The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy

Abstract

This recent work by Aristotle Papanikolaou, professor of theology and founding co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, is a profound achievement in political theology. Papanikolaou's work fills a great void in Orthodox Christian studies as well as political theology. Continuing his emphasis on divine-human communion and ecclesiology, he offers the beginnings of a contemporary Eastern Orthodox political theology divorced from imperial and Constantinian traditions found in most Orthodox thought. Additionally, he engages contemporary political theologians and ethicists such as William Cavanaugh, Vigen Guroian, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and Jeffrey Stout, suggesting possibilities for Christian engagement with liberal democratic civil society that some of these thinkers denounce. What I find particularly helpful in this work is his positive appreciation of liberal democracy and human rights from an Orthodox Christian perspective, which many Orthodox prelates and theologians simply find incompatible with their faith tradition. Papanikolaou starts his work with a discussion and critique of the Eusebian and Constantinian model of Orthodox political theology, bringing the discussion to the present age. Such a model has failed in the postimperial age of the church and does not reflect an alternative patristic theology that can be brought forth for the present age. In this regard, he suggests this other approach to political theology based on divine-human communion in Cappadocian thought as understood in the personalism of John Zizioulas. Emphasizing the importance of the human being as a relational being bearing the imago Dei and existing in Trinitarian relationships of love, a rich model for political theology can be developed. But Papanikolaou does not blindly accept the Eucharistic theologies offered by Nicholas Afanasiev and being discussed in the Radical Orthodox movement today, whereby a sectarian disavowal of the secular is maintained. Asking whether the option is the Eucharist or democracy as Cavanaugh and Guroian (and others) insist, he suggests that the Eucharistic basis of the church opens up the possibility for acceptance of the democratic political sphere as well as greater participation in the common good of civil society.