Opposition to Secular Philosophy.

The traditional unpopularity of Byzantium in the Western Middle Ages and in modern times has been somewhat moderated by the recent recognition that it was Byzantine scholars who preserved the treasures of Hellenic antiquity and transmitted them to the Italian Renaissance. If the transmission is, indeed, a fact (all the available manuscripts of the authors of Greek classical antiquity are Byzantine and often monastic in origin), it reminds that, throughout Byzantine intellectual history, the positive interest in pagan philosophy, which keeps reappearing in intellectual circles, is always staunchly opposed, often by the official Church and always by the monks. The official conciliar statements against the “Hellenic myths” — the term implies essentially Platonic metaphysics — appeared in 553, under Justinian, and later, at the condemnation of Italos and at the Palamite councils of the fourteenth century. More subtly but no less decisively, the gradual abandonment of Origenistic concepts was also a victory of the Bible over the Academy.

In spite of a widespread view that Eastern Christian thought is Platonic in contrast to Western Aristotelianism, an important corrective must be found in the fact that the above-mentioned condemnations of various forms of Platonism are repeated yearly as part of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy in all churches on the First Sunday of Lent. The universities taught Aristotle’s logic as a part of the “general curriculum” required from students under the age of eighteen; but the pious families prevented their children from continuing education on a higher level where students were required to read Plato. This generally explains the ever-recurring remark by hagiographers that saints, especially monks, stopped their education at eighteen to enter monasteries.

In monastic circles, denunciations of “secular philosophy” are constant; and the polarization, which occurs in the ninth century between the party of the monastic “zealots” (often followers of Theodore the Studite), on the one hand, and that of the higher secular clergy, on the other, is intellectual as well as political. The monks oppose compromises with the state, but they also reject the renaissance of secular humanism. Patriarch Ignatius, Photius’ great competitor supported by the monastic party, is known to have snubbed the promoters of secular philosophy;¹⁸ Symeon the New Theologian writes virulent verses against them;¹⁹ and Gregory Paiamas († 1359) orients his entire polemic against Barlaam the Calabrian on the issue of the “Hellenic wisdom” which he considers to be the main source of Barlaam’s errors. Perhaps, it was precisely because Byzantium was “Greek-speaking” and “Greek-thinking” that the issue of Greek philosophy in its relation to Christianity remained alive among the Byzantines. In any case, monastic thought continued to remind them of their conversion to the faith preached by a Jewish Messiah and their becoming a “new Jerusalem.”

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 502