Reflecții patristice despre biserică și Sfânta Liturghie ca paradigme pentru om și viața duhovnicească

Abstract

Stirred by St. Maximus the Confessor and his plan as revealed in Mystagogy, Father Dumitru Stǎniloae has looked into the theme of man as church and also into the topic of one’s liturgy in his paper on Spirituality and Communion in the Orthodox Liturgy, constructing his examination on samples of philocalic texts written by Byzantine authors who lived in different periods2. The current paper focuses on the research of two anthropological, spiritual paradigms recurrent in the Greek patristic tradition, namely the church and the Holy Liturgy, as well as of the semantic correspondences between the liturgical terminology and the spiritual life. The current research embarks upon the patristic period and the first half of the second Christian millennium, insisting upon the comparative analysis of the meanings of the selected Greek patristic texts. Its aim is to bring to the fore the terminological transfer from the sphere of the liturgical life into the hermeneutic context of spiritual life, with a view to insisting on the way how the spiritual meanings of the personal liturgical life have evolved through their recontextualization.