Perhaps the key to unwinding the mass of questions awaiting examination by the specialists in dialogue would be to adopt methods used in the positive sciences, and to relegate the methods already in use from the social sciences to a dependent level. Of course, one could not readily apply such methods to an examination of God and the life after death, but one could certainly do so for this life, with regard to spiritual experiences in the various religions.
In the Orthodox partisan tradition, genuine spiritual experience is the foundation of dogmatic formulations which, in turn, are necessary guides for leading to glorification. Translated into the language of science, this would mean that verification by observation is expressed in descriptive symbols which, in turn, act as guides for others to repeat this same verification by observation. Thus, the observations of prior astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists, and doctors become the observations of their successors.
In exactly the same manner, the experience of glorification of the prophets, apostles, and saints are expressed in linguistic forms, whose purpose is to act as a guide to the same experience of glorification by their successors.
The tradition of empirical observation and verification is the cornerstone of sifting factual reality from hypotheses in all of the positive sciences. The very same is true of the Orthodox patristic theological method also.
A basic characteristic of the Frankish scholastic method, mislead by Augustinian Platonism and Thomistic Aristotelianism, had been its naive confidence in the objective existence of things rationally speculated about. By following Augustine, the Franks substituted the patristic concern for spiritual observation, (which they had found firmly established in Gaul when they first conquered the area) with a fascination for metaphysics. They did not suspect that such speculations had foundations neither in created nor in spiritual reality.
No one would today accept as true what is not empirically observable, or at least verifiable by inference, from an attested effect. so it is with patristic theology. Dialectical speculation about God and the Incarnation as such are rejected. Only those things which can be tested by the experience of the grace of God in the heart are to be accepted. “Be not carried about by divers and strange teachings. For it is good that the heart by confirmed by grace,” a passage from Hebrews 13.9, quoted by the Fathers to this effect.
- Protopresbyter John S. Romanides – FRANKS, ROMANS, FEUDALISM, AND DOCTRINE — [ Part 2 ]
