On the Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement

By Matthew Baker, Seraphim Danckaert and Nicholas Marinides

"Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the Law by Thy precious Blood. By being nailed to the Cross and pierced with the Spear, Thou hast poured immortality on mankind. O our Saviour, glory to Thee. " — Troparion for Holy Friday“Atonement” is a contested but inescapable term in contemporary English-language theological discussion. The doctrine of atonement has received little attention in Orthodox Christian circles since the work of Fr Georges Florovsky, who labored to clarify and promulgate the Orthodox teaching on atonement on the basis of his theological leitmotifs of neo-patristic synthesis and encounter with the West. Florovsky saw the doctrine of the person of Christ as the key to apprehending the pattern and the unity of God's redemptive work. Hence he always sought to follow the Church Fathers in weaving together the themes of creation and fall, incarnation and atonement, deification and redemption, liturgy and asceticism, in the variegated yet seamless robe of true theology.The present volume is inspired by Florovsky's legacy. It is composed of two parts. The first is a collections of papers on atonement by contemporary theologians from a patristic symposium in honor of Florovsky held at Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University in 2011. The second part is a collection of writings on atonement by Florovsky himself, including previously unpublished manuscripts and other works otherwise hard to access. This book offers incisive and informed neo-patristic voices to any contemporary discussion of atonement, thus responding to the perennial legacy and task to which Fr Georges Florovsky exhorted Orthodox theological reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942699132

Matthew Baker

Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the MacDowell Colony, among many others, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. Born in Michigan, he currently lives in New York City.

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PART I

PROCEEDINGS OF THE SYMPOSIUM

Introduction

Marcus Plested

Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the Law by Thy precious Blood. By being nailed to the Cross and pierced with the Spear, Thou hast poured immortality on mankind. O our Saviour, glory to Thee.

(Orthodox Troparion for Good Friday)

Upon the Altar of the Cross / His Body hath redeemed our loss:/ and tasting of His roseate Blood, / our life is hid with Him in God.

(Ancient Latin Hymn for Eastertide)

A TONEMENT HAS THE DISTINCTION of being virtually the only theological term of wholly English origin. Used by Tyndale to render the Greek καταλλαγή (reconciliation), atonement speaks first and foremost of the at-one-ing of God and man, the reestablishment through the saving work of Christ of the union and communion lost at the Fall. Only secondarily has the term become overlaid with notions of expiation, propitiation, sacrifice, and substitution—associations that have made many Orthodox theologians instinctively uncomfortable with the term. Modern Orthodox soteriology has, very broadly speaking, tended to privilege the cosmic themes of creation, incarnation, and deification over the historical drama of fall and redemption, themes that have typically received greater attention in the Christian West. The experience of the divine light can be a more familiar topic for many Orthodox than the atoning death of Christ, the transfiguration a more congenial subject than the crucifixion, deification a more enticing prospect than mere redemption from sin. But the theological vision of Fr Georges Florovsky is one that adroitly encompasses all these necessary dimensions of Christian faith and that militates strongly against any sort of simplistic East-West dichotomy.

Florovsky is indeed one of the few writers in either East or West able to unite so cogently the themes of creation and fall, incarnation and atonement, and deification and redemption. This quality of balance is very much the product of his immersion in the Fathers of East and West alike. Florovsky’s theological program was consciously catholic in its deliberate encompassing of both Latin and Greek patristic traditions with all their distinctive emphases and insights. Florovsky’s whole conception of a neopatristic synthesis, let us recall, is posited on the underlying harmony of these traditions. The ubiquitous references in his works to Latin teachers, theological terms, and liturgical texts eloquently proclaim his conviction of the essential unity of East and West. It is no accident that he should have chosen to devote particular attention to the atonement—a theme that has historically preoccupied the West to a greater extent than it has the East. Indeed Florovsky’s essay on the atonement may be considered the closest he ever came to producing a tangible example of neopatristic synthesis in practice.

The essay In Ligno Crucis: The Patristic Doctrine of the Atonement presents itself as a positive reconstruction of the original patristic doctrine. This systematic reconstruction is offered as proof that just by return to the Fathers one may regain a solid basis for theological research and a pointer toward what one may describe as a neopatristic synthesis. In affirming the ongoing relevance, vitality, and richness of the patristic tradition, he appeals to Louis Thomassin’s declamation, Inexhaustum est penu theologiae patrum (the storehouse of the theology of the Fathers is inexhaustible). The fact that a seventeenth-century Catholic theologian should figure so prominently in Florovsky’s single most programmatic statement as to the nature of his envisaged neo-patristic synthesis speaks volumes as to the properly catholic nature of that undertaking.

Florovsky’s hope that his work on the patristic doctrine of the atonement would stimulate further research has been amply borne out by the papers presented in this volume. One of his favorite reference points was, as we have mentioned, the Latin liturgy. The very title of his essay on atonement, in ligno crucis (on the wood of the Cross) takes us back to the Latin liturgy for the exaltation of the Cross. Another favored phrase used by Fr Florovksy, in ara crucis (on the altar of the Cross) comes from the Ambrosian hymn cited above. Fr Irenei Steenberg rightly homes in on the dimension of liturgy in his A Sacrifice for Life: Atonement in the Orthodox Liturgical Tradition. While the emphasis here is on the Orthodox as opposed to the Latin liturgy (and to the eucharistic liturgy in particular), his intuition as to the indispensability of the liturgical matrix is certainly congruent with that of Fr Florovsky. Perhaps the most arresting assertion in this paper is that the synthesis of the Fathers is the Divine Liturgy of the Church. As mouthpieces for the Church’s liturgical revelation of the Kingdom, the Fathers voice a united witness to the same liturgical experience. As a devout admirer of St Augustine, Fr Florovsky may have been pleased to see in this paper a sophisticated vindication of that ardent Augustinian, Prosper of Aquitaine, in his famous declaration that the lex orandi, the rule of prayer, establishes the lex credendi, the rule of faith.

Moving on now to some of the specifics of the patristic teaching(s) on the atonement, Fr John Behr presents us with a tour de force entitled Irenaeus on ‘Atonement’. While rightly suspicious of any artificial compartmentalization or systematization, Behr presents us with a profound set of insights into St Irenaeus’ comprehensive and coherent account of the mystery of redemption. Behr emphasizes the interconnectedness and inseparability of incarnation and atonement, deftly doing away with any hint that the incarnation was merely God’s Plan B after Adam and Eve had wrecked Plan A. The paper is especially penetrating when it comes to the matter of death: Death is a catastrophe—we should weep and wail; but, it is also a marvel, a miracle, a mystery (a sacrament)—to which we have been wedded by the command of God, no less. These two aspects of the same reality depend very much on perspective. The same may be said of Christ’s work of salvation—freeing from sin and bestowing immortality. As in the troparion for Good Friday, quoted at the beginning of this introduction, these actions are to be recognized as two dimensions of one and the same eternal economy of salvation.

Fr Khaled Anatolios’s paper delves further into the patristic treasury through a close and exacting reading of a theologian whom Florovsky regarded as of quite decisive importance in regard to the theme of atonement–St Athanasius of Alexandria. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this paper is its compelling argument for the correlation of the doctrines of creation and redemption in Athanasius. Basing himself on Athanasius’ master work, the double treatise Against the Pagans – On the Incarnation, Anatolios comprehensively undermines the false dichotomy between ‘ontological’ and ‘juridical’ accounts of salvation that is sometimes assumed to obtain between Greek East and Latin West, the Greeks in this schema favoring themes of creation and incarnation over themes of Fall and redemption and the Latins vice versa. Anatolios goes on to demonstrate just how squarely Athanasius’s understanding of creation underpins and shapes his narrative of redemption. This is a significant and substantial contribution to the volume—and indeed to Athanasian studies in general.

Fr John McGuckin offers a salutary warning against artificial systematization of the doctrine of the Fathers. Like a number of the other contributors to this volume, McGuckin is not entirely sanguine as to the possibility of Florovsky’s systematic and positive reconstruction of the original patristic doctrine of the atonement. Be that as it may, McGuckin’s Preludium presents an incisive account of the meta-history of patristic studies, cautioning against reliance on the overly-neat abstracts of patristic theology found in many modern patrologies and textbooks and arguing instead for a greater engagement with what particular Fathers actually said in their own contexts. McGuckin goes on to provide a magnificent example of such an engagement in his paper on the Theology of Salvation in St Gregory the Theologian. Among the many riches of this paper is its reinterpretation of ransom theory and its reminder that Gregory’s famous Christological dictum, What is not assumed is not saved, derives from Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides. McGuckin also emphasizes the extent to which the Cross is, for Gregory, a point of entry into a doxological and profoundly Pauline account of the whole divine economy of salvation.

Alexis Torrance’s paper on Atonement in the Ascetic Fathers provides a useful shift of emphasis onto the ways in which the individual believer might enter into and, as it were, appropriate Christ’s universal atonement. Drawing on the Desert Fathers, St Mark the Monk, Abba Isaiah, and other monastic teachers, Torrance lucidly demonstrates the extent to which participation in the Cross and sufferings of Christ is a sine qua non of all Orthodox ascetic endeavor.

The last paper in this volume is by no means the least. In his In Ligno Crucis: Atonement in the Theology of Father Georges Florovsky, Matthew Baker argues passionately and persuasively for the universality of Florovsky’s approach in its deliberate encompassing of both Greek and Latin liturgical and theological traditions. While certainly wary of Anselmian and post-Anselmian notions of atonement, Florovsky was committed to constructive interaction and dialogue with the West—and a positive embrace of the West wherever possible. Baker devotes much of his attention to what he understands as the single largest issue that preoccupied Florovsky—the nature of history. It was a truly historical sense that Florovsky found lacking in Bulgakov’s sophiological synthesis. The incarnation is the historical event par excellence. Redemption is to be understood as taking place in time, in history, and having permanent continuing power throughout all history. Florovsky also detected an ahistoricism in Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky’s The Dogma of Redemption (1917), criticizing this work as having overlooked the death of Christ in its subjective and crypto-Kantian preoccupation with the sufferings of Christ. This ahistorical Christianity is, for Florovsky, no more than mere moralism. Baker draws on his impressive knowledge of edited and unedited sources to articulate a critical and constructive account of Florovsky’s own understanding of the atonement. Perhaps the most intriguing insight here is the extent to which Florovsky’s views appear to have evolved to give greater credence to the substitutionary nature of Christ’s atonement, to such a degree that he can approve Cranmer’s description of the Cross as a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction. This fine exploration of Florovsky’s own work on the atonement serves as a fitting conclusion to this collection.

It would be false to suggest that the papers presented here may be condensed into a kind of synthesis. Like the patristic witness, these are very different voices, with differing emphases and insights. But this plurivocity is a richness furnishing eloquent testimony to the ongoing force and urgency of Florovsky’s mooted retrieval of the Fathers. The theology of the Fathers is indeed an inexhaustible storehouse. These papers have delved into that storehouse with splendid results. They have also intimated that there is plenty more to be drawn from that rich treasury.

Postscript

I have deliberately left untouched the words I wrote about Fr Matthew Baker’s paper long before his untimely death (and indeed long before his ordination). As a matter of fact, we were corresponding about my revision of this introduction only a few days before his passing. I should like now, however, to underline the fittingness of the dedication of this volume to his memory. Fr Matthew Baker had a stupendous knowledge of Florovsky’s work and thought-world and an almost unrivalled commitment to the perpetuation of his legacy. Some have spoken of him as a ‘new’ or ‘second’ Florovsky although I prefer to think of him as the first Matthew Baker—a theologian who was beginning to finding a distinctive voice grounded in Florovsky, certainly, but also very much his own. It is a cause of great regret to me, as to so many, that that distinctive voice was cut off before it had the opportunity to develop in all its richness and fullness. One of things he and I found particular common ground in was a shared sense of Florovsky’s love for and appreciation of the Latin liturgical and theological tradition, just one example of which being the Latin tags around which Florovsky structured the treatise on the atonement presented in this volume and to which Fr Matthew’s paper draws attention. I recall Matthew being delighted by my being the first (by his account) to acclaim him in Latin ‘dignus es!’ shortly before his ordination (the Greek ‘axios!’ being the more common form). Bearing all this in mind, it seems right and proper to close with this supplication: Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

Marcus Plested

Marquette University

Pentecost 2015

A Sacrifice for Life: Atonement in the Orthodox Liturgical Tradition

Irenei Steenberg

A TONEMENT IS A HEAVY-LADEN WORD in contemporary theological usage, a bone of contention between differing religious groups, and a term prone to definition and radical re-definition across history. The attempt to understand what atonement might mean in a broad patristic context, as with the focus of this symposium, is critical; but it cannot and must not be carried out apart from the liturgical framework within which the majority of Church Fathers lived and wrote. The present paper seeks to examine the testimony of Orthodox liturgical experience to a concept of atonement—chiefly in the Divine Liturgy and Orthodox liturgical pre-history in Israelite worship surrounding the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)—revealing the manner in which it is perceived as a deeply incarnational reality rooted in eucharistic participation in the divine-human person of the Son.

The Contours of Atonement in Liturgical Life

The shape and reality of Orthodox belief comes from the Divine Liturgy. Or rather, it comes from the whole liturgical consciousness of a Church that has, from its earliest history—and indeed, its older prehistory—been shaped and molded by its life of ordered worship of God. It was in the context of the ritually remembered and liturgically enacted eschatological hope of Old Testament worship that the apostles came to perceive in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah to whom worship and prophecy, Scripture and expectation had long pointed. It was within the context of the sacrificial system of the Temple that Christ’s embrace of the Cross and His unparalleled resurrection were understood by those first disciples as events that perfected a centuries-old relationship between man’s sin and God’s redemptive love. It was in the context of eucharistic, liturgical worship that sense could be made of the martyrs’ sacrifice during the first persecutions; that apostles and fathers could discover and articulate the theological realities of suffering and redemption. And it was, perhaps above all, within the liturgical context of Orthodox life that the great theological conflicts of pivotal centuries in church history could be responded to, not as abstract philosophical or metaphysical discussions, but concrete arenas in which a lived and experienced theology might be articulated and defended in intellectual terms—in which, as the popular Latin saying goes, the lex orandi might be effectively spelled out as the lex credendi.

Taking the Divine Liturgy as the heart of this whole liturgical reality of Orthodox worship, it is important—though not at all surprising—to note that it is shot through from beginning to end with images and contexts of sacrifice, and even what we might call atoning sacrifice (though what we mean by this latter phrase is at the heart of our interest in this study, and a question to which we shall return). Drawn out of a sacrificial history and shaped around the self-offering of the sacrificial Christ, the Liturgy perhaps naturally has the shape of a sacrificial reality. Yet it is revealing to note the unique way in which sacrifice itself is re-presented (that is, made newly present, newly experienced) in the liturgical actions themselves. Just what is the sacrifice and the atonement that is proclaimed and lived in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and in broader Orthodox liturgical life?

Perhaps we might begin by identifying the contours of just what is not proclaimed, of certain elements or visions of sacrifice and atonement that are notably absent in the Orthodox liturgical context. Taking for the moment the dominant two modern views of atonement in Christian religious contexts, namely the various forms of a ransom theory, on the one hand, and of a satisfaction theory, on the other, certain absences in the Divine Liturgy are noteworthy.¹ There is, for example, no textual language, visual imagery, or enacted motion in the Liturgy that speaks in terms of Christ’s sacrifice effecting the payment of a debt for sin, whether to God or to the devil; there is no trace whatever in the Liturgy of Christ’s sacrifice as standing in substitution for a penalty owed by man; and there is no sense in which the liturgical sacrifice is portrayed as appeasing the wrath that God might hold toward man or his sin. Let us be clear: these individual concepts are all present—there is certainly liturgical language that speaks of sin as debt, that talks of man being ransomed from death by Christ,² that identifies divine wrath³—but, and this is the critical point, these are not directly connected to the liturgical emphasis on sacrifice proper. They are identified as part of the complex reality of humanity’s fluid and changing interactions with God whose nature is eternal and immutable, and the way God’s consistent nature is experienced by the human race in light of the creative self-mutilation of its sin. But when Orthodox liturgical worship focuses on the atoning sacrifice offered by Christ upon the Cross—mystically experienced upon the Holy Table—its emphasis is elsewhere. Atonement itself means something different.

What, then, is its liturgical meaning? In the context of this paper, I will suggest that the Orthodox vision of atonement, as defined by liturgical experience, is chiefly an incarnational, eucharistic concept, stressing the forging of communion between the divine and human, God and man, through participation in the incarnational unity of the Father’s Son. But to arrive at this definition (which may seem rather robust, perhaps, for a term—καταλλαγή in Greek; the Russian equivalent is примирение—that appears only once in the New Testament, at Rom 5:11⁴), we must resist the urge to start anywhere other than the prayer of the Church. Our definition must come from the testimony of liturgical experience and history, and in fact in the prehistory of the Orthodox Liturgy: namely, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament and the Scriptures that ground it, for it is these realities that create the whole context of sacrificial theology in which Orthodox worship is rooted.

Drawn from the Old Testament: Revealing Divine Reality

It is necessary as a first step in this project to say something about the broad Orthodox vision of liturgical worship itself, which is inherited directly from a long Israelite history of worship and prayer. Namely, and as a kind of first principle, Orthodox as well as Old Testament liturgical life is rooted in the belief that worship is something divine, revealed by God rather than fashioned by man, and revealed precisely so that there may be a created experience in the temporal world of the eternal heavenly worship that surrounds the throne of God. Earthly worship mirrors heavenly reality. In this, its source in the divine is critical, for liturgical worship is understood as an essential part of