Nicholas Loudovikos
All Articles by Nicholas Loudovikos
Professor of Dogmatics and Philosophy, University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki; Visiting Professor, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK; Research Fellow, University of Winchester, UK
Dialogical (bio)technology? The problem of (bio)technology as definitive and post-lapsarian utopia: from Marx and Heidegger to Bostrom, Stuart Russell, and the dark star of desire
I should like to name here another perspective for (bio)Technology, a theologically-inspired one. I would call it Dialogical (Bio)Technology, in consideration of the fact that its fundamental characteristics, internally interdependent, would be the initial orientation towards what I have called the ‘dialectical composition of created nature’; thereafter the overthrow of the enforced homogenisation of people which is brought about by their being reduced to their psycho-biological elements through the promotion of a genuine dialogical society of real people, in which people do not dictate their existence to others; and the creation, in the end, of precisely that analogical identity which is expressed as imitation of the unifying, agapetic energy of God –of the will to consubstantiality rather than the will to power. These three principles would have the power to make (bio)Technology in general, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, dialogical, constantly reviewing the words, the actions and, in the end the purposes of God among his creations: wise, moderating and beneficial, with the sense of boundaries always present.
Every modern discussion on technology has already been embedded within the domain of its power and speaks in its defence. Everything is now all about technology, and this is very disturbing for the very existence of us humans and of the world. It is not only yet another, historically fleeting, trope, because, as Heidegger showed, it will never collapse and never be surpassed{1}. It is also a lecture by Heidegger, from 1955, which will be used to start our discussion.
1.Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik, trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977), 39.
Science in the Destiny of Theology A discussion in the midst of a Pandemic
The experience of this ongoing pandemic has not been a common and terrifying danger only. It has also been a sign of unity of our scattered post-secular humanity, as the question of our forgotten common natureseems to come to the fore again. This now happens as an unexpected medical problem, against our narcissistic dreams of individual prosperity, that is, beyond what Charles Taylor termed an exclusive humanism,as the common post-secular self-authorization, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, where the only transcendence accepted is Nussbaum’s transcendence of an internal and human sort.
That means that nature returns as a threat and an obstacle, unifying humanity not in the glory of its ‘aspiring minds’, according to Marlowe, but in the misery of its corruption. And now humanity remembers God, bringing him again to the court of theodicy; now God is, again, in the minds of many, the author of this lamentable burden of necessity, which prevents our detached thinking selfhood to fulfil its destiny of dominating the universe. The Greek-Western world has always had two temptations here, which both proved to be problematic: either to surpass or to enhance this nature. Let us start from the latter.
Theology and the Discovery of the Unconscious: Preliminary Remarks
The most recent relevant discussion seems to involve, perhaps unavoidably, a theological account of the Unconscious, which lies behind almost all concepts on the adoption of which concepts psychoanalysis depends. In the present paper I will limit myself to studying some important books that show the current status of relevant research, and then I will attempt to offer some more, though still preliminary, theological remarks.
In my book entitled Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology: On Desire, Catholicity, and Eschatology,1 I ventured to search for the uncovering of a possible spiritual dimension of psychoanalysis that somehow ‘correlates’ with fundamental theological notions. For this purpose, I confined myself to what are in my view three of the most important and common concepts, considered bridges between theology and psychoanalysis: First, that of Desire as it is described in its subjective functioning according to Lacan, or, in theological terms, of natural will (as formulated by St Maximus the Confessor), which has to be rooted in nature as an expression of its internal life , instead of being just a vehicle of the intellect. In this way it can express human desire as the pure yearning for unity, both internal and external, which can hold all things together, an ontological unity that can be properly expressed by the theological notion of consubstantiality.2
Second, the concept of Catholicity, which I called ‘Inter-Intra-co-Being’, developed as a theological commentary on the psychoanalytic experience of inter-subjectivity, where the pan-unity of all things (co-being) takes place within the
Αθήνα: Αρμός, 2003.
Regarding the concept of consubstantiality, see in my book Analogical identities: The Creation of the Christian Self. Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism in the Patristic Era, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 183: ‘The achievement of the of nature is, of course, the work of Christ, who draws together the ontological gaps which segment the relationship of created things between themselves and God, effecting this thereafter in the Church through the mysteries, as “Eucharistic Ontology” of the entry from now of beings into the last things of the Kingdom. As regards the will, from the point of view of the believer, the manner in which this consubstantiality emerges, which Christ Himself activates eucharistically in the Holy Spirit, is a bond of the personal will towards others, as a relationship “bringing all, through the one logos of creation to the one cause of nature” (Maximus the Confessor, To Thalassius, PG 90, 724C-725A), i.e. to consubstantiality’ .
Psychoanalysis And Eschatology
After the arrival of psychoanalysis, nothing has remained untouched by it, and this is even more the case if we add Freud’s meta-psychological ambitions, which sought to explain even more broadly the phenomena present in the individual soul, such as culture, religion, art, etc. Theology in particular felt directly threatened by Freud’s militant atheism. Despite this fact, however, I would still hazard saying that at the deeper level of ontological presuppositions and consequences, psychoanalysis has yet to receive proper theological treatment or be given sufficient interpretation.
Theological Hermeneutics and Depth Psychology1
A century after the publication of the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams(1900), it would merely be to repeat a truism to claim today that not only the method of investigation of psychoanalysis but also its terminology have come to permeate the whole of Western humanistic thought, a unique phenomenon in the intellectual history of the modern period. Despite initial objections, the new Freudian ‘science’ has proved to have established itself not only in the realm of experts but in the common perception of modern man about himself. The popularisation of psycho- analysis has already produced a veritable mythology about the soul, and it is not at all rare to hear terms taken from the first and second Freudian local description of the psyche thrown around in public as common sense and self-evident.
At the same time, much water has flown since then in the river once carved out by Freud. Many of his views have been reconsidered, and ‘depth psychology’ is now carried along countless new hermeneutical channels and ‘schools’, none of which can lay claim to very great success in their attempts to develop the ‘science of the unconscious’. Of course, there has been no lack of attempts to ‘return to Freud’ and his ‘holy’ texts, usually of varying levels of inspiration and accompanied by radical hermeneutical revisions, either at the level of theory or of clinical practice, which is only natural given that the latter constitutes the goal of the former.
A paper given at the International Conference ‘Orthodox Theology and Psychotherapy’ in Aliartos, Greece on 1–5 October 2003. Published in Greek, as part of my book Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology: on Desire, Catholicity, and Eschatology, (Αθήνα: Αρμός, 2003). Translated in English by Vincent DeWeese.
Ecstasy as Descent: The Palamite and Maximian Bedrock of The Theology of St Sophrony
According to St Sophrony, the greater the intellectual riches, the more inexplicably painful is the abandonment by God, the Godforsakenness, which, however, opens the soul up to others, that is it inspires man to initiate a dialogical progress towards achieving consubstantiality, by gathering all creation into his hypostasis. This descent seems to be the only possible authentic ecstasis in Christ. But we are forever within the blessed context of Hesychasm. As did St Gregory Palamas, and before him St Maximus the Confessor, so St Sophrony ascends to God without any internal dichotomy, without any psychosomatic division, without any separation from the others, but perichorising consubstantially all created nature, without the rejection of any passion—since it is possible for everything to be transformed. As St Gregory and St Maximus were, so St Sophrony was, and still is, a presence of Christ in the world.
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Although the theological discussion of the theology of St Sophrony has just begun, it promises to be exceptionally important for the identity of Orthodox theology in the immediate future. This is because, as I hope will become clear below, St Sophrony was not simply an ‘ascetic author’, as a group of authors has come to be known, who con- centrate their attention on what is wrongly labeled ‘spirituality’ and would perhaps be better called ‘the neptic (νηπτική) tradition’. Indeed, many of the ‘neptic authors’, as they are commonly known, show little or no interest in the incorporation of theology as a whole into their work. Of course, this in no way diminishes their work, since it is true that Orthodox theology is equally interested in genuinely empirical, neptic, and ascetic theological epistemology, without which any form of Eucharistic or Ecclesial ontology is in danger of becoming a kind of stale, incomprehensible, transcendental pursuit of a vague ecstatic communion. Very few of the Fathers, among whom are Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, attempt any deep amalgamation of the neptic/ascetic tradition and its anthropological and theological predicates and consequences. In my view, St Sophrony Sakharov
Christological Or Analogical Primacy. Ecclesial Unity And Universal Primacy In The Orthodox Church
What is primacy, then, in the Church, if not precisely the initiation and protection of this step-by-step consubstantial unification of all things in Christ, in which consubstantial unification the very ecclesial being consists? And since Christ is himself not only the ontological/hypostatic event of this consubstantial unification, but also the foremost teacher and initiator of it, through the mystery of the Cross, and in the Spirit, he is indeed the only head and leader of his Church, he is her primordial and ultimate primate. But this means that when we speak of primacy in the Church, we always mean a Christ-like primacy (i.e., an analogical primacy). That means, a primacy-in-participation in Christ’s unique primacy. And the way of this participation is, according to Greek Patristic theology, analogy, which is identified, in the Areopagitic texts, for example, with syn-ergy, which means precisely participation in the divine energy as manifest- ed in Christ-as-primate. How can this be discussed in the context of the contemporary ecclesiological dialogues?
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The ecclesiological dialogues between East and West over the last fifty years, and especially those between the Roman-Catholic and the Orthodox theologians, have led some theologians from both sides to realize that the basic underlying problem is that, over the course of the centuries—even before the Great Schism, and, of course, in a more decisive way, after the Schism—two different ecclesiologies were gradually created, all the more so in gradual alienation between them. I think that Edward Siecienski’s book The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate1 is far the best book ever written by an Orthodox theologian on this issue, precisely because it succeeds, by using a highly objective scholarly method of approaching the texts and the problems (it is revealing that one of the book’s eminent Roman-Catholic critics wrote that it is impossible for anyone to discover the author’s denomination
What is Sophia? Bulgakov, or the Biblical Trinity between Kant and Hegel
This paper aims at showing how strong is Hegel’s influence upon the very formation of Bulgakov’s Trinitarian metaphysics, serving as a correction to Kant’s metaphysical closedness, as the Russian theologian understands the latter. It focuses upon the Hegelian coordinates of Bulgakov’s understanding of Divine subjectivity, dealing especially with his concept of Revelation. Finally, it tries positively to apply other possible terms in order to move Sophiology beyond the limits of German Idealism.
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It is more than possible that if you put the above question even to some of the most fervent exponents of Bulgakov’s theology, you will receive more than one answer. Most of the scholars who dealt with this confined themselves to gathering the nuances and differentiations of this concept dispersed in the eminent Russian theologian’s writings, without being able to give a final comprehensive definition. It is also possible that even Bulgakov himself would not be able to make a clear-cut statement concerning the essence of his beloved term, which he inherited from his Russian mentor Pavel Florenski (who had taken it from Soloviev).
It must be admitted that, in modern times, Sophia has been a sort of idiosyncratic Russian theological concept; it is a concept with deep cultural roots both in Russian thought and art, and also in a specific Russian paganism.1 Of course, a certain ancient Sophiological doctrine exists already in Augustine, in the Thirteenth Book of his Confessions. Sophia here is eternal but not uncreated, she is a superior spiritual creature, created before all the other creatures , before even the beginning of time; she is not the uncreated divine Sophia, identical with God’s essence, through which the earth and heaven were made, but she is the ‘created Sophia’, which ‘con- templates the divine light’, and thus remains unalterable, through God’s love for her.
The magic and pagan elements in Soloviev’s thought, along with his erotic utopia, his estheticism, and his theurgic devotion, have been well described, between others, by B. Zenkovsky, in his Histoire de la philosophie russe, Tome II (Paris: Gallimard 1955), 57–71.
Narcissism beyond Pleasure and Inter-subjectivity without Meaning: Reading Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, and Thomas Aquinas Today
This study is a systematic effort to understand modern narcissism-without-pleasure and intersubjectivity- without-meaning, with the help of the Maximian teaching on pleasure and pain, and the Palamite distinction between essence and energies. This is, at the same time, an effort to understand tradition in the context of a lively re-appropriation of the spiritual findings of the past. In order to express this, some new terms such as inter-meaningfulness are thus created with the help of modern Philosophy.
Introduction: The Strawberries of Tradition and the Blood of Interpretation
It was in Cambridge where Virginia Wolf, in 1923, started her famous lecture on modern literature with the phrase: ‘Suddenly, around 1910, human nature changed’. Indeed, human nature had started changing long before Wolf’s circle of artists and thinkers, along with other groups of intellectuals in Cambridge, such as the poisonous ‘Apostles’, realized it. If this change represents the ‘self-sufficient humanism’, its story has recently been told again, brilliantly, by thinkers such as Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) and Rémi Brague (Le Régne de l’homme).2 In any case, even the Enlightenment’s ‘detached self’ was strongly doubted: by Nietzsche and his change of ecstatic transcendence into will to power, along with the parallel re-evaluation of materiality; or by Freud and his (re-)discovery of the Unconscious, which is now decisively psycho-biological; and of course by Feuerbach, Hegel and Marx,
Half of this paper, in an earlier form, was published as ‘Δι-εννοημάτωσις or Inter-meaningfulness: rereading Wittgenstein through Gregory Palamas’ and Thomas Aquinas’ readings of Aristotle’, in S. Mitralexis, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 151–165. This half has undergone substantial changes.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Rémi Brague, Le Régne de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 2015).
Dialogical Nature, Enousion Person, and Non-ecstatic Will in St Maximus the Confessor: The Conclusion of a Long Debate
In this article, I strive to conclude a long theological debate with modern Orthodox Personalism and show that, in the Confessor’s thought, nature is essentially dialogical. That is, I argue against the imposition upon Maximus of any abstract separation of nature from person. Person is enousion, not an abstract ecstatic detachment from nature. Will, for Maximus, is an expression of the inner life of nature, both in anthropology and Christology, and stands in opposition to any transcendental conception thereof. This article also strives to show that neither Trinitarian life nor human fulfilment can be theologically articulated without the concept of homoousion. Finally, it seeks to inaugurate a systematic discussion of these notions within the context of modern philosophy and psychology.
I think that sometimes philosophers make theologians feel happy. This is precisely the case with philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Richard Kearney in our era, or Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, Nikolai Berdiayev, and Maurice Blondel, amongst others, in the recent past. What do they all have in common? It is that they created philosophies partially inspired by theological concepts and sources but, at the same time, faithful to the requirements of philosophical rigour. This sort of philosophy can often speak directly to the intelligent modern but theologically uncommitted man, using his language and his ways of thinking. On the other hand, these philosophies tend to leave the historical apparatus of theology intact, since they do not claim full domination or possession of theological tradition.
The above-mentioned claim of domination or possession is usually made by theologians. However, also in order to meet the requirements of the modern mind, some theologians also use philosophy, albeit in a way that seems to be the opposite of the method espoused by the aforementioned philosophers. These theologians use some philosophical concepts or methods a priori, thus trying both to assimilate and to interpret theological tradition in a way that is existentially convincing for their epoch. Perhaps the most well-known amongst them in the twentieth century are.
Practising Consubstantiality: The Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary between Synergy and Sophia in St Nicholas Cabasilas and Sergius Bulgakov, and in a Postmodern Perspective
This paper examines the in-depth way Nicholas Cabasilas assimilated Palamite Hesychastic theological anthropology, transforming it into a Mariological humanism of theological provenance, which responds to the humanism of the Western Renaissance. Then it compares it with an analogous tendency in Bulgakov’s thought, putting this theological humanism in dialogue with the self-sufficient humanism of the post-modern kingdom of man.
A Long Introduction: Byzantine Individualism and Hesychasm
According to the experts, the conflict between the iconoclasts and the iconophiles, which ended in the victory of the latter, seems to present a key to the interpretation for the understanding of the spiritual state of Byzantium in the period that Paul Lemerle refers to as the ‘first Byzantine humanism’ in his eponymous book.1 This era spiritually preceded and somehow inaugurated the period that Steven Runciman calls the ‘second (or last) Byzantine Renaissance/Humanism’,2 the period during which St Nicholas Cabasilas lived. The essence of the matter is that the icon defends the completeness of human nature and of the world against the likelihood of an Eastern (Semitic and Asian) ‘blending’ of this nature in the ocean of the divine nature. In this sense, the spiritual purview of icon veneration (apart from being the locus where a distinctive eschatological ontology was consolidated, the significant theological and philosophical consequences of which have yet to be studied) also provided a home for a humanism which, apart from anything else, preserved certain fundamental requirements of classical Greek education as well as the whole of medieval ‘Greek’ Aristotelianism.
1.In the ‘historical’ pages which follow an attempt is made to construct a critique of the works of specialists. See particularly P. Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantine. Notes et remarques sur enseignement et culture à Byzance des origines au Xe siècle (Paris: P.U.F., 1971); C. Mango, Byzantium, The Empire of New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); H. G. Beck, Das Byzantinische Jahrtausend (München: O. Beck, 1978); S. Runciman, Byzantine Civilization (London: Edward Arnold, 1959); S. Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; H. Ahrweiler, L’ideologie politique de l’Empire Byzantin (Paris: P.U.F., 1975).
2.This also, not coincidentally, functions as the title of his book, The Last Byzantine Renaissance.