For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West

By John Panteleimon Manoussakis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

For the Unity of All offers significant and new contributions for the furthering of dialogue and the path to unity between East and West. In this excellent example of ecumenical theology, the author utilizes the resources of contemporary philosophy in an effort to shed some new light on centuries-old debates that perpetuate the division between the Christian churches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498200431

John Panteleimon Manoussakis

John Panteleimon Manoussakis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, and an Honorary Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy of the Australian Catholic University. He was born in Athens, Greece, and educated in the United States (PhD, Boston College). He is also a monastic ordained to the diaconate in 1995 and into the priesthood in 2011 (Archdiocese of Athens). His publications focus on philosophy of religion, phenomenology (in particular post-subjective anthropology in Heidegger and Marion), Plato and the Neo-Platonic tradition, and Patristics (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius and Maximus). He is the author of two books, editor of five volumes and he has published over thirty articles in English, Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.

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For the Unity of All

Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West

John Panteleimon Manoussakis

Foreword by 
His All-Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I

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FOR THE UNITY OF ALL

Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West

Copyright © 2015 John Panteleimon Manoussakis. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

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Eugene, OR 97401

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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0042-4

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0043-1

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Manoussakis, John Panteleimon

For the unity of all : contributions to the theological dialogue between east and west / John Panteleimon Manoussakis ; foreword by Patriarch Bartholomew.

xx + 102 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0042-4

1. Orthodox Eastern Church—Relations—Catholic Church. 2. Orthodox Eastern Church—Doctrines. 3. Catholic Church—Doctrines. 4. Christian union—Orthodox Eastern Church. 6. Christian union—Catholic Church. I. Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, 1940–. II. Title.

BX324.3 .M36 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For His Holiness

Pope Francis

and

His All-Holiness

The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I

On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Historic Encounter between Their Predecessors

Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras

1964–2014

Ut unum sint!

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Foreword

It is with joy that we welcome and recommend For the Unity of All, by the Reverend Dr. John Panteleimon Manoussakis.

For several decades now, especially since the historical meeting in January 1964 of our predecessor, the late Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, with the late Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem, the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church have made significant progress toward reconciliation as obedience to our Lord’s prayer and commandment that His disciples may be one (John 17:21), as well as toward the realization of their identity as sister churches.

What occurred in 1964 was little noticed at the time. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary departure from the inexcusably cold and hitherto nonexistent relations between our two churches over many centuries. It led to the mutual lifting of the anathemas only a year later, the exchange of visitations at the respective patronal feasts, and ultimately the theological dialogue between our two churches. Thus, the dialogue of love gradually prompted and progressed into the dialogue of truth.

One of the most significant issues embraced in recent years by the joint international commission for this dialogue has been the difference in methodological and theological approaches to primacy in the Church. This book contributes to the ongoing discussion of this crucial topic.

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Acknowledgments

I am thankful to His Eminence Metropolitan John of Pergamon (Zizioulas), who, in his capacity as the co-president, allowed me to attend the ninth plenary session of the Joint International Commission on the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in Belgrade, an experience that gave me the initial inspiration for this book; the influence of his theological work can be felt in every page of the present work.

I am also thankful to His Eminence Metropolitan Methodios of Boston, in whose Metropolis I have the privilege to serve and whose commitment on the ecumenical dialogue has been a personal example.

I am grateful to His Excellence Archbishop of Lecce Domenico Umberto D’Ambrosio for his kind invitation to give a lecture in Lecce in honor of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s twentieth anniversary from his election to the apostolic throne of St. Andrew. Most of the material for the first part of this book originated as part of that lecture. I am thankful to Dr. Massimo Vergari (of the Office of Ecumenical Relations of the Archdiocese of Lecce) and to Mrs. Isabella Bernardini D’Arnesano and to Mr. Awdie Coppola for facilitating that visit and providing me with unforgettable hospitality. Thanks are also due to Prof. Aristotle Papanikolaou for inviting me to give a paper at the conference Orthodox Constructions of the West at Fordham University. An earlier version of the discussion on primacy was first presented there and it was subsequently included in the proceedings of that conference.

I am also thankful to Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević) for his kind invitation to participate in the international conference on St. Maximus the Confessor in Belgrade, Serbia, in October 2012. The last chapter of the present book originated in that conference presentation.

The manuscript of this book was substantially improved by the corrections and comments of Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman, Abbot of Glenstal Abbey; Prof. Richard Kearney of Boston College; and two of my former students at the College of Holy Cross, Thomas Arralde (now brother Ambrose, OP) and Nicholas Powers. I am thankful to all of them for their willingness to read this work. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues at the College of Holy Cross, in particular Fr. John Gavin, SJ.

I would also like to fulfill a promise and an obligation by thanking Dr. Artur Sebastian Rosman for a wise recommendation at a moment of despair. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my editors at Wipf and Stock, Dr. Charlie Collier and Mr. Jacob Martin, whose tremendous efficiency made the publication of this book so much more pleasurable. As always, I thank Dr. George Pelayo for his friendship and his unfailing support of my work.

Introduction

For the peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord.

So reads the third petition of the great collect (ἡ μεγάλη συναπτή) with which every liturgical service in the Orthodox Church begins. In repeating these words the praying church echoes the prayer of its Lord, in which, we could say, the Church finds the beginnings and summation of its own liturgical life: "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:20–21). The petition also recapitulates the early church’s understanding of unity as, at once, a sign and a promise given to the Church. Thus St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Ephesians:

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph

4

:

1

–

6

)

The very structure of the Church with its various ministries (a theme which will occupy our discussion in this book at some length by means of the dispute over Petrine ministry) reflects and safeguards the mystery of this mystical unity of all:

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Eph

4

:

11

–

13

)

It seemed thus quite appropriate that the present essay in ecumenical theology¹ be named after so important and ancient a prayer: for the unity of all.

The cause of the ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church became a concern of mine a long time before I had any academic engagement with theology: it imposed itself on me as a problem in the days of my junior seminary in Athens, in the all too urgent form of my young classmates’ hostility toward all things Latin. The first forms of this work, therefore, should be traced back to the debates that kept a number of young Orthodox seminarians up late at night, when the risk of being branded a sympathizer of the pope was much greater than the punishments we would have suffered had our schoolmaster found us out of our beds long after the lights had gone out.

It would have been difficult to imagine then that, only some years later, I should be given the opportunity to participate in the deliberations of a plenary meeting of the highest consultation on the theological dialogue between the two churches. I was afforded exactly that experience in September 2005, at the meeting of the Joint International Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Belgrade, Serbia. Other occasions of a similar nature were to follow: academic conferences and invited lectures that touched, one way or another, on the relations between the two churches.² Meanwhile, I had entered the monastic life and was ordained into the priesthood. Along with my ecclesiastical profession came the engagements of my professional life as an academic, teaching and writing at times on theological philosophy and at other, more daring moments on philosophical theology. The two occupations were never better harmonized than when I had to call on philosophy’s resources in order to articulate or explain—I do not dare say solve—one of the problems which the futile polemics between the two churches passed down to us as our onerous inheritance. I am aware that, in doing so, I was humbly following, as a latecomer, a long line of tradition that goes back to the great synthesis of Athens with Jerusalem that took place during the Middle Ages, and extends as far back as St. Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, and the early Apologists. For philosophy has always played and continues to play an irreplaceable role in the articulation of the faith, as Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) states quite unambiguously:

As a theologian, I do not regard philosophy as being, ultimately, a study which we pursue for philosophy’s sake. And yet how the very case at hand demonstrates that the integrity of faith depends on rigor of philosophical thinking, such that careful philosophizing is an irreplaceable part of genuine theological work.³

The tradition of employing philosophy’s resourcefulness, theology’s ancilla of old, in cultivating an ecumenical theology was not entirely lost in the times of modernity. The pioneer in what might be called an ecumenical theology was the great Renaissance philosopher and polymath Nicholas of Cusa, whose participation in two equally unsuccessful councils, Basel and Ferrara, provided him with the opportunity of some remarkable theological contributions.⁴ Then there is also the example of Leibniz’s missions, officially entrusted on him, in facilitating the theological dialogue between the Catholic and the Protestant churches in the late seventeenth century. Even though the desired outcome of reunion was not one of the fruits of his labors, his efforts have given us some remarkable works, such as his Dissertation on Predestination and Grace.⁵

The book at hand provides its reader with two such examples: each of the two chapters of Part Two draws from contemporary philosophy and especially phenomenology, in an attempt to revisit some theological issues that have become points of contention between East and West.

The first of these chapters has to do with the (possibility of the) experience of God and the nature of such an experience. As a point of departure for that investigation serves the old debate on the hermeneutic of the Old Testament theophanies: how does God appear to Moses and Elijah and, for the Christian exegete, who—that is, which of the three persons of the Holy Trinity—appears? Two different answers have been given to these questions, behind which the alleged difference between Eastern and Western theology became exemplified and crystalized. On behalf of the latter spoke St. Augustine; in defense of the former wrote a late Byzantine theologian, St. Gregory Palamas. Our chapter reads the two fathers closely and with respect to their theological and historical idiosyncrasies, while it seeks to discover the common ground not only between Augustinian and Palamite theological aesthetics but, by extension, between two distinct—and for some antithetical—theological styles represented by these two theologians.

The second chapter ventures a similar attempt, but this time with respect to the relationship between the human will and the divine grace. On this score, too, some have seen East and West as standing on opposite sides, or at least as approaching this issue with different sensitivities, indicative, as they believe, of a different mindset that characterizes each church in opposition to the other. In this chapter we turn again to St. Augustine, not only because he is the father of the philosophical problem of the will as well as the doctor of grace, but because he is invariably seen by anti-Western authors as the instigator of every evil that befell the West—from the Great Schism to the Reformation and the Enlightenment and beyond.⁶

In both of these chapters, I have tried to