Byzantine Philosophy, Renaissance

Term Paper, 2020

The relationship between theology and philosophy has always been a difficult issue throughout the history of Christianity. In the first part of the first "Triad," Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), the prominent Late Byzantine theologian, sharply criticizes “those who seek knowledge from external philosophers.” The theologian is outraged by the claims of such people that ‘engaging in science’ can make believers perfect in Christ. Palamas is convinced that “lovers of vain philosophy cannot contain the fear of God,” and stigmatizes the pursuit of knowledge as the ‘bad idleness.’ Gregory Palamas contrasted the “wisdom of external philosophers” with the “wisdom of God” on the basis of his conservative religious worldview. Perhaps nowadays such statements can make their author a reputation of a stagnant retrograde and an opponent of any intellectual development, but, in fact, this is not the case for the Byzantine theologian. The investigation of Gregory Palamas' views is done in this paper in the context of intellectual trends popular in Byzantine Empire in the first half of the century XIV for their proper understanding.

The article explores the contributions of 15th century Byzantines to the Italian Renaissance, the 'great schism' between traditional thinkers and Platonising thinkers in Byzantium, and St Gregory Palamas' approach to science.

A parallel analysis of the dogmatic conclusions of the beatific vision debate in Avignon (1331-6), and the hesychast debate about a decade later in Byzantium (1341-51) show that the two debates brought about contradictory dogmatic decisions. This outcome points to fundamentally divergent assumptions in Trinitarian, and Christological theologies between the mainstream Latin, and Byzantine Christianities in the fourteenth century.

The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2017

Would the term “Byzantine philosophy” be meaningful to the Byzantines themselves, and would it be at all acceptable to them? Put otherwise: Is “Byzantine philo- sophy” a historically valid category, that is, one that the agents commonly regarded as its major representatives, such as the great Orthodox theolo- gians John of Damascus, Maximos the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, would find applicable to what they were doing intellectually, especially if they were told that they were thereby engaged in the same enterprise as, say, John Italos, condemned as a heretic in the addenda to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy? And vice versa: would self-styled “true” philosophers such as Psellos and Italos approve of their reclassification among false philosophers whom they mocked, or those “teachers who sit with smug faces and long beards, looking pale and grim, with a frown, shabbily dressed,” i.e. prob- ably monks?4 The following analysis will not rest on any exclusive, specific, and trans- historical definition of philosophy. There may be several views about what that is, what it should be or do on this or that basis, or absolutely, but ours is a historical study and we are interested in what the Byzantines thought about “philosophy” as apprehended in their particular context, and whether recent conceptualizations of an intrinsically “Byzantine philoso- phy” would be acceptable or meaningful to them. Though we are careful not to commit ourselves to an objectivist view of philosophy, we are equally wary of the anachronistic uses of the word philosophia that are now widely observable: its valorized Byzantine meanings have been “liquidated” and reinvested in relativist modern approaches. As we believe that modern scholars rely on relativist arguments to maintain the ostensibly distinct field of “Byzantine philosophy,” we shall show that these “specialists in Byzantine philosophy” invariably confuse ancient, Byzantine, and modern approaches to philosophy; and they only rarely note that the Byzantines themselves used the word according to standards and priorities very different to those employed by the Hellenes and of course by the moderns too.

Lumen Veritatis , vol. 15 (4) , 2023

This article which was presented at the Congreso Tomista Internacional, organised by the Universidad de Los Andes, (Santiago, Chile, June 28th-30th, 2023), aims to investigate possible interactions between Thomistic and Byzantine Patristic thought regarding two principal topics: Trinitarian Theology, concerning the “distinctio realis” or “conceptual” (τῇ ἐπινοίᾳ) between God’s Essence and Energies; and how this distinction affects Natural Theology concerning the relationship between God and creation.