Dumitru Staniloae in a Dialogue with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers: The Cultural and Political Context of the East West Philosophical Debates of the 1940s

In this article the author presents a philosophical dialogue delayed and at distance between the Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae and the German thinkers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in the context of the early tensions in Europe during the Second World War and its division afterwards. D. Staniloae had already begun in the thirties an extensive work of assimilation of Western philosophical thought with the purpose of trying to help renew Romanian Orthodoxy both theologically and spiritually, as it risked to depart from the patristic sources and the original inspiration of the Church Fathers, a victim of the scholastic rationalization of the modern philosophical currents. The analysis made by Staniloae highlights elements that could provide a genuine philosophical dialogue between East and West, between philosophy and theology, through its representatives personalities at the time, even at a distance and in the critical circumstances of war and of the fragmentation of our continent.