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Introduction
itics, modern philosophers in Europe and in America keep alive in various ways the interest in eschatology, thus maintaining its central- ity in contemporary thought.12
Orthodox academic theology, however, does not seem to have been affected by these developments. Its dogmatic manuals continue to treat eschatology as their last chapter covering subjects such as life after death, the final judgment, etc. The relation of eschatology to the other doctrines of the Church—or to the present life of the be- liever—is totally missing.
A different approach to dogmatics is to be found, as we have seen, in Florovsky and, in regard to the Liturgy, in the work of the late Alexander Schmemann. Both of them draw mainly from the liturgical experience of the Church, in which eschatology occupies a central place. For both of them, the lex orandi and the lex credendi must coincide and serve as the source and the foundation of dog- matic theology. Yet, in neither of them do we find a discussion of the implications that the integration of these two sources might have for systematic theology and Christian existence in its fundamental as- pects. In the last century, an attempt to liberate Orthodox dogmat- ic theology from Western rationalism and lead it back to the patris- tic sources was made by the late Vladimir Lossky, who has exercised a strong influence on contemporary Orthodox thought, particularly with his book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Lossky did indeed lead Orthodox dogmatics away from western Scholasti-
12 Emphasis on eschatology in modern philosophy could be traced back to Heidegger. The self-understanding of Dasein (hermeneutics of facticity) always projects itself toward the future and thereby becomes aware of its finitude (“Vorlaufen zum Tode”). See, espe- cially, his Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. J. van Buren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). The new generation of phenomenologists, such as Jean- Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Richard Kearny, engage, each in different ways, some kind of eschatology in their phenomenological analysis. Marion in particular treats the relation between Eucharist and eschatology in his Dieu sans l’ être (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991, pp. 197–222). The most interesting attempt to reconcile the phenomenological principle “back to the things-themselves” (Husserl) with escha- tology (“the things-to-come”) is made by J.P. Manoussakis with particular significance for theology. See his “The Anarchic Principle of Christian Eschatology in the Eucharis- tic Tradition of the Eastern Church,” Harvard Theological Review 100:1 (2007) 29–46. Cf. more recently his The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
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