
past events through communication with those human beings who partici-
pated in these events. Spiritual history stands against the idea of history as the
continuation of natural processes. Outside this communion within continuity
of consciousness historical sources do not exist. Historical past, its documents
and events, that are studied at present, assume thus the presence of intelligent
beings behind these documents and events, so that understanding history
means, in fact, the direct entry into communion with those intelligences that
were acting in the world of the past. History, understood in this sense, assumes
that there is continuity of human consciousness, whose potential transparency
through ages allows one, through a spiritual invocation, to commune with
hypostatic intelligences of the past. In themselves, these invocations are not
part of a natural history of the world, for they happen as voluntary and inspi-
rational breaks from the actuality of the present in an attempt to commune
with the past as if it is being realized in the present. It is here that one can
understand that history, thus interpreted, implies human presence, that is, his-
tory, in a proper etymological as well as ontological sense, is human history,
and the study of the past (in a vague sense of this term, being even related to
cosmic ‘history’) is a study of the human past. In this respect, for example,
cosmological evolution, treated as ‘a history’ of cosmic ‘events’, is not history
at all, for those ‘events’ that are reconstructed by human mind at present do
not contain any intelligence behind them in the past, so that a so-called ‘cosmic
history’ is not at all communion with some intelligence, as if it existed in the
past, but rather a passive reflection and interpretation of those acts of con-
sciousness that are directed towards the universe at present, although in terms
of past tense. The underlying and forming principle of cosmological ‘historicity’
is physical causality based on impersonal physical laws which are articulated
by humanity. But, in fact, all these laws are mental creations of human subjec-
tivity as they are unfolded from the present, so that one has only an illusion of
a history of the universe as if it was driven by these laws. The real historicity
of cosmological research can be revealed only if one treats the developing
content of cosmological ideas as history of human subjectivity rooted in its
internal time consciousness, and as a cognitive process, which is always turned
towards the future. In this case one can conjecture that cosmological ‘history’
is the outward encoding of human history in a very special sense, as being in
a situation of incarnate subjectivity.
It can now be seen that the whole ethos of a neo-patristic synthesis in the-
ology and science implies a very different approach to the history of thought
and spirit that constitutes a particular mode of that metanoia that this synthe-
sis implies. This metanoia, in its function upon human thought, resembles
closely the phenomenological reduction, suspending judgements about naïve
naturalistic historicity of things and seeing through them and behind them the
presence of that subjectivity which brings them to articulate existence. In other
words, a neo-patristic argument (appealing to communion with the mind of the
Fathers) performs a kind of reduction of the natural and naturally historic in
order to assert the value of the spiritual achievements and theological affirma-
tion of a patristic age, which is treated not as a historical past, but as a mode
of being present and, even stronger, outlines our future. In a way, the patristic
age, as a subject of historical and theological study, and treated as a continua-
tion of events linked to the coming of the Logos of God into the world, itself
demands the acquisition of such an approach to it which places this age in the
same historical ahistoricity of the Christ-event. If the Christ-event and the
hypostatic condescension of the Holy Spirit are treated as a break of the Divine
into the human history, then the patristic age was also the break of the Divine
in the midst of the Hellenistic world, which was not subject to particular natu-
ral and historical contingencies. It is in this sense that the very apology for a
neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science in the beginning of the twenty-
first century must be treated not as the continuation and logical development
of the contingent history of humanity during past centuries, but as a new break
of the Holy Spirit upon the history of human theological and philosophical
thought, as a reminder of those decisive events when the Word of God entered
into this history and recapitulated it, and when the testimony to this Word
through the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church took the form of commu-
nication of the Gospel’s message in the Hellenistic world. It is exactly the
appeal to the living communion with the Fathers in Florovsky, the acquisition
of their mind that makes the renewal of the patristic synthesis to be existential
and properly historical in the sense of ‘history of the Spirit’. Thus the tradition
of the Church, which assumes a constant return back to the thought and expe-
rience of the Fathers, acquires the features of genuine human history, as such
a state of being in general, which is involved into the irreversible flux of action-
events of the human spirit (guided by the Holy Spirit), which cannot be undone
and cannot be understood in terms of any underlying ‘natural’ causes. It is in
this sense one can agree with Florovsky that ‘historical knowledge is not a
knowledge of objects, but precisely a knowledge of subjects – of “co-persons,”
of “co-partners” in the quest of life. In this sense, historical knowledge is, and
must be, an existential knowledge. This constitutes a radical cleavage between
the “study of Spirit” and the “study of Nature.” . . .’12
12. Florovsky, G. (1974) ‘The predicament of the Christian historian’, in Christianity and
Culture, Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 2, Belmont: Nordland, pp. 31–65 (43–4).
Here we are tempted to interpret the appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis as an

element of the history of the Spirit who freely ‘blows where He wills’ (Jn 3.8),
that is, to recognize that the Spirit acts upon contemporary world in the same
way as He acted when He initiated the Christ-event and the witness to this
event in the midst of the Hellenistic world. Then one must rearticulate that it
is fundamentally insufficient to grasp the meaning of a neo-patristic appeal
only on the grounds of its specific and concrete socio-historical emergence,
either in the context of Russian theology or, widely in the context of the philo-
sophical spiritual development in both the East and the West. If this point were
taken as the only reason for a neo-patristic synthesis to emerge, then one could
claim that Florovsky’s appeal was no more than a contingent event in the
whole development of theological thought, although specific, but which had
no deep intrinsic justification in the development of the spirit of the Church,
that is, as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. However, if one looks at the
ideas of a neo-patristic synthesis from the point of view of the history of the
Spirit, then its emergence in the middle of the twentieth century can have a
very deep interpretation as an event of the pouring out of the Hypostasis of the
Spirit upon history in order to remind us about Himself, namely, that He had
already laid out the scope of spiritual tasks of humanity when the Logos of
God condescended into the world and that it was not a ‘cosmic or natural
incident’, but an intentional action of God who manifested Himself in a par-
ticular historical stage of development of the human-created spirit. In the same
sense as the anonymous presence and initiation by the Spirit of the Christ-
event (which recapitulated the whole human nature and rearticulated the
meaning of humanity as divine humanity), ultimately aimed to renew to human
beings the Fathers’ teaching and to open up an eschatological direction of their
life, spiritual growth and ultimately salvation, the intervention of the Holy
Spirit in the midst of the twentieth century through the appeal ‘back to the
Fathers’ meant a very similar thing by pointing to the same eschatological
future, but through the anticipation of the past, that patristic past, in which
the Spirit had been already acting from the future.
One should not, however, overstate the last thought as an indulgence towards
a new kind of eschatologism which potentially diminishes and devalues the
meaning of human history as the process unfolding in real time, and which
revives the Hellenistic anti-historicism.13 There is an element of ‘realized escha-
tology’ present in the abovementioned interpretation of a neo-patristic appeal
as the action of the Holy Spirit which provides another argument that Christian
13. Ibid., p. 63. What Florovsky means here under the name of anti-historicism is the
Greek classical monistic idea that the world is in a state of the eternal return, so that all
contingent history has no ontological sense and must be explained away. See on this issue, his
paper (1956) ‘The Patristic Age and eschatology’, Studia Patristica 2, 235–50.
history is going on, it was not exhausted by the Christ-event and we are not in
a passive phase of expectation for the eschatological future of the next coming
of the Lord.
The Holy Spirit becomes present (revealed) in history through the events
which are addressed to human beings. His actions are not impersonal changes
to natural history, not a cosmic display of novelty and progress of knowledge,
it is rather an appeal to persons in response to their faith and, thus, to their
invocation of this Spirit. However the intentional invocation of the Spirit of
God constitutes the essence of the liturgical life of ecclesial beings in their com-
munity, that is, the Church. This makes it possible to suggest that the response
of the Spirit to the prayer of the Church in a somewhat difficult time of the
historical and ideological turmoil in the historically Orthodox lands in the
twentieth century, was exactly that one which, through the words and writings
of Florovsky and others, revealed to all ecclesia that God hears its prayer and
sends the Comforter to remind us, once again, that history initiated and reca-
pitulated in the Christ-event and Pentecost, is going on with the same innate
telos that had been revealed to the disciples of Christ and to the Fathers of the
Church. It is through the anticipation of the past at present which is implied
by a neo-patristic synthesis, that this telos can be revitalized in the life of the
Church in order to affirm once again that history is human history, the history
of the human spirit, which has its specific context, its hypostatic indwelling in
the life of persons and cannot be anything else. Human history, understood
in its entirety in a deep spiritual sense, can itself be treated as an event in a
sense that it is unique in its facticity and contingent upon the will and wisdom
of God who wills through His Spirit. The return to a patristic era in theological
thought and experience of God in liturgy, the movement ‘back to the Fathers’
accompanied by the liturgical renewal aims not towards the incantation of
some archaic sentiments, hostile and irrelevant to the lovers of postmodernity,
but, actually, the thrust for the reinstatement of the wholeness of the disinte-
grated human spirit in present times to its genuine dignity of the divine
humanity, which was given the knowledge of God, the witness of Christ, and
the gift of the Spirit in the Church in those specific conditions in historical past
when God decided to open Himself to man in order that man was able to
receive God and open his self to Him. Two thousand years ago the hypostasis
of the Holy Spirit descended upon humanity in order to make its history the
history of the human spirit, directed to God through His Spirit. Can then we
appreciate the events surrounding the emergence of a neo-patristic idea in con-
temporary Orthodox theologians as another action of the Holy Spirit upon
human history, being effectively a response to prayer of the Church for its
reconciliation and reintegration. In Florovsky’s emphatic words,
Unity in the Spirit embraces in a mysterious, time-conquering fashion, the faithful

of all generations. This time-conquering unity is manifested and revealed in the
experience of the Church, especially in its Eucharistic experience. The Church is the
living image of eternity within time. The experience and life of the Church are not
interrupted or broken up by time. This, too, is not only because of continuity in the
super-personal outpouring of grace, but also because of the catholic inclusion of all
that was, into the mysterious fullness of the present. Therefore the history of the
Church gives us not only successive changes, but also identity . . . [and] the Church
thinks of the past not as of something that is no more, but as of something that has
been accomplished, as something existing in the catholic fullness of the one Body
of Christ.14
Now we are in a position to advance a neo-patristic stance on mediation

between theology and science by pointing out that the Hellenistic ethos present
in this synthesis makes this mediation, as happening in this world, but being
not of this world. Hellenism in its historical aspect reminds us about the earthly
roots of theology and science as linked to a particular culture and people.
However, its unavoidable presence in modern theologizing linked to a particu-
lar type of realized eschatology exalts Hellenism to some non-worldly status.
This antinomian presence of Hellenism as being a historical reference on the
one hand, and on the other being a pointer of the Spirit towards the future age,
brings into neo-patristic methodology a new important element. Hellenism,
being a common denominator of all Western philosophies, allows one to use
any philosophy in clarifying the dialogue between theology and science with-
out risk of diluting theology as revelation and faith with some social and
worldly agendas. This means that adherence to any particular philosophy while
conducting the enquiry into the relationship between theology and science, is,
so to speak, a matter of convenience, because to reflect some truth this dialogue
should reveal the presence of the Spirit either by reference back to the old
synthesis of Christianity with Hellenism, where knowledge was inconceivable
without theology, or in the manner of realized eschatology by making this rela-
tionship a mode of the Cosmic Eucharist where all impartiality of a particular
philosophical elucidation of this relationship is reduced to mere contingency.
This implies that all discursive forms of this dialogue are fundamentally incom-
plete if they are detached from the immediate unmediated experience of
existence as a link between the world and God, the experience whose fullness
can be achieved only in the Eucharist, when the link as such acquires an escha-
tological dimension. Seen in this perspective, the dialogue between theology
and science appears to be the ever-ongoing accomplishment of humanity, its
infinite task.
As we have discussed earlier, the crisis of contemporary academic theology
led Florovsky to seek for a ‘renewal’ of the living theology of the Church,
which he described as coming back to the roots of Christian theology, that is,
by placing all forms of contemporary theologizing into the context of those
existentially important issues about being and humanity which had been dealt
with by patristic thought. However, the appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis in
14. Florovsky, G. (1972) ‘The Catholicity and the Church’, in Bible, Church, Tradition:
An Eastern Orthodox View, pp. 37–55 (45–6) (emphasis added).
theology (and also in the dialogue with science) in terms of its adherence to the
tradition, its intrinsic Hellenism, ecclesiality and worshipping ethos, as it was
initiated by Florovsky in the twentieth century would not have any chance of
gaining serious intellectual support outside of the Orthodox communities, if it
would stand alone, isolated from the overall theological and philosophical
thought of the twentieth century. If this would be the case, the very attempt to
create a ‘new’ synthesis of theology and science under the slogan of restoring
the spirit of Christian Hellenism would be considered, in academic and theo-
logical circles, with great suspicion as irrelevant and anachronistic. Fortunately,
this is not the case. In spite of the fact that Florovsky himself did not explore
any links of his ideas to prevailing philosophies of his day, to say nothing
about science, there have been some who found inspiration in his ideas and
followed by way of integrating patristic heritage in the fabric of modern theo-
logical thinking. In particular, some contemporary Greek theologians openly
admitted that existential philosophies of the twentieth century as well as phe-
nomenology can be usefully employed in creating an even further Orthodox
theological synthesis, which can be qualified as a neo-patristic.15 In this respect
we find it extremely important to demonstrate that the above-mentioned phi-
losophies experienced their own intellectual difficulties, in a way similar to
those which theology experienced, which demanded a reversion of their atten-
tion to the roots of their tradition of philosophizing in the history of classical
Greek philosophy. According to phenomenological philosophy the presence of
Hellenism in rational thought and its new invocation in the twentieth century
manifested once again the hidden entelechy of European humanity, its advance
towards the telos of the universal reason (logos), the telos which was formu-
lated for the first time in history by Greek philosophers.
Thus our invocation of phenomenology aims to clarify three important
issues: the importance of the historical dimension of human activity, be it tradi-
tion in theology, philosophy or science, in order to reveal the transcendental
meaning of these activities; the presence of the hidden teleology in research
which makes sense of the overall historical dimension of the human encounter
with reality; the teleological convergence of all intentionalities of human sub-
jectivity (in theology, philosophy and science). As a matter of methodological
15. See, for example, Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 45n, 46n. Yannaras makes a direct
attempt to employ some ideas of Heidegger’s philosophy for a reinterpretation of Eastern
orthodox theology. See, for example, his Person and Eros; or The Absence and Unknowabil-
ity of God. See also a paper of a Russian philosopher Chernyakov, A. (1996) ‘The consolation
of philosophy today’, Symposion, 1, 19–34, which attempts to position contemporary
Russian philosophy, which is historically linked to Eastern Christian theology, in the context
of contemporary Western thought, referring, in particular to the phenomenological trend in
philosophy. Some ‘parallels’ between the return to Christian Hellenism in Florovsky’s appeal
to neo-patristic synthesis and Heidegger’s attention to pre-Christian Hellenism were dis-
cussed in the paper of Horuzhy, S. (2000) ‘Neo-patristic synthesis and Russian philosophy’,
St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 44, 309–28.
selection, relevant to the purposes of this book, we will lay out our arguments
by employing some ideas of Husserl and Heidegger in order to assert the rele-
vance and importance of Hellenism in modern thinking, as well as, although in
an indirect way, to draw some similarities between a neo-patristic understand-
ing of the eschatological presence of God, which we have already discussed in
the previous section and the problematics of the idea of God, as trans-historic
telos, in later Husserl. Heidegger will also be important in this respect in view
of his writings about the unconcealment of Being. Our objective, however, is
not to become immersed in details of phenomenological research as such, but
to demonstrate its relevance to our project on the synthesis of theology and
science.
History, Hellenism and Teleology in Husserl
The very project of ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’, put forward by Husserl,

implied a deep suspicion with respect to everything which fell under the rubric
of ‘historicity’ or ‘historiology’. The transcendental inclination of phenome-
nology carried with itself a flight from psychologism (as a particular kind
of historicism) as well as from all sorts of so-called genetic explanations in
philosophy. Husserl aimed for the philosophy of essence and this implied,
in his specific terminology, the reduction (in a phenomenological sense) of all
facticity of the historical as contingent. In fact, the same thing happens in
all theoretical science when all particular contingent outcomes of physical laws
that represent the breakdown of symmetries implanted in these laws, are dis-
regarded, that is, bracketed, in a phenomenological language, in order to retain
their sense and conceptual significance. In other words, the ‘eidetic reduction’
that happens in all sorts of scientific abstractions represents a simple reduction
of history.
It seems then that no particular historical period in either philosophy or
science must have any privileged meaning in comparison with other periods.
How then can one use the intrinsically ahistorical philosophical project in
order to promote the idea about the special value of Greek philosophy? The
answer to this paradox lies in a distinction made between the history of con-
tingent events and genesis of ideas as the unfolding of the bigger from the
lesser on the one hand, and the history of the spirit on the other. This distinc-
tion is based in the sort of attitude exercised by subjectivity with respect to
different sciences and that of genuine (that is phenomenological) philosophy.
The natural sciences, as well as human sciences (which Husserl called ‘the
sciences of the spirit’) deal with historical facticity and therefore must be
reduced. It is in this sense that the spirit of historical societies has being only
for and through absolute consciousness which constitutes it; that is why the
history of the spirit understood in the sense of this absolute consciousness is,
rather, a transcendental history, differing in its deep essence from that history
which is studied by ‘the sciences of the spirit’. What is important to mention,
however, is that the twofold phenomenological understanding of history

implies a certain stance on anthropology. In other words, the problematics of
personhood is always implicitly present behind all phenomenological enquiries
because it is in the heart of hypostatic consciousness that nature and history are
constituted. This hypostatic consciousness is always temporal, so that it entails
the temporality of intersubjectivity and hence temporality of the constituted
reality. However, the intersubjective synthesis of time is not yet history: ‘His-
tory is “outside,” whereas time is consciousness itself.’16 In other words,
transcendental time is not transcendent history. This implies that if the history
of historians (i.e. empirically contingent) is reduced and receives its own syn-
thesis of constitution from within transcendental consciousness, one can
elaborate another meaning of history as being grounded in intrinsic character-
istics of the constitutive consciousness. Then the major question which faces
philosophy is how to reconcile the transcendental consciousness as an inte-
grated whole with the plurality of egos and hypostatic selves through which
this absolute consciousness is revealed. Here phenomenology comes close to
the understanding that history implies the elaboration of the sense of commu-
nity that develops in cosmic time, but in similarity to what happens in theology,
it does not want to subordinate all individual consciousness to a single and
absolute centre which could control them. The individuality of personal real-
ization of subjectivity must be preserved while the community is formed.
Phenomenology tried to avoid talking about the absolute subject by employing
only an anonymous field of consciousness, whereas theology denies the exis-
tence of the ultimate transcendental subject, pointing towards the Church as a
provider of ecclesial mind whose integrity and wholeness follows from the
presence of Christ as its ultimate telos. It is in this sense that the unity of variet-
ies of hypostases originates from the unity of their movement towards the
saving telos. Then all activities of humanity as realizations of different charis-
mas converge in the same telos.
Phenomenology anticipates the abovementioned unity by ascribing to the
history of events a particular manifestation of transcendental history, that is,
history of reason whose sense can only be understood teleologically and
eschatologically, and the very invocation of this eschatological dimension in
phenomenology is linked to the consciousness of the crisis of the European
thought. It is this crisis which provokes the questions about the sense of human-
ity and its goals in ever advancing contingences of its perseverance in being.
It is the sense of doubt of any meaning of historical happenings which brings
philosophy to search for this meaning in the Idea as an ultimate pole of human
rationality, that rationality which requires history as its structure. It is in this
sense that the meaning of historical flux is not seen directly, but can be assessed
through the revelation of its hidden teleology, which originates from the
perpetual break of the Idea into being.
16. Ricoeur, P. (1967) Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology, Evanston: North-

western University Press, p. 149.
It is important to note here that the teleology which is immanent to this Idea
does not directly imply a teleology as related to the world, understood in a
natural attitude, as the material state of affairs independent from human sub-
jectivity. The teleology of reason implies the unity of telos in all hypostatic
consciousness, making thus the multiplicity of hypostatic humanity, united,
indeed, not only on the level of its natural consubstantiality, but on the level
of common tasks of humanity (its common telos) as the incarnate transcenden-
tal subjectivity. The crucial question here is whether this supratemporal and
trans-historic telos (being de facto a metaphysical notion, a kind of logos that
sustains and drives the universe) is immanent to the universe or, represents a
transcendent and exterior pole in relation to it. This question definitely has
theological overtones, because if, according to Husserl, the telos is identified
with the idea of God, this same question can be posed as to whether a philo-
sophical theology, implied by all considerations above, is pantheistic or theistic.17
For the purposes of this research, however, the most important question is
whether the teleology of the reason has a panentheistic character, that is, it is
acting upon the world, but its disclosure cannot be effected only on the grounds
of its traces in human rationality in the world. However, before we continue
this discussion let us dwell a little on what Husserl meant by the immanent
telos of European humanity.18 We make a very short excursus to this topic,
concentrating our attention on a main thesis of Husserl that it was Greek
thought which entered history as an axiological and teleological delimiter of
all European philosophizing.
According to Husserl it was phenomenology, which through its analysis of
the historical development of the European spirit and its crisis at the beginning
of the twentieth century, asserted this spirit as the privileged bearer of the
teleological value of Greek philosophy, the value which phenomenology tried
to bring to light through new comprehension. As Husserl writes:
Then the task stands before us not merely as factually required but as a task assigned
to us, the present day philosophers. For we are what we are as functionaries of
17. See more details in Strasser, S. (1977) ‘History, teleology and God in the philosophy
of Husserl’ in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology,
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 317–33 (324–9).
18. One should notice that this subject was discussed intensively in many commentaries
on Husserl, and, in particular, on his book The Crisis of the European Sciences. Apart from
works of Ricoeur and Strasser, which we have already quoted above, it is worth mentioning
in this respect an excellent paper of Kelkel, A. L. (1977) ‘History as teleology and eschatol-
ogy: Husserl and Heidegger’, in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian
Phenomenology, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 381–411; (see also his
(2002) Le legs de la phénoménologie, Paris: Editions Kimé, pp. 151–80), a paper of Sindoni,
‘Teleology and philosophical historiography’, also Johnson, G. A. (1980) ‘Husserl and history’,
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 11, 77–91, as well as Gurwitsch, A. (1966)
Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
pp. 399–412.
modern philosophical humanity; we are heirs and cobearers of the direction of the
will which pervades this humanity; we have become this through a primal estab-
lishment [philosophy] which is at once a reestablishment and a modification of the
Greek primal establishment [philosophy]. In the latter lies the teleological begin-
ning, the true birth of the European spirit as such.19
For Husserl philosophy took its origin in ancient Greece – ‘cradle of the
European spirit’ – which is not an incidental fact but the gradual and natural
realization of the whole idea of humanity and its communities. It is Plato’s
merit to have conceived the idea of the absolutely rational philosophy and of
its normative function in the development of humanity as an authentic com-
munity. The whole history of humanity will have determined itself by this
unique idea, and it will not cease to develop itself in conformity with it, because
it acts as the telos which arose in Greek science and culture but proved appli-
cable to the whole history of humanity. The challenge to modern philosophy
is to understand whether the telos that was inborn in European humanity at
the birth of Greek philosophy (and here Husserl stresses that this humanity is
defined as seeking its existence through philosophical reason), ‘then is a merely
factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among
many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not
rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its
entelechy.’20 One anticipates that the problem here is similar to what we dis-
cussed earlier about a neo-patristic synthesis: whether this synthesis which
appeals to the Christianized Hellenism, is one among many other attempts to
renew theology and its dialogue with science (i.e. it is a simple ‘theologumenon’,
or a theological delusion), or, alternatively, represents the reminder of that
action of the Spirit upon the Church and its theology, which is liturgically
‘present’ in the history of Christian nations, as their entelechy.
In philosophy, all the reasoning of Husserl aims to prove that this is the
point, that is, Greek philosophy entered history and outlined the telos of the
European humanity. If this is true then one sees that phenomenology argues
for the specialness of Hellenism and its indispensability for the European
humanity. This specialness is expressed in intrinsically philosophical terms, as
the adherence to the spirit of reasonability and its rationality. If contemporary
philosophy, phenomenology, would be proved to be the entelechy which had
started in Greek philosophy, then it
could be decided whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea,
rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China’ or ‘India’; it
could be decided whether the spectacle of Europeanization of all other civilisations
19. Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol-
ogy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 71; emphasis added.
20. Ibid., p. 15.
21. Ibid., p. 16.
bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning, one which is proper to the sense,
rather to a historical non-sense of the world.21
Husserl insists that it was only in Greek philosophy that the theoretical atti-
tude formed as a communal form in which it worked itself out for internal
reasons corresponding to essentially new communities of philosophers and
scientists.22 But this event of creation of a new attitude predetermined all fur-
ther historical development by entering the course of history as its immanent
teleology which stands behind the actual movement of history as disordered
events. And this immanent teleology is what makes European philosophy, as
an adherent of the Greeks, rational: ‘. . . philosophy is nothing other than
[rationalism], through and through . . .; it is ratio in the constant movement of
self-elucidation, begun with the first breakthrough of philosophy into mankind,
whose innate reason was previously in a state of concealment, of nocturnal
obscurity.’23
However, rationalism has a universal and normative character in the sense
that, being the immanent teleology of European mankind, it penetrates and
rules all spheres of human existence. Philosophy, then, assumes the rational
historical foundation for humanity and it is this philosophy that points towards
the crisis of European existence, and this crisis is apparent as failure of rational-
ism in its entanglement with ‘naturalism’ and ‘objectivism’.24 Husserl believes
that there are two ways of escape from this crisis: either to fall into mysticism
and barbarity of the pre-Greek civilization devoid of intrinsic rationalism, or,
alternatively, to give ‘rebirth to Europe from the spirit of philosophy through
a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all’.25 This hero-
ism of reason was realized in phenomenological philosophy and it is in this
sense that phenomenology reveals itself as a carrier of a ‘teleological idea’
faithful to that of the Greek philosophy of the past in which the teleology of
universal history, as authentic history of humanity, originates.
For Husserl the breakthrough of philosophy into history also meant the for-
mation of a new European humanity in a deep spiritual sense, that is, that a
new man shares ideas, which refer to infinite ‘things’. What is important is that
these ideas establish personhood as a new type of being-in-the-world, from
which a new attitude to reality is inborn, which is drastically different in com-
parison with a simple interest in the finite.
Ideas, meaning-structures that are produced in individual persons and have miracu-
lous new way of containing intentional infinities within themselves, are not like real
things in space; the latter, though they enter into the field of human experience, do
not yet thereby have any significance for human beings as persons. With the first
22. Ibid., p. 280.

23. Ibid., p. 338.
24. Ibid., p. 299.
25. Ibid.
conception of ideas, man gradually becomes a new man. His spiritual being enters
into the movement of an advancing reconstruction . . . Within this movement . . .
there grows a new sort of humanity, one which, living in finitude, lives towards
poles of infinity.26
Husserl links the presence of ideas about infinity in the human mind to
something which is specific for human beings as hypostatic, personal beings.
To be a person means to relate to all (i.e. to intend to be ‘all in all’ as it was in
a prelapsarian condition) and through this relationship to be in constant com-
munion with all generations through the future horizon of infinity. To have
the ideas pointing towards infinity means to be spiritual and means to be a
person. In this sense new humanity is open to search for the infinite, but the
infinite of this world, not beyond it. This is an important remark, because in
its created condition a human being is intrinsically a religious being, for human
nature is always thirsty for infinity and desires at least ‘some sort of infinity’ in
order to overcome the anxiety of psychological and ontological relativity of
life and to chain itself to something stable and eternal, which is outside of this
empirical world. However, for those who do not have God in their heart, the
desire to possess the infinite and absolute becomes the idolization of their god-
lessness. Like a cosmologist who believes in the universe and its ultimate origin,
the ideas of incomprehensible infinity of its initial state become and idol and
that ‘god’ that was responsible for the predetermination of all things in the
universe. Here the infinity of cosmology becomes an idol of godlessness. Even
in its deep atheism, and in an attempt to convince oneself of futile efforts to
contemplate infinities, a human being cannot stop its invocation of infinity,
it cannot forbid for infinity to be a permanent intentionality of its consciousness.
To be a person means to live in tragedy of the infinite, which cannot be exter-
minated because self-consciousness cannot be extinguished.
For Husserl, the orientation towards infinities and the confronting of infinite
tasks is a different way of saying that, that new humanity inaugurated through
Greek philosophy was inclined to deal with absolute and certain knowledge
(episteme) in contradistinction to the world of opinion (doxa). For it is in the
episteme, as well as in science that follows its way, that the infinite and ideal
pole is present: ‘Science has its origin in Greek philosophy with the discovery
of the idea and of the exact science which determines by means of ideas.’27
Then Greek philosophy acquires importance not so much in a historical sense
but as the idea of philosophy, which is, de facto, the idea of an infinite task and
it is this idea which proves to be its immanent telos.28 Hellenism can thus be
seen as an inherent and indispensable factor of all science, as that originating
and ever-present enquiry into ‘what is the universe?.’
26. Ibid., pp. 276–7 (emphases added).

27. Ibid., p. 301.
28. See ibid., pp. 277–8; also Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology,
pp. 405–6.
When Husserl advocates that the idea of philosophy, which can be charac-
terized as adherence to rationalism, constituted the telos of European humanity,
he effectively proclaims that all particular historical forms of philosophy were
implicitly driven by this urge for the rational explanation of the world and
humanity in it. The discovery of the infinite tasks in Greek philosophy prede-
termined the whole development of the European philosophy which resulted
in the emergence of phenomenology, whose aim is to rearticulate and reaffirm
the presence of the same telos in all forms of philosophizing. Then one can
have an impression that the telos of the European humanity, as it is described
by phenomenology, is unique so that the very philosophical, or eidetic, history
of humanity represents a contingent necessity: that is, the facticity of the his-
torical appearance of Greek philosophy represents a constant and stable factor
forming the philosophical tradition.
However, the main question remains: why the entry of this telos in history
took place at that particular era and place that afterwards became an arena for
a different synthesis, that is, the patristic theological synthesis. The question
about the supratemporal origination of this synthesis brought us earlier to a
theological problem of the Spirit in History, and so it seems that what Husserl
attempted to assert in his teleology is something similar: the entry of the telos
in history acquired a feature of humanity’s entelechy, so that the telos, being
probably not of this world, entered history and is present in it. One could sug-
gest that the discovery of the telos of humanity in pre-Christian philosophy
corresponded to what Clement of Alexandria described in the second century
as tearing off the elements of truth, the discovering of the logos that is present
behind the world, but only the impersonal logos, the logos as the sheer princi-
ple of rationality and harmony in nature, with no reference to the source of its
hypostasization in Christ. Clement claimed that the Greeks, through the gift of
reasoning granted to them by God, approached this truth but did not manage
to collect together the divided truth and find its source in the Logos – Son of
God. ‘Barbarian and Hellenic philosophy have torn off a fragment of eternal
truth from the theology of the ever-living Word’ (Strom. I.13). In this respect
it is quite legitimate to ask whether Husserl himself gave an account that the
telos in his own philosophical understanding corresponded to pre-Christian
truth and, seen from the Christian perspective, did not reflect the fullness of
truth linked to the Gospel message and Christ. Husserl, in his analysis of the
genesis of the European thought, disregards all historical currents which devi-
ate from this pre-Christian Hellenism. For him the lapse into the Christian
Hellenism in patristics could be interpreted as the estrangement from the
European spirit into the fog of mysticism and spiritualism. The starting
position of phenomenology is the givenness of the human subjectivity and
enclosedness of the field of consciousness, so that all transcending acts of faith
must be bracketed, that is, made the mere phenomena of this consciousness.
The problem which remains unanswered, however, is the ground (as foundation)
of human subjectivity. For Clement of Alexandria this ground was in faith, as
an existential attitude, as participation and irreducible experience of existence,
which, then, gives rise to knowledge and rationalism. Such a position would
seriously challenge phenomenologists who would try to explain faith as a par-
ticular type of intentionality of consciousness, rather than position consciousness
within existential faith.29 Finally, as a historical fact, one can state that Husserl
disregarded not only patristics, but the whole body of Christian philosophy,
whose intrinsic teleology differs with that of phenomenology in a crucial way:
it contains Christ and Spirit. However, it seems plausible to argue that the
Husserlian telos of the European humanity can be placed in a wider Christian
view, although the whole of phenomenology must be then related to theology
in a radically new way. The teleological convergence of philosophy (and hence
science) and Church’s theology thus demands a new synthesis of phenomenol-
ogy and Christian thinking, which is, partially, a task of this research.
The Western history of ideas (as philosophical ideas) effectively disregards
Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages and treats the Renaissance as that
epochal change of attitude that allegedly gave back an encompassing sense to
reason in its theoretical and practical application stripping from it any attach-
ment to the inner spiritual dimensions of the human condition which was
so profoundly articulated and sustained by the Christian Church throughout
the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages. Indeed, by gaining its freedom from the
inward presence of faith, reason and science released themselves to the modal-
ity of the natural attitude of dealing with objective things, depriving them of
sanctification and transparency of their purposes and ends as it was in episte-
mology of Christian patristics when science, as an activity of knowing, was
inconceivable without its rootedness in existential faith and communion with
God. In this sense the emergence of modern science, qualified by phenomenol-
ogy as being intrinsically adherent to pre-Christian Hellenism, and where the
emergence of ratio was characterized as ‘the first breakthrough of philosophy
into mankind’,30 can be understood as a transmutation of that vision towards
science and philosophy as if they were ‘sanctified’ within Christian Hellenism
(i.e. as inconceivable outside of their inward foundations in faith as it was in
patristic theology) into a stage of reason which can be characterized as the
kingdom of the natural attitude and oblivion of the fact that this attitude has
sense only within the inward presence of human subjectivity, account for
whose facticity cannot be made while remaining in the natural attitude. (This
led to the crisis of the European sciences, as Husserl rightly claimed, but whose
resolution by phenomenology has not been enough.) Indeed, Hellenism is
still inherently present in modern science as an indispensable component of its
29. See in this context an interesting comparison of a phenomenological approach to

knowledge with that of philosophy of Thomism in essays of E. Stein, Knowledge and Faith,
pp. 1–63.
30. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 338.
telos, but it is present in a state of privation of its own existential root, or, using
the words of Husserl, applied in a different context, in a state of ‘concealment
and nocturnal obscurity’. However, for Husserl the disintegration of the spirit
was diagnosed as being historically linked to the fragmentation of the sciences
that originated from the loss of awareness of their own context in philosophy
(as one brilliant realization of infinite tasks) not to deviation from the patristic
ideal and Christian philosophy in general.
Here we would like to point out that in spite of a very specific attitude of
Husserl, as a founder of phenomenology, to religion and to God he was a
believing Protestant Christian and the question of religion and faith was present
in his philosophy.31 The problem of God appeared in his thought together with
his teleology32 and he was preoccupied with the question of the universality of
religion. The universality of the European spirit, as its rationality, culminates
in Husserl’s phenomenology, whereas the religious universality comes to its
self-realization in Christianity.33 However, unlike a systematic exposition of
the idea about philosophy as the telos of European humanity in his Crisis and
other books, his approach to the universality of Christian religion did not
receive any support from theology as such, including patristics. Certainly,
Husserl was not obliged to appeal either to Greek Fathers or to St Thomas’s
teaching, for example. But it is here that lies the reason why Husserl’s claims
about universality of Christianity were met with discontent and some research-
ers in the phenomenological philosophy of religion accused him in that his
approach to religion and the problem of God was exclusively Christian34 and
according to whom a phenomenological approach to religion must address
equally all different religions and cannot give a privileged treatment to any
particular sense of God. Mystically, Husserl felt that there is the transcendent
foundation of Christian theology, but, being a phenomenologist, he could hardly
justify his belief by recourse to the authority of the Church and its method
of sustaining truth through faith and eschatological liturgical invocations of
31. According to Mall, Husserl was not explicit in his published work about religion,
God, faith and mysticism. Among Husserl’s published works Mall lists those which concern
with religious matters: The Crisis of the European Sciences, Erste Philosophie (Part 1), Zur
Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Husserl, nevertheless, discusses religious issues in his
unpublished manuscripts. See details in Mall, R. A. (1991) ‘The God of phenomenology in
comparative contrast to that of philosophy and theology’, Husserl Studies, 8, 1–15 (1). See
also a book of Housset, E. (1997) Pesonne et sujet selon Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, pp. 265–90, where one can find a comprehensive bibliography on Husserl’s
involvement in religious issues.
32. See, for example, Mall, ‘The God of phenomenology’, as well as Strasser, ‘History,
teleology and God’.
33. Mall, ‘The God of phenomenology’, p. 9.
34. Ibid.
the Spirit.35 It is in this sense that the phenomenological appropriation of

Christian theology, or vice versa, the inclusion of phenomenological method-
ology for the service of a neo-patristic synthesis seems to be a very timely
enterprise. In retrospect, one can only regret that phenomenology at large,
with some rare exceptions, has not been able to appreciate and identify those
dimensions of Christian theology which validate claims of the tradition as
being ontological and related to personal God transcendent well beyond the
world and the sphere of consciousness. But it is this mystical path, where God
enters human subjectivity not as correlate of imagination and symbolic con-
sciousness, but through direct communion with His givenness, which represents
a major difficulty for phenomenology in which the very transcendence is fun-
damentally problematic.36
One should make a clarification important for our further analysis. It is
important to realize that Husserl’s assertion of the value of Greek philosophy
was made when the eidetic reduction of historicity in philosophy was effected.
This means that the conclusion about the importance of Greek philosophy for
all consequent development of the European thought was already implicitly
present in the very historical fact of the emergence of phenomenology. This
means, in turn, that to assert the value of Greek philosophy is the same as to
assert the value of phenomenology, because the very appearance of phenome-
nology was in a way predetermined by Greek philosophy, through a chain of
35. Assessing Husserl’s tension in his attitude to the problem of God (as being the founder
of phenomenology and a Christian believer) Mall states that ‘the chasm between the God of
phenomenology and that of theology remains unbridged till it is bridged either by a fulfilment
of intended meaning of the concept of God or the reality of God makes its entrance unto
human consciousness via the routes of a mystic experience, revelation, faith or grace. The
path phenomenology has legitimately to traverse is only the former one and not the
latter. Husserl might have reconciled the two in his own person. But that’s a different story,
then . . . .’ (Mall, ‘The God of phenomenology’, p. 13).
36. The challenge for our research is to overcome the limits imposed by ‘strict’ phenome-
nologists with regard to theological issues, in order to deal with the foundations (sufficient
reason) for the facticity of the transcendental human subjectivity as well as with the mystical
experience of God, which were characterized by Husserl himself as non-intentional feelings
of our consciousness (See Mall, ibid., p. 11). Theology in a patristic sense is prepared to deal
with these problems. In this case some old patristic formulas receive their new linguistic
expression in the language of contemporary philosophy, as well as that phenomenological
philosophy will receive more clarification and extension through the inquiry about the factic-
ity of its very possibility. Such a move will involve phenomenology itself into a ‘theological
transformation’ when the immanentism of human subjectivity and its facticity will be
subjected to the scrutiny of the ‘alternative’ and hidden intentionality. See in this respect
Faulconer, J. E. (ed.) (2003) Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, as well as Westphal, M. (2004) Transcendence and Self Transcen-
dence: On God and the Soul, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. The
spectrum of problems of a possible ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology is discussed in
Janicaud, D. et al. (2001) Phenomenology and ‘The Theological Turn’: The French Debate,
New York: Fordham University Press.
particular philosophies and their evolution to what Husserl described as

the crisis of the European thought. The point of entry of the telos, as a philo-
sophical idea, was found by phenomenology, whereas phenomenology itself
represents a particular stage in the teleology of the European spirit, which was
destined to reveal this telos. Through this, phenomenology asserts itself as a
very special stage in the history of the human spirit, the fact of whose appear-
ance in the twentieth century can be intuited as a certain modality of the Spirit
acting upon history.
It is important to note, however, that the historical contingent facticity of
the entry of Hellenistic philosophy is not accounted for. This leaves one to
speculate at large of what revolutionary transition in the human thought had
happened two and a half thousand years ago. Indeed that was an event when
the telos ‘entered’ natural ‘history’ and transformed it into the history of
thought, that is, making empirical happenings in human life imbued with
teleology as the realization of the idea, pertaining to humanity. However, by
entering history this idea did not remove its contingent features, that is, the
rational character of history did not exclude its dramatic movements, mani-
fested in particular philosophical schools, scientific developments and crises.
In view of this one can suggest that while being implicitly in history, it does not
predetermine history, that is, the telos of history does not replace the logos of
history which is the underlying and forming principle of its facticity. Historical
events are free to happen while being a reflection of the telos. This means that
the one that drives them is not a logos-like structure, but some action upon
history which brings to light those crucial moments which later, in retrospec-
tive analysis, seem to be built up of a logical chain, which looks as if the telos
that drives these events is intrinsic to their historical chain.
Thus, implicitly, the praise for Hellenism as that stage in the development of
the human spirit where infinite tasks were set up, corresponds to the praise of
phenomenology which made it articulate with a new force. One can say, even
more, that to exercise one’s adherence to Hellenism means to follow phenome-
nology in its determination to understand all history of philosophy in its ultimate
teleological sense, as well as to deal with the crisis of the European thought.
On the basis of this interpretation one can suggest that that historical effec-
tuation of the synthesis of pre-Christian Hellenistic philosophy with the Gospel
message was initiated from above history and inaugurated the entry of such
a renewed telos of the human spirit, in which the telos discovered by pre-
Christian Hellenistic philosophy was recapitulated, sanctified and referred to
Christ as alpha and omega of all history. Thus one can conjecture that the
ancient patristic synthesis with its unity of theology, philosophy and the
sciences was the first break into history of the knowledge about that eschato-
logical ideal where the unity of all forms of human knowledge and activities is
achieved. Then one can anticipate that the appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis
in theology, as well as in theology and science, represents a characteristic
reminder of the old patristic synthesis that has to be effected in new conditions
when phenomenology, as the discloser of the foundation of science, replaces
ancient Hellenism and when the Gospel message and witness of the Fathers is
advanced through the centuries of ascetic, theological and liturgical achievement.

The mediation between the living theology of the Church and the philosophy
of the surrounding culture, which provided a thoughtful and natural incorpo-
ration of the sciences in the fabric of the human condition in the past, needs
to be restored on the grounds of the ancient archetype as being invoked in
modern conditions. This, first of all, requires for theology to take on board all
achievements of secular philosophy thus, de facto, sanctifying this philosophy.
But it is because phenomenology makes a claim that it and only it is in a posi-
tion to recapitulate all historical and philosophical development and to explicate
the foundations of the sciences, that the new, that is, a neo-patristic synthesis
in theology, as well as in theology and science, is inconceivable without taking
on board phenomenology as that tool which clarifies the meaning and founda-
tions of the sciences thus overcoming their crisis. Since the mediation between
theology and the sciences which are allegedly in a state of crisis seems to be an
ill-conceived and contra-productive enterprise, one needs, as a matter of clari-
fication and potential healing of that mediation, phenomenology in order to
relate the foundations of the sciences to the immediate existential condition of
humanity which, as we argued before, constitute a major concern of theology
understood in a neo-patristic sense. Thus science cannot rigorously enter the
dialogue with theology without being phenomenologically reduced to its fac-
ticity in the human subjectivity.
Here phenomenology, as methodology, resembles theology in the sense that
it breaks the self-enclosedness of the sciences and provides insight into their
foundation. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, modern science is indis-
pensable for understanding the sense of existence, although in itself it cannot
unfold the fullness of this sense – one requires a much wiser and humble insight,
typical for theology, in order to understand the sheer possibility of science. The
aim of phenomenology as a ‘rigorous science’ is to explicate that absolutely a
priori context of all objective sciences. Hussserl labelled this context as the
life-world.37 Then the explication and thematization of the life-world becomes
one of the goals of phenomenology with respect to the sciences, for which it
carries a hidden teleological meaning.
37. The stream of philosophical works which interpret the notion of the life-world is
enormous. See, for example, Brand, G. (1973) ‘The structure of the life-world according to
Husserl’, Man and the World, 6, 143–62; Blumenberg, H. (1972) ‘The life-world and the
concept of reality’, in L. E. Embree (ed.), Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron
Gurwitsch, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 425–44; Kersten, F. (1978) ‘The
life-world revisited’, Research in Phenomenology 1, pp. 33–62. Among recent sources, see,
for example, Steinbock, A. J. (1995) Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after
Husserl, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 77–122. In a theological context one
can refer to the life-world as that pre-given and difficult-to-articulate ground of all facticity,
including that one of human subjectivity, whose existence as intentional consciousness
assumes some noematic presence.
The important point to remember, is that when such terms as ‘life’, ‘the world
of life’ etc. are used, they are used in a pre-philosophical sense, that is, they
are intuited within the immediately and adaptively necessary natural attitude.
Phenomenologists and existentialists argued at length that these notions can
hardly be thematized scientifically because any objectivism brings here a fun-
damental inadequacy by diminishing humanity and its values. This is the reason
why the usage of such terms as ‘the life-world’ in many ways has a metaphoric,
even apophatic character, when what is meant by it is felt as inescapably pres-
ent in its sheer absence. One can make a trivial observation that the life-world
is everywhere (all contexts of consciousness reflect its presence) and nowhere
(because it cannot be thematized in an objectivistic sense). Phenomenology as
a universal science aims to understand the life-world, and therefore to expli-
cate the foundations of all objectives sciences. It is here, in its intention to
address the issue of the ‘universal how’ of the ‘being-already-given of the
world’38 that phenomenology implicitly transcends the immanentism of inten-
tional consciousness and implies the otherness of all contingent facticity of
noetico-noematic givenness of being. It exercises the disclosure of its telos, as
the telos of all sciences under the pressure of the presence of this otherness in
its sheer absence. It is seen from here that in spite of all existing reservations,
the phenomenological project is destined to become a theological project,
although in a strictly limited, philosophical sense. It is through its intrinsic
teleology hidden in explication and thematization of the life-world that it
becomes potentially convergent with the living ecclesial theology, which is
rearticulated by a neo-patristic synthesis. The explication of this convergence
exactly forms the goal of the present research.
Husserl himself did not develop any clear views on the ‘nature’ of the other-
ness of facticity of human subjectivity; for him, the reference to the Divine was
a painful experience of combining Husserl the phenomenologist with Husserl
the believing Christian.39 On the one hand phenomenology aimed to accom-
plish the project of intentional immanence of subjectivity, on the other hand
by entering the speculations about the telos of the European humanity it inevi-
tably draws itself into serious trouble by placing this telos, as a like to the
Divine, either in history (and thus implying a pantheistic ontology) or outside
history (implying an ontology of classical theism).40 It can be anticipated that
the radical otherness of the contingent facticity of everything, including imma-
nent consciousness, implies in this very consciousness the presence of such a
particular ‘intentionality’ which being linked with the immanent intentionality
of the world, yet exceeds this very intentionality by referring it to something
which can hardly be called intentional in an ordinary sense. Rather it is inten-
tional as directed at the foundations of the very ordinary intentions and thus
38. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 146.

39. Mall, ‘The God of phenomenology’, pp. 1–13.
40. See, for example, Strasser, ‘History, teleology and God’, pp. 317–29.
directed towards the foundation of facticity of consciousness. The distinction

of these layers of intentionality requires some other operations of human
subjectivity which differ from discursive reason and have rather inexplicable
existential content (for example, metanoia as an existential change). One can
talk about these operations theologically, although on a pre-philosophical
level, but the truth of theological claims follows from faith in the transcendent,
that faith which effectively constitutes existential immanence with God (i.e. par-
ticipation or communion), which allows one to recognize God’s transcendence.
This is something which resembles panentheism in a phenomenological sense:
the facticity of all subjectivity is in God, but the intrinsic limitedness of this
facticity, felt as having its foundation in its otherness, points towards what
is beyond it, that is, to God, which exceeds indefinitely its immanence with
subjectivity.
The fact that phenomenology struggled and still struggles with the idea of
God, points, from a sheer theological point of view, to the fact that it does not
reflect upon the presence of intrinsic grace, in spite of the fact that the presence
of grace in consciousness as a ‘self-contained complex being’ was admitted
indirectly and outwardly.41 The movement of phenomenology to reach the-
ology indicates, however, that the Grace of God is acting upon it and it is this
action which makes it possible to believe that phenomenological thought and
analysis is predisposed to be transfigured (i.e. to be brought through the
enlightening metanoia, on the altar of the heart) in the ecclesial mind in order
to advance theology and its dialogue with science along the lines of a neo-
patristic synthesis.
Heidegger on Tradition and Hellenism
For Heidegger the interest in classical Greek philosophy originates in a slightly

different perspective. Heidegger understood the task of philosophy as a dia-
logue with those who originated and later developed the great philosophical
tradition. Heidegger appeals to the dialogue with history as following the
paths of philosophical thought since the very commencement of Greek classi-
cal philosophy. The aim of this dialogue is to reach out to all those preceding
philosophers in order to recapture their witness of thought in order for a phi-
losopher of the present to involve themselves in the approach of true thought.
However this dialogue aims to reach the very beginnings of thought not so
much in terms of discovering what was thought, but rather what was not
thought, and from this to acquire the impulse for the present thought. In other
41. See, for example, Husserl (1998) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology,
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 112. See also Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s
Phenomenology, pp. 328–9.
words, the step forward of philosophical thought takes place by means of tak-
ing a step back. But this return to the great thinkers has nothing to do with an
attempt to invoke the past which has irreversibly gone. In this very step, treated
as tendency of all philosophical thought, there is a hidden teleology of thought,
whose meaning is that the only possible way of carrying out its enquiry as
directed to future, is a constant placement of this enquiry in the tradition that
originates in Greek thought. Heidegger makes a clarification that history of
philosophy in this context does not imply some pure and naïve historicity in
the sense of a historian who treats facts of thoughts as some empirical past
events. What he advocates is that history of ideas must become, in a way,
‘simultaneous’ to that philosophical thought which appeals to history. Thus a
historico-philosophical dimension is an inevitable companion of thought con-
taining a healthy dose of ‘repetition’ of what is present in the cause of thought.
It is important to realize, however, that the appeal to tradition and the
dialogue with the past, according to Heidegger, has a distinctively different
intention, if one compares it with that which was advocated by Florovsky in
his appeal to Christianized Hellenism. For Heidegger the whole history is a
subject of a certain deconstruction that he calls the ‘destruction of history of
ontology’: whoever intends to pose the fundamental question of metaphysics
about being must reject everything that in the history of philosophy has con-
tributed to oblivion of the very thinking about being. For Heidegger this is the
premise for creating a new ontology of being.42 Tradition, instead of revealing
what it supposes to transmit, in fact, prevents all effective understanding by
hiding it behind what Heidegger calls ‘historicism’, which tries to objectify
history and ‘calculate’ the future images of thought from what it had in the
past. Thus the history of philosophy appears as the progressive covering up of
its own origins and the originating question of the philosophical project. This
is the reason why tradition in Heidegger plays an apophatic (negative) role in
a sophisticated sense: one needs to know tradition in order to make its histori-
cal deconstruction that effectively works as the phenomenological reduction
(epoché) of all historical facticity. Certainly the apophaticism in Heidegger
does not imply a naïve rejection of tradition and abolition of the past: it is
rather genuine ‘deconstruction’ of the history of philosophy than its ‘destruc-
tion’; what it implies is a ‘critique’ of the history of philosophy, not a break
with history. Heidegger argues against simple historicizing of the history of
philosophy by making it just a narrative description of facts and events. In
his view the deconstruction of the history of thought requires to appropriate
what, in fact, tradition offers.43 Phenomenological deconstruction in history of
philosophy is the liberation of what is concealed under the sign of historicity,
rendering free what tradition delivers.44 For Heidegger this deconstruction of
42. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 44.

43. Heidegger, M. (1968) What is Philosophy? London: Vision Press, p. 33.
44. Ibid., p. 35.
history of philosophy, means, however the acquisition of the true experience

of tradition that transmits and donates to our thought the right atmosphere of
philosophizing: ‘the tradition experienced in the right way, provides us that
present that stands over against us as the matter of thinking . . ..’45 To follow
tradition in this sense does not mean any submission to the irrevocable past;
on the contrary it frees thinking from submission to a lifeless past and leads
towards the freedom of the dialogue with it. Taken in its authentic sense the
tradition of thought: ‘genuine tradition is so far from being the dragging weight
of what is past that it much rather frees us for what approaches us as present,
and thus becomes the enduring directive toward the matter of thinking.’46
The specific feature of the phenomenological reduction of the history of
thought, however, is that it has its own purpose, its own aim and makes itself
different in comparison with a simple dialogue with historical philosophical
personalities. The attitude of the historical epoché is not to bracket history away,
but to bracket a concrete and specific history. This means that ‘historiality’ is
still present in the whole way of thinking, but it is present through its invisible
telos towards which philosophy is progressing. Tradition thus supplies us with
the direction in which philosophy leads our thought.47 It is in the very question-
ing ‘What is philosophy?’, which is effectively a teleological one, one anticipates
the appeal to the roots and sources of philosophy: ‘the name “philosophy”
summons us into the history of the Greek origin of philosophy’, or ‘we can ask
the question, “What is philosophy?” only if we enter a discussion with the
thinking of the Greek world.’48 There is a teleological inevitability in entering
a discussion with the Hellenistic thought which makes it amazingly similar to
a neo-patristic conviction that the communion with the Fathers must be restored
in order to progress forward in a theological development.
In the middle of 1930s Heidegger started to develop a view that any philoso-
phizing must assume some historical consciousness again, not in a trivial sense
of collecting the fact from past, but as such intrinsic propensity of humanity
on the basis of which men act and undergo their present, but, and this is of
utmost importance, history is not something passive and outgoing to the past
from the present, on the contrary, it is coming from the future.49 History in this
context is essentially the history of philosophy and this means that the last
45. Heidegger, M. (1998) ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, in W. McNeill (ed.), Pathmarks,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 323–36 (324).
46. Ibid.
47. ‘This tradition which bears the Greek name philosophia, and which is labelled for us
with the historical word philosophia, reveals the direction of a path on which we ask, “What
is philosophy?”.’ (Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, p. 33).
48. Ibid., p. 35.
49. ‘History as happening is an acting and being acted upon which pass through
the present, which are determined from out of the future, and which take over the past.’
Heidegger, M. (1959) Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 44.
sentence effectively wants to state that, in its relationship to the totality of

being, philosophy discloses what is to come while relating back to its own
commencement, to its own original source.50 We see here some signs of teleo-
logical thinking similar to that of Husserl when the very beginning of philosophy
and thought in general, including that one of science and technology, receives
its origin in Hellenistic philosophy being imbued with the telos of the European
thought which humanity carried out through history. Heidegger’s turn on
Hellenism conveyed his message that all European philosophy is essentially
of Greek origin and essence: it could only be primarily born in the Greek
cultural world and to transmit to Western European posterity the Greek and
philosophical character of its origin. However this entails even more serious
affirmation that ‘the West and Europe are, and only these, in the innermost
course of their history, originally “philosophical.”’51 Speaking about Greek
philosophy as the origin of all Western European thought Heidegger, in effect,
means that all this thought belongs to a common destiny, common to initial
Greek thought and to that of today and which makes one and the other
European. Of course European in this context does not refer to a mere geo-
graphical delimiter: Europe means rather as that world-wide historical scene in
which the destiny of the world has been decided and from which its future
history will spring.
Finally, it would be worth invoking another line in Heidegger’s assessment
of Hellenism from the side of its language, that is, Greek language, in order to
set up a parallel with Florovsky who, as we saw previously, advocated the
implicit necessity of the presence of the Hellenistic linguistic mind behind all
theological and liturgical realities of the Orthodox life nowadays. Heidegger
tries to convey a message that what happened in history of European thought
after the Classical era, when the Greek philosophical heritage had been trans-
lated into Latin and later all Roman languages, was effectively the destruction
of the actual meaning of the Greek philosophical terminology: ‘what happened
in this translation from the Greek into the Latin is not accidental and harmless;
it marks the first stage in the process by which we cut ourselves off and alien-
ated ourselves from the original essence of Greek philosophy.’52 For Heidegger
the importance of this original essence of Greek philosophy is linked with the
question of truth. If we change the language, that is, Greek language that,
according to Heidegger, is the logos and presents ‘what lies immediately before
us, brings us into the presence of the thing itself, not . . . of a mere word sign,’53
we, in fact, hide the origins of philosophy and hence the sense of truth that was
asserted by the Greeks. (How similar this is to Florovsky’s negative reaction,
50. Ibid.
51. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, p. 13.
52. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 13.
53. Heidegger, What is Philosophy? p. 45.
as well as to other contemporary discussions, against any deviations in the

Hellenistic ethos in modern theologizing and liturgical practices even if these
practices are exercised in the countries with specifically non-Greek languages.)
However, what is fundamentally left behind in Heidegger’s assessment of what
happened in the history of European thought is exactly the Greek patristic
period and the survival of the genuine Greek philosophical ethos in patristic
theology. It is exactly this patristic period, when classical philosophy was
appropriated and transfigured by Christianity, that was, in a way, sanctified
by it, that is missing in the logical chain of Heidegger’s arguments, missing as
if it was non-existent. Indeed let us look carefully at this passage:
However the originally Greek nature of philosophy, in the era of its modern-
European sway, has been guided and ruled by Christian conceptions.54 The
dominance of these conceptions was mediated by the Middle Ages. At the same
time, one cannot say that philosophy thereby became Christian, that is it became a
matter of belief in revelation and the authority of the Church.55
One can agree with this, that is, that philosophy did not become Christian,
but only with respect to the Latin West in its late historical development. This
was not the case in the Christian Greek-speaking East. What the Greek patris-
tic synthesis achieved was exactly the appropriation and transfiguration of
the Classical Greek philosophy through the Gospel’s message, when philoso-
phy essentially became Christian philosophy, that is, it was inconceivable
without its embedding in the fabric of faith and immediate experience of
God. However, since the Greek patristic synthesis was forgotten in the West,
Heidegger is right by saying that philosophy did not become Christian. But
this happened exactly because the separation of philosophy and the natural
sciences from theology that took place later at the at the dawn of modernity,
demonstrated, in fact, that the synthesis between faith, philosophy and the
sciences, which was achieved in the Christian East, was never acquired in its
accomplished form in the West. Philosophy, in its pre-Christian origin, thus
evolved into its modern and postmodern condition and Heidegger links this to
the rise and dominance of the sciences. ‘Because they stem from the innermost
Western-European course of history, that is, the philosophical, consequently
they are able, today, to put a specific imprint on the history of mankind upon
the whole earth.’56
He refers here not to the transfigured Christian Hellenism, but effectively to
that pre-Christian Hellenism which was essentially amended while being trans-
mitted to the West by the Latin Christianity. When he says that ‘the Christian
54. In fact, the Classical philosophical tradition was preserved and transmitted by the
Church throughout the Byzantine period and later to the Middle Ages. See, for more details,
for example, Lindberg, ‘Science and the early Church’.
55. Heidegger, What is Philosophy? p. 31.
56. Ibid., pp. 31–3.
Middle Ages were prolonged in modern philosophy’57 he refers only to the

Middle Ages of the Latin Church, which in their oblivion of the Greek
patristics presented to the West the modification of Classical Hellenism
under the sauce of the Latinized mentality which, and it is argued by
Heidegger, led also to oblivion of some of the basic metaphysical enquiry
about being.58
One can agree with Heidegger that modern Western civilization hardly
remembers anything which is linked to Greek patristic period, or to philosophy
and science of the Byzantine Empire. Indeed there is a great historical mystery
as to why the history of those eight hundred years between Augustine and
Roger Bacon in the West that can be described as flat and unimpressive in
terms of developing either philosophical or scientific culture, does not even
mention the theologians of the Greek East (such as St Maximus the Confessor,
St John of Damascus and St Gregory Palamas) who not only transmitted the
ethos of the Greek classical philosophy through the ages, but, in fact, advanced
this philosophy along the lines of a patristic theological synthesis. One can also
agree with Heidegger that the loss of the initially Greek ethos in the sphere of
philosophizing and its transmission – deviation by the Latin Christianity
through the so-called Middle Ages to the West – had drastic consequences for
the whole way of life which both Heidegger and Husserl characterized as the
crisis of European thought.
One can conclude that the whole position of Heidegger with respect to
Hellenism manifests itself as different to that which was pronounced by
Florovsky: Heidegger appeals to classical pre-Christian Greek philosophy as
the ultimate root of all European philosophizing in which the destiny of phi-
losophy and the whole civilization is implicitly present, whereas Florovsky, in
his appeal to a neo-patristic synthesis, sees the root of the future Christian phi-
losophizing in updated and further developed Christianized Hellenism as that
unique synthesis when the impersonal Logos of the Greeks met the personal
Logos in Christ.59 In spite of these, as they seem to be, fundamental differences,
it is amazing to see that independently of each other both thinkers of the twenti-
eth century revealed a coherent sensitivity to the darkening of the world,
emasculation of the spirit, wasting away, repression and misinterpretation of
the spirit.60 In their invocation for the restoration and reintegration of the human
spirit they were, probably, both responding to and acted upon by the Spirit of
God in order to be reminded about those times when truth of the impersonal
logos of the Greeks and the personal Logos in Christ entered history.

58. Ibid.
59. In the context of this comparison between Florovsky and Heidegger, see also
Horuzhy, ‘Neo-patristic synthesis and Russian philosophy’, pp. 317–19.
Heidegger and Theology: Oblivion of Being, Abandonment of God
In spite of the fact that Husserl and Heidegger in their historical philosophical
analysis effectively ignored the Greek patristic period, their attitude to the-
ology was different and hence their views on pre-Christian Hellenism were
also very different. If Husserl struggled with religion and theology on a per-
sonal level, not placing the whole phenomenological project in the context of
this struggle, Heidegger’s philosophy was imbued with theological content
from the very beginning. Like Husserl, Heidegger felt that it was necessary to
break the whole conceptual enterprise of classical metaphysics in order to find
its living roots and experience. But unlike Husserl, Heidegger saw a historical
precedent of the unity of abstract philosophy with life in the medieval philoso-
phers and theologians who drew their insights from the living experience of
God. Historically, however, this stance of Heidegger originated in his conver-
sion form Catholicism to Protestantism and his intention to turn from scholastic
and dogmatic theology to theology of the New Testament which led him to
St Augustine and St Paul.61 By following Luther’s criticism of the medieval
scholasticism based in the system of Aristotle, Heidegger attempted to recon-
sider ancient Greek philosophy from within the living experience of the New
Testament communities, that is, as we would say nowadays, from an existen-
tial stance. It is in this sense that ancient philosophy, being subjected to
phenomenological deconstruction, has to reveal factual structures of the Greek
existence, which received their interpretation, for example, in the philosophy
of Aristotle. In this sense the very approach of Heidegger to the underlying
value of Greek philosophy can not be simply classified as pre-Christian. The
Christian experience of life is in the base of Heidegger’s analysis and recapitu-
lation of Greek philosophy,62 but, one must admit, that it is not exactly what is
meant by us when we advocated a neo-patristic synthesis. Like neo-patristics,
Heidegger intended to avoid scholastic-like theology which centres on a specu-
lative, discursive cognition of God devoid of any experience.63 But unlike
neo-patristics he was not inclined to take seriously the whole grandeur of
the Greek patristic synthesis with its theological and cosmological systems.
61. Caputo, J. D. (1993) ‘Heidegger and theology’, in Ch. B. Guignon (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 270–88
(270–4).
62. There is a strong perception that ‘Heidegger was giving a reading of the early Greeks
that it is impossible to believe was not the result of a transference of the categories of Christi-
anity to early Greek texts.’ (Ibid., p. 280) One must add, however, that this transference was
not for the sake of Christianity. Heidegger’s ‘Hellenising and secularising of the fundamen-
tally biblical conception of the history of salvation’ was not in any way the renewal of patristic
theological synthesis because, according to him, Christianity was falling away from the pri-
mordiality of Greek experience. It is interesting to note that Catholic followers of Heidegger
found inspiration in this thought while preserving the value of Christianity (ibid.).
63. See, for example, Caputo, J. D. (1983) ‘Heidegger’s God and the lord of history’,
New Scholasticism, 57, 439–64 (443).
He was advocating the primacy of an existential dimension of theology as

based in faith and wanted to study these existential structures without placing
them in any, as he believed, presupposed and dogmatic systems. It seems plau-
sible to argue that Heidegger invited theologians of the twentieth century to
make that same move which was suggested by Florovsky. However, the fun-
damental difference is that the for Florovsky, as an ecclesial theologian, it was
clear that the missing link between dogmatics and life can be found only on the
grounds of ecclesial mysticism and realized eschatology of the Eucharist, which
are not easy subjects for discursive reason, whereas for Heidegger this was
unacceptable because, according to him, such a theology is simply an ontic
enterprise that works in rubrics of the pre-given facticity of Christianity, whose
absolute ontological meaning is unclear for reason. For Heidegger, and later for
Bultmann, the facticity of the Christ-event and all Church institutions after-
wards represented a kind of mythology and idiosyncratic cosmologies with no
ontological foundation. This mythology must be deconstructed in order to
reveal those primary ontological existential structures that only have sense as
kerygma.64 The Orthodox reaction to this move would be to say that in its
immanence the living experience of the first Christian communities is incom-
plete without the other-worldly dimension of the Spirit, its Pentecostal entry
upon history and its acting upon it in incessant liturgical invocations. In spite
of possible objections to this move by phenomenologists who would see in this
an illegitimate transcendence, the life of an Orthodox believer, their being-
in-the-world, contains this dimension of the Spirit on the level of another
intentionality, which does not simply operate on a philosophical level and
requires faith.
Heidegger’s qualification of theology as an ontic and positive science, such
as mathematics or chemistry, for example, and depriving it of any ontological
status is based exactly on his claim that theology is a science of a particular
domain of being, so that its partiality follows from its particularity, as being
essentially Christian experience, that is, experience of Christ’s birth, preaching
and teaching, as well as his Cross. As Being, as absolute being is wider and
deeper than that reality of Christianity, the latter cannot pretend to any onto-
logical universality and must be subjected to the same deconstruction as other
sciences in order to reveal some ultimate underlying existential structures,
similar to those of the life-world of Husserl. However, what strikes one here is
that the question of the contingent facticity of Christian experience, as well as
of the Christ-event itself and its incarnation are not addressed at all. They are
manifestations of Being, but why are they specific and concrete as we perceive
them? Here comes the issue of grace. That grace which makes the Christian
experience consistent and enduring originates in the same Spirit Who initiated
the incarnation of the Logos, and Who offered the unfolding of what Heidegger
calls Being from a specific personal perspective of Christ, as the Son of the
Father, who are both united in the same God with the Holy Spirit. In analogy
64. Bultmann, R. (1961) Kerygma and Myth, New York: Harper & Row.
with this, one can conjecture that the contingency of reason (as logos) is based
in existential faith that this reason is possible at all in its specific concreteness.
Thus faith in existence of the ground of all facticity of reason which exercises
itself in philosophy and searches for the manifestations of Being is grounded in
the very manifestation of this Being in rubrics of faith. This is the reason why
with all respect to Heidegger’s attempt to search for absolute Being devoid of
any historicity, the very search was attempted in such a living context where
Christianity was present, although implicitly.
In spite of all that we have said about Heidegger’s position on theology one
particular aspect of his thought on Being must be discussed carefully, in order
to draw a parallel with some ideas which underlie our neo-patristic project.
Heidegger’s claim is that ever since ancient Greek philosophy, meaning mostly
Plato and Aristotle, philosophy and later theology participated in concealment
of Being by covering it by different intellectual forms which expressed meta-
physical notions of Being but not Being itself. All sort of metaphysics and
science participated in this ‘oblivion’ of Being, so that the unconcealment of
Being means stripping off all layers of conceptual mythology and entering the
direct experience of Being as it was, according to Heidegger, prior to Plato and
Aristotle in the philosophy of early Greek materialists. However, the negative
overtones of this concealment of Being proved to be very positive in a sense
that, according to Heidegger (after his Kehre), the oblivion of Being was
effected by this Being itself, as its withdrawal and it is through this withdrawal
Being manifested itself, although in an characteristically apophatic way. The
modern technological darkening of the world represents a characteristic mani-
festation of Being through its withdrawal: ‘if we today feel no need to ask the
question of Being, that feeling is just the way we are turned to Being,’65 or what
comes to be present in technology is withdrawal of Being. Correspondingly
different historical epochs constitute different degrees of presence or absence
of Being. In particular, the historical contingent facticity of the Christian era
corresponds, according to Heidegger, to a certain degree of the same oblivion
of Being.
As we mentioned earlier, the language of Being devoid of any historical
specificity is a good philosophical abstraction, but being itself launched from
within a particular historical entry of Being, it intrinsically contains some con-
tingent features pertaining to the forms of thought. This is the reason why for
a consistent Christian appropriation of the idea of Being it must be placed into
the existential context of Dasein, that is, of that hypostatic human subjectivity
that asserts and articulates all forms of Being. This existential context is faith
in God, being and existential faith, that is faith in existence as such. Then all
terminology of Being can be abandoned in favour of the Spirit, the Comforter
and Giver of life. What happens in Greek patristics from this point of view is
65. Caputo, J. D. (1988) ‘Demythologising Heidegger: Aletheia and the history of Being’,
Review of Metaphysics, 41, 519–46 (526).
exactly the manifestation of the Spirit in Greek philosophy before Christ. As

was mentioned by Clement of Alexandria (and later Augustine), Greeks tore
off a piece of truth but they did not realize that it was based in the Logos of
God whose truth was later proclaimed by the Gospels. The manifestation of
the fullness of that truth was achieved through the Incarnation of the Logos
of God in Jesus Christ and Pentecost. That impersonal Being of the Greeks was
sanctified through communion with the personal God, so that it received the
interpretation of its purpose and end through Christ. However, at the existen-
tial level, regardless of the doctrine of faith, the presence of personal communion
with Christ was not apodictically necessary as it was in the idea of the God of
metaphysics, whose presence is always in one’s mind. In other words, the pres-
ence or absence of God in one’s life and feelings is subjected to a personal
experience that can be affected by ecclesial realities. Christianity says about
this personal experience of God as grace: it affirms it either as presence or
absence. However presence and absence of grace come in to interplay, so that
the union with God appears to be an eschatological task. In view of this, one
can draw a parallel with theology: does the crisis in theology imply the effec-
tive withdrawal of God? This seems to be a contradiction: theology is dealing
with God, so that if God withdraws from it, it must collapse or degenerate into
a nonsensical murmur by humanity of that which it does not understand. Defi-
nitely this is the sheer impossibility for ecclesial theology that is involved in
invocation of God, so that his presence is confirmed operationally. However,
as we discussed in a previous chapter, this can happen if academic theology
becomes disjoint from its liturgical roots, and this is what happened when
Florovsky spoke about the crisis in theology. Here Heidegger’s thought can be
applied: namely that the withdrawal of grace from academic theology was a
sign that theologians are turned to this very grace in desperation to acquire
back its presence. In this sense the presence of a crisis in theology (as well as in
science) is not an entirely negative thing: it alerts reason and soul to something
that is present in absence in them and when the degree of this absence prevails
over any presence. If this crisis in modern times is associated with domination
of science and technology, then, together with Heidegger, one can suggest that
the oblivion of Being, understood as its withdrawal from beings demonstrates
not the impotence of thought but, on the contrary, the condition of planetary
domination and constitutes the fundamental feature of the Western civilization.
Then the crisis of theology, when theology becomes speculative and metaphys-
ical, devoid of the living experience of God, can be interpreted as being
subjected to the same movement of Being’s withdrawal as was felt in philoso-
phy and technology. However, becoming metaphysical, theology demonstrates
its loss of grace, because it is grace which preserves theology from deteriora-
tion to metaphysics. So, we observe here an interesting feature of distinction
and difference between modern science and technology: for science to domi-
nate the world, to become a ruling power of its own affairs, it must become
metaphysical (in the sense of being abstracted from immediacy of personal liv-
ing experience) and there must be withdrawal of Being, which leaves in this
science the sense of incompleteness, thus orientating this science to Being

through the feeling that it is in oblivion; for theology, on the contrary, to pre-
serve its independence from metaphysics and support its intrinsically mystical
and ecclesial nature, there must be present a grace that does not allow theology
to be influenced by the escape of Being. As we mentioned in previous chapter,
the Orthodox Church never experienced withdrawal of grace in its liturgy, so
that the task of a neo-patristic synthesis is to preserve the presence of grace in
its theology in spite of a tendency to involve this theology into a metaphysical
discourse and polemics with that science which, according to Heidegger, in
the background of its very functioning experiences the withdrawal of Being.
However, as we mentioned earlier, the withdrawal of Being in science, seen
philosophically, orientates this science to Being. Thus science, through the
mode of its very existence, represents a genuine apophatic tool in search for
Being. But to explicate this apophatic mode, that is to deconstruct science and
to see Being through its immediate context, one needs grace, so that here the-
ology enters discourse as that indispensable tool which brings science back to
its proper standing in the condition of Dasein and its relation to Being. The
very sense of the dialogue between ecclesial theology and science thus acquires
the form of the explication of this apophatic dimension in science as pointing
towards God.
The meaning of that which is called tradition, let us say in theology, is mani-
fested and disclosed in the very fact that it refers to the presence of grace: for
example, the liturgical tradition is supported through the invocation of the
Spirit and its action upon history. But this indicates that tradition must not be
understood as any significant continuity between epochs of Church’s history.
These epochs cannot be derived from one another and reduced to the sequence
of a consecutive process. Their ‘continuity’ that is interpreted as tradition comes
from their common non-historical Source. The contradistinction between tra-
dition understood in this sense and evolution of scientific thought, based in a
kind of continuing dynamics of human exploration of the world is fundamen-
tally different. Tradition is intrinsically eschatological, because what humanity
finds in its past as part of this tradition is conditioned by its forward-moving
project, its expectations and hopes for the age to come. The disclosure of the
meaning of this tradition at present depends on the aspirations of humanity
which it takes as being acted upon by the Spirit. The meaning of tradition as
uniformity of its manifestations in different epochs is based upon a simple fact
that what is revealed in religious history is always the same and the presence
of grace in it does not allow to involve this tradition into a constant thread
running through the course of history. Tradition thus transcends all forms of
a traceable evolution from some fixed beginnings. The beginnings themselves
are contingent in the same way as the realizations of the Spirit are contingent
in its actions upon history. This contingency is a key factor which makes tradi-
tion eschatological and different from any form of thought which adopts
historicism and evolutionism as a guiding principle. There is no equation for the
action of the Spirit and, therefore, no intrinsic logos that could account for
a particular epoch of the Spirit. In this, the action of the Spirit is fundamentally
different from the displayed logos-like structure of the universe which can be
grasped by means of induction. This observation makes it possible to conjec-
ture that there are two intentionalities in human subjectivity that work together
but explicitness of whose presence can be fundamentally absent, that is, using
Heidegger’s language, in oblivion. The premise of the triumphant exploration
and invasion of the world through science implies the oblivion in human sub-
jectivity of that, so to speak, spirit-like intentionality, so that grace withdraws
itself from subjectivity, and the logos-like structure of the universe appears to
this mind as a mechanistic and deterministic whole in which the freedom and
choice of humanity are annulled, and transcendence and access to the living
God of faith is silenced. Even in these conditions of abandonment, the Spirit is
present in its negative sending: it is a reminder to obscure and confused thought
that in spite of this crisis it is still turned to that which is present in oblivion,
in its absence. The explication of this presence assumes a change of intention-
ality in its attention to the Spirit and this is exactly to comprehend that the
present epoch of Being is intrinsically eschatological, for it is here and now
that the Spirit acts upon humanity urging it to bring together explicitly escha-
tological ecclesial theology and steadily advancing science. Thus, along the
differences between Husserl and Heidegger, one can affirm that the dialogue
between theology and science either represents a particular mode of eschato-
logy of the Spirit, who acts from outside history and is revealed in its particular
action here and now, or, alternatively, the dialogue between theology and sci-
ence can be treated teleologically as being intrinsic to history and following the
logic of the overall reason acting in and through this history. In view of this
difference the objective of the dialogue between theology and science can be
seen as twofold: one of them is eschatological and consists in explication of the
presence of the intentionality of the Spirit in scientific research by analysing
the conditions of the withdrawal of grace from rational philosophy and
science; the other one is closely connected with explication of the telos of
explanation in both theology and science through thematization of the condi-
tions of the incarnate human subjectivity, that is, the life-world. In analogy
with the distinction and similarity in views on history in Husserl and
Heidegger,66 one can say that in the first line of analysis the history of science
is seen as decadent and advancing to its close where the threat reaches its cul-
minating point so that the appeal to theology happens because of science’s cry
66. See, for example, Kelkel’s paper, ‘History as teleology and eschatology’, in which a
characteristic verdict is given on divergences and convergences in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s
approach to the foundations of transcendental history. For example, ‘the Husserlian teleol-
ogy – with its progression and ascension toward universal Reason . . . – and Heideggerian
eschatology – which permits the return to the sources of thought, from where the force of
future thought must rise – are not fundamentally opposed. Both historicize the Absolute, the
one under the name of Reason, and the other under that of Being, conceiving the movement
of history as eschatologically determined by its march toward the end’ (p. 407).
for help in the face of being abandoned by God, whereas in the second line of
thought, history is seen under the sign of progress of the reason that through
phenomenology reverts this science to its roots in the conditions of the incar-
nate subjectivity, whose problematics forms the major preoccupation of
theology.
Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Existential

Phenomenology – an Outline of Interaction
A question we must now address is: in what way philosophical phenomeno-

logy can help in our task of advancing the dialogue between theology and sci-
ence under the slogan of a neo-patristic synthesis. Does it mean a mechanical
symbiosis of patristic thought with science, where phenomenology is used as a
mediating tool? Or, alternatively, whether phenomenology, as a particular
practice of studying human subjectivity, being intrinsically present in patristic
thought needs to be explicated and advanced on theological grounds in order
to make theology easier to mediate with science? In order to answer these
questions one should remind the reader, as we have already mentioned in
Chapter 1, of some attempts on the side of Orthodox theologians to use the
philosophy of Heidegger and Levinas to advance understanding and implica-
tions of patristic theology. One must not forget that Heidegger, being a
philosopher intrinsically oriented towards theology, inspired many Catholic
(e.g. K. Rahner) and Protestant (e.g. R. Bultmann) theologians to acquire and
transform his thought.67 One must also mention that phenomenology sparked
an enormous literature in philosophical theology which must not be ignored.68
In Orthodox literature, however one can only mention two names: C. Yannaras
and J. Zizioulas who attempted to bring Heidegger’s (and Levinas’) ideas into
the fabric of Orthodox theological thinking. Zizioulas articulated some diffi-
culties of applying Heidegger’s thought for this task, so that no simple synthesis
67. See more on this in Caputo, ‘Heidegger and theology’. Some phenomenological phi-
losophers express a view that phenomenology does not contradict Catholic philosophy, in
particular, Thomism. Religious philosophy starts from the primacy of faith, which according
to phenomenologists is a legitimate way to enter philosophy in general, but, as they argue,
this is not the only way, and phenomenology complements and does not contradict the
Thomistic approach. See, for example, Sokolowski, R. (2000) Introduction to Phenomeno-
logy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 206–8. For more discussion see Dondeyne,
Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith, pp. 129–64, and Sokolowski, R.
(1994) Eucharistic Presence. A Study in the Theology of Disclosure, Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America. An interesting contrast between Husserl’s phenomenology
and the teaching of Aquinas can be found in Edith Stein’s Knowledge and Faith, pp. 1–63.
What is implied in comparisons of phenomenology with Thomism is that they both enter the
relationship as uniform terms, as having right to exist independently of each other, and not
needing each other for developing of their starting arguments.
was possible.69 However, one can agree with J. Caputo, another commentator
of Heidegger, that the importance of Heidegger for theology is not to be found
in what he actually says about god and the gods so as much as in the wholly
new way of thinking, whether about Being or God, which he teaches us.70
Then the task for ecclesial theology is to appropriate Husserl, Heidegger and
other philosophers for the purposes of faith, which is something that Christian
thinkers have been doing for centuries since the patristic age.
Here we approach the core question, which was posed by Zizioulas and
which is most relevant to our quest for a neo-patristic synthesis, namely the
question about the relationship between theology and philosophy.
Is a philosophical justification of patristic theology is possible? Or does patristic

theology in its essence constitutes the converse, that is, a theological justification
of philosophy, a proclamation that philosophy and the world can acquire a true
ontology only if they accept the presupposition of God as the only existent whose
being is truly identified with the person and with freedom?71
68. Just to orientate the reader in the subject one can give few references, apart from
those which have been already used in the text. See, for example, Duméry, H. (1964) The
Problem of God in Philosophy and Religion, Evanston: Northwestern University Press;
Earle, W. et al. (1963) Christianity and Existentialism, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press; Laycock, S. W. and J. G. Hart (eds) (1986) Essays in Phenomenological Theology,
Albany: State University of New York Press; Guerrière, D. (ed.) (1990) Phenomenology of
the Truth Proper to Religion, Albany: State University of New York Press. One must
especially mention those French philosophers who attempted a theological extension of
phenomenology. Among them E. Levinas (his contribution to phenomenological theology is
well summarized in Purcell, M. (2006) Levinas and Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), M. Henry (see a review of his religious ideas in Ph. Capelle (ed.) (2004)
Phénoménologie et Christianisme chez Michel Henry, Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf); Jean Luc
Marion (see, for example, his (2002) Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness,
Stanford, Stanford University Press; (2002) In Excess. Studies of Saturated Phenomena,
New York: Fordham University Press).
69. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 44ff. (n. 40). In a way any application of secular
philosophy to ecclesial theology is problematic. However, as was rightly claimed by Hei-
degger, any possible contribution by philosophy to theology must assume the autonomy of
philosophical thinking. The involvement of philosophy in ecclesial mode is not the task of
philosophy itself.
70. Caputo, ‘Heidegger’s God and the lord of history’, pp. 459–60.
71. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 46ff. (n. 40). What is most important in this
questioning, however, is that theology cannot and must not ignore achievements of philoso-
phy, because without mutual interchange of experience of thought, neither of them could
properly accommodate in surrounding cultures. This implies that it is impossible to have a
dialogue between theology and science without having established some universal language of
this mediation, which is essentially a philosophical language which reflects adequately scien-
tific realities and, at the same time, does not loose perception of its God-gifted givenness. (See
Filaret (Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk) The Way of the Life-Asserting Love, pp. 44–5).
If in the synthesis that we propose one goes affirmatively along the first part
of this question, that is, that ‘a philosophical justification of patristic theology
is possible,’ one would tacitly assume a stance that within the universal and
all-encompassing nature of philosophy as forms of thought, patristic thought
occupies a particular, may be historically contingent place, so that the appeal
to a new patristic synthesis (as a bearer of a particular historical presence)
would not look too convincing, not to say simply too apologetic. In this case
postmodern philosophers and theologians could justly point out that our
choice of Greek patristics is prejudiced by a particular ecclesial affiliation and
does not have and cannot have in principle any validity as a universal point of
view in the dialogue with science. This kind of question can be posed by those
who attempt to preach about the dialogue between theology and science on the
inter-denominational and even on the inter-religious level. For these preachers
the appeal to patristic thought would seem to be outdated and irrelevant. They
could say that it would be much safer to start the dialogue with science from
within a philosophical theology, where the concrete facticity of the Divine in
history is not articulated. However, from the Orthodox point of view this kind
of approach faces a difficulty with assertion of truth. If for postmodern think-
ing the question of truth does not have too much relevance because truth is
conceived as relative and hermeneutically corrigible, Orthodoxy insists on its
privilege to proclaim the right glory of God as truth. This means that access to
truth is linked to its only source which is open to humanity through Christ
with the Father and in the Spirit. It is in this sense that truth is not a ‘dogma of
truth’ but truth as life and communion, achieved through a personal challenge
as well as through ecclesial presence. This ecclesial presence is exactly that
inconceivable aspect of truth which is missing in all postmodern discourses.72
But ecclesiality, as the way to proceed to truth, entails a certain kind of univer-
sality, which is capable of transforming the ‘universality’ of secular philosophy
72. Heidegger’s case is interesting in this respect. He makes a clear distinction between
speculative concepts of God and faith as the ultimate religious relationship. The God of a
genuine religious experience is not simply an object of thought (God of philosophers: causa
sui), but a partner in dialogue, prayer song and poetry. ‘Before the causa sui, man can neither
fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god’ ((2002)Identity and
Difference, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 72) Heidegger asserted
(in a complete coherence with patristic thought) that no conceptual definition of the living
God can exhaust the depth of communion with him expressed in all sorts of manifestation.
In a way he reinstated in modern philosophy the old stance of apophaticism about the free-
dom of expressing God within the boundaries of faith. But these boundaries of faith are set
up by the Church as its definitions, so that the God of Christians is a partner in dialogue,
prayer and song only if they guard their loyalty to truth affirmed within Church’s definitions.
This is an ecclesial dimension in asserting the more ‘divine’ God, which is tacitly missing in
Heidegger’s advocacy for the right theology and which deprives his approach to God of the
dimension of truth and right glory.
into modality of human life through personhood and freedom, which are
constrained only by that Other which is known to Christians as God-Trinity.
The dilemma present in Zizioulas’ questions can simply be understood as the
choice of perspective: either to believe in primacy of impersonal being to which
all other sorts of beings and histories are referred as particularities and contin-
gences,73 or, vice versa, to believe in ultimate supremacy of human freedom in
personhood through communion with God, as the Father of all humanity and
all facticity, and then to place the quest for impersonal Being through the
reduction of the uniqueness of the human facticity to particular manifestations
which exhibit some impersonal commonality. In the first case philosophy pre-
tends to justify theology as a particular expression of life, in the second case
the situation is opposite and philosophical claims about being are placed in the
context of truth, which is linked to personhood and freedom.
It is not difficult to see that a neo-patristic synthesis aims to answer posi-
tively the second half of Zizioulas’ question, that is, that patristic theology,
understood widely as the theology of the worshipping Church, in its essence
constitutes a theological base of philosophy, a proclamation that philosophy
and the world can acquire a true ontology only if they accept the presupposi-
tion of God as the only existent whose being is truly identified with the person
and with freedom.74 It is clear, that this justification will transcend far beyond
the adopted norms of discursive theologizing and will take some particular
forms of ecclesial and Eucharistic ‘discourse’, as well as a particular stance on
human being. The fundamental point here is that in order to grasp these stances
and how they work one will need to use phenomenological ideas; to use them
for elucidation of the fact that these ideas, being self-enclosed in the sphere of
intentional immanence, are incomplete. It is in this sense that to comprehend
fully our advocacy for a neo-patristic synthesis one needs to exercise a different
attitude to the whole enterprise, which can be provisionally called a phenome-
nological attitude. Thus the link between theology and phenomenology is not
something artificially constructed but intrinsically present in both of them:
phenomenology elucidates conceptually and linguistically existential claims of
patristic theology whereas patristic theology sheds light on the very possibility
of phenomenology’s foundations. However, by being a very efficient tool in clari-
fying the foundations of science, the explicated phenomenological dimension
73. This is what happens in Heidegger’s thought, whose gods are worldly and mundane
and serve to manifest impersonal Being in respect to which they play subordinate role.
74. As Metropolitan Filaret writes: ‘Philosophy cannot ignore theology first of all because
in the list of its “ultimate questions” philosophy encounters a question which is born out of
religion, that is, the question of God as that “ultimate foundation”, or, conversely, of that
“contingency”, which has a decisive meaning for the eternal fate of humanity and which
determines the dynamics of its spiritual way.’ (The Way of the Life-Asserting Love, p. 44
(author’s translation)).
of patristic theology serves perfectly for establishing an adequate mediation

between theology and science. Such a neo-patristic appropriation of pheno-
menology will also entail the development of a certain attitude to those
appropriations of phenomenology in Catholic and Protestant theology which
have been already done, and this, as a by-product, will contribute to the neo-
patristic goal of overcoming disintegration of the broken spirit of Christianity.
The appeal to both patristic theology and phenomenology makes our project
on the synthesis of theology and science in its substance at once premodern
and postmodern. However, in its methodology the project follows that stance
of existential phenomenology where it does not seek to establish the facts of
the case but rather to explore possible modes of experience as existential pos-
sibilities, that is, what is at issue is the meaning of my and other’s life.
The specific methodology of the synthesis of theology and science does not
choose any simplistic approach. As we demonstrated in the previous chapter
the necessity for the dialogue arises from the lack of harmony between the-
ology and science, which itself points to the fact that the dialogue attempts to
find God exactly there, where one feels his absence and withdrawal. Here, the
living theology manifests itself, in contradistinction to any metaphysical sys-
tem where the withdrawal of God as an idea can be exercised by means of
intellectual ascension, as that experience of life where the withdrawal of God
is inconceivable. This demonstrates to us that because of the very essence of
the word ‘dialogue’, the dialogue between theology and science (i.e. the dialogue
between two experiences of presence and absence of God) cannot go along the
lines of rational metaphysics and philosophical theology: it takes inevitably the
dimension of faith and personal experience. At the same time the presence of
the problem of the dialogue demonstrates to us that in modern science and
technology one definitely experiences the signs of withdrawal of God. Thus
the dialogue and the synthesis which we are seeking for deals exactly with
qualifying the forms and establishing the extent to which God is ‘present’ and
at the same time ‘withdrawn’. On the one hand the aim of this synthesis is to
affirm the ‘presence’ of God in science and technology; on the other hand it is
to demonstrate that in some cases scientific ideas manifest the intentional
withdrawal from God which, in an apophatic way, contributes to the under-
standing of his hidden presence. In both cases one should remember that the
affirmation of God within a conceptual synthesis of theology and science has
a very limited value, because it provides not more than a pointer to God, with
no intention to exhaust its content entirely. It is in this sense that the very
dialogue between theology and science seen as their characteristic synthesis, by
virtue of the fact that science is always rooted in discursive thinking, cannot
seriously advance our ‘understanding’ of God who can be present and who can
withdraw. Any ascension from science to God always entails a kind of meta-
physical necessity of God who cannot withdraw. Thus the dialogue must
proceed along different lines: not from the universe to God, but from those
who experience presence and absence of God, that is, from human beings.
In this case sciences themselves and the content of their theories, expressing
necessity of their objectivized claims, should be reverted to the roots of their

facticity in humanity.
We see thus that the methodology of the dialogue between theology and
science which we associate with their neo-patristic synthesis is rather two-fold.
On the one hand its standpoint is phenomenological and transcendental for it
addresses the ‘meaning’ of the universe and God, that is, the ways in which the
universe and God enter human understanding in the background of its contin-
gent facticity. At this stage the transcendental horizon is established within which
theology and the sciences articulate the human condition and, differently but
intrinsically convergently, contribute to the explication of the life-world. The
hidden teleology of the human spirit is thus explicated in its local achievement:
the life-world. On the other hand, when the horizon is outlined, the question
shifts toward the mystery of the universe and God as being given to us in the
events of their presence and absence. The existential question about the under-
lying facticity of the human subjectivity and its openness to the world as
founded in its otherness is replaced here by the immediate experience of pres-
ence and absence of the universe and God, the events by virtue of which the
dialogue between theology and science occurs. The very modern era, when this
dialogue seems to be possible and timely, represent thus an event in the history
of the human spirit, when the Spirit of God acts upon this history in order to
remind about His presence in spite of being withdrawn. The very essence of
the dialogue between theology and science is to deal with the situation of the
presence of God in His absence. This dichotomy cannot be overcome in his-
torical times: thus all forms of the dialogue have an apophatic and ever
advancing sense playing a role of a pointer towards that eschatological unity
when the withdrawal of God will not be available to humanity anymore. The
neo-patristic synthesis of theology and science clearly understands the mean-
ing of its apophatic undertaking. It is here that the old lessons of the live
experience of God, His presence and absence, find some new expression in
the midst of modern humanity whose experience, not only that of presence
but also absence of God, was dimmed by the overflowing expansion of
modern science and technology. As we will discuss later, science, in its essence,
contains a very profound experience of God’s absence which, appropriated
spiritually, returns us to God. The dialogue between theology and science is
not a dialogue at all: it is a drama of the human spirit which feels itself some-
times so powerful in petty things and, at the same time, abandoned by a higher
sense of existence. The dialogue is the mediation between the irrecoverable
ambivalence of the human condition to experience the grace of existence and
anxiety of its lack of sense. It is here that through the communion with the
Fathers of the ancient Church that the consolation of modern desperation and
anxiety comes. The Fathers remind us of the Father of all humanity to whom
only we can refer in hope to overcome the fear and anxiety of the uncertain
technological future.
Chapter 3
Theology and Phenomenological Attitude: The
Human Condition, Existential Faith
and Transcendence
Authentic theology consists not in the conjectures of man’s reason or the results of
critical research but in a statement of the life into which man has been introduced
by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Archimandrite Soprony (Sakharov) (1973) The Monk of Mount Athos, p. 171
Introduction
As outlined in a previous chapter, our objective is to demonstrate that faith

and knowledge, theology and science, represent two different intentionalities
working within the same human spirit whose difference is based on the split in
attitude towards the world and humanity itself, the split which can be charac-
terized as constitutive of the human condition. Then the so-called dialogue
between theology and science, or, more precisely, the mediation between what
can be conditionally called ‘theological intentionality’ and ‘scientific intention-
ality’ can be understood as the disclosure of their mutual interaction. For
example, it will be argued that faith, being a mode of human subjectivity acts
in a phenomenological attitude (in comparison with the natural attitude in
science) and lies in the foundation of discursive thinking and all corresponding
articulations of the world. Therefore, by studying the structures of science one
will be able to disclose the presence of human subjectivity behind scientific
theories and ideas, the subjectivity which works in the rubrics of existential
faith, which can hardly be articulated by science, but which is silently present
in the very existential condition of humanity. In other words, the difference in
intentionalities and attitudes appears to be an initial moment in our research,
whose aim is to search for their reintegration as mediation between their divi-
sions on the level of morality.
However, it is important to elucidate for the reader some basic and very
delicate nuances in definitions of theology and faith as contrasting to those
of science. By accepting that faith (and hence theology) is a legitimate mode of
human subjectivity, we demonstrate our affinity not to the bottom-up approach
to the science–religion dialogue, which is so popular in the West, but to its
Theology and Phenomenological Attitude 107
opposite – top-down. This means in turn that in the context of mediation

between science and theology our approach to theology will not be based on
the way of ascension from empirical realities to the Divine, because it never
leads us to existential faith in the living God. Theology and experience of God
will rather be understood in a sense whose explication demands some special
means, which differ from simple schemes of thinking employed in science and
scientific philosophy. The fundamental stance of this research is that the only
viable strategy of affirming God is theological apophaticism, known since
patristic times, and implicitly employed and terminologically advanced in
modern phenomenology. Apophaticism implies a simple cognitive attitude: on
the one hand, the ‘knowledge’ of transcendent God, as a way of expressing
experience of him in words, can never be exhausted on the level of discursive
reason, so that there is something in the experience of God which always
remains unknown, and in this sense the reason faces God as an intelligible
entity that is presented to reason in the conditions of God’s empirical absence;
on the other hand, the reality of God is perceived by human beings through
immediate experience of life and grace, so that this experience can be expressed
in all possible forms pertaining to the human social, cultural and simply psy-
chological condition, thus affirming God’s presence, but in the conditions of
God’s infinite incomprehensibility. Apophaticism thus is such an attitude of
human subjectivity to life which accepts as its intrinsic dimension God’s ‘pres-
ence in absence’. Apophaticism makes theologically irrelevant all metaphysical
constructions of the Divine, giving them a clear qualification as ideas of God,
but not the living God himself. Thus any attempt to predicate God as something
outside the world and human life, as some objectifiable entity, is considered as
a mere allegory and symbolic expression of experience of the presence of God,
which has no existential and spiritual consequences. It then becomes clear that
any ‘comparison’ of theology and science on the level of ‘relationship’ between
God and the universe has only a metaphorical and contentious sense as a
particular activity of the curious human mind with no serious existential con-
sequences. Since the God of faith cannot be externalized and removed from the
immediate experience of being, theology and science can only be compared
from within their function in human subjectivity.
It is then not difficult to realize that the apophatic attitude in theology
presupposes a kind of discernment in experience of God that is akin to the
phenomenological attitude (which suspends all judgements about the existence
of any objective correlates to this experience), but supported and supplied by
faith, as well as by metanoia. Faith, here, appears not as something ad extra
with respect to reason; rather it enters the whole discourse as a propensity of
existence, which makes it possible for theology and science to exist as realms
of human conscious activities. In fact, faith constitutes the essence of theology
and any theology devoid of faith represents, from the point of view of a
believer, a sheer nonsense. Then the challenge for theology, which wants to
position itself with respect to philosophy and science, is to explicate faith in
phenomenological terms and for philosophy to explain discursively what is
faith. Then the difference between the intentionality of faith and that of science
will be seen in the perspective of their inherent unity in human subjectivity

embedded in the world. The explication of this difference has a methodolo-
gical character with the aim of showing that no naïve approach to the dialogue
between science and theology as uniform terms of the corresponding opposi-
tion is possible, whereas the mediation between them corresponds to a certain
anthropological and psychological change (metanoia), reintegrating the split
intentionalities through the imitation of the prelapserian human condition
when, while being with God, man was ‘all in all’.
The reader would be right to ask a question about the legitimacy of our
intentions to employ phenomenology for theology and for its dialogue with
science. One group of questions can be posed on how to reconcile theology,
which predicates the transcendent God, with phenomenology whose initial
aim was to remain within the immanence of human subjectivity. Another
group of concerns can be raised on purely methodological grounds as to
whether any extension of phenomenology towards theology terminates an ini-
tially phenomenological project and phenomenology effectively evolves into
something ‘new’, rather theological. In order to clarify these concerns, we
should recall, on the one hand, what is meant by theology in this book and
how this meaning can be referred to the phenomenological project on theology
and science, and on the other it must be pointed out that phenomenology
appears in our project with an adjective ‘existential’.1 As we will see later,
many of the ideas having a patristic reminiscence were expressed in recent
centuries by religious philosophers, who worked in the philosophy of existence,
exercising de facto the phenomenological method; among them Gabriel
Marcel, whose writings, made in the form of spiritual diaries and meditations
resemble, in a way, the style of ascetics and ancient Fathers.2 We take a risk in
claiming that Marcel, in a characteristic way, elucidated and advanced some
Fathers’ teachings in a new linguistic and philosophical form; at the same time
while reading him one understands that the Fathers of the Church were
deeply existential philosophers by using, without asserting, a method similar
to phenomenological reduction. One can go even further by saying that the
contemporary ‘theological turn’3 in French phenomenology contributes even
1. The literature on the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and philosophy

of existence is enormous. For a general reference see, for example, a book of Brockelmann,
P. (1980) Existential Phenomenology and the World of Ordinary Experience. An Introduc-
tion, New York: University Press of America.
2. For a general reference on Marcel one can recommend, for example, the following
books on him: Gilson, E. (ed.) (1947) Existentialisme Chretien: Gabriel Marcel, Paris:
Libraire Plon; Troisfontaines, R. (1968) De l’Existence a l’Etre. La philosophie de Gabriel
Marcel, Louivan: Editions Nauwerlaerts; and Parain-Vial, J. (1989) Gabriel Marcel un
Veilleur et un E’veilleur Lausanne: Les Editions l’Age d’Homme.
3. The contribution towards this turn is mostly associated with names of E. Levinas,
Michel Henry, Paul Ricouer, Jean-Luc Marion and others. See discussion in Janicaud et al.,
Phenomenology and ‘The Theological Turn’.
further towards possible appropriation of patristic ideas, whereas phenome-

nology itself is in a deep need of sanctification through the ecclesial and
Eucharistic theology of the Fathers.
Theology as Experience of God and Faith:

From Patristics to Phenomenology
Given that ‘theology’ was not a scriptural term and did not appear either in the
Old Testament or in the New Testament, so that the term theology was intro-
duced into the Christian context by Clement of Alexandria, there was no
uniform definition as to what was meant by theology in Greek patristics in
general. All Fathers were united in their view that theology is the organized
exposition of Christian doctrine, but they expressed differently their approach
to theology. A sharp contrast to Clement’s discursive definition of theology, as
demonstrated faith,4 can be found in Evagrius Ponticus’s famous affirmation
that theology is prayer: ‘If you are a theologian you will pray truly and if you
pray truly, you are a theologian.’5 The importance of these assertions is that if
truth is a subject of a theologian’s enquiry it is accessible only through per-
sonal participation in this truth in the worshipping experience. It is prayer that
forms the living experience of truth and it is only through prayer that the expe-
rience of truth is possible. Evagrius develops in the above quote the ideas of his
teacher St Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen) that the necessary condition to
be a theologian is to go through moral purification, katharsis.6
In a different place Evagrius employs the notion of communion in the context
of prayer: ‘Prayer is communion of the intellect with God’7, that is, theology is
communion with God. This aspect of theology is especially emphasized by
St Maximus the Confessor. According to St Maximus, theology is the last and
the highest ‘stage’ of spiritual development in man, that is, the accomplishing
mode of a Christian’s experience of deification:
When the intellect practices the virtues correctly, it advances in moral understand-
ing. When it practices contemplation, it advances in spiritual knowledge. . . . Finally,
the intellect is granted the grace of theology when, carried on wings of love beyond
4. See discussion of this in Danielou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture,

pp. 303–22.
5. Evagrius Ponticus, ‘On prayer’, 61, in Philokalia, vol. 1, p. 62. St Maximus the
Confessor rephrased this by implying that theology presupposes love of God: ‘He who truly
loves God prays entirely without distraction, and he who prays entirely without distraction
loves God truly’ (Four hundred texts on love, II.1, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 65).
6. St Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen), Orations, XXVII.3; XXVIII.1. The reference
to this dimension of theology can be found in the New Testament: ‘Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God’ (Mt. 5.8).
7. Evagrius, ‘On prayer’, 3, Philokalia, vol. 1, p. 57.
these two former stages, it is taken up into God and with the help of the Holy Spirit
discerns – as far as this is possible for the human intellect – the qualities of God.’8
For St Maximus, theology as the knowledge of God is granted only in the

mystical union with God, at the last stage of deification, which is not an instant
act, but preceded by a long spiritual development (katharsis). This highest
state of union with God was granted to saints; for example, to Moses who
entered on Mount Sinai the mysterious darkness of God,9 and to apostles at
the mountain of the Transfiguration.10 Developing this insight of St Maximus,
St Gregory Palamas argued later that it is the saints who are the only true
theologians, for only they received the full communion with God: ‘through
grace God in His entirety penetrates saints in their entirety, and the saints in
their entirety penetrate God entirely . . . ’11 Theology by the virtue of the saints
and the Fathers acquires, so to speak, an ever-present historical dimension,
because ‘the Fathers are liturgical persons who gather round the heavenly altar
with the blessed spirits. Thus they are always contemporary and present for
the faithful.’12 This is the reason why theology in a patristic sense can be seen
as the living incarnate Orthodox faith, which never ages and is always present
in the mind of the Church.
We see that in this approach to theology, rooted in the personal and ecclesial
experience of God, patristic theology appears as radically different from what
is understood by the term theology nowadays among academics when it is
defined as ‘science of religion’. Theology (theologia), in a concise form, accord-
ing to the Philokalia, ‘denotes . . . far more than the learning about God and
religious doctrine acquired through academic study. It signifies active and con-
scious participation in or perception of the realities of the divine world – in
other words, the realization of spiritual knowledge’.13
To strengthen and enlighten this definition in a contemporary setting let us
quote a passage (which contains a sort of critique with respect to intellectual
theology) by Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov):
Science created by humanity provides one with tools to express experience, but
cannot communicate true and saving knowledge without assistance of grace.
Knowledge of God is ontological but not abstract and intellectual. Thousands and
8. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Four hundred texts on love’, II.26, in Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 69.
9. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Two hundred texts on theology’, I.83, in Philokalia,
vol. 2, p. 132.
10. Ibid., II.15, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 141.
11. St Gregory Palamas, The Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defence of Those
who Devoutly Practise a Life of Stillness, in Philokalia, vol. 4, p. 421.
12. Vasileos (Archimandrite) (1984) Hymn of Entry, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, pp. 22–3.
13. See Glossary of the Philokalia for ‘Theology’ (any volume).
thousands of professional theologians receive high diplomas but in their essence

remain deeply ignorant in the realm of the ‘Spirit’.14 ‘There is only one way of train-
ing and educating in Church, that is, through schools and theological ‘science’. But
let me say, that this way is no more than palliative. Our time demonstrates with a
new force all ‘incoherence’ of theological sciences. Through science one cannot
grasp God existentially and to live by Him . . . Man acquires salvation not through
various scientific information: Through it we cannot achieve the state in which we
would be granted ‘to see God as He is’ (1 Jn 3.2).15
One can see from these definitions, belonging to different centuries, but essen-
tially similar, that theology is seen as spiritual knowledge, which is attained
through communion, participation16 and is a gift, bestowed on but extremely
few persons. Theology, according to this definition, is not a theory, or a science
with a definite subject, prior to investigation. On the contrary theology is the
mode of existence with God where the knowledge of God is the unfolding of
one’s own experience of life in God. In order to receive a gift of theologia one
must be nearly a saint. How then can one be a theologian, if one is not a saint?
How can theology be communicated and taught if it involves a personal expe-
rience of union with God? St Gregory Palamas suggested that those who have
no direct experience of God, but who trust the saints, can be regarded as true
theologians as well, but at a lower level;17 the fidelity to saints that Gregory
advocated acquires ontological character, because fidelity stretches across time
effectively overcoming it and winning our life against it.18 If the Fathers’ mind
is acquired through entering communion with them it means victory over time.
This victory is akin to love of a close person, when love as permanent commu-
nion erases spatial and temporal separation (diastema). To acquire the mind of
the Fathers means to love them in the sense of fidelity to them and implies the
change of one’s own mind (metanoia), so that the love of the Fathers, and hence
trust of them, constitutes an indispensable part of the Christian metanoia. It is
in this sense that a neo-patristic synthesis turns out to be a concrete and
specific realization of metanoia which is necessary for advancing modern the-
ology and its dialogue with science. Fidelity to the Fathers can be interpreted
as our co-presence with the Fathers and, conversely, the Fathers’ co-presence
14. S. Sakharov (2002) On Prayer (in Russian), Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of

St John the Baptist, p. 119 (author’s translation).
15. S. Sakharov (2003) Spiritual Conversations (in Russian), Essex: Stavropegic Monas-
tery of St John the Baptist, p. 131 (see also p. 139) (author’s translation).
16. See, on the difference between the two terms ‘participation’ and ‘communion’, Zizio-
ulas, Being as Communion, p. 94. The language of participation was used in the
twentieth century by G. Marcel in his discourse on faith (see later in this chapter).
17. See Allchin, A. M. (1966) ‘The appeal to experience in the Triads of St Gregory
Palamas’, Studia Patristica, 8, 323–8.
18. Compare with Marcel, G. (2002) Creative Fidelity, New York: Fordham University
Press, p. 147.
with us. However this co-presence takes place in the conditions of its empirical
absence. Thus the Fathers’ ‘presence in absence’ in our subjectivity indicates
our fidelity to them and their fidelity to us.
Here one can account for a fine difference in intentionality while reading
patristic texts. On the one hand, one can study a text as that information
which is encoded in it and in this case the text’s content is abstracted from that
personal consciousness which produced it, and on the other, one can study the
form of the same text (textual analysis) once again abstracting from the con-
sciousness that created it. In the first case there will be a passive study of the
text and in the second there will be its investigation. However, the acquisition
of the Fathers’ mind assumes that the text’s content and its form are related to
the concrete type of thinking and experience of a particular Father’s personal
expression of experience of God and the world as hypostasized by him. Such
a vision and apprehension of the text is possible if the person of a Father or a
Saint is seen through the text. To see and recognize the person through the text
is the same as to see the person of an artist behind their painting, that is, to live
through and by their feelings, that is, ultimately, to love them. Thus one can
conjecture that fidelity to saints (as well as faith in God) corresponds to some
hidden intentionality in human subjectivity that performs the eidetic reduction
of time and space and transforms the reading of the Fathers’ text into experi-
ence of communion with them in the conditions of their empirical absence.
Then one can deduce that a neo-patristic synthesis in theology, as well as in
theology and science, implies revealing and employing this latent intentionality.
The trust in the Fathers either through invocation of their names in worship or
through reading their texts assumes trusting their experience and hence the
whole experience of the Church. Then theology emerges as the description
of this experience in human words and concepts, and not as its definition.19
In this point theology resembles phenomenology in the sense that the latter is
also concerned with description of phenomena of human subjectivity rather
than their logical definitions. We see once again that it is possible to compre-
hend why phenomenological methodology can become very useful for mediation
between science and theology in the perspective of a neo-patristic synthesis.
In view of what has been discussed so far one can articulate the distinction
between theology as experience and science as research. It is not imperative for
actual scientific research to perform a reference to the past in order to com-
mune with the old knowledge (i.e. previous theories, which can be outdated),
because it is based on cumulative experience of generations in which the whole
temporal sequence of discoveries and theories is encoded in the present ‘final’
product of knowledge, so that it is impossible to develop one’s personal scien-
tific attitude to the world while being adherent only to some views of the past.
Faith, contrary to science, allows one to eliminate the rupture with the past by
19. Schmemann, A. (1972) ‘Liturgy and theology’, The Greek Orthodox Theological
Review 17, 86–100 (90).
entering communion with the Fathers and saints from any historical period
without distorting the wholeness and fullness of communion with God. Science
in its basic motivation fights against ‘presence in absence’ of unexplained
facticities, unceasingly attempting their conversion into ‘presence in presence’
of experiments, empirical observations and explanations. Faith contrasts with
science because of its deliberate decision to face the conditions of ‘presence in
absence’, when co-presence of a personal consciousness with a particular
Church Father or saint is easily combined with overall ecclesial experience.
One should clearly take into account that communion with saints, and trust
in them, gives to overall experience an ecclesial dimension that implies liturgi-
cal life, which is to link ecclesial experience to truth. The notion of truth, being
involved in a theological context, makes the experiential dimension of theol-
ogy even more vivid because, truth was linked, since St Ignatius of Antioch and
Irenaeus of Lyons, with life, understood Eucharistically. The Eucharist was
considered as a principle of truth in a quite characteristic way as a principle of
life and immortality. Since in our everyday life we are subject to decay and
death, the life in the Church (which can be understood as the acquisition of the
ecclesial hypostasis, that is of incorruption and immortality) is achievable
through the Eucharist, keeps us alive and provides us hope for immortality.
It is Christ, who is the centre of the Eucharist and is the principle of life.20
Proclaiming the truth of Christ, as truth of incorruptible and everlasting life,
Irenaeus justifies his view by appealing to the Eucharist which, according to
him, establishes his doctrine: ‘Our opinion is in harmony with the Eucharist,
and the Eucharist in turn confirms our opinion.’21 In other words it is the
Eucharist itself that forms a principle of truth: namely that participation in
truth is attained only through the Eucharist. Theology thus is seen as life
in Christ, life in unceasing communion with God, life through participation in
building the Body of Christ, that is, the Church. Theology thus is not only the
way, but also the reality of God conferred to the person in an ecstatic rapture,
in the form of the blessings of the age to come.22 The unique function of
Church’s Liturgy is to open for us the Kingdom of God. The remembrance of
the future Kingdom is that source of all in the Church and it is what theology
aspires to announce to the world.23 The task of theology is to restore the essen-
tially Christian vision of the world which can be achieved through liturgical
experience and liturgical witness.24 The fact that the Fathers used the formula
20. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, III.19.1 (see also IV.38.4).
21. Ibid., IV.18.5, in H. U. von Balthasar (ed.) (1990) The Scandal of the Incarnation:
Irenaeus ‘Against the Heresies’, San Francisco: Ignatius, p. 92.
22. Peter of Damaskos, ‘Twenty-four discourses’, in Philokalia, vol. 3, p. 277. The ques-
tion of what makes the theological experience true, can thus be considered as an ontological
question because, through its function in the Church’s tradition, theology creates reality in
the same way as God reveals Himself to us. Theology which is not ontological, that is, whose
mode of existence is non-hypostatic, is just an illusion and fallacy.
23. Schmemann, A. (1985) ‘Liturgy and eschatology’, Sobornost 7, pp. 6–14 (14).
24. Ibid., p. 12.
lex orandi est lex credendi (‘the law of worship is the law of faith’) meant for
them that theology was possible only in the Church as a fruit of new life in
Christ which is gifted to one through the participation in liturgical mystery
which manifests the eschatological fullness of the Church. Liturgical tradition
thus reveals itself as ontological condition of theology, that is, of true and proper
understanding of the Word of God.25 Theology, according to A. Schmemann,
‘is never autonomous, never self-contained and self-sufficient. Its credibility
lies not in its rational consistency, but in the fact that it points beyond itself –
beyond all words and categories, beyond all formulations and definitions – to
that experience and reality which alone gave birth to these words and can
alone ‘authenticate’ them.’26 Thus theology is apophatic and transcending. But
having its foundation in liturgy, theology becomes the content of our prayer
which, then, transforms into the state of the human spirit, who lives unceas-
ingly in God and the Holy Spirit.27 Theology, as constant questioning of one’s
own experience of existence and faith, through prayer, as G. Marcel said in a
different context, becomes invocation:28 the intentionality of human subjectiv-
ity switches from enquiry to invocation. Thus theology functions in the
conditions when the object of intentions transforms into the personal appeal
to the Spirit of God for help to strengthen one’s faith in life and in God.
Another important aspect of theology is that theology, and the truth which
it proclaims, are inconceivable without the presence of the Spirit of God.
Here the charismatic dimension of theology comes forward which makes it
inseparable from the liturgy. Indeed we experience the presence of God in the
Eucharist as the presence of his Word (Logos) either in written or spoken
form. But we know that God is present because we experience His presence in
the Spirit: ‘where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every grace, but
the Spirit is truth.’29 This indicates that only that theology is true which receives
its fulfilment in the Spirit. Charisma as another aspect of theology means thus
that the knowledge of God is revealed to us by Christ and through Christ: ‘No
one has ever seen God: the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father – he it is who revealed God to us’ (Jn 1.18). This indicates in turn that
theology is not just our searching for God, but rather God’s self-revelation to
us, His charismatic manifestations, where the knowledge of God is received by
us from God in response to our quest, which is faith. God grants to the human
person the knowledge of Him, because this person is known by God through
25. See Schmemann, A. (1963) ‘Theology and liturgical tradition’, in M. S. Sheperd (ed.),
Worship in Scripture and Tradition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
pp. 16–17.
26. Schmemann, ‘Liturgy and theology’, p. 96.
27. Sakharov, Spiritual Conversations, p. 138.
28. See Marcel, G. (1940) Du Refus a l’Invocation, Paris: Galllimard, p. 189.
29. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, III.24.1, in H. U. von Balthasar (ed.),
The Scandal of the Incarnation, p. 49.
the communion of faith (Cf. Gal. 4.9.). The distinctive feature of the charis-
matic nature of theological knowledge, if we compare this knowledge with
science, is that the knowledge is bestowed upon us by the Person of God Who
wants us to know Him, and Who is the active centre of theology, understood
as an ‘outflowing’ and a ‘shining’ from God Himself. The Eucharistic and
charismatic dimension of theology leads naturally to the conclusion that truth
affirmed by theology is ecclesial truth. But the Church, in order to avoid becom-
ing a semi-blind force, which by virtue of its social standing can be involved in
the process of destruction of the world, needs to listen to ‘reason from Above’,30
that is, to be sustained by the action upon it of the Holy Spirit.
We see thus that even the lower level of theologizing that is available to all
‘who trust the saints’, requires an enormous effort of participation in the Church
Tradition; for the experience of communion with God through ecclesial life
will condition someone’s claim to be a theologian.31 Theology in its spoken or
written form is able to create the conditions where persons can experience
God, but it does not provide any direct means of this experience, for direct
experience comes only from personal participation in ecclesial and liturgical
life. C. Yannaras develops a similar thought. Theology is the gift of God, the
fruit of interior purity of the Christian’s spiritual life, based mostly in the living
of Church’s truth empirically, that is, through what is experienced by the mem-
bers of her Body directly. The language, terms and expressions were introduced
in order to express the ecclesial experience, but this verbal or written word
about God is intrinsically linked to the vision of God, with the immediate
vision of the personal God.32 Theology, therefore, is not a theory of the world,
that is, a metaphysical system, but ‘an expression and formulation of the
Church’s experience . . . not an intellectual discipline but an experiential par-
ticipation, a communion’.33 Theology is not a passive meditation or reflection
upon some truth communicated through study; it is the trial of engagement
with another kind of reality and another propensity of life that is initiated
through the act of faith, not as a mode of cognitive experience, but as an
immediate encounter with trust, empathy and love of the other. Theology is
a dialogue with God through love of the other, the participation through
prayer in the eternal dialogue of love among the persons of the Holy Trinity.
30. Sakharov, On Prayer, p. 127 (author’s translation).

31. It is worth quoting here Fr Sophrony’s criticism with respect to what is meant by the-
ology in academic circles: ‘Human science provides a tool for expressing experience, but true
and saving knowledge it cannot deliver without assistance of Grace. Knowledge of God is of
ontological kind, but not of abstract and intellectual nature. Thousands and thousands of
theologians obtain high diplomas but in their essence remain deeply ignorant in the realms
of the Spirit.’ On Prayer, p. 119 (author’s translation).
32. Yamahas, Elements of Faith, pp. 15, 18.
33. Yannaras, C. (1972) ‘Theology in present-day Greece’, St Vladimir’s Seminary
Theological Quarterly 16, 195–214 (207).
Theology is never a monologue but dialogue and thus is possible only as a per-
sonal mode of participation in being and God.34
Theology implies personal involvement and experience in a way the other
subjects do not. As theologians one can not be detached from, and be objective
(in an ordinary sense of this word) with respect to, what one studies. If one
remains ‘outside’ the subject, one is not able to understand it properly: in the
words of Diadochos of Photiki ‘nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophiz-
ing about God when it is without Him.’35 In order to theologize truly one
should be part of the experience. It is seen from here that Orthodoxy conveys
such a sense of theology and perception of God different from that conveyed
by academic theology in the modern West nowadays. Theology as a mode of
human existence assumes the presence of God in extraordinary conditions of
his empirical and even logical absence. These conditions can be characterized
by the word ‘faith’. This means that in spite of the fact that theology involves
human language and reason, which is employed in its ultimate limit, and which
requires an extreme vigour in its exercising, theology does not depend simply
upon reason. Faith enters in, personal faith: ‘Faith is the substance of things
hoped for, manifestation of realities unseen’ (Heb. 11.1). Faith is not a psycho-
logical attitude but a state of being which provides ‘an ontological relationship
between man and God’.36 In St Maximus the Confessor’s words: ‘Faith is a
relational power or a relationship which brings about the immediate, perfect
and supranatural union of the believer with the God in whom he believes.’37
St Maximus elsewhere calls faith a kind of knowledge: ‘Faith is knowledge
that cannot be rationally demonstrated . . .’38 Here he implies something very
similar to Clement of Alexandria, namely that faith appears naturally in those
cognitive situations which cannot be subjected to demonstration.39 However,
Maximus proceeds further by affirming that because of its indemonstrability
‘faith is a supranatural relationship through which, in an unknowable and so
indemonstrable manner, we are united with God in a union which is beyond
intellection.’40 Faith which is a sort of knowledge and which lies in the founda-
tion of ordinary logical knowledge manifests itself as an existential condition.
However this existential condition is implicit and inaccessible to the reflection
of discursive reason if it is withdrawn from faith. Thus one of the functions of
theology is to explicate this faith as an existential condition of humanity.
34. Compare with T. Torrance’s views on dialogical nature of theology in (1996)

Theological Science, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, p. 39.
35. Diadochos of Photiki, ‘On spiritual knowledge’, 7, in Philokalia, vol. 1, p. 254.
36. Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 16.
37. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology, the Divine economy, and
virtue and vice’, II.7 (Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 189).
38. Ibid.
39. See Clement of Alexandria, Stromaties II.4.
40. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, II.7, in Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 190.
It follows then that when one studies theology with faith one cannot be
detached from what is studied because faith assumes participation in the object
studied and union with it. This indicates that theology has a distinctive posi-
tion among other forms of knowledge and sciences because of its subject
matter, which is God: if one wants to know something of God, one must par-
ticipate in Him, to subject oneself to a trial and experiment. One’s knowledge
of God can not be objective (in the sense of modern rationality) because God
cannot be abstracted from participation and union with him and hence to
become an or the ‘object’. For a theologian God is rather the subject and that
knowledge of God depends on how this one is involved in the subject. One’s
knowledge is relational with regard to what is studied since the subject of the
study is accessible only through one’s personal communion with Him. As a
result, dogmas and theological propositions provide only some outlines of
human experience of the divine, but they never substitute for or exhaust this
experience itself. Understood in this sense, the theological system as a set of
written or verbal formulations is intrinsically apophatic because in its usage
of human thought and language it is incapable of exhausting the content of
those entities it predicates for.
Since theology, as activity, demands participation in the subject that is to be
comprehended, it inevitably presupposes that there is a genuine object of the
theological knowledge, for participation in something is not possible if it does
not exist as object in the sense that the ontological mode of this object is dif-
ferent in comparison with that of the person who makes enquiry.41 It is in this
sense that one can speak about the ‘rationality’ of theology in order to save it
from being dissolved in the sheer irrationality and uncontrollable mysticism
manifesting through varied phenomena of consciousness: the subject-matter of
theology, or its ‘object’, is God, and theology as participation is possible as
long as there is someone in which one can participate. In spite of the fact
that theology in its written and verbal transmission through history has a
this-worldly side, it is ultimately driven by its own object, which is God
(Cf. Jn 1.18, Gal. 4.9) and hence true theology is open to the infinite self-
disclosure of its object. This way of thought allows one to argue that theology
implies a special understanding of objectivity, different from that which is
prevalent in modern scientific discourse and scientific philosophy (the natural
attitude) and in which objectivity means detachment from the object, or, in
different words, where the object is posed as transcendent to the field of
consciousness. For in the natural attitude, in the disclosure of an object, as if it
is in itself, all passions and emotions involved in the enquiry should be removed
from our activity and any subjective influence on the object suspended. In
other words, in order to know an object one usually thinks that one should get
rid of any a priori assumptions and views which can influence the vision of the
41. Theology, unlike classical phenomenology, does not restrict itself by the immanent
sphere of subjectivity and transcends towards the otherness of the world and subjectivity.
object before it is studied. This is supposed to be possible because the reason

(pertaining to classical rationality) can separate itself from attachments in
order to be detached from the finite object (this can be described as transcen-
dence of an object). In theology, which involves not only the discursive mind
but another intentionality (which, as we will see later, is associated in Christian
anthropology with spiritual intellect nous) that makes it possible to exercise
the direct apprehension of metaphysical realities and the divine, and which lies
in the foundation of the workings of the reason, no prior assessment of the
attachments to its object, that is to God, is possible, for the intellect is revealed
to itself only through its relationship with the divine, which means that any
imagined detachment of the intellect from its object would mean the immedi-
ate cessation not only of its function, but existence as such.
It then becomes clear that that Divine which is affirmed in terms of partici-
pation and communion has nothing to do with the God of philosophers, which
is posed in human subjectivity by means of abstractions and intelligible series
of causation as the concluding term and transcending entity, causa sui in
Heidegger’s terms,42 hence human subjectivity can always doubt its reality and
its existential meaning. In phenomenological philosophy this doubt was
expressed in the famous 58 of Husserl’s Ideas I43 where Husserl argued that
the notion of the transcendent God who allegedly transcends both the world
and the field of ‘absolute’ consciousness and thus is posed in the natural atti-
tude as existing objectively out there, that notion must be subjected to the
transcendental epoché (phenomenological reduction) so that the question
about its reality is suspended and thus the very theology of a transcendent
God is brought to a methodological halt.44 It is important to realize here that
‘transcendency pertaining to God’45 takes place not through an ascending series
of the world phenomena but through observing ‘marvellous teleologies’46 in
Nature which characterize the activity of consciousness. Then arises the ques-
tion about the ground of facticity of this same constitutive consciousness as the
source of ‘endlessly increasing value-possibilities and value-actualities’, the
ground ‘which naturally does not have the sense of a physical-causal reason’.47
Husserl intentionally avoids any attempt to approach this issue from the
side of an a priori religious consciousness, that is, to affirm divine being that
42. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 72.

43. Husserl, E. (1998) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 133–4.
44. This was the central point of ‘objection’ of D. Janicaud in his book (1990) Le tour-
nant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Combas: Éditions de l’éclat, to attempts of
extending phenomenology towards theology. (For the English translation and further discus-
sion see in Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and ‘The Theological Turn’.)
45. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, p. 134.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
is transcendent to the world as well as to that consciousness which seeks for

its own foundation. The important thing is that, according to Husserl, this
‘divine’ would be ‘therefore an “absolute” in a sense totally different from that
in which consciousness is an absolute, just as it would be something transcen-
dent in a sense totally different from that in which the world is something
transcendent’.48 Unfortunately Husserl does not explain precisely the meaning
he ascribes to this difference between absoluteness of the divine and absolute-
ness of consciousness. The explication of this difference could constitute the
phenomenological understanding of theology. In spite of this, by proclaiming
the transcendence of God to consciousness his next step is to reduce thus
affirmed God and to remove the whole subject of the Divine from the phenom-
enological project. The major problem in this procedure is exactly theological:
it does not discern between God as a mental construction that is subject to any
possible operation of consciousness, such as reduction, for example, and the
living God of faith whose presence in consciousness is exactly that ontological
link which makes this consciousness possible at all and which can be cut off
only in abstraction. It is clear that the ‘absolute’ consciousness of Husserl that
through the very mode of its being expresses our existential participation or
communion with God cannot bracket or reduce the living God because by so
doing this consciousness attempts the impossible: to deprive itself of its own
foundation and hence, de facto, to destroy itself as consciousness in God. Here,
by using a religious language, consciousness degenerates and falls into an illu-
sion of its might, full of pride and sinful attitude.
Now one needs to look at the difference between the affirmation of a philo-
sophical God and the living God of faith in the perspective of what is known
as Eastern Orthodox apophaticism. In fact, there is nothing special and new in
the transcendental reduction of the transcendent God performed by classical
phenomenology, because what is effectively happening here is that the idea of
God is deprived of any objectification outside the generating consciousness,
that is, its transcendence cannot acquire an ontological quality, remaining
transcendent but only within the immanence of consciousness. This situation
corresponds precisely to what was advocated for centuries by Eastern Ortho-
dox apophaticism: namely the dismissal of all intellectual and philosophical
idols of God as pretending to exhaust the reality of the living and personal
God. Any human image of the transcendent God was understood as incom-
plete and inadequate. However, in the apophatic approach the presence of
God is still maintained in spite of that fact that God cannot be approached
creatively and constructively by sheer reason. On the one hand, it is clear that
God is explicitly absent for the discursive reason; on the other hand, God is
present to the faithful through relationship and communion, in such a way
that allows one to express this paradoxical experience of ‘presence in absence’
through music, painting, poetry etc. However, this experience cannot be
48. Ibid.
verbalized and expressed in accomplished discursive definitions. It is exactly

this paradoxical ‘presence in absence’ of God which allows the human spirit to
make the distinction between what is absent (and hence always suspected in
inadequacy of its expression in concept and then legitimately bracketed away),
and what is present (i.e. what is left after the bracketing of conceptual idols)
and hence allegorically expressed in mundane realities without any risk of
being mixed with the ineffable essence of God. In fact, one can say that the
very bracketing of the conceptual idols of God is possible only because the
resulting absence of God, which always lures human imagination, is compen-
sated by the reality of its concrete presence, manifested in the very possibility
of thinking about God.49 This means that it is the implicit presence of God
in all acts of human subjectivity that cannot be phenomenologically reduced
(i.e. bracketed as transcendent and ‘non-real’) because if this could happen,
then the very consciousness would be bracketed away and hence eliminated.
In other words, it could be said that the core of the presence of God that is
widely thematized in arts, stories about ascetics and holy people, constitutes
the life-world, the lived world of immediate indwelling and events of hypo-
static existence, which cannot be reduced further without eliminating with
itself the very immanent sphere of that human subjectivity which is capable of
thematizing the life-world and creating abstractions from it, resulting in an
idea of the transcendent God. It is in this sense that God who is immanent to
human consciousness, and perceived by it as sheer presence, cannot be reduced
further without drastic existential consequences, that is, the destruction of
consciousness itself. But this sheer presence of God that can be described as
sheer existential mysticism is not something which is easily available for reflec-
tion in the natural attitude, and hence the reason why any further reduction of
the facticity of human subjectivity as a fight against the natural attitude is not
possible. God is present in the givenness of every phenomenon in a mode
where no logical articulation is possible. And this is the reason why that con-
sciousness which thinks and talks about God has a fundamentally unique,
multihypostatic character, which cannot be reduced to one single and univer-
sal and anonymous transcendence of God, which can be objectified and hence
bracketed away. It is here that phenomenology experiences a serious difficulty
49. J. L. Marion in his polemics with Dominique Janicaud provides four arguments
against Janicaud’s objections to revelation based on Husserl’s bracketing of God as transcen-
dent in 58 of his Ideas I. One of them is similar to our conviction that the presence of the
Divine is inerasable from the facticity of consciousness. Let us quote Marion: ‘Husserl submits
what he names “God” to the reduction only in so far as he defines it by transcendence (and
insofar as he compares this particular transcendence with that, in fact quite different, of the
object in the natural attitude); and yet in Revelation theology, God is likewise, indeed espe-
cially, characterized by radical immanence to consciousness, and in this sense would be
confirmed by a reduction’ (Being Given, pp. 242–3; See also n. 4 at p. 343)).
because it is incapable of taking on board the idea about the variety of

charisma of the Holy Spirit which descends upon the multihypostatic but
consubstantial human race. Unlike the Logos which is present in human rational-
ity in a universal way, the Holy Spirit effectively creates the variety of the
life-worlds which phenomenology initially wants to bracket away as irrelevant
empirical multiplicity. However, this kind of reduction of personhoods risks
the very phenomenological project, because it makes the whole idea of the
field of immanent consciousness very similar to that abstract and anonymous
consciousness of classical rationalism against which phenomenology was striv-
ing. It is clear here, that the danger of dismissing theology on the grounds of
transcendental reduction of the impersonal metaphysical God is, in fact, linked
to the oblivion of the primary existential fact that the participation and union
with God is happening in the conditions of multihypostatic embodiment or
incarnation. Without taking into account this primary fact, that is without
laying down its foundations in a concrete existence-in-situation, theology
indeed becomes inconceivable, and this is why, when Eastern Orthodox the-
ology insisted on the experiential understanding of theology as participation
and communion, it always implied that both are possible and necessary only
on the personal (hypostatic) level. Then, because of the personal attachment of
the spiritual intellect to its ‘object’, that is, to God, one can achieve an ‘objec-
tive’ knowledge of the ‘object’, that is, God. The difference between the
commonly accepted anonymous, that is, impersonal collective objectivity in
science and that in theology, can be described as the difference between detach-
ment from all personal presuppositions about the object that is required by
scientific objectivity, on the one hand, and the impossibility to be detached
from its ‘object’ in theology, understood as personal experience and participa-
tion in the Divine, on the other. In the words of T. Torrance: ‘it is sheer
attachment to the object that detaches us from our preconceptions, while we
detach ourselves from our preconceptions in order to be free for the object,
and therefore free for true knowledge of it.’50 One must add to this that the
dialectics of attachments and detachments in theology implies its essentially
personal character. The knowledge of God can be said to be objective and
true, that is, not accidentally subjective and individual, because it is the engage-
ment with God that disengages us from any attachment to different things that
could eventually distort the vision of God. In a practical sense it implies that
whatever the topic of theological ‘disciplines’ could be, the first and most
important ‘datum’ for theology remains the existential event of liturgical expe-
rience.51 It is this experience that, in Torrance’s words, delivers us as well as
the whole Church to that ‘sheer attachment’ to God in His Kingdom.
50. Torrance, Theological Science, p. 36.

51. Schmemann, ‘Liturgy and theology’, pp. 96–7.
Theology and Anthropology
It can be seen from the foregoing discussions that the unique nature of theo-
logical enquiry, as grounded in participation and direct experience of God, in
comparison with that of science and philosophy, implies a certain anthropol-
ogy and a very special stance as regards the human abilities to know. The very
distinction between abstract philosophical theology and the possibility of
experiential theologia of mystics and ascetics, as it is seen through a theologi-
cal mind, implies the presence of two different cognitive faculties in man,
which manifest the layered structure of human subjectivity. Classical philoso-
phy and especially phenomenology would object to this point by claiming the
integrity of the field of consciousness and qualifying the distinction between
the ‘natural’ reason, and the ‘supernatural reason’, pertaining to experiential
theology, as empirical distinctions made within the natural attitude of reason.
It is by denying this last mentioned distinction that phenomenology overlooks
the differentiation of two intentionalities in human subjectivity: one which is
directed towards the empirical world and intelligible realm, and the other
which is concerned with the underlying foundation of consciousness as such,
and whose existence is itself a mode of participation in the Divine and thus
constitutes the immediate existential condition of humanity.
One needs to recall, briefly, how this difference in cognitive faculties (which
Western tradition named ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ reason) is reflected in
Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology. The patristic model differs from
the modern, widely accepted understanding of the human person as a being
endowed with a reasoning brain, consciousness, will and emotions. The early
Fathers considered the human person not only in the light of the dualism
between body and discursive reason (dianoia, i.e. intellect in its contemporary
sense, or just mind). They made a subtle distinction between dianoia and nous,
where the latter stands for the faculty of apprehending truth, which is superior
to discursive reason. Nous can be broadly explained in modern language as
spiritual insight, or as intellect which, while exercising discursive thinking
reaches its limit, beyond which logic can not be used anymore; instead the
intellect (reason) experiences silence that gives way to nous, which can also be
interpreted now as spiritual intellect. Dianoia (reason, mind) functions as the
discursive, conceptualizing and logical faculty in man; it employs such cogni-
tive operations as dissection, analysis, measurement and the use of mathematics.
Dianoia is functioning in the natural attitude and never questions its own
limits and foundations, that is, it never transcends its own limits and thus
exerts a certain violence on itself.
Thus dianoia, while being a capacity of thinking about the God of philosophy
and discernment of experience as it appears at the empirical level, cannot be
used for theologia as experience of a direct communion with God. St Maximus
the Confessor expressed this with an outstanding clarity.
According to the wise, we cannot use our intelligence to think about God at the
same time as we experience Him, or have an intellection of Him while we are
perceiving Him directly. By ‘think about God’ I mean speculate about Him on the
basis of an analogy between Him and created beings. By ‘perceiving Him directly’
I mean experiencing divine or supranatural realities through participation. By ‘an
intellection of Him’ I mean the simple and unitary knowledge of God which is
derived from created beings. . . . By ‘experience’ I mean spiritual knowledge
actualised on a level that transcends all thought; and by ‘direct perception’ I mean
a supra-intellective participation in what is known.52
The dianoia is explained in the Glossary of The Philokalia as rational knowl-

edge of a lower order than spiritual knowledge; it does not imply any direct
apprehension or perception of the inner essences or principles of created beings,
still less of divine truth itself. The apprehension in the latter sense is possible
only by nous (spiritual intellect) and is beyond the scope of the reason.
In contradistinction to dianoia the nous (spiritual insight, or spiritual intellect)
works by direct apprehension. It does not reason from premises to conclusions
by strict logical steps, but it apprehends the truth through a kind of inner vision.
Nous, according to the definition of The Philokalia, is the ‘highest faculty in
man, through which – provided it is purified – he knows God or the inner essences
or principles of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual per-
ception’.53 According to St Maximus ‘The intellect [ nous] is the organ of wisdom,
the intelligence that of spiritual knowledge.’54 The Fathers made a clear distinc-
tion between knowledge in the ordinary sense, as the knowledge of things
(‘natural’ knowledge), that is relative knowledge,55 and that of spiritual (that is
authentic) knowledge,56 which by its function transcends the natural realm and
aims to apprehend intelligible realities and the realm of the Divine (‘supernatural’
knowledge).57 This belonging, in a different passage, is described as the participa-
tion in the divine radiance when the intellect becomes totally filled with light.58
This knowledge as True light comes through the grace of the Holy Spirit.
52. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, IV.31, in Philokalia,

pp. 242–3. See also ‘Two hundred texts on theology’, I.8, in Philokalia, p. 115.
53. The entry ‘Intellect’ in the Glossary of the Philokalia.
54. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, III.31, in Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 215.
55. Ibid., IV.29, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 242.
56. St Maximus ascribes to spiritual knowledge the power of unification of people who
can, prior to this, possess different opinions and thus links this knowledge to the presence of
‘spiritual unifying light’ in it. (Ibid., V.82, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 280). Spiritual light con-
tributes to catholicity of humanity: it is through nous that humankind can affirm itself as
multihypostatic consubstantiality.
57. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, V.68, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p.
276.
58. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Four hundred texts on love’, II.48, in Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 73. The usage of the terminology of light by St Maximus brings an analogy with the Latin
distinction between natural light of the human mind (lumen naturale) and the True Light of
God. The natural light can reveal itself through dianoia whereas the True Light is accessible
only through immediate experience of God by nous.
Just as it is impossible for the eye to perceive sensible objects without the light of
the sun so the human intellect cannot engage in spiritual contemplation without the
light of the Spirit . . . The faculties which search out divine realities were implanted
by the Creator in the essence of human nature at its very entrance into being; but
divine realities themselves are revealed to man through grace by the power of the
Holy Spirit descending upon him.59
In a different place St Maximus uses another way of expressing the meaning

of nous by employing the notion of wisdom.
Natures endowed with intelligence and intellect participate in God through their
very being, through their capacity for well-being, that is for goodness and wisdom,
and through the grace that gives them eternal being. This, then, is how they know
God. They know God’s creation . . . by apprehending the harmonious wisdom to
be contemplated in it.60
We thus see that the association of nous with grace, Spirit and wisdom makes
the ecclesial dimension in the desire to attain the divine realities indispensable,
for the action of the Spirit upon history takes place in the Eucharistic context
of the Church.61 One must not also forget about love as the condition of true
knowledge, which is also the achievement of nous. ‘Love . . . frees the intellect
from arrogance and always equips it to advance in knowledge.’62 Love and
self-control, once they have purified the soul’s passible aspect, always keep
open the way to spiritual knowledge.63
A direct apprehension of the Divine by the nous is very close to what is sim-
ply called faith. For faith, for many, is a gift of God’s grace, which should not
be discussed or positioned in the whole hierarchy of human faculties. One can
assume that the nous provides conditions for faith to be intentional: if some-
one wants to find God through his reason, he can do it, theoretically speaking,
if he develops his nous. It is clear, at the same time, that the exercise of rational
faculties in order to develop the nous, requires one, in a sense, to transcend the
59. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, IV.17,18, in Philokalia,

p. 239.
60. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Four hundred texts on love’, III.24, in Philokalia,
vol. 2, p. 86.
61. As we already mentioned the so-called ‘scientific wisdom’ is fundamentally incom-
plete if it is not related to Eucharistic experience. Science can be considered as para-Eucharistic
work, but it lacks the eschatological attitude (communion with the age to come) which can
alone bring a scientist to metanoia, or transfigured wisdom. See in this respect Nesteruk, A.
(2006) ‘Wisdom through communion and personhood’, in H. Meisinger, W. Drees and
Z. Liana (eds), Wisdom or Knowledge? London and New York: T&T Clark International,
pp. 73–90.
62. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Four hundred texts on love’, IV.60, in Philokalia,
vol. 2, p. 107.
63. Ibid., IV.57, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 107.
rational faculties which one starts with. This is an important observation, for
it asserts that if the nous by its constitution and function overcomes the empir-
ical priority of the discursive mind (dianoia), it reveals itself as the ground of
dianoia, for the nous manifests itself in the otherness of the dianoia. Faith
sometimes is juxtaposed with knowledge. In our context this juxtaposition
means one of nous with dianoia.
The nous thus provides a foundation and a pointer for the reason to infer to
the existence of God from the created things; that is, to experience the founda-
tion of all things as correlates of the dianoia-like intentionality in the otherness
of the dianoia itself, understood as the ‘ground’ of its contingent facticity. This
inference constitutes faith in the existence of God as the giver of knowledge
about things granted to us in existential events (this faith is more than any
logical proof and which is not an abstract construct of metaphysics). This faith
is not the exaltation of the logical mind to its limiting capacity but the gift of
grace as the initiation of another intentionality in human subjectivity that is
articulated through the nous: ‘Faith is true knowledge, the principles of which
are beyond rational demonstration; for faith makes real for us things beyond
intellect [mind, A.N.] and reason’ (cf. Heb. 11.1).64 Faith makes it possible to
initiate that intentionality which is directed towards realities that are present
in their absence. Faith, whose organ is nous is such a faculty which allows one
to transcend beyond general conditions of knowledge that are imposed by
mind and reason with respect to the things from this age, that is, to transcend
the conditions of presence in presence.
The very possibility of theologia as experience of God is thus implied in the
human constitution, as a part of the human condition in general, which admits
the distinction between dianoia and nous and it is through nous that man can
have experience of God and to be in communion with Him. Nous thus is not
only the organ of faith, but the centre of human existence and thus faith and
theology as the realization of the function of nous receive their interpretation
as existential functions. Nous is related to the essence of the human person,
that is, to that individual and distinct link that a person has with God, and
which makes this person different from another: it refers to hypostatic proper-
ties in man which transcend what is naturally differentiated (body and soul,
for example). In patristic thought, body and soul constitute the natural com-
position, which is held in the human hypostasis. The hypostasis of man, being
not only of human nature, is rooted in the Logos of God, that is, it is itself
enhypostasized. Nous as a mode of human existence, has close relationship to
man’s hypostasis; it is understood by some Fathers as the divine part of man.
Nous is identified by St Maximus with the totality, or wholeness of man, that
is, rather with the mode of human existence that is called by him ‘the inner
64. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Two hundred texts on theology’, I.9, Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 116.
self’65 (the person). The realization of the potential of a person towards full
existence makes a challenge for nous; if man succeeds in establishing their
ultimate personhood, to make ‘a monk of the inner self’,66 their nous will be fit
for theologia, that is, mystical contemplation of God to the extent which is
possible for humans.
The presence of nous in human constitution allows one to make a transition
from the faculty of dianoia, that is, of scientific wisdom which deals with the
question ‘What is truth?,’ to another question ‘Who is truth?,’ making thus
an existential sense of the words of the Sinaite revelation ‘I am Who I am.’
Theology then is also personal and unique for everyone who engages in it,
having only some common connotations from a subject to subject within its
empirical representation in the propensities of dianoia. This is the reason why
theology, unlike science, cannot rely only on the anonymous discursive rules
of dianoia and should always sustain itself through personal experience of the
ecclesial body, especially ascetics and mystics seeking for communion with
God. All theological treatises written for study and communication on the col-
lective level are never complete without attaining experience of the Fathers and
spiritual writers. As we argued earlier, humanity cannot be fully understood
without taking on board all varieties of ascetic and liturgical experience.
It should be clearly seen that our discussion about the difference between
dianoia and nous, and psychological and epistemological hierarchy among
them, was itself conducted by us in the natural attitude of the human mind,
which attempts to consider both faculties separately and empirically. However,
it is clear from what we have said before that this separation itself is possible
only because dianoia and nous are intrinsically linked with each other existen-
tially, so to speak. This is the reason why if someone doubts the relevance of
this classification and is prone to ask a question of the foundation of the nous,
one will have to respond that the very question of the further foundation of
nous is itself formulated in the natural attitude, that is, only within the capac-
ity of dianoia, and therefore this question as such is an indirect manifestation
of the implicitly present nous which, through dianoia, enquires about the con-
ditions of their functioning. However if the reduction of their empirical
difference is performed, the integrity and unity of dianoia and nous reveals
itself through the sheer existence of human subjectivity, which is contemplated
through this unity. It is only because of the separation between dianoia and
nous in the natural attitude that the vicious circle in reasoning appears to
enquire on what comes first. The break of this circle lies in the very fact of
existence in which the implied nous and dianoia are inseparable. It is this
primary existential event that forms the ground for faith, for to exist means to
believe in the reality of existence. God thus enters human existence as the
trustworthy ground of reality and truth of this existence. The certitude of faith
65. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Four hundred texts on love’, IV.50, in Philokalia,
vol. 2, p. 106.
66. Ibid.
is certitude of existence. Faith precedes knowledge in the sense that one should
believe in reality and possibility of knowledge in order to know. This entails,
as a by-product, a simple observation that all philosophical proofs of existence
of God either presuppose faith in God prior to this proof, or these proofs have
no theological sense at all, in attempting an intellectual transcendence and thus
remaining in the certitude of dianoia detached somehow from nous.67
However, dianoia is a legitimate tool in analysing faith as it appears to this
same dianoia in its empirical mode. This means that philosophy can and must
analyse faith in spite of the fact that it can only effectively work in the condi-
tions when the presence of faith in the background of all discursive analysis is
not articulated and even not accepted as a viable methodological option. The
philosophical project with respect to faith, and this is the stance of phenome-
nology, is to remain in the limits of genuine immanence, that is, to attempt to
construct knowledge that would be absolutely one with its object and safe
from any doubt. In other words, phenomenology fights against any transcen-
dence and this is the reason why faith, along with other faculties, appears to
be, for a philosopher, as no more than at a level of its empirical functioning
and does not entail any apodictic necessity. This necessity is ascribed only to
reason – dianoia which, in its unconscious detachment from nous, hopes to
establish fullness of knowledge. Seen theologically this ideal of knowledge is
unattainable, because it is only in God that being and knowing are one (‘all in
all’),68 but for us they are separate. According to St Maximus the Confessor,
God knows existent things as the products of his own acts of will69 and this fea-
ture of God that human beings attempt to imitate by proclaiming, according to
their will, that there must be some immanence between being and knowledge,
which would guarantee its fullness and would not require any transcendence.
Even being an image of God, man exists in actual incapacity of achieving the
unity and identity between being and knowing, because of the creaturely condi-
tions incapable of sustaining its incarnate existence according to his knowledge.
The monistic ideal of philosophy and science, as enduring through history and
persevering through constant transitions from life to death can then be thought
only in an ‘evolutionary sense’ ascribing some absolute character and eschato-
logical vision of humanity as a never-ending accomplishment.
Nous, as the organ of faith, allows human beings to realize the tragedy of
their existence between two poles, namely of mundane realities and the infinite,
and it is this tragedy which makes it possible for them to stretch the dianoia
beyond its normal use. St Isaac the Syrian wrote explicitly about the limits of
67. G. Marcel expressed a similar thought in rather secular language: ‘we cannot substi-
tute proof for belief; but what is more, there is a profound sense in which proof presupposes
belief, in which it can only help to evoke an inner reaffirmation of the person who feels within
himself a cleavage between his faith and what he takes to be a special requirement of his
reason’ (Creative Fidelity, p. 179).
68. Cf. (1 Cor. 15.28).
69. Cf. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Ambigua’, 7.
reason, stating that knowledge that is accessible to reason can be thought of as

legitimate and true only if it deals with the finite things in the natural world:
‘Knowledge adheres to the domain of nature, in all its ways . . . Knowledge is
not able to make anything without materials. Knowledge does not venture to
step over unto the domain which lies outside nature.’70 That is why accurate
designations can only be established concerning earthly things. This is not the
case, however, if reason trespasses the boundaries of its legitimate sphere and
attempts to discuss things which are not of this world. In this case it is ‘faith
[that] makes its course above nature’,71 such that ‘knowledge is united to faith
and . . . lifted up from the service of earthly things towards the place of its
creation, acquiring also other things’72 that is, towards the things of the Age to
Come, which do not possess a true name but can only be apprehended by
simple cognition which is exalted ‘above all perceptibility’,73 – all signs, forms,
all colours and composite denominations. When therefore ‘knowledge elevates
itself above earthly things and – faith swallows knowledge, gives anew birth to
it, wholly spiritual’,74 the fathers use, concerning this knowledge, any designa-
tions they like, for no one knows their real names.75 The function of dianoia
finishes exactly at that point when the situation of ‘presence in presence’
pertaining to scientific knowledge, as well as the intended immanentism of
philosophies cease to be adequate. Knowledge aspires to something that it
cannot adequately express but which is existentially felt by means of other
ontological qualities of existence. Here comes the nous with its ability to insert
wisdom into the ambitions of reason and to impose a healthy apophaticism
which restrains dianoia in its ambitions to deduce God from creation and
subjects it to the guidance of faith. Nous directs the dianoia towards breaking
the naivety of the intended epistemological monism and all pretensions for
reaching ultimate truth, and, thus, towards humble and mysterious living with
the ‘presence in absence’ of God.
Participation, Incarnation and Existential Faith
Our account of what is meant by theology, in that particular form of commu-

nication aimed to the reader, has had, so far, a descriptive character and thus
70. St Isaac the Syrian, Homily 51, in A. J. Wensinck (tr.), Mystical Treatises by Isaac of
Nineveh, p. 243.
71. Ibid., p. 243.
72. Ibid., p. 246.
73. Ibid., p. 246.
74. Ibid., p. 250.
75. A few centuries later Nicholas of Cusa affirmed a similar view: ‘in relation to lan-
guage, apophaticism entails not simply silence, but the acknowledgement that “because in all
speech it [infinite wisdom] is unexpressable, there can be no limit to the means of expressing
it”’ (see Duclow, D. F. (1974) ‘Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa: Infinity, Anthropol-
ogy and the Via Negativa’, Downside Review, 92, pp. 102–8 (107)).
itself was conducted within the natural attitude of human mind. This implies
that in spite of all things we have said about theology as experience, we did not
describe the structures of this experience and its content, because they cannot
be subjected to reflection of the anonymous discursive reason. This happens
because theologia, as we argued earlier, is personal endeavour, the fact of
whose success or failure can be communicated in common language but whose
inward dynamics as existence and participation remains out of reach by imper-
sonal rationality. Here lies a fundamental difference between theologia and
other forms of experience, and also its mystery. This mystery is personhood.
For as personhood, or hypostatic existence, cannot be communicated from
one to another, communion with God, as the intensity of life through all its
moments, cannot be communicated from one being to another. It can be
expressed outwardly by means of a story but, as is known from writings of
the Fathers and ascetics, all these stories are different in their concreteness
and circumstances, having similarities only in patterns of faith expressed
through references to Scriptures and the cumulative experience of the Church
(i.e. tradition). Thus, when talking about theologia by using dianoia, we
assume within this anonymous dianoia the presence of multiple persons, who,
while possessing this dianoia in order to communicate general ideas, contain
in themselves something which cannot be grasped by this dianoia and must be
admitted as radically irreducible to any common form of description. It is here
that dianoia demonstrates its insufficiency not only to grasp the Divine but
even other human persons.76
In a strange way the very existence of theologia, as described empirically
from the perspective of the natural attitude, presupposes the multiplicity of
persons. St Basil the Great expressed this thought while commenting on God’s
command to man to ‘multiply’ in Gen. 1.28: ‘This blessing pertains to the
church. Let the theology not be circumscribed in one person, but let the Gospel
of salvation be proclaimed to all the earth.’77 Persons are, on the one hand,
capable of communicating the patterns of their religious experience; on the
other, they remain as monads, impenetrable and thus ontologically different.
76. G. Marcel expressed the inability of the discursive thinking to grasp other persons in
following words: ‘The other, in so far as he is other, only exists for me in so far as I am open
to him, in so far as he is a Thou. But I am only open to him in so far as I cease to form a circle
within myself, inside which I somehow place the other, or rather his idea; for inside this circle
the other becomes the idea of the other, and the idea of the other is no longer
the other qua other, but the other qua related to me; and in this condition he is uprooted
and taken to bits, or at least in process of being taken to bits’ (Marcel, G. (1965) Being and
Having, London: Collins, p. 116). O. Clément, expressed a similar thought in a different way:
‘The person, set by its very brilliance beyond the reach of rational analysis, is revealed in love.
This disclosure surpasses all other ways of knowing a human being; it requires prayer, atten-
tiveness, even to the point of dying to oneself; knowing a person is unknowing, the darkness
of night made luminous by love’ (Clément, On Human Being, p. 31).
77. St Basil the Great (2005) On the Human Condition N. V. Harrison (tr.) Crestwood:
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 52.
By referring to the external conditions of persons as living organisms one can

say that all of them share in human nature, or, in other words, that they are
consubstantial. On the other hand all persons are distinct and different in the
concreteness of their existence. Theologia as a particular mode of the human
condition thus functions at the hypostatic pole of multihypostatic consubstan-
tiality of humanity. This stands in contradistinction with philosophy and
science whose possibility is rooted in the conditions of sharing the substance
of the universe.
Multihypostatic consubstantiality expresses a distinctive position of human-
ity in being, as standing on the crossroads of the natural and physical,
reasonable and spiritual. This situation reflects a fundamental fact of the human
condition as incarnate existence, that is, existence in situation, or being-in-the-
world, which means to be inserted into a spatio-temporal world. Incarnate
existence, or incarnation, in this case can be understood as a way of expressing
the simple thought that every human being is distinct, because of a particular
contingent interplay between its intelligence and physico-biological constitution.
As Marcel put it: ‘To be incarnate is to appear to oneself as body, as this par-
ticular body, without being identified with it nor distinguished from it –
identification and distinction being correlative operations which are significant
only in the realm of objects.’78 Or, in different words ‘Incarnation – the central
“given” of metaphysics. Incarnation is the situation of a being who appears to
himself to be, as it were, bound to a body.’79 Marcel here defines existence in
a way similar to that which was later used by E. Levinas, who spoke of hypos-
tasis as an ontological event wherein ‘the existent contracts its existing’.80
Incarnation is just a different way of expressing the event of hypostasis as
appearance of personal existence. What is distinctive, however, in Marcel is
that the ontological event when ‘existence comes into being’ is linked to incar-
nation, which, as such, cannot be defined in terms of a relationship between
the subject and their flesh, but is rather a primal and incomprehensible mys-
tery that is given expression by human subjectivity, but which cannot be
explained. This means that all previous attempts to state what incarnation
means are approximate and ultimately inadequate. Incarnation is a primary
ontological fact which cannot be expanded and analysed by discursive think-
ing, for example, as the unification of body and soul, because the very split
into these two is an abstraction, which arises from an attempt to objectify
incarnation and approach its mystery from within the natural attitude. Marcel
calls the situation of incarnate existence a ‘concrete reality’, which is neither
exclusively physical nor psychical but which marks the limits of actions of an
incarnate subject.
78. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, p. 20.

79. Marcel, Being and Having, p. 16 (emphasis added).
80. Levinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 43.
Here we need to make an important comment. Marcel, when he talks about

incarnation, tries to accentuate that it must not be thought within the natural
attitude, where soul and body are naively considered as two opposing agen-
cies, which unite somehow to create a human being. In spite of the fact that
this language is inadequate, it is necessary in order to express the intuition of
incarnation in rather outward terms. The language of body and soul was pre-
dominant in Christian literature in both East and West, but its fundamental
insufficiency in describing the mystery of incarnation was not realized and
expressed by many. In patristic tradition, soul and body have never been sepa-
rated, asserting that the natural man is neither soul without body nor conversely
body without soul, but the single form of beauty constituted from the combi-
nation of soul and body.81
To elucidate the sense of incarnation St Maximus the Confessor attempted
to express its mystery through making an analogy between man and the world
by making parallels between the intelligible realm in created being and the soul,
and the sensible realm and the body: ‘. . . intelligible things display the meaning
of the soul and the soul does that of intelligible things, and . . . sensible things
display the place of the body as the body does that of sensible things.’82
Then he describes incarnation as the mutual penetration of these two realms,
‘intelligible things are the soul of sensible things, and sensible things are the
body of intelligible things; as the soul in the body so is the intelligible in the
world of sense,. . . the sensible is sustained by the intelligible as the body is
sustained by the soul.’83 Incarnation is taken here as a primary empirical fact
of unity of soul and body in order to assert the hidden presence of the same
principle of unity in all creation: ‘. . . both make up one world as body and soul
make up one man, neither of these elements joined to the other in unity denies
or displaces the other according to the law of the one who has bound them
together.’84
The unity of the world is paralleled with human incarnation and is expressed
by St Maximus in a quite complicated form as the
engendered principle of the unifying force which does not permit that the substan-
tial identity uniting these things [intelligible and sensible, or soul and body, AN] be
ignored because of their difference in nature, nor that their particular characteris-
tics which limit each of these things to itself appear more pronounced because of
their separation and division than the kinship in love mystically inspired in them
for union.85
81. See, for example, Nellas, Deification in Christ, p. 46.

82. St Maximus the Confessor (1985) Mystagogia, in G. C. Berthold (tr.), Maximus the
Confessor. Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press, p. 196.
83. Ibid., p. 196.
84. Ibid. (emphasis added).
85. Ibid., p. 197 (emphasis added).
We see thus that St Maximus uses the notion of the ‘law’ and ‘kinship in
love’ in order to express the mystery of the union between soul and body,
intelligible and sensible, which both represent certain attempts to articulate
something about the mystery of incarnation of human beings, as well as about
the mystery of holding together the constitutive parts of the world. Later, in
the same passage, he insists on a fundamental inseparability of two realms
in being and two constitutive elements in humans by saying that ‘they exist by
the relationship which unites them to each other rather than to themselves’ but
this relationship itself is sustained by the power of that one who created all.
Here we observe the interplay between the principle of existence and relation-
ality: the essence of human beings and the world is based in this fundamental
inter-penetration and mutual indwelling of the intelligible and sensible in each
other, and it can hardly be explicated further. However, the distinction between
body and soul which attempts to describe incarnation as an event of creation
of human beings is itself the property of this age when the human condition is
distorted in comparison with what theology teaches about the prelapserian
state of humanity. The inadequacy of the natural attitude, which operates with
such notions as incarnation, is clearly understood by St Maximus when he
asserts the temporary character of any distinction between body and soul and
that it will be ultimately removed together with the cognitive attitude to it
when ‘He who bound them together decides on their dissolution for the sake
of a greater and more sacred order of things, . . . when the world of appear-
ances will die like man, but rise new from the old . . .’.86 What follows from
here is a simple truth that the ultimate mystery of every particular life, its birth
or incarnation, will rather be understood and phenomenalized to man in the
end of time. Thus for every human being the mystery of their incarnation, as it
is represented to their consciousness, forms a kind of anticipation of the past
through the movement of life into the future and can not be simply resolved at
present on the grounds of any logical consideration.
Returning back from the seventh to the twentieth century, it becomes clear
why for Marcel incarnation is the basic ‘given’ of metaphysics: it makes it
possible for the ego to become self-aware and to realize its co-ordination with
the whole of being. And the body, as individualized flesh in empirical space
and time, plays a central role, most of all in terms of co-ordinating the incar-
nate, conscious self, with the rest of what this self treats as the objects of its
intentional grasp. The co-ordination of an empirical, incarnate subject with
the whole of reality, as well as with the reality of other subjects, can be under-
stood if one employs the language of consubstantiality of the human flesh and
the material content of the universe. Marcel expresses a similar idea in simple
bodily terms: ‘To say that something exists is not only to say that it belongs to
86. St Maximus the Confessor (1982) Mystagogia, in D. J. Stead (tr.), The Church,
the Liturgy and the Soul of Man. The Mystagogia of St Maximus the Confessor, Still River:
St Bede’s Publications, p. 85.
the same system as my body . . ., it is also to say that it is in some way united
to me as my body is.’87 The sensible universe then represents the extension of
the body of humanity in a very non-trivial sense.88 Incarnation, or embodi-
ment, considered as a primary ontological fact extends towards human’s
environment and spatio-temporal structure of being involving space and time
into existential givenness. Marcel writes in this respect: ‘I am my body; but
I am also my habitual surroundings . . . There is a close relationship between
I am my body and I am my past, for my body has registered all my formal
experiences.’89 Since incarnation, or ‘being in situation’ cannot be objectified
in terms of external constraints, so that the same is true with respect to space
and time; space and time, as part of one’s being in situation come together
with this situation, so that one can say that ‘One exists in space and time.’
Space expresses here some characteristic of dynamics of life, being thus a rela-
tional ‘entity’ with respect to that human agent which makes room for itself as
place and space. Making space constitutes a part of that creative development
which accompanies any incarnation or being in situation, so that space acquires
some specific forms of hypostatic expression of one’s being, providing thus
forms of communication of different persons as different ‘being-in-situation’.90
87. Marcel, Being and Having, p. 15. This thought was expressed differently by many
writers. For example, in words of D. Staniloae: ‘In the perceptions of the body man bears
the impress of the world in ways specifically applicable to the perception of each thing’
(Staniloae, D. (1969) ‘The world as gift and sacrament of God’s Love’, Sobornost, 5, 662–73
(670)). P. Heelan proposes the manifest image of nature as the totality of empirical horizons
reached by human subjects through embodied intentions. In this case the body as subject is
used by these intentions to extend itself into the environment and then to be adapted to any
bodily extension (Heelan, ‘Nature and its transformations’, pp. 497–501).
88. Orthodox theologians accentuated this thought because the link between our body
and the universe makes it possible to explicate the metaphor of ‘Cosmic Liturgy’ as transfigu-
ration of all creation not only through its intellectual apprehension, but physically. V. Lossky
writes: ‘The world follows man, since it is like him in nature: “the anthroposphere”, one could
say’; and then ‘only through us can the cosmos, like the body that it prolongs, receive grace’
(Orthodox Theology, p. 71). O. Clément expresses a similar thought in different words: ‘what
is our body but the form which our “living soul” impresses on the universal “dust” which
constantly penetrates and passes through us?’ ((1958) ‘L’homme dans le monde’, Verbum
Caro, XII.45, pp. 4–22 (11–12) (author’s translation). See also his On Human Being, p. 109.
89. Marcel, G. (1952) Metaphysical Journal, London: Rockliff, p. 259.
90. This train of thought reveals a similarity with Christology accentuating in theological
conviction that humanity was made in the Image of God, and its archetype is the Incarnate
Logos Himself, who made room in creation in order to communicate knowledge of the
Father. Nicene theology affirmed that space, in which the Word of God took human nature
was that medium of communion with God made by God himself, in order to be revealed to
man. Space in Nicene theology acquired some relational features depending on that Divine
agency which granted this space to humanity as the sphere of mutual indwelling and commu-
nity, as well as communion with God. (See more details on dynamic understanding of space
in Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation.)
It is important, however, to make a clear distinction between the language

of body and flesh. For if our co-ordination with the world is understood as an
inherent consubstantiality, then it refers to what human beings share with
each other and with the substance of the universe in a transcendental (not
empirical) sense. This means that the ‘matter’ and ‘nature’ which are involved
in all articulations of existence by incarnate consciousness, have transcenden-
tal meaning as different expressions of that consubstantiality of the flesh with
the whole universe. It is in this sense that one can argue that consubstantiality
must not be understood only as sharing of nature and physical substance, but
rather as a fundamental feature of a humanity that relates itself to the universe
through transcendental intersubjectivity and which allows one to synthesize
knowledge about different layers of the universe in a single consciousness.
The difference between ‘flesh’ and ‘body’ thus reflects a difference in attitude.
In the natural attitude a body can be treated by a subject as something that is
‘external’ to its own subjectivity, as something that can be possessed and
attached to this particular ego, and which, though only in a sense of some con-
tradictory mental move, can also be thought as non-existent (this is what
Marcel called body-object (corps-objet)). Flesh, on the contrary, indicates the
fundamental inseparability of the conditions that permit the functioning of
human subjectivity in the world, that is, the inseparability between those
poles which philosophy usually designates as ‘subject’ and ‘object’. The flesh,
however, is linked, in its intrinsic existential meaning, to transcendental con-
sciousness in a mysterious way (and this is the mystery of incarnation), but at
the same time is revealed to this consciousness and is later articulated by it as
its own intentional correlate. The transcendental subject continuously identi-
fies its own body in the flow of its internal time perceptions as the privileged
‘object in which’ it exists as a living organism, but this body is not yet posited
as a transcendent object existing in itself (as are other things affirmed in the
natural attitude). That is why the individualization of transcendental subjects
is associated with the differentiation in incarnations in flesh (different hypo-
stases), whereas the individualization of subjects as living organisms is associ-
ated with the separation of bodies in space and time. The consubstantiality of
the flesh is that unifying ground that helps human beings to overcome the sep-
arateness of their bodies and establishes the basis for their mutual participation
in each other as realized incarnate intersubjectivity.91
In view of what we have just discussed, one can suggest that the so-called
‘natural light’ of the human mind, can then be interpreted as the gift of an
awareness of the consubstantiality of the flesh (as the unity of all materiality in
the universe): the co-ordination of human insight with the rest of the world is
established through the incarnation of consciousness, and flesh is revealed
91. Incarnate intersubjectivity, when understood in terms of the consubstantiality of

the flesh, is closely linked with the ecclesiological notion of ‘sobornost’ (catholicity). See
Zenkovski, ‘The Principles of orthodox anthropology’, pp. 67–91.
as their fundamental inseparability. ‘Without’ flesh the natural light is not

available to human subjectivity. The statement that transcendental subjectivity
(as intersubjectivity) expresses the consubstantiality of the flesh can be
rephrased in a theological context by saying that the natural light of the human
mind manifests the primordial co-ordination of this mind with the world that
is granted to mankind in the gift of incarnation.
Incarnation in flesh reveals itself in space through a particular body but it
itself is not of space. The incarnate consciousness manifests itself as non-local
(that is transcending the boundaries of a body) and stretching across the uni-
verse thus carrying the whole world together with the body; while being in
a body it is not of the body, and this is the reason why it represents a typical
situation when, in spite of its obvious presence, that is, presence of a particular
person as body, the foundation of its presence, its sheer contingent facticity, is
unavailable to the incarnate consciousness’s grasp, implying thus that the
facticity of the incarnation is present in absence. It is because of this freedom
of not knowing the underlying causes of this incarnation that any approach
to its mystery acquires some apophatic features of not being able to exhaust
discursively or symbolically its intrinsic meaning.
While being chained to some common necessities of nature, that is, sharing
the parameters of functioning as living organisms, and even being subjected to
some uniformity in social life, all human beings, in their ontological essence,
are different from each other, and this difference comes from the contingent
facticity of every particular incarnation. It is in this sense that the uniqueness
of theologia for every person reflects the uniqueness of their incarnation as a
primary ontological relation to God. Then one can easily realize that because
of the contingency of incarnation it cannot be phenomenalized even to the
reflective consciousness of the incarnate person (there is no access to the
mystery of one’s birth). This implies that every particular religious experience,
as a realization of contingent incarnation, cannot be subjected to any summary
and averaging, and thus cannot be studied in the same way as it takes place
in the sciences at the level of anonymous and intersubjective consciousness.
Theologia originates in persons and it addresses their questions to being not in
the form ‘What am I?,’ but ‘Who am I and who will I become?’; this has very
serious implications for the whole picture of the world, for the world also
acquires some personal qualities which are attached to the unfolding and
disclosure of the sense of one’s existence.92
The multiplicity of incarnations follows a Biblical command ‘Fill the Earth’
(Gen. 1.28) which was commented by St Basil the Great in terms of humanity’s
spiritual growth in order to fill the earth with good actions, that is, bodily
services: ‘Fill the flesh which has been given you for serving through good
works. Let the eye be filled with seeing duties. Let the hand be filled with
92. The world becomes enhypostasized. (See details in my Light from the East,
pp. 110–17.)
good works. May the feet stand ready to visit the sick, journeying to fitting
things. Let every usage of our limbs be filled with actions according to
commandments. This is to “fill the earth”.’93
The multitude of incarnations implies that humanity comes in generations
(in temporality) and in space. In order that God be received by incarnate
persons He must have made some space for Himself in the world manifesting
His presence in absence. Thus the very existence of theologia, as the sheer
possibility of personal experiences, presupposes the differentiation of persons
in space and time and thus presupposes space and time themselves.
In contradistinction with a philosophical and theological concern, science
does not care about the facticity of incarnations and abstracts from them by
extracting only the transcendental component, which pertains to all conscious
beings. As a result, the issue of origin of personhood is removed from all scien-
tific enquiries. One can say that the empirical multitude of persons is reduced
to a single transparent and impersonal subject. However, the multiplicity of
persons that is present behind this reduction of the empirical is ultimately
responsible for the unfolding of the sphere of transcendental consciousness
and reflects some features of the physical world, such as space and time, which
are not entirely understood by scientific consciousness if it is abstracted from
personhood.
Anonymous human subjectivity creates a picture of the universe where a
concrete human consciousness becomes a contingent epiphenomenon of the
physical; it does not address any questions about factual multihypostacity of
human beings, about their historicity and their meaning as disclosures of the
universe. Here we face a remarkable existential paradox: on the one hand
humanity contemplates its being-in-the-world through existential communion-
events (and theologia); on the other hand through the discursive mind it
perceives its being as embedded in the natural conditions of the world. This
dualistic position, seen in the natural attitude, leads to a famous paradox of
human subjectivity in the world which was articulated by philosophers and
theologians long ago. This paradox constitutes a basic problem for theology
and science; the tension between theology and science is seen as the split of two
co-existing intentionalities in the same human subjectivity: the one is concerned
with the very foundations and facticity of being-in-the-world; another one
with the natural conditions of its manifestation. The split of these intentionali-
ties indicates not a fundamental deficiency in the system of knowledge and
culture, but an inevitable feature of humanity in its present condition.
One sees thus that any attempt to address the problem of mediation between
theology and science, their reintegration, cannot avoid enquiry in the sense
of the incarnate human condition. However this enquiry from the very begin-
ning has a hidden theological dimension which can be called existential faith.
93. St Basil the Great, On the Human Condition, p. 52.

This existential faith underlies not only belief in reality of the surrounding
world (where this faith still manifests itself through the natural attitude) but
also the intrinsic belief in the truth of what is given in the immanent sphere
of consciousness (in a philosophical attitude).94 The existential facticity of
this faith as life makes it possible to claim that the top-down approach in the
science–religion dialogue has a solid experiential ground supported through a
rigorous philosophical reflection.
From Apophaticism of Incarnation to Existential Faith and

Quest for Existence
An inherent apophaticism in knowing the mystery of incarnation leads thus to

an interesting situation where there is no sense in trying to interpret this mys-
tery either in terms of some necessary conditions related to its surroundings
(e.g. to relate the fact of existence of intelligent life on earth to necessary physi-
cal cosmological conditions), or in terms of contingency understood in the
natural attitude as related to some hypothetical situation where the facticity of
incarnation is set against its potential impossibility. To treat one’s existence in
situation (or incarnation) as contingent would mean to separate in thought the
invariant core of the self from this particular situation. If one were to say that
he or she was born in a particular place at a particular period of history, or
with particular physical features such as height or colour of eyes, it would
imply that one has a self (or disembodied hypostasis) which is distinct from the
features which have been listed. According to Marcel,
to treat the self of given circumstance as contingent in relation to a kind of tran-

scendental kernel is fundamentally to regard that empirical self as a husk of which
the rational self can and in a sense ought to be stripped. But I can only carry out
this stripping in so far as I arrogate to myself the right to abstract myself from a
given circumstance and, as it were, to stand outside it. . . . In abstracting myself
from given circumstance, from the empirical self, from the situation in which I find
myself, I run the risk of escaping into a real never-never or no-man’s land – into
what strictly must be called a nowhere . . .95
In a different place Marcel exercises a similar thought with respect to one’s

origin as birth, which is not given to one in its phenomenality, so that any
94. This corresponds to a delicate distinction in the meaning of existential faith as a reac-
tion to Husserl’s stance that ‘faith in existence of the world’ is still a part of the natural
attitude and must be subjected to phenomenological reduction.
95. Marcel, G. (2001) Mystery of Being, vol. 1, Reflections and Mystery, South Bend:
St Augustine Press, p. 133.
speculation about its contingency against the hypothetical necessity would

imply a pretension of getting out from existence-in-situation, that is, implicitly
denying the very fact of one’s coming into being.96
The situation with ‘no necessity’ and ‘no contingency’ in the fact of human
incarnate existence ultimately demonstrates that being-in-the-world entails
for humanity a certain antinomy of sense and nonsense. This leaves humanity
with accepting its life as a gift which, being the gift of the Other, cannot be
grasped from within the being-in-the-world either in terms of sense or non-
sense. But the gift in its manifestation through life conveys a sense of mystery.
Thus the intrinsic apophaticism in human existence with respect to its origin
or foundation implies mysticism of communion with being without any hope
to grasp some reasons for this, as well as without any hope to get out from it.
This mysticism entails faith in existence. To ‘grasp’ this is to believe that it has
happened, but with no desire to explicate this belief in discursive terms. Belief
in this concrete existence is personal, because, strictly speaking, the content of
this belief cannot be communicated to any other person in the same way as the
mode of one’s existence cannot be transferred or ‘transplanted’ to another.
This contrasts principally with impersonal thinking, whose content can be
communicated to another and, in virtue of this, loses its initially unique hypo-
static character. The latter contrasts with faith, whose modality is strictly
personal. Marcel expresses this: ‘In as much as I think, I am universal, and, if
knowledge is dependent on the cogito, that is precisely in virtue of the univer-
sality inherent in the thinking ego. In faith there is nothing of the kind.’97
Then it is clearly seen that the distinction between Cartesian ‘I think, there-
fore I am’ and ‘I believe that I exist, therefore I am’ (which would follow from
the existential appropriation in incarnation) corresponds to the distinction
between the faculty of dianoia and nous correspondingly. As we described
before it is because of this distinction that nous has to acquire knowledge
directly, as not mediated by any thematizations or abstractions made by dia-
noia. This direct knowledge allows one to surpass the boundaries between self
and its body, between subject and object and to accept existence in its immedi-
ate givenness. The mystery of incarnation is reflected in thinking and realized
as mystery through existential faith, which is available because of nous and
which itself represents its certain manifestation. Marcel expresses this thought
without any appeal to a theological distinction in degrees of knowledge:
‘Through faith I affirm a transcendental foundation for the union of the world
and of my thought. I refuse to think myself as purely abstract, as an intelligible
form hovering over a world . . .’98 And then he formulates a relationship
between cognitive faculties similar to that one between dianoia and nous,
96. Marcel, Being and Having, p. 24.

97. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, p. 40.
98. Ibid., p. 45.
which we have described in the previous section in a theological language:

‘Thus the order of science is relative to faith in the measure in which the I think
is subordinated to the I believe – where abstract thought (the thinking subject)
is subordinated to the mind.’99 To believe, in the sense of existential faith,
means effectively to experience being and participate in it. Faith implies some
openness to reality and it is of the order of experience rather than that of
knowledge. It is a mode of being (‘un mode de l’etre’).100
However, to experience ‘being’ does not mean a return to a naive empiricism,
for this experience is not reduced to senses or even power of intelligence. Expe-
rience means to be face to face with the indubitable certitude of existence as the
body, and through this body one’s existence manifests itself. According to
Marcel to say ‘I exist’ means to say ‘I am manifest’ and that ‘I have something
to make myself known and recognised both by others and by myself. . . .’101
It is in this manifestation that a human being utters some inadequate words in
order to express its experience of participation in being. Participation means
here some non-objective relation to being102 in a sense of co-presence with it,
so that no distance (as diastema) is incurred between being in general and a
particular being; such a presence is not subject to empirical or intellectual
objectification, so that, from the point of view of the natural attitude, partici-
pation means experience of presence in absence. But the fate of humanity to
live through the experience of presence in absence implies that this humanity
possesses, by the freedom of living in the conditions as if there were no neces-
sity and no contingency, the ability to perceive both sense and nonsense of
being in the world. Freedom, however, goes together with creativity, so that
participation in being is not empirical indwelling in it, but rather the active
making room in this being for a being, implying thus that the mode of mani-
festation of being is the same as a mode of manifestation of a being. Creativity
and development put man in such new conditions when he is not content with
being circumscribed by the world, on the one hand, whereas being absolutely
free from any sense of existence as if it came from nowhere, on the other hand.
The search for the sense of the origin of existence through outward thematiza-
tions, in spite of its limited capacity and effective oblivion of the primary
mystery of being, and regardless of its multiple articulated content, has, never-
theless, one crucial feature as manifestation of being, namely its directedness
to the future through its incessant urge. This unceasing desire to progress in
order to explicate origins of existence forms the telos of humanity, which, if it
is seen in the natural attitude, annihilates the despair of impersonal necessity as
well as hypostatic contingency; and being embedded in the fabric of existential
99. Ibid., p. 45.

100. Marcel, G. (1935) Journal Metaphysique, Paris: Gallimard, p. 152.
101. Marcel, Mystery of Being, vol. 1, p. 91.
102. Ibid., p. 116.
faith, this progression towards the sought and hoped telos forms another kind
of faith, which is not just existential, but religious, for it entails in itself the
vision of humanity’s destiny as driven by the invisible origin.
Faith in God reveals itself in a mode of being such that, to the extent one
believes truly, this belief is a ‘manner of being’ and an ontological modification.103
Faith is not something which one can deliberately acquire or dispose; it is
because of faith that someone cannot identify themselves with another which
he can possess: this faith deals not with the order of having but with the order
of being. However, the order of faith is not continuous with other forms of
experience; it implies the order of ‘invocation’ as openness to that personal
Other which gives itself to one in the measure that give themselves to the reality
of their belief. The formation of subject thus is only possible because of the
directedness to that invoked reality.104 Faith thus presupposes being with some-
one (‘d’etre-avec’) which cannot be expressed in terms of exterior relations.
This means, in accordance with an inherent apophaticism of faith, that even
when one speaks of God, it is not that God who is believed.105 The God of
metaphysics (as a metaphysical that [cela metaphysique]106) has no sense because
it does not reflect the existential meaning of God in faith,107 that is, it places
thinking outside God, thus making this thinking have no sense and content
(empty intentionality). Definitely, in this case, the God who is outside thinking
in faith, can easily be bracketed off according to Husserl’s suggestion in $58 of
his Ideas I because this bracketing does not affect the very existence of thinking
as imbued with existential faith and thus irreducible. Faith thus is participation
in the sense that to think God means to participate in it: ‘I can only think myself
as participating in God in so far as I have faith in him.’108 Participation implies
that faith is intrinsically present in sensations and intellectual reflections, so
that if the latter are considered in the perspective of this faith, they could poten-
tially lead to a renewed vision of reality, more infallible and immediate.109
Faith, unlike other modalities of concrete existence (or specific conscious-
ness), demands the total engagement of one’s being. To the extent that a human
being exists in situation, that is, it is incarnate, it experiences itself as a believer
so that to a certain extent one can paraphrase Descartes by saying that ‘I exist
as far as I believe and I believe as far as I exist.’ Marcel accentuates the point
that the link between I believe and I exist must be recognized as a primary
103. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, 153ff.

104. Marcel, Du refus a l’invocation, pp. 235–6.
105. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, p. 159.
106. Ibid., p. 262.
107. As Marcel would say: ‘thinking faith does not mean believing,’ or ‘as long as belief
remains the thought of belief and in consequence depends on the cogito, it is prohibited from
being really itself.’ (Metaphysical Journal, p. 68. See also p. 262.)
108. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, p. 66. In a different place he affirms that ‘the infinite
cannot be thought apart from the participation’ (p. 158).
109. Marcel, Du refus a l’invocation, p. 219.
truth in which one must not be deduced from another, so that the analogue of
the ‘ergo’ in the Cartesian formula ‘cogito ergo sum’ must be omitted here. He
wants to say, that ‘if I come to I believe, then I come to this as existent but not
at all in virtue of thinking in general . . .’110 In human life this can be compared
with the experience of love. To love someone is not to perceive him or her out-
wardly; rather it means to be in a state when the absence of another is not an
existential option. Love destroys space and time because it is communion with
a person who while not being present empirically, is present in absence as an
existential modality. Faith and love are not separated because love implies
trust in that one who is loved and faith has no sense if that one who is believed
is not loved (‘il n’y a pas de foi sans fidelite’)111. Faith in God implies love for
him, but this love, unlike the love of parents or children, cannot be explicated
because all attempts to express this love outwardly somehow shadow the love
as being, so that the initial transparency in love with God is overshadowed. In
this sense the purification of the heart, as a part of ascetic experience can be
treated as the desire to restore the immediate transparency between one and
God which pertains unconsciously to the early childhood. However, this desire,
as well as faith itself, as an attainment and achievement, could not be easily
effected by man himself without the volition of God to whom man is open in
his mysterious longing for grasping the sense of his existence-in-situation. The
volition of God is manifested in granting to man a freedom to choose between
faith and no-faith. If faith were to be something like a mode of biological
necessity and contain a feature of inevitability, it would not be faith at all. This
choice cannot be made on grounds of reflections and analysis based in necessi-
ties of nature and rules of deduction, but represents an existential opportunity
either to acquire a glimpse of sense about one’s existence-in-situation or just to
live in a paradoxical tragedy of sense and non-sense with no goal and orienta-
tion and with the inevitability of the exit out of being. This opportunity, that
is to acquire faith through a reflection upon existential givenness, is implanted
in man by God. Here Marcel provides his insight:
As the soul approaches more nearly to faith, and becomes more conscious of the
transcendence of its object, it perceives more and more clearly that it is utterly inca-
pable of producing this faith, of deriving it from its own essence. For it knows itself,
it realises more and more clearly her own weakness, impotence and instability; and
thus it is led to a discovery. This faith can only be an adherence, or, more exactly,
a response . . . to an impalpable and silent invitation which fills it, or, to say it in
another way, which puts pressure upon it without constraining it. The pressure is
not irresistible: if it were, faith would no longer be faith. Faith is only possible to a
free creature, that is, a creature who has been given the mysterious and awful
power of refusal.112
110. Ibid.
We have already discussed earlier that faith is the gift of grace and that
faith’s advanced stage leads to theologia as an insight about God. Faith is
participation in being and in God, but that participation, which is reflected
and recognized as linked to freedom through reason. As a potentiality, partici-
pation is gifted to every man through freedom in an absolute sense even in his
ability to deny its very existence.
It is through the presence of faith as a gift of freedom, and as an existential
premise, that humanity is predisposed to enquire as to why existence as
opposed to non-existence is possible. Faith here is not an abstracting tendency
of reason which thematizes its own domain by questioning its own limits; it
is an existential urge (prior to any conscious reflection about it) to enquire
into the very fact of existence as an incessant flow of events of contracting
the existing. Faith here is the tragic contemplation that there is no simple way
out from there is, that ‘there is’ is not something which has the cause of its
persistence in intentions of consciousness, but that this ‘there is’ is the glimpse
of the life-giving Light in which the human transcendental field of conscious-
ness (which reveals itself to itself through being in this ‘there is’) participates.
Humanity perceives a tragedy of not being able to control and stop its flow
of consciousness through endless myriads of images and petty thoughts until
this characteristically human thought becomes thought about God. Until
this happens, human thought entails for humans a ‘heaviest burden, greatest
torment, darkness of hell, and, alas, the universal burden and universal
hell’.113 All the despair of generations of philosophers and humanists was not
able to enlighten them as to the meaning of the human existence as continuity
of conscious experience without appeal to its sanctification and ultimately
to God.
Faith is that particular latent intentionality which makes it possible to discern
reality and meaning of consciousness in the background of its incessant flow
as intentionalities towards different things. The very Cartesian formula ‘cogito
ergo sum’ reveals itself as an act of faith that there is some stable core in
human subjectivity which is not overwhelmed by the spontaneous flow and is
capable of stopping this flow for a moment when it states ‘I think therefore
I am’; but this pronouncement does not give an account that its very possibility
originates in faith that it conveys truth about reality. In other words, the form
of this Cartesian formula, as having meaning, comes from some underlying
ability to contemplate truth, which is expressed by it. And it is this truth that
forms the other-worldly pole of the relationship between human subjectivity
and the world, and which can be called an ‘immanent’ awareness of the pres-
ence of God (as different from any thematized idea of God and faith in him that
is usually bracketed by the transcendental reduction), which is silently present
in all discursive speculations about the world as well as in all phenomena of
113. Popovitch, J. (2004) Philosophical Chasms (in Russian), Moscow: The Publishing
Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, p. 16 (author’s translation).
intentional consciousness. This awareness is sometimes called by religious

philosophers the natural light of human mind made in the Divine image. It is
this natural light which makes it possible to transcend the sheer naivety
of cogito ergo sum as impersonal proclamation and turn together with the
nous towards the question of ‘why cogito ergo sum in this situation?’ Here,
any impersonal logical reflection upon the Cartesian formula acquires the
feature of personal participation from within the existence-in-situation, in the
only One, Who can say ‘I am Who I am.’
In the Cartesian, and strictly phenomenological approach, transcendental
consciousness was stripped of all natural attributes, so that all references with
respect to which the methodological doubt can be carried out are removed.
That is to say that, logically, the question of the foundation of such a con-
sciousness that questions itself by transcending the immanentism of its own
reflection, must not appear. However, even if the transcendental reduction
with respect to a thematized context of faith is performed, it is not powerful
enough in order to bracket faith itself, which underlies the very possibility of
this reduction (in other words an existential premise of the reduction itself
cannot be bracketed by it). This means that the reduced consciousness is still
in a position to question itself in a different way, by employing another type of
intentionality whose ‘object’ is the facticity of consciousness itself.
It is clear with a new force that in our exposition of existential faith we
transgress the boundaries of all classical philosophical ideas about the compo-
sition of human beings. We invoke the old, premodern, patristic theological
anthropology, which assumes not only the interplay between body and soul in
human hypostatic composition, but also the presence of the transcendent
dimension of the spirit. As we discussed earlier, patristic theology refers to the
spiritual intellect (nous), which represents the centre of human person, its
hypostatic essence that makes this particular person distinct from another. In
this present context the invisible ‘work’ of this nous (hidden behind all acts
of consciousness articulating things through the discursive mind (dianoia)),
provides one with the ability to perform the transcendental reduction. The nous
is that centre of human constitution which makes it possible to contemplate
the sense of belonging to the great whole of the universe while being a part of
it. Seen in this perspective the meaning and achievement of the transcendental
phenomenological reduction can thus be understood as not only revealing the
presence of the field of transcendental subjectivity as the world-of-meaning
(hidden inside the natural attitude to the world), but also disclosing the tran-
scendental subjectivity as characteristically shaped by the natural light, and, as
a result, developing such an intentionality within human subjectivity which
turns to the search of its ultimate source in the otherness of its inclusion in
being-in-the-world. The role of the nous is crucial here in order to form the
intentionality that discloses the existential faith and its transcendent reference.
If, within this new intentionality, consciousness reveals itself to itself as preg-
nant with the natural light, it contracts its own existing as posited with respect
to its own transcendent. The awareness of the transcendent starts with the
question that consciousness can pose to itself: why there is consciousness as

‘cogito ergo sum’, or why there is natural light in us?
By its essence, any questioning about the foundations of consciousness in
terms of the non-worldly, which is bracketed in the course of the phenome-
nological reduction, is questioning from within the philosophical attitude
extended through metanoia towards a deep theological insight. Then one can
propose a general idea that any theological state of mind (such as faith in God
present in absence) that involves participation in God is extended beyond its
naturalistic boundaries and functions in a philosophical attitude. However,
this theologically extended ‘consciousness’ advances beyond the scope of
phenomenology. Here the philosophical attitude accompanied by metanoia
not only justifies but also sanctifies the natural attitude thus pointing simulta-
neously to its value as well as to its limits. Seen together with metanoia as a
tool of explicating the sense of knowledge and its inherence in human subjec-
tivity, the transcendental reduction and phenomenological method in general
can be understood as preparation of faith in those who are, by the will and
wisdom of God, predisposed to it.114
Theological Attitude: Transcendental Reduction and Metanoia
Metanoia, as an existential change, implies a change of mind, which is very

close to a change of attitude, or change of intentionality. However, there is a
fundamental difference between metanoia and phenomenological reduction,
understood simply as suspension of all judgements about reality and their dis-
passionate contemplation from within subjectivity. Metanoia fights against
anonymity and impersonality of the field of consciousness. In this it opposes
the natural attitude, if the latter is taken as a spiritual orientation, for this
attitude assumes some common system of norms and references that predicate
things of the outer world as existent in the background of anonymous field of
consciousness. Metanoia in this case is not only the reduction of all which is
out there inside subjectivity, to the level of phenomena, but another ‘change
114. Since faith in God is usually treated as a strictly private, intimate relationship, it
implies a special kind of intentionality which directs consciousness beyond the sphere of
the intersubjective (e.g. in inner prayer). This is the reason why it is possible to compare our
conjecture about the transcendental reduction in phenomenology as ‘preparation of faith’
with another reduction that is associated with the sphere of ownness and which attempts
to eliminate the dimension of other persons. In both cases we have a move within the philo-
sophical attitude, uncovering various levels of experience undergone by the transcendental
ego. (See, for example, Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, pp. 154–5.) However a
theological extension of phenomenology implies a different type of intentionality that aims
the fullness of faith in God through the acquisition of the ecclesial hypostasis as a mode of
communion in the community of the earthly and heavenly Church.
of attitude’ which makes all phenomena be seen as manifestations and reali-

zations of particular hypostatic existences in God. In other words, metanoia
implies the vision behind these phenomena, of that invisible origin by whose
creative activity these phenomena are brought into existence in a particular
person. Metanoia is a new apprehension of the primordiality of personhood as
that centre of unfolding the whole reality, the awareness of whose presence is
naturally lost in the course of human socialization and advance of scientific
culture.
Metanoia, like the transcendental reduction, aims to suspend all passions
with respect to the alleged reality of things and make them all the same as
phenomena given to human beings to live with. However, there is a certain
impartiality in grasping creation as it is presented in phenomena that presup-
poses love for creation and some ‘heart felt attitude’. The ‘world as loved’,
however, can only be grasped by hypostatic human beings: love is the achieve-
ment of persons who love the world, seeing in it its Creator in the mode of
‘presence in absence’. Metanoia cannot be carried out without faith; but faith,
being the assurance in things that are not seen (i.e. are present in absence),
represents a sort of transcendental reduction when human subjectivity experi-
ences certain realities on the level of their heart without demanding their
empirical presence. However, metanoia, being an existential, ontological
change in one’s life, entails a kind of irreversibility which ‘deconstructs’ the
dominance of the natural attitude once and for all. It does not mean that per-
sons slide towards sheer mysticism of internal life; ‘deconstruction’ rather
means the encounter with the tragic inability to easily control one’s existence,
understood as a ceaseless flow of phenomena of incarnate consciousness.115
This ‘deconstruction’ of the natural attitude is exactly the desire to see beyond
things visible their real foundations, their underlying causes and ends which
make existence specific and concrete. One can illustrate the impact of metanoia
upon the natural attitude as the overcoming of the ‘pantheism’ of consciousness
when all beauties of the world (observed in the natural attitude) are lifted to
the level of the ‘divine’ principle acting in this same world and which are not
seen as having their purposes and ends in themselves. ‘Pantheism’ of conscious-
ness implies that its foundation is seen in itself, so that the field of immanent
consciousness becomes the deity that drives and enslaves us, and the endless
flow of consciousness becomes the living hell for a person unless this flow
evolves into prayer and pantheism breaks up.116 Thus metanoia, seen from this
angle, implies a certain control of consciousness through prayer by lifting up
this consciousness to its own transcendent foundation.
115. As J. Popovitch expressed it: ‘undoubtfully, the tragedy of men is in that they cannot
annihilate their consciousness’ ((2002) Dostoevsky on Europe and Slaves (in Russian), Mos-
cow: Sretenskii Monastery, p. 111 (author’s translation)).
116. Popovitch, Philosophical Chasms, p. 261.
Fr Sophrony (Sakharov) expressed, although without an explicit reference

to phenomenology, the link between the reduction of the outer world and
metanoia as growth of personal awareness about the mysterious facticity of
conscious existence. He writes: ‘When personal dimension grows in us, then,
while living in any confinement, we transcend spiritually towards indefinite
spaces of the created Cosmos. Man does not see things external to him but
lives inwardly.’117 Like in transcendental reduction, the outer world is not
denied, but all judgements about its outward reality are suspended and sub-
jected to inward discernment. Transfigured consciousness is concerned with
depths of its own unlimited flow that is personalized and felt as specific and
concrete for this particular existence. He continues: ‘And this contemplation
of infinite and unfathomable chasms cannot be characterised by any human
word.’118 The inward experience of infinity brings a human being to the awe
that cannot be communicated in forms typical for an anonymous collective
consciousness. Its expression however is possible in all sorts of symbolism that
does not exhaust the fullness and existential meaning of this experience. Thus
we see here again the presence of inherent apophaticism which appears as a
characteristic mode of metanoia. Then he poses questions:
What can be said about those chasms which are revealed to a man who immerses
into love to Christ? What are these abysmal chasms? Are they outward [that is per-
taining to the world] or inward [that is pertaining to the soul]? We can neither
understand nor define this: the only thing we can do is to enter that world through
repentance of an ontological order. But even in this case it remains unknowable for
man whether that infinity, which opens to him, exists “objectively”, or is the state
of our mind created in the image of the Creator’s Mind, that is, God Himself.119
It is the facticity of this incredible life of consciousness in its potential inex-

haustibility, which becomes the object of metanoia and represents thus a major
existential tension for any being-in-situation. We are drawn into this world of
incarnate existence not only to experience bodily pleasures or sufferings. We
are doomed to deal with a host of infinities in our consciousness, which, in its
potential power, can either lead to enquiry about its foundation and abilities
to control and order it, or, alternatively, to a hopeless exercise of imagination
capable of demonic despair and destruction. To find God through metanoia
is to transform the flow of consciousness into prayer, to order and control
one’s own thoughts in order to reach in those intelligible immensities of that
saving Light which brought us out of nothing. Here the concreteness (being-
in-situation) and hypostasicity of consciousness becomes of utmost importance:
for person seeks for a person, so that through the endless chaos of thoughts,
illusions and broken images, person persistently searches for another person in
117. Sakharov, Spiritual Conversations, p. 307.

118. Ibid.
119. Ibid.
order to live in communion with others and the Father of all, the communion
that anonymous consciousness of the world attempts to conceal and which
metanoia is destined to restore.
The difference between the transcendental reduction in phenomenology and
that one which is effectively involved in metanoia is that, although in both
cases it fights against naïve transcendences formed by anonymous conscious-
ness, metanoia always refers to humanity as the centre of all disclosure. It is
through metanoia, that one can discern that the reduction as such is incapable
of eliminating that transcendence which is inherent (i.e. immanently present)
in personal consciousness and faith as existential and participational modality.
This is the reason why, like phenomenology, metanoia assumes the return to
the sphere of inward subjectivity, but, at the same time, overcomes a temptation
to absolutize it and thus looks for some inherent transcending elements in it
which point to the other ‘side’ of the world, as well as subjectivity itself. In a
word, metanoia is that complementary feature of the transcendental reduction
which holds in person the balance of immanence and transcendence. How
similar this is to faith in God as being present in absence!
It now becomes clear that while the phenomenological reduction becomes
a tool, an indispensable element of any exercise applied to the articulation
of absoluteness of the sphere of subjectivity, one needs metanoia in order to
preserve the inherent transcendent presence in this sphere of consciousness.
As we said earlier, for Husserl the question about transcending the sphere of
subjectivity, so to speak, ‘inwardly’ that is, not towards the world had no sense
because he worked in the one-dimensional model of consciousness where no
intentionality was allowed to reflect upon its own facticity. This intentionality
was rather considered as unfulfilling and empty. It is true that one cannot get
out from the interior horizon of subjectivity, but it is not true that within this
subjectivity there cannot be another kind of intentionality that attempts to
reflect upon the very facticity of subjectivity and thus to look towards those
immanent elements, which have traces of transcendence. The question about
the boundaries of life (consciousness) cannot be posed as if these boundaries
existed outside; however, there is something specific in the incarnate condition
that contains self-transcending elements. We limit ourselves to a very short
comment on this by referring to the paradox of human subjectivity in the
world, which in a way explicates the mystery of incarnate existence. Briefly, in
this paradox, two attitudes to human existence in the world clash: on the one
hand, humanity is considered as a particular developmental stage of the uni-
versal evolution of things in the world, as one thing among others; on the other
hand humanity is seen as that centre of articulation and disclosure of the
universe in front of whom the universe stands. This paradox represents two
extremes in diversification of human intentionalities: on the one hand there
prevails a natural attitude which intends (as object of research, for example)
humanity in terms of objective corporeal objects; on the other hand, human
consciousness positions itself as the primary source of articulated being,
resembling thus the philosophical attitude where all objective references are
considered purely as noetic content of subjectivity’s dynamics. It is clear that

both extremes are unsatisfactory and, as a puzzle for reason, represent an
antinomy-like difficulty, so that some balance between them must be main-
tained. However, the presence of antinomial difficulties in discursive thinking
concerned with ultimate questions points towards the common source of their
opposed terms, which ‘situates’ in the otherness of both extremes. By referring
to our experience of dealing with these kinds of antinomies in our previous
book,120 one can point out that the paradox of human subjectivity and corre-
sponding antinomy articulate characteristically the mystery of the human
hypostasis as enhypostasized by the Logos of God. However in order to make
this theological inference the metanoia as a change of mind must happen.
Phenomenology allows one, in principle, to deconstruct scientific views about
the mediocrity of humanity among other objects and phenomena in the uni-
verse by finding back humanity as the centre of disclosure and manifestation,
but, one will need an extra step in order to address the issue of its contingent
facticity. This step is metanoia which directs the reduced consciousness, that
is, that consciousness which was freed from illusions of finding explanations
of its facticity in the outer world, towards the source of its facticity which is
not only beyond the empirical world but even beyond consciousness itself.
However, this does not imply naively that the mystery of consciousness can be
fully grasped. The apophaticism pertaining to metanoia is still there: it always
stops one from making final judgements about truth. By pointing to the source
of consciousness in God, metanoia applies the same apophatic rule to God:
God is ‘present in absence’, so that all images of God in discursive philosophiz-
ing or theologizing can be bracketed away, but the ineffable presence of God
as existential principle is still there, but in absence.
Thus the reduction of God in $ 58 of Husserl’s Ideas I, seen through meta-
noia, demonstrates with a new force that, indeed, we are granted a gift of grace
to discern between the idols of God that can be subjected to the reduction and
the true living God of faith that makes this very reduction possible and traces
of whose presence cannot be eliminated from the sphere of subjectivity under
any circumstances. Metanoia gives a tool to preserve and articulate experience
of God after all possible cataphatic definitions of God as its idols were effec-
tively rejected. Thus the very awareness of inaccessibility and unknowability
of the Divine nature is in itself a result of Grace and Wisdom of God granted
to man121 and is equal to the experience of meeting with the personal God of
revelation. This means, in a very sophisticated way, that the bracketing of
conceptual God in Husserl, as a recognition that the true and personal God
cannot be found through mental construction, represents a sort of meeting with
personal God, the meeting that is difficult to express in terms of affirmations.
120. See Nesteruk, Light from the East, chapters 4–7.

121. Cf. Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 34.
In other words, through the very bracketing of the idols of God in pheno-
menology, the intentional consciousness experiences meeting with its own
foundation and this in turn is exactly the experience of meeting with the per-
sonal God. In this sense the very possibility of the transcendental reduction of
mental images of God is a gift of grace which aims to separate any idols of God
from what God really is in its ‘presence in absence’. The transcendence of the
abstraction of God in phenomenological thought is a logical (logos-like) oper-
ation; however, what has not been taken into account is that the very possibility
of this operation (not its structure but the actuality of its performance) is pos-
sible only because there is some parallel intentionality in human subjectivity
which predisposes the thinking to doubt all mental constructions and to look
for the conditions of this experience as such. This is what can be called the
‘intentionality of the Spirit’, as the reception of the Grace of God in order to
penetrate through all logical idols of the ultimate existence, to Him, Who
animates in us the very ability to discern the difference of the logical (and
hence subjected to reduction) from the existential (which cannot be reduced
further). This means that the bracketing of God (as sheer existential impossi-
bility), stops exactly at that point when consciousness realizes that it cannot
suspend itself, that is, the very conditions of its functioning. Here the logos-
like thinking becomes inefficient in discerning the intentionality of the Spirit,
which effectively enables it.
From the Natural Attitude to Eschatology
As we affirmed at the very beginning of this chapter, our aim was to convince
the reader that the difference between science and theology, if they are both
referred to their origin in human subjectivity, was the difference in attitude
and intentionalities of this subjectivity and ultimately reflects the part of the
human condition. Let us exemplify the dynamics of this split in the case of
a particular individual.
When new life enters this world, that is, when a child is born and a particular
incarnation has happened, this new life, as being given and gifted to a person,
is lived empirically and as something which goes without saying. To function
in the incarnate condition one needs a blind and non-reflective faith that
whatever happens to this or that being is something which was launched into
existence and which has to perpetuate this existence by the will of the unknown
origin. Existential faith in reality of existence is needed in order to survive. For
a child, it is important to acquire a right coordination in physical space in
order to survive biologically. In other words, one can say that the instinct of
survival can be equated to existential faith. Existential faith is embedded in the
incarnate, biological condition of humanity, which can be expressed philo-
sophically as being consubstantial with the whole world. This existential faith
in reality of the surrounding world manifests a natural acceptance of the world
as a gift, which accompanies humans all through their life. Thus life is gift
and existential faith is acceptance of this gift. This faith is reception of the
outer world as real and true because incarnate life is possible only in this
world. One can say that existential faith is a mode of biological adaptation
and hence the acquisition of the whole world-view through the prism of cor-
poreal existence.122 The world itself becomes the extension of a body, although
the very thought about this is the result of work of incarnate consciousness in
that particular body.
However, when a child is functioning through his body at the level of exis-
tential faith and adaptation he does not know anything about its existence: it
is not reflected. In early childhood, when a child does not reflect upon the fact
of its own existence, their life is a norm of mundane and unconditional reality
which cannot be doubted at all. Certainly at some particular stage of every-
one’s life there arises a thought as to ‘Why do I exist?’ in the background of
the fact that I could, potentially, have not been in existence. Here a new emo-
tion appears that one’s concrete and specific being is balanced by a potential
otherness of its non-being. First of all this otherness is found in the outer
world. Thus the natural attitude develops to full extent through the awareness
of the contingent facticity of one’s existence in the background of the existence
of others and hence as a possibility of non-existence as such. Here comes
another element of conscious life: if non-existence as exit from existence is
possible, where did my own existence come from? The mystery of birth enters
irreversibly into the mind of a child. All its efforts to unfold this mystery are in
vain: it is phenomenologically detached from adult conscious life. The immedi-
ate experience of existence is replaced by the reflected existence in the world,
so that the old atemporality of early life evolves into a particular type of physi-
cal and social temporality that wipes out memory of the first years of life, as
well as making it impossible to unveil the mystery of birth. Here one can make
an interesting comparison with irreversible processes in physics where growth
of entropy completely destroys memory about the initial conditions imposed
on elements of a system. But growth of entropy is linked to temporality, so
that temporality blocks access to the initial state of a system. Analogously,
irreversible temporality of the advanced human consciousness blocks any
access to the facticity of one’s birth.
As we see, the experience of thinking about death and birth comes together.
Thus the fear of death is linked to the mystery of birth: man does not want to
see its own life as some contingent appearance out of non-being, because it
assumes eventual return to it. Human beings do not want to come to terms
with the inherent eventuality of their existence that forms their existential
tragedy: emotionally and instinctively, while having come into incarnate exis-
tence, they want to stay in this condition forever. In theological terms man
122. This reminds one of Marcel’s thought that ‘my body is the window into the world’
(Being and Having, p. 15.)
does not want to consider himself as a creature, he wants to control his own
life and to become the artificer of his affairs in the universe. While feeling that
he is unable to become the one he wants to be, he attempts to find such an
immutable and absolute foundation of his life that itself would not need any
further foundation. And here he exercises his basic transcendence towards the
world’s matter or substance, which is seen by him as existent independently of
the event of humanity and which is the ultimate ground of life. Death is still
there, but it becomes simply a natural death as decomposition, so that it does
not threaten exit from the physical world: there is no life beyond it, so that
there is nothing to be afraid of, because the finitude of one’s existence does not
imply a short term for the universe thus depriving it of any sense.123
This way of thought induces a certain belief that by tracing somehow the
conditions of life to the very beginning of the world one will be able to solve
the mystery of our appearance in the world and explain away the fear of death
by appealing to some outward inevitabilities of nature. This belief is realized
in mechanistic and deterministic world-views that chain humanity to the
universe and stop it from any dreaming about transcendence. Since the world
began somehow in the past, in the same manner ‘I’, came into existence.
However in this attitude this ‘I’ represents no more than a generic symbol of
humanity, whose multihypostatic essence is lost. Mechanicism raised to its
extreme through the natural attitude cannot account for personhood, cannot
deal with particular contingent ‘initial conditions’ of human lives as their real-
ization, as particular broken symmetries in impersonal physical and biological
laws. One must not wonder then that the fear of death, as an end of personal
existence, accompanied by the fear of ontological loneliness, induces a desire
to dissolve personhood into a collective-like state of existence simply through
sharing impersonal substance. This creates a strange nostalgia of seeking
behind life some solid and unshakable foundations at the fundamental level of
reality, be it elementary particles or the beginning of the universe. However,
the vanity of such a consciousness consists in what Marcel brilliantly expressed
by saying that my beginning and the beginning of the world represent one and
the same mystery of existence that cannot be solved on the ground of any
science or philosophy.124
Since the foundation of the very fact of one’s existence escapes any clear
phenomenalization, this existence, stands before man in a mode of ‘presence
123. It is indicative in this context to quote a typical conviction of cosmologists that

the sense of existence and the overcoming of anxiety of life and death comes from the outer
universe: ‘When I look up into the sky at night, I often wonder whether we humans are too
preoccupied with ourselves. . . . There are things that I would otherwise be bothered by –
my own death, for example. Everyone will die sometime, but when I see the universe as
a whole, it gives me a sense of longevity. I do not care so much about myself, as I would oth-
erwise because of the big picture.’ Loeb, A. (2006) ‘The Dark Ages of the Universe’, Scientific
American 295 (5), 22–29 (23).
in absence’. Incarnation as an event of birth takes place in space and time

where the conditions of its ‘presence in presence’ to others are available. How-
ever, it escapes any spatio-temporal representation, being a mystery for that
one who was incarnated, and thus, in spite of its given facticity, appears to be
inexplicable, that is to be the sheer manifestation of the gift in the conditions
of incarnation, that is in its ‘presence in absence’. This is the reason why the
mundane and naturalistic consciousness, not being able to come to terms with
the fact that it cannot control its own incarnate existence, wants to transfer
this control to some other ‘third power’, that is, to the world where matter
evolves to such a state as to be able to become a receptacle of consciousness,
which thus turns out to be no more than an epiphenomenon of the material; it
wants to explain away the mystery of its facticity, as if consciousness was
defined and controlled by itself, including its inception at birth with the body.
In this view the cessation of the bodily existence entails the termination of
consciousness: there is no disembodiment, instead there is only the absolute
end of the particular material state of life. Thus the desire of ‘presence in pres-
ence’ not only of the body but the associated consciousness dissolves into
non-being, that is, in terms of those who are still in the incarnate existence,
into ‘absence in absence’, that is, sheer absence. In this case the end of the
incarnate state is thought as the end in space and time and of space and time.
By reversing this way of thought, then, the event of incarnation is also thought
as happening in space and time and being of space and time. It is here that one
can see the hidden psychological desire and longing for the idea of the origin
of the world: since my own origin is in this world and of this world, the world
as such must have an origin which can be traced (let’s say cosmologically) in
the world and which is of the world. What happens in this way of thinking is
that an attempt is made to explain away the contingent facticity of one’s life as
well as the contingent facticity of the world and dissolve them in the idea
about the initial state of the world. It is clear that the factual uniqueness
of every hypostatic incarnation (which is always present in discourse in its
absence) is dismissed in favour of variability in particular realizations of
biological forms and associated consciousness.
The fear of ontological death as exit from the physical universe, which
underlies human desire to sustain its indefinite existence in space and time,
causes not only the cultivation of the natural attitude, but a certain unbelief in
eschatologism as transcendence of history, that is that, on the one hand, life is
unfolded in history, but its foundation and ultimate sense is not of history but
beyond it. Eschatologism as an attitude is fundamentally different to mechani-
cism because it aspires beyond space and time towards non-worldly realities
which drive history and the very scientific exploration of the world. In the
eschatological attitude the past as objective reality becomes unimportant;
rather it concerns the human mind only in the perspective of its eschatological
fulfilment. Here one finds a certain asymmetry between birth and death: birth
is detached from our awareness at the level of phenomena; the same is true for
death, but the latter is thought only in the perspective of future life for which
the ‘pastness’ of birth has a very limited value, only as a premise of death and
possible transition to another aeon. Thus Christian eschatologism can be inter-
preted as a change of mind such that all anxiety of the contingent facticity of
incarnation and fear of death is transfigured into certainty of the everlasting
life that is effected upon us by the Spirit ecclesially and Eucharistically.
Finally, one must rearticulate the main point in the distinction between
the modes of subjectivity in theology and science: it is their intentionality.
While the sciences deal with the objects of the surrounding world, posed by
consciousness as existing independently of it (thus exercising the logos-like
intentionality directed to the outward rational meaning of its objects) theology
is turned to the primary fact of existence at all, as it is given to the human
reflection, that is, to human existence and to its internal conscious life. While
being through embodiment in the world and dispassionately accepting this fact
as a gift of facticity, theology reflects upon this gift not by making a transcen-
dent reference to the world, but through a transcendent reference beyond
both the sphere of consciousness and the world. And this turning from within
subjectivity, but towards its beyondness, is possible, because there is another
hidden and more profound intentionality that is implanted in human beings
made in the Divine image, that one which we have already named as the
Spirit-like intentionality. However, unlike the logos-like intentionality that has
simple empirical references in space and time, the Spirit-like intentionality acts
silently and anonymously in those who are predisposed to the invocation of
the Spirit and receiving, as a response, grace from him. It is not easy to give
a simple account of division of intentionalities that we discuss here, because
even this reflective analysis implies faith in God, and, in particular, faith in the
Trinitarian image in every human person.
The spirit-like intentionality directs one towards the very facticity of exis-
tence without making this fact an object of study in an ordinary sense. For
human subjectivity imbued with a healthy dose of the natural attitude, this
issue of facticity of existence is linked to the question of the origin of existence
as incarnation, which is certainly inaccessible to any phenomenalization. In
a theological frame of mind the problem of individual incarnation is closely
linked to the mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos of God in Jesus Christ.125
Here one can rephrase Marcel’s thought that when one talks about incarna-
tion in a purely philosophical sense, ‘this incarnation, mine and yours, is to
that other Incarnation, to the dogma of the Incarnation, as philosophical mys-
teries are to the revealed mysteries.’126 Indeed, we have no ability to know and
125. Theological teaching that man was made in the image of God entails that Christ
represents an ultimate Archetype of humanity, the head of true humanity. This is not so much
concerned with physical origin of human being, but with attainment of the unity with Christ,
to receive the hypostasis of the Logos. See more details in Nellas, Deification in Christ,
pp. 34–42.
126. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, p. 80.
understand the dogma of the Incarnation in Christianity along the logic of this
world. Theology explicates this mystery not in order to ‘explain’ it, but only
with the purpose of pointing out that all theology is linked to the fact of the
Incarnation.127 There are two important factors: on the one hand there is some
general condition for the Incarnation to take place, such as space and time; on
the other hand there is the very event of incarnation as that unique and unpre-
dictable (from the point of view of its contingent facticity) act of conception
and birth. In the same way as an ordinary man’s incarnation is fundamentally
inaccessible to phenomenalization, so that its sense as an initial event remains
utterly obscure to individuals during all their life thus unfolding the meaning
of its facticity through the future, the mystery of the event of the Incarnation
of Christ (its ‘scandal’ in the outward reflection) unveils only after the Pente-
cost, when the Spirit of God makes himself seen (so that his presence ‘behind’
the Incarnation becomes clear). He is present there as that power which initi-
ates the eventuality of the Incarnation with the purpose of inaugurating the
future Kingdom. In this sense space and time appear not only to link the Logos
with the man Jesus, but make the conditions in which the will of God, through
the action of the Holy Spirit, becomes visible and realizable.128 Thus the theo-
logical typology of events of incarnation in ordinary men originates in the
theology of the Incarnation and Pentecostal condescension of the Spirit of
God: the Spirit grants life to a man at the time of conception and then with-
draws in order the mystery of birth is not available. It is this contingency of the
Spirit’s action at the time of conception which makes its outcome, that is a
particular hypostatic being, completely unpredictable. Thus it seems plausible
to argue that the unfolding of the sense of incarnation and birth and, hence,
the sense of existence becomes possible only through the acquisition of the
Holy Spirit as a spiritual attitude directed to the future of one’s life, not its
past. However, it can also be anticipated that the result of this acquisition will
lead to the loss of interest in the phenomenalization of the event of incarnation
and conception and birth in the past of an individual. The search for its foun-
dation will have only eschatological, but not cosmological, sense as the goal
and will of God with respect to this or that human being.
The Spirit in the Incarnation and the Spirit-like Intentionality
By bringing into our discussion a new idea about the intentionality of the Spirit
in the dialogue between theology and science we exalt this dialogue to a strictly
127. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Two hundred texts on theology’, in Philokalia,

vol. 2, p. 127.
128. Thus the very unfolding of the phenomenality of the Incarnation by the Spirit
assumes the facticity of space and time. From here one can conjecture that space and time in
their factual givenness manifest a sort of ‘event’ of enhypostasization of the world structures
by the Logos of God, which had been also initiated by the Holy Spirit.
theological mode, namely, that one of pneumatology. As was intuitively felt

on previous pages, pneumatology enters the dialogue between theology and
science through ‘anthropology’, more precisely through the intrinsic Trinitar-
ian image in a human person who explores the universe, creates science and
aspires to God. In this present context the Trinitarian image implies a deep
sense of interrelations of intentionalities of human consciousness, which are
engaged in forming persons’ existential orientation. In most cases Christology
enters scientific discourse implicitly if one refers to a structure of the universe
as sustained by the Logos (as some rational principle behind all particular
phenomena) and to an old patristic conviction that the sense of the universe
can be found in Christ. In this case a typical intentionality that is involved in a
naturalistic and objectivistic science (which aims to attend to outer objects and
laws) is the logos-like intentionality. In other words, science operates with the
structure of the universe in the conditions where the questions about the fac-
tual contingent origin of this structure (their logoi) and the very possibility of
its comprehension (i.e. the logos in human cognitive abilities), are not asked
at all. Typically, within the natural attitude, the structural similarity between
the constitution of human beings (body/soul) and the universe (empirical/
intelligible) is taken as the justification for the very possibility of knowledge.
However, this similarity can only have theological reference through the
dogma of the Incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh, as the recapitulation of
all humanity in Christ, considered in the perspective of its non-trivial non-local
spatio-temporal setting, as the only and ultimate historical reference through
which the microcosmic position of human beings, as capable of articulating
the whole universe, can be understood. Therefore one should look carefully at
the heart of the theology of the Incarnation, in order to grasp the importance
of the hidden pneumatological dimension that is present in it, and, as result,
behind the microcosmic position of humanity. It is theologically important to
understand how our grasp of the Incarnation implies the presence of the Spirit
behind the Incarnation itself, as well as behind our comprehension of the
Incarnation as a fundamental mystery of the Church. Then and only then will
one be able to address the issue of how the dimension of the Spirit (i.e. pneu-
matology) is implicitly present in our existential orientation in the world and
in scientific intentionality (that is behind the logos-like intentionality). This
deep underlying intentionality of human subjectivity that (by analogy with
pneumatology in Christology) forms the foundation of all events, when human
consciousness grasps the logos-like structure of the world, has been already
called the ‘intentionality of the spirit’, or the spirit-like intentionality.
Let us give a theological illustration of how our comprehension of the
Incarnation of the Logos is influenced by the Holy Spirit in order to transfer
this theological move later on, into the dialogue between theology and science.
The presence of the Spirit in our knowledge of the Son is not available at the
same level as the Incarnation of the Logos in the midst of space and time. For
the Spirit is not embodied in the way it happened in the Incarnation of the Son,
that is, His presence and action cannot be described in concrete modalities
and structured objectivities of space and time. The Spirit exercises here a
certain anonymity.129 This implies that our comprehension of the presence of

the Holy Spirit happens when human consciousness has to question its own
capability to witness, understand the Christ-event and to interpret it as the
only possible point of access not only to the Son, but, in fact, to the Father
and the Spirit Himself. On the one hand the presence of the Holy Spirit is
not mediated by anything that is related to space and time; on the other hand
the comprehension of the synergy in the work of the Father and the Son
together with the Spirit comes from the whole chain of events through Cre-
ation, Incarnation, Resurrection and Pentecost. We see thus that the Holy
Spirit, in comparison with the Son, is related to the realities of space and time
only indirectly, to the extent by which He is one being with the Son, whom we
know through the Incarnation which took place in space and time.130
Since the Incarnation took place in the realities of space-time, our compre-
hension of the whole Christ-event is inevitably anthropomorphically linked to
the imagery of the presence of God among us through his union to human
nature. In a way, human mind which thinks about the Christ-event exercises
the natural attitude with respect to this event, projecting therefore this event
into modalities of the empirical world in space and time. It sees this event as
happening in the conditions of the world in spite of all the mystical overtones
which surround this event. The whole logic of our thoughtful movement
toward the Logos of God undertakes a route from within the world, that is, in
rubrics of space and time. It is here that a patristic apophaticism enters as a
warning message into the theological discourse by setting the boundaries of
any transcendence from the world to God. The apophaticism suspends the
norm of our thinking even with respect to the Incarnation itself, for it stops us
thinking and talking too much about ‘how’ the Incarnation had happened.131
This suspension of a ‘naturalistic’ intentionality with respect to the mystery
of the incarnate Son of God is accompanied by the entry of a parallel inten-
tionality, very dim and difficult to observe, directed towards the Christ-event
not as sheer physical and historical fact, but as an existential and mystical
givenness within human subjectivity.132 The shift of intentionalities indicates
that there is something or someone beyond the sheer imagery of the Christ-
event which initiates not only our comprehension of this event but also initiated
this event as happening in history. As soon as our consciousness confronts
129. Similar to that anonymity of him within the community of the Holy Trinity
which was discussed by Lossky, V. (1997) In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood:
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 74.
130. See more discussion in Torrance, T. F. (1996) The Christian Doctrine of God, One
Being Three Persons, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 98–111.
131. ‘Neither by the objectivity of rational discourse nor by the structures of conceptual
categories is it possible to interpret the logically contradictory fact of the Incarnation of God,
or to subject the Word’s becoming human to precise definitions’ (Yannaras, On the Absence
and Unknowability of God, p. 94).
itself with the question such as ‘why the contemplation of the Christ-event is
possible at all?’, the noematic correlate of this enquiry splits in itself. On the
one hand human consciousness realizes through faith that there must be some
foundation silently present behind all events surrounding the Incarnation as
happening in structures of space and time; on the other hand, this same foun-
dation acts as the only reliable witness to what actually happened because all
human opinions about this event cannot be reliable. On the one hand human
comprehension is directed towards the world, in which the Incarnation has
happened as the birth of Jesus Christ; on the other hand, the same contempla-
tive mind intuits that in spite of the contingent facticity of the Incarnation in
rubrics of space and time there must be some other-worldly ‘logic’ in what hap-
pened: it directs the mind not to the event itself, but to its hidden foundation,
which is not given empirically and whose phenomenalization is not possible by
any means.
History points out to us that the underlying sense of what happened in
empirical events surrounding Christ were shown to the apostles and hence to
the Church only after the Pentecost when the Person of the Holy Spirit opened
the sense of that mystery to humanity. In their desire to comprehend the mys-
tery of Christ a faithful soul realizes that the knowledge of the Son is possible
and revealed to us in the Spirit, acting as the ‘unobjectifiable transparent pres-
ence of God’, which co-ordinates us with the whole stretch of time in the
universe, as well as with the ultimate meaning of the event of the Incarnation.
This is the Spirit-like intentionality which directs human subjectivity towards
that ‘unobjectifiable transparent presence of God’ (as the ‘object’ of its inten-
tion) which lies in the foundation of facticity of our incarnate existence whose
eternal archetype is the Incarnation of the Logos of God in Jesus Christ. One
can say that this intentionality is the search for the Spirit through existential
and pre-categorical ‘knowledge’ about him and thus is implanted in existential
faith.
The difficulty with the articulation of the spirit-like intentionality consists in
that the Spirit is not present explicitly: he does not bear witness to himself in
the same way that he does not make himself manifest in the Christ-event
(despite being the initiator and witness to this event). The Holy Spirit does not
show (phenomenalize) explicitly himself to us, but he shows the Face of the
Son in which he shows the Face of the Father. He provides us with the ‘light of
132. The presence of this ‘new’ intentionality can be detected by analysing the spatial
paradox of the Incarnation which was discussed by Torrance in his Space, Time and Incarna-
tion. It is because of this intentionality that space becomes seen not simply as a particular
physical organization of things ‘present in presence’, but as a special condition and medium
of our communion with God, so that space as this medium shows itself, but in the conditions
of its empirical absence. In fact the paradox of the Incarnation leads a contemplative phenom-
enological mind to see beyond the facticity of spatial display in the universe and to enquire
about the underlying and forming principle (logos) of space, that is, to transcend space.
Christ’, in whose presence we can discern the world and its relationship to
God. In words of Irenaeus of Lyons, Christ recapitulated heavenly things and
earthly things thus ‘uniting man to the Spirit and making the Spirit to dwell in
man. He became the head of the Spirit and gave the Spirit to be the head of
man for it is by the Spirit that we see and hear and speak.’133 It is through this
light of Christ that the Holy Spirit directs us to the Godhead of Christ, in
accordance with whom all our knowledge of God-Trinity is formed.
We see thus that the reference to the Incarnation of the Logos of God pro-
vides us with some types of how the Divine humanity is related through God
to the entire universe, and how the whole nature is seen as having its end and
purpose in Christ-Logos who informs all things with order and harmony.
Whereas with respect to the Spirit, we are prevented from entertaining the
notion of the Spirit in a similar fashion, as an underlying and forming principle
that imparts to human beings out of Himself. Rather must we think of the
Spirit as actualizing its union with the Logos within creation, so that it is
through the power of the Spirit that human minds are given the knowledge
about the incarnate Logos and united to Christ on the grounds of his renewing
work. It is the Spirit thus who is actualizing our perception of our place in the
world, the bearing of the archetype of the Son of God in us, and thus seeing
through him the Father and the Spirit Himself. What we know about God, we
know from Christ, but this knowledge is delivered to us by the Spirit, who
interiorizes the knowledge of God within us. By initiating in us the knowledge
of the Christ-event in the Spirit, the Spirit actualizes in us God’s own witness
to Himself. It is through this movement of the Spirit that humanity is capable
of exercising that glimpse of the True Light and which allows us to transcend
the boundaries of our own subjectivity, to reject its self-centredness, so much
promoted in modern culture and to be converted to thinking and knowing
of God.
Spirit-like Intentionality in Phenomenalization of Birth:

The Christian Typology
The preoccupation with one’s contingent facticity which is accompanied by

the entry of the spirit-like intentionality can be explicated in a slightly different
way through paralleling the issue of phenomenology of birth with the under-
lying sense of the Nativity of Christ.
The question concerning birth is how to understand my birth134 showing
itself as a phenomenon. The problem is that I did not see my birth and I must
133. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies V.20.2, in H. U. von Balthasar (ed.), The
Scandal of the Incarnation, p. 55.
134. For simplicity of presentation we will use in this subsection the first person
singular.
rely on the account of my parents or other witnesses in order to attempt to

grasp birth, but I will never be able to reconstitute this event as a phenomenon.
The amazing thing is that while not being a phenomenon given to myself,
I always experience an intention to look at birth as a phenomenon that initi-
ated me, my identity, my spiritual growth, ultimately my hypostatic uniqueness.
Birth as an existential premise is always silently encoded in all my actions,
which attempt to reconstitute it in order to come to terms with the fact that
I was born without my consent and can do nothing about it. In a way, my birth
can be seen as the never-ending continuation of my experience of life, but it is
still inaccessible as a phenomenon to my direct gaze. One can formulate this
inability to comprehend my own birth as a kind of a paradox: birth shows
me exactly that my own origin cannot be shown. How then can my birth as a
phenomenon, while not showing itself, affect me radically in a sense that it
produces my unique existence in a particular, contingent, hypostatic incarna-
tion? How can the origin of myself that is present in all following events of my
life shows itself in such a way that effectively it is indemonstrable? The answer
to these questions comes from the realization that this showing has an escha-
tological character because the past of my birth is being shown to me only
through its anticipation (as the intention to understand ‘who I am’) as directed
to the future. My birth has sense only as an ‘event’ which phenomenalizes itself
by endowing me with my indefinite, potential future. Being an indemonstrable
phenomenon birth reveals itself as an ‘event’ that was never present to me in
orders of its presence (i.e. as ‘presence in presence’) and always already imbued
with the qualities of the passed, but never outdated. But even in this ‘eschato-
logical phenomenalization’ my birth does not allow any demonstrability in a
sense of communication: my birth is an event of my hypostasis, which cannot
be communicated at all, which is irreproducible and surpassing any expecta-
tion and prediction. Correspondingly, one can say that the phenomenality of
my birth follows from the fact that it gives itself in an unmediated and inde-
monstrable way.135
The analogy between the facticity of birth and the facticity of the Christ-event,
as we have already discussed, can be established through the reference to the
dogma of Incarnation as an event that was not initiated by anything worldly
but rather by the anonymous presence of the Holy Spirit, who in turn initiates
in believers the vision of the Christ-event as experience of God, not-reducible
and affected in its pure facticity by any operation of the discursive mind. The
image of our birth through the archetype in Christ, allowed us to conjecture
that the very process of phenomenalization of birth as directed to the future is
itself initiated by a sort of eschatological intentionality and it drives our search
135. See, for more on phenomenology of birth, Henry, M. (2003) De la phénoménologie.

Tome I. Phénoménologie de la vie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 123–42;
Marion, In Excess. Studies of Saturated Phenomena, pp. 41–4, (2003) ‘The event, the phe-
nomenon and the revealed’, in J. F. Faulconer (ed.), Transcendence in Philosophy and
Religion, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 87–105 (93–101).
for the origins of ourselves and the universe into future. This intuition can be
confirmed through a reference to the Nativity and the parables of the Kingdom.
Indeed, the Apostles and the Church overwhelmingly affirmed that the
Nativity of Christ, apart from its occurrence at a given point of the earthly his-
tory, contained the hidden message about the everlasting Kingdom that Christ
opens to men and which nobody can close after him (Mt. 2.2, Lk. 1.32,33;
2.11,12). The incarnation of the Logos in flesh was a manifestation of the
end of the one old age, and the beginning of the new, the age which is driven
towards and by the ‘logic’ of the Kingdom of God, the age which is eschato-
logical per se. The turning point in the history of the created world was
proclaimed by the angel at the Annunciation: ‘He will be great, and will be
called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to Him the throne
of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of
His Kingdom there will be no end’ (Lk. 1.32,33).
We see thus the hidden dualism in Christ-event. On the one hand, in its out-
ward appearance, the Christ-event, as an event in the conditions of created
nature, begins with the Nativity of Christ, the birth of baby Jesus, and extends
through his life in flesh and his teaching towards his death on the Cross. On
the other hand, the Christ-event expresses enigmatically the plan of man’s
salvation, the promise of God to man and His Kingdom. The hidden message
of the Nativity of Christ is thus the inauguration of the Kingdom of God,
which in its heavenly supremacy is no longer inaccessible to humans, that
human beings, in spite of their natural condition and limited faculties can hope
to ‘see and hear’ the message of the Kingdom through the Spirit. The outward
appearance of the Nativity of Christ, his conception and birth, was surrounded
by extraordinary events. Christ’s birth was the incomprehensible miracle. The
hidden message of the Nativity, which later was set forth by Christ through
His parable of the Kingdom, was a mystery, not accessible to everyone, but
opened by Christ Himself to his followers. For many the parable of the King-
dom was a kind of enigmatic wisdom, the same kind of mystery as the very
fact of Christ’s extraordinary birth. And when His disciples asked him what
this parable meant, he said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of
the Kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they
may not see, and hearing they may not understand’ (Lk. 8.9,10).136
The message of the Kingdom that is manifested through the birth of Christ
in Bethlehem points toward an incredible mystery of the union of man and
God in Christ, man who was born in Palestine and God who, being in flesh,
did not cease to be present hypostatically in the entire universe, being its ruler
and provider of its order and harmony. Being in Palestine, he still was in the
Kingdom, about which he taught his disciples. It is because of this that when
we assert that the incarnation recapitulates the whole creation, we also assert
136. See more on the parables of the Kingdom, Matthew the Poor (1984) The Commu-
nion of Love, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, pp. 65–78.
that the whole creation is recapitulated from the perspective of the Kingdom
of God: it is in Christ’s incarnation that the sense of the temporal span of the
created universe is revealed starting from its ‘beginning’, when the universe
was created and fashioned to be prepared to receive God in flesh, and finishing
by its ‘end’, that is, the Age to Come, the eschatological future of the Kingdom.
By pointing towards the Age to Come in his parables Christ encourages his
disciples and all Christians not to be preoccupied with questions about the
facticity of his birth, not to pose questions as ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’. Since the
whole span of history is recapitulated by him, the facticity of his arrival in
the world in terms of space and time has no importance, whereas it has impor-
tance as the inauguration of the Kingdom whose presence transfigures here
and now, past and present in such a way that all of them receive their ultimate
meaning from the future.
This Christian teaching can be considered as typology of anyone’s birth: the
preoccupation with the contingent facticity of one’s birth, and the underlying
causes of one’s incarnate existence directs persons toward the source of its
sense which is not in their physical and biological past, but in their future. In
other words, the foundation of the facticity of one’s birth comes not from
some familial circumstances in the plane of the world, but from the one’s
future as accomplished becoming and potentiality of salvation.
Everything which Christ taught his disciples through parables was conceived
by them through the action of the Spirit upon them at the Pentecost. Thus the
entry of the Kingdom of God and annunciation about a new aeon in the event
of Nativity was inaugurated by the same Spirit, who by his action initiated
Logos’ entry into history. In a similar way the vision of the mystery of one’s
birth being unfolded through the movement to the future, that is, in perspec-
tive of person’s becoming and potential salvation, is initiated by the Holy
Spirit who activates in human subjectivity that eschatological intentionality
which we have already called the spirit-like intentionality.
The Holy Spirit in the Dialogue between Theology and Science:

Why Their Synthesis Needs an Ecclesial Dimension
At this stage of our discussion of the distinction between the logos-like and
spirit-like intentionalities in human subjectivity, we would like to introduce
a final element which accomplishes our brief discussion of the status of the-
ology in its dialogue with science. Once again we will have to conclude that
theological discourse in difference with any scientific or philosophical activity
demands the invocation of the spirit-like intentionality which, in order to be
fulfilled assumes the entry of the ecclesial dimension. The basic difference
between scientifico-philosophical activity and theology is based in the modali-
ties of the presence of Grace of the Holy Spirit in them.
In order to make it clear what is meant by this mentioned difference let us
start from asserting that the animation of the scientific logos-like intentionality
directed to the world, when the world is seen not as a decoherent set of appear-
ances, implies in a certain grace which makes it possible to see the whole world
through the face of the Logos of God. The famous exclamation of Einstein that
the most striking aspect of the universe is that it is conceivable at all, can be
responded by saying that to conceive the universe one needs Grace. But this
Grace, being a gift of the Holy Spirit remains anonymous and impersonal in
every knower, being present, theologically speaking, on the level of divine
energies. This grace in energies was granted man by the Creator in order man
could know Him through creation.137 This grace was the foundation of all
knowledge and philosophy which received its inception in ancient Greece.
Then one can claim that any scientifico-philosophical ascension to God, that
is, a discovery of the presence of the divine in the world and in human thought,
can be considered as para-Eucharistic work in a sense that it constantly accom-
panied by the invocation of the Grace without which knowledge is not possible.
However this invocation, being a propensity of the divine image in humanity,
is present behind the logos-like intentionality, but not always articulated. To
give account for this Grace in scientific research, that is, to become aware
about the foundation of the facticity of the logos-like intentionality or facticity
of knowledge, would be a first step to laying down the pneumatological dimen-
sion of the dialogue between science and theology. This is the reason why all
our discussion of the entry of the spirit-like intentionality can be considered as
a certain attempt to articulate that Grace of the Holy Spirit which is present
behind scientifico-philosophical approach to the world. The search for the
presence of the Spirit through science and philosophy means, first of all, to
rediscover humanity behind science in a very non-trivial sense: not by a simple
assertion that all scientific theories are mental creations, but by disentangling
intentionalities which are involved in different articulations of the world in
science and theology. Practically this implies that science and scientific activity
in general, must be appropriated not through analysing the content of its
theories and their claims about reality (which allegedly can be contraposed to
some theological ideas), but rather by making a sort of ‘deconstruction’ of its
theoretical notions in order to reveal the structures of human intentional
consciousness (whose correlate is interpreted by science as the objective world),
and its integrating capacity to sustain the presence of the Divine image in it
and to confer this image on the world. When we mention the presence of the
Divine image in human subjectivity we assume that it is because of this pres-
ence that human subjectivity is not something that creates a chaotic image
of reality, it contains in itself ‘grace’ by making this reality harmonious and
beautiful. The coherence of the world as it appears through conscious articula-
tion in human subjectivity is a contingent fact, but this contingency is of the
Divine origin: it is present as a gift of grace to exist in co-ordination with
137. St Athanasius (1998) On the Incarnation, 14, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary

Press, p. 42.
the world, and to be able to express this co-ordination by making the world
inherent in the hypostasis of humanity. This ‘grace’ definitely points beyond
consciousness-in-the-world (which is contingent in itself), that is, to the non-
worldly dimension, from where the link between consciousness and what it
tackles as an object of its intention and thematization is effectively actualized
in its created incarnate contingency. The categories of knowledge which allow
us to reveal beauty and harmony in a good creation of a good God are not
something which are inherent in the sphere of transcendental subjectivity; the
knowledge is in us but it is not from us. Human beings experience knowledge,
as a certain fulfilment of incarnations of their logoi (i.e. principles of divine
humanity), whose literal meaning is to confer on humanity the ability to con-
template the Light of Christ. In this case, whatever human mind asserts as
‘nature’ or ‘the world’ by its very ontological constitution contains the Light
of Christ: patristic writers asserted this differently by saying that nature receives
its meaning, purpose and end in Christ.
Then it is not difficult to realize that if subjectivity withdraws (willingly or
unwillingly) from this Grace (the Divine image), the whole harmony of the
world collapses into the chaos of sense impressions and figments of imagina-
tion. This is the reason why theology is always concerned with our world,
where hypostatic humanity was introduced by the power of the Holy Spirit
and where His Grace is available. Any speculation about a universe without
human beings is effectively the speculation about the universe without Grace
and, as such, is devoid of any existential content and meaning. It can form no
more than a pointer towards possible intelligible worlds whose existential
meaning is obscure.
In view of what we have said, the performance of mediation between science
and theology is possible by the way of disclosing the ‘presence of grace’ in
scientific theories by means of ‘reverting’ their objective references to the struc-
tures of human subjectivity, which exhibits the presence of grace and refers to
the ultimate source of this Grace in God. However, the detection of the pres-
ence of Grace through scientific and philosophical research does not exhaust
the pneumatological dimension in the science–religion dialogue. No scientific
research and philosophical reflection will be theologically complete without
understanding of their telos in the context of the ‘infinite tasks’ of humanity,
that is, without the eschatological dimension in these activities. But this can be
disclosed only Eucharistically through the invocation of the Person of the Holy
Spirit. Here we enter a new phase in our discussion which requires one to
make a subtle distinction in the modalities of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
Let us remind the reader that Orthodox theology advocates transcendence of
God on the level of essence (ousia), and the presence of God in the world on
the level of His uncreated energies (energeia). It is in this sense that one
must make a subtle distinction between the Holy Spirit as a Hypostasis of the
Trinity, that is, as a Person, and the Holy Spirit as present through Grace,
that is, in energies common to all Divine Hypostases. This distinction is of a
fundamental importance, because theology asserts that the first entry of the
Holy Spirit into history took place at the Pentecostal gathering of the apostles,
that is, at the event which initiated the earthly Church. If science believes that
it deals with universal physical laws and logical structures of the world any
intuition of the Holy Spirit as if it would be present in the universe before the
Pentecost must give a clear account that it implies the Spirit as manifested
through the energies, rather than His Hypostatic entry into history. In other
words, before the Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was not present in the Divine
economy personally and particularly. The world and humanity were created
by God and animated by the Spirit (Gen. 1.2), but the Holy Spirit as Person
was not present in history directly, rather he was present through the energy
pertaining to all persons of the Holy Trinity, but in his hypostatic absence.
The important question now is: how is the historical specificity of the Pente-
costal event important for the understanding of a pneumatological dimension
of the science–religion dialogue? Here we face a twofold problem: on the one
hand, it is the issue of the difference between, let us say, human knowledge of
the universe before and after the Pentecost; on the other hand, if the Pentecost
is the manifestation of the entry of the Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit into
human history the problem is whether the Holy Spirit is constantly hypostati-
cally present in history since then, or, alternatively, he is not constantly present
in history and he only acts upon history in ecclesial events, which invoke the
Spirit by recreating liturgically the Pentecostal event. Depending upon the
acceptance of the former or latter points of view one comes to two different
views about the role of pneumatology in the science–religion dialogue.
There are alternative views about the ways in which the Holy Spirit is related
to history in recent Orthodox theology. Florovsky’s conviction was that ‘on
the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on the Church . . . He entered
into the world in order to abide with us and act more fully than He had ever
acted before . . . The Holy Spirit descended once and for always.’138 ‘The
descent of the Spirit was a supreme revelation. Once and for ever, in the
“dreadful and inscrutable mystery” of Pentecost, the Spirit–Comforter enters
the world in which He was not yet present in such manner as now He begins
to dwell and abide.’139 Thus, according to Florovsky, the Holy Spirit has been
constantly in history since the Pentecost. This could raise a reasonable question
as to why in this case the development of theology did not lead to the entry of
a neo-patristic idea earlier or later in history. Here we have to state that the
presence of the Spirit among us should be treated as a personal response to
human needs, expressed through intensity of their prayer and invocation. This
means that the Spirit’s response to us, in that way which theology of the twen-
tieth century articulated as a neo-patristic synthesis, happened exactly when
the corresponding lamentations of the suffering Churches were heard by the
138. Florovsky, ‘The Catholicity and the Church’, p. 37.

139. Florovsky, G. (1972) ‘The Church: Her nature and task’, in Bible, Church, Tradi-
tion: An Eastern Orthodox View, pp. 57–72 (63).
Spirit, as well as the conditions of the human created spirit were such that the
response of the Spirit could enter the comprehension of the modern fathers of
the Church.
If the Holy Spirit is constantly present in history, then one can conjecture
that the teleology of the human reason, as it reveals itself in scientific advance,
can imitate the teleology of the Spirit that animates creation and drives it to
self-affirmation through knowledge and exploration. In this case scientific
research can indeed be understood not only as para-Eucharistic work (which
deals through its investigation of the logos-structure of the universe with the
para-invocation of the Spirit through its Grace) but as a genuine Eucharistic
work. One then could argue that scientific research would be a kind of theo-
logical work, so that it could potentially imitate ecclesial institutions and hence
the traditional Church would be optional for the affirmation of truth in the
Spirit.
It can be easily seen that an alternative point of view that the spirit acts
upon history through liturgical events, is advocated by J. Zizioulas, stands
effectively in opposition to Florovsky’s assertions about the constant presence
of the Spirit in history. Zizioulas strongly opposes to any attempt to merge
the Spirit with history that is to the entry of the Spirit into its channels. If
Florovsky envisages a historical perpetuation of the one Pentecost,140 for
Zizioulas ‘the eschatological penetration is not a historical development which
can be understood logically and by experience; it is a vertical descent of the
Holy Spirit, by the epiclesis – that epiclesis which is so fundamental and
characteristic in the Orthodox liturgy – which transfigures the “present age”
and transforms it in Christ into the “new creation”.’141 This means that the
Pentecostal context is necessary for any action of the Church, and the hypo-
static presence of the Spirit in the world can only be invoked through a liturgical
action. It is in this sense that the Spirit acts upon history, but He is not in
history. This theological view has serious consequences for the understanding
of history as such: history stands not as an allegorical line of events, which
rolls out from the past into the future, but as a single ‘event’ of humanity, the
humankind-event, which is integrated and fulfilled from the Age to Come.
In a way every Pentecostal celebration in the Liturgy makes the invocation
of the entirety of history as it is revealed to humanity by the action of the
Holy Spirit upon it. Church history, patristics as history, is thus invoked not
through simple memory of the past, but rather as the memory of the future.
A neo-patristic synthesis can be seen as a new invocation of the experience of
the Fathers through and for the sake of the future, so that the underlying and
140. Florovsky, ‘The Catholicity and the Church’, p. 45.

141. Zizioulas, J. (1967) ‘La vision eucharistique du monde et l’homme contemporain’,
Contacts, 19, 83–92 (91). (This translation is quoted from McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes
the Church, p. 214. See more on the difference between Florovsky’s and Zizioulas’ positions
in the same book at p. 59).
transforming idea of this synthesis is to anticipate the past for the purpose of
renewal of the present.
If the Holy Spirit is not constantly present in history, and acts upon history
through his invocation in liturgical events, one sees immediately an exclusive
role of the Church in affirmation of the Spirit and the fundamental insuffi-
ciency of science alone to attain truth, as truth in the Spirit. Scientific institutions
then must be complemented by ecclesial ones, and scientific and philosophical
experience of the Divine is fundamentally incomplete without the Eucharistic
context through which the Pentecost is made present and the Holy Spirit acts
upon history. In this case any personal mystical experience of God through
contemplation of harmony and beauty of the universe must be placed in the
ecclesial context of the Liturgy in order to assure the presence of Grace in it.
If the Spirit acts upon history through liturgical events, the intrinsic teleology
of science (if it exists) does not necessarily follow the ‘teleology’ of the Spirit.
It is in this sense that the meaning of science in the perspective of the overall
progress of the human spirit cannot be understood only on the grounds of the
scientific and philosophical, that is, without a theological input supported by
experience of God in ecclesial communities and life of inner prayer.
Chapter 4
The Dialogue between Theology and Science:
Human-Centred as Opposed
to Nature-Centred
All questions concerning human reason . . . are eliminated from the sciences . . .
However, if the human mind and human rationality are either overlooked or
explained away in a naturalistic fashion, the sciences themselves become unintelligi-
ble. Since they are products and creations of the human mind, the foundations upon
which they rest, the sense of their procedures and accomplishments, and the limita-
tions of their legitimacy cannot be brought to light except by referring the very
products to the generating and producing mental activities.
Gurwitsch, A. (1966) Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, pp. 399–400
By studying the forms of objectivity assumed to be present in nature, one can,

however, infer the forms of subjectivity that are presupposed. Inquiry of this kind
must proceed according to phenomenological method, the purpose of which is to
uncover the noetic pole constitutive with the noematic pole, of the noetic–noematic
(subject–object) intentionality structure within which the form of the question and
the form of the answer mutually determine one another.
Heelan, P. A. (1972) ‘Nature and its transformations’,
Theological Studies, 1, p. 486
Introduction
We have already argued in the previous chapters that because theology and
science constitute different types of activity of human subjectivity, the problem
of mediation between them is the problem of unity and integrity of the human
experience of existence, which by virtue of humanity’s ambivalent position
in being appears to be in a state of split. However, it is intuitively felt that if
theology and science are seen not as statements about facts of the case but as
different existential experiences, the seeming divergence between theology and
science is a curious incident that must be healed through a careful analysis of
anthropological premises in theological and scientific views. In the previous
chapter we attempted to outline the specificity of cognitive faculties and modes
of human subjectivity, involved in a theological insight. In this chapter we are
going to proceed in a similar way with respect to science. Our major concern
will be to analyse science phenomenologically in order to articulate humanity

as tacitly present behind all its assertions about reality. Theology insists on the
fundamentally irreducible hypostatic essence of any particular life-world but
assumes a special sort of intersubjectivity, called catholicity (conciliarity, in
Slavonic ‘sobornost’), which establishes a common ground for their communi-
cation; science, while thematizing life-worlds removes all hypostatic specificity
and reveals their unity on the level of consubstantiality of human subjects.
Whereas theology, while insisting on the priority of the personal dimension in
human existence, does not reject from its account the world and human nature
as part of their essentiality, science in virtue of its intrinsic logic of advance has
to use all particular human persons as a tool while disregarding every human
life as valuable existence per se. What we see here is that the understanding of
the ontology of the human condition as incarnate existence is different in the-
ology and science. Thus the aim of mediation between theology and science is
to restore the broken unity in this understanding.
Thus the immediate practical task is to restore the status of personhood as
that ontological priority from which science unfolds. We would like to remind
the reader that the oblivion of personhood in contemporary science is not
something that is absolutely new and typical for our times. One of the basic
assumptions of the European intellectual tradition (in its deviation from Christi-
anity) is that human nature or human phenomenon is part of the one and single
reality of an encompassing Nature. More than that the seeming exhaustiveness
of the methods of physics, for example, is transferred to anthropology and cre-
ates another conviction that one can exhaustively comprehend the meaning
of human existence by methods of the natural sciences. Hence Nature at large
as well as human nature, as part of it, was implicitly conceived of as objects
present-to-consciousness. In this case the reality of Nature was the collection of
things and objects given this anonymously present consciousness in their sheer
facticity and the real business of science and knowledge in general is to appre-
hend the essential, universal and common characteristics of these objects. Since
human nature was considered as part of Nature at large, it acquired the features
of object things within Nature whose knowledge meant knowing the essential
and shared characteristics of human beings, which aim to define this very human
nature; the whole discourse of humanity was thus reduced to the level of syllo-
gistic ability to predicate human nature as the sharing of physical and biological
attributes with a total disregard of personhood as the radical otherness to essence
(as the absolutely undifferentiated) and existential uniqueness in the sense of
feelings, emotions, relationships, convictions, beliefs etc.
The major difficulty with this naturalistic stance is that it predicates human
nature as being part of and determined by Nature at large whereas this very
Nature can be attained only from within its particular fragment, that is, human
nature. In all naturalistic approaches to humanity it becomes clear that the
human philosophical desire for radical enquiry about the knowledge of Nature
(or being) as devoid of any presuppositions about what has been sought can
hardly be achieved because philosophy is created by human beings who cannot
be removed from the central and initial point of philosophical enquiry about
The Dialogue between Theology and Science 169
Nature (or being). Thus the question of Nature and human being in nature in
particular is most intimately connected with the question of how this being can
be attained. It seems evident that the comprehension of this being can only be
reached from within the experience of what we ourselves are.
Here we approach the major question of existential phenomenology on
humanity: what is such a being that can question itself as a particular realiza-
tion of being in general? This being is man, a particular mode of being, the
human existence, which can accomplish this function. Existential phenome-
nology assigns to this term ‘existence’ a special meaning by affirming, for
example, that this ‘term’ serves not to express that something actually belongs
to the realm of existing realities, but to indicate that mode of being which is
proper to man and precisely constitutes him as human being. Existence in this
sense is only intrinsic to human beings, and it is this existence that makes them
a fundamentally special mode of being.
One can describe humanity in terms of its relatedness to the world and to
others: on the one hand all human beings are distinct and separated in their
particular but contingent incarnations in the world, that is in their unrepeat-
able and unique personhood; on the other hand any personal aspect of human
existence is inconceivable without relationship and openness to the other. It is
only through their awareness of the relationship to the world and other hypo-
static creatures that human beings can realize themselves, that is, to reach their
self-consciousness and articulate their personhood in terms of this relation-
ship. Thus the being of human beings is being-in-the-world.1
Existential phenomenology considers human existence as a primordial phe-
nomenon, as an initial fact of any further philosophizing about the world, which
cannot be reduced to something else or demonstrated (in discursive structures
of consciousness) by reference to ‘the outside’ of this existence. This is differ-
ent in comparison with theology, which in its ‘explanation’ of the mystery of
human existence asserts the creaturehood of humanity, that is, its non-consub-
stantiality with God, and, hence, that human existence is hypostatic (personal)
existence which, while being in the world (being incarnate), is inherent in
the Logos of God ‘through whom all things were made’. This implies that the
existence of a particular human person is not something which is inherent or
latently present in the world, but represents an event (in Levinas’ terms an
event of ‘engaging of existing by an existent’2) which is initiated in creation but
which is not of creation.3
1. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 78.

2. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 43.
3. In Christian anthropology human subjectivity is inconceivable without embodiment,
so that human existence is constituted by the unity of the body and soul. However, this unity
is rooted in the mystery of the human hypostasis, which transcends the world. Human beings
are not only predisposed to transcend their own subjectivity in the world, but also have
ability and will to transcend the very relationship between their subjectivity and the world,
that is, to transcend being-in-the-world.
In spite of the differences in treatment of humanity by existential phenome-

nology and theology it is clear that their views are posed as radically different
in comparison with the scientific natural attitude of treating humanity as thing
among other things. This entails, further, that both physics, as well as theology
with respect to its claims about the world and God, cannot be consistently
understood without some pre-categorical intuitions about what human beings
are and hence (when one tries to mediate between science and theology) it is of
primary importance to state clearly the anthropological assumptions employed
either in science or in theology and to emphasize the implications of the differ-
ence or commonality of these definitions in the dialogue.
Subjectivity and Existence
Existential phenomenology and existential tradition in general object to that

stance of modern science which positions humanity within only Nature as if
both existed outside and independently of human insight. Rather than begin-
ning with Nature and then seeing human life as part of it, it argues for the
reversal of procedure, that is, seeing human reality as the primary fact of any
enquiry so that Nature is to be seen in light of it. This implies that not only
human reality cannot be a subordinate part of Nature, but the methods which
are used to study Nature are not applicable to the phenomenon of humanity
and human reality, because it is never an ‘object’ present to itself, because
subjective reality can never be made an ‘object-thing’ in spite of the fact that it
is this subjectivity which is always tacitly assumed in all sorts of vaguely under-
stood objectivity. The classical philosophical tradition overlooks that same
subjectivity that, in its attempt to subordinate all of reality to a single and uni-
form Nature, is removed ‘behind the screen’ of appearances of various things;
it disregards persons with their fullness of life enclosed in their interior sub-
jective experience. Thus existential phenomenology insists that the ultimate
meaning of Nature can be unfolded only by starting with human reality as
separate and different in kind from the realm of objectivized nature. The means
of knowing human reality are also different to ordinary objects. Rather than
human reality being subordinate and reducible to Nature at large, then, Nature
is conceived as subordinate and reducible to human experience of existence.
The existence of humanity is intimately connected with the interiority of its
consciousness. Existential phenomenology argues that this consciousness is
fundamentally intentional consciousness. But the affirmation of this interiority
as a certain definition of human being, that is, as the self-affirmation or self-
awareness of one’s ego, leads naturally to the desire to transcend the sphere of
pure subjectivity, and this requires the embodiment of consciousness in order
to become something special and concrete, that is, to be placed in a particular
space and time. Human beings find themselves already in the world, in a partic-
ular place and at a particular time, but this being-in-the-world is not articulated
by them as something that is necessarily connected with their subjectivity

(the natural attitude). In other words, it is through their own subjectivity
that human beings try to find understanding of their ultimate meaning, but
they cannot reach this goal without transcending the realm of their immediate
subjective givenness, so that one must transcend subjectivity towards the
world.
Since consciousness is always intentional, directed to something that is not
consciousness itself, the existence of human beings is somehow intimately
bound to this intentionality because it assumes relationship to the world, an
intentional relationship in its essence that constitutes the foundation of all
meanings, associated with the articulation of nature as a mode of this relation-
ship which ‘produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and
our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and in the landscape we
see, more clearly than in objective knowledge, and furnishing the text which
our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’.4
The involvement of human beings in the world, the access to the world and
to its meanings has its deepest ground in consciousness, which is the universal
and sole medium of access.5 However, when one asserts the primacy of con-
sciousness one means the perceptual consciousness, which makes the contact
with the reality that is not consciousness itself. The field in which consciousness
operates constitutes the intimate life-world, the sphere of immediate sense-
perceptions and meanings that forms the foundation that one needs in order to
construct the world through a scientific thematization and conceptualization.
Husserl believed that the task of philosophy is to uncover the structures of
the life-world in order to explicate the ultimate meaning of our experience of
reality. It is important to stress here that consciousness being in an intricate
link with the world does not represent itself entirely as an agency responsible
for the constitution of the meaning; for, being responsible for the constitution
of the meaning, it at the same time is perceptive of the meaning. One can point
out again that the meaning is not a function of a pure consciousness; it is linked
to the world, so that the meaning and the world are interwoven. Phenomenology
doubts the legitimacy of any claim about existence of the ever-made pre-existent
world without human beings; but it also denies the possibility that the mean-
ing of the world, as given together with the meaning of man, can have its
foundation outside the bundle of the world and man. The reason for this latter
denial (that contrasts phenomenology with theology) comes from insistence
on the primacy of the perceptive consciousness, which is bound to the world.
The other faculties of human beings which make it possible for them to
transcend the very relationship of being-in-the-world are not subject to genuine
4. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge, p. xx.

5. Gurwitsch, A. (1974) Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, Evanston: North-
western University Press, p. 12.
phenomenological interest, but, at the same time, a subject of a very intensive

critical discussion where classical phenomenology is extended beyond its
boundaries.
In spite of this difference with theology, phenomenology makes a useful
observation that nature, as articulated worldly reality, has sense only in the
context of the dialogue between human consciousness and that which is pos-
ited by consciousness. It is the dialogue with the unarticulated otherness of
consciousness, which ultimately reveals the meaning. In this respect one should
mention that in some contemporary scientific accounts the ideas of phenome-
nology on the dialogical essence of what is meant by scientific reality are
present explicitly. Let us consider, as an example, how this dialogism was
expressed by J. Kockelmans who writes that the meaning of the world arises in
the encounter between man and the world and
exists only in an interplay of question and answer. We find the question in the
world but it is still implicit and vague. Through my reply, which itself is a question,
the first question becomes sharper so that a more accurate answer becomes
possible. Meaning arises in a dialectic relationship between man and the world, but
it is not possible to say which of the two first begins the ‘interplay’ and which of the
two first gives meaning to the other.’6
By using theological terminology one can assert that, when defining human
existence as being-in-the-world, existential phenomenology asserts an inherent
relationality between man and the world, the relationality that constitutes
their ontology. The specificity of knowledge as a mode of relationship between
man and the world can be described as a particular intentionality of the incar-
nate consciousness, which directs itself towards the world and which it treats
as existing outside and independently of the sphere of subjectivity. This corre-
sponds to the natural attitude of the cogito which dissects the immediacy of
being-in-the-world, extracting from it only the mode of its ‘presence’ to con-
sciousness. However, the exercise of the natural attitude presupposes a kind of
‘pre-scientific’ knowledge, as awareness of the surrounding medium in which
human incarnate subjectivity functions, but which ‘shows’ itself in its empiri-
cal absence. Husserl calls this medium the life-world, the world of immediate
unthematized and originally inarticulate experience, which constitutes the
foundation for all scientific idealizations and abstractions.
6. Kockelmans, J. (1966) Phenomenology and Physical Science, Pittsburgh: Duquesne

University Press, p. 53. This passage is similar to later ideas of J. Wheeler who asserted that
physical reality reveals itself as an evolving complex of meanings in the course of the interplay
between questions and answers that the human subject addresses to and receives from that
‘out there’ which is articulated by human observers as the physical reality and nature. See,
for example, Wheeler, J. (1988) ‘World as system self-synthesized by quantum networking’,
IBM Journal of Research and Development, 32, 4–15 (5).
Humanity in the Universe and the Natural Attitude
In spite of some philosophical obviousness that scientific research in all its

dimensions involves human intelligence, so that everything which is affirmed
by the results of observations and measurements ultimately receives its mean-
ing and interpretation from the human agency, modern science is still wrestling
with the idea that reality, let us say physical reality, cannot be alienated com-
pletely from the acts of an apprehending intellect. Science still pursues in many
of its areas the methodology that is historically identified with the name of
Descartes and which is based on a strict separation between the empirical
world and the world of ideas, or, in widely accepted terms between body and
soul, object and subject. Science attempts to establish an ideal of objectivity of
its theories by making a split between subjective conditions of any human
knowledge and the meaning of this knowledge that it tries to objectify. Accord-
ing to this view the object of our knowing is an objectively existing world,
which is fully explainable and can be expressed in precisely formulated objec-
tive laws. The fundamental premise of the natural attitude of science is that
the world exists in itself in its entirety and possesses a rationality that can be
fully understood. Scientism, as a radical implication of the natural attitude,
follows a rather definite criterion of objectivity, based on the principles of
quantity. In other words whatever can be quantified and mathematized accord-
ing to certain rules is objective by definition. All those aspects of ‘reality’ which
cannot be quantifiable are not objective and therefore meaningless, whereas
the subject (being obviously in its physical dimension a part of the world), is
treated as pure consciousness, which is fully transparent to itself and which
faces the rational world objectively, that is, as it is in itself.
It is not difficult, however, to reveal that in spite of all attempts of modern
scientific discourse to follow the ideal of naturalism, there is a paradox silently
present in this discourse, associated with the fact that it is human beings who
are describing the world. One can see, for example, that if cosmology positions
humanity in the background of the vast and multivaried universe, assuming
that its reality is ultimate and pre-existent (with respect to the human intelli-
gence), then, definitely, humanity represents a particular type of ‘objects’ in
the universe, dependent on it and incapable of changing anything in this
global environment affecting the physical laws that form the basis for the
human incarnate condition. The so called ‘anthropic inference’ refines asser-
tions about humanity’s position in the universe through some deep affinity to
its large-scale structure by proclaiming consubstantiality of the universe and
humanity in quantitative terms. Indeed, some fundamental physical constants
are so finely tuned to sustain the human biological condition, that any imagin-
able variation of these constants would destroy the necessary conditions of
the mentioned consubstantiality. In a way this is a trivial observation which
affirms self-consistency of our knowledge of the universe with its true physical
structure. It is difficult to imagine any realistic cosmology which would affirm
such a physical state of the cosmos which could not allow humans to exist.
The paradox, however, dwells not in these simple observations. The very fact
of quantitative consubstantiality between humanity and the universe is brought
to its articulation by human subjectivity existing in the incarnate conditions.
But humanity is incapable of proceeding beyond this simple affirmation of
consubstantiality (sometimes characterized humanity as ‘microcosm’) as a
given fact; it has to humbly accept that it exists in the given conditions of the
cosmos and this is sheer fact. However since patristic times the idea of human-
ity as microcosm was severely criticized because it did not take into account
hypostatic dimensions of human existence and excluded any hopes to under-
stand Christian claims that humanity bears the Divine image. Consubstantiality
is triviality and, according to St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘there is nothing remark-
able in Man’s being the image and likeness of the universe, for earth passes
away and the heavens change . . . in thinking we exalt human nature by this
grandiose name (microcosm, synthesis of the universe) we forget that we are
thus favouring it with the qualities of gnats and mice.’7
With all respect to physics one must admit that its laws cannot give any
account for their particular outcomes, that is, for the contingent display of
existent objects; physics does not control the initial conditions of happenings
in the universe. Thus there are necessary conditions for existence of human
intelligent life in the universe, which are stated in the ‘anthropic inference’ but
the sufficient conditions that imply intelligence and hence the articulated image
of the universe is not directly implanted in the physical universe.8 The mystery
of the sufficient conditions for human existence remains utterly obscure
together with man’s inability to account for contingent facticity of all. One
deduces that if the contingent facticity of the state of affairs in the physical
universe, as reflected in consciousness, cannot be accounted for from within
physics, the contingent facticity of consciousness itself and its ability to relate
to the universe and create its coherent and ordered picture cannot be accounted
for by physics. The natural attitude of consciousness that attempts to explain
the origin of this consciousness as the epiphenomenon of the physical and bio-
logical fails to recognize that effectively it attempts to explain itself from within
itself. The break out of this fallacious circle of logical arguments comes from
pointing towards the fact that physics and biology operate in the framework
of given consciousness but this very consciousness never becomes their subject
matter. Consciousness is in place, it observes the universe, but it is irrelevant
for the universe! What is missing here is the simple awareness that the very
7. St Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 16, this translation is in Clément, On

Human Being, p. 34). Gregory’s comparison of humanity with mice is remarkable, because it
is a very popular thing to do in our times when the advocates of biological evolution, in order
to confirm their conviction that humanity did not get far from animality, announce that
humans and mice share 96% of their DNA.
8. See on this issue in my Light from the East, pp. 195–208.
word ‘universe’ as well as all theories of the universe are mental creations,
so that to say that humanity is irrelevant to the universe is the same as to say
that the natural attitude that makes this kind of statements is irrelevant to its
own foundations. As eloquently put by M. Merleau-Ponty: ‘Scientific points of
view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world’s are always
both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted,
without explicitly mentioning, it, the other point of view, namely that of con-
sciousness, through which from the outset of a world forms itself round me
and begins to exist for me.’9 In phenomenological terms, the natural attitude is
capable of transcending human subjectivity towards the world, but while
doing so it forgets about all problems connected with its own functioning as
originating in hypostatic subjectivity. By separating the world and the universe
from the conditions of functioning of consciousness, science based on the nat-
ural attitude, by using the words of S. Bulgakov, orientates us in the kingdom
of death,10 and because of this it acquires a kind of lifeless intentionality.
The climax of this strange situation when humanity experiences a certain
ambivalence in assessing its own role in creation can be expressed in terms
of the longstanding philosophical paradox asserting that while being in the
universe (through sharing its physics and biology), humanity transcends the
universe (through its hypostatic consciousness). The dualism in human posi-
tion in the world that is present in this paradox constitutes the major problem
in establishing a reasonable and justified mediation between theology and
science, that is, reconciling the abilities to transcend the world with the condi-
tions of being enslaved by it. The dualism in the human condition leads to the
fundamental split of intentionalities that are at work in human subjectivity:
one which is directed to the world and treats the human phenomenon as a thing
among other things, and another one which treats existential events (as event of
communion) as primary basis for all other explanations of the world, as that
centre of manifestation and disclosure through which the whole of being
becomes palpable and intelligible. Thus one of the objectives of the dialogue
between theology and science is to mediate between these intentionalities.
Paradox of Human Subjectivity
In spite of the fact that the aforesaid paradox, called by E. Husserl, ‘the para-
dox of human subjectivity being a subject for the world and at the same time
being an object in the world’, received numerous formulations and interpreta-
tions11 we would like to give its brief account, which will be important for the
9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix.

10. Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy, p. 207.
11. See Carr, D. (1999) Paradox of Subjectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
elucidation of the differences between theology and science and hence to their
phenomenological reconciliation.
Husserl formulated this paradox as follows:
Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything that exists at all, is
resolved, can obviously be nothing other than mankind; and the latter is undeni-
ably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its
human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its inten-
tional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to
develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing
subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are them-
selves only partial formation within the total accomplishment?12
M. Merleau-Ponty rephrased the same paradox as the tension between two

prevailing tendencies in classical philosophy:
There are two classical views: one treats man as the result of the physical, physio-
logical, and sociological influences which shape him from the outside and make
him one thing among many; the other consists of recognizing an a-cosmic freedom
in him, insofar as he is spirit and represents to himself the very causes which
supposedly act upon him. On the one hand man is a part of the world; on the other,
he is the constituting consciousness of the world.13
The importance of this paradox in the context of our attempt to reintegrate

theology and science becomes obvious if one understands that any speculation
about nature must be supplemented not only by anthropology (in which nature
is seen as the extension of the human body) but also by psychology and episte-
mology, so that one could say that ‘man and the universe are like two parts of
the same book which can be understood only by means of one another,’14 or
that ‘a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of man are mutually comple-
mentary; [. . .] neither can be completed unless it shows itself as the counterpart
of the other.’15 The latter claim seen through phenomenological eyes brings us
to another metaphor of the container and of the contained applied to human
beings in the universe: on the one hand by its physical and biological constants
humanity is contained in the universe, on the other hand the universe itself,
being an articulated image of the being-with-man, is contained by human
beings in their immanent intentional subjectivity.
One can feel that the paradox of human subjectivity in the world points to a
fundamental existential problem and mystery of human incarnate (embodied)
12. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 179.

13. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1982) Sense et Non-Sense, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, p. 72.
14. Dondeyne, Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith, p. 10.
15. De Laguna, G. (1966) On Existence and the Human World, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, pp. 81–2.
subjectivity. E. Fromm gave to this paradox a status of ‘existential dichotomy’

arising from the fact that, according to him, man emerged in being as
‘anomaly’ and ‘the freak’ of the universe, whose being in a state of constant
and unavoidable disequilibrium, anxiety, dissatisfaction and restlessness,
which follow from being part of nature and transcending it. In Fromm’s
words
He [man] is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home
he shares with all creatures. Cast into the world at an accidental place and time,
he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realises his
powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualises his own end: death.
Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his
mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is
alive . . .16
Just to take up this line of thought let us see a similar motif enclosed in the
words of J. Popovitch.
Man is an incredibly mysterious being: He is situated at the crossroads between

another world and this one . . . There is something in man which can fit into this
three-dimensional world, in space-time categories . . . By his psychophysical struc-
ture man is positioned at the very tragic cross-roads between spirit and matter,
good and evil, visible and invisible, sensible and non-sensible, between this and
that, ‘I’ and ‘Thou’.17
R. Ingarden describes the existential dichotomy as a very special and doubly-

complexioned feeling.
On one side, he [man] feels quite alien to everything that happens in nature inde-
pendently of him, and he sees himself deprived by it of any kindly help, so that he
almost loses trust in fate. On the other side, however, in his pure and autonomous
essence he feels himself to be something that stands out above nature, something
that is so much more dignified than purely physical processes or what transpires in
animals, that he cannot feel in solidarity with nature and live fully happily by being
united with it in its domain.18
When humanity positions itself as a thing among other things in the outer
universe, it imposes on itself depression and anxiety of being insignificant flesh
in the vast cosmos whose life is enslaved and controlled by it. However, when
the cosmos acquires some inward meaning for humanity which sees itself as
the centre of disclosure and manifestation, then nature acquires some intrinsic
human qualities thus uniting it to humanity.
16. Fromm, E. (1967) Man for Himself, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 40.
17. Popovitch, Philosophical Chasms, pp. 23, 29 (author’s translation).
18. Ingarden, Man and Value, pp. 17–18.
The paradox of human subjectivity in the world tacitly present behind all
affirmations of contemporary science about reality reflects the fundamental
existential dichotomy of the incarnate human condition, which cannot be
escaped even in extreme cases of naturalistic approach to reality. In this sense
this dichotomy must be humbly accepted as the given, as that primary existen-
tial reality from which any philosophy and any dialogue between theology and
science must start. The inability of science either to deal with the paradox
or to dismiss it leads inevitably to a theological logic in assessing the human
situation. This was brilliantly expressed by the Russian theologian V. Nesmelov,
who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century,
“existing as a person and, at the same time, as an ordinary thing of the physical
world linked necessarily to the mechanism of external conditions, man is not an
unconditional being, but only expresses in itself the real link between conditional
and unconditional being . . . If scientific thought had not denied this mysterious
fact through its pseudo-scientific explanations, but had truly contemplated it as an
incomprehensible fact of being, perhaps long ago scientific thought would have
come to the Biblical vision of humanity as made in the image of God. This could be
possible because the existence of man as an image of Absolute Being can be estab-
lished strictly scientifically and independently of the Bible just from the psychological
analysis of the nature and content of human person, so that one can appeal to the
Bible not with the purpose of extracting from it this very doctrine, but only in order
to find in it the explanation of the real fact.”19
Here Nesmelov explicitly suggests that the very position of humanity in the
universe, as, expressed in the paradox of human subjectivity, is capable of
invoking in human mind some religious vision that man not only transcends
nature, but, in fact resembles in itself the ultimate personhood where the whole
universe stands before it as its lord (man is the ‘lord of the universe’). This
observation makes it possible to conjecture that the engagement of science
with theology is inevitable and unavoidable as soon as science comes to realize
the very special position of humanity in the background of all being. But this,
according to Nesmelov, means that all further enquiry must proceed from a
simple acceptance of the fact of human existence. Science can interpret and
express this fact (including the very capacity of humans to transcend), but it
can hardly account for the facticity of the human existence as such. It is here,
as suggested by Nesmelov, theology can enter by offering a Biblical account as
a proclamation of the sheer facticity of humanity.
The Paradox of Human Subjectivity and Theology
Now we are not surprised that the existential dichotomy expressed in various
forms of the paradox of human subjectivity, seen theologically, manifests the
19. Nesmelov, V. I. (1905) Science of Man (in Russian), Kazan: Central Printing Office,
vol. 1, pp. 264–5 (author’s translation).
essence of humanity as made in the image of God and that the Fathers of the
Church were aware of it long before modern philosophy and science. Interpre-
tation of the paradox was undertaken through belief in God who created man
in his own image and likeness, so that initially man was ‘like’ God, that is, he
was ‘all in all’.20 For example, St Maximus the Confessor described this pres-
ence of man in all things in terms of a potential unity of all creation, which was
to be realized by man as originally created: ‘. . . man was introduced last
among existent things, as the natural bond mediating between the extremes of
the whole through his own parts, and bringing into unity in his own person
those things which are by nature far distant from each other.. . .’21 Man was
created in order to mediate between all divisions in creation, as well as between
creation and God, to fulfil his task of bringing all things to unity in God and
then to become like God of being all in all: ‘The whole of him [man] then
co-inheres wholly in the whole God, and becomes everything that God is
except for identity of essence.’22 ‘As a compound of soul and body he [man] is
limited essentially by intelligible and sensible realities, while at the same time
he himself defines [articulates] these realities through his capacity to appre-
hend intellectually and perceive with his senses.’ 23 For St Maximus, however,
the dichotomy, present in this affirmation was not a problem, for according to
his theological position the fundamental non-locality which is present in
human insight about the universe originates from the human ability to com-
prehend the intelligible realm that contains ideas about the universe as a whole.
However, because man did not fulfil his task the unity of all creation through
the mediation of man is only present in the human condition as a potentiality.
The Fall was a landmark moment in the history of the human condition. Man
turned aside from the task, conferred to him by God, of mediating between
various divisions in creation and establishing the unity of all in God. The
human condition thereby lost its original ‘naturalness and lapsed into a kind
of irrational state’, as a result of which contemporary man has only a vague
memory of the unifying power of his potentially all-encompassing presence
everywhere in the universe. In its present setting this memory provokes a tension
between the human empirical ego, which can be theologically characterized with
the notion of the ‘garments of skin’,24 and the transcendental ego in which the
memory of this potential unity is still alive. This explains in turn the ambivalence
20. Cf. Col. 3.11.

21. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Ambigua’, 41, in P. Nellas, Deification in Christ, p. 212.
22. Ibid., p. 213.
23. St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Various texts on theology’, 71, in Philokalia, vol. 2,
p. 277. It can be conjectured that the theological ‘resolution’ of the paradox of human sub-
jectivity could come from the St Maximus’ anthropology in which the parallel was drawn
between the logoi of human beings and the logoi of the universe as originating in their com-
mon source – the Logos of God.
24. On the notion of garments of skin see, for example, Nellas, Deification in Christ,
pp. 43–91.
and split in man that is evidenced by the paradox we have already discussed
at length.
If human history is treated as epiphenomenon or as a continuation of the
natural history of the universe, then the presence of humanity in the universe
has no particular philosophical or theological significance apart from being
a dimension of natural history. It is then quite possible to argue that the emer-
gence of the phenomenon of man in the late history of the universe is merely a
contingent aspect of cosmic and biological evolution, and any question about
mankind’s significance or insignificance has meaning only if the whole of natu-
ral history is seen through ‘teleological eyes’, which are themselves not an
integral part of the scientific attitude. If, on the contrary, human history is not
only distinguished from the natural history of the universe, but actually under-
stood as incorporating all of natural history as the unfolding constitution of
the world and humanity within human history, then human history ceases to
be a part of cosmic determinism and acquires features of a ‘trial’, an ‘event’
(the ‘humankind-event’) in which man’s intrinsic freedom and predisposition
to the Fall (and thus the possibility of salvation) are encapsulated. The central-
ity of the man’s position in the universe thereby acquires soteriological
connotations: the universe needs humanity in order to be transfigured, brought
to unity with the source of its own creation and be saved from lapsing into
non-being.
In contemporary words the stress is made on personhood which stands in
the centre of the paradox. For example:
Man is a microcosm, a synthesis of all creation, which he can therefore know from
within; he is the interface between the visible and the invisible, between the carnal
and the spiritual. But man is above all a person, in the image and likeness of God.
As such he transcends the universe, not in order to leave it behind, but in order to
contain it, to give expression to its praise and thereby cause grace to shine forth
within it.25
Personhood of humanity is the image of God in it which makes it possible to

transcend the universe not in order to abandon it (and effectively commit
ontological suicide) but, while being chained to it, to establish such a relation-
ship with the universe in order to grasp it at once, to contain it within human
hypostasis and ultimately to make the universe enhypostatic as having sense
only in the context of humanity and for humanity. This is similar to phenome-
nological philosophers who asserted that the world is radically human in a
non-trivial sense: the world as the whole comes forth to humanity’s grasp in
the same way as humanity’s existence can only be affirmed through being-
in-the-world: ‘if man is attached to the world, the world likewise is attached
25. Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch (1989) ‘Three sermons’, Sourozh: A Journal of

Orthodox Life and Thought, 38, 1–14 (3).
to man, in such a way that it is no longer possible to speak about a world-

without-man.’26 The world, being a container for man is contained by man as
person not through the power of physical forces, but through the power of the
divine image, which makes humanity as conscious persons equally (i.e. quali-
tatively) distant from the world (i.e. from all other objects in it) in its
apprehending capacity to articulate the world.
The similarity between the difference between body and soul in human
hypostatic constitution with the difference between sensible and intelligible in
the world, which, according to St Maximus the Confessor, contributes towards
the Divine image in humanity,27 manifests the closeness of humanity to the
world at large, that is, that ‘human matter’, being sanctified matter as the unity
of the physical and the soul embedded in it, imitates the structural difference
in the universe. However, this similarity of humanity to the world does not
justify the ability of human beings to articulate their own existence and exis-
tence of outer things. Persons are able to mediate between the sensible creation
and intelligible world of meanings, but the major premise of the factual possi-
bility of this mediation through relating sensible and intelligible to the ground
of their unity in their otherness, that is, in the uncreated, is not developed until
the very hypostatic unity of body and soul in human beings (i.e. their divine
image) is referred to the uncreated. But if this is done, and the divine image in
humanity is asserted through its non-worldly character, then the essence of
humanity, its logos, reveals something that is fundamentally different from
the logoi of all other created (non-hypostatic) things. This difference can be
expressed as the presence of the distance or gap (diastema) between humanity
and the rest of creation.
To clarify further the meaning of this gap one can quote St Gregory of Nyssa,
when he treated the diastema between the Creator and creation as a ‘one-way
gap’.28 There is no gap on the side of God, that is all creation is immediately
present to him whereas the diastema is present throughout the whole creation
as extension in space and time, which has boundaries and cannot be overcome
either ontologically or epistemologically in order to grasp the essence of God
either by human-embedded souls or incorporeal angels. Hypostatic humanity
is different from the rest of creation because of its similarity to God, as made
in his image. Similarly to how God inheres all creation in his hypostasis,
humanity is endowed with an ability to inhere the universe in its own subjec-
tivity through the fusion of knowledge, which implies the ability to contemplate
the universe, form its meaning and, ultimately to act in the universe as its
26. Luijpen, W. A. (1960) Existential Phenomenology, Pittsburg: Duquesne University

Press, p. 25.
27. St Maximus the Confessor (1985) ‘Mystagogy’, 7, in G. C. Berthold (tr.), Maximus
Confessor. Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press, p. 196. See a discussion of the analogy
between man and the universe in my Light from the East, pp. 208–14.
28. See Gregorios, Cosmic Man, pp. 95–8.
self-consciousness and self-realization. In other words, the existence of the

non-human (i.e. non-hypostatic) can only be affirmed from within human
hypostases. The very fact of existence of non-hypostatic matter is itself enhy-
postasized from within ‘human matter’.
By using the terminology of Levinas we can now express the meaning of the
diastema between hypostatic and non-hypostatic existence by saying that
human beings as existents contract their existing in their own hypostasis,
whereas non-hypostatic ‘objects’ receive their existing only though their appro-
priation by human hypostatic subjectivity. These modes of existence are indeed
ontologically distinct and distant. It is this distinctiveness and distance which
makes it possible to affirm non-hypostatic things in such a way in order to
allow them to be freed from egocentric tendencies of the inward personifica-
tion by human beings, that is, making possible their objectification. One can
argue that those types of appropriation of non-hypostatic things that are asso-
ciated by us with abstraction and mathematization are possible and rooted in
the diastema between human hypostases and the rest of creation. The very
possibility for objective science to exist and to be able to assert outer nature as
detached from consciousness deeply originates in the fact that humanity, while
being physically involved in relationship with the world, has something in
itself that is not part of the world at all. And this something is its freedom of
realizing its personal relationship with the world. Paradoxically it is this free-
dom that allows human beings to destroy the primary existential relationship
with things and to transform it into one-sided submission as a result of tran-
scending one’s own egocentric intentionalities which neutralize object within
the primary relationship with subject.29
The paradox of human subjectivity in the world can thus be understood in
a different way. On the one hand, being inseparable from reality in virtue
of its intentional consciousness, human persons can exist only in the context
of their immediate non-distance from reality. On the other hand, being a hypo-
static formation, that is, being fundamentally different from other material
things, human persons are ‘infinitely’ distant from those other things. The
ability to distance themselves from outer things (even, in abstraction, from
one’s own body), makes human hypostases equally positioned with respect to
all objects in the universe, so that all of these objects can be articulated by
human consciousness as being different and uniformly distant from it. Para-
doxically the diastema that we are speaking about does not imply an
epistemological diastema in cognition of the outer universe (i.e. unknowabil-
ity): on the contrary human personal subjectivity is similarly close to all objects
in the universe (from atoms to galaxies), so that this closeness allows it to
articulate them in a consistent chain.
29. See more in Yannaras, C. (2004) Postmodern Metaphysics, Brookline: Holy Cross
Orthodox Press, p. 114.
One can conclude that the paradox of human subjectivity in the universe
sheds light on the tension between science and theology not so much with
respect to particular statements by science about the insignificance of human-
ity in the universe as opposed to the theological conviction concerning human
centrality in the universe but with respect to the tension (between them) as
regards their respective evaluations of human capabilities to form judgements
about things and those modalities of consciousness and underlying intention-
alities that are at work in man. We are justified in seeing a phenomenological
distinction between the ‘natural’ attitude in which scientific intentionality
works, and that of philosophical attitude, which is at work in a theological
mind. Scientific consciousness starts by posing the external world as existing
outside and beyond human subjectivity. Religious consciousness sees the
origin of things in God, so that the outside world, as articulated by human
consciousness, receives its enhypostasized existence from the Logos of God.
The ‘natural’ mode of thinking that admits of things existing ‘in themselves’ is
suspended in theology, since for theology all things subsist in the Personhood
of God, and, as created things, can only be articulated by a conscious human-
ity that is endowed with its own created personhood. Theology, however, in
comparison with philosophy, has an advantage of questioning the very possi-
bility of the philosophical as it functions in the world. It is in this sense that
theology can go much further than philosophy in its evaluation of science in
the context of the science–theology dialogue, for the goal is not so much to
criticize science because of its incapacity to understand the world beyond
the limitations of the natural attitude, but to make explicit the origins of this
attitude in human subjectivity.
If science limits itself to the sphere of naturalistic explanation, so that exis-
tential events do not enter scientific discourse, any correlation of such a science
with theology becomes extremely problematic, since consciousness approaches
truths of a theological order in a ‘natural’ attitude, with the result that the
existential and ontological meaning of theology cannot be seen or conceived at
all. In this case the whole enterprise, unfortunately, acquires the features of a
mental exercise whose sense and value are completely unclear. The whole
complexity and extraordinary variety of the human multihypostatic phenome-
non is reduced to a single universal, abstract, impersonal, anonymous and
interchangeable consciousness, which is responsible for the articulation of the
mathematicized nature. This impersonal consciousness appears to be a sort of
universal logical structure common to all men but, as believed in science, rep-
resenting only a sector of the cosmic determinism, one part of an all-embracing
impersonal equation, that is, the universe. In this approach the issue of incar-
nate existence (embodiment) is neglected. Once again all individual beings in
the commonality of their scientific consciousness are reduced to a disembodied
and de-personified subject. This makes it nearly impossible to understand the
possibility of community as communion in a deep existential sense of love,
passion, empathy, etc. By making conscious life an aspect of cosmic determinism,
rationalistic science does not see the incarnate life as an event (as a ‘trial’) in
which some sort of intrinsic value and destiny associated with its freedom are
hidden.
One sees that in such a vision the entire ontology of humanity is distorted as
regards its historicity, intersubjectivity as personal communion and the very
fundamentals of personhood are removed as a non-essential element in human
existence. Humanity inevitably finds itself in a state of having been emptied
of its intrinsic reference to the Transcendent as a Personal God who is worthy
of worship. At the same time the notion of God is also reduced in a mathemati-
cal fashion to one of Deity, the bearer of common and universal intelligence in
the world.
Thus the major difficulty that underlies all modern scientific discourse is that
it can hardly accommodate the presence of inherent human subjectivity in its
scientific models of the world, thereby inevitably concealing the presence of
the sense-forming level of reality.
Human Subjectivity in the Background of Scientific Objectivity
Now we give a brief sketch of what happens in scientific rationality, which is

driven by human freedom when it suppresses egocentric intentionality and
thus makes possible access to reality as the other term of the personal relation-
ship; this reveals the essence of the naturalistic assumptions which are present
behind the imaging of human beings as tiny pieces of physical substance in the
universe. First of all the positioning of human beings in the entire universe
represents an act of mental abstraction from the living experience in the given-
ness of its sheer facticity. It is within this everyday context that human beings
conceive themselves as completely unique and the most important aspects of
being in general. They develop this assurance on the grounds of their happi-
ness and satisfaction through living in the human world. Human beings are
inclined to consider themselves not as some ‘walking dust’ in the vast cosmos,
brought into existence by virtue of the blind chance and necessity of nature,
but as persons who contemplate themselves as individualities formed through
relationship to others; there is an immediate living context common to all
human beings which makes their life meaningful and valuable regardless of
what scientific books write about human insignificance on a cosmic scale. But
this living context, the life-world in the terminology of Husserl, is not taken
into account by science (as an ingredient of its own constitution) which tries
to objectify its findings by getting rid of all living and ‘subjective’ contexts of
its theories. One can compare the scientific picture of the world with a kind of
a screen in human consciousness, at which only intersubjective abstractions
and idealizations are projected, but the internal life of any particular creative
consciousness is left behind this screen, not being exteriorized and not being
able to become an object of intersubjective analysis.30 All this indicates that

the scientific picture of the universe, and hence its assertions about the insig-
nificant place of human beings in it, represent abstractions from the living
experience and do not reflect the inward experience of being by individual
human persons. They rather represent an abstract core of the world, which
reflects only the consubstantiality in the universe and its relatedness to human
beings on the natural that is physico-biological level. These abstractions have
an element of outward ‘objectivity’, being some ideal forms of the exteriorized
human subjectivity.
The abstraction from living experience manifests the ideal of classical ratio-
nality to objectify the meaning of things found within human subjectivity by
means of paralleling its immediate experience through introducing a sort of
intelligible ‘space’, which contains universal structures and which are accessi-
ble by everyone in the same similar way. The possibility for objectivity as
such is deeply based in some fundamental epistemological assumptions. These
assumptions, being transparent to philosophical reflection and religious think-
ing, escape from the field of scientific enquiry where scientific consciousness
does not make an introspection upon its own function.
When one studies, for example, physical phenomena, it is assumed that
events in the world which one wants to describe rationally as objective and
happening independently of one’s sensible experience, should be reproduced
by different observers in a ‘space of observations’, whose existence guarantees
continuity in the ability of reproducing mentally and empirically (as actions of
the intellect) the states of observation. This assumes that any observation takes
place on the background of some trans-empirical acts of consciousness, which
manifest its self-identity and continuity. Classical rationalism assumes thus
that there are no ‘black holes’ in the wholeness of human experience, where an
object of observation could slip away and could not be described from the per-
spective of different locations in the space of observations. This view thus
assumes that there is a single absolute observer that corresponds to the single
objective world so that all individual living experiences that do not fit into this
‘space of observers’, in other words, which cannot be objectified, are not inter-
esting at all for science which follows the thus-established naturalistic trend.
It is then understandable that without the principle of continuity of con-
scious human experience and its ability to reproduce and hypostasize a given
experiment as an element of the space of observations, no physical knowledge
would be possible. The epistemological assumption that this principle works
implies that there is a self-identity of the subject of observations; there is one
and the same consciousness that constitutes a continuous media for all events
30. This corresponds to that situation when human freedom fights against egocentric
intentionalities but carelessly forgets that it cannot divest itself from it simply because of the
primacy of personal existence and existential events of encountering the world.
of observation as reflected by consciousness. The structure of the space of

observations allows one to translate one’s own consciousness to those events
that took place without one’s presence and allows one to reflect upon those
events thus reproducing them consciously. This demand for the reproduction
of all possible events in one and the same consciousness manifests then that
there is one and only one transcendental subject (anonymous and impersonal
consciousness), which is an autonomous and ultimate origin of these events in
the space of observations.
Classical rationalism assumes thus not only the identity of all possible
observers as given in space and time, but also the identity of their mental and
emotional qualities, the variety of which could prevent the observers from
giving a uniform interpretation of the events that are projected into the space
of observers. It now becomes clear what is the real meaning of any cosmologi-
cal diagram that asserts the position of human beings in the universe: this
diagram represents existential events of encounter with the universe in the
conditions when the content of these events is projected onto the space of
observations so that the fact of their spatial and temporal insignificance in the
universe as biological bodies is emphasized. The intrinsic paradox between
human subjectivity and the fact that human beings are objects in the universe
is still there: for it is human subjectivity itself that is responsible for the forma-
tion of the space of observers through which the articulation of the ‘objective’
properties of the universe is made. But the space of observers, being a mental
construction, represents only a part of human reality in which egocentric
intentionality is suppressed and the second term of the relation transforms into
impersonal one-sided need of scientific curiosity. Here the world (as thema-
tized along scientific lines) is not involved into the life of inward human
subjectivity, so that the contemplation of its living significance is lost.
Rationalism of scientific explanation starts to experience logical difficulties
if it attempts to understand the phenomenon of the continuity of conscious-
ness and its integrity from within itself. For whatever is scientifically thought
as objective assumes its spatio-temporal representation. Then, can one describe
the origin of the space of observations in physical terms, that is, in terms of
impersonal causations in the natural order? This seems to be problematic.
Indeed, if we base our understanding of ‘knowledge’ in general on classical
observations, then the knowledge of an object X means not only the immedi-
ate reflection by a particular consciousness of the content of X revealed in the
experiment, but, also the knowledge of the state of consciousness (which is one
and the same transcendental consciousness) with respect to X. If the standing
of X in front of reflective consciousness is an existential event which does not
need to be explained in its ultimate contingency and accounted for, the state of
consciousness, such as its particular intentionality which ‘objectifies’ X and
makes it an impersonal content of transcendental consciousness in general,
becomes a decisive thing for subjective and personal knowledge of X to enter
the space of observers and contribute to common knowledge as episteme. The
knowledge of X contains thus not only some empirical affirmations about
X by a particular person, but also the hypostasization of the knowledge X with

respect to consciousness at large. The fact that the content of consciousness
about X is invariant for all possible locations in the ‘space of observers’, indi-
cates that the transcendental consciousness possesses some global non-local
properties (similar to a ‘divine intellect’), which embraces all particular con-
scious subjects. The presence in human transcendental consciousness of some
‘non-local’ elements which cannot be described in terms of space and time;
these elements sustain the continuity of ‘one and the same’ consciousness. One
can add that these non-local elements of consciousness are not empirical at
all, but rather trans-empirical. This entails that the scientific picture of the
world that is built as a dissected image or partial projection of the existential
encounter with the world on the ‘screen’ of the ‘space of observers’, and which,
allegedly provides us with the objective image of reality, is ultimately depen-
dent on ‘non-local’ and ‘trans-empirical’ elements implanted in human incarnate
subjectivity. It is only because of their presence that the articulated picture of
the universe is possible as different from that one which could be based on the
contingent inward presence of a particular being.
The structure of the space of observations implies a language of description
of events, namely mathematics which includes geometry and which allows
everyone to position a physical event (as an existential event) in the abstract
mathematical space and time. Every observer from the space of observations
has access to the universal system of mathematical notions and language,
which are assumed to be present out there, in some world of intelligible forms.
In this sense the classical ideal of rationality assumes (in addition to the conti-
nuity of the space of observers or the continuity of human transcendental
subjectivity), that there exists the world of universal intelligible forms (Platonic
ideas) and which are accessible to all observers and have the same meaning
and interpretation and are subject to the same logical rules for all observers.
This indicates that classical scientific rationality assumes not only a certain
divorce between subject and object, between the world of cogito as pure con-
sciousness and the world of extended spatio-temporal things but it is also
predisposed to a mathematical Platonism in order to make acts of objectifica-
tion available in a universal language. One then can realize that the ‘physical’
reality that is hypostasized by conscious beings in the space of observers con-
tains in itself non-empirical elements, rooted in the trans-empirical nature of
human subjectivity. This implies that ‘nature’, as it is understood classically (as
something which is independent from acts of human consciousness) cannot
function anymore as a logically consistent notion, for it involves human con-
sciousness in its definition. Long ago W. Heisenberg advocated such a vision
of science appealing to a nearly tautological observation that natural sciences
are created by men, and that the function of the sciences is to be a part of the
interaction, or relationship between nature and human beings.31 By appealing
31. Heisenberg, W. (1989) Physics and Philosophy, London: Penguin Books, p. 69.
to the example of Quantum Mechanics, where the interplay between what is

observed in nature and observers becomes explicit, he writes
we can no longer consider ‘in themselves’ those building stones of matter which we
originally held to be the last objective reality. This is so because they defy all forms
of objective location in space and time, and since basically it is always our knowl-
edge of these particles alone which we can make the object of science . . . . From the
very start we are involved in the argument between nature and man in which sci-
ence plays only a part, so that the common division of the world into subject and
object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and
leads us into difficulties. Thus even in science the object of research is no longer
nature itself, but man’s investigation of nature.32
The fact that human subjectivity appropriates, through scientific advance,

the realm of the previously unknown world, indicates that modern science
operates within a new type of rationality in which a radical non-egocentric
intentionality becomes impossible. This entails an inevitable conclusion that
scientific reality is not only the realm of the outer world, but also the realm of
consciousness’s work in scientific discourse. Reality indeed becomes a relation,
an encounter, a coexistence of myself and the world, ordination of the world
to me and opening of myself to the world, at once myself and that which is
other than myself.33
Scientific theories thus can be interesting not only for the sake of science
itself, that is for physics or biology, for example, but also for psychology and
epistemology, for while showing themselves through human thinking and
behaviour they represent some intentionalities of subjectivity through which
human beings constitute and articulate themselves outwardly. These theories
thus can be used in order to learn about structures of human transcendental
subjectivity and its trans-empirical elements which point to both the non-
empirical (e.g. intelligible forms and ideas) as well as non-worldly (uncreated
realm of the Divine) origins of the world itself as well as human persons who
study this world. New type of rationality means that while studying nature we
also study the relationship between us and nature, and as a result, we study
human nature.
Nature and Mathematics
When one talks of nature one must not forget that nature as articulated notion
originates in humanity. Humanity is related to nature through its embodiment
32. Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, p. 24 (emphasis added).

33. De Waelhens, A. (1957) ‘Science, phenomenology, ontology’, Cross Currents, 17, pp.
167–74 (168).
as well as through intentional immanence of its consciousness. Humanity feels

nature through its senses and it thinks about it through its intelligence. Thus
there are two poles of nature that are both linked to humanity, which mediates
between them. In this sense the mathematization of nature is a natural con-
sequence of man being a microcosm and mediator between sensible and
intelligible. However the mathematization of nature can have the connotation
of something negative and misfortunate – this happens when the mediating
function of humanity is forgotten and the link between sensible and intelligible
is thought as existing in itself. In this picture the central role of humanity in
creation is diminished and its presence in the universe is denigrated to the level
of the physical although of a higher level than other inorganic and organic
creatures. This all has some serious spiritual consequences, including devalua-
tion of creation and its deprivation of the Divine presence. It is clear that if
the extreme mathematization of nature in scientific discourse is effected, no
reasonable and justified dialogue between science and theology is possible.
Thus, the logic of our research demands us to enquire into the roots of mathe-
matization with the purpose to ‘deconstruct’ it and restore the lost image of
humanity.
It is widely accepted in modern philosophy of science that science does not
deal with simple empirical facts. The facts in science are theory-dependent,
that is, the appearance of novelty in scientific investigation is conditioned by a
theory that dictates to an experimenter what aspect of physical phenomenon
to observe, and what particular characteristics of the object studied to
measure. Nature appears to be a kind of a dialogical construct where empirical
and theoretical elements interpenetrate each other. Here the question of truth
in scientific constructs comes up. What makes all the claims of a physicist true?
This is a difficult question for what is clear is that the questions about truth
cannot be detached from the context and language of physical theory itself.
This implies that the criteria for truth must come out from the structure and
logic of physics itself. Thus there are two dimensions in the response to this
question. The first one is connected with the scientific methodology of discov-
ering and approving new results. The primary and simplest requirement for
some scientific fact to be true is that it must be reproduced in independent
experiments, assuming that all experimenters belong to the same continuous
space of observers; this assumes that any new result must be articulated in
some common language and logic, so that the other observers can have access
to it (the experiment must be described as part of common space of observers).
The requirement that the experiment and its results can be reproduced,
described in words and communicated to any researcher constitutes the meth-
odology of objectifying the experience encountered by a particular physicist
and asserting that there is some objective reality which corresponds to this
newly discovered phenomenon. The idea of reality, as an invariant (intelligible)
aspect of different, but similar measurements that can be represented in the
space of observers drives modern science.
The second dimension of scientific methodology that provides further sub-

stantiation for the objectivity and hence ‘reality’ of newly obtained results,
comes from the much more sophisticated demand, namely, that there is some
mathematical structure that corresponds to the fact which has been found in
experiment and can be fitted into some mathematically arranged theory. Here
the idea of stability of experiential patterns of physics plays a central role, in
order, as was expressed by Einstein,34 to order the sense data in some stable
and logical patterns. A similar view was expressed by Max Born who linked it
to the problem of how to obtain objective and common knowledge from the
subjective experience of a physicist.35 From Born’s point of view mathematics
is suitable for establishing the meaning of experience in objective terms,
because it represents a way of discovering and investigating structures of think-
ing, which is objective thinking as having its roots in the sphere of human
intersubjectivity, so that mathematics constitutes a substantial element of the
space of observations. It is important, however, to bear in mind that these
structures of pure thinking that are represented by mathematics should be
mediated with empirical reality. The role of this mediator is usually exercised
by theoretical physicists who should correlate symbols with observed phenom-
ena. Born points out that the new physics of the twentieth century made a
fundamental breakthrough in this direction, by dropping off any direct attempts
to correlate its models with some visualized mechanical images, as was done
since Newton’s times. Classical mechanics with its differential equations played
a role of a mediator between any experimental fact and theoretical construc-
tion. New physics somehow released human thought from this necessity and
allowed one to seek directly for a mathematical structure corresponding to
a phenomenon, without any attempt to make this structure expressible in an
ordinary language and in images easily accessible to the human mind. The
important aspect of mathematics in physical theories and in general under-
standing of science is its role as a universal language, which allows physicists
to communicate with each other and also to communicate the content of their
theories to engineers and non-specialists. However, it is reasonable to demand
that the balance between sensible reality and abstractions from it in scientific
theories must be maintained. But, the issue of interpretation of abstract math-
ematical ideas in physics becomes vital in order to avoid the danger of building
a mathematical model of something which, like a Kantian thing-in-itself, will
never turn to us by its sensible and macroscopic, accessible and comprehen-
sible side, if mathematical structures lose their contact with the everyday
world, scientific view of nature becomes an ‘idol’ of reality, which can preoc-
cupy human consciousness on the level of imagination while detaching it from
the existential conditions of its functioning.
34. See Einstein, A. (1973) Ideas and Opinions, London: Souvenir Press, p. 291.
35. Born, M. (1968) My Life and My Views, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
pp. 168–9.
The presence of a deeply developed mathematical theory becomes especially

vital for those branches of physical science that deal with such structural
elements that are not immediately observable and accessible (e.g. microscopic
elementary particles or some details of the past evolution of the universe).
In this case theory claims that the ontological status of these entities is inferred
from the stable (i.e. not subject to a temporal flux) and rationally consistent
mathematical pattern, which is usually considered as representing reality itself.
In a way, to say that something is real is equivalent to say that this something
can be described mathematically.36 Mathematics becomes a kind of magic
which, being uncovered by a creative mind, brings into existence new realities,
which are, in spite of being purely mental creations, are objectified as if they
acquire an ontological (i.e. not ontic) status. The truth of these mental cre-
ations follows from the longstanding conviction that intelligible forms and
mathematical ideas do not have temporal dimensions so that, after being
discovered, they are treated as not being transient any more, and therefore as
reflecting some stable truth.
In the light of this mathematical view of true reality as devoid of transience
and emergence it is claimed sometimes that science deals with a world inde-
pendent of human history and human intervention: ‘the truths science attempts
to reveal about atoms and the solar system, and even about microbes and
bacteria would still be true even if human beings had never existed.’37 The pos-
sibility of this is associated with the common belief (that is part of the natural
attitude) that the reality of nature is independent of man’s existence, can be
grasped via mathematical forms and it does not matter that a phenomenon
was not known before the form has been discovered. The mathematical pat-
tern which describes it does exist in itself, so that the appeal to mathematics is
usually considered as a safe escape from the contingency of appearances in the
empirical realm to the world of logical stability and impartiality.38
In spite of all that has been said, the mathematical description of nature itself
is closely connected with human intelligence. For, even if one accepts that
the universality of mathematical laws is closely linked to the intelligibility of
the universe, the latter is only accessible to, and articulated by, intelligent
human beings. Even if mathematical laws and the patterns of beauty of the
world are hidden in the realm of non-transient Platonic forms, one needs
36. This criterion for reality is used in contemporary theoretical cosmology where any
direct correspondence between what is predicted mathematically and what can be observed
physically is problematic. Thus in this case the criterion for reality of something which is
predicated in abstract mathematical terms is rather based on the coherence of explanation
but not on the criterion of correspondence.
37. O’Hear, A. (1990) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, p. 6.
38. In fact an interpretation of mathematically expressed laws of nature that depends on
particular ontological status of mathematics is accepted by a given scientist.
human intelligence in order to make these laws and patterns to be explicitly

present in the physical universe. H. Poincaré emphatically advocated this view:
Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature, exist outside
of this [human] intelligence? No – beyond doubt, a reality completely independent
of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exte-
rior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call
objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings,
and could be common to all; this common part, as we shall see, can only be the
harmony expressed in mathematical laws.39
However, it is important to point out that the articulation of nature through

mathematics leaves some questions unanswered. In particular, even if the real-
ity of the world is articulated in terms of intelligible patterns, the issue of the
meaning and ultimate origin of thus posited reality, that is its facticity, is still
to be addressed. Here a possible explanation leads us not only beyond the
physical world, but also beyond the mathematical realm itself for implicitly the
question about the facticity of the human mediation between sensible and
intelligible is raised, that is, the question about facticity of humanity as incar-
nate intentional immanence. Some scientists understand the issue raised and
admit that this ‘beyond’ lies outside human transcendental subjectivity where
it originates from. Hermann Weyl explicitly linked these origins with God.
Thus the mere positing of the external world does not really explain what is meant
to explain, the question of reality of the world mingles inseparably with the ques-
tion of the reason for its lawful mathematical harmony. The latter clearly points in
another direction of transcendency than that of a transcendental world; towards
the origin rather than product. Thus the ultimate answer lies beyond all knowledge,
in God alone.40
Mathematization of Nature and the Human Condition
We hope that, from what we have already discussed in previous sections, the
reader will have a general idea that the complex which is called ‘nature’ is
formed not only of sense-impressions but also of mathematical ideas and
39. Poincaré, H. (1958) The Value of Science, Mineola: Dover Publications, p. 6.

40. Weyl, H. (1970) ‘Subject and object’, in J. Kockelmans and T. J. Kisiel (eds), Pheno-
menology and the Natural Sciences, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 93–116
(116) (emphasis added). There must be made a careful distinction in this quotation between
the word ‘transcendent’ as indicating the exit from the world and the word ‘transcendental’
as indicating the sphere of human intersubjectivity.
mental abstractions from reality.41 This implies that nature cannot be non-
mathematical in principle. It is mathematical because mathematics is used for
its formation as a whole and its description in detail. In this case one can ask:
why the mathematization of nature connotes something negative and needs to
be critically accounted for. The problem with the mathematization of nature is
not so simple, when it is affirmed that mental constructs are substituted for
existential realities. One understands that in some branches of physics, such as
cosmology for example, most of the theories can never be directly verified by
means of their correspondence to the empirically given. The ‘objectivity’ of the
ideal constructs in this case is established rather through the appeal to coher-
ence of explanation, which does not require that this explanation is correlated
with any empirical reality on the grounds of the principle of correspondence.
‘Objectivity’ follows in this case not from empirical verification but from
intellectual convention. Thus some physical realities become mathematically
constructed by convention with no reference whatsoever to the immediate
existential world. The problem, however is not in these mental conventions as
such, but in their limiting and degrading effect on the intellectual capacity of
human beings, when they start to influence human perception of the world to
such an extent that it corrodes the human reality by denying existence of those
aspects of the world that cannot be mathematized (e.g. human feelings, love
empathy emotions, relations etc.). Such an extreme form of mathematization
of reality that is admitted as possibility by contemporary mathematicians can
lead to a furious reaction from the camp of scientists and philosophers inclined
towards an existentialist stance, as well as from religiously oriented thinkers.
Ph. Sherrard, for example, gives a very strong negative evaluation of mathema-
tized science, which, if being taken as a methodological guide could deprive us
of any possible dialogue between science and theology. He writes,
Modern science, based as it is on a rationality subordinated to non-spiritual catego-

ries, likewise can never attain a knowledge of anything in itself, no matter how
much it concerns itself with experiment and observation or how far it carries its
function of dissection and analysis. This is the situation to which modern science
has been condemned and in which it continues to be trapped. It is compelled by its
very premises to ignore in things those qualities that transcend their finite appear-
ance and the reason’s capacity for logical analysis and deduction.42
From Sherrards’s point of view mathematization of knowledge represents

the ‘lowest level of intelligence to which the human mind has ever sunk’43
41. One can argue that nature as ‘the concept of nature’ is not part of any particular
science because in its scope it transcends far beyond any limited definition. In this sense the
notion of nature is destined to be rather philosophical and thus include all possible connota-
tions with humanity.
42. Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, p. 84.
43. Sherrard, Human Image: World Image, p. 35.
because, taken in its absolute sense, and rejecting from the picture of reality
the human life in its richness that cannot be mathematized, this knowledge,
adopted as a social and cultural paradigm, distorts the essence of humanity
and its link with God. This leads to a strict separation between the world of
intellect and the world of sense which cascades up to the separation between
the mathematical, intellectual nature (that is claimed to be a true nature) and
the empirical conditions of the human indwelling in the world. The alleged
reality, as true and inviolable, is placed outside man in the sphere of his thought,
being paradoxically devoid of its inward existence in human subjectivity. It is
this concept of nature which is ‘inhuman in its heart’ that has been widely
promoted through the scientific advance and public opinion.44 Nature being
by such an idealistic constitution mechanical and impersonal does not include
anything that is connected with life in a mundane sense of this world. Contem-
porary mathematicians themselves are conscious about this: ‘As we mathematize
the world, we proceed to lose or to throw away those parts of the world that
cannot be mathematized. What is not mathematized seems not to exist, even
never to have existed.’45 As we see some of them are capable of seeing an exis-
tential danger of the apology for the total mathematization and issue a warning
that all numerical and abstract views of ‘reality’ represent its shadow, but not
life as reality.46
In the tendency to express all aspect of existence by using formulae, equa-
tions and statistical tables (not only in the physical picture of the world, but
even in some aspects of sociology and social psychology), the existential dimen-
sion of nature as the extension of human incarnate existence is thrown into
oblivion so that the mystery of life and death, the mystery of beginning of a
particular incarnate existent, as not being able to be mathematized and thus
transcending mathematical description does not fit into the definition of the
natural and objective. The primary existential events of life are usually dis-
carded by contemporary science causing a great distortion to the human image,
for human beings, being pronounced as mere physical and biological artefacts
of nature, are reduced to self-enclosed and self-sufficient para-empirical and
unaccountable embodiments of the soul which, in its extreme discursive capa-
city (although being a gift of human freedom), abstracts itself from the source
of its life and then considers itself as an almighty power of asserting laws for
itself and for the outward nature.47
44. Ibid., p. 42.

45. Davis, P. J. and R. Hersch (1990) Descartes’ Dream. The World According to
Mathematics, London: Penguin, p. 98.
46. Ibid. At the very conclusion to the book quoted, its authors appeal to development of
‘heightened awareness of the relationship between humans and the mathematics they have
created’. It is necessary ‘to shield us from the effects of the revolutionary waves of symbols
that are about to wash over us’ (ibid., p. 306).
47. One can add to this that science in hands of such de-spiritualized beings ‘becomes an
idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man’ (Voegelin,
E. (1948) ‘The Origins of scientism’, Social Research, 15, 462–94 (487)).
Even if one attempts to argue that the ideal of mathematical knowledge is

based on the old Greek idea of episteme, as knowledge of things in a Platonic,
that is, systematic and stable perspective, one should remember that the Platonic
universe was a living organism where the intelligible patterns of things were
imbued with spiritual essences of a transcendent origin. This, in a Christian
adaptation of Platonism, would mean that neither empirically visible things
nor their intellectual images provide us with the knowledge of these things as
they are in themselves.48 This implies that mathematics with all its intellectual
grandeur and overwhelming ambition reflects upon things and submits to the
human spirit only things as they appear through the prism of the discursive
faculty of knowing, but not the underlying and forming principles (logoi) of
their existence originating in God. These logoi cannot be mathematically
represented at all because they enter the intricate relationship between exis-
tence and being. However, existence can only be affirmed through the mode of
the existing, that is, through human intentional subjectivity. This strongly
points towards a simple truth that the ultimate essence of things can hardly
be exteriorized and objectified by means of discarding human subjectivity.
We see then that the whole problem is linked to the mystery of being a subject
of knowledge, in a deep theological sense, for no existence as articulated exis-
tence is possible if this existence is not present in the hypostatic humanity, or
in God himself. While making a non-egocentric assumption that the world
exists somehow without participation of human beings, in fact, the world can
achieve the meaning and fullness of its existence only through the transfiguring
activity of humanity, hypostatically inherent in the ultimate subject of all exist-
ing beings and things, that is, in God.49
Seen from the perspective outlined afore, the mathematization of nature and
the attempt to proclaim its ultimate and objective sense through abstracting
from all-constituting acts of human subjectivity represents the distortion and
perversion of the natural order (if this is understood theologically and existen-
tially as given by God). We quote another witness on the seriousness of this
problem as it comes from mathematicians themselves interpreted through a
theological mind.
48. Here it is appropriate to refer to a famous claim of Gregory the Theologian that
knowledge cannot arrive ‘at comprehension of the realities themselves’. See his Oration 28.29
in Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) (1991) ‘Orations’, in F. W. Norris (tr.), Faith Gives
Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen, New York:
Brill, p. 242.
49. The transfiguring function of humanity becomes evident not only through its explo-
ration of nature as something which is brought into existence through human insight, but
also as a need for its improvement through human intervention as a part of an ecological
imperative, which is advocated by some Orthodox theologians. See, for example, Zizioulas, J.
(1996) ‘Man the priest of creation’, in A. Walker and C. Carras (eds) Living Orthodoxy in
the Modern World, London: SPCK, pp. 178–88, and ‘Proprietors or priests of creation?’
(Keynote address, Baltic Symposium, June 2003, see www.rsesymposia.org/symposium_v).
Abstraction and generalisation are two characteristic features of mathematical

thinking, and mathematisation is one of the crucial ways in which meaning [e.g. the
meaning of existence – AN] is transformed and sometimes lost. If mathematics
resided entirely in the mind and, although it derived from our interaction with the
external world, if it played out all its themes and variations entirely in the mind,
then it could do no great harm. But this is not the way it works. Mathematics
comes from the interaction of the mind with the external world, and this interac-
tion simultaneously creates mathematics and transforms our perceptions of the
external world, and these then create new interactions.50
It is this consistent transformation of our perception of the external world

that changes our orientation in the world and which can, if being unguarded,
lead to severe conflict with a different kind of philosophy and theology that
provide a different psychological and spiritual orientation towards reality as
well as towards fulfilment of humanity.
Mathematics with its sharp differentiation of things in terms of numericals
can be abused in social implications and can ‘become a source of evil even if it
confers benefits’.51 Mathematics can diminish human person not only in a
global sense by subjecting it to mathematized nature, but while implanting in
human mind mathematical perception, human being themselves can be valued
and judged in terms of sheer numbers: this leads to the dehumanization of the
individual.52 Here it is important not only to blame people who recklessly
apply mathematics to all aspects of life and thus commit consciously a certain
offence against the idea of humanity as it is understood in philosophy and the-
ology, but to realize that while engaging in rationality based in mathematics,
we are doomed to commit a certain dehumanization of the persons because of
the intrinsic logic and conditions of application of mathematics. Contemporary
era of computers and all sorts of digital applications makes it absolutely clear:
‘Whenever we use computerization to proceed from formulae and algorithms
to policy and to actions affecting humans, we stand open to good and to evil
on a massive scale. What is not often pointed out is that this dehumanisation
is intrinsic to the fundamental intellectual processes that are inherent in
mathematics.’53 The development of mathematics thus extends human embodi-
ment of reality in a very specific incorporeal sense: this extension effectively
changes human subjectivity, which, in the long run, can change the very human
nature and thus threaten the basics of the human condition. One can then
draw an important conclusion that the analysis of mathematical thought, and
all applications of mathematics for the mathematization of nature, can help
enormously to reveal in the structure of human subjectivity some intrinsically
50. Davis and Hersch, Descartes’ Dream, p. 281 (emphasis added).

51. Ibid., p. 282.
52. Ibid., p. 283. (Compare with Sherrard’s discussion on dehumanization of man in his
Rape of Man and Nature, pp. 63–89.)
53. Davis and Hersch, Descartes’ Dream, p. 283.
non-human elements. Then the difference in orientation of science and theol-

ogy to the world can be treated as the difference in workings of different
intentionalities of human subjectivity. This could potentially lead to the same
conclusion that we have made before that the differentiation between science
and theology is deeply rooted in the incarnate human condition in the world,
which is imbued with the above mentioned differentiation of intentionalities.
Here we meet again the paradox of human subjectivity in the world as
regards mathematics: mathematics is capable of dehumanizing and deperson-
alizing humanity, but still it is the mental creation of humanity. One can see
that mathematics, while being a tool for describing nature, if placed in the con-
text of human existence leads to the fundamental question of its own foundation.
The very fact that mathematics exists and can be used by humanity in order to
articulate nature can hardly be explained on the grounds of the natural evolu-
tion taken in itself. This entails in turn that the mathematics that is used for the
mathematization of nature, by proclaiming that the ultimate sense of things is
in thus-mathematized nature, contradicts the obvious fact that mathematics is,
by its essence, a derivative quality of human life, which forms a useful tool for
shaping the outward impressions about the world, but which in no way repre-
sents the foundation of existence understood in an absolute and unconditional
metaphysical sense. In simpler words, the foundation of mathematics itself is
not in mathematics.54 When mathematics attempts to mathematize human
being it contradicts itself, because it attempts to mathematize, that is, to make
demonstrable in mathematical terms, its own origin. Even if this were possible,
mathematics can explain only the mathematical. All other aspects of the incar-
nate existence that are not projected into the frame of mathematical mind are
removed as unimportant and, in a way, ‘non-existent’. The human reality,
however, is more far reaching and immense than any particular reduced form
of its discursive image so that the conditions for the existence of human beings
transcend the natural and mathematical, pointing thus to humanity’s inher-
ence in the personality and intelligence of God.
The mathematization of humanity thus means not only a complete disregard
of the individual modes of human existence, that is, its personal qualities, but
also a complete distortion of the perception of the human position with respect
to the environment, society and culture.55 Through mastering ‘his own nature’,
that is mathematized nature as a project that is yet to be accomplished, man
takes over the control of his own life and fate by relying on mathematics
implemented in technology. Husserl compares human beings, as being capable
54. Cf. ‘While mathematics is comprehensible, its ways, as are the ways of God, are
incomprehensible.’ (Ibid., p. 238)
55. One can fully agree with Davis and Hersh’s conviction that not only ‘the inner life of
the individual that is beyond mathematics; even more so is the “inner life” of society, of civi-
lization itself, for example, literature, music, politics, the tides and currents of history, the
stuff and nonsense that fill the daily newspaper’ (Idem., pp. 13–14).
of ruling their own affairs indefinitely (because of their feeling of omnipotence

founded in rationalism), to God seen as ‘infinitely distant man’.56 If man is
capable of unfolding the sense of the universe through mathematization that is
treated as the only valuable and worthy mode of existence, one can say that
man mathematized himself. But, being de facto, in a strictly theological sense,
the image of God, man also abstracted and mathematized God,57 dismissing
thereby God from being as ultimate and personal source of all being and by
reducing God to the principle of the ultimate rationality of the universe, which
can in principle be revealed through the rigorous mathematical mode of the
discursive mind.
If human beings consider themselves as the rulers of their own affairs and
their fate, they pretend to play the role of creators of the world and of their
own lives, thus taking on, de facto, a function of the Divine. Human beings are
free and creative creatures, so that creativity is essential for their condition.
However, it is this creativity that puts human beings above the rest of creation
and because of it human beings are not satisfied with the status quo of their
biological condition and attempt an analogy with the Divine to change cre-
ation by using their will. It is this rise above creation that in its potentiality
gives humanity ability either to create something new or to destroy what is
‘given’ to it. Here lies a theological problem: man’s destiny is to stand above
the rest of creation, but at the same time to be responsible for creation in a way
of establishing its communion with God; for the fundamental finitude of the
world that is linked with its transient nature, instability and decay, points
towards its inevitably contingent character. Man’s destiny, seen theologically
lies in relating the world to God in order to save it from decay and oblivion.
Here emerges a priestly function of humanity, expressed in the metaphor of
‘man as priest of creation’.58 But relating the universe to God man still remains
a created being, which needs in all its knowledge and actions to refer to God.
The state of affairs in modern science and technology reflects the situation in
which man not only did not fulfil its function as the priest of creation, but
making itself an ultimate point of reference, that is, God, through rational
exploration and mathematization of nature, it condemned the universe to
finitude and inevitable decay according to physical laws,59 – the finitude and
transience which originates in the finitude and transience of man itself, whose
blindness to the transcendent shields it from understanding its createdness and
contingency upon God.
56. Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 66.

57. Sherrard, in a different context, but in a way similar to Husserl, criticized the mathe-
matization of nature, which was initiated by Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton arguing
that they not just replaced one set of theories by another one but, actually, destroyed the
vision of the world and the understanding of the Divine humanity in this world, and thus
made God himself a great cosmic mathematician (Human Image: World Image, p. 35).
58. See, for example, Zizioulas, ‘Man as the priest of creation’.
59. Here lies the root of the ecological problem. See Zizioulas, ‘Man as the priest of
creation’, and ‘Proprietors or priests of creation?’.
This state of mind and soul makes it nearly impossible to accept a theolo-
gical truth that human beings are creatures, but not creators in an absolute
sense. It is exactly the inability of human beings to sustain their own physical
and biological existence indefinitely which points towards the fact that the
absolute ontological ground for humanity cannot be phenomenalized and
practically achieved from within the world. When human beings start to
pretend to be gods, Christianity and its theology sees in this development
something which deviates from what it considers as a norm of a progress:
namely, the progress of the spirit which orientates humanity not only in the
external world of the scientific universe, but which also poses to humanity a
question of its own origin and destiny, that is, ‘where it comes from and where
it goes’. In the words of D. Staniloae,
Orthodox theology takes scientific progress into account only in so far as science
makes a contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and only in so far as it
deepens in man the experience of his own spiritual reality and of the supreme spiri-
tual reality, neither of which can be reduced to the physical and chemical level.60
Here we must stress that in no way do we imply diminishing the value of

contemporary science. There is no doubt that without science human civiliza-
tion could not function in its present state. The tragedy of this is that the
scientific progress of the last centuries made the human race a hostage of its
own achievements. This is exactly what happens if humanity loses control of
its own destiny in a spiritual sense. And this is the reason why human activity
with its greed for exploration and utilization of the resources of the world
should look at its own achievements from outside, from the perspective of
existence as such, existence which is not something because of chance and
necessity in the play of the impersonal forces of nature, but existence which is
granted to human beings as a gift, the gift of contemplation of the world and
communion with the source of this world in God. Science is a useful tool of
biological and physical survival. But its justification and its foundation must
be clarified as ever. There is something in human life that cannot be described
scientifically but which has an infinite value for human beings as persons.
Science is good but it is not sufficient to enable one to understand what it
means to be a human person. The warmth of human relationship and the
transmission of grace through generations make humanity unique and special
among other types of ‘existence’, which are described scientifically as exis-
tences of impersonal, that is, effectively ‘non-living’ bodies. The exploration of
the world of persons that underlies the realm of scientific experience can thus
complement science in articulating the genuine place of human beings in the
world and thus facilitate the dialogue with theology.
One now can anticipate that the dialogue between science and theology
can be seen in the perspective of another existential dichotomy in human
60. Staniloae, Theology and the Church, p. 216.

apprehension of the world: the intrinsic split between human humanity and
human inhumanity. Since man is always positioned at the background of what
makes them different for the other, be it nature or other human being, there is
something in human constitution which always leads to a clash between
humanity and inhumanity. One could suggest that the incarnate human condi-
tion as being enslaved by nature and at the same time feeling one’s transcendence
above it makes this dichotomy unbearable. But here the difference and distinc-
tion between science and theology becomes articulated in a new light. The
dialogue between them is about the dialogue between human and inhuman.
This is the ultimate disintegration of the human spirit which can only be
addressed and understood in theological terms by appealing to the Fall. Because
the difference between human and inhuman in man does not necessarily have
to imply division between them, tension and conflict. The presence of the natu-
ral in the human constitution, that is, something that pertains to the animal
kingdom, and intellectual and spiritual that is implanted in the Divine image,
do not have to compete and fight with each other: on the contrary they must
be mediated by means of overcoming divisions. But even in the intended,
deified, state of man, when all divisions are supposed to be overcome, the dif-
ferentiation in the human composition between natural and intelligible will be
intact because it represents the constitutive element of all creation. Thus the
dialogue between theology and science can be seen as an inevitable mediation
between the human and inhuman in humanity.
As we have seen afore, some thinkers are prone to criticize science for the
loss of humanity and hence to dismiss as a right way to live and progress.
However one must admit that science itself is a victim of the same paradox of
human subjectivity in the world, so that in its function it is intrinsically para-
doxical. A French philosopher Michel Henry placed this paradox in the context
of the human cultural condition, which he called ‘La Barbarie’. According to
him science functions as a form of life that denies itself: ‘Here we have a form
of life which turns against life refusing all values and contesting even its very
existence. This is a life which denies itself, it is the autonegation (l’autonégation)
of life which is a crucial event which defines modern culture as a scientific
culture.’61 The paradoxical nature of the human condition in the universe thus
reveals itself not only in terms of opposition between personhood (hypostasis)
and outward nature (physis), but through a more deep and intrinsic split
between intentionalities of human subjectivity as the tragedy of the human in
the background of the non-human or inhuman. It is inevitable for humanity to
predicate of its condition in the background of its worldly otherness, as poten-
tial non-humanity (e.g. the cold and vastly dead universe). Then the problem
is whether modern science is destined to develop itself through predication of
that inhuman part in the universe (perceived primarily as totality of life) in
order to identify and outline ‘the kingdom of the human’ as distinct from it.
The alleged denial of life that Henry invokes in the passage quoted above
61. Henry, M. (1987) La Barbarie, Paris: Bernard Grasset, p. 113.

corresponds exactly to the exaggeration of that non-human part in human

thinking that is latently present in the very heart of the human condition. This
part can be associated with non-egocentric intentionality to which we referred
a few times earlier and which has to be employed in order to articulate the
world as ‘out there’, depriving it deliberately of its primary inward presence in
human subjectivity. Thus we see that in this condition inheres another interest-
ing split in intentionalities between what could be called concretely human
and abstractly non-human. The first intentionality represents that which is
concerned with the facticity of existence in humility accepted as a gift of life.
The second one represents the non-egocentric desire to position this existence
in the background of the other, not intrinsically hypostatic nature, which alleg-
edly gives rise to hypostatic existence. It is the exaggeration of the second
intentionality, implied heavily in scientific research that can be identified with
dehumanization of life and its auto-denial. One must understand, however,
that our analysis and treatment of science has nothing to do with any anti-
scientific or anti-scientism stance. What we attempt to demonstrate is that some
extreme tendencies to mathematize nature create serious difficulties in main-
taining human spiritual integrity and thus must be carefully accounted for in
order to relate science to theology. Our objective is to discern the paradox of
human subjectivity in all its dimensions and make it a challenge for the human
spirit in order, while wrestling with it, to find a way forward out of it.
Now we would like to discuss briefly how phenomenology analyses science,
and what is the positive outcome of its deconstruction of the mathematized
nature. The aim, again, is not to accentuate misfortunes of the scientific world-
view but rather to indicate that this mathematization is a special mode of
human discursive thinking which, unfortunately, overshadows the sheer
facticity of existential events. The de-mathematization of nature will allow us
to reveal on a different, so to speak, next order of meaning, the immediate
presence of human subjectivity behind all thematizations of nature when
the constructive ‘negation’ of mathematized nature takes place. It is through
the recovery of the basics of the human condition through the phenomeno-
logical analysis of science that science can be related to theology, which
articulates the human condition through a different symbolism of the living
God of Christian faith.
From Mathematization of Nature to the World of Persons
Phenomenological philosophy in the style of Husserl linked the rise of Platonic

tendencies in scientific discourse with the name of Galileo. However the name
of Galileo was used only to label that scientific trend which developed in the
seventeenth century.62 This trend, which is essential for modern science, can be
62. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, p. 34.

characterized by the view that there is a fundamental split between the world
as presented to human beings in their perceptual experience and everyday life,
and the world as uncovered through scientific method and mathematical struc-
ture. But this, as is not difficult to see, implies Platonism in the sense of ancient
Greek philosophy, which made a clear-cut distinction between the world of
doxa (opinion) and episteme (knowledge), as two modes of cognition, which
correspond to different realms and different truth. For Galileo and for those
who followed him this meant that the true knowledge of things must corre-
spond to the ideal of episteme. Husserl in his analysis of the genesis of Galilean
physics shows how the mathematization of nature was performed and what its
result was.63 He points out that geometry exemplified an ideal of episteme for
Galilean physics; it was considered as a standard of knowledge and therefore
science that to achieve the true knowledge of things, the ideal of geometry and
mathematics should be followed. But this, according to Gurwitsch, implied
that Galilean Physics is essentially Platonic in structure, for its Platonism
‘appears in the distinction between the perceptual appearance of nature and its
true, that is, its mathematical structure’.64
However, if one does not take the claim about the Platonism of modern
science at face value, one realizes that ‘nature’, which science aims at through
idealization and mathematization, is not something a priori given to human
observers and thinkers, but something that is constructed and evolves towards
an indefinite telos of the human spirit. ‘Nature’, thus constructed, while being
essentially an intentional correlate of human subjectivity becomes exteriorized
as a Platonic or Kantian ideal,65 which is subject to accomplishment in a histori-
cal movement of scientific research because mathematics as human science is far
from being static and accomplished,66 and its advance creates more and more
space for physicists to invade the realm of the yet unknown (although, perhaps,
intelligible and invisible). In other words there must be made a distinction
between nature as it appears in primary perceptual experience and nature-for-
physicists (i.e. ‘nature’), which is a mental accomplishment, as an ideal limit of
convergent sequences of ‘images of nature’, which are constructed by physicists
in the course of history. One can then understand the historical process of
63. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, pp. 23–59; see also, Kockelmans, J.
(1970) ‘The mathematization of nature in Husserl’s last publication, Krisis’, in T. J. Kiesel
and J. Kockelmans (eds), Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, pp. 45–67; Gurwitsch, A. (1967) ‘Galilean physics in the light of Husserl’s
phenomenology’, in E. McMullin (ed.), Galileo. Man of Science, New York: Basic Books,
pp. 388–401 (395–401); Cassirer, E. (1967) ‘Mathematical mysticism and mathematical
science’, in E. McMullin (ed.), Galileo. Man of Science, pp. 338–51.
64. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, pp. 51–2.
65. Ibid., p. 46.
66. See on temporality and mathematics Davis and Hersch, Descartes’s Dream,
pp. 189–201.
science as sequence of scientific paradigms, as a process of an ever-unfolding rep-

resentation of the mathematical universe, the process which, being human and
hence unique in its factual givenness, makes all paradigms united as belonging to
one and same unique sequence, pertaining to the telos of the human spirit.
In such a vision ‘nature’ appears to be a ‘hypostasis of mental creations’.67
This view and terminology resembles what we previously called the continuing
enhypostasization (personification, or human articulation) of the universe.
Then a new mathematized nature has sense only in the context of humanity,
which is in a position to relate it not only to the commonalities of the percep-
tual experience, that is, to put it in the context of incarnate existence-in-situation,
but also to relate to the source of its intelligible otherness in the Logos of God.
It is in this sense one can suggest that all images of the mathematized nature
provide us not with a true ontology of the world, but rather, in combination
with sensible experience, manifest the presence of the immutable dualistic
constitution of all things in the created world, a fundamental differentiation
between the sensible realm of human indwelling and the mathematical universe
in which a particular, scientifically articulated, sense of the life-world is
impressed and thematized.
When we mentioned that the construct of ‘nature’ represents an ideal that
can only be accomplished in the whole of the historical process, we assumed
this view as a philosophical hypothesis or a theological insight, which asserts
some hidden teleology in the development of the overall human spirit. Thus
the progress of mathematization of nature has meaning of one particular ten-
dency of the human spirit under which scientific knowledge and technology
advance. Thus the mathematical universe, as a human achievement, represents
characteristically the fragmentation of the primary existential link between
humanity (as an event) and the world, considered through a particular discur-
sive function of the human intellect that is based on abstraction and idealization.
‘Nature’ in the thus-understood scientific sense, being a particular human
accomplishment, does not exhaust the totality of reality (which, if seen theo-
logically, extends to the state of affairs where humanity was brought into
existence by the power of the Holy Spirit). On the one hand the constructed
‘nature’ is exteriorized by human subjectivity and is intended as being devoid
of its inward existence in the hypostasis of human beings, on the other hand the
same ‘nature’, as being constructed, still entails some traces of its hypostatic
origin (in spite of the ‘autonegation’ of life, its traces are still contained in the
primary condition for its possibility before any negation). ‘Nature’ appears as
a mode of the intentional immanence of human subjectivity, which articulates
that there are some aspects of the overall reality that are not hypostatic in
themselves, but enhypostasized by human persons.
67. This expression is used by Gurwitsch, in Phenomenology and the Theory of Science,
p. 44, where ‘hypostasis’ is meant not in a theological sense. Elements of nature as ‘mental
creation’ also appeared in the terminology of Einstein (Ideas and Opinions, p. 291).
However, in spite of the success of the naturalizing tendencies of scientific

discourse in depersonalizing reality in its outward objectivistic impression,
a person, the human hypostasis, is still present behind the mathematical struc-
ture, and the transcendental phenomenological analysis allows one to reveal
this presence behind all shades imposed by that discursive thinking which shapes
the impression of the scientific universe. We can only observe the degrees of
nature’s objectification for, in analogy with theology, one cannot completely
deprive nature of the presence of humanity because in the extreme case ‘nature’,
as articulated complex, must disappear together with humanity. This is the
reason why any interpretation of science which claims that science contradicts
to theology because it deals with other aspects of reality which are devoid of
the Divine presence, is flawed in its essence, for ‘nature’, being constructed by
human beings is ultimately hypostatically inherent in the Logos of God, as a
created accomplishment, so that traces of the Logos and its image in humanity
are hidden in ‘nature’ and can be found.
For the purposes of our research in science and theology, the primary prob-
lem is how to uncover the forgotten life-world which is always present in
scientific insights. Phenomenology shows how the life-word can be articulated
through contrasting it to ‘nature’ constructed scientifically. It is the analysis
of the scientific universe as mental creation that can help to uncover the
life-world when ‘nature’ (as scientifically constructed and abstracted from the
life-world) is itself subjected to a kind of deconstruction, which leads us back
to the life-world of the next, so to speak, reflected order. It turns out to be
that scientific method provides us exactly with the tools of articulating the life-
world by means of apophatic discernment of the scientifically constructed
nature (as the otherness of all the scientific) as its ultimate foundation. Para-
doxically it is by the way of abstraction from the reality of the living condition
that this condition is articulated back through deconstruction of scientifically
aimed accomplishment in the idea of nature. It is clear that in such a decon-
struction of scientific ‘nature’, the life-world will be articulated under the
conditions that there exists a scientific explicability of nature as well as an
access to the life-world through a certain apophatic move from thus-articulated
‘nature’. In contrast to this, the life-world as it is articulated in theology does
require some theological explication of nature, but, contrary to science,
it never leads to the concealment of the life-world. What is common to these
life-worlds is exactly that which cannot be explicated by science, namely, the
underlying personhood as the existential link to the otherness of the life-world
in God. To summarize the main idea of this section we quote a passage from a
late paper of M. Merleau-Ponty in which he paralleled not science and the-
ology, but science and art, and in which he points to what science forgets
about while drawing the grandeur picture of the world.
Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-
in-general, must return to ‘there is’ which precedes it; to the site, the soil of the
sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies –
not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information
machine but this actual body which I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the
command of my words and acts. Further, associated bodies must be revived along
with my body – ‘others’,. . . along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual
Being . . . In this primordial historicity, science’s agile and improvisatory thought
will learn to ground itself upon things themselves and upon itself, and will once
more become philosophy . . .68
The World of Persons and the Meeting of Science

and Theology: A Synthesis
It is inevitable that by analysing contemporary science along phenomenolo-

gical lines, we in fact criticize science for the lack of human dimension in its
picture. But this criticism, even though it is a constructive reinstitution of the
life-world as the world of persons, does not overcome the basic philosophical
monism as that enclosedness in the sphere of immanent subjectivity expressed
in the formula ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘existence-in-situation’. In other words
it does not overcome a basic existential dichotomy that is expressed in the
paradox of human subjectivity in the world, which explicates the difficulty of
the monistic stance on humanity. It seems plausible to suspect that in order to
relate science to theology the monism of knowledge in science should be
unlocked in order to expose knowledge to the presence of God who is in the
world but not of the world (i.e. to God’s presence in absence). Can this be
achieved if science continues to operate in the rubrics of mathematical knowl-
edge and mathematized nature? The response to this question seems to be
negative because the mathematization of nature, as we have seen, conceals the
meaning and place of humanity in the universe and distorts its ontology of
communion with the Divine, stopping man from mediating between the world
and God and thus driving away not only the idea of God but the sense of God.
However, one can conjecture that by ‘deconstructing’ the mathematical uni-
verse and re-establishing the central role of humanity in constitution of reality,
its life-world, as the telos of all scientific explanations, that one can find a
way of mediating between a scientific explication of the sense and telos of the
human existence, and theologically explicated existential faith whose telos
directs humanity and the world to the ultimate sense of its being with God.
As phenomenology shows, science exhibits itself as an infinite advance of
knowledge whose content is not something that is determined as finally true
and immutable, but rather subject to a change and development along the lines
68. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993) ‘Eye and mind’, in G. A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-
Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
pp. 121–49 (122–3).
of the advance of human spirit. This implies that the historicity of science, as
its essential feature, reflects the essential historicity of the human condition.
Humanity positions itself in the world articulated by it, through the field of
intersubjectivity as the premise of the very possibility of relating an individual
human consciousness to the universal intelligence present in the heart of the
human condition. It is this intersubjectivity that manifests essential non-local
properties of the human insight, stretching through the whole universe, which
makes possible the articulation of the historicity of the human condition, for
it is through the intersubjectivity that in the transience of human being the
element of truth is grasped, and past, present and future are united in the event
of the concrete human life, which ‘haunt a single, present and actual Being’.69
Any activity assumes an access to the experience of the ‘elders’ in science, that
is, to the tradition, expressed as a scientific method and its outcomes as hypos-
tasized by the continuity of the scientific thought through centuries. By being
essentially a social world, the basic world of common sense (i.e. the life-world)
can be found through deconstructing scientific ‘nature’; at the same time being
in its a priori givenness to everyone, that is, being pre-theoretical and pre-
conceptual , this world exhibits a certain specific logicality that can be called
‘protologic’.70 This logicality as such, being different from what is developed
in the natural sciences by means of abstraction and mathematization, allows
one to conjecture that it can be represented in a different frame of conscious-
ness, which, not being strictly non-logical, still follows a different type of logic,
which has its grounds in such faculties, for example, as faith. The intentional-
ity of faith is different in what concerns its worldly grounds and is based on
intersubjectivity asserted in rather ecclesial terms. For example, the meaning of
intersubjectivity present in theological assertions of the life-world can be expli-
cated by an appeal to the idea of the tradition in an ecclesial sense, understood
not only in a simple historical sense as the sustenance of the Church through
the sequence of ordinations starting from apostolic times, but also as the
constant presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church. This affirmation about the
presence of the Spirit as a constitutive factor in the reality of ecclesial commu-
nities and the reality of the universal Church as Body of Christ forms an
element of a different type of intersubjectivity, where the ultimate subject,
or hypostasis in which all human hypostases indwell, is the Church herself.
However, the presence of historicity and intersubjectivity as being in their exis-
tential essence the same in both scientific and theological articulations indicates
the basics of the human condition in the world and ultimately the key features
of the life-world. It is through this commonality of the underlying core of the
life-world that the natural sciences have common features with theology.
It must be understood, however, that in no way do we attempt to put the-
ology on the same footing as other sciences in order then to extend a claim of
69. Ibid.
70. Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, p. 140.
phenomenological philosophy about the unity of the sciences towards an

essential unity between theology and natural science. According to theology
that is a mode of participation and communion with God, human life as
such, that is, being-in-the-world represents communion with God and can be
articulated and grasped only in the context of this communion. Theology, in
contradistinction to all sciences, articulates the human condition in the world
as the unconcealment of its non-worldly ground, which is present as shown
through the very fact of humanity’s existence, but in its absence. This implies
that the presence in the human condition of the reference to the transcendent
assumes that the life-world can be explicated through its relationship to the
Divine, so that theology, as a mode of this explication, is inherently present as
a component of human spirit.
Finally, we would like to articulate the question about the relevance of
Christian theology, theology that is not an abstract philosophical theology of
an impersonal deity, but theology of Christ, the Logos of God, the living God
of Christian Faith ‘who for us men and for our salvation came down from
heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was
made man’. The mystery of human incarnate existence as the point of depar-
ture of any discourse and disclosure of reality is closely linked to what is
asserted in this fragment from the Nicene Creed on the Incarnation of the
Logos of God in flesh. Humanity is inherent in the Hypostasis of the Logos of
God through which the human insight which in its created potentiality is the
Divine insight, is compatible with the actuality of human ‘incarnate’ finitude
among the world of physical things. Such a theological thematization of the
life-world as inherent in the Hypostasis of the Logos forms a sharp contrast to
how life is thematized in the mathematical science and rationalistic philosophy
as a sector of cosmic determinism and integral part of the equation, that is, the
universe. To underline this difference we used the term ‘humankind-event’71
in order to stress that humanity was brought into being, so that its intrinsic
historicity is hidden in the fact that it had its beginning and it will have its end
determined by the logic of the invisible origin.
The paradox of human subjectivity can thus receive a new formulation as a
paradox of the humankind-event which, through the fusion of the human
intellect in the universe, contains in itself, by means of this fusion, the totality
of existence including the beginning and the end of history. This is a paradox
about the priority of personhood (as hypostatic being) against any noematic
(or semantic) formulations of content of consciousness and, thus, it points
towards the impossibility of a simple and absolute identification of the human
existence with conscious life, that is the life of the cogito. The paradox
brings us to the recognition that the reality of person precedes any conceptual
object-like definition. Harmony of the universe as well as a peculiar position
71. See Nesteruk, Light from the East, pp. 195–214.

of humanity in it (present in existential faith) as the context of conscious life

verify in an unmediated way ‘hypostatic’ (personal) nature of consciousness
and its notions.
The existence of persons, as embodied existence, entails thus a problem of
truth in this existence, namely, how to reconcile historicity of such an exis-
tence (as having its beginning and end in space and time) with truth which is
present in this existence. And it is here that theology comes forward again to
rescue the puzzled reason by pointing to an analogy between human historicity
and historicity of the Christ-event, in which the reconciliation between the
historical presence of Christ on Earth and his ultimate meaning as alpha and
omega of history took place. Indeed in the history of humankind one can find
the only event that made us the witness of the possibility of atemporal truth to
be incarnate in history: here the mystery of human embodiment can be paral-
leled with the Incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh. The metaphor, which
we have used above, namely, that the relation between man and world is a
reciprocal of one like that between ‘container’ and ‘contained’, and which, in
fact, reflects the mystery of embodiment, receives its theological manifestation
in the Incarnation of the Logos in space, where He was contained in flesh,
while not ceasing to be the Logos-Word of God, being present in all space and
time, ‘containing’ all space and time not by the power of some creaturely force,
but through the relation to the created world (as its enhypostasization) which
can be manifested in terms of God’s will and wisdom.72
The Paradox of Human Subjectivity and the Incarnation
As we tried to convince the reader that the paradox of human subjectivity in

the world encapsulates the essence of the tension between science and theol-
ogy, our aim now will be to reveal in it some existential wisdom that is related
to the main Christian stance on the Incarnation. Here the role of Christian
theology in mediating with science becomes articulate and indispensable.
If the paradox reflects the intrinsic feature of the human condition, then, to
Chalcedonian definition, Christ himself, by being fully human, that is through
His belonging to the created world, exhibited the presence of the above
paradox. However, one must realize that the Incarnation of the Logos in flesh,
represented for the human mind a difficult task, not only in terms of compre-
hending how being in a human body and through human faculties of knowledge
Christ contained in himself the articulated image of the universe (this is the
essence of the paradox), but also that being God, he sustained the existence of
the created universe in an absolute ontological sense as related and ‘standing
in front’ of the person of God. On the one hand Christ was a historical person
72. See the development of this idea in Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation.
in ancient Palestine in a particular location in space and time of the universe;

on the other hand he was still near the Father, thus holding and governing
the whole creation throughout its space and time. By his human nature Christ
was contained in the universe, while by his Divine nature he was not contained
by anything in the universe. By being the hypostasis of the Logos of God,
in whom two natures were united, he made visible to humanity that the
Divine can be united to the human and created, thus manifesting the mutual
co-inherence of two natures. And the power of upholding the entire universe
while being on this planet, which can be seen as the explication of this
co-inherence in spatial topological terms related to the geography of the Holy
history and the entire universe, can be interpreted as a ‘type’ (as an anticipa-
tory sign) of what the Divine humanity is endowed with in its microcosmic
constitution: namely, by the power of its comprehension human being can
hold the entire universe in the integrity of its intersubjectivity, referring thus
the universe to its transcendent God-creator. The Incarnation of the Logos in
Jesus Christ thus revealed to human beings that the mystery of their existence
in the world, perceived through their intentional consciousness which spans
the whole universe, is rooted in their special origin in God, who brought
human beings into existence in order to unify them and the universe with God.
But the function to mediate between the world and God can only be realized if
human beings and the universe can interpenetrate each other on the natural
(consubstantiality) as well as hypostatic (communion) levels.
In the same way as the presence of Christ in a particular location in space
and time in the universe did not prevent him, as the Logos, from being present
everywhere in the universe through the hypostatic inherence of the universe in
the Logos, one can say that the presence of humanity in a particular location
in the universe does not preclude this humanity to be present everywhere in the
universe through the ‘inherence’ of the universe in the hypostasis of humanity,
whose archetype is Christ himself. One should understand, however, that
the mode of being of the universe as an intentional correlate of human subjec-
tivity, is not ‘ontological’ in the same sense as the hypostatic inherence of the
universe in the Person of the Logos. The universe is created by the Logos as a
personal relation of the Logos with human persons and that is why it is onto-
logically contingent upon and derivative from the Logos. The mode of the
universe’s existence in its sheer facticity represents the Logos’ desire to have
the universe in a particular shape in order that the Logos himself could indwell
in the universe.
One can conjecture that the paradox of human subjectivity in the world
points towards a fundamental twofoldness of the human incarnate existence,
that is, their physical finitude in space and time, as well as the potentially
unlimited capacity of knowing the world, which both originate in the Logos of
God, who created the world as extended in space and time and who, while
creating the world, transferred some of its intrinsic rationality to human beings
making them the bearers of the Divine image in the sense that ‘the subject
communes with the object, or rather, through the mediation of the object,
communes with the Word, the Word of God, of which the object is a substan-
tial word, a symbol.’73 Transferring some of his qualities to humanity, the
Logos created such a world, whose sense can only be disclosed from within the
priority of personhood, where the difference between noesis and noema, or
subject and object, acquires some secondary qualities and represents a particu-
lar way of oblivion of that primacy of personhood through exaggerated
non-egocentric intentionality.
When we affirm that the world (or the universe) can be understood as the
enhypostasis of the Logos of God, we say that the world exists in the hyposta-
sis of the Logos, so that it is the personality of the Logos which forms the
foundation for the world. However the word as such is not hypostatic. There
is one particular domain in the world, namely, the community of human
beings that can be interpreted as hypostatic. Human beings are enhypostasized
by the Logos as hypostatic creatures, so that their own hypostases are not
self-sufficient. All other objects, such as physical particles, fields and their
complex combinations are not hypostatic at all, so that their existence can
only be manifested in the hypostasis of the other, namely in the hypostasis of
human beings and, ultimately, in the hypostasis of the Logos.
If we now try to comprehend, in these terms, the Incarnation of the Logos of
God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, in Jesus Christ, and say that the
Logos was incarnate in flesh we mean, in fact, something like this: the Logos
enhypostasized himself in human body by preserving his own hypostasis. If we
compare the Incarnation of Christ with incarnations of other human beings,
we can formulate the difference: the self-enhypostasization of the Logos in
Jesus Christ was a deliberate action of the Logos with respect to himself, the
enhypostasization of other human persons is a deliberate action of the Logos
with respect to created beings. The act of enhypostasization of created human
beings can then be treated as the intentional immanence of the Logos towards
establishing the relationship with human persons. This assumes that there
must be some commensurability between the Logos and human beings. This
dimension is usually called in theology the divine image in man.
But the enhypostasization of other human beings by the Logos is not only
the act of bringing the relational aspects of existence of human being with
respect to the Logos himself, but also the implanting of some intrinsic relation-
ality among human beings, which is perceived as intersubjectivity, as an ability
to share knowledge and emotions, to know each other through love. It is here
that the Logos imitates among human beings that all-permeating love which
he experiences himself in the community of the Holy Trinity. It is interesting
to realize here that the very possibility for all different existents that are brought
into hypostatic being by the power of the Logos, to overcome their solitude
and enter the sphere of the shared existence, is founded in the Logos himself.
It is through the very existence of the intersubjective field of consciousness that
73. Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, ‘Three sermons’, p. 7.

the fact of the implicit presence of a common existential source for all human
persons becomes accessible to the attentive mind. This common ground that is
linked to the presence of the light of Christ in all of us, as well as the awareness
that there is the immediate surrounding world among all of us that seems to be
the same in spite of the differences among persons, points out in a characteris-
tic way that there is some fundamental non-locality in human apprehension of
the world, non-locality expressed in terms of physics as accessibility to differ-
ent scales in the levels of reality as well as a shared accumulated past also
inherent in the Logos. It is this non-locality of the human condition in the uni-
verse that expresses the paradox of human subjectivity in the world and which
forms the mystery of intersubjectivity not only as communicability among
persons, but also as an access to the intelligible imprint of human life in the
world, understood as accumulated history of the world. The Incarnation of the
Logos in flesh at one particular point of the universe, and his simultaneous
presence everywhere in the universe, including all layers of its intelligible
counterpart, provides us with the archetype of how the all-penetrating human
subjectivity can affirm itself from a particular position in the cosmos on the
planet earth. It is through its opposition to the whole of creation, through par-
ticularization as the radical otherness, that existents receive their existing, that
is, they receive their unrepeatable experience of being. The contraction of the
existing by a potentially existent creature is exactly what theology describes as
‘special making of man’, as a manifestation of our relationship with the Logos.
To know the Logos means to transcend our solitude, to transcend our being
existent in potentiality and to contract our existing as existing in the Logos.
This is the meaning of our being hypostatic creation. It is through our relation
to the Logos, as inherent in him, that human beings inherit an ability to articu-
late the world as inherent in the Logos.
From Ethical Individualism in Knowledge to Ecclesial Wisdom
What we have achieved so far in our analysis of the underlying causes of the
outward distinction between theology and science is a clear understanding that
this distinction, which can potentially result in tension and conflict, originates
in differing intentionalities of one and the same human subjectivity, which
articulate differently parts of the overall experience of being. Thus the prelimi-
nary step in overcoming the tension between theology and science is to refer
them both to the source of their manifestation and disclosure in human per-
sons. If this is understood, then there will be a temptation to pronounce that
the problem of the dialogue between religion and science is solved. However,
this is not exactly true, because even if both theology and science in their ontic
manifestation find their source in humanity, the question remains about their
implications in human life. The difference between them is lifted up to the level
of ethics, which, as a particular social or environmental realization of the
human attitude to the world and fellow-humans leads to different existential

implications.
While rediscovering personhood as the uniting mode of articulation and
exploration of the world and God, one must not be naïve in order to under-
stand how different this personal knowledge of the world and God can be in
physical or social reality. Personhood, or personal mode of existence, implies
not only radical otherness with respect to the substance of the world, but also
radical communion with this substance, which, in particular, is realized in
human communities as the living chain of interpersonal relationships which
make an individual a person. Communion here incorporates much more
than a simple sharing of living space and exercising love, empathy and com-
passion with respect to fellow-neighbours. It implies an element of corporate
responsibility for persons as community in a particular environment, which is
conditioned not only by simple social norms, economic interests of a particular
group or purely by the instinct of survival. Communion of persons, as we have
seen before, assumes a certain reference of the source of their otherness, beyond
creation, in the Divine, which is the source of their existence. It is through this
reference that the collective responsibility is linked to the concept of wisdom,
as distinct from that of knowledge.74 In early patristic times wisdom reflected
through ethics meant, for example, that knowledge was inconceivable without
being referred to the source of its facticity in God.75 Reason as dianoia was
sanctified, or anointed by the spiritual intellect nous as that link between man
and God which made wisdom accessible to human grasp.76 It is important to
stress, however, that the presence of Wisdom in human communities was
secured not through particular visionaries and spiritually advanced persons,
74. It is often implied that scientific advance takes place in a stream of wisdom: science
makes human life better and longer, it gives knowledge and conquers ignorance. But this
scientific wisdom does not address the issue of existence: in its success in answering the ques-
tion ‘What is the universe?’, it does not answer the question ‘Why is the universe?’. Scientific
wisdom operates in the limits of the pre-given which is accessible to the discursive mind. In a
way, scientific wisdom is tacitly embedded in a wisdom of another kind, that is, the wisdom
of being, which is affirmed through the very fact of our existence in the universe; and it is the
understanding of this ultimate existential wisdom that became a major preoccupation of
Christian theology since its early patristic period. (See more details in Nesteruk, Wisdom
through Communion and Personhood, pp. 73–5, 83–9.)
75. Knowledge can rather be connoted with created wisdom, which in turn is paralleled
with philosophy, or reason. In this case the wisdom of the Church, that is Divine wisdom,
contrary to created wisdom, represents a saving knowledge to which all mundane activities
such as science and philosophy contribute and cooperate. But by cooperating in attainment
of truth the wisdom of the sciences and philosophy never exhausts this truth because they are
contingent upon this truth existentially: they contain a glimpse of the Divine wisdom through
the sheer fact that science and philosophy exist. The sciences and philosophies aspire to this
wisdom, but in themselves can never attain it within their own boundaries, that is, without
communion with God, which itself sanctifies all sorts of created wisdom.
but on the level of corporate participation in it which originated in the charis-

matic nature of the Church and its Councils.77 This is what is described in
Eastern theology either by using such words as ‘catholicity’ (universality) or in
a particular Slavonic Orthodox usage ‘sobornost’ (conciliarity).78
76. Augustine of Hippo articulated wisdom as the link-piece between creation and God
by making a distinction between the uncreated and created wisdom, as it appears to the
human spirit (Augustine of Hippo (1975) ‘On the Trinity’, XII.14.22, in V. J. Bourke (ed.),
The Essential Augustine, Indianapolis: Hacket, p. 37). Augustine insists that in spite of the
fact that both the word of wisdom and knowledge are given by the same Spirit (1 Cor. 12.8)
they are distinct (‘On the Trinity’, XII.15.25, ibid., p. 37). And wisdom in this context as
being created is dependent upon something else, which originates beyond creation. Here he
makes an analogy with the light that gives origin to illumination, which is caught by the
human grasp. But human grasp, being the manifestation of the created wisdom, itself depends
on the uncreated light through which the natural light of human mind as made in the divine
image is seen. Even if the human mind is capable of articulating things in the universe because
of the inherent coordination between the world and mind originating from the image of God,
it does not immediately imply that this mind is wise by itself through the natural capacity that
is granted to it at the moment of its creation (Augustine of Hippo (1991) Confessions, 12.15,
in H. Chadwick (tr.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 255). The human
mind can become wise if it makes an ecstatic transcendence in faith when the natural light
present in this mind will be brought to communion with the supreme Light in which the
supreme wisdom of the very existence will be revealed. And it is only through communion as
participation that the supreme Wisdom can be revealed and all forms of created wisdom can
be sanctified. But this also implies that it is through man’s communion with God that the link
between God and the world, that is, the ultimate sense of existence is hypostasized and
revealed to humanity as wisdom. This conclusion points sufficiently enough to the demarca-
tion between what can be called wisdom of knowledge and wisdom of communion; it is only
through the latter that the former can be assessed and sanctified. This implies in turn that all
attempts of attaining wisdom will lead to the necessity of ecclesial experience as that medium
in which communion becomes effective through the action of the Holy Spirit.
77. Church Councils were gatherings of bishops, not of academics, so that the Councils
were liturgical events through which Church affirmed its truth. This brings an eschatological
dimension to wisdom, because, since Irenaeus of Lyons the Eucharist was considered as a
sacrament which changes man in a way such that he attains ecclesial dimension of his exis-
tence, as the life in the ‘world to come’. It means that the Eucharist as a principle of truth and
ontological affirmation of the Church’s existence is possible only as an eschatological move
towards fulfillment not of a particular, individual mode, of sanctification but rather as par-
ticipation in building the Body of Christ, that is, the Church. This participation, seen from
the eschatological perspective, manifests the ontological affirmation of Church’s reality, not
only on the visible historical scene, but also as life in the Kingdom of God.
78. For a scientific and philosophical discourse, even if they were able to account in their
systems the presence of generating hypostatic subjectivity, it would be incredibly difficult
to anticipate the ecclesial and hence Christological dimension of the hypostatic unity of
humankind. St Maximus the Confessor articulates this thought by saying that the Holy Church
forms the image of God and that all human beings who constitute its Body are united in a
non-trivial ecclesial sense (see St Maximus the Confessor, ‘Mystagogy’, 1, G. C. Berthold, (tr.),
Maximus Confessor. Selected Writings, pp. 187–8) forming thus an ecclesial microcosm.
One of the features of catholicity is to establish decisions about what is good

and right for men not on the grounds of what is good for this or that individual
but what is good for all humanity in its entirety including past, present and
future generations: thus catholicity in its essence refers to the fullness of
humanity understood eschatologically.79
Epistemological and hence ethical individualism is inevitable in the condi-
tions when the picture of the world is presented as a correlate of impersonal
and anonymous subjectivity, so that the atomization of humanity takes place
on the ground of their differentiation as corporeal units in space and time. This
atomization results in that every human person is free to achieve its own goals
by using their potential and capacity to the ultimate limit. It is this feature of
modern society that leads to incredible scientific discoveries and advances in
technology: human scientists feel free to explore and study whatever they want
and how they want, and, while discovering this or that potential in nature, to
develop it to its extreme use and exploitation without correlating the results of
this usage with other aspect of human life. What happens is that the ethical
individualism in knowledge, as freedom from the corporate morality of
humanity as the whole, leads to the individualization and atomization of
potentialities of nature, when every newly discovered phenomenon is brought
by free human will to its limiting use as a source of power, that is, to its
humanly-seen teleological end. One can see consequences of such an approach
to exploration of new physical forces in a contemporary ecological crisis when
the unlimited usage of energetic capacities discovered in the twentieth century
applied to some particular individualistic goals can threaten the existence of
the entire planet, thus potentially annihilating those agencies who, in virtue of
their freedom, unleashed knowledge forgetting about wisdom, which always
teaches that knowledge assumes faith and loving relationship with what is
known, and does not consider it as the source of power.
Conciliarity, in its depth, appeals to such a morality whose subject is not a
single person, or a particular political group, but all humanity understood as
multihypostatic consubstantiality. The gift of finding the ultimate common
background for human intelligence in the sphere of abstract transcendentality
was granted to many visionaries and deep thinkers. However belonging to this
anonymous sphere did not prevent the atomizing tendencies in human com-
munities, remaining thus no more than a philosophical pointer towards truth
79. The intuition of fullness encompasses all possible generations of human beings who
will ever live in the idea of fulfilment of pleroma of humanity, that is, of the fullness of the
‘body’ of humanity in Christ. St Gregory of Nyssa argues that when the Holy Scripture says
‘God created man according to His image and likeness’, it does mean ‘. . . the entire plentitude
of humanity was included by God of all, by His power of foreknowledge, as it were in one
body . . . The whole race was spoken of as one man . . . Our whole nature, then, extending
from the first to the last, is, so to say, one image of Him Who is’ (St Gregory of Nyssa (1994)
‘On the making of man’, 17, in P. Schaff and H. Wace (eds), The Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, vol. 5, Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdman Publishing Company, p. 406 (emphasis added)).
of some common spirit of humanity, but not reaching the truth of its unity in
full. What was missing in all such findings is the charismatic and Eucharistic
dimension of this truth as present and manifested in the Church.
In Russian religious thought the unity of humanity through the Church was
denoted by a special word ‘sobornost’, which meant, on the one hand, that all
human beings belong to the same Church, which in its particular empirical
incarnation was presented by a ‘sobor’ (i.e. a ‘cathedral’), and, on the other,
that all people are living through the council (for which the same Russian word
‘sobor’ is used) with each other. The Russian philosopher S. Trubetskoi argued
that in all articulations of the outer world, as well as in our self-awareness, we
hold an invisible ‘council’ (‘sobor’) with all people and that the acts of knowl-
edge, although they are constituted by individual consciousness contain in
themselves the traces of this conciliarity.80
This gives another dimension to the notion of ‘sobornost’: it is only through
being in Church, that is, being in council (‘sobor’) with all people, and being
under the veil of the Holy Spirit, that it is possible to live and know truly. One
can thus conclude that the reality of the Church, its tradition as the continuity
of the historical revelation of God in the World, as well as constant presence
of the Holy Spirit in Church’s Liturgy, forms the conditions for the ultimate
transcendental and multihypostatic ‘subject’ to show its presence in the condi-
tions of its empirical absence. It is through the wisdom of this ‘subject’ that all
outward articulations of the world possess truth, understood in ecclesial and
hence Eucharistic sense, as truth of life.81
80. Commenting on the medieval scholastics and criticizing for being authoritarian in
imposing some collective and impersonal norms of personal thinking, Trubetskoi admits that
it is this authority that gave some historical strength to scholastics as an ecclesial organization
of consciousness. The main point since the early Fathers was that they believed that fullness
of truth cannot be reached by individual minds and they accepted unconditionally the author-
ity of a catholic (sobornost-like) consciousness as the living form of the Church and its
tradition. Then he makes a conclusion that the logical and psychological principle of the early
Christian thought was much wider than that Protestant subjectivism which came after the
Reformation, because along with a personal dimension in human consciousness it was
admitted its possible conciliatory ( sobornost-like) character. But, as Trubetskoi notices, the
medieval philosophy, logic and psychology did not develop any substantial teaching on this
issue (see Trubetskoi, S. (1994) ‘On the nature of human consciousness’, in Collected Works
of S. Trubetskoi, in Russian, Moscow: Mysl, pp. 483–591 (493)).
81. The assertion of human existence as ecclesial existence received an interesting
symbolic interpretation in St Maximus the Confessor who interpreted the entire universe as
the universal Church (‘Mystagogy’, 2, in G. C. Berthold, (tr.), Maximus Confessor. Selected
Writings, p. 188). If one takes into account another parable of St Maximus, that is, of similar-
ity between man and the universe (‘Mystagogy’, 7), then one can in the same way infer that
there is analogy between man and Church, so that in some sense the Divine image in human
beings is essentially the image of the universal Church. St Maximus develops this theme in
‘Mystagogy’, 5, ibid., pp. 190–5.
It is reasonable then to enquire about the sense of humanity and the universe
before the earthly Church appeared. The multihypostatic consubstantiality of
humanity was present on planet earth before the historical Jesus Christ. Christ
as the Logos of God was effectively present in every human soul by virtue of
which all human beings were inaugurated into real human dignity. When we
say that all human existents receive their specifically human logos, or the
Divine image, we mean that humanity had been already brought into life
through the image of Christ before Christ appeared in history; the invisible
presence of pre-historical Church among human beings consists exactly in
bearing the image of Christ in every particular hypostasis. One can introduce
the notion of ‘natural sobornost’ (natural catholicity) as multihypostatic
consubstantiality of humanity which resembles the notion of Church before its
historical incarnation on earth. We have here the unity of humanity in its rea-
son, conscience and acts of freedom as the image of the One God. According
to St Gregory of Nyssa ‘the image is not in part of our nature, nor is the grace
in any one of the things found in nature, but this power extends equally to all
the race,’82 including generations of people before the historical Church. And
then, when St Gregory of Nyssa continues that ‘a sign of this is that mind
is implanted alike in all: for all have the power of understanding and deliberat-
ing . . .’,83 he definitely refers further to the universal commonality of human
transcendental faculties, which originate from the unity of all humans as pos-
sessing the Divine Image.
However being united in Christ in potentiality, the actualization of this unity
becomes possible only after the recapitulation of humanity by Christ and inau-
guration of the historical Church whose telos as Christ’s Body was manifested
through the synergy of the Holy Spirit and humanity. The whole universe then
is seen through the human ecclesial hypostasis as a correlate of that intention-
ality which aims towards building the universal Body of Christ, so that the
whole universe can be seen as the universal Church. This thought bring us
back to the analogy used by St Maximus the Confessor when he paralleled the
Church and the universe; for the whole Church represents the world, and it is
Christ who is the head and the foundation of the Church. The universe, being
mirrored in the Church, is held hypostatically by the Logos of God, who is the
head of the universe understood as a Church.
If humanity is brought into existence in order to realize its ecclesial function
by building the picture of the universe together with the universal Church, its
destiny is to take care of the universe being the priest of creation by bringing
creation through mediations between its divisions back to union with God.
The whole history of the universe, seen previously only through secular eyes
and displayed as a natural process, will transform consequently (as renewed
82. St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On the making of man’, 16.17, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, vol. 5, p. 406.
83. Ibid.
articulation in the renewed hypostasis of humanity) towards its ecclesial

mode.84
By relating humanity to Christ, whose hypostasis, after the Pentecost, was
transmitted to the Church, theology implicitly affirms that the Christ-event as
central for our comprehension of the possibility of knowledge of the entire
universe (see discussion above) has some cosmological significance. Then one
can conjecture that the development of the universe has, theologically speak-
ing, a drastically different meaning before the Incarnation of the Logos on
Earth, and, after it. It was necessary for the universe to be in a state of con-
structive development in order to sustain life on Earth and to allow God to
condescend to us and to assume human flesh in order to initiate the new stage
of salvation history. Thus after the Incarnation man, having realized its eccle-
sial standing, becomes fully responsible for the fate of the universe. Humanity
then can only be understood in the context of the promise of God for its salva-
tion as constituting the locus point of the meeting of God and His creation,
as the mediating agency, which is supposed to bring the whole universe through
its genuine knowledge to new creation.85 The wisdom of what he have just
discussed is formed by what the Church is left with after the resurrection and
ascension of Christ, the wisdom which we know through the Church tradition
and its ever experienced liturgical epiclesis. In the same way as through
Liturgy Christians experience an eschatological presence of Christ, the eccle-
sial wisdom in the knowledge of the universe through science discloses to men
the presence of the hypostasis of Christ (although in its empirical absence).
This wisdom reinstates the existing split between the ecclesial and scientific
intentionality in studying the universe to their Eucharistic unity, that is, unity
in communion with God, revealing thus the work of scientists as a para-
Eucharistic work.86
84. St Maximus the Confessor gave a metaphorical expression of this transformation in

Mystagogy, in Berthold (ed.), p. 197. In analogy with St Maximus, for St Gregory of Nyssa
the fulfilment of pleroma of humanity will be accompanied by cessation of that time which
we experience as temporal flow of physical events and by cessation of procreation, that is,
effectively by cessation of the biological function of human beings as we understand it today
(St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On the making of man’, 22, ibid., p. 412). But this will imply that
human nature will experience a change which will lead to a change of the embodiment
constitution which determines intentional consciousness at present.
85. The fact that this knowledge can be different in comparison with ordinary knowledge
is not just a matter of speech. The renewal of knowledge (metanoia) while human beings
acquire their ecclesial hypostasis leads to the development of a new conciliatory and thanks-
giving intentionality and thus to the change of its noematic correlate, so that the ‘content’ of
knowledge, the strategy of exploration of the world and its necessity is driven by the saving
telos of humanity. This implies that the universe will indeed be transfigured by humanity, and
it is exactly that which has been called ‘new creation’.
86. Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 120.
Here the wisdom of Christian Church makes itself clearly distinct from all
sorts of philosophical and scientific wisdom as being natural predispositions of
the human reason since ancient times. The ancient Hellenistic world, as well as
all philosophies and sciences that followed its intellectual pattern, did not feel
the modes of gratitude and thanksgiving as a beginning of thought. If for the
ancient thought there was nobody who had to be thanked, for the modern
thought it has always been a fight against the transcendent who might be
thanked. The lack and loss of the Eucharistic intentionality in philosophical
and scientific vision of the world results in a desire for unlimited and uncon-
strained possession of knowledge of things in order to use them for some
particular utilitarian goals. Because the possession of things, even in their
abstract knowledge, destroys a loving relationship to them, the intentionality
of thanksgiving ceases to function as the gratitude for the every fact of
existence of those things in creation which are supposed to be loved. To acquire
back that Eucharistic intentionality in knowledge one requires to exercise a
certain metanoia when abstract knowledge and ideas become manifestation of
that image which supposes to disclose That One who stands in communion
with the human spirit and who makes it possible to see behind scientific proofs
a certain witness of the One. This metanoia represents a mode of ecclesial
reality; ‘thus, it is the Church as Eucharistic mystery which gives us knowledge
of a universe which was created to become a Eucharist.’87 The universe acquires
the sense of sacrament thus being a correlate of the Eucharistic intentionality
of humanity. The Christian Church as carrying and sustaining this intentional-
ity reveals itself as the ultimate multihypostatic subject that unfolds the universe
in the state of communion and loving relationship. It is in the wisdom of
the Christian Church that all atomizing and individualistic tendencies of the
human reason are subjected to a certain restraint and regulation for the
welfare of the whole world.
Then it is not difficult to realize that the wisdom, exercised through commu-
nion, can deal either with the question of knowledge’s usage, or, what is more
radical, with the question of whether this or that particular knowledge must
be obtained at all. A certain person can be ‘wise’ in using new knowledge,
but the freedom of scientific research and information cannot guarantee that
another one will use this knowledge with caution. One can anticipate an obvi-
ous objection to this thesis from those who defend the freedom of reason from
any delimiters which do not follow the pattern of free thinking itself. Ecclesial
and conciliatory wisdom sees in this unrestrained freedom a certain danger of
not being conforming to demands of other people, nature and God himself. In
its potential freedom to perform free thinking human beings are prone to loose
any moral guidance based in understanding of sheer givenness of life by God.
When free thinking in its technological implications threatens the very fact of
life, definitely one sees here a certain contradiction between thus-realized
freedom and moral obligations to preserve this life as a gift.
87. Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, ‘Three sermons’, p. 2.

Finally one can see that the recovery of the lost personhood in the dialogue
between theology and science forms only a necessary condition for this dia-
logue to be justified. Since the presence of persons behind scientific knowledge
does not preclude its misuse, theology enters the relationship with science at a
different, ethical level, bringing knowledge under the guidance of wisdom
embedded in the human condition but realized in Eucharistic communities.
Thus the ecclesial dimension of the dialogue receives its further specification as
the articulation of a thanksgiving intentionality in scientific research, the inten-
tionality that once again positions humanity in the centre of this dialogue.
Chapter 5
The Universe as Communion:
Apophatic Cosmology, Personhood
and Transcendence
I cannot really stand aside from the universe, even in thought. Only by a meaning-
less pretence can I place myself at some vague point outside it, and from thence
reproduce on a small scale the successive stages of its genesis. Nor can I place myself
outside myself . . . and question myself upon my own genesis. I mean of course the
genesis of my non-empirical or metaphysical reality. The problem of the genesis of
the I and of the genesis of the universe are just one and the same problem, or, more
exactly, one and the same insoluble, the insolubility being bound up with my very
position, my existence, and the radical metaphysical fact of that existence.
Marcel, G. (1965) Being and Having, p. 15
Introduction
When, in philosophy, it is asserted that God is absent, one usually exercises

either an argument that to prove the opposite (i.e. God’s existence and then
presence) is impossible (Kantian philosophy), or that the notion of God which
is effected in the course of ascension from the empirical series of causation to
their accomplishing telos, must be bracketed in order to avoid temptation to
ontologize this God. Apophatic theology, in regard to both of these cases, mani-
fests a certain suspicion with respect to any affirmation or denial of God, because
it claims that the living God who is worthy of worship is mysteriously present
in this world but He is present in his actual absence.1 This situation, paradoxical
to the human mind, allows one to use all sorts of metaphors and allegory for
expressing communion with God without exhausting His existential mystery.
However, the apophatic method in theology, which explicates the paradox
of presence and absence of God, is usually exercised on the level of relations
1. God permeates the world, but He is not in the world. One can reverse this statement
by saying that the world is in God being held by God by His power and will. This expresses
the essence of panentheism. See, for example, Clayton, Ph. and A. Peacocke (eds) (2004),
In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Reflections on Panentheism in a
Scientific Age, Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
The Universe as Communion 221
between the world and God: God is transcendent to the world and hence it is
impossible to infer to God’s essence while studying created nature. Here is a
certain measure of the natural attitude employed in theology because both
God and the world are posed as two ‘out there’ outside of reflective conscious-
ness. The facticity of consciousness that is involved in apophatic statements
on the relationship between God and the world is tacitly assumed in these
statements implying that God and the world appear to human subjectivity in
conditions of its particular incarnation. However, the application of the natu-
ral attitude in theology, when the facticity of consciousness is unaccounted for,
becomes unsatisfactory because it implicitly contradicts a theological convic-
tion about creaturehood of humanity. Any naturalistic-like reference to the
generating power of nature combined with the will of God in creating human
beings provide only apophatic pointers towards the mystery of human incar-
nate subjectivity because the sheer facticity of consciousness (i.e. its intrinsic
phenomenality) still remains unaccounted for. In its functioning the facticity of
consciousness is presented to itself, but in the conditions when the foundations
of its functioning are obscure and effectively absent from its own grasp. It is
through this presence in absence of the foundations of consciousness that one
can apophatically infer, although through a different pathway, to God as the
ultimate source of hypostatic consciousness. The presence in absence of God
can thus be explicated not in rubrics of the outer world but through the mys-
tery of human persons whose facticity escapes any rational definitions. Here
the link between God and the world, theology and science, is being found in
human persons: human persons are creators of science, and the inference from
scientific views of reality to the perception of the Divine will have to inevitably
pass through the subject-pole of both impressions, that is, human persons.
Since, as we mentioned in a previous chapter, the living presence of person-
hood can hardly be articulated in scientific discourse, any attempt to infer to
God from within science, in whose account of the world personhood is absent,
leads to no more than a syllogistic abstraction of impersonal consciousness
resulting in the abstract notion of God which has no qualities of the living and
personal God of communion and which, therefore, can be easily dismissed
either by transcendental criticism or phenomenological reduction as existen-
tially irrelevant. But the true and living God is beyond definitions and their
deconstructions, being ‘the continuous eruption into being of those myriad
forms, the active thating and ising of everything which emerges into conscious-
ness in the experience of wonder’.2 Thus the internal world of human subjectivity
in its contingent facticity, be it religious experience proper, or just scientific
thinking, is capable of pointing towards God who shows Himself without
phenomenalizing himself, that is, as being present in absent.
2. Brockelman, P. (1997) ‘The miracle of Being: cosmology and the Experience of God’,
Human Studies, 20, 287–301 (297).
In this chapter, we would like to link science and theology by attempting

the ascension from cosmology to God not in the well-known fashion of
natural theology and arguments for God’s existence, but via human persons.
Cosmology, being subjected to a certain phenomenological analysis, reveals its
authors – human persons – who are capable of predicating the universe through
the power of consciousness granted by that invisible origin, communion with
whom reveals the true and living God of theology. The universe as a medium
of person’s facticity reveals itself as a mode of communion with God. We will
argue that transcendence in cosmology is only possible through articulating
the conditions of communion with the universe, which inevitably leads to
human persons as existential events of disclosure and then to communion with
God as the pillar and ground of facticity of all.
From the Paradox of Human Subjectivity

to Presence in Absence of Personhood
The paradox of human subjectivity in the universe that we have discussed in

the previous chapter can be explicated as pointing towards the different posi-
tions human subjectivity can adopt with respect to ontology of being. On the
one hand there is an explicit treatment of the world in terms of thinghood,
that is, in terms of things pre-given in order to be recognized by thinking
consciousness. In this sense the universe pre-exists as substance and the ulti-
mate ontology of being is thought to be the ontology of this substance. Then
the facticity of human beings in the universe is treated as the variation of this
substance. In this case, humanity being a part of the universe stands in a moral
opposition to it in the sense that it experiences fear that the laws of the
universe at some stage can remove the phenomenon of humankind from its
surface. On the other hand there is a different intuition which can be described
as the living presence of personhood in all articulations of the universe. In
other words, things which are out there, objects and entities in the universe
appear not as external and hostile environment but as the manifestation of the
living presence of human subjectivity in the universe, which actually makes all
these things beings. The making of the universe must not be understood as
manufacturing things from some pre-given material, but rather as creating
things in a rather different sense. By making an artificial object from a pre-
given material, the underlying substance is subordinated, controlled and
dominated by individualized thinking. In some sense a human being, who is
involved in this kind of making, is itself transformed into a thing which acts
with respect to another thing. But man as a thing is not man as a person, and
to create in the sense of personhood means not to dominate the pre-given, but
to create such an ontological situation where all so called things acquire the
‘presence’ relevant to the totality of existence understood not in terms of sub-
stance but in terms of hypostasis. Humanity itself becomes present and manifest
through transferring its hypostasis to being. This hypostasis is not something
which ‘pre-exists’ in substance or in nature, it is not an impersonal combina-

tion of the worldly elements or platonic numbers, but the centre and the
ultimate beginning of all articulated existence.
The paradox of human subjectivity can thus be explicated as the tension
between ontologies of being based either on substance or on hypostasis.
It explicates insufficiency of the scientific world-view (which functions in the
natural attitude) in appropriating the problem of personhood. For example,
in modern physics and cosmology, there is the grandeur of the world as it is
understood by physics: it deals with particles, fields, space-time, planets and
galaxies, but there is no place for human subjectivity, for the only thing
physics can speculate about is the physico-biological of functioning of human
bodies. Physics does not attempt to understand human consciousness and its
hypostatic origin as personhood. Physics is the product of thinking individuals
whose consciousness was directed to the world, but the very fact that physics
is possible at all, that is, its sheer facticity, as the ability to articulate the
universe, is not understood and even not attempted to be understood. This
happens because personal characteristics of those who create the physical pic-
ture of the world are remarkably missing from the very result of their activity.
It is clear that personhood must be present behind the living presence of the
world, the presence which is the result of personhood’s creativity; at the same
time this personhood cannot be made explicit in its presence. One can say
that while being tacitly present behind the works of its own creation, person-
hood as the source of this creativity is explicitly absent from its own creation.
The picture of the universe is the manifestation of personal presence in the
universe, but those persons, who created the picture, are not explicitly found
in it. Physics itself, by virtue of its existence, manifests the presence of persons
in the universe but in its outward content it creates such conditions for uncon-
cealment of being in its theories, which takes place at the expense of concealment
of persons.
The concealment of personhood can be easily illustrated by pointing out
that the whole edifice of physics, while being produced by particular historical
persons represents an effort of anonymous and collective transcendental sub-
jectivity, which is not interested in contingent incarnations of this subjectivity
in historical beings. In spite of the fact that a scientist works in a particular
historical situation that forms the immediate existential horizon, his activity is
directed towards the infinite horizon of omni- and trans-temporal truth, that
truth which is accessible in principle to everyone and hence this truth tran-
scends the relativity of any truths achieved in a historical situation connected
with a particular person. But this omni-temporal truth, as an ‘infinite’ task,
is not achievable by one particular scientist. This or that scientist should par-
ticipate in collective activity of the many by submitting his individuality to the
interests of the open-ended collective of scientists, which outlines the tradition
in which all scientific accomplishments acquire a certain sense. It is in this
sense that the presence of a particular scientist who advances a general view
of reality is important only as a contributing factor to the overall tradition.
Paradoxically a particular historical presence of this scientist (who is a person)

is crucial for the advance to be made; however, his or her personality is not
important in the context of the knowledge achieved, the knowledge which
since its first articulation by a scientist and its appropriation by a community
enters so to speak the realm of atemporal ideas to which everyone has access.
One observes here an interesting transformation of personal knowledge into
an a-personal and anonymous compendium of knowledge whose ultimate sub-
ject (if it is seen in a secular, non-theological perspective) is the de-personalized,
that is, anonymous transcendental subjectivity. It is now clear why, when
a scientific fact or a theory are ‘downloaded’ on a routine basis from the com-
pendium of ideas, it is unnecessary to enter communion with a person (we
mean not just to know about persons as historical figures), who brought them
into existence and which is, in a way, still present behind them. The memory
of this person will enter the discourse only as labels of past historical discover-
ies and it is this that happens in science. For example, one feels the presence of
Einstein, for example, while reading texts on relativity, but one contemplates
this presence in Einstein’s spatial and temporal absence. Relativity was created
by the person of Einstein: that is why one can say that theory of relativity is the
manifestation of his presence; but the theoretical content of relativity as related
to physics in general (e.g. the fact that space of the universe is curved) has no
mention of Einstein as that event of personhood through which the relativistic
view of the world received its inward existence for the first time. As long as
theory of relativity was appropriated into the whole body of physics, all traces
of its personal origin in science were forgotten.
At the same time in order to understand science as an overall process one
should study its history (not as a chain of contingent facts and persons) as the
open-ended unfolding horizon of meanings, which simultaneously serves as
the delimiter of science: ‘to understand a science one must understand it from
the ground up and gain an insight into the founding action which originally
instituted it, into the process by which its fundamental concepts were created,
and into the original spiritual motives of its creation.’3 However these spiritual
motives (which can be linked to the very motto of science, its infinite telos) are
not explicitly present to scientific reason because personhood as an existential
centre of these motives does not show itself to science in its phenomenality:
it is present in absence. One can argue that the action of the ultimate telos of
science upon history always takes place in the conditions where science fails to
account for personhood while being its mental creation.
It is interesting to mention that while in their very genesis theories and ideas
still contain the traces of personal agencies that created them, their presence is
of a different kind if one compares it with the work of art. In art, when one
3. Kisiel, T. J. (1970) ‘Husserl on the history of science’, in T. J. Kiesel and J. Kockelmans

(eds), Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
pp. 68–90 (71).
enjoys painting or listens to music one perceives the presence of an artist or

composer in their actual absence: they are present only because they are absent.
In every work of art a person manifests itself in its fundamentally irreducible
originality and distinctiveness with respect to all community, including that
one of artists themselves. Each work of art is the end in itself, which cannot be
simply used in order to create a consecutive piece of art. It is in this sense that
the person is always present behind this piece of art and this person is essen-
tially historical and concrete. In fact a piece of art is the person itself.4 The
understanding of a masterpiece is not that algorithmic way of downloading
scientific ideas from the already pre-existing world of articulated ideas; on the
contrary the approach to a piece of art requires a personal effort, which cannot
be taught and explained unless a direct communion with the ‘mind’ of the
artist is established. Since no accumulation of experience in art is considered
as a premise of successful creativity, artistic communities are much looser than
scientific ones and the sense of history and tradition is not present to the same
extent, so that no dissolution of personhood happens in an artistic collective.
The absence of human consciousness and personhood from the scientific
picture of the universe was in the history of thought qualified as the result of
an extreme realization of the rational ideal as the hegemony of discursive
reason. Rationalism appropriates any personal contribution dissolving the
presence of any personal insight and achievement into an impersonal ocean of
ideas. Indeed, in order to formulate an idea there must be a person. But what
is left from this person when the idea is formulated and inserted in the already
articulated part of the world of ideas, is just a mode of transcendental subjec-
tivity which does not need any hypostatic specification. By working through
logic, induction and dissection applied to things, this discursive mind mani-
fests itself in the modality of the natural attitude. One can qualify the natural
attitude as such transformation of the totality of existence perceived through
personhood, which corresponds to the disintegration of the living and united
presence into divisions among outer things allegedly existing independently
and prior to events of personhood. It is in this sense that in the natural attitude
the presence of persons is not seen: they are still in place, but they do not
show themselves. But it is exactly through the absence of personhood in science
that the philosophical and theological reason can anticipate the presence of
personhood. The very fact that science is not able to account for personhood
shows that its functioning is only possible in the conditions of presence in
absence of personhood.
One can realize that the reason why the natural sciences cannot reflect upon
personhood is that the sciences approach human beings in the same way as
they approach other things: one needs to mortify human beings and reduce
them either to ‘walking dust’ or to impersonal physico-biological robots in
order to affirm their presence by means of observation and rational induction.
4. Yannaras, Person and Eros, p. 122.

But personhood as existential event (which lies in the foundation of all sciences)
escapes scientific grasp by transcending either materialistic definitions or
idealistic beliefs. Personhood manifests itself as an absolute freedom, which
cannot be subjected to any constraints of the pre-given matter or categories of
thinking. This is the reason why it is impossible to define personhood in the
way one defines things. Things can be defined because they can be possessed,
but it is impossible to possess persons5 and this is the reason why personhood
escapes any rational definition.
From the Presence in Absence of Personhood

in Science to Personhood as Communion
However, in spite of all the insufficiency of science to deal with the problem of
personhood, persons do not disappear but reveal themselves in a rather dra-
matic way. Humanity as personhood is not content with the presence of
beings in the world as they are given to it empirically and studied scientifically.
Man attempts to understand the underlying meaning of things not only through
their ‘nature’ (accessible to science), but through the purposes and ends of these
beings as they stand with respect to place and goals of humanity in creation.
This understanding is not what can be expressed physically and biologically;
it is sustained by humanity’s ideals and religious aspirations, which portray
man as the crown of creation made in the image of God. And this is the reason
why in a God-like fashion humanity wants to recognize all sorts of beings
(either simple physical objects or living organisms) not according to their
nature (as happens in scientific research) that is, according to their compelling
givenness, but as results of humanity’s free will.6 But human freedom is linked
to communion with God, so that by subjugating that truth which is gained on
the grounds of the scientific, to the desire for truth of existence originating in
communion with God, humanity exhibits its hypostatic essence, that is, its
personhood. Humanity as personhood prefers to express its own presence
by appealing to the truth of God in the conditions of its own incapacity to
5. Cf. Clément, On Human Being, p. 32.

6. The analogy comes from St Maximus the Confessor’s discussion on whether God
knows created things according to their nature. His answer is negative: God knows things
according to his will: ‘. . . when Christians were asked by some outsiders puffed up with their
learning, how they can claim God knows existent things . . . and that he knows intellectual
being intellectually and sensible things sensibly, they replied that he neither knows sensible
things sensibly nor intellectual things intellectually. For it is out of question that the one
who is beyond existent things should know things in the manner proper to beings. But we say
that God knows existent things as the products of his own acts of will . . .’ (‘Ambigua’, 7, in
Blowers, P. M. and R. L. Wilken (2003) On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Selected
Writings from St Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, pp. 61–2
(emphasis added)).
overcome the absence of personhood in science. Humanity makes this effort as

an alternative of being contained by nature, of being comprehended by some
object-oriented thinking. It does not want to be manipulated through circum-
scribability and individualization, which are inherent in spatio-temporal forms
of creation. It is in this sense that humanity as personhood longs for truth of
existence which is in this world – through man – but not of this world. This
longing forms spiritual motives of humanity and points toward the telos of all
creaturehood, in which the paradox of truth of the human hypostatic existence
as presence in absence will have to be finally resolved. Ecclesial humanity
experiences truth of existence Eucharistically by establishing communion with
the Age to Come. By so doing all sorts of mundane scientific truth are subjected
to the truth of communion and thus acquire the status of para-Eucharistic
achievements. Thus the realization of human freedom leads to a rebellion against
a naively realistic interpretation of scientific activities and places them within
existential tasks of humanity, that is, within the discourse of personhood.
To accentuate the presence of personhood through science would mean
to escape circumscribability of the phenomenon of manhood through scientific
rationalism, which places man in the framework of cosmic necessity and
determinism. The rediscovery of personhood implies a kind of a phenomeno-
logical reduction leading basically to re-discovery of the life-world as the core
and basis of the human indwelling in the world. But this will imply that we
must return to study the foundation of the sciences. The absence of person-
hood in the resulting scientific picture of the world must be subjected to the
phenomenological scrutiny in order to recover back those intentionalities of
human subjectivity that led to the development of contemporary science. The
reversal of the natural attitude means the movement from the absence of
persons in science to their presence in absence in philosophy and theology.
Does this unconcealment of personhood mean creativity in a way similar to
art? Or, differently, can we treat human desire to seek for the foundations of
science and rediscovery of personhood as an attempt to understand science
through the ‘will of man’?
The search for the foundations of science can be a sort of creativity, similar
to art, for, in fact, humanity seeks to understand the purposes and ends of the
sciences, which have no simple empirical indicators and which require placing
the whole scientific process in the context of the overall teleology of the human
spirit. The necessity for this search comes not from the laws of physics but
from the spiritual and moral discontent originating in the ambiguous position
of humanity expressed in the paradox of human subjectivity in the universe, or
the antinomy of personhood’s presence in absence. Thus one can conjecture
that what is truly creative in science, that is, what follows the logic of will, is
reflection upon its foundations and facticity of communion with the universe.
But the very search for this facticity reflects the basic riddle of personhood as
an ultimate source of this facticity, its actual presence (as a dimension of the
living presence of the totality of existence) in the conditions of potential
absence (in the transitive incarnate state).
This shift in the human attitude, according to his will, to look at science not
as at a passive reflection unfolding the realities of the surrounding world, but
as the activity of human subjectivity which attempts to understand and articu-
late through science its own facticity and to constitute personhood, can only
take place in the paradoxical condition of presence in absence of personhood.
This constitutes a teleological aspect of the human reason which, being real-
ized in human will, attempts to overcome the dichotomy between presence and
absence.
We have here a kind of a phenomenological reversal in attitude to science: to
look at science not from the point of view of the content of its theories and
their alleged reference to the physical world, not to enquire into the meaning
of concepts, such as, for example, the universe, but, in fact, to use science as a
hermeneutical tool for understanding humanity itself, to use the human image
of the universe as a kind of mirror through which human subjectivity and per-
sons constitute themselves. It is through this shift in attitude that the sense of
science can be reversed: science can now be seen not as alienating human sub-
jectivity and personhood from its own picture, but rather as that activity of the
dative of manifestation, that is, human self, which through its outward look
establishes itself and brings out (according to its will) the absence of person-
hood in the mathematized science to its explicit theological presence.
The phenomenological reversal of such constructs as the universe (which
served for the naturally oriented mind as an ultimate objective background of
all facticity of life) acquires status as a structure of transcendental conscious-
ness whose incarnate facticity follows the logic of existential events and cannot
be reduced to anything natural. If in the natural attitude science affirms the
explicit presence of the universe at the expense of the absence of personhood,
in the theologico-philosophical attitude the universe as an intentional correlate
of human subjectivity (represented by numerous theories of its early stage)
does not possess qualities of ‘out there’, that is, of ‘presence in presence’ as any
other thing. The universe in all its entirety is hypostasized by human beings: it
is in this sense that its existence is the enhypostasized presence; but since the
entirety of the universe is not available to our grasp, this very enhypostasiza-
tion turns out to be no more than the manifestation of the universe’s presence
in absence. This result is not surprising at all, for as human personhood escapes
complete definitions by manifesting itself through ‘presence in absence’, the
universe, being a mirror of the human reason through which humanity consti-
tutes itself through the ever unfolding events of personhood, also escapes
complete definitions thus acquiring a mode of ‘presence in absence’.
We see thus that if the scientific mind acquires the mode of ‘will of man’ it
evolves in the direction of contemplating its own foundation, its own facticity
via the way of recovering the lost personhood. This transformation is exactly
manifested through the desire to escape the circumscribability of necessities of
the surrounding world by means of a philosophical ‘negation’ of cosmic deter-
minism through which personhood becomes back the dative of manifestation,
as that centre from which the articulation of the entire universe, the integration
of all varieties of impressions about the universe, its data and theories become
possible. As we said before, the mystery of personhood as its presence in the
background of its unaccountability by theories of the physical world reflects
a similar thing in the universe whose content, being a reflection and matter
of human consciousness, just reproduces the same existential mystery of
‘presence in absence’, although in physical terms. If this reversal of attitude
takes place from within scientific mind, one can definitely say that the work
of this mind becomes similar to that of creativity in art. Unfortunately this
creativity is not complete yet, for it has not yet led to the production of the
work of art, but only to the rediscovery of an artist.
What happens here is the revelation of a strange reversal of the paradox of
‘presence in absence’ in cosmology: when we articulate the universe we lose
personhood; when we deconstruct cosmology and acquire personhood back
we lose the sense of the universe. By contemplating personhood through an
event of hypostasis, the external world disappears. The universe can then be
understood as a kind of otherness of personhood, which is present in the event
of its self-affirmation.
Identity of the Universe: Its Unknowability and

the Deposit of Personhood
For all who have ever been involved in cosmological research it is well known
that cosmology reveals better than any other study in theoretical physics a
constant advance of theory and observations that change very quickly our
views about the universe, especially its mysterious early stages. Small details
about the universe, the technicalities of its theories contribute towards our
perception of ‘pieces’ or ‘moments’ of the universe in the background of which
the universe’s identity is assumed (as something which we simply call ‘the
universe’) and which is contemplated silently by cosmologists as the pre-given
with respect to all its ‘pieces’ and ‘moments’. But what is this identity? In fact,
cosmology operates with certain physical and astronomical ideas without clear
understanding what is its identity: either this is an idea, to which some unful-
filled intentionality of human subjectivity is directed, or, alternatively, this is
an expression of a special object of human intentions, which is being fulfilled
gradually through accumulation of more and more material from theories and
observations. Cosmology itself is not very much concerned with this question
and even if were, it would be incapable to answer it: one needs philosophy in
order to perform the reduction of facticity of facts present in cosmological
research and to look at cosmology and the alleged object of its intention from
a phenomenological perspective, as a phenomenon of subjectivity, where the
content of all that is reduced acquires features of the intentional correlate of
the generating subjectivity.
It is obvious that theoretical cosmology has to work in conditions where its
subject matter, that is, the universe as a whole, cannot be subjected to any
empirical observation, leaving a cosmologist with a mysterious feeling that

there are various appearances of the universe, but the identity of the universe
as the unity of all its sensible and intelligible appearances is not available to a
scientist in a way similar to identities of other empirical things. For an ordi-
nary object its identity is formed through the object’s presence and absence to
a particular consciousness, so that the object appears in its identity as the unity
of its profiles and impressions available to the public mind. One particular
feature of constituting identity is that it can be formed through consciousness
of its sheer absence, that is, its non-existence. For example, while experiencing
the beauty of a flower one appreciates it in the context of created contingency,
without clear understanding as to why this particular kind of beauty was cre-
ated and who could appreciate it if anyone would not be there. One anticipates
here that the very identity of this flower implicitly occupies our consciousness
either from the perspective of its possible non-existence (absence in absence) or
in terms of our non-existence. The same is true with respect to another human
being: we identify this being as finite, and mentally and emotionally homo-
geneous with us. The distinctiveness of ‘me’ from ‘him’ is determined by the
multitude of human beings who are all different. Thus the synthesis of one’s
identity ultimately originates in relationship, which, implicitly, in reflection,
allows one’s non-existence. The anticipation of the identity of the other consti-
tutes one’s own identity. The disappearance of the other from the horizon of
one’s life thus affects one’s own identity. However, unlike physical objects, it
is extremely difficult to achieve a clear consciousness of one’s own absence for
itself, that is, non-existence of itself. Even the intending of this strange condi-
tion is intrinsically contradictory and cannot be entirely empty: it still contains
the presence of one’s subjectivity. A similar thing happens in cosmology, where
any attempt to think of the universe as non-existent is intrinsically contradic-
tory, for it eliminates that same consciousness that thinks of the universe.
It is necessary to discuss in detail the notion of the identity of the universe as
different in comparison with the identity of ordinary objects. First of all, what
does one mean by the universe in a mundane, non-theoretical sense? One can
give an allegorical description of the universe as a picture that we observe
while looking at the surface of the two-dimensional heavenly sphere from
within. The universe then is that totality of heavenly objects which we see in
the sky, plus, of course, a finite three-dimensional world of our planet extended
by cosmic travels in the solar system. The universe is reaching us through opti-
cal images in telescopes and radio signals in receivers, through counting devices
in cosmic particle chambers etc. So, the universe is the manifold of different
sense impressions that come from the sky, synthesized in the human mind.
However, cosmology as a science, about the structure and origin of the uni-
verse, aims to see the universe not only as a manifold of observations and facts,
but as a single coherent physical unity, which possesses some intrinsic logic
that is present behind the variety of astronomical facts. The underlying tendency
in all speculations about the universe implies a philosophical attitude, namely,
to secure the reality of the identity of the universe by bringing out the fact
that it is different from its manifold presentations and showing that, despite its
slippery status, it is truly a component of what we experience. In the language
of phenomenology one can say that, indeed, the universe is presented to us,
that is, present through its ‘pieces’ and ‘moments’, but the identity of the uni-
verse is absent, so that we deal here with a situation of ‘presence in absence’.
The contemplation of the identity of the universe in the conditions of its
actual absence constitutes the core of the human condition pointing again to
that twofold presence of humanity in the universe, being on the one hand a
part of it, and, on the other hand, being a dative of manifestation and thus
containing the entire universe within subjectivity. The identity of the universe
thus comes into existence from within a particular and special formation of the
universe, tiny in its scale and at the same time powerful in terms of its intellec-
tual might – humanity. Then it is natural to suspect that the presence of identity
of the universe in subjectivity represents a particular intentionality of human
subjectivity that has its origin in the identity (as facticity) of that unique event
of human being-in-the-world, existence-in-situation or hypostasis.
The incessant search for the unity of the universe forms in the cosmologist’s
mind the intuition of its identity as that cosmic whole, yet unknown and
unavailable, which stands face to face with hypostatic human subjectivity.
Thus the very idea about the identity of the universe originates in human
beings, who understand that the universe is not an object, which can be posited
in the background of human facticity, and that the universe can only be con-
templated through communion and participation, as an immediate and direct
experience of belonging to and unity with the universe, the experience of which
can hardly be verbalized and explained.7 The universe cannot be an object
because it cannot be removed from human experience; its hypothetical removal
would imply the removal of the incarnate consciousness itself (in a sense that
its intentionality directs and belongs to the universe), which is a sheer impossi-
bility and can be considered only as an imaginative intuition, which by no
means is able to deny its own facticity. Thus, the very mode of conscious life
implies communion with the universe. This communion, as the immanence
of the universe to man, is drastically different in comparison with the view of
scientific cosmology that considers the universe as a composite of different
eras, domains and ingredients, that is, as a structured and complex system,
which in its spatial and temporal vastness dominates with its ‘realms’ of the
non-existential and non-human, because only those areas from which life is
stripped off can be described by physics with a great efficiency. Thus one can
characterize the identity of the universe as the en-hypostasized facticity of our
communion with the universe, the whole of reality. The identity of the universe
is that immanence of the field of consciousness in the background of which all
moments and pieces of the universe are articulated. Definitely the identity of
7. This is typical for all sorts of creation (mythological) cosmologies, that is, to assert
communion with mysterious forces that animate the universe.
the universe in its noetic aspect, being a form of personal (hypostatic) commu-
nion, is not available to any rational and hence anonymous and impersonal
grasp. However, the unavoidable fact for every hypostatic consciousness is
that this identity as communion is present in every conscious being. Thus one
can argue that there is the transcendental, noematic analogue of this identity,
which, using the terminology of Husserl, one could qualify as an attribute of
the life-world, understood as a sphere of immediate indwelling of humanity.
The very presence of the identity of the universe in human consciousness
reflects the consubstantiality of all humanity and the universe, which, in its
noetic essence, is fundamentally multihypostatic. The difficulty of science lies
exactly here: it cannot deal with the multihypostacity of knowledge and expe-
rience (i.e. individual histories and temporalities) and, therefore, attempts to
annihilate it by reducing the varieties of en-hypostasized identities of the uni-
verse to a kind of objective and graspable, although impersonal, representation.
This is what is exactly attempted in Big Bang cosmology.
Physics and mathematics approach the lack of empirical evidence for the
identity of the universe by invoking a faculty of imagination and extrapolating
sensible images of reality here and now through space and time summarizing
them in a kind of unity, which is intended by cosmologists as potentially grasp-
able. For example, according to modern cosmology we can observe only that
part of the universe which, in terms of space, is covered by the amount of light
years multiplied by the age of the universe (10–15 billion light years = 1028
centimetres (cm)). In fact, modern observational cosmology deals only with
that part of the universe which became transparent after the decoupling of
radiation and matter, so that the actual size of what is observed is reduced
further to 1025 cm. However, there is an idea, at the back of a cosmologist’s
mind, that there must be some large-scale integrity of the universe beyond the
observable cosmos which, not being immediately accessible to observations,
somehow reveals itself. Such a universe is seen as the totality and unity of
space and time filled with a uniform ‘cosmological fluid’ (made, for example,
of clusters of galaxies), so that some geometrical images can be used in order
to provide us with an allegory of the unity of the universe.
However, one must make it clear that the representation of the universe as
a whole implies a particular assumption, known as a ‘cosmological principle’,
which postulates the uniformity of the universe in space, as if one could verify
this postulate by repositioning oneself from one point to another. It is here that
the human mind exercises it ability to displace itself in a kind of intelligible
space in order to stretch its consciousness across the whole universe, which is
‘seen’ not only as the intelligible entity but also as the intelligent entity (e.g. as
a multiplicity of potentially possible but undifferentiated observers). However,
this displacement implies the loss of hypostasis, because this extended cosmic
intelligence functions as disembodied and anonymous; this is the reason why
the sought identity escapes a cosmologist’s catch once again: it is ‘present’ as
a banal intuition of the uniformity of all spatial pieces and ages of the universe
as well as an imaginative extension of consciousness beyond its incarnate
presence on earth.
Under the above assumptions, and in spite of the philosophical inevitability

of not reaching the identity of the universe, some cosmological theories pretend
to model and give an image to this identity. For example, if the universe is
thought to be closed and finite in space and time, it is depicted as a curvilinear
cylinder with two apexes symbolizing Big Bang and Big Crunch. It is in this act
of creative imagination that the universe acquires a kind of identity as being
‘created’ by consciousness: here the identity of an image is supposed to origi-
nate from the identity of an ‘artist’ who produced this image. But the image of
the universe as a curvilinear cylinder is an anonymous geometrical shape, cre-
ated intentionally for sharing within the scientific community, which, because
of its collective nature, does not bear any signs of personhood. Hence this
image has a sense of an apophatic identity: it tells us what the identity of the
universe is not, and this is the negative reason why this image is valuable. The
identity of the universe is thus implied in terms of its mental otherness. It allows
us to differentiate between the ever mutable results of eidetic reductions of the
empirical and that intrinsic sense of immanence and participation with being
(which is similar to the internal time-consciousness), which cannot be excluded
(reduced) from subjectivity at all. Thus the identity of the universe, in an ill-
articulated sense of our consubstantiality with it, is present in its sheer absence.
In his mind a cosmologist attempts to transform the presence in absence of
the identity of the universe into its sheer presence, as if it were available in a
way similar to ordinary objects. In so doing the facticity of the empirical is
transcended and an image of the universe as a whole is created by using geo-
metrical ideas and physical extrapolations. This brings us to another question
as to ‘how much’ of personhood (as hypostatic identity) is posited in cosmol-
ogy when one talks about the identity of the universe? The universe thought by
cosmologists as something out there does not have its own hypostasis, hence
it seems inconceivable that the identity of the universe can be disclosed as
a movement from the universe itself. From a theological point of view the
universe is rather thought as being enhypostasized by the Logos of God, so
that it receives its identity through the identity of the Logos. However the
spelling out of this identity originates in humanity treated as the hypostasis of
the universe8 and its voice, in the sense that it is human beings who explore
and articulate the universe, give names to it and persevere in disclosing its
identity in a constant fight against its absence (in a sense that some particular
aspects of the universe are not being disclosed yet) in order to bring it to pres-
ence. This latter enhypostasization of the intuition about the identity of the
universe can exactly be treated as a deposit of personhood into the intuition of
the identity of the universe. Certainly it does not mean that this identity itself
acquires explicitly any hypostatic features. However, one cannot exclude that
cosmological research, as human activity, forms the idea of the identity of
the universe in a ‘quasi-hypostatic’ sense, when the very impetus of research
8. See my Light from the East, pp. 194–248.

becomes an interaction with yet unknown and fundamentally open-ended

‘being’, which while being manifested to a cosmologist through multitude of
appearances, withdraws itself from any accomplished comprehension. Here an
analogy with a theological anthropology will be appropriate: in the same way
as any other human person (as a modus of unique and incommunicable being)
cannot be known by using syllogistic faculties of the cogito,9 the universe, as
being enhypostasized by the Logos of God and thus permeated by the hypos-
tasis of God transferred towards its wholeness, cannot be known by means of
simple observation, analysis and theorizing. Whereas in cosmological syllogis-
tic thinking the identity of the universe is posed as that aspect of the universe
which allegedly can be described outwardly. Then, seen from a philosophical
perspective, a theoretical exploration of the universe can be interpreted as an
attempt to investigate by means of discursive thinking another para-hypostatic
being. In this case the fundamental irreducibility of para-hypostatic being to its
‘pieces’ and ‘moments’ makes the cosmological enterprise a fundamentally
open-ended, that is, apophatic enterprise, similar to that aspiration of human-
ity in persevering to establish its own identity through positioning itself in the
surrounding world. This perseverance has its foundation in a hidden intention-
ality of human subjectivity directed towards the grasp of its own facticity.
This is that intentionality which we have already known as the spirit-like
intentionality.
Phenomenology allocates a special place to the idea of the world (or the
universe) as the ‘horizon of all possible horizons,’10 which is implanted in
human incarnate subjectivity. However, for cosmology, as a particular physi-
cal discipline, the interest lies not in identifying the universe as the horizon of
all possible horizons in an existential sense; it is rather preoccupied with the
physical integrity of the universe and in particular with its origin as an ante-
cedent of this integrity, which (in contradistinction to the life-world) acquires
the features of a mathematical abstraction. The identity of the universe for a
cosmologist forms a subject of his intended ideal: to find the ultimate formula
or set of formulas, which will express a simple physical law that lies behind
the origin, uniqueness and concreteness of our universe, which we perceive in
the life-world through the symbolism of the night sky. This desire reflects
humanity’s anxiety about the contingency of its own existence and desire to
rely on some stability and have assurance in the midst of nature. The intuition
of this stability and integrity is always present in our horizon, but is hidden
from us, that is, absent in some of its aspects. One thus sees that in order to
reveal the presence of identity of the universe that is always tacitly intended in
9. See a vast discussion of this issue in Yannaras, Person and Eros, pp. 93–112, and in
Clément, On Human Being, pp. 25–33.
10. See on this terminology of Husserl, Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology,
pp. 331–7.
cosmological research, one should proceed along the lines of the phenomeno-
logical reduction, which brackets all particular theories and ideas and leaves
subjectivity with undeniable presence of the underlying core of all facticity,
that is, with an intuition of totality of being, which thus reveals itself as a teleo-
logical ideal of the human reason. In a way similar to human persons, always
present to the other in the conditions of their essential absence, the identity of
the universe as its enhypostasized image, as an intentional correlate of human
subjectivity, is always present to this subjectivity in its empirical absence.
Thus all ways of expressing this identity through science, for example,
represent metaphors and symbols of the unknowable: the apophatic sense of
grasping hypostatic existence is transferred to the universe as that otherness
which, in a way, constitutes every particular person.
Identity of the Universe as an Enhypostasized Integrity of Personal Being
Let us approach the issue of identity of the universe from a different angle. The
paradox of human subjectivity that we have thoroughly discussed in a previ-
ous chapter represents a certain perception and expression of co-inherence,
that is, mutual indwelling of human hypostatic beings and the universe on the
level of their consubstantiality as well as hypostatic inherence, as articulated
givenness, in human subjectivity. Co-inherence denotes here a kind of commu-
nion with the universe, which makes any description of the universe in terms
of its gradual stages of formation irrelevant in the sense that the entirety of the
universe as co-present to human subjectivity is ‘transcendent’ to all object-like
vision of its parts and phases of development. This feeling of co-inherence with
the universe and the contemplation of its actual simultaneity with the totality
of one’s life indicates a way to psychological apprehension of the ‘identity of
the universe’. Space and time modes of perception are suspended in this com-
munion with the universe. This communion can be paralleled with communion
with a person who is present in absence: when one thinks about someone,
this thinking does not position the content of this thought as co-presence with
that one who is thought of, as being in space. Space is overcome and thus sus-
pended while one thinks of another. Communion in this case manifests itself
as experience of personal presence without any reference to space, that is, in con-
ditions of empirical, spatial absence. Communion with the universe is exactly a
mode of removing space between a human person and the universe when all
forms of space-perception and separatedness are suspended. The universe enters
as an indispensable part of the totality of existential event of communion.
Thus communion with the universe implies a kind of personal relationship
with the totality of being, which itself is not a person, but which is personal-
ized through an existential event of living in and through the universe. In this
sense the identity of the universe through communion can be defined as the
enhypostasized mode of the universe’s inward existence in human subjectivity
and as such, an intentional correlate that does not allow any spatial and tem-
poral representation. It is then clear that such an identity is not an abstract
philosophical notion, not an impersonal substance or the totality of all con-
vergent sense-impressions and their objective correlates, but a feature of the
universe (as the correlate of subjectivity) which in its deep existential sense
reflects the identity implanted in human personhood as an irreducible existen-
tial event whose facticity cannot be the subject of further explanation and
understanding. The contemplation of the identity of the universe is similar to
the contemplation of the identity of one’s ‘I’ as the break through the anonym-
ity of existence and its solitude.11 This contemplation can be compared with
a mystical experience of life in the universe as existence in solitude, that experi-
ence which does not dissolve in social tasks and objectives, but rather
corresponds to a child’s perception of being, which is given in its sheer facticity
and which is a mystery with no beginning and no end. Life as communion
gives the sense of its co-inherence with the universe, its fundamental attach-
ment to the universe when the universe exists only in so far as a particular
hypostatic communicant exists. Existence of the universe in this attitude of
subjectivity has sense only in so far as humanity exists. Using a different lan-
guage, one can say that the universe exists in so far as it participates in human
life and, vice versa, a human being exists as long as it participates in the total-
ity of the universe. This mode of perception obviously does not enquire about
the grounds of the universe facticity, for if it were to do so, it would be tanta-
mount to enquire about the facticity of one’s ‘I’. As a consequence, in this
attitude, the question about the origin of the universe does not arise, because
the universe is not an object, but communion.
In order to clarify further the meaning of what we call the living and immedi-
ate communion with the universe it is useful to make a certain analogy with
the phenomenology of the human body: we mean the constitution of the body
by the human subjectivity. This will have a direct relation to the constitution
of the universe, because the universe exists for me only through my body, so
that my body turns out to be the centre of disclosure of the universe. But my
conscious contemplation of my body is not a simple act of depositing and
treating my body as ad extra to my subjectivity. My body and consciousness
co-inhere, so that any separation of my body from me as identifiable self, in
thought, has a sense of abstraction with no existential importance. The imme-
diacy of this co-inherence, since it takes place only in so far as life continues,
has no spatial and temporal dimension: I exist only as my body.12 If, in thought,
11. Cf. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 41. Similar to Levinas, this breakthrough towards
one’s identity and hence the universe’s identity cannot be achieved either through knowledge
or ecstatic transcendence towards the universe (which would imply one’s disappearance as
person). Thus when we speak about the universe as communion we mean that solitude can be
exceeded while identities of both human being and the universe are preserved as distinct.
12. Cf. Marcel, Being and Having, pp. 15–16.
my body is separated from me, so that the body is abstracted as an external

thing, as a physical object, in a similar way, the universe, as an overall context,
including my body, is abstracted as a thing among other things and is treated
as an object. But this, as Marcel writes, leads to a severe contradiction.
[B]y an anomaly, which disappears when it is reflected, the more I emphasize the
objectivity of things, thus cutting the umbilical cord which binds to existence and to
what has been termed my psycho-organic presence to myself, the more I affirm the
independence of the world from me, its radical indifference to my destiny, to my
goals; the more, too, this world, proclaimed as the only real one, is converted into an
illusory spectacle, a great documentary film presented for my curiosity, but ultimately
abolished simply because it disregards me. I mean that the universe tends to be anni-
hilated in the measure that it overwhelms me – a fact forgotten whenever the attempt
is made to crush man under the weight of any data of astronomical proportions.13
If I forget about my body as a centre of disclosure of the universe, the uni-

verse is thought as an object separated from me, as something that is bigger
than me and thus something that does not need me for its existence. However,
the disclosure of the universe happens only through me! The universe as ‘out
there’ swallows me, makes me a piece of ‘walking dust’, an insignificant and
unnecessary mode of being. But this is a contradiction, because the universe,
as an articulated existence is ‘out there’ only through the umbilical cord of my
subjectivity. What then happens, when the abstract grandeur of the universe
dismisses me as a centre of disclosure, is that the universe effectively denies
itself, negates itself, because, being an abstract thought devoid of inward pres-
ence in the incarnate existence, it has no true meaning and name outside that
me who articulates the universe. In this case human subjectivity risks treating
itself as an epiphenomenon of the physical and biological chain of efficient
forces, so that the universe is not seen as a miracle (an event or trial) of the
incarnate cognition, but rather as the absolutely necessary pre-existent entity
in which humanity has to participate as an inevitable artefact of its impersonal
evolution. Such a perception of the universe removes a theological sense of
creaturehood in incarnate human beings. These beings are still part of the uni-
verse, but in the sense of being created contingently by the will and power of
God, but rather as produced through some efficient causes. Then, to understand
the sense of facticity of existence in this ‘objective’ picture of the universe, one
should understand how conscious life is produced through the elements of the
universe. It is here that the discursive reason cannot proceed beyond formulat-
ing the necessary conditions for its emergence. Here we come back to Marcel’s
affirmation that by cutting off the umbilical cord of human subjectivity in
views about the universe as an object, one annihilates personhood as a centre
of disclosure of the universe. But this, as we will see below, leads to serious
problems associated with the spiritual standing of cosmology.
13. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, pp. 20–1.

The cutting of the umbilical cord between human subjectivity and the uni-
verse, when the primary ‘contemplation of the fullness of life and its co-eternity
with all being’ stops, leads one to enquire about the origin of things: where
they come from, are they finite and where they go. Human consciousness starts
to enquire about the sense and origin of the object-universe, for to understand
it as an object one should know its origin, where it comes from. Here we see
clearly a split in the initial existential communion into subject and object
(however, this split as the differentiation between identities of persons and the
universe does not dissolve them). This split entails the entry of temporality into
the discourse: the universe as an object is possible only if it can be expanded in
terms of its consecutive stages of appearance, which in turn entail (as we know
from cosmology) the presence of such a ‘moment’ in its allegedly existing past
where all, which is in the universe, had its ultimate origin. It is interesting
to realize the fact that the presence of the originally inherent ‘identity of the
universe’ in human subjectivity does not disappear completely when the non-
egocentric intentionality prevails and subject–object dichotomy becomes very
acute; it is still in place, but transformed: the integrity of the universe is now
seen not through a variety of different objects, whose intrinsic coherence is not
available to the human grasp here and now, but enters human subjectivity
under the guise of the origin of the universe. And this is the reason why the
nostalgia for the identity of the universe reveals itself in the search for the
remote origin of ‘all in all’14 in the past Big Bang, whose notion, in spite of pre-
tending to carry a sense of the totality of the universe, still functions in the
human mind as an object of thought. The very urge (present in non-egocentric
intentionalities) to express communion with the universe (and our co-inherence
with it) in an objectivistic language, leads a cosmologist to the idea of the ulti-
mate origin of the universe, which contains also the origin of a cosmologist
itself. But in its truth, this attempt to articulate the origin of the universe still
represents no more than a vain desire to mirror the problem of one’s own
origin, and to comprehend the very moment of inception of that incarnate
hypostatic existence which experiences the ineffable link with the universe.
Theologically, the universe and free human agencies are part of the same
kenosis which realizes Divine love to creation. Thus communion with the uni-
verse is a mode of experiencing the Divine love.15 This gives a further elucidation
of G. Marcel’s thought that the problem of the origin of the universe and of
my ‘I’ is one and the same fundamental metaphysical problem, the problem
of facticity of being which represents a primary existential fact and whose
mystery is insoluble in its essence.16
14. Cf. (1 Cor. 15.28)

15. See further an interesting discussion in Ward, K. (2001) ‘Cosmos and kenosis’, in
J. Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love. Creation as Kenosis, Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, pp. 152–66.
One can reiterate once again that the ‘identity of the universe’ enters human
consciousness as an enhypostasized form of our communion with the universe
as the living whole in which our lives are brought to existence by the power of
the invisible origin (the Divine kenosis). The identity of the universe reflects in
an encoded form the perception of the personal identity as unique and monadic
existence, as that centre of disclosure and manifestation from which all is
unfolded in its articulated mode. It is from within this communion that all
sorts of thematization of distinct objects in the universe take place. However,
the identity of the universe reflects not only monadic being-in-the-world, but
also the love to the universe, which stems from the ecstatic predisposition to
love God. It is the Divine kenosis as particular creation that reveals itself
in incessant urge to search for the foundation of humanity’s facticity as the
source of life, and which inevitably goes through the stage of implicit ‘person-
alization’ of the universe.
As we will see later, if the comprehension of the totality of the universe
can be compared with the perception of the inseparable link of human con-
sciousness with that body in which it is incarnated, the problem of the origin
of the universe as an attempt to establish its identity by reducing all variety
of its appearances to some undifferentiated state in the remote past, can be
compared with the problem of phenomenality of one’s birth in the incarnate
existence.
The Origin of the Universe as Its Identity?
Cosmological research, as well as scientific discourse in general, feel extremely

uncomfortable with respect to their inability to give account of the facticity
of different conscious persons. The anthropic principle in cosmology attempts
to link the natural conditions of human embodiment with the fundamental
physical parameters that are responsible for the stability and actual display
of the physical universe. However, what is articulated here is the natural,
biological conditions of human existence. The anthropic inference makes a
nearly trivial observation that, indeed, there is an underlying consubstantiality
between human observers and the universe expressed in some particular tech-
nical terms. However, even in this case, the very facticity of this consubstantiality,
its particular contingent noetico-noematic givenness, are not accounted for
and, probably, cannot be accounted for at all. But it is this very facticity which
is ontologically responsible for the multihypostatic incarnations of humanity,
which cannot be simply reduced to the natural. And it is these particular con-
tingent realizations of anonymous and impersonal physical laws in human
persons that disturb all scientists and cosmologists, who are eager to dismiss
any trace of them under the suspicion of non-scientific ‘subjectivity’. Here we
clearly see the link between the problem of the facticity of multihypostatic
human consciousness and facticity of the universe. Indeed, since all conscious-
ness is intentional, the primary object of this intention is the world in which
this consciousness indwells. But consciousness acts as the nominative of disclo-

sure and dative of manifestation, so that the world, disclosed and constituted,
is contingent in its immanence with consciousness. Hence, in the same way as
anthropology and psychology cannot tackle the problem of hypostatic exis-
tence (thus manifesting its apophatic value),17 cosmology cannot adequately
approach the problem of the identity of the universe as the ‘name’ of its factic-
ity (being thus also an intrinsically apophatic enterprise).
However, cosmology cannot come to terms with this last simple conclusion
and it persistently attempts to explain away the mystery of the universe’s con-
tingent facticity by referring to the initial conditions in the universe, which are
supposed to contain all information about the future of the universe. Hence in
many aspects, the question about the identity of the universe is linked to the
question of its origin. In other words, the reinterpretation is attempted of the
contingent facticity of the universe, as a given display of its various aspects
here and now in terms of a certain temporal origin (in the remote past of the
universe), in which the undifferentiated ‘substance’ was ‘set up’ in such a state
as to evolve into the visible universe. The procedure of ‘naming’ this initial
state is supposed to play the role of disclosing the universe’s identity and hence
acts in thought as a disguised name of its present display. It is clear, however,
that the problem of contingent facticity of the universe cannot be explained
away, because there is no way to explain away the very contingency of the ini-
tial conditions. The facticity of the universe is affirmed in terms of its initial
conditions. We see an interesting transformation of the whole issue of the
‘presence in absence’ with respect to the universe’s identity: it is because cos-
mology cannot overcome the dichotomy of presence in absence implanted in
the present-day multivariance of the universe in terms of its pieces and moments
that it reverts the whole problem to the allegedly existing past, where the
empirical variety of the universe, being reduced to a single description (although
incredibly difficult mathematically), allegedly acquires its ‘simple name’ (cos-
mological singularity, Big Bang), ‘present in presence’, although in a purely
intelligible, eidetic sense, being a form of the impersonal collective of scientific
individuals who transfer their convictions to a wider audience. But this shift of
the sense of the identity of the universe implies a price to pay: the idea of the
Big Bang, as a short-hand form of talking about the beginning of the universe,
acquires the status of an intelligible entity (an ‘idea’ in a Platonic or Kantian
sense) as the property of disembodied and impersonal transcendental subjec-
tivity. The ‘presence in presence’ of the Big Bang where all is supposed to be in
the undifferentiated all, as an ideal of cosmological knowledge, implies the
elimination of the sense of ‘presence in absence’ of the personalized mystery of
facticity of the human being-in-the-universe.
We now need to recall two attempts to speak scientifically about the Big Bang.
Both of them will manifest the transcendence in cosmology towards the hidden
17. Cf. Clément, On Human Being, p. 30.

identity of the universe, and attempts to know the unknowable by means of

mathematical inference. The first attempt is a famous idea of S. Hawking that the
universe in the so called past was in a quantum state and effectively did not have
any point of origination. The universe was in a space-like state where all tempo-
rality, associated with the flux of time and irreversibility, was suspended.18
As we mentioned afore, the space-time structure of the early universe can be
presented as the curvilinear cone, with an apex which is usually associated
with the Big Bang. This representation of the universe provides a philosopher
with a simple insight that the physics of the universe cannot be fully monistic,
because the universe has a boundary whose nature cannot be accounted by the
physics that is suitable for the interior of the cone. In other words, the initial
conditions at the Big Bang are not subject to the laws of physics within the
universe and there some meta-physical assumptions must be made on the
nature of their contingent facticity. In general the existence of such singular
points like the Big Bang induces a thought that the universe has to be embed-
ded into a wider ‘structure’ beyond the universe and this destroys the monism
of the physics because it does not make sense to speculate about physics beyond
the universe. Physics reveals itself as incomplete in regard to the foundations
of the Universe.
This incompleteness of physics has been recognized by physicists themselves
and, in particular, was the leading motif of Hawking in his attempts to remove
it by suggesting sophisticated theories of how to remove the point of temporal
origin in cosmology (which in the natural attitude divides the universe into
two periods: as it is for us and as it ‘was’ or ‘was not’ prior to it). This has been
done through a mathematical trick by replacing the temporal variable (which
is usually associated with the empirical flowing time), by an abstract imagi-
nary quantity which behaves like space (‘imaginary’ refers here to a special
type of complex numbers).19 The aim of this quantum cosmology was to
deconstruct temporality and to announce that there was no time in the early
universe; the universe did not have a point of temporal origination; it just
exists. It exists as compact four-dimensional space, which is contemplated by
human observers in its ‘remote’ consequences within pseudo-Euclidean time.
In a sense, here the monism of physics is restored to its extreme: the universe
18. According to Hawking, temporal flux is a ‘figment of imagination’, so that the

‘real’ underlying world is atemporal, that is, either trans-temporal or simply ever-existing
(Hawking, S. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, London:
Bantam, p. 139). Here we have an example of dismissal not only of the internal time-
consciousness, subjective time, historical time, but also the objective physical time. Temporality
as a basic category of the world of living beings is eliminated.
19. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 139. Its physical meaning (saying nothing at all
about it existential meaning) is completely unclear. For Hawking, however, it was not a
problem at all, for according to his suggestion the so-called imaginary time is really the real
time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations.
described by quantum cosmology is experienced by us as its classical projec-

tion, and one does not need anything non-physical or trans-natural in order
to describe the existence of the universe and its particular features. There is
nothing beyond the universe and the universe is fully graspable by the human
intellect.20 Hence whatever is not described within this monistic trend is treated
as non-existent.
By reinstating, de facto, monism in cosmological physics, Hawking implied
a certain monism in epistemology, by asserting that consciousness is ‘isomor-
phic’ to the universe in the sense that it does not need any reference to anything
which transcends the universe. If the field of consciousness is isomorphic to
the universe with no boundaries, then, this field while being compact has no
boundaries: in its entirety it does not admit any otherness of itself. Since,
according to Hawking, the question why the universe exists has no sense if the
universe has no temporal beginning, a similar situation takes place with respect
to the question why consciousness exists. Since the boundaries of conscious-
ness (as delimiting it in incarnation) are removed, there is no such thing as
the otherness of consciousness and that is why there are no foundations of
consciousness as clearly articulated horizons and limits which, for example,
were outlined by Kant. The question about identity of the universe thus is
equivalent to the question about facticity of consciousness.
It is interesting to observe here how some cosmological ideas based on a
monistic vision of the universe, flourish from the depth of that type of psycho-
logy which attempts to escape a persistent question about the facticity of
human intelligence and its other-worldly foundation. The tendency to profess
monism and to adopt an idea that mathematics gives access to ultimate truth,
leads, as we have seen before, to the mathematization of human beings. In
Hawking’s case this mathematization comes from a strong assertion that his
cosmology reflects truth. It is human mind that is mathematized so that all
other possible faculties of interacting with the world are effectively rejected.
Similar to what we have seen afore, as being asserted by Husserl and Sherrard
in a different context, in cosmology a distorted anthropology is implied. The
human discursive mind is ‘deified’ here as an ultimate judge and guarantor of
truth. Mathematics, if its existence is taken for granted becomes a kind of God
which governs the universe and human mind’s affairs.
The identity of the universe in this case is associated with its special ‘no-
boundary’ state.21 Definitely a philosophical mind observes here an element
20. The apology for such a cosmology leads effectively to extermination in it any existen-
tial element and then as a result, to dismissal of the idea of God, which was explicitly
formulated by Hawking in his famous phrase ‘What place, then, for a creator?’ (Hawking,
A Brief History of Time, p. 141). This situation is in a coherence with that which was predicted
and criticized by Husserl in his Crisis of the European Sciences, namely, that extreme mathe-
matization of nature makes human beings to believe that they rule their own affairs in the
universe by believing that the universe as it is described mathematically is ultimately true.
of transcendence towards the unknown and fundamentally untestable.22

However, scientists (as well as philosophers and theologians) were very much
impressed by this model of the universe, because, in a way, the issue of
contingency of its temporal creation (not creation in a sense of ex nihilo) was
‘explained away’. In fact when we use the word ‘transcendence’ in application
to this model we mean a transcendence of the empirical (in a sense of eidetic
reduction). By no means does it imply transcendence in a theological sense;
for the facticity of the very ‘initial conditions’ of the universe, that is, the
pre-existence of space, was not addressed, so that genuine transcendence has
not been achieved.23 What is important, however, is that the scientific mind
exercises a typical trick by attempting to explain what it existentially intends
from within the empirical, by means of purely non-existential mathematical
ideas.
A similar situation can be observed in another scenario of the initial condi-
tions, based on a famous conjecture of R. Penrose about the low-entropy
condition at the Big Bang, which is responsible for the observed display of
irreversibility in the universe.24 His scenario is Platonically oriented, for in
order to interpret the specificity of the initial conditions in our universe (and
hence its facticity), Penrose makes his inference from the fundamentally non-
observable but imaginatively and conceptually existing ensemble of universes
with different initial conditions. Then the choice of the particular initial condi-
tion corresponding to our universe is made by a hypothetical mechanism,
interpreted by Penrose himself as ‘creator’s’ choice, and mathematically
described as the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis.25 We observe here a similar shift
in reasoning about the unknown by displacing oneself into the conceptual
space of mathematics where all sorts of scientific imagination are possible.
Whether this imagination leads to any fulfilment of its intention is an open
question. But heuristically this kind of explanation creates a feeling of satisfac-
tion in some scientists that the observed facticity of the universe, in its intrinsic
contingency, is explained away and referred to the realm of intelligible necessity,
21. Hawking, S. and R. Penrose (1996) The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, p. 79.
22. Certainly the principle of correspondence with empirical evidence does not work here
at all. One could raise a question as to whether the mathematical beauty of this theory and
its intrinsic coherence, as an explanatory device, could provide another justification for this
model to be ‘true’.
23. See a detailed philosophical and theological analysis of Hawking’s ideas in my Light
from the East, pp. 141–59.
24. See a popularized version of his ideas in Penrose, R. (1989), The Emperor’s New
Mind, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 435–47.
25. Penrose, R. ‘Singularities and time-asymmetry’, in S. W. Hawking and W. Israel (eds)
(1979) General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 581–638 (629–32).
which is rather the domain where philosophy and even theology may have
their say.26
It is remarkable, however, that in spite of the evidently speculative nature of
all hypotheses about the initial conditions of the universe (this is admitted by
cosmologists themselves),27 the search for models of these conditions is still
going on. Here one can detect two underlying motivations: the first as a drive
to a coherent and aesthetical approach to the origin of the universe, and the
second one, qualified as teleological. Let us discuss the first motivation, which
is linked to the idea of coherent epistemic justification.
Coherence in Cosmology as Its Apophaticism
It is clear before the beginning of any theoretical quest that the initial condi-
tions of the universe cannot be tested, not only because they are separated
from us by an unbridgeable gulf of temporal immensity, but also because one
cannot transcend this universe in order to ‘have a look’ at its beginning from
‘the outside’. However, cosmologists are very proud that they can speak in
nearly priestly terms about the beginning of everything without being caught
in fallacious reasoning. This happens because what is dominant in cosmologi-
cal research is not the principle of correspondence with that empirical reality
which constitutes the living world of cosmologists, but rather a principle of
coherence in justification of some epistemic and theoretical claims.28 Without
any deep recourse to philosophical aspect of coherence theories of justifica-
tion, we would like to make two points. If cosmology relies on the coherence
of its own statements it is fundamentally enclosed in itself and cannot be
assessed from an outside system of thought. As there is no direct link between
coherence of justification and coherence of truth that naturally requires break-
ing out of the system of coherent suppositions, cosmology can afford to create
as many theories allegedly explaining the universe as it wants, without even
a slight idea whether these theories correspond to truth. In fact, the question
of truth is inappropriate in this context because everybody, philosophically
honest, understands in advance that the fullness of truth of what concerns with
26. See a philosophical and theological analysis of this idea of Penrose in my Light from
the East, pp. 171–7.
27. See, for example, Barrow, J. D. (1999) Between Inner Space and Outer Space: Essays
on Science, Art and Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 26–7.
28. See on the coherence theories of justification, for example, Audi, R. (1998)
Epistemology. A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, London and New
York: Routledge, pp. 187–204. See also a book of Bowker, J. (2005) The Sacred Neuron,
London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 118–48, in which the author persuasively argues on the importance
of coherence considerations in science and religion as a different form of justification in
comparison with the correspondence principle.
the foundations of the universe cannot be grasped through some fragmented

theories. All references to correspondence with the available empirical mate-
rial do not reach their aim, because the process of adjusting theories of the
early universe in order to fit observable data is in a state of permanent advance,
so that all theories, seen philosophically, seem to be metaphors of the human
desire to know the universe. They also manifest a fundamental human inca-
pacity to achieve this goal. In this case the whole pattern of coherent epistemic
inference in cosmology has a sense of belief which attempts to express com-
munion with the universe, which is to remove ‘presence in absence’ of its
totality by sheer presence.
Here it is not difficult to realize the intrinsic apophatic meaning of cosmo-
logy, similar to that in theology. In theology apophaticism implies the whole-
ness and consistency of religious beliefs in their limitations by what are called
dogmas.29 These dogmas, as Church definitions, are those boundaries of faith
that cannot be demonstrated from outside. Apophaticism intends to proclaim
the freedom of expression of faith within its boundaries, that is, within the
dogmatic system, if the coherence of this expression with respect to dogmas is
observed. Coherence in this case means faithfulness and absence of desire to
doubt dogmas. In this case the experience of faith can expand unlimitedly
within the boundaries of faith, being coherent with the content of dogmas.
Apophaticism reveals itself as a principle of coherence in theology that stops
human reason from vain attempts to treat dogmas as definitions of the essence
of God and which guarantees freedom of expressing the experience of God
through music (liturgy), poetry, painting etc. if the limits of this experience are
observed. However, apophaticism in theology leads to coherence of truth.
Here one reveals the real meaning of apophaticism not as logical proclamation
of truth about God, but as participation in this truth through the action of
prayer and liturgy. The reality of what the Christian Church teaches in its dog-
mas cannot survive outside doxological proclamations.30 Thus the apophatic
coherence in theology implies, so to speak, liturgical coherence as ever-presence
of tradition in space and time, that is, in history. Coherentism in theology thus
acquires a historical dimension. It is clear why theological apophaticism makes
it necessary to rely on coherence of interpretation in religious matters: God is
not an object, He is present in absence and we know that He is with us but
we do not know ‘what He is’. No theory of correspondence is possible here.
However, we affirm God on the basis of our faith in Him, that faith which
implies the coherence of dogmas, tradition and liturgy. Dogmas, definition
and theological opinions can point towards God, can change our attitude to
29. The meaning of what are called dogmas originates in the Greek word horos (bound-
ary, fence) which was used in theology in the context of the Church’s definitions with a
purpose to set out the boundaries of Christian faith and protect it against heresies. See, for
example, Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 16.
30. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 117.
His presence in absence, but they never qualify God as essence and substance
to which one can refer in the mundane sense of empirical evidence. One should
mention here that prayer and liturgy, as genuine means of transcendence,
create in theology that breakthrough from the seclusion of its dogmatic system,
making thus demonstrable that any theology has no direct sense as a carrier of
truth if it does not imply faith and living communion with God. And it is this
last element of genuine transcendence that makes theological apophaticism
crucially different, in comparison with the apophaticism in cosmology.
A similar situation takes place in cosmology: one can attempt to express the
experience of admiration by the forces of the universe through very compli-
cated mathematical theories (a kind of incantation), but all of them will remain
no more than symbolic and metaphoric images of that anticipated unity and
infinity of the universe which is present in the incarnate human subjectivity.
Since there is no empirical access to the Big Bang, all that we express about it
by using cosmological theories can be characterized as metaphors and an
esoteric symbolism based in the mathematical formalism. The beauty of this
symbolism, its coherence, gives us some assurance to believe in the possibility
of the Big Bang as a principle of explanation and justification. However the
‘truth’ of the Big Bang in an ontological sense remains unclear and, what is
more important, fundamentally inaccessible. In other words, all cosmological
theories give us some symbolic representation of that towards which they
aspire, but that which will never be known and reached in a sense of truth. The
apophaticism in cosmological research is thus present as the limitation of
thought: it wanders around the idea of the Big Bang, but it will never reach it
as ultimate origin of the universe.31 In this case all competing theories are
epistemologically and axiologically equal, but no one can pretend to claim
the fullness of truth and the knowability of the Big Bang as that which is
intended in a hidden teleology of cosmological knowledge. Thus all cosmo-
logical knowledge is apophatic in the sense of its limited validity determined
by the boundaries of the physical, and because of the open-endedness of the
intended horizon and a fundamental inexhaustibility of the truth about the
universe by means of discursive thinking. However, in order to realize this fact,
one should place one’s consciousness in a phenomenological attitude that is
capable of bracketing all theoretical statements about reality and to conceive
them as varieties of expression of the human intuition about the entirety and
identity of the universe. But this attitude is simply not available to cosmo-
logists themselves. They will never agree with the verdict of philosophy that all
eidetic imagination in cosmology, incarnate in complicated formulas, is only a
wandering around truth, but not truth itself.
31. In general, the apophaticism in knowledge can be formulated as such an attitude to

cognition ‘which refuses to exhaust the content of knowledge in its formulation, which
refuses to exhaust the reality of things signified in the logic of signifiers. It correspondingly
refuses to verify knowledge merely by controlling the correct representational logic of the
signifiers.’ (Yannaras, Postmodern Metaphysics, p. 84).
The Big Bang and Phenomenology of Birth
Now we are in a position to start discussion of the second motivation that

drives cosmological research, namely, its hidden teleology. However, as a con-
stitutive element of this teleology, we start our discussion by developing, within
the natural attitude, the analogy between the intentionality directed to the Big
Bang and intentionality of grasping one’s birth. In spite of the fact that the past
of the universe is available to astronomical observations only to a very limited
extent (as related to the whole temporal span of the universe, counted by
modern cosmology by 10–15 billion years), the idea of some underlying tem-
poral origin of the universe, as if it was in a state of undifferentiated substance
(with a high degree of symmetry), persistently guides cosmological research.
In many aspects this search for the origin is rooted in a psychological desire
to understand one’s own origin,32 that is, a mystery of one’s own biological
birth,33 understood in a philosophical sense as the mystery of hypostatic
incarnation. In the same way as an event of a human being’s birth is unavail-
able to phenomenalization in consciousness, whereas its phenomenality
unfolds while this being constitutes itself in its progression to the future,34 one
can say that in cosmology the origin of the universe (as that background to
which one refers in order to understand the present universe) is present only in
its actual absence, so that all attempts to articulate this origin (as intentions
of consciousness being directed to the future) are doomed to deal with the
unfolding facticity of the universe (in which the alleged past is encoded) with-
out any hope to achieve the ‘presence of the past in presence’. It is in this sense
that the very advance of cosmology towards understanding the past of the uni-
verse constantly deals not only with its unknowable essence but also with an
unavoidable absence. In other words, in spite of the metaphysical fact that the
origin of the universe as well as the origin of ones’ person are radically unavail-
able to humanity because of the contingency of their facticity,35 cosmology still
intends towards the principally unknowable and absent as if it would become
knowable and present at some distant future. Here cosmology exercises not
only its tendency to the imagination of the past in mathematical terms, but
effectively manifests the very essence of the human condition, which can be
expressed as man’s desire not to be circumscribed by the necessities of nature
and inevitability of the universe’s facticity, and to see nature and the universe
(and hence imagine them) according to man’s will and in its own image.36

33. Marion, ‘The event, the phenomenon, and the revealed’, pp. 96–7.
34. So that the facticity of birth in its remote consequences is present whereas its
origin or ground is absent.
36. We have already pointed out that this analogy comes from St Maximus the
Confessor’s assertion that God knows created things according to his will. Human beings,
because of the divine image in them, imitate this desire to know according to their will.
To know thyself means to know the universe. To know thyself means to under-
stand the indestructible presence of the immanent self-consciousness, which is
always looking for its own origin but, failing to find it, this self-consciousness
appeals to the idea of infinity as that indefinite context of totality to which it
always desires to refer itself (the universe is approached as an idol but not
icon). Consciousness is always intentional; thus it is immanent to the object of
its intention; thus it cannot live without the universe; thus the searched foun-
dation of consciousness, as the ground of its facticity, implies the ground for
the universe as the media to which the immanent intentionality is directed.
Then, if in the natural attitude consciousness thinks of its own origin in tem-
poral terms, the origin of the universe also acquires some features of temporality
and this leads to varieties of the Big Bang model. In a complete incapacity to
phenomenalize the origin of the incarnate transcendental subjectivity, the mind
in the natural attitude physicalizes this mystery under the cover of the begin-
ning of the universe.37 One anticipates here that the tendency to search for the
origin of the universe is deeply embedded in the human condition, as a kind of
an innate idea, donated to every human being at its birth. Theologically this is
an idea of the Divine image in man and an archetype of its lost likeness when
man, like God, knew all because he was ‘all in all’.38
We now analyse in more detail the dynamics according to which this innate
idea realizes itself. When cosmology deals with the so-called past of the uni-
verse, a characteristic displacement of the self of cosmologists takes place when
they descend by means of scientific meditation into the remote stages of the
early universe. The very intentionality of a cosmologist’s consciousness attempts
to grasp the meaning of such a condition of the universe where no incarnate
conscious life was possible. The more a cosmologist’s mind, in its eidetic reduc-
tion of the empirical, advances towards the Big Bang, the more it intends
something which is fundamentally non-human. By acquiring conceptually the
impersonal physical content of the universe, the self, its consciousness, exer-
cises a kind of empty intentionality, which will probably never be filled and
fulfilled.
From a phenomenological, and even theological, point of view one finds
here an incessant urge of the human soul to find the impersonal ‘foundation’
of the facticity of the world at the expense of losing the sense of uniqueness
and identity of every particular human person. On a psychological level one
must say that those philosophizing cosmologists who believe that through
studying the alleged origin of the physical universe they touch upon the sacred
truth (which allegedly points towards God), in fact, dissolve themselves in the
abyss of non-human physics, which, although being a very interesting eidetic
exercise, turns out to be devoid of any spiritual and soteriological meaning.
37. Psychologically, because of the fear of contingency that implies death, one wishes to
establish a reference to a sort of stability that attaches some sense of existence.
38. Cf. (1 Cor. 15.28).
Such a cosmologist begins to predicate the universe in esoteric (mathematical)

and non-existential (not having immediate references to the realities of the life-
world) language which is accessible only to those who follow this cosmological
gnosis. One should add that this cosmological gnosis ignores some obvious
philosophical doubts about the ontological universality of its claims and the
sheer naivety of its pretension for objectivity based in the natural attitude.
That is why it seems intrinsically paradoxical to claim the objective (physical)
status of all sorts of models of the Big Bang (or even different pre-existing
universes) where no trace of human intelligence was possible, in conditions
when all predications of the universe take place from within such a state of
affairs where the incarnate consciousness is not possible.39 A simple epistemo-
logical observation of this paradox disappears from cosmologists’ insights,
those cosmologists who sometimes believe that the asserted ultimate reality of
the past universe, where all forms of matter were present in a kind of undiffer-
entiated soup, has more relevance to the truth of existence than the variety
of mundane experiences and that it is this reality which fills one’s life with
content and meaning. One can qualify this movement of thought as the ‘lure
of cosmos’40 implicitly driving the cosmological mind in the search for the
ultimate cradle of life in the ‘cosmic heaven’ and is deeply interwoven with the
discomfort and fear of the contingent facticity of everything in the universe,
including the very human subjectivity which discloses and articulates the
universe, with the inevitability of the transience and mutability of objects and
lives, which tragically contradicts the human desire for the all-encompassing
39. Definitely one could suggest that the non-human past of the universe was a necessary
condition for the later appearance of life, so that there is no contradiction between what the
Big Bang cosmology affirms as the non-human physical state and what emerged from this
states afterwards. The naivety of this argument is based in the belief in the continuity of cos-
mological as well as biological evolution, which led to emergence of consciousness that
articulates this same evolution as well as its origin. The difficulty lies in the part of this argu-
ment which supposed to deal with the sufficient conditions of emergence of consciousness.
These conditions are not part of physics and rather belong to the realm of human will
and destiny. It is in this sense, that when F. Dyson in his book Disturbing the Universe
(New York: Basic Books, 1979) argues, along the lines of the anthropic argument, against
J. Monod’s apology for the accidental coming of intelligent humanity in the universe, by
saying that ‘I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and
study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense
must have known that we are coming’ (p. 250) he effectively invokes a teleological argument
by reference to the existence of another, parallel sense of the universe’s future as the unfold-
ing of transcendental history through which the physical history is articulated. But this
‘knowledge’ by the universe that we were coming cannot be consistently placed in the frame-
work of scientific explanation. It is rather an axiological and soteriological argument that
refers to the teleology of human reason.
40. This term was used by Berdyaev, who discussed the theme of ‘lure of cosmos’ in his
book Slavery and Freedom, pp. 93–102.
knowledge and a certain immortality of the sense of that which happens here
and now. These anxieties of life are implanted in the very facticity of the
human subjectivity, so that they represent, the innate idea, or hidden teleology
of the human spirit in disclosing this idea. In this sense all cosmological specu-
lations are unavoidable as pertaining to the very essence of humanity. However,
a question of a theological nature arises about possible realizations of this
intrinsic teleology: either to consider the models of the Big Bang as having
indeed literal relation to the past of the physical universe (cataphatic cosmo-
logy), and which hence, can be idolized, or alternatively, to treat the Big Bang
as an icon of something which we do not know and we will never know (but
which is given to us through a direct communion with its ‘presence in absence’)
and whose discursive imaging represents one out of many infinite tasks of
humanity (apophatic cosmology).
The Big Bang as the Telos of Cosmological Explanation
What is interesting, however, is that, it is phenomenology which makes it pos-

sible to change the overall attitude to theoretical cosmology and all theories
of the beginning of the universe. Phenomenology acts here as that mode of
philosophical thinking which unfolds the hidden teleology of scientific research
and teleological meaning of some particular scientific ideas.41 This teleology
appears as an endless commitment to a theoretical task (understood philo-
sophically) so that each particular scientific result or theory is considered as
temporary and provisional and must be put aside while looking for the succes-
sive developments. Cosmology in this sense is not an exception and represents
no more than a very sophisticated set of eidetic reductions from the empirical.
The ultimate existential meaning of cosmology, its own ground as its sheer
possibility, can only be understood if cosmology is referred to its roots in
human subjectivity and to the cultural dimensions of the life-world, and thus
to the hidden teleology of reason which provokes a cosmological quest as a
particular mode of fulfilment of its telos.
In this perspective the persistent exercise by every human mind of that inten-
tionality which is directed towards the removal of the contingent facticity of
everything and searching for the ultimate foundation of the universe in a state
where ‘all was in all’,42 reveals another meaning of the notion of the Big Bang
as the telos of cosmological explanation (as well as a telos of the human reason
41. The ideas about teleology of scientific research were developed by Husserl in his
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. See also a paper of
Rizzacasa, A. (1977) ‘The epistemology of the sciences of nature in relation to the teleology
of research in the thought of the later Husserl’, in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), The Teleologies
in Husserlian Phenomenology, pp. 73–84.
42. Cf. (1 Cor. 15.28).
enquiring about the foundation of its facticity in the life-world in general).

In the natural attitude the meaning of the Big Bang was to describe the tempo-
ral origin of the universe as if it took place in the physical past. The ideal of
cosmology and its own telos is to find such an explanation of the original state
of the universe, its initial conditions, which would allow one, by using known
physical laws, to describe in terms of species the variety of cosmic objects
observed in the sky. The Big Bang, being effectively the telos of cosmological
research which, as an intentional activity of conscious human beings, advances
and unfolds the sense of the universe forward in time, is allegedly placed within
the natural attitude of the human mind in the physical past. Here we see the
competing tendencies of human subjectivity, which cannot function properly
if this subjectivity is not ‘purified’ by being placed within the philosophical
(phenomenological) attitude. For that one who is in the natural frame of mind
there is a paradox: how can we talk about the Big Bang as a telos, that is,
something which is supposed to be in the future, if this Big Bang is by defini-
tion in the past? First of all, as we said afore, the natural attitude to the Big
Bang must be abandoned on simple grounds that its construct is achieved by
means of a series of eidetic reductions, so that its physical characteristics, even
if one admits the high degree of coherence in its theoretical description, make
no sense in the context of what it is supposed to describe, namely, the present-
day universe and the life-world. Then, by being a fundamentally unfinished
and unfinishable construct, all existing and future theories of the Big Bang have
equal weight and importance if they are treated from within a strictly scientific
discourse. Because cosmology tends to become the science of the whole uni-
verse, the very idea of the cosmology of the Big Bang can only be a ‘normative
form situated at infinity’. Thus each historical realization of cosmology in its
theories still has the idea of the Big Bang (as the hidden totality of all) for its
horizon. The importance of cosmology becomes evident if it is appropriated
phenomenologically, when the reduction of all historical facticity of its theories
is performed and the essence of cosmology as a search for the foundation of
contingent facticity of all is revealed. In this case the presence of the Big Bang
theories in cosmology reflects the deep and inherent propensity of human
incarnate subjectivity to enquiry about its own facticity as well as the facticity
of being. This is what Husserl called entelechy of the reason, the reason that
attempts to disclose the meaning of the universe in the perspective of its telos,
when it will be united to the entire universe, that is, when for this reason ‘all
will be in all’.
But cosmological thinking does not anticipate its own intention for the Big
Bang as a ‘teleological principle’ of the working of the mind itself. The natural
attitude of a cosmologist treats the Big Bang in terms of objectivity pertaining
to a remote hypothetical past, its consciousness does not realize that, in fact, it
acts as a centre of disclosure, whose actions are initiated by the telos of cosmo-
logical explanation, which is always in the future. The natural attitude of a
cosmologist drives him away from an existential question about the facticity
of humanity (and hence the facticity of the universe) which is seen just as the
prolongation and extension of the physical into biological and then psycho-
logical. The theological sense of this oblivion of the human presence behind all
theories is that cosmology is fundamentally incapable of transcending the
facticity of the physical in order to contemplate its purposes and ends which
are disclosed to humanity not through its ability to sense and think, but through
its ability to feel the tragedy of created existence as its implicit eschatology.
It is this inability to transcend towards the source of life and existence of the
universe that is substituted by a surrogate of transcendence towards the sub-
stance of the Big Bang, which is arranged through various hypotheses about
the initial conditions of the universe.
In order to conclude this section and to clarify the meaning of what we
affirm about the Big Bang as a telos of scientific explanation, let us attempt a
sort of a graphical illustration of this non-trivial conviction. First of all we
should remind the reader that the observable universe is always turned to us
by its past: because of the finitude of speed of light as well as other agencies,
signals travel from the space to reach us, so that we see and detect the informa-
tion from the sky not as it is here and now, but as it was at the time of its
emission in the past. In theory of relativity this situation can be illustrated by
the space–time diagram (Fig. 5.1), where the human observer, while progress-
ing into the future still faces the universe only in its past.
Definitely our capacity to observe the universe in its present dust-like form
is restricted in the past by the era when matter decoupled from radiation
and the universe effectively became transparent for propagation of light and
formation of large-scale structures (such as galaxies and their clusters) began.
Future
Time
Present
Visible γ-incoming
universe photons
Decoupling of matter
and radiation
Past: 10–15 billion Space

years ago
Figure 5.1 The past light cone. We see the universe in its past.
This happened when the ‘radius’ of the universe was only a thousand times less
than its present size 1028 cm (corresponding to 10–15 billions of propagation
of light). However, in its exploration of the early stages of the universe theo-
retical cosmology goes beyond this limit in the past and attempts to explore
the processes in the universe up to the very limit of the universe, associated
(in classical cosmology) with the point of its temporal origination 10–15 billion
years ago. The advance of cosmological research, as the process directed to the
future (although unavailable to us) explores in more and more detail the alleg-
edly existent past. Thus our knowledge of the past expands in the future. It is
in this sense that one can claim that the future of the cosmological research
results in expanding of our knowledge of the past. The ‘past of the universe’
becomes the ‘future of cosmological explanation’, so that the Big Bang becomes
the telos of this explanation. In order to illustrate this thought graphically let
us make a certain transformation of the Fig. 5.1, attaching to it a logical rather
than physical sense.
In this diagram (Fig. 5.2) the human observer progresses in its knowledge of
the universe by moving into so-called future by its back, that is, by always
turning by its eyes towards the past. The Big Bang then appears as the Ideal of
cosmological explanation whose knowledge, while the base of the ‘light cone
of the past’ becomes wider and wider, expands, so that future knowledge
acquires more and more content of the past. The advance of research as
directed in the future corresponds to the growth of content of this research
Ongoing anticipation of the Past
as an Ideal of cosmological explanation
Big Bang (origin of the universe)
Cosmological research on
disclosing the past of the universe
as a process directed to the future
t
Ongoing anticipation of the Past
Figure 5.2 The Big Bang as the telos of cosmological explanation.

as unfolding of more and more aspects of the past. Thus the telos of cosmo-
logical explanation is the past of the universe – the Big Bang. One must not
forget, however, that both diagrams as well as all references to the future are
related to the natural attitude of the human mind and can be considered, from
a phemonenological point of view, only as anticipatory intentionalities, whose
sense is still to be fulfilled while studying the past of the universe. It is in this
sense that the notion of the Big Bang as the telos of cosmological explanation
functions in human subjectivity on the level of ever-fulfilled anticipatory
intentionality.
From the Substance of the Universe to the Vision of God

through Ontological Repentance
Let us briefly summarize what we have achieved so far. By employing the phe-
nomenological attitude, we have explicated that intentionality which is latently
present in cosmological research: it is related to the mystery of the inception
of incarnate subjectivity. This intentionality, being intrinsically teleological,
paradoxically attends the past of the universe, which as it is understood in the
natural attitude does not contain life. Thus one faces here a two-fold contra-
diction: on the one hand ‘the beginning of the universe’, being the telos of
cosmological explanation, that is, being the ideal of knowledge, that is, unfold-
ing through human activity towards the future, is positioned in the past; on the
other hand, what follows from here, is that human subjectivity by positioning
this ‘beginning’ in the past, intends something that excludes life and thus seem
to be non-human. Certainly this does not affect the incarnate necessities of
humanity, but leads to a certain existential deviation in a spiritual sense, for,
implicitly, it explains away the problem of personhood in the universe in a
sense of its emergence from the non-human. The paradox can be summarized
as the following: the existential concern of humanity by the foundation of its
facticity leads one away from personhood towards the unknowable undiffer-
entiated substance in the foundation of the universe which, by it very definition,
cannot account for the multihypostatic incarnations because it has nothing
to do with life. Cosmology exemplifies the existential contradiction and thus
the deprivation of transcendence. Transcendence is stopped first of all because
its subjects are eliminated from the discourse. Effectively, this very vision of
the state of affairs in the universe represents a serious corrosion of the self-
awareness of divine image in humanity, that is, deprivation of man from God.
One must remember, however, that all our conclusions are made in the
framework of the phenomenological attitude that is not granted so easily to
scientists and other critical realists, but demands a certain metanoia, when a
cosmological discourse is subjected to ecclesial transfiguration. This metanoia,
in full agreement with the phenomenological reduction does not aim to recon-
sider the result of cosmological research as they are obtained in the natural
attitude, but to change the attitude to them and to see in them some basic
exigencies of humanity, which cannot be reduced to and explained by means

of their otherness in the world. In other words, we mean the restoration of the
Divine image in humanity and hence personhood which can be achieved only
because of the will of man. Transcendence in cosmology thus should lead to
personhood, and only then to God.
Thus with all respect to priestly ambitions of modern cosmology it does not
reach any para-theistic status until it recognizes that in its apophatic essence it
discovers the otherness of the universe in persons. Any desire to fulfil intention
towards God through the universe on a discursive level is empty: it just con-
firms that cosmological signifiers do not exhaust the reality of what they intend
to signify. Theistic intentions can become filled and fulfilled only if this intend-
ing is placed in the framework of communion. Overcoming the desire of
removing God’s presence in absence in the universe corresponds theologically,
to the liturgical invocation of God and hope for His charismatic appearance in
response to this invocation. The role of the Holy Spirit, present behind these
invocations, is to fill and fulfil empty intentionalities towards God, through
the world, by Eucharistic participation and communion.
How can the transfiguring metanoia happen? Since it itself cannot be
described scientifically, we are only left with the possibility to describe it
empirically, for there is no physics in metaphysics. When we reverse our cos-
mological insight and while studying the universe reaffirm the presence of
personhood, we inevitably step into the ways of repentance. The reason’s
pride, which annihilates the sense of personhood contracts a false belief about
its own capacities and that reality which allegedly rules the world. It is here
that the dissolution of personhood in the impersonal substance of the world
takes place. In cosmology the Big Bang takes a place of this Absolute.
However, the condition in which thought cuts itself of God, prepares a
ground for finding God through being abandoned by Him. Cosmology with
all its grandeur and breathtaking imagination leaves the human heart with a
sense of frost that the universe in its vastness is effectively empty and dead,
that it is not sanctified by the human spirit in its created facticity. It is in this
sense that the inherent egocentric intentionality of the human sense of imme-
diacy of living always feels discomfort of being taken over by the discursive
reason which reduces humanity to the level of ‘walking dust’. This disaccord
of two intentionalities (that of immediate indwelling in the world and holding
the whole world in one’s mind, and, at the same time, being an organic part of
the universe) creates a spiritual tension of feeling God through the immediacy
of life and being potentially abandoned by him in cosmic immensities. As it has
been said before, cosmological research in its desire to trace down the ultimate
origins of things, seen psychologically rather than philosophically, is guided by
the fear of death as absolute annihilation of existence. The presence of this fear
is spiritually constructive because it provides an experience of God through
His withdrawal, that is, in the conditions of his ‘absence in absence’. However,
while experiencing the abandonment by God, one is urged to search for Him.
The abandonment of God manifests itself in all intellectual searches for the
abstract and trans-personal Absolute as the foundation of life. The Big Bang
in cosmology as an ideal and telos of cosmological explanation occupies the

place of such and Absolute. But withdrawal from God’s grace is capable of
bringing one back to God. Let us, as a matter of illustration, examine the
dialectic of presence and absence of God’s grace, the desire for God in the con-
ditions of being abandoned by Him, in the experience of Fr Sophrony
(Sakharov), who in his prayerful search for God refers to that period in his life
when God left him.
. . . sometimes through prayer my insight penetrated into abysmal depths. My soul

appealed to God in painful despair. Yes, being a sinner, I desire for God, the Holy
God. In my memory I did not have any concrete acts from my past except knowl-
edge of my apostasy from God, Whom I knew in my childhood and early youth.
He deviated from me when I moved aside from Him towards a mad search for
another, allegedly highest and trans-personal Absolute.43
One can conjecture, reflecting upon this example, that in order to find God,
one’s mind should descend inside the hellish furnace of the Big Bang which
swallows life and ‘where the gazing mind is alone; the earth disappears; there
are no sun and stars, no people and creatures’44 at all in order to realize all
emptiness and coldness of impersonal being.45 Only then, when this same mind
become aware that any temptation by the Big Bang theories wants to distract
and detach our consciousness from the reality of its hypostatic incarnate exis-
tence, on the planet earth in the human world, consciousness realizes the whole
scale of the paradoxical tragedy of its own existence: on the one hand, being
incarnate consciousness, it exists in the context of substance of the world, but
not being rooted in this substance; on the other hand it does not understand
the foundations of its own facticity: it feels being brought into being without
knowing its reasons and motives and being unable to control or suspend its
facticity in the conditions of life. And it is through this acute feeling of ontologi-
cal loneliness and an incessant desire to enquire about the foundations of
personal life, some other channels of human communication with reality at large
experience transformation so that the intentionality of repentance comes forth.
43. Sakharov, S. (2000) To See God as He Is, in Russian, Moscow: By the Way of Grain,
p. 139 (author’s translation).
44. Ibid.
45. By paraphrasing Berdyaev’s words this could sound like this: the Big Bang as an idea
of a ‘harmony’ of the whole forms the source for man’s slavery: this is the power of objectifi-
cation upon human existence where no freedom is allowed. But the Big Bang as the kingdom
of the universal and impersonal will come to its end and will be burnt. ‘All concrete beings,
human personalities above all, but also animals, plants and everything that has individual
existence in nature will inherit eternity, and all the kingdoms of the world, all the kingdoms
of the “common” which torment the individual personal will be burnt completely’ (Berdyaev,
Slavery and Freedom, p. 88). The chimeric Big Bang, as a primordial fireball annihilating all
life, will itself be annihilated through metanoia crushing the idols of the fallen objectivism.
At this stage faith in God is called out of its latent presence in a being, by
the power of the Spirit. To feel the loneliness in the universe and abandonment
by God one needs faith: ‘those who do no believe in God do not know the
meaning of being abandoned by Him.’46
When humans being by the virtue of their tragic wisdom are tempted to con-
template their finitude and finality, their ultimate dissolution and return to the
substance, from which they were born, at this very moment, the non-erasable
divine image in man realizes the scale of its despair and apostasy against
God – that single and life-giving source, which makes human life the most
valued thing in the universe. At this very moment a human being is ‘reduced to
zero’ in a sense of feeling alone in a vast and hardly comprehensible universe
without a link with God, being withdrawn from God, that God who still sus-
tains life through his incomprehensible absence. This acute awareness of the
mystery of life in a person who experienced a loss of care from God is described
by Fr Sophrony as ‘uncreated energy’, as the arrival of the Divine Light, and
the entry of the Spirit of God into the heart of a person: ‘. . . through the repen-
tance given to me – even up to the hatred to myself – I unexpectedly for myself
experienced a wonderful world, and uncreated light surrounded me, perme-
ated through me and transformed me into light, and was giving to me in
the Kingdom of God of Love. The Kingdom to which “there will no be end”
(cf. Matt. 18.10–14).’47 A sort of metanoia takes place here, where the inten-
tionality to comprehend the world and the meaning of existence in terms of
things and objects is changed and the event of personal existence becomes the
existential centre of disclosure and praise of God.
The Spirit exercised His action in a human heart providentially: through
the awareness of the tragic facticity of personal life the economy of the Spirit
reveals tacitly itself by showing us God in the conditions when God withdraws
from His phenomenality and is given to us through some mediated manifesta-
tions. This metanoia through the Spirit means ontological repentance. The
Comforter comes to transfigure us for while ‘returning to nothing, we become
a material, from which God creates according to his will.’48 The mystery of
personhood, revealed in ontological repentance, shows to man all the incom-
prehensible nonsense of creation if no persons are present in it. But this leads
to understanding that the basic mystery of personhood is its sheer facticity; the
gift of life originating in its transcendent otherness, in God, because ‘only that
One Who created us can have such a vision about capacities of our nature,’49
that is, to know the ultimate meaning of presence of persons in the universe.
A moment of true vision, when man faces himself before the abyss of nothing-
ness, all transitiveness of cosmological being, this moment one can compare
46. Sakharov, To See God as He Is, p. 123 (author’s translation).

47. Ibid., p. 144 (author’s translation).
with that grace, gifted to a man for the first time, which enters the reality of
the human heart when one is ‘reduced to zero’ in its primordial created naked-
ness and when one is open to those flows of the Divine presence that transforms
the human constitution and when God, while imitating his ‘absence in absence’,
comes back to man’s comprehension in the form of ‘presence in absence’. It is
after such a moment that this ‘presence in absence’ becomes that stable phase
in the human condition in which human freedom is subjected to a trial: free-
dom either to achieve the fullness of communion with God, or, alternatively,
to reject God and not to see the ultimate telos of life. The momentary conde-
scension of grace entails its providential withdrawal, for: ‘. . . we cannot
survive the fullness of grace in our earthly existence; this is the reason why all
appearances of God in his eternal glory are possible only for a very short
moment.’50 This providential withdrawal of God as unavailability of his
constant grace creates an acute sense of absence of God in spite of his presence.
The desire for God always comes together with a certain resistance to his
presence: this, in a way, gives a different explication of the paradox of human
subjectivity.
Metanoia, or ontological repentance, does not only mean change of attitude
to the world; it implies a certain ontological change in communion with it. In
order to illustrate this point let us refer again to Fr Sophrony, who makes an
interesting distinction in the human spiritual condition between what he called
‘ethical’ and ‘ontological’. He explains this distinction by comparing two
levels of repentance: ‘one is in the limits of ethics, another one, when one
speaks not about ethical things, but about eternity itself, is that about God.’51
As an example Fr Sophrony refers to the young man from the Gospels who as
an act of his personal repentance asked Christ what must he do in order to
enter the Heavenly Kingdom and to leave behind the world of transient things.
And when he testified to Christ that he followed all commandments then Jesus
said to him: ‘if you wish to be perfect, go sell your possessions, and give to the
poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.’ When
the young man heard this he went away with a heavy heart . . .’52 There are
many levels of human spiritual condition: one can be very moral and to dwell
ethically on a highest degree of perfection, but there is another level of the
human condition which is referred to the sphere of the Divine, Uncreated and
Original Being. This level demands not so much the expression of love out-
wardly and on the plane of the visible things, as to confess love by living, and
seeing all creation from within, through communion with God (it is a shift in
attitude supplemented by faith). The first level is what can be called ethics of
life, the second one is the ontology of existence. The entrance into this second
level requires one to go through repentance of an ontological order: by means

51. Sakharov, Spiritual Conversations, p. 304 (author’s translation).
52. (Matt. 19.16–22).
of this repentance one can contemplate the abysmal depths of the created order
still seeing Christ through it. And it is the transition from the level of ethics to
ontology of existence which is the most difficult and painful step which the
young man from the Gospel story, as well as many postmodern realists, could
not make. For them, probably, such a transition was inconceivable because
their search for truth is guided by the question ‘What is truth?’ And when
Christ tells humanity to change its attitude and search for ‘Who is the truth?’,
this turns out to be beyond the limits of modern science. The change of one’s
attitude to seek for the hypostatic truth needs the repentance of an ontological
order that changes man’s vision of truth as being in the world but not of this
world. Ontological repentance means that the world is no more seen as pre-
given stage for ethical behaviour but that it is created by the Will and Wisdom
of God, and that humanity humbly appreciates the tragedy of creaturehood
(expressed through the paradox of longing for immortal presence which is
hardly compatible with the necessities of its biological incarnation) as the
manifestation of the gift.
We see thus that the transition from a simply ethical spiritual condition that
can be achieved in the rubrics of the pre-given reality and which can be imple-
mented in social life, towards the awareness of existence as such, the existence
in God through communion, demands not only naturally oriented moral
behaviour and the following of the commandments, but it requires the onto-
logical ‘turn’, a kind of reversal from the simplicities of the worldly conventions,
some transfiguration of one’s naturalness into hypostatic presence, the pres-
ence which can hardly be explained in ethical terms, but can only be experienced
through faith and communion with the will of God. The transition from ethics
to ontology thus requires existential faith, not an abstract and simply moral
belief (as and ad extra to life) but the vivid and scaring contemplation of
being and the very possibility of this being to be dissolved into non-being and
oblivion. Ontological repentance implies a certain fear of mundane visions of
reality, a certain realization that the world is the gift and it is given not to all
biological creatures, but humanity alone.
The fear of existence is not something that has to be avoided in favour of a
better life, because the fear itself is an existential condition. Upon contempla-
tion of the truth of this condition, ontological repentance is possible. Ethics,
in a truly religious sense, is thus linked to the contemplation and awareness
of existence as truth about the actuality of communion with God in its poten-
tial distinction from non-being, understood as a possibility of not being in
communion. This, from a philosophical point of view, entails an important
conclusion: namely, that ethical and moral in a Christian sense can only be
such an attitude and relationship to the outer world and human beings indwell-
ing in this world that corresponds to true vision of reality of existence. This
means that truth about the human condition and the world enter the discourse
reciprocally: to see the world in the light of God man should achieve the
consciousness of its own place and destiny in the light of God. C. Yannaras
points toward the fallacy of conventional ethics which ‘separates the ethos of
morality of man, his individual behaviour and value as a character, from his
existential truth and hypostatic identity – from what man is, prior to any social
or objective evaluation of him.’53 Then he develops the thought similar to what
we have already inferred from Fr Sophrony on the transformation of ethics
into ontology.
[T]hus ethics leaves outside its scope the ontological question of the truth and real-
ity of human existence, the question of what man really is as distinct from what he
ought to be and whether he corresponds to his ‘ought’. Does humanity have an
ontological hypostasis, a hypostasis of life and freedom beyond space and time?
Does it have a unique, distinctive and unrepeatable hypostatic identity which is
prior to character and behaviour, and which determines them? Or is it a transient
by-product of biological, psychological and historical conditions by which it is nec-
essarily determined, so that ‘improvement’ in character and behaviour is all we can
achieve by resorting to a utilitarian code of law?54
Truth in comprehending the human condition entails also truth in under-

standing the outer cosmos as the inward, enhypostasized reality. In other
words, ethics as a designated word for the adequacy of human behaviour as its
‘dynamic response of personal freedom to the existential truth and authenticity
of man’ in its created condition is not separable from the carriers of this ethics;
it cannot precede their existence in some abstract world of intelligible morals.
Ethics as existential truth is the very fact and event of hypostatic freedom
which humanity exhibits. But this implies that existential truth about reality in
which humanity is involved, that is, the outer nature and the whole universe,
also proceeds from the very fact of the human existence, that there is life and
that this life is not death. Thus Christian ethics is not conceivable without the
carriers of this ethics, that is, without living beings who follow Christian faith;
to deny Christian ethics means implicitly to deny ontological presence of human
beings. The denial of ethical–ontological truth about existence in general is
tantamount to the denial of truth about the meaning of life as existential event.
As we see, the overcoming of this denial in cosmology cannot be done only
epistemologically, that is, in a non-ecclesial way. Ontological repentance implies
finding Christ as that archetype and ground of the overall humanity through
whom and by whom the gift of life is manifested. But to find Christ entails
entering a certain relationship with him so that the exploration of the universe
would represent a mode of this relationship between humanity and the Logos
of God by whom everything was made. Here the thanksgiving intentionality
enters in human subjectivity: while exploring the world we praise God for his
good creation. However it is by the providence and will of God, that humanity
53. Yannaras, C. (1996) Freedom of Morality, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,

p. 14.
54. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
while thanking God for his creation is taught by God, in the moments of his
withdrawal, not to be mislead and lured by the created as such, in particular by
those aspects of the world which engage humanity in a pseudo-transcendence.
Transcendence of the world happens not through exploring its frontiers, but
through discernment and humility of the soul, dealing with the world’s
infinities. In the present conditions that are interpreted theologically in terms
of the Fall, and which in religious conviction manifest apostasy from God,
humanity hardly understands to the fullest extent the meaning of the earthly
living world. Even less is it capable of comprehending the remote cosmic aeons
of its creative imagination which are still to be sanctified by the Divine Light.
Withdrawal of God as the Authenticity of Transcendence
Finally we discuss why the providential withdrawal of God is decisive for the
authenticity of transcendence in order to realize why there is no transcendence
towards God in some cosmological intentionalities.
As we mentioned before with a reference to Fr Sophrony, the bliss of grace
of God is a short-term experience, which never allows a recipient to contem-
plate its fullness and thus to acquire any complete knowledge of God. It is
through this unavailability of the fullness of grace that God never discloses
Himself to a human being but only shows Himself through manifestations
which cannot be phenomenalized. The basic diaphora between God and cre-
ated beings is preserved, and it is this undisclosedness of God that makes his
experience authentic and ever advancing. God has also to withdraw in order
to retain His own face (to preserve His hypostasis as He is in Himself), for
otherwise this face will be affected by the subjectivity of that one who attempts
to see God. At the same time God is not absent completely and His face appears
as a response to our call or invocation. But God’s absence is important and
imperative if He wants to retain his face as He is. If the accessibility of God
were to be an easy exercise, then we could not be sure that His authenticity
would be intact in His emerging phenomenality. In other words the phenome-
nality of God assumes that He is withdrawn from His phenomenality in some
obvious ways. The phenomenalization of God is achieved only through a
struggle to recover the presence of God in His obvious absence. And the hope
lies exactly in the fact that in order to be shown, God must withdraw.
What does all this mean in the language of transcendence. It means that God
in his transcendence (i.e. being different with us) avoids phenomenality, that
is, he does not show himself as an object. By paraphrasing J. L. Marion, one
can assert that God, who shows Himself, must act as the self by giving the self
and under the pressure of that givenness to show himself not as an object but
as sheer manifestation (i.e. not as ‘presence in presence’, but ‘presence in
absence’). This is the reason why the authenticity of God follows from His
showing Himself as Person. In this case the phenomenalization of God as

manifestation is an event of a meeting between a human subject and Person
who gives Himself.
If our meeting with God through His phenomenalization in manifestations
is an event, it is clear that it cannot be a product of any procession or
production. An event itself, as the givenness, happens on God’s volition. For
a human person it is important to make an effort to meet God in order for God
to show Himself (i.e. to phenomenalize God) in His manifestations. However,
it is here that one important detail reveals itself, which makes overall sense of
our considerations: that the phenomenalization of the revelation of God does
not entail its showing as an object. God shows Himself in his sheer manifesta-
tion, which cannot be externalized, communicated or investigated. It can only
be stated as having taken place, that is, as an event with no underlying (worldly)
causation.55 The ‘presence in absence’ of God prior to any manifestation
remains the same ‘presence in absence’ after the manifestation (or the gift of
short-term grace); however, if formerly it was not treated as an ‘event’, later
the ‘presence in absence’ appears to be the phenomenalization of God in His
manifestations in the hypostasis of a particular person. It is still ‘presence in
absence’, but now it is not that abstract philosophical ‘presence in absence’
that is available through mental induction, but that existential ‘presence in
absence’ that deals with the facticity of life, its ultimate mystery which points
towards God, who is present because there is being, because there is life, but
who, at the same time, does not phenomenalize Himself as an object, and thus,
in a way, absent in the display of the universe.
But the personal meeting with God, as we said before, requires one to make
an effort even in the conditions of a severe abandonment by God. Without this
effort the spontaneity of grace can descend on a person in very rare cases; even
in this case one cannot say that the sheer manifestation of God can be caused
or predetermined outwardly. For example, the practice of inner prayer in
Christianity, as an intentional invocation of the presence of God, creates only
a context of gaining a glimpse of grace through which the presence of God will
be somehow felt. But the actual fulfilment of its intention is not causally con-
nected with acts of prayer. If the meeting with God takes place (transcendent
God shows Himself retaining his absence) this is truly an ‘event’ with no tran-
sitive and relational features. It is in this sense that one can say that the medium
of the meeting with God can be characterized as His ‘presence in absence’.
God withdraws Himself in order to keep His transcendence. God is present in
front of that one who prays, God shows Himself in his manifestations, but this
presence takes place in His actual absence, that absence which still makes God
transcendent and which at the same time makes our experience of presence of
55. This is similar to the definition of hypostasis in Levinas, where the event is the act of
contracting existing by an existent in which there is no transitive elements and relations to
anything outside of it (See Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 43).
God authentic. The withdrawal of God from the life of the one who prays
unceasingly is a necessary condition for that one to exercise its freedom of
transcendence, that is, an attempt to ‘see’ God in His sheer manifestation,
which becomes an ‘event of the hypostasized presence in absence’ contrary to
abstract ‘presence in absence’ of God of philosophers. But even this showing
up of God’s ‘presence in absence’ to that one in whose hypostasis it is mani-
fested is not something that can be communicated to the other, so that the
manifestation of ‘presence in absence’ is hypostatic through and through, that
is, available only to persons, but not just physical objects. The withdrawal of
God in this sense is a ‘condition’ for His authenticity and uniqueness in
personal events of revelation, and, at the same time, the affirmation of His
‘presence in absence’ in our midst.
This line of thought clarifies further the essence of the Eastern Orthodox
theological apophaticism. The ‘presence in absence’ of God, being manifested
and revealed only to persons in the effected hypostatic events, does not allow
hypostatic human beings to communicate their experience of the meeting
with God in His absence. The presence in absence of God in hypostatic events
suspends all spatio-temporal modalities of the world so that the same presence
in absence is contemplated in an absolutely inexpressible way, where all natu-
ral spatial and temporal connotations of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ disappear in
God’s manifestations. This means that no demonstrated knowledge of these
events can be developed, and this is the reason why the Fathers of the Church
and theologians, in order to express their experience of ‘presence in absence’
of God, felt free to use any symbolism and allegory.
It is in this sense that theology, as being experience of God in communion,
always deals with different degrees of articulation of ‘presence in absence’.
The longing for the ideal of replacing ‘presence in absence’ by ‘presence in
presence’ of God, in fact, can lead only to the personalization of ‘presence
in absence’ by transferring to it some unique and hypostatic qualities of that
one who attempts to communicate with God. In the theology of St Maximus
the Confessor this corresponds to mediation between creation and God, not
through removing the basic distance between the world and the Divine, but
through reconciliation of those divisions between the world and God which
were effected by the Fall. Maximus describes the attainment of this mediation
as the ‘mystical union’ with God, which does not remove the dichotomy in
‘presence in absence’ of God to a creature, but mediates between this presence
and absence. In order to preserve His authenticity God must keep the differ-
ence between Him and creation and thus He must manifest himself through
withdrawal, that is, through His ‘presence in absence’. This means that the
mediation between presence and absence, even if it is effected in a mystical
union between man and God, while removing the paradoxical character of
presence in absence as it seems to human mind, does not eliminate the onto-
logical element in the dichotomy of presence in absence of God which reflects
in different words the difference (diaphora) and distance (diastema) between
God and the world.
Conclusion: Transcendence in Cosmology?
What we have been trying advocate in the pages of this book is a simple idea
that transcendence as an act of human will is possible only with respect to per-
sons or Person. Transcendence implies not knowledge which appropriates
object so that its identity dissolves in the enhypostasized form of subjectivity;
it does not imply ecstatic departure from hypostatic subjectivity and dissolu-
tion in the object of desire. Transcendence implies a more subtle and gentle
form of communion when it comes from outside as the gift of the Other who
preserves its authenticity by manifesting himself without phenomenalizing
himself. Transcendence is the reciprocal desire for loving relationship when
love amplifies both identities and makes them shown to each other without
being swallowed by each other.
We hope, that now the reader will understand why by searching for the
identity of the universe genuine transcendence cannot be reached: the universe
is not a hypostatic entity so that it cannot deliberately show itself while with-
drawing its phenomenality. The process of knowing the universe is the process
of acquiring a sort of possession of the universe on the level of phenomenality
(let it be phenomenality of mental images). The things unknowable are treated
by cosmologists as not known yet, so that the phenomenality of the universe
even if not disclosed in full yet, is disclosable in principle. Thus the search for
the universe’s identity means not transcendence towards God, but transcen-
dence towards personhood, for through studying the universe humanity enters
an invisible dialogue with itself, namely, that part of itself which is manifested
in the very possibility of knowing the universe, but whose phenomenality is
not shown. By searching for the universe’s identity, human beings exercise
their desire to know not only through mind, but by will, thus imitating the
Divine image in them. What happens then is that by attempting to know the
universe by its will humanity discovers its own Divine image; it discovers its
personhood as the centre of disclosure and manifestation, which then releases
human mind from its attachment to the outer world towards the ultimate
foundation of persons’ facticity in God.
The natural attitude of a cosmologist drives him away from an existential
question about the facticity of humanity and human subjectivity (which is
seen as the extension of the physical into biological and then psychological
through the ‘evolution’). Cosmology is incapable of transcending the facticity
of the physical in order to contemplate the purposes and ends of the universe,
which are disclosed to humanity not through its ability to sense and think
the surrounding world, but through the intrinsic sense of tragedy of existence
as creatures, through its ability to commune with the Other of the world in
a hypostatic mystical way of fear and love. It is this inability to transcend
towards God that is substituted by a surrogate of transcendence towards the
substance of the Big Bang. In the recent past some scientists and theologians
used the Big Bang theories to affirm creationist ideas, to make inferences about
God, or to deny God on the grounds of the self-sufficient evidence of cosmo-

logical theories. However, as we have seen afore, the ‘Big Bang’ (as an idea of
the ultimate impersonal foundation of the world) can be interpreted as a telos
of scientific explanation. But the thus-understood telos, reflecting rightly the
desire of humanity to search for the foundation of its own facticity, obscures
the central point of Christian teaching that the telos of humanity that involves
the world in its own teleology is not the origin of humanity (in some distant
past) but its eternal salvation. Within the Christian understanding of teleology,
the universe can be treated merely as an event in the history of salvation
and the meaning of its existence as well as ours comes from the eschatological
future.56
Cosmology attempts to personalize the universe by subjecting it to the ambi-
tions of the mathematized human reason. It wants the universe to be known
across its span in space and time in order to make the universe as a whole
‘present in its presence’. But to achieve the ‘presence in presence’ of the uni-
verse would mean to understand not only its initial conditions, its identity and
its ultimate purpose, but, in fact, to grasp the logos of its creation (as inten-
tions and volitions of God towards the world). In this case the paradox of
‘presence in absence’ of God would seem to be overcome. But it is here that it
becomes clear that neither God nor His creation can be exhaustively grasped
by incarnate beings: the apophaticism in knowing things of the world and God
thus turns out to be an intrinsic aspect of the human condition.
If this intrinsic apophaticism is understood and reflected in cosmology, so
that its knowledge is treated as a symbolic expression of our intuition about
the unity (identity) of the universe, then all the non-human and impersonal
characteristics of the Big Bang do not represent any problem, because they do
not reflect truth, and have existential meaning only as a form of ethical orien-
tation.57 In this case the Big Bang cosmology, even if it is based on the ideas of
coherence theories of justification, being still symbolic in its essence, does not
affect the perception of the life-world and does not deviate the human spirit
from communion with the ground of its creation. The idea of the Big Bang
thus looses its ‘objective’ reference, and becomes a symbol of that intentional-
ity which attempts to express the foundation and ground of its own facticity
56. See more on the idea that the universe is an ‘event’, a flash of cosmological memory,
in my Light from the East, chapter 7.
57. Cosmology can be a form of ideology, spiritual guidance and ethical imperative.
In ancient societies cosmology was important to envisage the expectations by knowing the
environment. This sustained the foundations of ethics where the moral order was deduced
from the natural one (See, for example, Lovin, R. W. and F. E. Reynolds (eds) (1985)
Cosmogony and Ethical Order, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press;
Mathews, F. (1991) The Ecological Self, London: Routledge). In the present state of human-
ity cosmology can become an ideology that can impose strange views and social and ecological
patterns which can undermine the natural grounds of humanity’s existence, and, therefore,
the existence of cosmology itself. See, for example, my Light from the East, pp. 239–44.
through the principle of its otherness, and thus, inevitably but unharmfully,
contains the features of the otherness of humanity itself. If the reflective and
critical mind, having overcome the natural attitude, understands this, it is safe
from all fallacies of objectivizing tendencies in cosmological research and it
understands that its theories express the human desire for transcendence and
overcoming psychological and ontological relativism; but no more than this,
for genuine transcendence implies the pre-philosophical and pre-rational hypo-
static communion with the ground of the created universe and consciousness
itself under the pressure of its contingent givenness. 58
Cosmological research can be treated as para-Eucharistic work, if it is
involved in communion in a deep ecclesial sense. But this requires the activa-
tion of the intentionality of the Spirit through which the abysmal detachment
from God (if one places the truth of living in the Big Bang) will be revealed,
and through which ontological repentance will be evoked leading ultimately to
the recovery of lost personhood to attain communion with God through inner
prayer and the Eucharist. If this is achieved, one can assert that the apophatic
attitude to truth asserted by cosmology and developed along the lines of phe-
nomenological philosophy evokes a far wiser and more humble relationship to
the origin of the universe, reflecting thus a far wiser and humble relationship
to the origin of ourselves.
58. If this does not happen and the Big Bang theories are taken along the line of the
natural attitude, then the immanence of the mind contradictory dissolves into impersonal
cosmic material.
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Index
anthropic inference (argument, principle) experience of, 107, 127, 175, 211
173–74, 239, 249 impersonal, 52, 97, 103
anthropology, 12, 29, 45–6, 49, 76, 155, oblivion of, 29, 93–94, 96–7, 139
168, 176, 240 unconcealment of, 75, 223
apophatic, 12, 46 withdrawal of, 97–8
ascetic, 46 being-in-the-world, viii, 2, 32, 45, 79,
Christian, theological, 45–6, 118, 122, 95, 130, 136, 138–9, 143, 146,
143, 169, 179, 234 169–72, 180, 205, 207, 231,
Apophaticism, 239–40
as via negativa, 66 Berdyaev, N., 21, 28, 34, 249, 256
in knowing the origin of human Bible references,
existence, 138 Genesis, 1.28–29, 135
in Orthodox theology, 29, 32, 65–7, Exodus, 3.14, 52
102, 107, 119, 137, 140, 146, Matthew 2.2, 160
156, 245–46, 263, 265 Matthew 18.10–14, 257
in science, 204, 265 Matthew 19.16–22, 258
See also theology, apophatic Mark 16.17, 30
Aristotle, 62, 94, 96 Luke 1.32–33, 160
Athanasius of Alexandria, St., 11, 43 Luke 2.11–12, 160
Augustine of Hippo, St., 22, 24, 93–4, Luke, 8.9–10, 160
97, 213 John 1.18, 114, 117
John 3.8, 61
Basil the Great, St., 129, 135 1 Corinthians, 12.4, 58
being, 43–4, 45, 48, 55, 62, 73, 76, 1 Corinthians, 15.28, 250
87, 89, 91, 201, 222, 235, 238, Galatians, 4.9, 115, 117
251 Hebrews, 11.1, 116, 125
absolute (divine), 95–6, 99, 101, 118, 1 John 3.2, 111
178, 258 Big Bang, 41, 233, 238, 240, 241, 243,
and humanity, 130, 132, 167, 169, 246–49, 251, 256, 265
178, 237 as telos of explanation, 246, 250–1,
as opposed to non-being, 150, 152, 253–4
180, 259 as undifferentiated substance, 240,
being-in-situation, 69, 133 247, 252, 255, 264
communion with (participation in), 42, cosmology of, 232, 251, 265
44, 116, 139, 142 See also universe: origin, initial
contemplation of, 52, 235–36 conditions
278 Index
birth (of a human being) Christian Church, 13–4, 18, 21, 45–6,
and death, 152 52, 73
as an event of incarnation, 152, 154 and the Holy Spirit, 57–8, 72, 78,
Christian typology of, 154, 158, 161 114, 157, 164–66, 206, 213, 215
contingent facticity of, 150, 159, 161 as the Body of Christ, 33, 52, 73. 113,
mystery of, 135, 150, 154, 161, 247 206, 213, 216–17
phenomenality of, 132, 137, 159, dogmas (definitions) of, 46, 245
239, 247 Eastern Orthodox, 12, 15, 19, 98
phenomenology of, 158, 247 early, united, 19–21, 28, 32, 34
See also incarnation liturgical experience of, 18, 33, 113,
body, 30, 130, 133, 181, 205, 208, 210 124, 215, 218 (See also Liturgy)
and flesh, 132, 134 mind of, 62, 110
and soul, 122, 125, 131–2, 143, 155, Roman Catholic, 19
169, 173, 179, 181, 188 the Fathers of, 11, 15–6, 41, 43,
as centre of disclosure of the 63–6, 70, 72, 105, 108, 113, 165,
universe, 50, 133, 135, 236–37 179, 263
as incarnate existence, 139, 152 Clement of Alexandria, 34, 81, 97,
phenomenology of, 236 109, 116
world as extension of, 150, 176 Cogito, 138, 140, 172, 187, 207, 234
Born, M., 190 Cogito ergo sum, 22, 141–44
Bulgakov, S., 17, 25, 28, 33 Coherence
Bultmann, R., 95, 100 in cosmology, 244, 251, 265
in theology, 245
Cappadocian Fathers, 44 of epistemic justification
Caputo, J. 101–1 (explanation), 191, 193, 243–44
Christ-event, 65, 70–72, 95, 156–60, of truth, 244
208, 217 Communion
See also Christ, jesus as transcendence, 246, 266
Christ, jesus, 52, 57, 81, 260 events of, 44, 136
and the universe, 209 separation of being and, 42, 44
as alpha and omega, 85 the universe as, 245, 250, 265
as the head of Church, 216 with persons, 141, 212
as Son-Logos of God, 93, 97, 153–54, with saints, 113
157–58, 207, 210, 216 with the Church Fathers, 13, 16, 18,
See also Logos of God 51, 62–4, 69–70, 90, 105, 113
hypostasis of, 52, 217 See also God, communion with
knowledge of God through, 114, 158 Consciousness, 38, 41, 47–9, 50, 56,
Light of, 52, 55–6, 163, 211 58–9, 65, 68–9, 120, 148, 152,
Nativity (birth) of, 95, 157, 160–61, 156, 163, 173, 184, 206, 216–17,
157–58 222–23, 225, 229–30, 236, 239,
sacramental communion with, 97, 113 266
unity of the divine and human nature absolute, 75–6, 118–19
in, 208 collective (anonymous,
Christianity, 24, 40, 58 impersonal), 121, 146–47, 168,
and Hellenism, 37, 60–64, 66, 73–4, 221
78, 82, 85, 89, 92–4, 97 facticity of, 88, 120, 143, 174,
Western (Latin), 35, 92–3 221, 242
Index 279
field (sphere, medium) of, 76, 81, 84, Creation, 14, 23, 124, 156, 158,
117, 122, 144, 147, 153, 171, 160–61, 163, 169, 226–27,
186, 210, 231, 242 238–39, 265
foundations of, 50, 59, 122, 143, 145, God as a governor and a source
174, 221, 242 of, 23, 33, 53, 150, 181, 209,
historical, 48, 62, 90 212, 217
immanent, 55, 87, 119–21, 137, 145, knowledge of God from, 128, 162
189, 248 mental, 49, 67, 162, 175, 191, 197,
incarnate, 134–35, 145, 150, 171–72, 203, 204
231, 249, 256
internal temporality of, 69, 223, 241 Daniélou, J. (Cardinal), 16
(See also time) Death
intentionality of, 53–4, 80, 82, 87, fear of, 25, 37, 150–53, 255
142–43, 149, 155, 162, 170, 182, as an end of personal existence, 152,
209 (See also intentionality) 255
personal (hypostatic), 50, 76–7, Deification, 31, 109–10
112–13, 120, 146–47, 175, 221, de Lubac, H., (Cardinal), 16
232, 239 Descartes, R., 22, 140
religious, 66, 118, 183 Diadochos of Photiki, St., 116
transcendental, 49, 76, 134, 136, dianoia (discursive reason), 122–23,
142–43, 186–87, 228 125–29, 138, 143
Contingent facticity diaphora (difference),
of created order, 55, 59, 152, 198, as a principle of variety and unity in
230, 240, 243 creation, 131
of incarnation (birth), 135, 137–38, in human hypostatic constitution, 181
151, 153, 159, 161, 163, 169 as a basic element of differentiation in
of physical laws, 239 the world, 181
of subjectivity (consciousness), 136, between God and creation, 261, 263
139, 158, 162–63, 174, 221, 223, in the presence in absence of God, 263
239, 266 diastema (distance, distinction),
of the historical, 29–30, 61, 68, 70– between humanity and the rest of
72, 75–6, 96, 102 creation, 181–82
of the universe, 41, 55, 155, 191, 240, between the hypostatic and
249–51 non-hypostatic, 182
Correspondence principle, 244 epistemological, 182
Cosmology, 41, 80, 173, 191, 193, in the dichotomy of presence in
222–23, 229–35, 237, 239–40, absence of God, 263
247, 249 division (diairesis) in creation, 33–34,
advance of, 222, 245, 247–48, 253 42, 47, 179, 200, 216, 263
apophaticism in, 204, 220, 245–46,
250, 265–66 Einstein, A., 190, 224
as cosmism, 249 Eschatology,
coherence in, 241, 244–45, 251, 265 Christian theological, 25, 33–5, 39,
quantum, 241–42 72, 97–9, 114, 153, 160–61, 165
teleology in, 246, 250–51, 253–54, 256 cosmological, 40
transcendence in, 222, 240, 252, in Christian Hellenism, 63, 65, 71, 73,
254–55, 261, 264 75, 85
280 Index
Eschatology, (Cont’d) as an existential condition, 48, 142, 147

realized (in the Eucharist), 27, 83, boundaries of, 102, 245
95, 217 existential, 34, 49, 82, 96, 106, 136–39,
Ethics, 29, 36, 211–12, 258–60 143, 149–50, 157, 105, 259
Eucharist, 27, 95, 113–14, 124, 163, See also nous; intentionality of; God,
166, 255 faith in
as a principle of truth, 113, 213, 215 Filaret (Metropolitan of Minsk and
cosmic, 23, 73 Slutsk) 60, 65, 101, 103
Evagrius Ponticus, 109 Florovsky, G., Fr., 1, 4, 11–21, 34–5, 43,
Evolution 51, 61–7, 70–4, 89, 91, 93, 95,
biological, 41, 147, 174, 180, 249, 264 97, 164–65
cosmological, 69, 147, 191 Fromm, E., 177
Existence
articulated (enhypostasised, Galileo, 22, 198, 201–2
inward), 59, 134, 182–83, God,
194–95, 203, 223, 228, 235, 237 abandonment by, 94, 100, 255,
as opposite to non-exisence, 142, 150, 257, 262
182, 230 absence of, 220, 261
existence-in-situation, 121, 130, 138, as creator, 23, 49, 53, 146, 163, 209
141, 143, 203, 205, 231 See also Creation
experience of, 73, 81, 114, 150, 211 as the Father, 103, 114
facticity of, 146, 150, 153, 201 as Trinity, 103, 115, 156, 158, 163–4,
hypostatic, 31, 43, 48, 52, 120, 129, 210
130, 145, 151–52, 169, 178, 183, as transcendent, 22–3, 55, 88, 107–8,
201, 212, 227, 235, 238, 240, 257 118–20, 163, 184, 209, 221,
incarnate, 29, 50–1, 127, 130, 146–47, 261–2
150, 152, 157, 161, 168, 183, communion with (participation in), 15,
194, 197, 207–208, 237, 239, 256 23, 31, 36, 40, 42–3, 49, 52, 57,
of humanity, 41, 45–6, 48, 57, 63, 79, 69, 82, 84, 88, 97, 102–3, 109–11,
116, 125–26, 138, 142, 147, 150, 113, 115–19, 121–24, 126, 129,
153, 168–72, 174, 178, 180–81, 133, 140, 142, 144, 147, 157,
184, 191, 197, 203, 207–209, 198, 207, 212–13, 217–18,
213, 215–16 220, 222, 226, 246, 258–59,
of the universe, 46, 209, 236, 242 263, 266
totality of, 222, 225, 227, 237 Energeia (uncreated energies) of,
tragedy of, 127, 264 162–64
truth of, 226–27, 249, 260 existence of, 125, 127
Experience experience of, 13, 18, 25, 32, 42,
mystical, 13, 65, 141, 236 47, 51, 53, 60, 64, 66, 68, 72,
of the Fathers, 68, 70, 126, 165 92, 94, 97, 105, 107, 100–12,
liturgical, 72, 126, 217, 227 115, 121–23, 125–26, 148–49,
See also God, experience of 159, 166, 245, 255–56, 261,
263,
Faith faith in, 23, 48, 52–4, 58, 96, 107,
and knowledge, 18, 24–6, 36, 43, 112, 114, 116, 119, 124–25, 127,
49, 92 106, 112–13, 116, 125, 140–41, 147, 153, 201, 207,
127–28, 214 245–46, 257, 259, 260
Index 281
grace of, 58, 110, 124, 148–49, 163, Gregory Palamas, St., 11, 17, 110–11
256, 261 Gurwitsch, A., 167, 202, 203
hypostasis of, 181, 234, 261
idea of, 77, 107, 119, 205, 242 Hawking, S., 241–43
Kingdom of, 23, 27, 113, 121, Heelan, P., 133, 167
160–61, 213, 257 Heidegger, M., 22, 27, 29, 37, 39,
knowledge of, 52, 55, 72, 110, 111, 74–75, 88–103, 118
114–15, 117, 121, 123–24, 158, Heisenberg, W., 27, 30, 187
212, 261 Hellenism, 37, 44, 60–67, 70–1, 73–5,
Light of, 54, 123, 257, 259 81–2, 85, 88–94
of philosophers, metaphysical Henry, M., 101, 108, 200
(as opposite to the living God of History
faith), 66, 97, 119, 121–22, Christian, 20, 58, 78, 93, 156,
140, 148 160–61, 208–9, 216
personal, 52, 148–49, 183, 208, 221, natural, 62, 69, 72, 85, 180
262 of salvation, 94, 217, 265
praise and glorification of, 33, 260 of the West, 24, 82, 92
presence of, 58, 104, 107, 114, 142, reduction of 75, 84, 90
156–57, 163, 205 Holy Spirit,
presence in absence of, 53, 66, 97, acting upon history, 14, 32–5, 50, 58,
104–5, 107, 120, 128, 136, 144, 62–3, 70–2, 78, 81, 85, 93, 95,
148–49, 205, 220, 245, 255, 258, 98–9, 105–6, 115, 124, 164–66
261–63, 265 and the Incarnation, 61, 155, 158,
relationship between the world 161, 207
and, 107, 170, 179, 198–99, and the human spirit, 114, 121, 154,
204–5, 209, 213, 220–21, 263, 265 156, 158, 216, 257
Son (Logos, word) of, 70, 71, 81, (See also humanity, spirit of)
97, 114, 125, 133, 148, 153–58, anonymity of, 159, 162
161–2, 169, 183, 203–4, 207–10, invocation of, 18, 41, 72, 153, 255
216, 234, 260 (See also Christ, in the dialogue between theology and
logos of God) science, 51, 163
Spirit of, 14, 32, 47, 97, 110–11, 121, the Grace of, 56, 59, 123–24, 163
263 (see also Holy Spirit) person of, 71–2, 102, 114, 163–64
union with, 14, 31–2, 47, 97, 109–11, present in uncreated energies, 52
121, 263 Humanity,
unknowability of, 32, 57 European 74, 77–8, 81–83, 87, 91
Will of, 43, 154, 208, 221, 257, 259, and technology, 26, 29, 30, 32,
260 34, 199
Wisdom of, 144, 148, 208, 259 and the universe, 48–50, 57, 59, 134,
withdrawal of, 97, 104–5, 255–58, 155, 173–77, 180–81, 183–84,
261, 263 186, 189, 200, 205, 207, 209,
Gregorios, P., (Metropolitan), 31, 33, 211, 215–16, 222, 264–65
37–8, 40, 51 as being-in-the-world, 32, 45, 79,
Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus), 136, 138, 143, 169–72, 205, 231,
St., 109, 195 239–40
Gregory of Nyssa, St., 174, 181, 214, as container of the universe, 50, 176,
216–17 181, 208
282 Index
Humanity, (Cont’d) spirit of (human spirit), 13, 21, 23,

as dative of manifestation and 28–36, 41–2, 45, 47, 50, 58,
nominative of disclosure, 147, 240 66–8, 70–2, 85, 93, 105, 106,
as hypostasis of the universe, 55, 69, 114, 120, 195, 199–203, 206,
163, 180, 182, 228, 233 207, 213, 215, 218, 227, 250,
(See also universe, as ehypostasized by 255, 258, 265
humanity) (See also paradox of human
as inherent in the Logos, 125, 148, subjectivity)
169, 181, 183, 195, 197, Humankind-event, 165, 180, 207
203–204, 207, 210–11, 260 Husserl, E., 4, 27, 43, 63, 75–86, 91,
as image of God, 51, 54–5, 127, 133, 93–5, 99–101, 118–20, 137, 140,
153, 158, 162, 178–79, 180–81, 147–48, 171–72, 175–76, 184,
189, 198, 214, 226, 248, 264 197–98, 201–202, 242, 250–51
as image of Christ, 52, 57, 102, 153, Hypostasis,
214, 217 as opposite to ousia (substance), hysis
as microcosm, 155, 174, 180, 189, (nature), 200, 222–23
209, 213 ecclesial, 144, 216–17
as mediator, 33, 42, 47, 189–90, 192 event of (in Levinas), 130, 182, 229,
as multihypostatic 231, 262
consubstantiality, 33, 77, 121, See also: personhood;God, hypostasis
123, 130, 132, 134–36, 145, 149, of; Christ, hypostasis of;
168, 173, 183, 185, 209, 214, humanity, as hypostasis of the
235, 239 universe,
as priest of creation, 198, 216
condition of (human condition), 69, Ignatius of Antioch,St., 113
86, 105–8, 116, 122, 125, 130, incarnation (as embodiment, birth), 46,
132, 136, 149, 170, 172, 175, 50, 121, 128, 130–32, 134–35,
178–79, 192, 194, 196–97, 152, 154, 210, 239, 254
200–201, 206–208, 211, 231, as the central ‘given’ of
247–48, 258–60, 265 metaphysics, 130, 132–33
constitution of (unity of body and contingent facticity of, 135, 137, 153
soul) of, 126, 132, 143, 181 hypostatic, 159, 249
destiny (telos) of, 26–7, 32, 40–1, 61, mystery of, 131–32, 134, 138
76, 81, 139–40, 199, 217, 226, presence in absence of, 135
265 intentionality
entelechy of, 4, 5, 45, 66, 74, 78, 81, change (see also metanoia)
251 ecclesial (eucharistic), 216–18, 260
free will (freedom) of, 25, 103, egocentric, 182, 184–85, 238, 255
184–85, 194, 198, 226–28, 264 empty, 140, 147, 248
fullness (pleroma) of, 155, 217 eschatological, 27, 35–6, 38, 58, 124,
history of, 13–4, 33–4, 40, 49, 61–2, 152, 159, 161, 163, 250
69–72, 76, 78–9, 81, 85, 105, in the mode of faith, 49, 82, 95, 107,
164–65, 179–80, 191, 208 124–25, 142, 206
infinite tasks of, 40, 71, 73, 77, logos-like, 153, 155, 161–62
163, 250 non-egocentric, 188, 195, 201,
intelligence of, 191–92, 214, 242, 249 210, 238
mathematisation of, 197, 242, 265 scientific, 106, 155, 183, 201, 217
Index 283
Spirit-like, 99, 149, 153–55, 157–58, (See also Christ; Holy Spirit; universe,
161–62, 234, 266 as inherent by the Logos)
theological, 106, 118, 143–44, 254 Lossky, V., 14, 56, 66, 133
Irenaeus of Lyons, St., 113, 158, 213
Isaac the Syrian, St., 24–26, 127 Mantzaridis, G., 15
Marcel, G., 114, 127, 129–34, 137–41,
Kant, I., 190, 202 150–51, 153, 237–38
Kern, K., (archimandrite), 14 Marion, J.-L., 101, 108, 120, 261
Kingdom of God Mathematics, 187–88, 190–93, 195–97,
as inaugurated by Christ, 27, 154, 202, 232, 241–42
160–61 Maximus the Confessor, St., 17, 33, 43,
parables, of 160 47, 55, 122–25, 127, 131–32,
thanksgiving invocation of, 25, 41, 213, 215–17, 226, 247, 263
113 (see also Eucharist) Merleau-Ponty, M., 175–76, 204
Knowledge Metanoia (change of mind), 24–5, 34–6,
as episteme, 80, 186, 195, 202, 41, 49, 51–2, 68, 70, 88, 107,
existential, 70 108, 111, 255, 257
of persons, 70 and apophaticism, 146, 148
progress of, 72 and phenomenological reduction, 144,
wisdom in, 213–14, 217 147–48
Kockelmans, J., 72 as a mode of faith, 26, 145
as transformation of
Levinas, E., 100, 101, 108, 130, 169, consciousness, 24, 26, 145–46
182, 236, 262 as repentance, 254, 257
life-world, 48, 86–7, 95, 99, 105, in knowledge, 27, 43, 124, 144, 217,
120–21, 171–72, 203–207, 227, 254
232, 234, 250–51, 265 Meyendorf, J., 14, 44
Liturgy,
cosmic, 133 Natural Attitude, 45, 47–9, 66, 68, 77,
See also Eucharist; Kingdom of God; 82, 87, 106, 117–18, 120, 122,
God, articipation in; Christian 126, 129–32, 134, 136–37, 139,
Church liturgical experience of; 143–45, 147, 149–53, 155–56,
Holy Spirit; Tradition, 170–75, 183, 221, 223, 225,
ecclesial. 230, 241, 247–49, 251, 254,
logos (logoi) 264, 266
of humanity, 179, 181, 216 Natural light (as light of a
of non-hypostatic beings, 181 knowledge), 54–5, 57, 59, 123,
of the universe, 99, 155, 157, 165, 134–35, 143–44, 213
179, 265 Nature
of things and natural beings, 27, 55, 195 as created (by God), 38, 160, 221
Logos of God as enhypostasized (articulated) by
as the center of origination of the humanity, 134, 203
logoi, 179 at large (all-encompassing), 168, 170,
as the head of the universe, 216 177
hypostasis of, 153, 207, 209–10 desanctification of, 28
Incarnation of, 51, 155–58, 160–61, laws of, 191, 194
207–11 manifest image in, 133
284 Index
Nature, (Cont’d) primacy of, 210, 212

mathematisation of, 173, 182–83, recovery of, 219, 255, 266
189, 191, 193–98, 201–203, 205, as communion, 23, 226
206, 242, 265 See also hypostasis
meaning of (in Christ), 56, 158, Pentecost, 61–2, 72, 95, 97, 154,
161, 163 156–57, 161, 164–66, 217
necessities (slavery to), 40, 46, 135, phenomenological attitude, 27, 103,
141, 151, 247 137, 144, 147, 183, 228, 230,
teleologies in, 118 246, 251, 254
Nellas, P., 15 phenomenology, 27, 48, 55, 74–9, 81–2,
Neo-Patristic Synthesis 85, 87–8, 100, 107, 122, 144,
in theology, 4, 11–2, 14–18, 42, 51–3, 148, 172, 234
57–8, 70, 71, 73, 98, 105, 111–12 and European thought
(see also Florovsky) (humanity), 76–9, 81–2, 85, 87,
of theology and science, 5, 7, 35 91–3
Nesmelov, V., 178 and Protestant Christianity, 83, 104
Nicene Creed, 133, 207 and theology, 103, 108, 112, 118,
Noetico-Noematic correlation, 86–7, 149, 171
157, 167, 207, 210, 217, 239 and the sciences, 86, 87, 100, 201,
Nous (spiritual intellect), 24, 118, 122, 204, 205, 250
122–28, 138, 143, 212 and Thomism, 100
existential, 56, 58, 74, 104, 169–70,
Orthodoxy, 11, 19, 32, 64, 102 172
and the West, 19, 20, 21, 23, 27, 31, of birth, 158, 247
35, 44, 116 theological turn in, 84, 108
See also, heidegger, henry, husserl,
paradox of human subjectivity in the levinas, marcel, marion,
universe, 59, 136, 147–48, 173, merleau-Ponty, ricoeur, stein
175–83, 186, 197, 200, 201, 205, Philokalia, 17, 110, 123
207, 208–209, 222–23, 227, 235, philosophy,
249 and theology (See theology, and
Patristic mind (mind of the Fathers), 13, philosophy)
15–8, 35, 68–70 Christian, 24, 51, 82, 92–3
See also Christian Church, fathers of. Greek, 30 61–3, 65–7, 74–5, 77–9,
Patristics 80–1, 84–5, 88, 90–2, 94, 96–7
Greek, 16, 18–9, 22 (See also Aristotle, Plato)
Latin, 19 history of, 60, 74, 78, 81, 85,
Oriental (Syrian), 17 89–90
Russian, 17 phenomenological
Penrose, R., 243–44 (see phenomenology)
personhood Western European, 19, 45, 67, 73,
as personal existence, 43–4, 46, 80, 79, 92
212, 257 scientific, 37, 67, 107, 117, 189
oblivion (dissolution) of, 28, 196, physics, 202, 229, 241
210, 255 Plato, 62, 78, 96, 187, 191, 195, 201
as otherness of the universe, 212, 255 pneumatology, 155, 164
Index 285
Poincare, H., 192 subjectivity (see dianoia (reason),

Popovitch, J., St., 145, 177 intentionality, aradox of
presence in absence subjectivity)
of God, 107, 119–20, 128, 136, 205,
220, 246, 256, 258, 261–63, 265 technology (see science, and technology)
of human person, 48, 139, 221–22, teleology
224–29, 257 in cosmology, 246–47, 250–54, 256
of the universe, 228–29, 231, 233, (see also Big Bang, as telos of
240, 245, 250, 255 explanation)
of European humanity, 79, 85
Rahner, K., 100 of science, 39, 74, 166, 224, 250, 265
Ricoeur, P., 77 of the human reason (spirit), 36, 47,
66, 77, 89, 105, 203, 227, 249–50
Sakharov, S., Archimandrite, 15, 53, of the Spirit, 165–66
110, 146, 154 Theology (Christian) 39, 44, 64, 67, 73,
Salvation, 41, 64, 71, 94, 160, 107, 111, 84, 207, 212
129, 180, 217, 265 academic, 43, 73, 97, 116
Schmemann, A, fr., 15, 114 advance of, 88, 104,
Science, and phenomenology, 82, 84, 88, 94,
advance of, viii, 12, 31, 36–7, 145, 105, 108, 118, 170–72
165, 168, 188, 194, 202–3, 212, and science (see science, and
214, 223, 229 theology)
and religion, 35–6, 40, 244 apophatic, 32, 107, 114, 144, 220,
and theology, 12, 18–22, 28, 31, 34–5, 245 (see also apophaticism)
40, 42–3, 45, 47–53, 57–8, 60, as demonstrated faith, 13, 34, 109
67–70, 73–75, 78, 82, 85–6, 88, as direct experience of God, 47, 107,
98–107, 111–12, 115, 117, 121, 109–10, 129
126, 136–7, 149, 153–55, 161–63, as explicating the human condition
167, 170, 175–76, 178, 183, 189, (life-world), 117, 153, 204
199–201, 205, 208, 221–22 as participation (communion), 11,
and phenomenology, 48, 86, 201, 205 117, 121
and philosophy, 19, 34, 43, 45, 66, as worship and liturgy, 113
75, 82, 85, 92, 99, 107, 122, 151, charismatic dimension of, 58, 114–15
179, 212 crisis in, 4, 12, 97
and technology, 21, 23, 26, 28–33, ecclesial, 33–4, 52, 61, 73, 87, 97–99,
36–40, 91, 97, 198 101
as historical process, 202 eucharistic, 109, 115, 165
natural, 21–2, 75, 92, 168, 187, 206, existential, 43–4
225 natural, 222
objectivity of, 167, 170, 173, 184–85, of the Incarnation, 61, 154–55
193 Orthodox, 11–2, 14, 19, 20, 23,
25, 31, 33, 37, 45–6, 64, 67,
Sherrard, P., 21, 24, 28–9, 36, 193, 198 110, 116, 128, 163–64, 199,
sobornost (conciliarity), 134, 168, 213–16 213, 244
Staniloae, D., Fr., 16, 39, 133, 199 Patristic, 13, 17, 43, 60–2, 66, 82–3,
Stein, E., St., 82, 100 92, 100, 102–104, 143
286 Index
Theology (Christian) (Cont’d) as sacrament, 218

hilosophical, 62, 97–8, 100, 104, 122, co-inherence with, 235, 238
207 communion with, 227, 231, 235–36,
Western (Latin), 21, 23–4, 45 238–39, 245
Time, evolution (development), 69, 217
and space, 132–33, 136, 141, 152–53, fate (future) of, 217, 240
155–57, 161, 181, 186–88, 208, history of, 69, 180
209, 214, 223, 232–33, 235, 245, identity of, 229, 231–36, 238–42,
252, 265 246, 264, 265
beginnig of, 53 initial conditions of, 240, 243–44,
eidetic reduction of, 112 252
end of, 42, 132, 217 knowledge (intelligibility,
historical, 61, 241 rationality) of, 164, 173, 175,
internal consciousness of, 69, 134, 191, 198
233, 241 mathematical, 28–9, 203, 205
Torrance, T., 16, 25, 116, 121, 157, 208 origin (beginning) of, 41, 151, 236,
Tradition, 238–40, 243, 244, 246–48, 251,
Church’s (ecclesial), 11, 46, 57, 61, 254, 266
66, 70, 98, 113–15, 129, 165, personification (personalization)
206, 215, 217, 245 of, 203, 239, 265
Eastern Orthodox, 12, 19, 33 presence and absence of, 105
Hellenistic (classical), 67, 74, 81, present-day, 41, 251–52
88–90, 92 purposes and ends of, 189, 264
Patristic, 13–5, 34, 51, 74, 131 quantum, 241
Western (European), 122, 168 scientific picture of, 29, 49, 136, 185,
Transcendence, 187, 199, 204, 225, 237
in phenomenology, 127, 149 sense (meaning) of, 105, 151, 198,
in science, 37–8 251
Trubetskoi, S., 215 substance of, 130, 132, 134
transfiguration of, 33, 217
Universe, 34, 48, 56, 80, 220, 222–24, unity of, 231–32, 238
237, 255, 257, 262
as an intentional correlate of von Balthasar Hans Urs, 16
subjectivity, 209
as church, 215–16 Wallace-Hadrill, D., 56
as created, 161, 208, 209 Ware, K., Bishop, 16
as enhypostasized (articulated, Weyl, H., 192
disclosed) by humanity, 55, 163, Wheeler, J., 172
180–81, 203, 209, 228, 235, 237, World (see life-world; the universe; God;
239, 249, 260 being-in-the-world)
facticity of, 236, 239–40, 247, 251
as inherent in the Logos of God, 52, Yannaras, C., 15, 20–1, 100, 115, 234,
135, 154–55, 183, 208–10, 233–34 259
as the whole, 143, 151, 155, 158,
160, 178, 206, 209, 216–17, 229, Zizioulas, J., Metropolitan, 15–6, 100,
230, 232, 260 101, 103, 111, 165

Nesteruk, Alexei V.-The Universe As Communion - Towards A Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and Science-T & T Clark (2011)

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Nesteruk, Alexei V.-The Universe As Communion - Towards A Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and Science-T & T Clark (2011)

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THE UNIVERSE AS COMMUNION

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Copyright © Alexei V. Nesteruk, 2008

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN-10: HB: 0-567-03327-9

Introduction: The Delimiters of the Dialogue between Theology

Chapter 1: A Neo-Patristic Ethos in the Dialogue between

Chapter 2: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Existential

Chapter 3: Theology and Phenomenological Attitude: The Human

Chapter 4: The Dialogue between Theology and Science:

THE PARADOX OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND THEOLOGY 178

Chapter 5: The Universe as Communion: Apophatic Cosmology,

assistance with creating computer graphs. My colleague and friend George

However, the existential ideal of patristic theology experienced a certain loss

project of disclosing the foundations of science, attempted to enquire about

experience, originates from the same source, as products and correlates of

Florovsky’s Appeal to a Neo-Patristic Synthesis in Theology

Theology remained an enclave within the organism of the Church. As it developed in

cultural environment. However, the return to the Fathers must be creative.

Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Orthodox Theology in the Twentieth Century

The appeal of Florovsky for a ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis’ was followed in the

Patristic heritage received its further clarification through the works of a

expositions by the immediate experience of God, without which any theology

However the recovery of a spiritual orientation in a style and manner of

A Neo-Patristic Synthesis and the Reintegration of the Human Spirit

Orthodox theology must preserve its independence from Western influences,

It could be argued that an authentic dialogue between science and Christian

Disintegration between East and West as Seen through

as a methodological and historical fact is the not-infrequently made link

Western Christianity, by adopting discursive thinking (detached from experi-

Metanoia in the Collision of Faith and Knowledge:

The major antipathy of the Orthodox to scholasticism is the ambition of

50. St Isaac the Syrian, ‘Homilies’, p. 245.

Christian societies.60 This harsh judgement about technology by the Orthodox

66. Clément, Le Christ Terre des Vivants, p. 146.

meaning of things from within a particular fragmented social and cultural

verities . . . Divorced from love and wisdom, science/technology becomes an

73. Gregorios, Science for Sane Societies, p. 75.

Metanoia in Scientific Research or How to Implement

tools making human life comfortable (although very non-independent from

82. P. M. Gregorios comments in this context ‘Science is not as objective a system of

Thus one can suggest that technology must be appropriated by Christianity

86. Staniloae, Theology and the Church, p. 225.

which is always an eschatological act. It is here that we see the presence of an

The Existential Reintegration of Humanity as the Central Theme

Paradoxically, this situation can also be revealed in modern academic theology

synthesis as proclamation of truth about the Word of God.93 ‘The theologian

Theology must become dialogical in order to talk about God in dialogue

events of human beings as well as ecclesial realities of the ever-building Church

Orthodox theology away from a naïve hope of finding an all-encompassing

The Dialogue between Theology and Science as a Refusal

As we mentioned already, any comparison of what science affirms about reality

or giving in exchange, or the communion. . . .’97 When the sciences articulate

97. Dondeyne, A. (1958) Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith,

unless the issue of the human transcendental subjectivity becomes a central

Why Does a Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and

99. Gregorios, Cosmic Man, p. 226.

The treatment of science as a mode of the human condition opens a way

Many theologians of the philosophical type, remaining essentially rationalists, rise

105. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, p. 42 (emphasis added).

One can conjecture that any scientifico-philosophical ascension to God, if it