Adrian Guiu

 

Adrian Guiu is an M.A. student in the Divinity School.

Adrian Guiu hails from Romania. He did his undergraduate studies both there and at the University of Augsburg, in Germany. He is an M.A. student in the Divinity School.

I entered the Divinity School thinking I would study modern Protestant theology. However, through encounters with Div School faculty, my interests changed, and so did the direction of my studies. I became increasingly intrigued by medieval thought, and subsequently began learning classical Greek. This, in turn, brought me into contact with the Church Fathers. The trajectory of my studies affirms the Div School’s reputation for offering diverse courses in a dynamic setting.

The Div School and the University on the whole is also characterized by a very international atmosphere. This was one very important factor in my decision to come here. As an international student I felt very warmly welcomed into the life of the school. The University of Chicago is remarkable in other ways, as well, one being the pride it takes in having a Divinity School. Moreover, the Div School belies the common notion that theology is an all too abstract field of study, inaccessible or inapplicable to everyday life. I have never had this impression here at the Div School. Although I study the early Church, I perceive theological pursuits to be thoroughly involved in current social and cultural debates. In this regard, Swift Hall is truly a part of the wider campus; Divinity School students and faculty are deeply integrated in the life of the University. As a theology student, I do not pursue my studies in isolation from the students in the other departments, but always feel encouraged to take classes in the Departments of Philosophy and Classics, and in the Committee on Social Thought. Most University professors have appointments in more than one department, making interdisciplinary work almost built in to one’s course of study.

Above all, what I appreciate here at the Divinity School is the fact that people pay attention to the larger implications of their topics of study. This awareness lends itself to an authentic academic dialogue that reaches beyond the specialized areas of each person’s individual studies. Moreover, the curriculum is sufficiently open as to allow students to choose from an array of possibilities in construing their studies. There are wide-ranging classes, rich libraries, many conferences, and interdisciplinary colloquia ready at hand.

In regard to my own studies, I am interested in examining how, in the history of thought, different people have attempted to overcome the subject-object duality in the process of knowing God. My starting point is the Church Fathers, who were among the first to develop a broad notion of rationality. The long process of coming to know and experience God (a process ultimately amounting to deification) is not simply based on human rationality and understanding; feeling and mystical experience are also involved. I begin my study with Gregory of Nyssa, for whom rational knowledge is never the only way to come to know things and God. I then examine how rational understanding and mystical experience are intertwined in the thought of Meister Eckhart. He stands in the great tradition of the scholastics like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, but he also explores new territories in mystical theology. The phenomenology of Martin Heidegger provides a modern example of a thinker who seeks to go beyond the concept of reality as being equivalent to what is given to rational understanding. I am trying to discern how a very broad notion of rationality (which included feeling and experience of God), such as we find in Gregory of Nyssa and a late scholastic like Eckhart, is reduced in modernity to a very strict and limited notion of rationality.

I chose the University of Chicago because professors and students have a very strong awareness of the history of thought. Even when a current issue is being discussed, people recognize that it is embedded in a historical chain of ideas. In other words, an issue is not perceived as a mere contemporary fact to be comprehended only on a logical and analytical basis, but as a part of a continuity, a tradition of thought. The Divinity School achieves a wonderful blending between tradition and modernity, between current critical discourse and the history of thought.