Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ by Alexis Torrance (review)

This book is the best anglophone book in Byzantine theology of the past twenty years. It has a strong claim to being the most important book in Byzantine theology in any Western language since Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944). Other studies, such as John Meyendorff’s Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas (1959) laid the foundation for later research, but his book had a rather narrow focus. Meyendorff also wrote more broad-ranging books, such as Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (1969), Byzantine Theology (1974), and Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions (1989), which either provided important surveys or proposed theses that were not very bold. Jaroslav Pelikan’s works, too, tended to be overviews. The German Jesuit Gerhard Podskalsky focused on particular historical periods or again, like Meyendorff and Pelikan, provided important surveys. I hope to explain in this review why Torrance’s book is so significant as well as draw attention to places where the book is uneven.

Like Lossky in his Mystical Theology, Torrance does historical theology at the highest level, propounding original if somewhat controversial theses, for the sake of an intervention in what we might call systematic Orthodox theology (vii, 6–7, and all of chapter 1). The motivation for Torrance’s study of the Byzantine tradition of reflection on Christ’s humanity deified by the hypostatic union (34) is that some important strands of modern Orthodox theology have strayed from this center of theological anthropology and risk “theological shipwreck (1).” While the founders of the various schools of Orthodox thought for the most part avoid this problem (with the important exception of Sergius Bulgakov), their students stray into theological error.

Georges Florovsky is central to this book, both in his approach to historical theology and in his Christocentric paradigm (3). Florovsky proposed his neopatristic synthesis in the mid-twentieth century and this name, if not its method, has been taken up by a number of his students. These followers often repeat the Fathers without engaging the contemporary world. This has led many Orthodox theologians to criticize Florovsky and his method as being inattentive to the nuances of the various Fathers (because of his synthesis) or ignoring the modern context (because of his attention to and attempt to be faithful to the Fathers). Torrance, influenced especially by the work of Matthew Baker, puts up a spirited defense of the neo-patristic synthesis, claiming the method is good, but often poorly applied (7).

Torrance is sympathetic to those Orthodox theologians such as Norman Russell and John Behr who call for a symphony (or harmony or polyphony) of the Fathers rather than a synthesis, but he worries that there is a possibility of dissonance in the metaphor of a symphony. On the other hand, Torrance thinks that in their concern to address the modern world many contemporary Orthodox theologians stray from the normative “quickening and guiding presence of the Holy Spirit in Scripture . . . the experience of the saints . . . [and] the living Body of Christ through history” (ibid.).

In the rest of his programmatic first chapter, Torrance examines contemporary strands of personalism in Orthodox theology. At times he strays far afield, for instance in his examination of the British and Boston schools of personalism in the early twentieth century. Here more attention to Florovsky or the normative character of the saints would have been useful. Torrance’s concern about modern Orthodoxy’s theological anthropology is that it sidesteps Christ who must be the cornerstone of any Christian anthropology (8, 10, 13). One can claim this about John Zizioulas who does not begin with Christ yet retains a strong Christological element, but whose followers tend to forget Christ altogether, or at least to subordinate him. Other Orthodox thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, and Vladimir Solovyov stray from the traditional Orthodox sources, for the...