Neopatristic Synthesis between Unity and Identity in Orthodox Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neo-patristic synthesis has constituted the mainstream in Orthodox theology during the twentieth century, making the motto "return to the Fathers," launched in 1936 by Fr George Florovsky, its banner. The polemical intent underlying Florovsky's appeal undoubtedly make of the call to the Fathers an identity element, which played an important role in the confrontation with Western theology triggered by the Orthodox diaspora during last century. Beyond the polemical and apologetic motive, the neo-Patristic synthesis was plainly accepted in all orthodox theological schools and animated the most significant movements of revitalization of the theological studies. This success, however, has created the perception of methodological fragmentation and has prompted criticism that the focus on the Fathers has stifled other fields of theological studies, e.g., biblical studies. In this contribution I will try to highlight from a historiographical point of view the constant presence of the patristic paradigm in the Orthodox tradition (and beyond), which has produced recurrent returns to the Fathers; secondly I will attempt to highlight from a theological point of view the aspects that make it an element of unity from both a historical and methodological point of view, moving beyond the mere identity motif with which it is usually approached.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".