Bridging Theology, the Humanities, and the Hard Sciences |

Bridging Theology, the Humanities, and the Hard Sciences through Transdsciplinarity: Personal Reflections

Thirty years on from the signing of the Charter of Transdisciplinarity, in November 1994, the issues listed in its preamble continue to trouble our world. Scattered knowledge through the “proliferation of academic and non-academic disciplines” still leads “to an exponential increase of knowledge which makes a global view of the human being impossible”; the absence of “a form of intelligence capable of grasping the cosmic dimension of the present conflicts” still renders us unable “to confront the complexity of our world and the present challenge of the spiritual and material self-destruction of the human species”; “the present rupture between increasingly quantitative knowledge and increasingly impoverished inner identity is [still] leading to the rise of a new brand of obscurantism with incalculable social and personal consequences.” [1] The other issues mentioned there are equally damaging—to our planetary ecosystem and its inhabitants, human and nonhuman alike. This makes transdisciplinarity more relevant than ever before, especially given the almost complete breakdown of the current cultural, economical, political, religious, and social systems, all of which are equally incapable of rescuing our species from the dirty waters where it swims…

But what I’d like to share today, for this anniversary of the Charter, is of a personal nature; that is, my own encounter with transdisciplinarity, as an academic and as a priest.

My story begins in 1995, when I was accepted in the doctoral programme of Orthodox Theology at the University of Bucharest, Romania. It was the year after the signing of the Charter. But I didn’t hear anything about transdisciplinarity before 1999, when Basarab Nicolescu’s Manifesto was published in Romanian translation, and included the Charter. [2] By that time, the first draft of my interdisciplinary dissertation—which aimed to assess the anthropic cosmological principle from two theological viewpoints, of Maximus the Confessor and Dumitru Stăniloae—was already submitted to my supervisor for feedback. Fortunately, he disliked it immensely and sent me back to the drawing board. His main criticism, which I then heard, obsessively repeated, from lesser academics and no academics at all for the next five years, was that I interpreted Maximus’ theology in an evolutionary sense. My mentor didn’t say a word about Stăniloae’s own evolutionary theology, but I was too deeply shaken by his views to react. So, fortunately, again, I had to rework my dissertation.

As Nicolescu’s Manifesto was now available, I proceeded to read it. And, lo and behold, down was I through the rabbit whole—towards what Nicolescu calls, poetically, la vallée de l’Étonnement, the valley of wonder. [3] His introduction to transdisciplinarity was the methodological lens I needed for reconsidering my approach to the matters at hand. And so, much better equipped, I redrafted several parts of my dissertation, which I then passed by defending it publicly, in 2000. To my knowledge, I was the first Romanian theologian who engaged transdisciplinarity on that level for the purposes of bridging theology, the humanities, and the hard sciences. I remained a convert to transdisciplinarity ever since, applying it both to my research and to my pastoral work, but not without tweaking it to suit my purposes. Let me give a few examples.

Left to right: Nicolescu and Costache. Bucharest, November 2012

Through the mediation of Magda Stavinschi, a common friend of Nicolescu’s and mine, I met him in 2001, on the occasion of the first-ever international conference on science and religion held in a post-communist country, Romania. I met him again in 2002, when he gave me a signed copy of his Nous, la particule et le monde. We met a couple more times before my relocation to Sydney, Australia, in 2004, and only once after that, in 2012. By now, I was an outcast in theological circles because of working within transdisciplinary parameters, but I matured as a believer, a thinker, and a researcher. In 2003, I published a book chapter, “Logos, Evolution and Finality in the Anthropological Research: Towards a Transdisciplinary Solution,” in a volume curated by Nicolescu and Stavinschi. [4] Then, in 2005, Nicolescu and I published together, in Romanian, a study of the christological doctrine of Chalcedon in transdisciplinary perspective. [5] I published another explicitly transdisciplinary contribution in Nicolescu and Atila Ertas’ edited volume of 2014. My chapter there was “The Transdisciplinary Carats of Patristic Byzantine Tradition.” [6] And, then, on the occasion of Nicolescu’s 80th birthday, in 2022, I wrote a little tribute, “Beyond Religion: (Orthodox) Christianity in Transdisciplinary Perspective.” [7] This last article also marks my transdisciplinary turn in matters pastoral. Indeed, it expresses what I hold true and consistently apply in my work, namely, that to become a true Christian one needs to adopt a “transreligious attitude,” [8] as Nicolescu calls it, which is a wonderful conduit for implementing Christ’s commandment of love for all.

Apart from the above, I haven’t published anything explicitly transdisciplinary. That said, the method—especially its axioms of various levels of reality and the corresponding levels of perception—is present in most of my research. For example, my 2021 monograph, Humankind and the Cosmos: Early Christian Representations, [9] begins by discussing an outcome of overspecialisation for both humanities and the hard sciences, specifically, the incapacity of humanities scholars, including theologians, to borrow scientific information that can lead to an appreciation of the universe in Christian representations of reality, as well as the incapacity of hard scientists to appreciate the experience of unusual levels of reality in Christian anthropology and cosmology. [10] Among the solutions I proposed for the purposes of overcoming this issue features the transdisciplinary method. [11] The same goes for a book I coauthored, A New Copernican Turn: Contemporary Cosmology, the Self, and Orthodox Science-Engaged Theology (2024), where I deployed transdisciplinary tools in order to bridge the gap between the contemplative self and cosmology. [12]

So far, my encounter with transdisciplinarity, through Nicolescu and others, proved to be extremely beneficial for my work. I have a few explicitly transdisciplinary projects in the pipeline—and I can’t wait for opportunities to bring them to completion. I hope that others will turn to transdisciplinarity, too, for the benefit of all.

Acknowledgment Talk given for The Charter of Transdisciplinarity: The 30th Anniversary (6 November 2024). A global online event organised by The National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH, Mexico), Complexa Transdisciplinarity (Transcomplexa, Mexico), The International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies (CIRET, France), UNESCO Transdisciplinary Chair at the University of Florence (CTU, Italy), and The Transdisciplinary Training Unit (Unitransd, Brasil). Unfortunately, some misunderstanding led to this talk being replaced in the official video of the event by my impromptu responses about transdisciplinarity, which were meant for the Romanian celebrations held on 7 November 2024.

Notes

[1] Available at https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/chart.php#en.

[2] Basarab Nicolescu, Transdisciplinaritatea: Manifest, trans. H. M. Vasilescu (Iași: Polirom, 1999).

[3] Basarab Nicolescu, Nous, la particule et le monde, 2nd edn (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2002) 13.

[4] Doru Costache, “Logos, Evolution and Finality in the Anthropological Research: Towards a Transdisciplinary Solution,” in Science and Religion: Antagonism or Complementarity? ed. Basarab Nicolescu and Magda Stavinschi (Bucuresti: XXI Eonul dogmatic, 2003), 241-260.

[5] Doru Costache and Basarab Nicolescu, “Repere Tradiționale pentru un Context Comprehensiv al Dialogului dintre Știința și Teologie: Dogma de la Chalcedon” (Traditional Landmarks of a Comprehensive Context for the Dialogue of Science and Theology: The Dogma of Chalcedon), in Noua Reprezentare a Lumii: Studii Interdisciplinare și Transdisciplinare, Vol. 4, ed. Magda Stavinschi and Doru Costache (București: XXI Eonul dogmatic, 2005), 33-45.

[6] Doru Costache, “The Transdisciplinary Carats of Patristic Byzantine Tradition,” in Transdisciplinary Education, Philosophy, & Education, ed. Basarab Nicolescu and Atila Ertas (Lubbock, TX : The Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning & Advanced Studies, 2014), 149-165.

[7] Doru Costache, “Beyond Religion: (Orthodox) Christianity in Transdisciplinary Perspective” Academica 32:5-6 (2022) 75-77.

[8] Basarab Nicolescu, From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture, and Spirituality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 15.

[9] Doru Costache, Humankind and the Cosmos: Early Christian Representations, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 170 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021).

[10] Costache, Humankind and the Cosmos, 1-2.

[11] Costache, Humankind and the Cosmos, 6, 35, 36, 131, 145.

[12] Doru Costache and Geraint F. Lewis, A New Copernican Turn: Contemporary Cosmology, the Self, and Orthodox Science-Engaged Theology, Routledge Focus on Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), 49-51, 62-63, 67, 72-73, 86, 92, 95-96.

Speaker’s bio: Doru Costache, Protopresbyter. Associate Professor of Theology, Sydney College of Divinity, Australia. Selby Old Fellow in Religious History of the Orthodox Christian Faith at the University of Sydney Library (2023-2024)

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