What interests us here is to note, even if briefly, the cultural expression of a different cosmology, equally theological but at the opposite pole to the Byzantine, which completely negated Byzantine culture as a mode of life and approach to using the world. This was the cosmology that arose from Western theology and was embodied historically in the technological culture of the West.
The development of a different cosmology in the West appears to be founded on the Byzantine teaching of the human person as a microcosm.[86] This teaching was transferred to the West in the ninth century through John Scotus Eriugena's Latin translations of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa. [87] But it only became widely disseminated in the first decades of the twelfth century, that is, with the renaissance of learning that accompanied the appearance of scholasticism in the West (the rediscovery of classical antiquity, the entry of Aristotelian epistemology into the field of theology, the rationalistic organization of human knowledge, and the utilitarian objectivizing of truth).[88] It is the century of the "awakening" of Western theologians to the potentiality of logic and of their appreciation of the first rationalistic conclusions of scientific observation and the systematic organization of knowledge.
Early scholastic thought set the doctrine of man-microcosm and world-macroanthropos in the context of the cognitive possibilities of the analogous syllogism, that is to say, it interpreted the microcosm-macrocosm relationship with the help of a rationalistic comparative epistemology. [89] The world was treated as an object along the lines of the human microcosm as mental concept, sensory observation and measurable size. Its objective truth was defined, measured and subjected by the human intellect and its material embodiment to human tools.[90]
Thus the doctrine of man as microcosm was developed in the West as a basis for the construction of an anthropocentric world-view, a humanism,[91] which saw in the human microcosm and its "interior life" the possibility of an intellectual and mechanical influence on the macrocosm.[92] Within the context of the mental concept, the sensory observation and the measurable relations, knowledge of the world becomes autonomous, is a knowledge with its own structure and organization, which is no longer expressed by the "semantic" terminology of aesthetic theory and personal relationship, but by an objectively articulated scientific method, which can predict events in nature and account for them causally. [93]
The objectivizing of the truth of the world and its subjection to the understanding of the individual, and also more generally the introduction of intellectualism into Western theology, is not an isolated symptom in the general development of Western Christianity. In the first place, one should note that in the context of historical phenomenology, the rationalistic structuring and systematization of knowledge in the medieval West is drawn primarily from jurisprudence, and is first introduced into theology, and then from there into cos-mology and the natural sciences [94] — without in consequence there failing to be a reverse influence: on theology from the natural sciences. [95] But the historical causes which provoked the generation of theological rationalism are much deeper, and should rather be sought in the need for the objective imposition of the authority of the Roman Church on the peoples of the West — a need which appears to have its roots not only in purely historical and sociological [96] conditions but also in the underlying monarchianism of Roman theology, from as early as the time of Sabellius [97] and Augustine. [98]
The objective strengthening of truth, which a clear and unambiguous authority lent to its institutional bearer, the Church, led Western theologians to separate faith from theology [99] and to organize the latter as an independent science [100]. This organization of theology as a science demands an apodictic methodology which objectifies the truth under examination and subjects it to the thinking and principles ("regulae, axiomata, principia") of the human intellect. [101]An apodictic theological methodology took shape largely in the second half of the twelfth century, when the logica nova, the second part of the Aristotelian Organon,[102] appeared in the West. This became the basis of a theory of knowledge and a technique of probability. [103]
The next step was the transfer of Aristotelian methodology from systematic theory to experiential reality, that is, to cosmology and physics — and it seems to be the naturalist doctor-philosophers of Toledo who led the way.[104] Science thus opened up a path for the systematic organization of knowledge in all fields of rational enquiry, that is, for the restriction of knowledge to the bounds of mental conception and intellectual expression, leading finally to the subjection of truth to the human intellect, and consequently to the subjection of the world to human will and human desire.[105]
When theology, as an apodictic methodology, objectified knowledge, when it took truth to be an object of the intellect and excluded truth as a fact of personal relation, it also excluded the possibility of a personal approach to the world. It ruled out a personal relation with the logos of things, with the disclosure of God's personal energy in creation. (The rejection of the distinction between the essence and the energies of God by Western theologians in the fourteenth century was the formal consequence of an intellectualist theology and completed the exclusion of truth as personal relation.) And when knowledge of the world is not realized as personal relation, when it does not aim at the reception and study of the logos of things, the only motive that can stimulate human interest in knowledge of the world is its usefulness.
And the criterion of usefulness implies the subjection of the world to humanity's will and desire. Thus the knowledge of nature began to serve technology alone. The criterion of usefulness transformed the world into an impersonal object. It forced nature to subject it to human need and desire.[106] The world lost its personal dimension. The world's logos ceased to be the disclosure of God's personal energy. God was radically set apart from the world by the boundary that separates created ontic essence from uncreated ontic essence, the experientially known from the experientially unknown, sensible and measurable reality from intellectual hypothesis (suppositio). The field was left clear for humanity's endeavor to secure sovereignty over as much of the realm of truth as was accessible to it through its intellectual and technical abilities, to interpret and subject the reality of the world to its individual mental capacity.
The theological presuppositions of technocracy
This subjection of the world to man's intellectual and technical capacity (what we call today our technological culture) finds its first expression as early as the Middle Ages in Gothic architecture. The builders of Gothic edifices were not interested in the logos of the material of the construction. They did not seek to coordinate and harmonize this logos to bring out its expressive possibilities. On the contrary, they subjected the material to given forms, and gave the stones a deliberate a priori shape with the intention of realizing the ideological objective that was envisaged by the construction. [107]
Erwin Panofsky, in his very interesting study, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism,[108] has drawn attention to the attempt of both scholastic thought and Gothic architecture [109] to explore the truth intellectually and to the fact that both arose at the same time: [110] "It is a. connection ... more concrete than a mere `parallelism' and yet more general than those individual 'influences' which are inevitably exerted on painters, sculptors or architects by erudite advisors: it is a real relationship of cause and effect." [111] Gothic architecture, following soon after scholasticism, is the first technological application of scholastic thought. It sets out in visible form the scholastic attempt to subject truth to the individual intellect, drawing on the new logical structures introduced by scholastic theology. In the thirteenth century, for the first time a truth is arranged and discussed systematically, under a num-ber of sub-divisions. A complete work is divided into books, the books into chapters, the chapters into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into articles. Each assertion is established by the systematic refutation of objections, and phrase by phrase, the reader is gradually brought to a full intellectual clarification of a given truth. [112] It is "a veritable orgy of logic," as Panofsky says of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae.[113]
In an analogous manner the technique of Gothic architecture is based on a structure of small cut stones of uniform shape. The stones form columns, and the columns are sub-divided into ribbed composite piers, with the same number of ribs as those in the vaulting above them.[114] The arrangement of the columns and the division of the ribs create a rigid skeleton which neutralizes the weight of the material by balancing the thrusts of the walls. Here again, thesis is reinforced by the systematic refutation of antithesis, "the supports counter the weights placed on them," and the weight of the material is neutralized by balances arranged on rational principles.
This technique conceals "a profoundly analytic spirit, relentlessly dominating the construction. This spirit considers the forces, analyzes them in terms of static diagrams and petrifies them in space" [115] forming a unity which is not organic but mechanical, a monolithic framework. "Our sense of stability is satisfied but we are perplexed, because the parts are connected no longer organically but only mechanically: they look like a human frame stripped of flesh."[116] We see here technology, i.e., human will and logic, taming matter. The structure manifests the intellectual conception and will of the craftsman rather than the potentialities of the material — the moral obedience of matter to spirit, not the "glory" of matter, the revelation of God's energies in the logos of material things.
Gothic architecture is historically the first striking example of the cultural and, more specifically, the technological extensions of the anthropocentric cosmology of European theologians in the Middle Ages. On this cosmology was founded the whole structure of Western technological culture. However strange it may seem, the principle which refers the genesis of technocracy to theology is not an arbitrary one.[117] The development of technology in the West is not simply a phenomenon of steady scientific progress. At the same time it is also the specific embodiment of a particular attitude towards the world, which recapitulates all the phases of Western man's evolution: the subjection of truth to the intellect, the denial of the distinction between God's essence and energies, and consequently the sharp divide between the transcendent and the immanent, the transformation of the personal relation with the world into an attempt to dominate nature and historical reality. The development of Western technology expresses a particular ethos, that is, the principles of a specific cosmology (since, as we have seen above, humanity's relation with the world is the fundamental moral problem), [118] both as a phenomenon of the organic detachment of humanity from the whole rhythm of the world's life, and as a phenomenon of history's being caught up in a nexus of threatening impersonal powers, which make it impossible for the uniqueness of personal human existence to be presupposed — such as the appearance of the capitalist system and its socialist counterparts, which alienate human life within the context of an impersonal economy trapped in the rationalistic balancing of production and consumption.
This is not the place for an extended discussion of all the historical consequences of Western cosmology and the problems surrounding each of them. Perhaps the most important stage in the historical evolution of the new relationship of humanity with the world initiated by the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages is the problem of the pollution of the environment, which in our time has become an increasing threat. The poisoned atmosphere of industrial zones, lands turned to desert wastes, waters made toxic, and the assertions of statisticians that in twenty-five years or less large areas of the globe will be rendered uninhabitable — all these reveal in a direct way some fault in humanity's relation with the world. They demonstrate the failure of humanity in its effort to subject the reality of nature to its individual needs. This subjection has been achieved by the power of the human mind materialized in the machine, but proves today to be the tormenting of nature and its corruption, which is unavoidably also a tormenting of human kind and the threat of death. For human life and human truth cannot be separated from the life and truth of the world which surrounds us. The relationship is a given and is inescapable. Any falsification, any violation of this relationship is destructive of the existential roots of human kind.
Within the context of today's technological culture, the culture not of relation or use but of consumption of the world, which is imposed on the multitude with systematic tech-niques of persuasion and the total subjection of human life to the ideal of an impersonal and individualistic comfortable life - within the context of this culture the Orthodox theological view of the world does not represent simply a truer or better theory of nature, but embodies the converse ethos and mode of existence, the potentiality for a culture at the opposite pole to consumerism. Orthodox cosmology is a moral struggle which aims at bringing out, by the practice of asceticism, the personal dimensions of the cosmos and humanity's personal uniqueness. Within the context of Western culture this could become a radical program of social, political and cultural change. With the proviso that such a "program" cannot be objectivized in terms of an impersonal strategy. The possibility always remains of personal revelation, that is, of repentance, as also the content of the Church's preaching and the practice of Orthodox worship. In opposition to the messianic utopia of consumer "happiness," which alienates humanity, turning people into impersonal units, and which is organized in accordance with the needs of the mechanistic structures of the social system, the Church sets the personal uniqueness of the human person, as attained in the fact of an ascetic, that is, a personal, relationship with the world.
From the book Person and Eros by Christos Yannaras
87 See M. A. Schmidt, "Johannes Scotus Eriugena," in Die Religion in Geschichte and Gegemvart, vol. 3, cols. 820-21; Chenu, La theologie au XIIe siècle, 40, 50; also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 202.
88 "It is in this context of renaissance — where inspiration takes precedence over imitation, where also the resources of antiquity nourished new spiritual initiatives — that there developed the literary, aesthetic and doctrinal theme of the relations of humanity with nature: the human being is a 'microcosm" (Chenu, La theologie au XIIe siècle, 37). See also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 327-28; Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIlle slick, 101: "Between the two great crossroads of the Carolingian renaissance and that of the Quattrocento, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark a stage characterized by the recovery of the capital of Antiquity."
89 "the first attempts at a microcosm-macrocosm parallelism were of a rational, we might even say of an early scientific, type" (Chenu, La theologie au Xlle siecle, 41). See also Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 327: "... reasoning by analogy, which consisted of explaining a being or fact by its correspondence with other beings or other facts. A method this time legitimate and which all science makes use of .... The description of the human person as a universe in miniature, that is to say, as a microcosm analogous to a macrocosm, is a classic example of this kind of reasoning."
90 "Confronted by the universe, the human person not only accepts the exterior world, but changes it, and seeks with its tools to compose a human world .... The thinking of the men of the twelfth century ... perceived all that art, in forcing nature, could reveal about humanity" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 49).
91. See ibid., 40.
92 "The 'interior life' calls in the microcosm, in the very name of its nature, for the intellectual and mechanical domination over the macrocosm" (ibid., 42).
93 See ibid., 314: "There is an autonomous knowledge of this world and of the human person, valuable in its own order, actually helpful for speculation and action, which is transferable to theological science."And on p. 48: "The order is no longer simply the schema of an aesthetic imagination or a religious conviction; it is proved, sustained by a method."
94 See ibid., 16: "In its earliest state, theology is normally a commentary, and throughout the course of its development it evolves in constant reference to structures related to the teaching of law. In the Middle Ages above all, canonists and theologians work in constant collaboration in analogous and interchangeable forms." Further research would be useful on the historical development of the legal-juridical spirit of the Roman Church even from the time of Tertullian and Augustine (who were both very well versed in legal matters). The same legal-mindedness calls for the objectivizing of particular cases, and the monarchical understanding of objective authority.
95 See ibid., 315: "In the organic construction of its wisdom, theology takes account of objects which furnish it with rational disciplines, sciences of the universe and its laws, sciences of humanity and its faculties." And on p. 51: "It is the same Alan of Lille (d. 1203), this master of nature, who is also the theoretician of the 'rules of theology,' that is to say, of the method by which, as in every mental discipline, the knowledge of faith is organized and built up, thanks to internal principles which give it the appearance and value of science."
96 The Roman Church is the only Western Medieval institution which preserves an unbroken cultural tradition and can meet the need for unity of the various nations living together in Western Europe. The exploitation of the need for such an institution had already arrived at a complete religious organization of the Western communities by the tenth and eleventh centuries. For the religious structures of the Western Medieval communities and their expression in the religious art of the eleventh century, see the extremely interesting study of Georges Duby, Adolescence de la chretrenté occidentale (Geneva: Skin, 1967). See also Robert Fossier, Histoire sociale de l'Occident medieval (Paris: Colin, 1970), esp. 43-44, 54-56; Jean Chelini, Histoire religieuse de I 'Occident medieval (Paris: Cohn, 1968; and J. Le Goff, La civilisation de l'Occident medieval (Paris: coll. "Les grandes civilisations," 1964).
97 "The West made the unity of God (one God) a clear and firm basis (for the dogma of the Trinity) and tried to conceive of the mystery of his threeness. A fundamental formula was 'one substance, one hypostasis.' From such a formula there was a danger of arriving at one person (Monarchians, the monarchianizing bishops of Rome Victor, Zephyrinus and Callixtus). The formula favored monarchianism and assisted in the battle against Arianism" (Basil Stephanidis, Ekklesiastike Istoria, 169). The monarchian spirit of the West was revealed very clearly by the rejection of the distinction between Essence and Energies and by the relevant works which tried to support this rejection, mainly in the fourteenth century. The pro-Latin opponents of St. Gregory Palamas defined the hypostasis as a referential essence which "differs from the simple essence because the one is referential, the other detached .... The detached differs from the referential only conceptually" (John Kyparissiotes, How the Hypostatics in the Trinity Differ from the Essence, ed. E. Candal, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 25. [1959]: 132, 140, 142). St. Grego-ry Palamas judged from the beginning that the denial of the uncreated Energies of the Trinity conceals a hidden denial of the hypostases and their identification with the essence (see On the Divine Energies 27 [ed. P. Chrestou, 2:115]). And Matthew Blastares accuses the antipalamites of wanting "to contract the divine nature into one hypostasis," introducing into Christianity the Jewish "poverty," that is, Jewish monotheism (see On the Divine Grace or On the Divine Light, Cod. Monac. 508, fol. 150, cited by Amphilochios Rantovits, To mysterion tes Agias Triados kata ton agion Gregorion Palaman [Thessalonica, 1973], 25, 27).
98 See Stephanidis, Ekklesiastike Istoria, 198-99n: "In the West the (monarchianizing) phraseology of Western Theology has through the influence of Augustine endured to the present day." See also F. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte (1906), 363ff. Also Chenu's conclusion (La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 95): "Augustine's theology ... is a fine piece of intellectualism" in conjunction with Stephanidis' observation (Ekklesiastike Istoria, 166): "The solution the Monarchians gave was based on rational argumentation, such that given the premises those were the ideas they would arrive at." See also N. Nissiotis, Prolegomena eis ten theologiken Gnosiologian (Athens, 1965), 178-79.
99 "Theology is decidedly distinct from faith (and Scripture) in the leading scholarly circles" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 26; see also 55, 79, 83).
100 See ibid., 26-27: "The 'scientific' regime which now established itself ... was the right of reason to install itself at the heart of the deposit and light of faith, and work there according to its own laws." See also 85-86: "Faith admits of ... a capacity for rational elaboration, exposition and proof, according to the philosophical sense of the word argumentum .... Even the definition of faith opens itself from now on, as if on a smooth horizon, to a rational expansion of a scientific nature."
101 See ibid., 42: "... to accept the objectivizing of the knowledge of faith in theology ..."; and 20: "Gilbert de la Porrée (1076-1154) vigorously enunciated the principle of the transfer to theology of the formal procedures (regulae, axiomata, principia) customary in every rational discipline." See also 51: "Like every intellectual discipline, the knowledge of faith was organized and built up thanks to internal principles which gave it the appearance and value of science."
102 The first part comprised the Categories, the De interpretation and the Prior analytics, the second part the Posterior analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical refutations. In some editions of the Organon the treatises On generation and corruption and On the universe were added.
103 See Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siecle, 20.
104 Ibid.
105 "Man's encounter with nature was only accomplished in such a way that man seized this nature and put it to work for him .... To set up Nature in fact put paid to a certain Christian conception of the universe" (ibid., 44, 50).
106 "In this mechanical universe, man ... depersonalized his action, be-came sensitive to the objective density and the articulation of things under the domination of natural laws ... Human science embraced the knowledge of this mastery of nature" (ibid., 48).
107 Byzantine and post-Byzantine architecture expresses a radically opposite attitude to the material of construction. A comparison of Gothic to Byzantine buildings gives us perhaps the clearest illustration of two diametrically opposed cosmological views which lead to two diametrically opposed technical approaches. See Christos Yannaras, E eleutheria tou ethous (Athens: Ekdoseis Athena, 1970), ch. 13, "To ethos tes leitourgikes technes," 183ff.: "Every piece of Byzantine architecture is a personal exploration of the potentialities of the physical material .... In Byzantine architecture we not only find a personal use of the material of construction, but also a personal dialogue with the material, the personal encounter of humanity with the logos of God's love and wisdom, which is revealed in the material creation. This dialogue, which is embodied in Byzantine architecture, conveys the measure of the truth of the entire natural world as communion and Ecclesia .... The material creation is 'shaped' as person, the Person of the Logos ...." [Cf. the ET of this work by Elizabeth Briere, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984; based on the Greek of the 2nd ed., 1979), ch. 12, "The Ethos of Liturgical Art."] See also Olivier Clement, Dialogues avec le Patriarche Athenagoras (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 278-83; P. A. Michaelis, Aisthetike theorese tes byzantines technes, 2nd ed. (Athens, 1972; ET of 1946 ed., An Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art [London, 1955]), esp. 85-98; Christos Yannaras, "Teologia apofatica e architettura bizantina," in Simposio Cristiano (Milan: Ediz. dell' Istituto di Studi teologici Ortodossi, 1971), 104-12; and Marinos Kalligas, E aisthetike tou chorou tes Ellenikes Ekklesias sto Mesaiona (Athens, 1946).
108 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe: Archabbey Press, 1951).
109 Ibid., 27ff.
110 "... this astonishingly synchronous development ..." (ibid., 20). See also the diagrams later in the book.
111 Ibid.
112 the construction of a knowledge within faith. From this, theology is established as a science" (Chenu, La theologie comme science au XIIIe siècle, 70).
113 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 34.
114 See Michaelis, Aisthitike theorese, 89-90.
115 Ibid., 90.
116 Ibid. See also Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich, 1910), 73 (cited by Michaelis).
117 "Theology is the first great technical science (technique) of the Christian world .... The men who built the cathedrals [also] constructed the summae" (Chenu, Introduction a l'etude de Saint Thomas d'Aquin [Paris: Vrin, 1974], 53, 58).
116 "For according to whether we use things rightly or wrongly we become either good or bad" (Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Love 92 [Palmer-Sherrard-Ware]).
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