„Turnura lingvistică“ și „structura“ ca formă a trăirii în teologia Părintelui Dumitru Stăniloae
“The Linguistic Turn” and “Structure” as a Form of Experience in the Theology of Father Dumitru Stăniloae

Author(s): Gheorghe Nichifor TĂNASE
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, Theology and Religion
Published by: Editura Doxologia
Keywords: truth and human language; linguistic turn; nature of theology; structure of experience; Mother of God as khôra;
Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the interrelationships between epistemology, anthropology, and the nature of human speech about God. Thus, the aim is to explore the connection between Christian discourse and the language of contemporary philosophical ideas. So, Christian discourse does not represent a theory of knowledge among others; instead, it was a penetration into the ”symbolic” structure of the Mystery of Incarnation. The articulation of the visible and the hidden is not done by the noetic reference of a signifier to another signified reality, but by affirming their unity in a single Person of the Lord, reveled in His double consubstantiality, i.e. divine and human. We can state that, because ”truth” by itself does not have a language, theology has always operated with the language of the spiritual and cultural environment of each age. Therefore, the language of theology was primarily the language of the Hellenistic philosophical context. There is an increased interest of contemporary philosophy in the linguistic phenomenon and in the meaning of language (that theology also uses). But due to the absolutisation of language, hermeneutics and structuralism dominate. By contrast, the theology of the Person and work of Christ is infinitely more than the proclamation of the word-message. At His Transfiguration, Christ’s disciples became something else, that is, He made them able to see the divine glory. The Lord changed man, which means He made him capable of taking part in a real state that man could not even think about before even if he had already heard the Lord’s words. Truth is not an idea; it is the divine reality in the divine-human Person of Christ. Thus, in the knowledge of the truth, the experience of the same truth precedes the linguistic formulation that follows. The linguistic formulation of the authentic experience of truth is always testified by what constitutes the Church’s Tradition. So, the way and the possibility for man to receive the truth is first the identity of the experience and not the identity of the form of expression. In our presentation, we will emphasise that the experience of truth precedes theology (”theologising”), as the expression or indication of truth, and that truth is not identified with linguistic form (Truth is uncreated, while language is created).

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