Of the late Greek theologian Chrysostomos Stamoulis

Orthodox theologian, university professor, and musician Chrysostomos Stamoulis passed into the Lord's keeping in mid-August 2025. I'd not heard of him until I read a tribute by the World Council of Churches, which led to further research. I really like Dr. Stamoulis's ideas. So, here's a place to put what I know about him and his work.

“The aesthetic theology of Professor Chrysostomos Stamoulis is a holistic one. For him, the distinction between the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane, is false. Music, poetry, theatre, film, the novel, philosophy, and science are not ‘secular’ endeavors, but attempts to give significance to the world and especially to its most critical questions about love, life, and death. The rejection of the distinction between holy and unholy applies equally to the distinction between the familiar and the strange. The stranger should be a part of my own life. He invites me to dialogue, he challenges me and he is the chance for an authentic self-knowledge. Christ is the supreme criterion for judging the ecclesiastical life. The members of the Church, in order to be authentic, must follow Christ’s paradigm. They must be open to the unfamiliar, to the wholly different one. But He is also the assumption of concrete man and reality. As a consequence, the Christian must embrace real life, as it is, without nostalgic flight towards an idealized historical past. Professing a living theology, Stamoulis urges us not to lose the beauty of the present by overloading it with the chimerical beauties of the past, or indeed of the future. His thinking is, in its way, a theological version of Carpe diem.”

Bibliography

• Texts on the diologue of Orthodoxy with the city, politics and culture publishes by Armos, Athens 2016.
• Love and sexuality. Interdisciplinary narrative, from antiquity to the present day, from microorganisms to humans (ed.), Armos Publishing House, Athens 2014.
• Test for a culture of incarnation published by Akritas, Athens 2009.
• Lot's wife and modern theology published by Indictos, Athens 2008 and Armos 2014.
• The saint is beautiful. Probers in the hospitable aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Akristas, Athens 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010.
• About light. Personal or physical energies? Contributions to the modern problematic Holy Trinity in the Orthodox space, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2007.
• Theotokos and orthodox dogma. Study in the teaching of Saint Cyril of Alexandris, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2003.
• Holy Beauty: Prolegomena to an Orthodox Philocalic Aesthetics. James Clarc. London, 2022.
• Broken Bridges: An Introduction to Orthodox Fundamentalism. Sebastian Press. Alhambra, California. 2021.
• We got run over: Essays on Orthodoxy's self-entrapment. Athens 2021.
• What the Fox seeking in the Fair? Essays on the Dilogues of Orthodoxy with Politics, Culture, and the City Athens 2016.
• As if I were a Stranger and a Wanderer, or Incarnation: the Migration of Love. Athens 2011.
• Love and Death: An Essay on the Incarnation. Athens 2009.
• Lot's Wife and 20th Century Theology. Athens 2008.
• Sacred Beauty: An Introduction to the Philocalic Aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Athens 2004, 2005, 2008.

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book review

The Genre of the Lord's Prayer

Let me revisit something I said about the Lord's Prayer, in that series above, which deserves more attention. The genre of the prayer is lament. Here's how you get there. (1) By the time the disciples ask Jesus to "teach them to pray", they have hundreds of years of world-literature-level devotional tradition and practice behind and around them, which they've imbibed from infancy. (2) So, "teach us to pray" is more like asking a martial arts master to "sum up the essence of your take on the tradition." (3) The context of the Prayer is absolutely that devotional tradition--and chiefly the psalms. (4) Therefore, to understand the prayer, one must look to the psalms. (5) Psalms come in several genres. (6) The Prayer is without doubt functioning in the genre of lament. (7) The genre's of the psalms, from royal victory to the deepest despair, fall along the spokes of a cycle, where each genre is aware of the others. So, (8) lament psalms are on-the-way to psalms of absolute praise, even as absolute praise is aware that human life is going to include despair eventually as well. But the whole of the five books of psalms does, nevertheless, slowly lift as a whole into priestly adoration of Yahweh. (9) Back to #2, the Prayer defines the Messianic call in the context of the psalmic devotional tradition. (Anyone who wants to know more about this praise -> lament and repeat cycle should consult the work of OT scholar W. Bruggemann.)

Grammatical analysis and exegesis drives you to the larger interpretive work (hermeneutics), and hermeneutics drives you to exegesis and grammatical analysis.

The Meetup of Divine Intent

Driving in to work this morning, I was listening to a lecture on St. Bonaventure. I have always been fascinated by the mystics of Christian history, and I have read many of their works and summaries of their lives. The problem for me, though, is the explicit Neoplatonism that informs their ideas. The mystic way is not something I would have learned from the lips of the apostles. Its descent into the soul to find God is not the kind of spiritual advice that I read Jesus encouraging his followers to practice. So, as much as I admire these devout men and women of the church, I respectfully believe them misguided with respect to their Biblical theology. And that is no hidden scar.

But this morning I realized that I have come to find myself at the door of a better mystic way. This way is not a ladder of divine ascent. It does not struggle inward to God. Instead, it journeys outward--soul and body together--into the lives of one's neighbors and the needs of our communities. Instead of the cloud of unknowing, the self disappears into the river of God's selfless, overflowing love. One is carried in the eucharistic direction, to be broken and distributed for others. Perhaps there is still the threefold pattern of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation of the self. Illumination about the people and communities in which one lives. And union with the Spirit as it pours itself kenotically into the world setting apart the name of God, living out the kingdom rule of God, and seeking to do the will of God.