Johannes Miroslav Oravecz, God as Love: The Concept and Spiritual Aspects of Agape in Modern Russian Religious Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), xviii + 518 Pps., $40.00.
Johannes Miroslav Oravecz earned his doctoral degree at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm, Rome, in 2010. He is a lecturer and retreat master on diverse theological and spiritual topics and an active member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Presenting no less than twenty-five nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Orthodox religious intellectuals’ thought, Oravecz delivers a tour de force in Russian Orthodox theology, noting that in this time period, the theme of love burst upon the scene with volcanic-like energy and over the span of just a few decades, there was more written on love in Russia than had been written over the preceding several centuries. Indeed, in this title, Oravecz reveals the unifying, divinizing, humanizing, as well as kenotic aspects of modern Russian religious thinking, highlighting the underlying theme of love. It is not a mere compendium of thought, however, as this text has a single, overriding theme: the interpretation of divine love in modern Russian Orthodox thought. This title makes it clear that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Orthodox religious thought was as much about humanizing the divine as it was about divinizing the human.
The scope of the work is to individuate, contextualize, and emphasize the concept and spiritual aspects that best represent the notion that “God is love,” i.e., understanding the value and role of agapē as divine love in Russian religious thought in the last two centuries. In order to achieve this, Oravecz takes an interdisciplinary approach. His choice of representative authors of the era was made based upon the significance of their contributions. The eight chapters of this text follow a chronological and notional pattern of diverse schools of thought that, in their complexity, have yet to be identified in their complexity by any other author. Many of the authors herein highlighted are relatively little known, if not entirely unknown in the West. In analyzing the writers under consideration, Oravecz directly focuses upon the texts of the authors in their original languages, searching for the concepts of agapē and/or love, making the synthesis of the principal works, and if possible, noting the development or evolution of the ideas within the particular thinker. Oravecz himself does all translations of the primary texts.
Throughout this title, Oravecz notes that the retrospective reflection on agapē love opens up the proverbial road to new faith-solutions for a large number of Russian religious thinkers, theologians, and philosophers of modern times. A typical, unifying aspect of the thinkers covered herein is that a social involvement completes the other indispensible humanizing dimension of divine love, meaning that it not only responds, but also spreads out and finds new responses in and through its multiplication. Moreover, these thinkers stress that it is up to us, believers, to cooperate with God’s divine grace and wisdom to find and relearn heaven’s silent yet ever-creative language of agapē. Shaped by their personal spiritual and mystical experiences and sufferings, the thinkers covered herein left us a precious testimony of true orthodoxy in faith, hope, and love, namely that of imitating Jesus’ kenotic self-sacrifice.
To think, perceive, contemplate, empathize, and love with the heart, says Oravecz, is not a mere sentiment, but means being fully human – and, surprisingly, also means to become God-like, i.e., to be in the process of divinization. The strong underlining of God’s trinitariety belongs to the DNA of Orthodox theology, and with modern theology, there was a significant shift towards the Trinitarian and intra-Trinitarian awareness and ontology. This shift, according to Oravecz, was onset and fueled by the Johannine ontological statement that “God is Love.” According to Oravecz, the theme of love courses and emanates throughout the entirety of Russian religious thought, at times as a guiding and sustaining element, at other times more accentuated in the form of eros and its manifestations than in its kenotic and agapic dimension.
At the base of modern Russian theology and Christian philosophy lies a profound divinizing hope for the human family and the world – that God has not abandoned either of them. Importantly, Oravecz presents herein what may very well be a unifying liaison between the Eastern and Western traditions, that is, between the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. Indeed, the concept is rooted in John’s love messages and in Paul’s kenotic hymn.