Human Dignity and Theosis in Dumitru Staniloae’s Theology
Human Dignity and Theosis in Dumitru Staniloae’s Theology

Summary/Abstract: Prof. Dumitru Stăniloae (1903-1993), the greatest Orthodox theologian of the 20th century, in general and of Romanian Orthodox Church in particular, was a thinker of the mystery of the incarnated Son of God and a lover of Christ. That is why his Christian spiritual thought and experience fit perfectly between the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum and Amo, ergo sum, according to the inspired expression of the patriarch Callistus of Constantinople who lived in the 14th century, which went beyond the metaphysical dimension of the correct concept and opened to the ultimate, divine, Trinitarian Christian reality (Rogobete 2001, 469; Duponcheelle 1992, 469; Petraru 2023, 285). Professor of Dogmatic and of Ascetic and Mystic, it is obvious that his theological concerns pertain to the meaning of human life in his ontological relationship with God, his Creator and Savior. A professor of theology of great intellectual scope who synthesized the philosophical currents of the time, i.e., existentialism and phenomenology, which he creatively explored in his theology, he overcame certain school templates, delving creatively into an admirable neo-patristic synthesis to the fathers of the Church, in Sibiu in the interwar period and then in Bucharest; he also stood out as an exemplary priest of the Christian spiritual experience of life perfected in Christ as the full meaning and sublime human dignity of deification, an essentially Christian anthropological concept. Unfortunately, the establishment of communism as an ideological and totalitarian political system in Romania had disastrous effects for the Romanian theologian who, between 1959 and 1964 was imprisoned for his dignity as a man of the Church and professor of theology, a vision and a life incompatible with the militant Marxism-Leninism of foreign communist leaders. Therefore, we consider that an approach to Orthodox Christian anthropology as deification in the thought of Prof. D. Stăniloae also constitutes an approach to human dignity from the perspective of the divine plan of man’s salvation and communion in time and man’s eternity with God.

• Details
• Contents