Mystical theology deals with the inner person, with his spiritual development and growth toward the ultimate goal of theosis. It cannot deal with the natural world. The natural world is its own mystery, but the spiritual development and transformation of the "inner person," must ultimately be dealt with and mystical theology, in the meaning of spiritual struggle and the chosen will to make this inner evolution take place, toward a transformation of the spiritual man, without ever making a sharp divide between the spiritual and the physical in mankind. Being religious in itself will not accomplish this. We see highly religious people doing incredibly wicked things and justifying them on the basis of their religion.
Orthodox Christian mystical theology deals precisely with that problem, and it deals with it in a personal, person-by-person, manner. At the same time, it calls upon Orthodox Christians as a community, nor its collections of communities, to strive toward that inner transformation. The inner transformation of communities is powered by the liturgical cycle, preeminently the Divine Liturgy, but matins, Vespers, and all the other liturgical services. First and foremost, it calls upon us to strive to acquire unselfish love and to move from there to Co-suffering love. We must be led away from the common and sometimes meaningless use of the word "love." Sometimes we use the word "love" as an excuse for hating people or declaring them outcasts and subhuman.
When we talk about the transformation of the inner human person, we are not talking about mystified moralism. Rather they struggle to become truly moral persons by nature. This does not mean becoming "as miserable as possible" as is often presented. This takes place in the spiritual realm but should be directly manifested in our outer relations with the humanity around us and the world in general.
Other forms of theology, our anthropology and understanding of the way culture and society actually work, and our understanding of the natural world must be on a different plane and cannot always be informed directly by our mystical theology. A theology of anthropology and of the natural world that does not take the principle of evolution into account is really not worth very much, but rather serves only to obfuscate reality. The evolution of the species is a fact which, in the words of the late Archbishop Vitaly (Ustinov) "can be denied, but not successfully."
Any cosmological or anthropological theology which denies evolution is simply false and likely ideological. A theology that does not recognise the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as allegorical and revealing about the human nature but not the origins of the cosmos, cannot be taken seriously any longer. Perhaps 1500 years ago, it could be seen as historical, but now a presentation of it as factual and historical is simply mythological, and those who try to perpetuate it as literal are simply the ones who are mythologising it.
We need to approach our theology of the cosmos and our anthropology free of ideology – and religious doctrines can quite easily become ideology – and in the context of what is not known for certain through science, otherwise, we are doing the Faith itself a great disservice and doing a great disservice to the faithful.
Any cosmological or anthropological theology which denies evolution is simply false and likely ideological. A theology that does not recognise the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as allegorical and revealing about the human nature but not its origins, cannot be taken seriously any longer. Perhaps 1500 years ago, it could be seen as historical, but now a presentation of it as factual and historical is simply mythological, and those who try to perpetuate it as literal are simply the ones who are mythologising it.
We need to approach our theology of the cosmos and our anthropology free of ideology – and religious doctrines can quite easily become ideology – and in the context of what is not known for certain through science, otherwise, we are doing the Faith itself a great disservice and doing a great disservice to the faithful.