Horizons of Human Understanding and Transcendence: Gadamer in Dialogue with Modern Orthodox Hermeneutics

This thesis brings into conversation Western and Orthodox hermeneutical schools, one represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers; the other school is less focussed around one person, and yet displays common distinct features. The main question of the thesis is how we can mediate not only the content of understanding of who we are in relation to each other, to the world in which we live and to God, but also comprehend the process of understanding across various historical periods. While analysing Gadamerian hermeneutics, the first part shows its strength in investigating transcendence as it appears horizontally in the historical character of our being in language. At the same time, the weakness of Gadamer's hermeneutics is pointed out, namely that it does not investigate what is transcendent sufficiently in relation to the divine. In the second part, an analysis of modern Orthodox hermeneutics is offered. Attention is paid first to the sources having a formative impact on Orthodox hermeneutics and then to the problem of negative identity formation as a key to what Orthodox hermeneutics should be. The strength of Orthodox hermeneutics is identified in terms of a belonging to community and seeing transcendence as something that mainly comes to this relationship from outside, as the Holy Spirit..