World-Affirming Theologies in Modern Orthodox Christianity

Abstract

The notion that God is present in creation has long featured in Eastern Christian thought, appearing as early as Origen (3rd century) and Evagrius of Pontus (4th century). Two major philosophical principles underlay the theology of divine immanence in creation: creation ex nihilo (the physical world is not eternal, but has a beginning, and it was created by God “out of nothing”) and nothing can exist totally separate from God, from a divine act of creation. The difficulty in ancient and modern times is to articulate this theology without falling into pantheism, a fusion or identification of God and creation. This is typically achieved by the simultaneous affirmation of divine immanence and divine transcendence: God is more, infinitely more, than creation; indeed, the divine essence is beyond human comprehension, the basis of apophatic theology. This essay explores these notions in Orthodox thought, especially in modern times. Modern Orthodox theologians (notably Sergius Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, Kallistos Ware, and John Zizioulas) draw on the patristic theologies of the logoi (“reasons”) of things in Maximus the Confessor (7th century) and the divine energies of Gregory Palamas (14th century) to develop a robust theology of creation which affirms human relationship with the rest of creation and human responsibility for the care of creation. These notions coalesce in the philosophical–theological position of panentheism, to which several modern Orthodox theologians adhere, providing a solid grounding for positive affirmations of the world as God’s creation.

1. Introduction

How God, as infinite, eternal, uncreated, immaterial, and transcendent, relates to the finite, contingent, and material and immaterial created world has long challenged human thought. Orthodox philosophers and theologians from the late nineteenth century onwards proposed different approaches to this challenge, some of which have fallen by the wayside (see Ladouceur 2019, pp. 194–205). We consider here especially the theologies of the divine energies, the logoi of creation and panentheism, which have wide acceptability in Orthodox circles and beyond. These theologies constitute a robust affirmation of creation and human relationship with the rest of creation. They avoid two philosophical–theological pitfalls: pantheism, which fuses God and the world, denying divine transcendence to creation, and dualism, which sets God and spirit in opposition to the world and matter in general, one inherently good, the other inherently evil.

2. The Logoi of Things and the Contemplation of God in Creation

In the development of Christian theology and spirituality, the importance of the contemplation of God in creation was strongly highlighted by Evagrius of Ponticus, a late fourth-century Greek monk in Egypt. For Evagrius, contemplation includes “secondary natural contemplation”, the contemplation of God through the ultimate principles or “reasons” (logoi) of visible creation, and “primary natural contemplation”, the contemplation of God proper to angels, to which purified humans may aspire (Sinkewicz 2003, p. xxxiv). St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) extensively developed the notion of the logoi of created beings, and both Evagrius and Maximus viewed the contemplation of God in creation as a preliminary and even necessary step to the direct contemplation of God. Among modern Orthodox authors, Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993) and Kallistos Ware (1934–2022) also stress the importance of the contemplation of God in the natural world (Stăniloae 2002, pp. 203–23; Ware 1996). Both rely on Maximus’s teaching on the logoi in creation and on the later theology of the divine energies of St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359). For Stăniloae and Ware, Maximus and Palamas formulate a theological understanding of God’s immanence, his presence in the world, while safeguarding his absolute transcendence, thus avoiding falling into pantheism. These ancient Fathers were responding to problems of their times, using slightly different concepts and language to articulate the philosophical and theological problem of the relationship of God to creation; their insights are still valuable for a modern theological understanding of creation.

In his doctrine of the logoi, Maximus connects creation to the divine Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, through whom God created the universe (see Louth 2004 and Ware 2004). Each created thing has a logos, God’s intention for that thing, which draws it to achieve its divinely ordained purpose. Christ, the Logos of God, is both the source of the logoi of things and their ultimate fulfilment. The universe is thus imbued with divine presence. The logoi are not something that a biologist, a geologist, or an astronomer will discover, but rather the spiritual sense of creation originating in God, God’s intention for created things and the goal towards which they strive. In this cosmic vision, all of creation is a theophany, a divine manifestation that can and should become an occasion for elevating our thoughts and our prayers to God, a spiritual movement that Kallistos Ware characterizes as “through creation to the Creator”.

Maximus and Palamas approach the same question, how God relates to creation, but from different perspectives. Seven centuries before Palamas, Maximus saw no conflict or incompatibility between his notion of the logoi and the essence–energies distinction that he inherited from the Cappadocian Fathers. Kallistos Ware points out that whereas Maximus’s approach is predominantly Christological, in attaching the logoi of beings to the divine Logos, Palamas emphasizes the Trinitarian aspect of the divine energies: “It is an error to say that any one person in the Godhead has an ‘energy’ in which the other two persons do not share” (Ware 2004, p. 161).

Metaphorically, the divine energies may be said to represent the relationship of God to creation from the divine perspective, God as Creator and Sustainer looking towards creation, whereas the logoi represent this relationship from the perspective of creation, creation looking towards God as the source, pillar, ground, and goal of its existence. The Russian theologian Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), without naming either Maximus and Palamas, expresses a similar idea in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth:

The reason of a thing [the logoi] is, from the point of view of a creature, love of God and the vision of God that comes from this. This reason is a particular idea of God, a conditional idea of the Unconditional [the ground of all logoi in the Logos, Christ]. But, from the point of view of divine Being, the reason of a creature is an unconditional idea of the conditional, God’s idea about a particular thing—the act [energy] by which God… condescends to think about the finite and limited—introduces the meagre semi-being of the creature into the fullness of being of the interior of the Trinity.

(Florensky 1997, p. 235)

The contemplation of God in creation plays an important role in the thinking of the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993). Picking up on Evagrius and Maximus, Stăniloae situates the contemplation of God in the second stage of the spiritual life, “Illumination”, together with the spiritual understanding of Scripture, apophatic knowledge of God, and pure prayer (Stăniloae 2002, pp. 195–293). The world as a theophany aflame with the divine presence has a fundamentally spiritual or mystical purpose in the divine economy:

The existence of the world is seen as having the purpose, among others, of exercising all our spiritual powers in our ascent to God. … The existence of the world itself as a way to God is a proof that the supreme knowledge of God isn’t an irrational act, but suprarational; that is, it isn’t realised by a premature renunciation of reason… but by the surpassing of reason. … We are raised to a suprarational, but not anti-rational knowledge of God.

(Stăniloae 2002, p. 208)

The logoi of things don’t consist simply of their fleshly utility, but in the revelation of a spiritual sense, of a divine intention.

(Stăniloae 2002, p. 216)

Stăniloae insists strongly on the necessity of “a long preparation of a pronounced moral character” (Stăniloae 2002, p. 209)—the mastery of the passions in classical ascetic terminology—as a pre-condition for discovering the logoi in things. Stăniloae does not allow for the possibility of a spontaneous, unprovoked intuitive experience of transcendental reality occasioned by creation, such as those envisioned in Orthodox authors Fydor Dostoyevsky, Sergius Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Kallistos Ware, who insist, less than Stăniloae, on a moral pre-requisite for an intuitive, spontaneous encounter with the divine presence in creation.

3. The Divine Energies and Createdness

The distinction between the divine essence (ousia) and the divine energies (energia) originated with the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, alongside the distinction between essence and person (hypostasis), and was brought to full development by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. In this theology, the divine essence is beyond human knowledge and even angelic knowledge; the essence is the subject of apophatic theology or “negative” theology, “indescribable, incomprehensible, invisible, inaccessible” (Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). However, one cannot stop at this notion of the inaccessibility of the divine essence, because it would mean that it is impossible for humans to know or experience God. The divine essence is the “what” of God, but, more importantly, God is also “who”—the divine Persons. In Christian theology, God is not the immobile Monad of Greek philosophy, but a personal God who acts and manifests himself and is in relation with his creation by the divine Persons and the divine energies, reflected in divine attributes and names: love, creator, justice, power, etc. Humans can know and experience God through his energies, and through them, they can participate in the divine life, in God—this is the sense of the Orthodox notion of theosis (deification), reflected in the words of St. Peter that humans become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4).

The theology of divine energies emphasizes that God is fully present in his energies, which are nothing other than God; the energies are not a “part of God” or something created which stands between God and humans. For this reason, Orthodox theology rejects the notion of created grace. Grace, as God’s active presence in humans, is not so much a gift from God as it is a gift of God—God gives himself and grace is therefore uncreated. Palamas elaborated the theology of the divine energies in response to criticisms that the light that monks on Mount Athos claimed to behold during intense inner prayer was either an illusion or a created light. In Palamite theology, the inner light seen by the monks is uncreated divine light—a divine energy. Palamas and others liken this light to that perceived by the apostles Peter, James, and John on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of Christ: “He was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light” (Mt 17:2). This mystical light is also akin to biblical references to divine glory, as in Jesus’s prayer at the Last Supper: “And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made” (Jn 17:5).

Although the Palamite theology of the divine energies was formally approved by councils of the Church of Constantinople between 1341 and 1351, it virtually disappeared from Orthodox theology after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For several centuries, Orthodox academic theology, expressed largely in Western, especially scholastic, theological categories, mostly followed the Western lead in ignoring the essence–energies distinction and theosis. Palamite theology has been revived in modern times, initially in Russia immediately prior to World War I, and in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, following severe criticism of Palamism by several Roman Catholic theologians, notably Martin Jugie (1878–1954). Jugie, writing on Palamas’s “strange theology”, repeats the ancient criticism that the notions of the divine energies and a real distinction between the divine essence and the divine Persons undermine divine simplicity; thus, Palamas “gravely adulterates the notion of God”, leading to “monstrous errors” (Jugie 1932, col. 1763). For Orthodox theologians, misrepresentations and biased critiques of Palamas confirmed the urgent necessity of accurately presenting Palamite theology and of reviving Palamism as a living feature in Orthodox thought.

The leading Russian philosopher–theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were aware of the Palamite theology of the divine energies. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) presents an accurate summary of the Palamite theology of the divine energies in his 1917 work Unfading Light (Bulgakov 2012, pp. 131–34). Leading early twentieth-century Russian theologians, notably Florensky and Bulgakov, appealed to the Palamite theology of divine essence and divine energies in their defence of imyaslavie during the “Name-of-God” quarrel (onomatodoxy) on Mount Athos and in Russia prior to World War I (see Ladouceur 2012). But they did not adopt Palamism as a central element of their theologies, since it appeared to be incompatible with their vision of Divine Wisdom, Sophia, as the key to the relations between God and the creation. Nonetheless, Bulgakov considered that his sophiology was a form of Palamism.

Among the future neopatristic theologians, Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) first highlighted the importance of the energy–essences distinction, initially in private letters to Bulgakov as early as 1925, and more substantially in his 1928 essay “Creation and Createdness” (Florovsky 2019). Florovsky points to the inseparable links which bind together the essence–energies distinction, apophatism (which relates particularly to the unknowable divine essence) and theosis (by which creatures can participate in the divine energies, thereby becoming themselves divinized). The article makes extensive use of Palamite theology in its central argument that the fundamental distinction between divine nature and human nature is that between uncreated and created.

But Florovsky was not the only Orthodox theologian who realized the importance of Palamite theology, as several other Orthodox theologians also sought to recover Palamite theology. Archimandrite Basil Krivoshein (1900–1985), then a Russian monk on Mount Athos, published a methodical study of Palamism in 1936, and Dumitru Stăniloae published a monograph on Palamas in 1938 (see Ladouceur 2019, pp. 104–5). Vladimir Lossky drew heavily on the Palamite theology of the divine energies in his ground-breaking Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) (Lossky 1957). The restoration of Palamite theology in Orthodoxy, called neo-Palamism, continued after World War II, reaching a high point in 1959 with the publication of the study of Palamism by John Meyendorff (1928–1992) (Meyendorff 1964). The Palamite revival, emphasizing both creation ex nihilo and the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, underpinned the elaboration of a theology of relations between God and the world grounded in patristic theology.

Does creation in some form subsist in God from all eternity? Bulgakov emphasizes that only God truly exists. “Only the divinity of the existent God is, and there is nothing apart from and outside of divinity”, he writes in The Bride of the Lamb (Bulgakov 2002, p. 43). The “nothingness” of the ancient formula creatio ex nihilo is not a “somethingness” apart from God: “‘Out of nothing’ means, after all, that there is no matter or force that could contain the possibility of the world and could assure for the world a place alongside God, outside of or apart from God” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 43). Bulgakov concludes from this that “If God is the Creator, he is the Creator from all eternity” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 45). This implies that creation somehow exists in God’s own being from all eternity, if only as a potentiality, an “idea” which comes to fruition in the fullness of time: “the world must be included in God’s being in a certain sense” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 46). Aware of the risks that this position entails, Bulgakov explicitly rejects, here and elsewhere, the pantheistic identification of God and the world.1

Florovsky’s major essay “Creation and Createdness” set the stage for much of subsequent Orthodox thought on creation. Bulgakov is Florovsky’s unnamed opponent in “Creation and Createdness”. Against any possible inclination towards pantheism, throughout the essay, Florovsky emphasizes the ontological distance between God as uncreated Creator and the world as created. The first sentences emphatically proclaim that “The world was created. In other words, it was made out of nothing and did not exist before” (Florovsky 2019, p. 34). To counter notions of creation as somehow arising from the divine essence and hence implying some form of necessity, Florovsky draws on the patristic theology of creation as a free act of God’s will and thus being contingent and dependent: “The world exists, but it also began to exist, which means that it might not have existed, and so its existence is not a matter of any necessity. Created existence is neither self-sufficient nor self-sustaining” (Florovsky 2019, p. 36). Thus, Florovsky rejects both the possibility of chance and arbitrariness in creation and a certain determinism which he detects in Bulgakov’s doctrine of creation.

Florovsky also rejects the potential existence of creation as an eternal idea in God’s “mind” (here equated with essence), since this “would introduce the world into the inner life of the Holy Trinity as its co-determining principle” (Florovsky 2019, p. 43). To circumvent the problem of the origin of the “idea” of the world, Florovsky postulates two “types” of eternity, one related to the divine essence (the eternal existence of the three divine Persons), the other to the divine will, which includes God’s eternal “idea of the world, his plan and intention” (Florovsky 2019, p. 44). Florovsky’s concerns are, above all, to preserve the distinction between divine essence or being and divine will and to attach creation to the divine will, not the divine essence: “The idea of the world originates in God’s will, not his being. Instead of ‘having’ the idea of creation, God ‘invents’ it, and because he does this freely through the exercise of his will, he in some sense becomes Creator, albeit from eternity” (Florovsky 2019, p. 43).

Florovsky’s essay is a powerful affirmation of patristic thinking on creation, with the theology of the divine energies, inseparable from the Incarnation, occupying centre stage in his understanding of how God relates to creation. Florovsky comes up against the same issues as his predecessors in the Russian religious renaissance, and he too introduces a new and questionable theological notion, two types of eternity, as an attempt to resolve the problem of how the temporal and created relates to the eternal and uncreated.

Vladimir Lossky’s vastly influential book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Lossky 1957), a masterly and articulate presentation of patristic theology, included, as major themes, the long-forgotten but now revived aspects of Orthodox theology: apophatism, the essence–energies distinction, and theosis. More than Florovsky’s essay “Creation and Createdness”, Lossky’s book signalled the return of Palamite theology to the centre stage of modern Orthodox thought.

The revival of Palamism in Orthodox theology reached maturity in the work of John Meyendorff, especially with the publication of his doctoral thesis Introduction to the Study of Gregory Palamas in 1959, his translations of Palamas’s Triads, and his more popular work St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Meyendorff 1964, 1974, 1983). For Meyendorff, as indeed for most modern Orthodox theologians, the teaching of Gregory Palamas on the essence–energies distinction in God is critical for a proper understanding of Christian anthropology, of the divine-human relationship, and, ultimately, of salvation and eschatology. Meyendorff defends Palamas not only against his Byzantine critics but also against modern Western critics. Subsequent studies of the Palamite controversy tend to downplay the contrasts that form the backbone of much of Meyendorff’s analysis: existence–essence; Palamism–Thomism; mysticism–scholasticism; and, ultimately, East–West.

Orthodox theologians writing in the wake of Florovsky, Lossky, and Meyendorff are almost universally supportive of Palamism as such, although some, such as Christos Yannaras (b. 1935) and John Zizioulas (1931–2023), are less enthusiastic. Zizioulas practically ignores the divine energies, consistent with his preference for person over nature, to which, as he recognizes, energies are attached, to the point that he denies any personal or hypostatic quality to the divine energies (Zizioulas 2006, p. 29).

In the 1970s, an ecumenical debate on Palamism took place in the pages of scholarly journals in Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The debate was sparked by articles critical of Palamism following the publication of Meyendorff’s Study of Gregory Palamas (see a study of this debate in Ladouceur 2019, pp. 212–14). By then, the Palamite revival was well established in Orthodox circles, and there was growing interest in Palamism among non-Orthodox thinkers. At stake in these debates is the challenge that Palamas poses to conventional Western, especially Catholic, theology, which saw no place for the essence–energies distinction, with perhaps a lingering suspicion that this theology may be heretical. Although many Catholic theologians reject Palamite theology, some see no inherent contradiction between Palamas and Aquinas. But the discussion became bound up with differing Eastern and Western approaches to theosis, grace, and whether there is a real or only nominal distinction between divine essence and divine energies.

While the scholarly debate of the 1970s over Palamism represents an evolution from the polemical dismissal of Palamism as pantheist and heretical by Catholic writers of the 1920s and 1930s, subsequent engagement between Orthodox and non-Orthodox scholars over Palamas has tended, with some exceptions, to be more irenic. Typical of a later phase of appropriation of Palamas is a colloquium held at Cambridge in 2008, with the participation of leading Anglican, Reformed, Orthodox, and Catholic theologians (proceedings in Athanasopoulos and Schneider 2013). The six Orthodox scholars represented in the symposium defend Palamism, and some Anglican, Catholic, and Reformed scholars sought to build bridges between Palamas and their own theological traditions.

The lines of demarcation in modern debates over Palamism, both in the 1920s and 1930s and later in the 1970s, are reminiscent of the general context of the fourteenth-century debates: a structured approach to theology strongly grounded in philosophy encountering a mystical–liturgical approach. It is nonetheless an over-simplification of complex theologies to characterize these two approaches solely as “essentialist” and “existentialist”. By the early twenty-first century, the polemics of denunciation of Palamism as pantheist and heretical had largely given way to concerted attempts to grasp the significance of Palamism in both Eastern and Western theology, with the dividing lines no longer being predicated on “East–West”, but rather on philosophical and theological concerns.

4. Beyond Theological Debates

The combination of the theologies of the divine energies and the logoi in creation is reflected in two other spheres of modern Orthodox thought, sacramental theology and environmental theology. The contemplation of God in creation is closely related to the notion of “the world as sacrament”, an idea associated with Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983) in particular (Schmemann 1966). Schmemann uses the expression in a pastoral and liturgical context, inviting his readers to reject both a flight from the world and seeing the world as “as something incomprehensible and unmanageable”. Instead, he encourages us to approach the world “sacramentally through Christ”: “Nature and the world are otherwise beyond our grasp; time also, time that carries all things away in a meaningless flux, causing men to despair unless they see in it the pattern of God’s action, reflected in the liturgical year, the necessary road to the New Jerusalem” (Schmemann 1979, p. 226).

In the theology of Alexander Schmemann, John Zizioulas, and others, humans are liturgical creatures, priests of the cosmic liturgy who offer creation to God. For Schmemann, “The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of his cosmic sacrament” (Schmemann 1966, p. 15). He continues: “For man can be truly man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God’s creativity and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the ‘owner’ of creation and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God, in response and acceptance” (Schmemann 1966, p. 85).

The cultic function of a priest is to offer the gifts of the community to God, so that they may be blessed, sanctified, and returned to be shared by the community. This act of offering does not add anything to God, but rather is a recognition of God’s sovereignty and providence. Humanity as priest of creation offers creation to God, recognizing that it is God’s from the outset, as Creator, Sustainer, and Finality of all that exists. “Only the human being”, writes John Zizioulas, “can … unite the world in his hands in order to refer it to God so that it can be united with God and thus saved and fulfilled” (Zizioulas 2013, p. 167). Zizioulas emphasizes that the notion of humanity as priest of creation is superior to the ideas of humans as proprietors of creation, free to exploit the natural world for their own benefit, or as stewards of creation with merely a managerial function. With the Eucharist as the model of the priestly function and offering, Zizioulas stresses that humans are called on to “improve” nature, as the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the result of nature (wheat and grapes), transformed through human creativity and work: “The human being is the priest of creation in the sense that the material world he takes in his hands is transformed into something better than what it is naturally” (Zizioulas 2013, p. 170). The idea of humanity as priest of creation does not supplant but rather complements that of humanity as steward of creation, responsible for its good management before God, its true proprietor.

The idea of the world as sacrament is a mystical and liturgical expression of the theology of divine presence in creation, as elaborated in the doctrines of the logoi of creation, divine energies, and the contemplation of God in creation. The world as sacrament includes a vision of creation which encompasses several other important features. For instance, creation is not something that occurred once in the past, whether 6000 years ago (per Genesis and Biblical genealogies) or some 14 billion years ago (per modern cosmology), but rather a continuous divine act. Nothing can exist without being sustained at every moment by divine will: creation is here and now (see Ps 103/104:27-30; Ps 138/139:7-12). Creation is simultaneously external to God, yet God creates the world “not as it were from the outside, but from within” (Ware 1996). As in panentheism, the world is somehow in God and God in the world, since nothing can exist apart from God.

The contemplation of God in creation also calls for a heightened awareness of the distinctiveness of each individual being. As Kallistos Ware stresses, “We are to perceive and to value each thing in and for itself, viewing that thing in sharp relief, appreciating what in the Zen tradition is called the special ‘Ah!’ of each thing, its ‘is-ness’, or haeccitas” (Ware 1996). The key to the contemplation of God in creation is to see beyond the uniqueness of each thing to the mystical divine presence in all things: “It is impossible to make sense of the world unless we also look beyond the world; the world only acquires its true meaning when seen as the reflection of a reality that transcends it … the world [becomes] pellucid, so that it reveals to us the indwelling Creator-Logos” (Ware 1996). This is the mystical or spiritual significance of Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi of things, which remains incomplete if it is considered only as an abstract reflection on God and creation.

The contemplation of God in creation means passing beyond a strictly utilitarian vision of the world to a vision of the world as a manifestation of God’s glory, as expressed by Dumitru Stăniloae: “So the world has been set up for us as a road to God. The existence of the world is seen as having the purpose, among others, of exercising all our spiritual powers in our ascent to God” (Stăniloae 2002, p. 208). The notion of the world as sacrament—all that is, is sacred, especially all that lives2—implies not only a respectful relationship between humans and creation, but a positive responsibility for creation. This is the theological basis for Orthodox concern for the environment, a prominent feature of Orthodox theology in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century (for a selection of key texts, see Chryssavgis and Foltz 2013).

5. Towards a Consolidation: Panentheism

The notion that God is “in the world”—and that the world is “in God”—is the philosophical and theological position called panentheism, which stands between pantheism and deism. Pantheism confounds God and creation, denying God’s transcendence and retaining only God’s immanence, whereas deism admits the existence of divine Being but does not recognize any divine action in the world other than the initial act of creation. Most Christian theology, however, is resolutely theist. Theism is situated between panentheism and deism: God is the creator of the world and acts in the world, but only metaphorically can we say that God is “in the world” or that the world is “in God”.3

The fundamental problem of panentheism is the middle term, “en/in”: how is creation “in” God and God “in” creation? Panentheism seeks to avoid both, separating God from the world, as traditional theism often tends to do, and identifying or fusing God with the world as in pantheism. Traditional theism emphasizes the difference between God and the world, for example, in Florovsky, while panentheism stresses God’s active presence in the world. Conversely, whereas pantheism identifies or comingles God and the world, panentheism maintains the identity and significance of both the divine and the non-divine, the distinction between the world as created and God as transcendent, uncreated and the Creator.

A rich diversity of panentheist models of God–world relations has developed in the past century, often in response to scientific theories, especially modern cosmology (see Clayton 2004). Sergius Bulgakov explicitly espoused panentheism. To distance himself from Vladimir Solovyov’s subtly pantheistic philosophical–theological system, Bulgakov emphasizes God’s transcendence to creation and God as Creator, while, at the same time, maintaining the prime panentheist affirmation that God is in creation and creation in God:

God creates the world, as it were, out of himself, out of the abundance of his own resources. Nothing new is introduced for God by the life of the world of creatures. That world only receives, according to the mode proper to it, the divine principle of life. Its being is only a reflection and a mirror of the world of God. … The world, having been created from “nothing”, in this “nothing” finds its “place”. God confers on a principle which originates in himself an existence distinct from his own. This is not pantheism but panentheism.

(Bulgakov 1993, pp. 63–64 and 72)

Bulgakov’s cosmology fuses panentheism and sophiology, with which he also assimilates the patristic notion of the divine energies, in a complex and not entirely coherent system that seeks to maintain an antinomic balance between God as utterly transcendent and yet radically immanent. He explicitly defines his theology as panentheist, defending it against the accusation of pantheism brought against Solovyov: “But is this not a pantheism, an impious deification of the world, leading to a kind of religious materialism? Yes, it is a pantheism, but an entirely pious one; or more precisely, as I prefer to call it in order to avoid ambiguity, it is a panentheism” (Bulgakov 2004, pp. 199–200). Bulgakov summarizes his panentheism as “the truth that all is in God or of God (panentheism)” (Bulgakov 2005, p. 27).

Kallistos Ware and Andrew Louth participated in a symposium on panentheism held in December 2001 (Clayton and Peacocke 2004). Ware’s paper focuses on the Palamite doctrine of the divine energies, and Louth’s on the logoi of Maximus the Confessor. Ware and Louth attach the doctrines of Maximus and Palamas to panentheism. Ware, for example, argues that panentheism “is a label that may legitimately be applied to Palamism”, in the sense of “weak panentheism”, since Palamas, in common with the main line of ancient and modern Orthodox theology, “believes that the divine being is in no way exhausted by the universe, for God remains utterly transcendent in his imparticipable essence” (Ware 2004, p. 166).

Orthodox critics of panentheism are not lacking, with Georges Florovsky being the strongest. He saw Bulgakov’s panentheism as little more than Solovyov’s pantheist wolf disguised in a theistic sheepskin. But rather than waging a frontal battle against Solovyov and Bulgakov, Florovsky attacks them indirectly by critiquing Origen and Arius, especially in his 1928 article “Creation and Createdness”, positing the patristic doctrine of creation as the true Christian theology of relations between God and the world.

Ironically, Florovsky’s willingness to admit, however reluctantly, that creation has some form of eternal existence in the divine will could be considered a legitimate formulation of panentheism. Florovsky tackles the problem of explaining the relationships between God and creation, time and eternity, in the context of his thesis that the idea of creation existed in God’s mind from all eternity but that its realization occurs in time. His solution is not entirely satisfactory, since it seems to run counter to his own categorical assertion that “Nothing created can ever be part of God” (Florovsky 2019, p. 45) and involves introducing time into eternity. Florovsky further muddles his own argument that there are two types of eternity by citations from John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor, and Augustine to the effect that there was some form of divine eternal pre-contemplation of creation before its actual realization (Florovsky 2019, pp. 45–47). Unlike Bulgakov and later theologians such as Ware and Louth, Florovsky is unwilling to call a spade a spade—to recognize intimations of panentheism in the ancient Fathers—but in the end, his solution appears to be panentheist in all but name.

Florovsky’s main target in “Creation and Createdness” is sophiology, but panentheism suffers collateral damage for being too closely interwoven with sophiology in Bulgakov and for being ultimately reducible, according to Florovsky, to pantheism. While Florovsky sees panentheism as a sub-species of pantheism (hence unacceptable), Bulgakov and other modern Orthodox theologians who espouse panentheism regard it as a sub-species of theism (hence acceptable). Considering the totality of Bulgakov’s theology, with the overwhelming evidence that he was a Christian theist, it is not possible to sustain a claim that he was a pantheist.

In attacking Origen’s cosmology, Florovsky implicitly invites the reader to draw a parallel between Bulgakov’s sophiology and panentheism and Origen. But another parallel is also valid: even if both Origen and Bulgakov made major theological errors, this did not prevent them from being sincere and pious Christians and outstanding theologians who were confessors of the faith, Origen suffering physical torture which likely resulted in a premature death and Bulgakov loss of employment and exile.

6. Conclusions

Modern Orthodox theology has devoted considerable attention to the issue of how God relates to the world, proposing widely different, overlapping, and even conflicting approaches. The related notions of all-unity and sophiology, key themes of the Russian religious renaissance, have not achieved significant and lasting acceptance in Orthodoxy, despite later interest in post-Soviet Russia and in the West. Although all-unity and sophiology and the elaborate theologies associated with them may now be more of historical interest than current interest, they nonetheless played an important role in the stimulation of other approaches which gained broader support in Orthodox circles. The mainstream of Orthodox thought, while intrigued by a mystical vision of a principle of unity both in the created world and between creation and Creator, was, at the same time, dismayed by the complexity and artificiality of the philosophical and theological constructs spawned in the elaboration of this unifying principle. It was more reassuring to fall back on notions well grounded in patristic theology and the history of the church—the logoi of Evagrius of Ponticus and Maximus the Confessor, the Palamite theology of the divine energies, and the contemplation of God in creation—and it is these notions which gained the upper hand in Orthodoxy. Yet even these theologies, together with the more troublesome notion of panentheism, have features comparable with all-unity, to the extent that they seek to bridge the gap between Creator and creation.

Patristically inclined theologians perceived all-unity as bound up with Romantic sentimentalism and German idealism and as too close to pantheism for comfort. In Vladimir Solovyov, all-unity and the world soul evolve into the problematic concept of Sophia, Divine Wisdom, in which form it was inherited by prominent successors such as Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov. For the critics of all-unity, the pantheistic risk of the metaphysics of all-unity was accentuated in the idea of Sophia, culminating in the conflict over sophiology in the mid-1930s. Although sophiology loomed large in the first half of the twentieth century, Orthodox theology did not “receive” sophiology, in the sense of a broad acceptance of its main ideas. In the eyes of critics, sophiology was irreconcilable with the doctrines of Maximus the Confessor (the logoi of things) and Gregory Palamas (divine energies). Maximus and Palamas might not provide all the answers that the sophiologists sought, but the sophiologists were unable to convince critics that their doctrine was a consistent development of patristic theology.

In many ways, Bulgakov’s sophiology represents the culmination of the theology of the Russian religious renaissance. Bulgakov constructed a theological system based on the intuition of Divine Wisdom as the key to the relation between God and the world. He can be faulted for developing a system founded on a doctrine which finds, at best, only weak support in Scripture, the Fathers, and the experience of the church. In setting out to construct a complete theological system, Bulgakov was more in the philosophical tradition than in the tradition of Orthodox theology. Nevertheless, despite the insurmountable weaknesses in sophiology, Bulgakov’s principal theological works must be considered among the major writings of modern Orthodox theology.

After World War II, sophiology was largely ignored in Orthodox theological circles, except as an aspect of the history of modern Orthodox theology. Bulgakov’s vision of sophiology as a development of Palamite theology did not capture the Orthodox imagination. The Palamite revival, already underway in the 1930s, continued to gather momentum after World War II and quickly eclipsed sophiology as a more satisfactory approach to a theology of God and creation. Insufficient attention has been paid to understanding the relationship between the Palamite theology of the divine energies and sophiology. The publication of Bulgakov’s major theological works in French (1980s) and in English (2002–2012) revived a certain interest in sophiology, but more attention is devoted to Bulgakov and sophiology in non-Orthodox academic circles than among Orthodox theologians (see Hallensleben et al. 2024). By the early twenty-first century, few Orthodox theologians actively subscribed to sophiology. Sophiology is an intriguing and spectacular but flawed and tragic theological insight, now largely relegated to the history of theology. Even if it is fair to say that Orthodox theology has not received sophiology, one can nonetheless affirm that the sophiologists asked the right questions about the relations between God and the world but gave the wrong answers.

Unfortunately, philosophers and theologians, not unexpectedly, naturally tend to read and understand Sophia through philosophical and theological lenses as a description of a metaphysical entity or reality of some sort, rather than as a poetic or mystical image of God in creation and creation in God. In this perspective, Bulgakov set himself on an impossible mission in attempting to solidify the mystical visions of Soloviev and Florensky into a coherent philosophical–theological system compatible with the Orthodox tradition.

Orthodox theologians of the early twentieth century stood on weak ground in defending Palamas, since Palamite theology had largely disappeared from Orthodox thought in the preceding centuries. Absent from nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-century treatises of dogmatic theology, the divine energies feature prominently in the works of theologians of the neopatristic tradition, such as Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, and John Meyendorff, and in the Dogmatica of Hilarion Alfeyev, John Romanides, and Dumitru Stăniloae (Alfeyev 2012, pp. 153–58; Romanides 2008, pp. 157–60 and 253–59; Stăniloae 2002, pp. 125–39). The first order of priority for early practitioners of neopatristic theology was to restore Palamas to his rightful place in Orthodox thought. By the time of the debate on Palamism in the 1970s, this had largely been achieved. As Aidan Nichols wrote in 1995, “Nowadays most, perhaps all, Orthodox theologians would regard [Palamas’s doctrine] as part of the assured dogma of the church, since the particular councils which taught it have themselves been ‘received’ by the generality of the Orthodox” (Nichols 1995, p. 47).

Despite the widespread acceptance of Palamism among modern Orthodox theologians, some, such John Zizioulas, do not attach much importance to the doctrine of the divine energies, or ignore it altogether—Zizioulas does not discuss the divine energies in his Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (Zizioulas 2008). Nonetheless, the revival and near-universal acceptability of these doctrines in Orthodoxy must rank as one of the most significant achievements of neopatristic theology, perhaps its most important. By the 1970s, Orthodox supporters of Palamism were in a position not only to defend his theology from the solid ramparts of a half-century of Orthodox scholarship, but even to mount an offensive against weak points in corresponding Western theology, while conceding to some of the criticisms, such as aspects of Meyendorff’s interpretation of the fourteenth-century debate. The discussion of Palamism is far from concluded, but it can now be conducted in an open and cooperative ecumenical context, as shown by the Cambridge symposium on divine energies of 2008.

In his 1928 article “Creation and Createdness”, Georges Florovsky put considerable emphasis on the ontological gulf between Creator and creation, as a counterpoint to the perceived pantheism of all-unity and sophiology. But, in itself, this emphasis does not resolve the question of how God relates to creation, which is properly the domain of the essence–energies distinction. It is theologically insufficient to point to fundamental differences between Creator and creation; provisions must be made for their potential unity, which is rendered possible through the doctrines of divine energies, the logoi of things, the Incarnation of the Logos, and theosis.

Despite theological weaknesses in the notion of all-unity, the idea of a fundamental, if often vaguely articulated, unity of humanity and the rest of creation—seen in the light of an essential differentiation between God as Creator and the cosmos as created—finds an echo in later Orthodox reflection on the divine energies, as manifested especially in the spiritual and liturgical notions of the contemplation of God in nature, the idea of “the world as sacrament”, and Orthodox concern for the environment.

The different approaches to a theology of God and the world overlap to some extent. Among the early Russian religious thinkers, all-unity flowed easily into sophiology, which ultimately proved to be a theological dead-end. On the other hand, the theology of the divine energies, the logoi of things, and panentheism appear to be compatible to some Orthodox theologians, who accept all three. These, in turn, flow into the spirituality of the contemplation of God in creation, concern for the natural world, and support for environmental measures. But there are still gaps. The grey areas of the relationship between Palamas’s divine energies and Maximus’s logoi are not fully worked out, and Orthodox theology has yet to deal adequately with the major philosophical and theological objections to panentheism raised by Georges Florovsky and Nicolas Lossky.

In a study of wisdom in the Christian tradition, Marcus Plested (2022) proposes a “re-oriented sophiology”, a “sophiology without Sophia”. He jettisons the troublesome notion of an intermediary, somewhere between God and creation, “shifting, imprecise, indefinable, ungraspable, elusive”, somehow associated with femininity, and which more than any other aspect of sophiology has been the source of unending debates and accusations of heresy. Plested’s framework for a re-oriented sophiology, is, as he states, “based in the first instance on Palamas”, which makes explicit tacit implications in Palamism itself. The framework is inherently panentheistic: “The creation as whole is a manifestation of the divine wisdom, the eternal ideas for the creation corresponding to the uncreated energies sustaining and underpinning the creation. … God thus creates, indwells, and draws all creation back to himself as wisdom according to energy or operation”. Through the Incarnation, God opens “to all human beings the promise of participation in the deifying energies of God” (Plested 2022, pp. 239–42).

Despite the seeming incompatibility of the all-unity and Divine Wisdom of the Russian religious renaissance with the theologies of the divine energies and the logoi of things that later gained wide acceptance in Orthodoxy, something of the religious philosophers’ mystical–poetic view of the natural world as a reflection of divine Unity–Truth–Beauty–Goodness–Love is found in the idea of the world as sacrament and the contemplation of God in creation, a re-enchantment of the cosmos infused with the divine presence and worthy of human respect and loving care. Sergius Bulgakov, in a meditation on the theological significance of the legend of the Holy Grail, offers a mystical justification of this vision by reflecting that, after Christ on the cross had been pierced by the soldier’s lance,

The blood and water [from Christ’s side] that flowed into the world abide in the world. They sanctify this world as the pledge of its future transfiguration. Through the precious streams of Christ’s blood and water that flowed out of his side, all creation was sanctified—heaven and earth, our earthly world, and all the stellar worlds… The whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail…The Holy Grail… is not offered for communion but abides in the world as the mysterious holiness of the world, as the power of life, as the fire in which the world will be transfigured into a new heaven and new earth… All of nature thirsts for the body and blood of Christ and receives them in communion in the blood and water that flowed out of his side when he was on the cross.

(Bulgakov 1997, pp. 33–34)

The sanctity of creation, both its divine creation and its continued divine preservation and protection, together with the cosmic implications of the Incarnation of Christ, as reflected in Bulgakov’s original and audacious meditation on the Holy Grail, powerfully underpins a Christian theology of the environment and human responsibility for the care of the creation.