Metropolitan Hierotheos’ works always center around two foci: the doctrine of the human person discussed in terms of his illness and cure, and the doctrine of the Church, discussed in terms of a spiritual hospital; so the recent translation of these two works is entirely logical. The Person in the Orthodox Tradition (1990) examines critically important terms in the history of the theology of the person, such as ousia and hypostasis, and the patristic teaching as a whole on the person. But for Hierotheos, the key to understanding the nature of the person is looking at the lives of the Saints, and that is his ultimate hermeneutic. Candidly, we have reservations about the partisan and polemical nature of some of Hierotheos’ work; his discussions of philosophy are superficial and depend on secondary sources. His style is awkward (we can’t say whether in spite or Because of the translation) and the text itself is embarrassingly full of typos. But when he turns to the Fathers, Hierotheos ’’hits his stride,’’ as it were, and we begin to see an authentic disciple at work, conveying terribly important teaching to a spiritually hungry Western theological world.
