CHAPTER VIII
DEMOCRACY AND SPIRITUALITY
DUMITRU POPESCU
Initially, European culture had a Christian origin, but in the course of time it underwent deep changes, having become secularized against its Christian background. The great change occurred in the modern epoch. Under the influence of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, European culture declined the deductive method whose center of gravity was divine Revelation and oriented itself towards the inductive method stemming from natural revelation, or, more precisely, from the concrete reality of the world we live in. Therefore, a substantial mutation occurred in the field of knowledge, as one passed from supernatural knowledge, which had its origin in God, to natural knowledge, completely dependent on man. This has great consequences from a spiritual point of view: the process of knowledge promoted by the Enlightenment ceases to appeal to theology, and lays stress on science and technology.
THE MEANING OF THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN OF THE EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Moreover, scientific knowledge was considered to be completely opposed to theological knowledge. Due to such errors as geocentricism, instead of the heliocentric system, the latter was accused of obscurantism. "The Enlightenment thinkers," says an English theologian,
spoke of their epoch as one of reason, considering reason to be especially the analytical and mathematical forces by which man could reach, at least in principle, a complete understanding of reality in all its forms and so become master of all nature. There was no more room for miracles and interventions of divine providence understood as a category of explanation. God could still be conceived, at best, in a deistic sense (that is isolated in transcendence), as the last Author of all things, but one no longer needed to know the Author personally, in order to read the book of nature. Nature, as the sum of all existent things, represented the only real truth. And the man of science was the priest who could discover the secrets of nature for us and offer us the practical skills of his job. Thus, reason remained sovereign in its action. It could not be subordinated to any authority, other than that of facts. It was no longer allowed that the divine Revelation, tradition or the holy dogma have the right to control its observance. Having answered the question concerning the essence of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant gave a very inclusive answer: Aude sapere, that is "dare to know". The century of light launched this challenge and ever since then, this assertion of Kant has defined the heart of European culture, in spite of all the changes occurring in the philosophy of science."
Emerging as a reaction against religious obscurantism (which had nothing in common with the Holy Scripture as geocentricism is not of biblical origin), Enlightenment culture opened the way to unexpected progress which proved favorable to man. The progress made in the study of macrocosms due, e.g., to the spaceships launched; the incursion into the microcosmic world through basic physics, which discovered that the visible world is based on the invisible world of particles; the alleviation of suffering and the extension of men’s life on earth due to the progress of medical science and especially surgery; the more decent and comfortable life man lives today due to the gadgets at his disposal and to the machines which considerably increase man’s power over nature; the fight for human rights, for democracy and political freedom — all these give us a more comprehensive image of the positive role which the Enlightenment has played in the life of humankind.
Like any other anthropocentric culture, with both positive and negative aspects, the Enlightenment culture, which moved the center of gravity of knowledge from God to man, implies, besides the remarkable achievements mentioned above, other less brilliant aspects. As the same English thinker said, "Science acquired victories beyond the expectations of the 18th century, but the world created as such could not be more reasonable than the one which the previous centuries knew. More and more people from the most powerful nations on the earth feel caught in the claws of certain irrational forces, hard to control."
2 The more man seems to rule over nature through science and technology, the more helpless he is when faced with the irrational forces stemming from his own being. The outburst of violence, terrorism and Satanism of all kinds is one more evident proof of this sad reality. The paradox of Enlightenment culture consists in the fact that man’s freedom and democracy have been accompanied by the loss of his inner freedom. As long as this side of freedom is ignored in order to stress only political freedom as a characteristic feature of democracy, people will not be able to find their own inner equilibrium.So, we have reached a point whence we cannot move forward in the analysis of this issue unless we discover the spiritual cause at the origin of the above paradox. This cause was emphasized by the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra, Australia, at the beginning of 1991. On that occasion it was shown that the real cause of deism and anthropocentrism, which represent the two major dimensions of the process of secularization, come from a theology which created a confusion between the transcendence of God and His absence from creation. In order to understand the deeper spiritual significance of these phenomena, let us analyze each of them.
Deism is the result of a philosophical and theological conception which appreciates that after he created the world, God isolated Himself in inaccessible transcendence. A well known theologian, Yves Congar, said that "one of the greatest misfortunes which affected contemporary Christianity consisted in the fact that the Trinity was isolated both from the people and from the cosmos in transcendence."
3 If the Christian doctrine on Trinity implies, on one hand, a divine nature and three persons, then to explain the assertions of the theologian cited a logical priority, must be given to the divine nature over the three persons. Thus, through the divine nature which remains incommunicable, the expression of the Christian God in the Trinity has been completely isolated in transcendence both from the people and from the cosmos. Another well-known theologian, Karl Rahner, showed that "the separation between nature and person occurred in the scholastics due to some causes not yet very clear. Here one no longer deals with God-the-Father as an unborn principle both in Divinity and in the reality of the world, but first of all with the divine nature common to all the Three Persons. Therefore, the Trinity has been closed in a deep isolation, which risks being considered to have no interest for religious existence."4The ideas expressed in the above-mentioned text above are very important for understanding the issue with which we are concerned. If God in Trinity has no longer been seen as a personal reality, but as an impersonal nature, then the relation between God and man ceased to be a relation of personal love, but a simple formal abstract knowledge of God, which diminished the interest of the faithful in divinity and made man focus on himself. One who understood this drama of the contemporary man very well was Dostoyevsky, for whom intelligence or reason considered in itself, detached from life, appears as a means by which the main values of modern life are permanently changing, moving from essential and primary to secondary.
5Ivan Karamazov, the embodiment of the Euclidean spirit of discursive reason, repeated the famous idea of Descartes, without uttering his name: Cogito, ergo sum. To this Dostoyevsky opposes the formula which sums up the thought of Abbot Zosima: "I exist to love", as a formula comprising the very existence of life, which is not cogito, but sum (I exist). Cogito is a secondary value, as first of all we exist and then think, while the assertion: I exist, and so, my destiny is to love, is a brilliant correction which Dostoyevsky makes to the error committed by discursive reason. If we seek rapprochement between Dostoyevsky’s thought and contemporary philosophy, then we must think of Henri Bergson. There is a great rapprochement between Bergson’s spirit and that of Dostoyevsky’s. It is absolutely incidental, as Bergson did not know Dostoyevsky when he formulated the first elements of his philosophy, nor did Dostoyevsky ever suppose Henri Bergson’s existence, as the latter is philosophy had not appeared at the time. But in this reaction against discursive reason, both are adopt the same attitude. Bergson’s philosophy is a strong reaction against the errors committed by a discursive intelligence which did not want to know anything about either intuition or love.
6REASON AND LOVE IN THE FIELD OF THE CULTURE
If we are to apply these considerations concerning the relation between reason and love to our knowledge of God, then, we should quote a great theologian, Gregory Palamas, who says
When you speak of the eyes of the soul, which have the experience of the heavenly treasures, you must not refer to reason. Reason exerts itself satisfactorily either over the sensible things or over ideas. If you imagine a city which you have never seen before, you cannot get an experience only because you thought of it; similarly, you cannot have an experience of God if you only look at Him with your sensible eyes, . . . even if the idea of God goes through your head one thousand times. The same, if you think one thousand times about the heavenly treasures without observing them through experience and with spiritual eyes which surpass reason, you do not see anything and you do not master anything divine.
One could have the impression that these considerations are against reason as such. That would be a false impression, as the theologians and writers mentioned above do not leave reason aside but put first experience and love on the basis of their meeting with God, and then reason. Discursive reason can speak of God in an abstract manner, from a distance, but God can be met in reality only through living experience. Reason can refer to God, with full knowledge of the case, only to the extent to which it starts from the experience of the personal meeting of man with God. If Divinity turns into an impersonal reality, then one can no longer speak of a personal meeting between man and God able to fill man’s soul with divine light and love. Everything is reduced to a discursive knowledge of God, a formal and abstract one, which represents a simple mental exercise with no deep spiritual consequences as it places man in a spiritual vacuum. As Karl Rahner has said, an impersonal divine nature in the place of the God of personal love cannot but undermine the interest of the faithful in Christianity and spiritual life. A discursive or abstract knowledge of God cannot give man inner freedom. That is acquired only through personal meeting with God, as only this purifies and releases man from the passions and irrational forces arising from within.
To deal with anthropocentrism, we should specify from the very beginning that it is the product of a deist mentality which encloses Divinity in a transcendence, as shown above, allowing man to enclose himself in his own autonomy. This autonomy becomes so real that contemporary man tries to avoid any divine restriction. In this regard Mircea Eliade notes eloquently:
Contemporary man considers himself as the only agent of history and refuses any appeal to transcendence. More precisely, he does not accept another model of man outside the human condition . . . (of) various historical situations. Man realizes himself and succeeds in doing so only to the extent to which he de-sacralizes himself and the world he lives in. The sacred is the main obstacle in the way of his freedom. Man will not really become himself unless he de-mystifies himself completely. He will not be really free until he shall have exterminated the last divinity.
Contemporary man is aware of his autonomy or liberty even in relation to the divine transcendence. Far from appealing to the help of God in order to release himself from the domination by the world, man today manifests an unlimited trust in himself. In this regard Berdiaev makes an eloquent and extremely telling comparison between the attitudes of Dante, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky towards man. Dante situates man in the objective order of the cosmos as imagined by the medieval world with heaven above him as one floor is above another. Hell is below. Heaven and hell — above and below — are exterior to Dante’s medieval man. Like a little wheel man is strictly integrated into this medieval cosmos considered as a divine work.
In contrast, in the Renaissance Shakespeare’s man emerges in empty space. The heaven above him is now empty; it is no longer the heaven of the medieval hierarchy, while the hell below him can no longer be seen. Man is no longer integrated in the cosmic hierarchy of the medieval conception, but now lives in isolation relying on his own powers. Therefore, the empty space around him creates panic in his soul, which panic makes him analyze himself in order to know better his own soul. Thus, Shakespeare’s man reaches into his own inner dimensions through descriptions of his soul. It is what we could call the psychological man, who having lost the points of reference upon which to rely in the exterior world, looks for them in his own power, in himself, discovering thus his own soul. But this discovery does not reach its ultimate consequences; it discovers a psychological phenomenon which does not penetrate to the mysterious roots of modern psychology.
9According to Berdiaev, that was reserved to Dostoyevsky, as in his vision man appears isolated in the gap created by modern culture and civilization. But through his isolation, in the panic seizing him, he goes more deeper into his soul than did Shakespeare’s man before. It is in this depth into which modern man always digs that Dostoyevsky discovers the spiritual, beyond the soul. Modern man also deals with a heaven and a hell, but heaven is no longer above nor is hell below as for Dante’s medieval man. In the soul of contemporary man both heaven and hell are open as perspectives of light or of an Inferno in this descent of the modern soul to its ultimate roots where lies the eternal value of the soul. This is Dostoyevsky’s man, different from Dante’s medieval type and from Shakespeare’s Renaissance type. It is man who carries in himself both heaven and hell and in whom this great fight between the principles of evil and that of good is being waged. Some of Dostoyevsky’s characters are triumphant in this encounter, but most let themselves be dominated by the force of evil. His heroes arise above the substance of arbitrary freedom arbitrarily used. They rise also above the excesses of passion, for passions are irrational forces which dull man’s mind and make him commit evil deeds. If Shakespeare is considered a psychologist by Berdiaev, one must consider Dostoyevsky to be more than a psychologist. He is called a pneumatologist by Berdiaev, the man who discovered the spirit in the human structure.
10All these considerations prove that contemporary man tends to rely more on himself than on God, as he tries to descend into himself in an individual way. The great problem of man nowadays consists in the feeling of a secret dependence upon the elements he carries in himself, which he ignores or does not understand, or wills not to understand. Whether ignored or accomplice, his psychic equilibrium becomes fragile and unstable. Although the rapid evolution of psychology overturned knowledge about the human soul, science refuses to specify the unstable boundary between health and illness. One who ignores his inner life is extremely vulnerable. In his moments of loneliness or suffering there is no social form to protect him or to resolve the conflicts of his soul. Freud sees in mental disease a diversion and a way out of the dissonance which has become almost impossible to bear. When the limit is reached, the instinct of conservation prefers madness to suicide. Moreover, Jung considers that many outside clinics suffer due to the fact that their life lacks both sense and positive creative content. Man gets bored in his own environment; he wears himself out in all kind of worries until he reaches the point when "his complexes look very much like demons". It is the threshold of temptation which causes despair or even suicide in some cases. Such people indulge themselves from the very beginning and until the end in a hard indifference towards life and its events. Their hearts are completely defeated, and one in good health, turns almost into a ghost. In the absence of God from one’s inner life, one hardens his heart, leading to indifference to everything that goes on around him.
11Individualism is a characteristic feature of contemporary man which directs him to give little importance to his inner spiritual life; instead of changing it, he prefers to create a religion according to his own individuality. The opinions of a Catholic analyst are quite remarkable from this point of view.
Everything occurs as if Christianity ceased to be a global unifying system that is to be considered as a whole, in order to become an ensemble of "detached pieces" offered for personal, free compositions as selective affiliations to a limited number of faiths, practices or recommendations. This system of "à la carte" religion rejects an institution designed to regularize practices and faiths, in favor of the principle of individual sovereignty. The imagination of those who declare themselves Christians is rather often a dismantled imagination. This is made up essentially of four types of elements: Christian elements, cosmic elements (universal energy), elements of a sublime self (the force of the psychic being), and such deified values as freedom or peace. Each person organizes one’s own universe out of different faiths, coordinating within it Christian and cosmic, psycho-spiritual and moral elements. So, in an imaginary complete product we meet both providence and the universal cosmic force, love and violence as landmarks of the personal search for salvation. From an objective point of view the combinations achieved may seem incoherent, but from a subjective point of view, from that of the people who use them, they are coherent. For those who discover the center of gravity in themselves, in an individualist way, no longer change themselves according to the divine law, but changes the divine law according to their own interest, imposing on this world the order they prefer.
NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM IN THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER
For the above reasons under the screen of the democratic order we witness the confrontation between two tendencies in the contemporary world, namely, between nationalism and internationalism. Let us deal with each of them. The advantage of nationalism consists in the fact that it starts from the concrete reality of a people with a well-defined ethnic identity. The human reality of the world we live in is not made up of abstract nations or uniform communities, but of the diversity of the peoples descended from man. Just as everyone has a psycho-physical aspect which distinguishes him or her from another person, so a people has its particular features which cannot identify it with another people. That is why one rightly says that a nation, as a people, means "the amount of the forces which live in the same territory and have common origin, history, customs and language."
13 Or, from the state’s point of view, nation means "a community made up of an ensemble of people ruled by the same Constitution."14All the same, nationalism is not a very clear term, as it may have several meanings. On one hand, as we have already mentioned above, it may have a positive meaning, as rather often it is invoked in favor of the idea of the ethnic identity of a people. From this point of view, nationalism is legitimate. On the other hand, the same idea of nationalism gets a pejorative meaning when identified with the idea of chauvinism, extremism or xenophobia, often causing tension, conflicts, damage and crimes. The conflicts in Yugoslavia, North Ireland, Spain or the Middle East are weighty examples from this point of view. In such cases, nationalism represents a selfish stress of the nation upon itself, for reasons of selfishness or superiority, which causes a serious degradation of the relations with neighboring peoples or nations. Everyone agrees that such nationalism is unacceptable. According to the way in which it influences the relationships between various peoples, nationalism can be considered normal or extremist.
Unlike nationalism, which stems from the concrete reality of a people, internationalism stems from abstract ideologies which allow certain internationalist circles to extend their power and influence over other nations. Or, as an encyclopedic dictionary says, internationalism represents "the doctrine according to which various national interests should be subordinated to a general, supranational one."
15 More precisely, it is the confrontation between national societies and the open society, as a transnational society. While the open society becomes more and more transnational and separate from the national societies, the latter societies consider themselves increasingly eliminated from the international exchange, which becomes more and more abstract (the electronic coin) and speculative (monetary credit and speculative stock exchange). Thus national societies are more and more separated from access to the "networks" of world exchange. In this fierce struggle, transnational societies take advantage of freedom, while the national societies invoke in their support the idea of equality. The confrontation between them can lead national societies to resort to national dictatorships, hoping that they will change the position of the whole nation in the world and in the hierarchy of the disadvantaged nations on the world scale.This confrontation between a society taking advantage of freedom and another adhering to equality is the result of a secularized mentality which overlooks the inner freedom which generates love. "If we opened the pages of the Holy Scripture," an English thinker says,
We would discover that what is really important here, for man, is neither equality nor freedom, but the inter-personal relations among people. Man and woman have been created by God to live in the deepest mutual relationship. Meanwhile, the peoples and nations are called to live in a covenant or relational alliance of brotherhood. Man can find the real purpose of his life in such a communion, in the bond of mutual love and obedience which reflects the communion of love typical for God.
Neither freedom nor equality bring us to the depth of the issue, the same theologian continues.
The tearing of the communion destroys both equality and freedom and none of them will be achieved when they are considered in themselves. True freedom will no longer be acquired through the unlimited development of its own power, as the human being is not made for autonomy, but for true communion in love which comes out of man’s inner freedom from evil and his affiliation to love. Nor can the simple search of equality create social justice, as justice (that is, to give everybody what he or she deserves) can be done only in mutual communion.
17The United Nations Organization frequently speaks of the international community of nations. If we were to apply the spiritual principles mentioned above to this community, then we should say that in order to resolve the confrontation between a society taking advantage of freedom and another one of equality, two basic principles should be taken into consideration. On the one hand, the right of each nation to keep its specific identity intact, so that it may bring its own contribution to the treasure of international values. On the other hand, each national society should remain an open society able to live and cooperate with the other nations for the common welfare. This is the only way to establish among the nations of the international community natural relations designed to avoid extremely painful conflicts in the life of the whole of humankind and to contribute to the mutual enrichment of all people.
GOD, MAN AND THE WORLD GAME
The game of human existence is played within the frame of a basic triangle: God, man and world. The chief point consists in the fact that it is not the relation of man with nature or himself which can reveal the ultimate mystery of his existence, but only his relation with God. A real culture must surpass the deism of contemporary culture, affirming at the same time both God’s transcendence towards creation and God’s presence in creation. The transcendence of God towards creation is explained by the fact that while the world remains created and temporal, God is uncreated and exists from eternity. The immanence of God in creation does not lead to the pantheist confusion between creation and Creator, because God is not present in creation with His being, but with His work, given in the uncreated light of divinity. The same as the sun does not identify itself with the earth but sends its rays of light, life and warmth over our planet, so God, as heavenly sun, does not identify Himself with the creation, but bestows the divine light, life and love on it through the divine rays of His uncreated energies. That is the reason the Holy Scripture speaks from the very beginning about "the power of God which was moving over the water" (Genesis 1,2).
So, Maxim the Confessor tells us that
the Holy Spirit is not absent from any being and especially from those worthy of receiving reason. He supports them all in their existence, as through His providential power God is present in all of them. He activates natural reason in everybody, He makes able to feel the one who is willing to receive the right thoughts of nature, aware of the wrong deeds committed against nature. So, we happen to find many people from various nations who live a life of good deeds and reject the wrong laws which once used to rule them. So, we can generally say that the Holy Spirit is present in everybody.
Here we are in a universe quite different from a world which exists and functions through itself. This universe is a dependent world which maintains a dynamic relation with God. God is the one who permanently supports the existence of the world and leads it to the accomplishment of the purpose for which it was built, that is the new heaven and earth of the Kingdom of God in Christ.
The presence of God in creation is very important for a democratic society, as it proves that the purpose of Christianity is neither to sacralize or to dominate the world in the name of Christ, nor to turn it into an object of irrational exploitation, as we have seen above. Its purpose is to transfigure man and creation in Christ, as well as the Church, through the work of the Holy Spirit. This process of transfiguration of man and creation is possible both from a scientific point of view, as science shows us that matter is a concentration of spirit and energy, and from a theological point of view, as the Scripture tells us that the face of Christ on Mount Tabor was shining like the sun and His clothes were dazzling white (Matthew 17, 20).
An outstanding theologian, Gregory Palamas, says that this transfiguration of man and of creation is not a natural work of man, but is achieved through the uncreated grace of God. "All those who assert that the union with God is done only through imitation, and natural impulse — without the transfigurating grace of the Spirit, just like between those who have the same habits and who love each other — and consider the grace of God to be an impulse of reasonable nature acquired only through imitation and not through supernatural illumination and through the help of the lasting spiritual work seen by those worthy of seeing it, must know that they are completely wrong."
19 Some others, although they speak about the uncreated energy of God, yet consider that its effects in the human being are created. The same theologian says the following when answering such a theory:If the transfiguration or deification had no other effect than the improvement of human nature, without lifting it above the level of the ordinary man built in the image of God, if man remains only a rational being who establishes a relation with God only through a natural power, then the transfigured ones cannot exceed their own nature and are not born of God, because Christ, having come into the world through the Holy Spirit, did not give those who believe in His name the power to become children of God.
This process of transfiguration has two aspects. First of all it is an exterior process, achieved through science and technology. In this process, achieved according to the will of the Creator, technology represents the bridge between the shapes of the spirit and the structure of nature, namely a transfiguration of nature. Just as the artistic genius introduces a part of the spiritual world into the material world, so the technical genius imposes on nature expressions and requirements of the spirit. That is so much more possible today when science has come to the conclusion that the world of the macrocosm is so complex that it can no longer be explained through the natural laws. It is not surprising then if scholars assert that science is knocking at the door of transcendence.
We learn from the Holy Scripture that technics appeared in the world after the fall of man into sin. In the fourth chapter of Genesis we are told that, after man is sent out of Paradise, Cain used all kinds of tools of bronze and iron (line 22). In his earlier state man had not needed technics, as he disposed of a special spiritual power which enabled him to act directly upon nature. In fact, even Christ, who re-established man in his early state, healed diseases, brought the dead back to life and calmed the enraged forces of nature without using technics, but only by His spiritual power. One of the Fathers of the Church, John Chrisostom, says that "as the first man created had no needs of any kind, he was not obliged to use craftsmanship and technics to satisfy his needs."
21 After man’s fall into sin "technics progressively developed on the earth and made the world better off."22 Technics has an extremely positive role, as it enables man to contribute to the transfiguration of creation. Contemporary man has lost so much of his spiritual power that he abuses technics when dealing with nature. The massive pollution of nature, which has reached a planetary level, is the result of this irrational usage of technics.But transfiguration concerns not only the exterior nature of man through technology, but also his inner nature through the Holy Spirit. Due to the power of the Spirit which embraces both body and soul, according to the Apostle Paul, "Man’s body is the temple of the Spirit" (I Cor. 6,19). A real revolution is produced within the human being, designed to turn passions — irrational forces which separate man from God and make him their slave — into virtues or rational forces which enable man to rise up to the resemblance of God in Christ. This is neither self-flagellation nor eroticism, but the dynamic conversion of passions into virtues, through the work both of the Spirit and of the faithful man. This is because the purpose of Christianity is not to do away with the passionate side of man, but to move it from evil to good, giving man his real inner freedom. Man can never be rid of passions or obtain the real inner freedom and openness towards his fellows all by himself. Only the power of God presents the fulcrum which enables humans to be free and true masters of creation.
The transfiguration of the human being in Christ has outstanding importance for democracy. As long as humans remain prisoners of irrational forces in their inner life which they cannot control, democracy becomes an opportunity for the manifestation of aggressive forces which deeply affect social life. The outburst of aggression, violence and hate, which we meet everywhere in the world, is a telling proof of this point of view. The more inner freedom man obtains through the power of divine uncreated energies, the more he becomes the promoter of the spiritual values and of the strengthening of democracy as well. Real democracy is based both on the external and the internal freedom of man. Only in these terms can one fill the great gap between the huge scientific progress of the contemporary world and its low spiritual progress. True democracy must rely on the equilibrium between spiritual and scientific values, as only the spiritual power of man will allow him to put technics in the service of life and common welfare.
As we tried to show in the content of this essay, contemporary man can choose between an independent conception of the world and a dependent one. André Malraux says that the 21st century will be religious or will not be at all. This provision depends upon the choice contemporary man will make between the two conceptions: dependent or autonomous.
NOTES
1. Leslie Bewbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Geneva: WCC, 1986), p. 15.
2. Idem, The Other Side of 1984 (Geneva: WCC, 1983), p. 17.
3. Yves Congar, "Le Christ dans l’economie salutaire et dans nos traités dogmatiques," Concilium, 11 (1966), p. 2.
4. Karl Rahner, "Quelques rémarques sur le traité dogmatique" De Trinitate, Ecrits theologiques tom. VIII (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1967,), p. 115.
5. Nichifor Crainic, Dostoyevsky si crestinismul rus (Bucuresti, 1998), p. 182.
6. Ibid., p. 278
7. Yannis Spiteris, Palama: graie i experien (Bucuresti: Lipa, 1996), p. 7.
8. Dumitru Popescu, Ortodoxie i contemporaneitate (Bucuresti: Diogene, 1996), p. 182.
9. Nichifor Crainic, Op. cit. p. 278.
10. Ibid., p. 52.
11. Paul Evdochimov, Varstele vieii spirituale, (Paris: Christiana, 1993), p. 53
12. Jean Delumeau, Religiile lumii (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 1993), p. 70.
13. Larousse en couleurs, Cinq volumes (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1997), vol. IV, p. 213.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Leslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984 (Geneva: WCC, 1983), p. 156.
17. Ibid.
18. Maxim Marturisitorul, R spunsuri c tre Talasie, Filocalia (Bucuresti, 1948), vol. III, p. 51.
19. Grigore Palama. Tomul Aghioritic, Filocalia (Bucuresti), III, p. 415.
20. Yannis Spiteris, op. cit. p. 87.
21. Dumitru Popescu, op. cit. p. 1.
22. Ibid., p. 157.