A faith without miracles is no more than a philosophical system; and a Church without miracles is no more than a welfare organization like the Red Cross. - BISHOP NIKOLAI OF OCHRID
Between the end of the 11th century and the end of the 12th, everything is changed in the West. - FR YVES CONGAR
The Disintegration of our Common Tradition
'The differences arise from a disintegration of a common tradition, and . . . the problem is to find the original kinship in the common past.' So the late Fr Bernard Leeming, paraphrasing and making his own a statement of Archpriest George Florovskii, has summed up the essential relationship between Orthodox and Catholics, between Greek East and Latin West.[1] It is in this perspective that we can most helpfully approach the question of 'Orthodoxy and the West', posed in such challenging fashion by Dr Yannaras in his original article, [2] and now taken up by Mr Bonner in his carefully argued response, 'Christianity and the Modern World-View'.
To speak in terms of the disintegration of a common tradition is to affirm by implication two things about the dialogue between Orthodoxy and the West. First, it is misleading and unhelpful to pose the question starkly in black and white, contrasting 'East' and 'West' as two independent and self-contained worlds, as two opposed and mutually exclusive blocs; for this is to ignore our original kinship in a shared past. Fortunately neither of our two contributors has done that, but the risk of such a distortion must never be forgotten. In the second place, it is equally misleading and unhelpful to go to the other extreme to suggest that no more than relatively superficial 'non-theological factors' are involved, and that on the intellectual, dogmatic and spiritual level there is no genuine difference between the two sides. For this to overlook the tragic disintegration - not total, but none the less far-reaching — that our common tradition has in fact undergone.
'Far-reaching' is a vague word, and it is important to establish more precisely the depth and limits of the disintegration. Is it as grave as Dr Yannaras imagines? Or can it be claimed that, despite the rationalism of the Scholastics, despite the Renaissance and the scientific discoveries of the 16th-17th centuries, despite the Industrial Revolution, the West has never lost a sacramental and eucharistic view of the universe, empha-sizing the cosmic consequences of Christ's Incarnation, of his Transfigura-tion and his Resurrection (themes so dear to the Orthodox conscience)? This is a line of thought which I had hoped that Mr Bonner might pursue; perhaps some future contributor to ECR will enlarge on this theme, with detailed illustrations. In all our comparisons between East and West, we must take the utmost care not to contrast the best on one side with the second-best on the other. This is a pitfall into which many Western admirers of Orthodoxy have tripped unawares; Fr Robert Murray has wisely drawn attention to the danger.[3] Furthermore, in all our comparisons we must strive to be exact and definite, eschewing — as Mr Bonner rightly urges — one-sided selectivity in our use of evidence, simplification and over-generalization.[4]
It is the contention of Dr Yannaras that modern Western technology is the child of medieval Scholasticism. Three points emerge from Mr Bonner's response :
(1) Dr Yannaras's analysis of the medieval West is over-simplified; there were other currents in Latin thought during the Middle Ages besides the type of Scholasticism that he is criticizing.
(2) Dr Yannaras has failed to allow sufficiently for the changes, above all in scientific method, which occurred in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries.
(3) Modern technology is not something which, as 20th-century Christians, we are free to accept or reject. It is a basic fact of our human environment, and we cannot opt out from it. Instead of seeking ways of escape, we should search for God in and through the world-view of con-temporary science.
Not being a specialist in medieval Scholasticism and never having been taught science at any stage in my education, I feel unqualified to discuss these matters in detail. Regarding the first two points, I would only say that, even supposing Dr Yannaras's diagnosis to be one-sided, that does not make it entirely untenable. Mr Bonner has at most indicated that the basic thesis of Dr Yannaras needs to be qualified. Over the third point I am in substantial agreement with Mr Bonner; and so, perhaps, is Dr Yannaras — who is (I suspect) not as negative in his attitude to modern technology as Mr Bonner imagines.
My own contribution is more restricted in scope, and even peripheral to the main debate. I wish to take up the opening section of Mr Bonner's article, and also the remark of Sir John Lawrence : 'It looks to me as if from the time of Anselm Western Christian philosophy expected human reason to be able to do more than it can.' [5] Mr Bonner, while not himself entirely agreeing with them, has quoted a number of passages from con-temporary Western medievalists which bear out Sir John's view. Now it could be argued that Dr Yannaras when he criticizes Scholasticism, and historians of our own day when they insist on the intellectual and spiritual changes which ensued in the West around the year 1100, are expressing a specifically modern point of view. Are such theories perhaps no more than a 20th-century reconstruction of the past? How far did men of the Middle Ages, either Greek or Latin, feel conscious of these changes? It is my contention that a succession of thinkers in the Christian East, from the 15th century onwards, did in fact take issue with the West over the nature and methods of Scholasticism.
Discussions between East and West, at the Council of Florence and in more recent times, have generally concentrated on specific points of doctrine, such as the Filioque, the Papal claims, Purgatory, the Immaculate Conception, or the Palamite teaching on the Uncreated Glory of Mount Tabor. But there is evidence to suggest that from the 15th century, if not before, some Byzantines had come to feel that the Latins were at fault, not only over particular points of doctrine, but more broadly in their entire approach to theology and their method of arguing.
What is theology? What kind of questions are we entitled to ask in theological inquiry, and what kind of answers should we expect? What is the place of discursive reasoning in theological discourse? Such were the queries that arose in Greek minds when confronted by Scholasticism. Clearly they are fundamental. Before we start to play tennis or chess, we must agree about the rules of the game; and before we can profitably discuss the distinction between the Essence and the Energies of God or the Procession of the Holy Spirit, we must agree about our theological method. As a result of intellectual developments in Western Christendom during the 11th-12th centuries, the Latins had in fact altered their inter-pretation of the rules of the game. By slow degrees, although not immediately, perceptive Greeks became uneasily aware of this.
Before considering what such Greeks said, it will be helpful to look a little more closely at these intellectual developments in the West. To Mr Bonner's collection of modern authorities, let us add one more — a Roman Catholic witness, Fr Yves Congar.[6]
From Monastic to Scholastic Theology
As Fr Congar sees it, there is a major watershed in Western spiritual history, 'a decisive turning-point', around the start of the 12th century. He endorses the view of Dom A. Wilmart : a believer of the 4th or 5th century would have felt more at home in the forms of piety (and, we may add, of theology) of the 11th century, than a believer of the 11th century would have felt in those of the 12th. This, of course, is true only of the West; in the East up to 1453 men continued to pray and theologize in a basically Patristic fashion. Latin Christians, on the other hand, began to teach and study theology in a new way, and so to an ever-increasing extent a common 'universe of discourse' was lost. Even in fields where East and West still seemed to agree, the same affirmations came to be felt and interpreted differently. The shared tradition was disintegrating. To Fr Congar it seems no accident that the rise of Scholasticism should have coincided chronologically with the hardening of the schism between Constantinople and Rome.
The change from the Patristic to the Scholastic world-view is summarized by Fr Congar under three main headings :
(1) It was a change from a predominantly 'essentialist' and exemplarist view of the world, to a 'naturalist' view, interested by existence. It was a change from a universe of exemplarist causality, where things are envisaged as receiving their reality from a transcendent model in which they participate, to a universe of efficient causality, where men search for truth in existing things themselves and in their empirical determina-tions. (Here, surely, we may see a connection between Scholasticism and modern scientific method.)
(2) It was a change from symbolism to dialectic; from 'synthetic perception' to an attitude of inquiry and analysis. When theologians start drawing distinctions and posing questions — quis, ubi, ad quid? — the Scholastic era is truly born.
(3) It was a change from a monastic to a university or 'scholastic' way of study. Before the 12th century, theological teaching and study existed mainly in the environment of the monastery; and so theology tended to be traditionalist, contemplative, and closely integrated with the liturgical life. With the rise of Scholasticism, the outward setting of theology shifts from the cloister to the lecture room and stress is laid upon personal research and analysis rather than the acceptance of tradition.
Thus far Fr Congar. At some risk of over-simplification, it might be said that in the West from the 12th century the theologian has appealed primarily to reason and argument, to logical proofs. Needless to say, Eastern theologians also employ deductive reasoning, [7] but for most of them the main emphasis lies elsewhere in an appeal to Tradition : Tradition as embodied in the Fathers and the conciliar canons; Tradition as expressed also in the experience of the saints and holy men living in our own time. The Latin Scholastics also revered the authority of the Fathers, and there may well be a higher proportion of citations from Dionysius the Areopagite in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas than in the Triads of Palamas. But the Latins analysed Patristic texts, arguing, questioning and distinguishing, in a way that most Greeks did not. Theology became a 'science' for the medieval Latins, in a way that it never was for the early Greek Fathers and their Byzantine successors.
The emphasis on the personal experience of the saints is a point of key importance.[8] While there is doubtless a mystical side to Thomas Aquinas which should not be under-estimated, the appeal to mystical experience is not very prominent in his two Summae. St Gregory Palamas, on the other hand, in his Triads regularly invokes the living experience of holy men : it is they who are the real theologians; as for those who are trained to analyse and discuss, who are skilled in the use of words and logic, they are at best theologians in an altogether secondary and deriva-tive sense. As Evagrius of Pontus insisted, theology is a matter of prayer, not of philosophical training : 'If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.'[9] The Serbian Bishop Nikolai (Velimirovich) of Ochrid spoke in a characteristically Eastern way when at the first Faith and Order Conference in Lausanne (1927) he insisted on the experience of the saints. During a discussion on the sacraments, he stated before a predominantly Protestant audience:
If anyone should think that perhaps Baptism and the Eucharist (or other two or three of the seven Mysteries) are the only Mysteries, the only Sacraments, well - let him ask God about it; by fasting and praying tears let him ask God, and he will reveal to him the truth as he has always revealed it to the saints. .. . All that we have said about the great Christian Mysteries is not an opinion of our own (if it were an opinion of our own it would be worth nothing), but it is the repeated experience of the Apostles in the ancient days and of the saints up to our own days. For the Church of God lives not on opinion, but on the experience of the saints, as in the beginning so in our days. The opinions of intellectual persons may be wonderfully clever and yet be false, whereas the experience of the saints is always true. It is God the Lord who is true to himself in his saints.[10]
To one accustomed to the principles of Scholastic reasoning, this may seems an emotional and sentimental way of arguing. To an Orthodox, on the other hand, it is precisely the experience of the saints that constitutes the final criterion in theology.
Byzantine Strictures on Scholasticism
`A faith without miracles is no more than a philosophical system. . .' Bishop Nikolai's words, chosen as the epigraph to our article, express the reaction of many Byzantines when confronted with medieval Scholas-ticism. They felt that the appeal to the saints, to the miraculous action of God as experienced by holy men, had been forgotten, and that Latin theology had become altogether too philosophical and rationalistic, too dependent on merely human modes of thought and methods of argument.
This question of theological method, while never a main topic at the Council of Florence, emerges several times in the course of the debates. When a Latin spokesman had invoked Aristotle, one of the Georgian envoys exclaimed in exasperation : 'What about Aristotle, Aristotle? A fig for your fine Aristotle.' When asked whose authority he accepted, he replied : 'St Peter, St Paul, St Basil, Gregory the Theologian; a fig for your Aristotle, Aristotle.' [11] This is the typical Orthodox appeal to Holy Tradition, to the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils, rather than to syllogistic reasoning. The humanist Bessarion, though accepting the union with Rome, did so on Eastern rather than Scholastic grounds : 'The words [of the Fathers] by themselves are enough to solve every doubt and to persuade every soul. It was not syllogisms or probabilities or arguments that convinced me, but the bare words [of the Fathers].' [12]
Opposition to Scholasticism, and in particular to the Scholastic use of philosophy, is expressed with some asperity by two eminent Byzantines who died in the decade immediately preceding the Council of Florence. Joseph Bryennios (tc. 1431 /2) affirms:
Those who subject the dogmas of the faith to chains of syllogistic reasoning strip of its divine glory the very faith that they strive to defend. They force us to believe no longer in God but in man. Aristotle and his philosophy have nothing in common with the truths revealed by Christ. [13]
The liturgist Symeon of Thessalonika (t 1429) protests in much the same terms:
You are a disciple not of the Fathers but of the pagan Greeks. If I wished, I too could produce syllogisms to answer your sophistic reasonings _ and better syllogisms than yours at that. But such methods of argument I reject, and take my proofs from the Fathers and their writings. You will answer me with Aristotle or Plato or one of your modern teachers; but to oppose you I will invoke the fishermen of Galilee, with their simple preaching and their true wisdom which to you seems foolishness. [14]
In Greek eyes, Latin religious thought had grown altogether too self-confident, and was insufficiently sensitive to the necessary limitations of all human language and conceptual thinking. In the Latin West, so it seemed to many Greeks, everything is cut down to size and classified according to man-made categories; the mystical and apophatic aspect of theology is too little appreciated. This is the complaint of Patriarch Nektarios of Jerusalem in the mid-17th century:
You have expelled, so it seems to us, the mystical element from theology. . . . In your theology there is nothing that lies outside speech or beyond the scope of inquiry, nothing wrapped round with silence and guarded by piety; everything is discussed. . . . There is no cleft in, the rock to confine you when you confront the spectacle on which none may gaze; there is no hand of the Lord to cover you when you contemplate his glory (Ex. 33 : 22-23). [15]
But, it may be objected, is Latin Scholasticism really as unmystical and anti-apophatic as Patriarch Nektarios alleges? Did not Thomas Aquinas affirm, 'God is known as unknown', and does he not quote repeatedly from the Areopagitic writings? True; but that does not automatically make Thomas into an apophatic theologian in the Eastern sense. It is necessary to assess the way in which he understood Dionysius, the theological context in which his Areopagitic citations are placed, and the part which they play in his argument. Is the Dionysius of Thomas the same as that of Maximus or Palamas? As Archpriest George Florovskii has so justly pointed out:
It is utterly misleading to single out certain propositions, dogmatic or doctrinal, and to abstract them from the total perspective in which they are meaningful and valid. It is a dangerous habit to handle 'quotations' from the Fathers and even the Scriptures, outside of the total structure of faith, in which only they are truly alive. 'To follow the Fathers' does not mean simply to quote their sentences. It means to acquire their mind, their phronema. The Orthodox Church claims to have preserved this phronema and to have theologized ad mentem Patrum.[16]
Our question, then, is this : How far has Aquinas preserved this phronema? When he appeals to the Mystical Theology of Dionysius and to other apophatic texts, is he truly theologizing ad mentem Patrum? [17]
Against Nektarios and others who accuse the Latins of 'expelling the mystical element from theology', it may also be objected that there was a rich flowering of mysticism in the West during the later Middle Ages: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Lady Julian in England; and many others in Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy. To this 'rich flowering' Mr Bonner rightly draws attention. But how far were this mystical tradition and the theology of the Schools integrated into a single whole in the medieval West, in the way that mystical and dogmatic theology were integrated by Palamas and the Byzantine Hesychasts? In the late medieval West there seems to be an increasing dichotomy between theology and mysticism, between liturgy and personal devotion. It is precisely this that has disturbed many Orthodox. [18]
A century after Patriarch Nektarios, the lay theologian Eustratios Argenti of Chios sees Latin Scholasticism, and more specifically the Scholastic use of Aristotle, as the root cause of the separation between East and West:
More than a thousand years after the birth of Christ, there arose the heresy of the Scholastic Latin theologians, who wished to unite the philosophy of Aristotle with Christian theology. Nevertheless they did not imitate the holy teachers of the early Church, who made philosophy fit theology; but the Scholastics did the opposite, making the Gospel and the holy Christian faith fit the doctrines of the philosopher Aristotle. From this source there arose in the Latin Church so many heresies in the theology of the Holy Trinity, so many distortions of the words of the Gospels and the Apostles, so many violations of the sacred canons and the divine councils, and finally so many corruptions and adulterations of the holy sacraments.[19]
Argenti's point is reaffirmed, with a slightly different emphasis, by the 19th-century Slavophiles in Russia. In the words of Ivan Kireevskii:
Rome preferred the abstract syllogism to Holy Tradition, which is the expression of the common mind of the whole Christian world, and in which that world coheres as a living and indissoluble unity. This exaltation of the syllogism over Tradition was in fact the sole basis for the rise of a separate and independent Rome. . . . Rome left the Church because she desired to introduce into the faith new dogmas, unknown to Holy Tradition, dogmas which were by nature the accidental products of Western logic.[20]
Here let us pause for a moment to consider what precisely Kireevskii is asserting. His allusion to 'Western logic' recalls to my mind a conversation which I once overheard between two Anglicans, both ardently pro-Orthodox, the one a Patristic specialist and the other a philosopher. Replying to a point made by the philosopher, the Patristic specialist exclaimed : 'We don't want that kind of Latin logic.' There's no such thing as Latin logic', the philosopher retorted. 'There's good logic and bad logic.'
The point may be generalized. In vindication of the Scholastics, should it not be said that their use of syllogisms and philosophical categories is no more than an attempt to think clearly and to speak coherently? While there is a place in theological discourse for paradox and poetry, [21] there is no place for mere inarticulateness and mental laziness. The mysterious has a vital role to play, but that is no excuse for muddle and mystification. If God has given man powers of reasoning, must he not use them to the full, and is this not exactly what the Latin Scholastics were aiming to do? When they employed distinctions and technical terms taken from Aristotle or other philosophers, this was as an aid to lucid thinking. What is wrong in that?
Such a line of defence, while in itself legitimate, fails to answer the main point that Symeon of Thessalonika, Argenti and Kireevskii are concerned to make. What they are deploring is not the employment of human logic as such but the failure to allow for its limitations, and the failure to recognize the unique character of the subject matter of theology. They are attacking the application of discursive reasoning to fields where it should play only a secondary role, strictly subservient to a 'synthetic perception' of reality, to an intuitive and mystical awareness of the Divine. Argenti has no objection to the use of philosophy as a tool, and he acknowledges that the Greek Fathers employed it in this way. But in the case of Latin Scholasticism, as he sees it, the tool has become a determin-ing standard; the servant has become the master.
If these charges are to be convincing, they must be formulated with greater precision and fully supported with evidence. The Orthodox critics of Scholasticism must show what are in fact the limits of human reasoning in theology. They must indicate, with specific reference to the sources, how and when Anselm and Abelard, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas applied logic to matters beyond logic's scope. They must indicate in detail how Aquinas relied on philosophy in a way that the Cappadocians and St John of Damascus did not. It is impractical to attempt this in a short article. But enough, I trust, has been said to establish that the view-point of the Byzantine anti-Scholastics needs to be taken seriously. Even if their strictures are not always objectively justified, it remains true that the rise of Scholasticism and the changes in theological method which it entailed have contributed permanently to the alienation between Orthodoxy and Rome. It is a significant factor in the disintegration of our common tradition.
Byzantine Thomists
One important qualification must here be added. Neither the Latin West nor the Greek East has ever formed a uniform and monolithic whole. Throughout the medieval period there were Western writers who protested, as vehemently as Bryennios or Symeon of Thessalonika, against the Scholastic use of secular philosophy. [22] And, alongside the Byzantine anti-Scholastics, there were enthusiastic and distinguished Byzantine Thomists.[23] Following the translation into Greek of large parts of the two Summae by Demetrius Cydones (c. 1325-c. 1398) and his brother Prochorus (c. 1330-c. 1370), Thomism became for a time almost fashionable at the Byzantine court. On the eve of the Council of Florence, educated Greeks had a better understanding of Thomism than the Latins had of Palamism; for the Latins knew of Palamism almost exclusively from the writings of Palamas's bitter opponents, whereas the Greeks knew of Thomism from the works of Aquinas himself. What many Byzantines admired in Aquinas was not primarily his doctrine or his conclusions, for on matters such as the Procession of the Holy Spirit a number of them considered him to be in error.[24] It was his theological method that impressed them - his systematic arrangement of material, his careful definitions and distinctions, the rigour of his argumentation; in a word, his 'Latin logic'. This should prevent us from hastily concluding that the Byzantines were exclusively 'apophatic'!
It should not be assumed that all the Byzantine Thomists were in favour of union with Rome. If we try to range the Greek intellectuals of the 14th-15th centuries into two opposed 'teams' — on the one side, the Platonists, the Palamites and the anti-Unionists; on the other, the Aristotelians, the Thomists, and the Unionists — we quickly discover that the real situation is far more complicated. True, in the 14th century the brothers Cydones are anti-Palamite, Thomist and unionist. But Palamas himself showed no systematic animosity against the Latin West, and was less anti-Roman than his opponents Akyndinos and Gregoras. [25] Barlaam the Calabrian was anti-Palamite, but also anti-Thomist. In the next cen-tury, while St Mark of Ephesus was Palamite and anti-unionist, his suc-cessor as head of the anti-unionistparty, George (Gennadius) Scholarius, was to the end of his life a dedicated Thomist. Plethon the Platonist opposed the union; his Platonist disciple Bessarion supported it. The Aristotelian George of Trebizond favoured the union but disliked Bessarion. 'Even in the last agony of Byzantium each of its scholars went his own individual way.'[26] No easy classification is possible.
The Things of the Age to Come
'Accurate designations', remarked St Isaac the Syrian (7th century), 'can only be established concerning earthly things. The things of the Age to Come do not possess a true name, but can only be apprehended by simple cognition, which is exalted above all names and signs and forms and colours and habits and composite denominations. When, therefore, the knowledge of the soul exalts itself above this circle of visible things, the Fathers use concerning this knowledge any designations they like, for no one knows their real names. . . . As the holy Dionysius says, we employ riddles.' [27]
Using an eschatological perspective, St Isaac has here expressed the basic standpoint of the apophatic and mystical theologian. Natural science and secular philosophy are concerned with 'earthly' and 'visible' things, with the realities of the 'Present Age'. This means that in the field of science and philosophy there can be established a certain system of `accurate designation' (although never, of course, absolutely accurate); it means that certain man-made methods of logical argument, of analysis and verification, can here be legitimately applied. The Christian theologian, on the other hand — to use a phrase of St Isaac — 'breathes the air of the Age to Come'. All his thinking and his speaking should be permeated by the spirit of the Future Age which, since the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is already inaugurated and at work among us as a present reality. In consequence, theology can never be a `science' in any comparable sense to philology or geology, because the subject matter of theology is radically different. It has its own forms of understanding, by 'simple cognition' rather than discursive reasoning; it has its own ways of analysis and verification, and the methods of natural science and secular philosophy cannot here be applied without drastic modification, without a fundamental metanoia or 'change of mind'.
The Byzantine authors that we have quoted felt that, in Latin Scholasticism, no sufficient metanoia had occurred, and that as a result theology had been assimilated too closely to earthly science and to human philosophy. They considered that Latin Scholasticism had neglected the transforming presence of the things of the Age to Come. How far were these Byzantines right?
Notes
[1] B. Leeming, sj, 'Orthodox-Catholic Relations', in A. H. Aimstrong and E. J. B. Fry, Re-Discovering Eastern Christendom: Essays in Commemoration of Dorn Bede Winslow (London 1963), p. 19.
[2] ECR iii (1971), pp. 286-300.
[3] A Brief Comment on Dr Yannaras's ECR iii (1971), p. 306.
[4] Mr
Bonner seems momentarily to forget his own warnings, when he writes
towards the end of his article : 'Is there any reason to think that
Orthodoxy is any better equipped to speak to modern secular man than
Roman Catholicism or Protestantism? The present writer sees no reason to
suppose that his English fellow-countrymen are more likely to be
impressed by Orthodoxy than by the forms of Christianity with which they
are familiar.' Would it not be safer to avoid generalizations about
'modern secular man' and 'English fellow-countrymen'? `Modern' men,
Eastern or Western, English or Greek, differ enormously among
themselves. Several 'secular' Englishmen among my personal acquaintances
have been immediately impressed on first encountering Orthodoxy.
Stifled by urban technology, they have responded at once to the Orthodox
interpretation of inward prayer, to the Orthodox use of liturgical
symbolism and insistence on the spirit-bearing potentialities of
material things. But I would not wish to generalize. Others among my
English friends find Eastern Orthodoxy picturesque yet irrelevant.
[5] ECR iii (1971), p. 491.
[6] Y. M. -J. Congar, 'Neuf cent ans après: Notes sur le "Schisme
oriental", in 1054-1954, L'Eglise et les Eglises: neuf siècles de
douloureuse séparation entre l'Orient et l'Occident. Etudes et travaux .
. . offerts à Dom Lambert Beauduin (Editions de Chevetogne, 1954), vol.
i, pp. 43-48.
[7] Few texts, for example, could be more elaborately (not to say,
tediously) syllogistic than the three Logoi Antirritikoi of St Theodore
the Studite (MPG, xcix, cols 328-436).
[8] On the appeal
to personal experience in Byzantine theology, see A. M. Allchin, 'The
Appeal to Experience in the Triads of St. Gregory Palamas', in F. L.
Cross (ed.), Studia Patristica viii (Texte and Untersuchungen Berlin
xciiii: 1966), pp. 323-8; and K. Ware, 'Tradition and Personal
Experience in Later Byzantine Theology', in ECR iii (1970), pp. 139-40.
[9] On Prayer, 60 (MPG, lxxix, col. 1180B).
[10]
Cited by N. Zernov, 'The Eastern Churches and the Ecumenical Movement
in the Twentieth Century', in R. Rouse and S. C. Neill (ed.), A History
of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (2nd ed., London 1967), p. 655.
[11] J. Gill, sj, The Council of Florence (Cambridge 1959), p. 227.
[12] Letter to Alexander Lascaris (MPG, clxi, col. 360B), quoted in Gill, loc. cit.
[13]
Cited in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, vol. ii (Paris 1903).
col. 1159. Compare M. J. le Guillou, Mission et Unité. Les exigences de
la communion, vol. ii (Unam Sanctam 34: Paris 1960), pp. 35-36; and T.
[Kallistos] Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under
Turkish Rule (Oxford 1964), pp. 110-11.
[14] Adv. omn. haer., 29 (MPG, clv, col. 140Bc).
[15] Peri tis Archis tou Papa Antirrisis (Iassy 1682), p. 195.
[16]
In Keith Bridston (ed.), Orthodoxy, A Faith and Order Dialogue (Geneva
1960), p. 42; quoted by Leeming, 'Orthodox-Catholic Relations', art.
cit., p. 21.
[17] On, the subject of apophatic theology, I accept
Mr Bonner's distinction between (i) apophaticism as an intellectual
discipline, complementing cataphatic theology, and (ii) apophaticism as
an attitude of adoration, accompanying the mystical union. (On this
distinction, cf. C. Journet, 'Palamisme et thomisme. A propos d'un livre
récent', in Revue Thomiste lx [1960], pp. 429-53, esp. p. 431.) But the
two types of apophaticism are parallel and interconnected.
Mr
Bonner is of course right to protest against an excessive apophaticism.
An exclusive use of negative theology would be self-defeating, ending in
silence and intellectual nihilism. The Greek Fathers never used
negative theology in this way. Dionysus wrote other works besides the Mystical Theology,
and in any case he is by no means representative of the Patristic
tradition as a whole. My own reading of the Greek Fathers, however, from
St Clement of Alexandria to St Gregory Palamas, leads me to suspect
that they are more apophatic than Mr Bonner allows.
[18] Compare Peter Hammond, The Waters of Marah: The Present State of
the Greek Church (London 1956), pp. 16-17: 'Orthodox Christendom has
never undergone an upheaval comparable to that which shattered the unity
of the western world in the sixteenth century, not on account of the
glacier of Turkish dominion which descended upon it a hundred years
earlier, but because it had never known that separation of theology and
mysticism, liturgy and personal devotion, which - when all is said as to
the influence of political and economic factors - is required to
explain the all-engulfing cataclysm of the Reformation.'
[19] Syntagma kata azymon (Leipzig 1760), pp. 171-2.
[20]
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. i (Moscow 1911), p. 226. I owe this
reference to Dr J. H. Pain, of Drew University, Madison, N.J.
[21] On the importance of the poetic element in theology, cf. Robert
Murray, sj : 'All theology starts with the human mind reaching out to
evoke some echo or reflexion of the ineffable by means of poetic
imagery, knowing that the ineffable cannot be pinned down. . . . The
peaks of theological poetry remain to inspire us again - Ephrem, Dante,
Milton, Blake, T. S. Eliot. It would be good for the Church if they were
put more in the forefront of theological study' (ECR iii [1971], p.
384).
[22] For details, see le Guillou, Mission et Unite, vol. ii, p. 277, note 55.
[23]
The impact of Thomism on the Byzantines is discussed briefly but
perceptively by R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the
Middle Ages (The Pelican History of the Church, vol. Harmondsworth
1970), pp. 79-82. For further details, see S. Salaville, 'Un Thomiste
Byzance au XVe siècle : Gennade Scholarios', in Echos d'Orient xxiii
(1924), pp. 129-36; M. jugie, 'Demetrius Cyclones et la theologie latine
a Byzance aux XIVe et XVe siecles', in Echos d'Orient xxvii (1928), pp.
385-402; G. Mercati, Notizie di Procoro e Demetrio Cidone, Manuele
Caleca e Teodoro Meliteniota ed altri appunti per la storia della
Teologia e della Letteratura Bizantina del secolo XIV (Studi e Testi 56:
Vatican 1931). The fullest and most recent treatment of the subject is
in the three works of S. G. Papadorpoulos: Metaphraseis Thomistikon
Ergon: Philothomistai kai Antithomistai en Byzantio (Athens 1967);
Synantisis Orthodoxou kai Scholastikis Theologias (en to prosopo
Kallistou Angelikoudi kai Thoma Akinatou) (Analekta Vlatadon 4:
Thessalonika 1970); Kallistou Angelikoudi kata Thoma Akinatou (Athens
1970).
[24] One nameless Greek reader wrote in the margin
of his copy of the Summa Theologica 'O Thomas, would that you had been
born in the east and not in the west! Then you would have been Orthodox
and would have written as truly about the Procession of the Holy Spirit
as about all the other questions which you here treat so well.' A
marginal gloss in another manuscript says of Aquinas: 'A Latin by race
and belief, he differs from us on the points where the Roman Church
differs; but in all else he is wise and exceedingly useful to the reader
. . .' (Salaville, art. cit.. pp. 132-3). Nilus Cabasilas, Archbishop
of Thessalonika, while attacking Thomas's views on the Filioque yet
conceded (according to Demetrius Cydones) that he was 'a holy man and
the most valuable teacher that there has ever been in the Church of God'
(jugie, art. cit., p. 398).
[25] See J. Meyendorff, Introduction a l'etude de Gregoire Palamas (Patristica Sorbonensia 3: Paris 1959), pp. 122, 313.
[26] S. Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge 1970), p. 84.
[27]
Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, translated from Bedjan's Syriac
text by A. I. Wensinck (Amsterdam 1923), pp. 114-15 (translation
adapted).
