Apophatic anthropology

André Scrima

Perspectives on Philosophy and Religious Thought | 17

Gorgias Press

2016

Abstract

An English translation of André Scrima's 1952 work on Apophatic Anthropology. Pascalian in essence, the approach departs from the Augustinian roots of Western Christian theology and develops a Christian anthropology based on Eastern Orthodoxy. The endeavor of a human being to understand oneself does not lead, as in the case of Pascal, to identification with Jesus Christ’s suffering, but further, to an attempt of deification, theosis, in which the main concept is Incarnation. This attempt opens to man the possibility to conceive himself as interior to God. Man becomes therefore the physical and metaphysical bridge between creation and the uncreated, the only creature that bears the image of God.