Staniloae, Dumitru (1903–1993)
ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU
Dumitru Staniloae was born in Vladeni in the Romanian province of Transylvania. After studying in Romania, Athens, and Germany, Staniloae began teaching in 1929 at the Theological Institute in Sibiu. Between 1946 and 1973 he taught at the Theological Institute in Bucharest, though between 1958 and 1962 he was incarcerated as a political prisoner at Aiud Prison. Early in his theological career, Staniloae rejected the Orthodox dogmatic manuals, which he felt, together with his Russian emigre counterparts in Paris, Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky, were under a “western captivity.” In his initial theological studies he noticed that the spirituality of hesychasm and the thought of St. Gregory Palamas were offering a different theological vision than that presented in the manuals. His life work is a labor of attempting to articulate an Orthodox dogmatic theology that is existentially relevant and not simply a set of propositional truths. The fruit of this work began with the publication of his study on Palamas, The Life and Teaching of Gregory Palamas (1938), and culminated with his three-volume Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (1978). Staniloae was also responsible for translating the Philokalia into Romanian (a larger edition by far than that of St. Nikodemos; nine volumes between 1946 and 1980). Up until his death, Staniloae published numerous books and articles, achieved a national reputation as a public intellectual commenting on the political and cultural issues of Romania, and acquired an internationally recognized ecumenical stature, with his work continuing to exercise influence in both Orthodox and non-Orthodox circles alike. He is one of the best-known, respected, and influential Orthodox theologians of the 20th century.
Among the many theological insights contained within Staniloae’s corpus, two stand out as distinctive. First, Staniloae insisted that trinitarian theology must articulate more explicitly the proper relation of the Son to the Spirit. Against what he saw as Lossky’s separation of the work of the Son and the Spirit, Staniloae argued that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and rests on the Son as the Father’s love for the Son, and is reflected back from the Son to the Father as the Son’s active love for the Father. Staniloae rejects the filioque because it inevitably makes the Son a Father of the Spirit, rather than seeing the relation between the Son and the Spirit as a reciprocity that has its source in the Father, and one that allows for humans to share in the Son’s filial relationship with the Father. The second distinctive aspect of Staniloae’s theology is his notion of creation as God’s gift that initiates the possibility of an exchange of gifts between God and human beings, who function as priests of creation. This exchange of gifts is simultaneously a dialogue of love enabling a personal communion between God and creation. The fact that the world was created for the purpose of communion between the personal God and human persons is not simply a truth of revelation, but is indicated, for Staniloae, in the iconic human experience of freedom and relationality. SEE ALSO: Filioque, Holy Trinity; Philokalia; Romania, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of; St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359).
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Louth, A. (2002) “The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of Dumitru Staniloae,” Modern Theology 13, 2: 253–67.
Neamtu, M. (2006) “Between the Gospel and the Nation: Dumitru Staniloae’s Ethno-Theology,” Archaeus: Studies in History of Religions 10, 3: 4. Turcescu, L. (ed.) (2002) Dumitru Staniloae: Tradition and Modernity in Theology. Palm Beach: Center for Romanian Studies.
Turcescu, L. (2005) “Dumitru Staniloae,” in J. Witte and F. Alexander (eds.) The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, vol. 1, pp. 685–711; vol. 2, pp. 537–58.