Aquinas and Orthodoxy
by Fr Andrew Louth
Talk given to the Oxford Orthodox Christian Student Society, at the Danson Room, Trinity College, Oxford, October 20th, 2011, 19:00-20:30
Transcript:
Fr Andrew Louth: I call this paper Aquinas and Orthodoxy. It’s got a bit of a history, but we don’t need to know the history of the paper. The engagement of Eastern Orthodoxy theology with Saint Thomas Aquinas is a complex and shadowy affair. Within a century of Aquinas’ death some of the works of the theologian were available in Greek translation in the Byzantine world and were greeted with both enthusiasm and dismay. Our understanding of this early Byzantine reaction to Thomism is complicated by a number of factors.
First of all, the works of Aquinas became known in the full flush of the Palamite controversy or the Hesychast controversy, by which time positions had already hardened. The first work of Aquinas’ to appear in Greek, the Summa contra Gentiles, was published in 1354. The three synods in Constantinople that supported Palamas in the Hesychast controversy are dated 341, 347 and 351, while the Hagioritic Tome, the statement of the monks of the holy mountain in support of Palamas, dates from 1341.
So Aquinas didn’t really in any way influence the controversy, rather what happened is that the reception of Aquinas fitted into largely predetermined positions, though often enough in a rather bewildering variety of ways. Now I think it’s important to emphasize this and to remember it, because our understanding of the engagement between Thomas and Byzantine Theology in the fourteenth century is made more difficult by the fact that in the twentieth century the Palamite controversy came to be seen as definitive for understanding the nature of the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom.
Palamism, as it were defining the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy, in opposition to Western Christendom that was defined by Scholasticism or sometimes by a more complex duality embracing Scholasticism and the emerging non-dogmatic mysticism of the Western later Middle Ages.
Virtually all Orthodox scholarship on the fourteenth century and most of the Western scholarship has been affected by the sense that here we find ourselves at the theological core of the schism. This in turn has been affected by the more immediate encounter between Orthodox theologians, to begin with mostly Russian Orthodox theologians and the West, that took place in the twentieth century.
Put perhaps rather too bluntly, the controversy of the fourteenth century has been seen from the perspective of the Russian Orthodox encounter with early twentieth century Roman Catholic theology in which Aquinas appeared either as the inspiration of a debased scholastic theology or as the hero of neo-Thomism. The interpretive categories employed in analyzing the fourteenth century therefore derived from the twentieth century engagement rather than the fourteenth, with the favored view being granted the [inaudible 00:03:02] of being existentialist.
Even to begin to disentangle this is more than can be attempted in a single paper. Therefore, this paper will remain really quite provisional. The Eastern Orthodox encounter with Aquinas however, either in the fourteenth or in the twentieth century or indeed in the centuries in between, is not perhaps the place to begin. For Aquinas himself engaged with tradition we would call Eastern Orthodox and which he knew to be Greek, though in Latin dress. Aquinas was indebted in his theology to a long tradition of theological reflection that had been shaped decisively by the Greek traditions of the Christian East.
Indeed, although Aquinas is cast in the Orthodox mind as the “Scholastic par excellence” this is to oversimplify. Unlike many of the schoolmen, Aquinas’ early education was not in a university but was in a monastic school – Montecassino, the monastery founded by Saint Benedict himself, where Lectio Divina and a meditative approach to the Scriptures would have made prayer and study inseparable venerated theory. Although his education was later supplemented by study at the University of Naples, an imperial foundation independent of the church, the basis of Aquinas’ learning was probably monastic and thus much closer to the tradition of what the Byzantines called the ‘Inner Wisdom.’
Furthermore, it was argued long ago within his Christology, Aquinas was uniquely well informed in comparison with his Western contemporaries by the Greek patristic tradition. More recently, the once popular idea that Aquinas departed from earlier Platonic tradition under the influence of the newly discovered Aristotle has been shaken and a strong Neoplatonic influence in Aquinas recognized.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that when Aquinas died in 1274 he was on his way to the Council of Lyon in an attempt to heal the schism between East and West. In general terms then, Aquinas appears more open to and concerned for Eastern influences than the common Orthodox preconception might suppose. In more strictly theological terms and especially in relation to the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas’ indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition may be considered further with reference to two theologians determinative of the Orthodox tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint John Damascene.
So first, Dionysius, the works ascribed to the disciple of the apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite have had an unparalleled influence on Eastern Orthodox theology. To put it briefly, these writings provided unifying theological vision that picked out the characteristic emphasis that Byzantine theology as it had developed by the beginning of the sixth century when the Corpus Areopagiticum first appeared.
There we find a cosmic vision focused on the Eucharistic celebration and associated sacramental rites in which the heavenly and the earthly realms united, the whole created order is governed by a principle of hierarchy by which everything is drawn more deeply into union with God, a principle of hierarchy manifest in its purity in the ranks of the celestial beings.
The creaturely orders are seen as engaged in praise of God, using the terms, the names by which God has revealed himself in the Scriptures, for the interpretation of which Dionysius introduces the terminology borrowed from Neoplatonism of apophatic and cataphatic theology, that is the theology of denial and the theology affirmation. It is through this praise the creatures are united to God and in this progress towards union there can be discerned a sequence of purification, illumination, union, the goal of which is an ecstatic union with God in love, experienced as darkness since it is beyond any creaturely capacity.
The writings of the Areopagite became known in the West initially through the ninth century Latin translations of Hilduin, Abbot of Saint-Denys and Eriugena. The version that Aquinas knew was a still further revision by John the Saracen. In both East and in West, attention was initially directed towards the works on the hierarchies, which became the subject of repeated commentary.
Such an approach preserved a sense of the integrity of the Areopagite’s vision. In the West this approach seems gradually to fall away, so that with Aquinas it is the work of the Divine Names to which he devotes a commentary. The extent of the influence of the Divine Names on Aquinas’ theology and especially the “Summa” is apparent from the index of citations of that work given in Payo’s edition of the commentary.
What lies behind this new approach to Dionysius is not clear, but it may have something to do with the fact that while the liturgical rites on which Dionysius commented remain recognizably similar in the East, liturgical development in the West had led to a practice of liturgy significantly different from that presupposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Although the celestial hierarchy remained important throughout Aquinas’ angelology, for which he was justly famous and that’s why he was called the Doctor Angelicus, attention to the Corpus Areopagiticum in the West shifted to the Divine Names in the Mystical Theology. There seems to be something emblematic in the fact that Thomas and later schoolmen comment on the Divine Names, while the Mystical Theology becomes the handbook of the emerging school of later medieval mysticism. Think for instance of the Middle English translation and commentary on the Mystical Theology, called Hid Divinity, by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
This shift of attention, I think, indicates a change in interpretation which maybe brought out by noting an early comment on the Divine Names preserved in the Greek Scholia. On Divine Names 5:8, the scholiast, conceivably Maximus the Confessor himself, comments: “As the cause of all that for God is hymned”, for he did not say these things are predicated as the same but properly speaking “hymned.”
In other words, the Divine Names is about how we use language to praise God not about the narrower logical issue of how he predicates qualities of God. This distinction seems to be lost in Aquinas. His commentary on the Divine Names is about divine predication. The connection with worship, which is explicit in Dionysius, has vanished.
This relates as we shall see that later to one of the principle bones of contention between Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas, the charge that for Aquinas and the schoolmen in general theology has become a matter of concept. It has been reduced to a rationalistic enterprise. The Summa Theologiae itself can be supported in support of this contention, but also against it. The Summa is composed of ‘questionnes,’ questions, the genre that came to dominate Western theology in the newly founded universities.
Although the questio related to the older genre of questions and answers, erotopokresis, they became important and remained important in the Byzantine world. In the world of the universities, it developed its own role. As Fergus Kerr has put it, the method behind the use of questionnes in disputations was, and I quote, “Not intended to reach compromise or supposed consensus by splitting the difference between conflicting interpretations. It’s allowed the disputants to discover the strengths and weaknesses of opposing views, but the aim was to work out the truth by considering and eliminating error, however common or plausible or seemingly supported by authority.”
The Summa Theologiae is a collection of questionnes in which Christian doctrine is interrogated and set out as an array of propositions supported and defended by reason. It could, in the circumstances, hardly be other than an exercise in conceptual theology. But on the other hand, the structure of the Summa suggests something beyond this. The arrangement of the questionnes is far from arbitrary and it can be interpreted as following a movement out from God into the created order and then back through the human to God in a process of contemplation, the whole cycle being made possible by God’s uniting himself with humankind and overcoming human sin in the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God.
Underlying the conceptual distinctions there is a fundamental concern with the return of creation to God, reflected in the cycle: rest, procession and return as Neoplatonic providence, so that the core concern of the Summa is deification or theosis of creation. As Fergus Kerr puts it in lapidary fashion to quote him again, “The Summa Theologiae is a study of the transcendental condition to beatific vision, not foundationalist apologetics but a set of practices for receiving the gift of beatitude.”
Another point of contrast between Dionysius and Thomas concerns their differing uses of the word and concept analogy, analogia. This is perhaps less significant than it once seemed to be when Thomists tended to reduce Thomism to the principle of Analogia Entis, the most famous led by the Jesuit Guevara but also in other people. Penido for instance wrote an important work called “Le rôle de l’analogie en théologie dogmatique.” This was in the mid-twentieth century, this approach to analogy, while this sense of analogy being central to Aquinas just gradually dismantled.
Nonetheless, analogia is important in Aquinas though maybe not the central crucial term, and is concerned with how we are to interpret our language about God. Aquinas seeks a middle way, the way of analogy, between the way that suggests that our concepts apply in the same way as they apply in the creative world, what’s called univocity, and the idea that our concepts as applied to God and creature reality have nothing at all in common, equivocity. Analogy is somewhere between these, but it preserves the sense that there is something in common between what we know when we say that God is good and all the creatures are good but doesn’t identify the concept in the two cases. So it is a conceptual puzzle for Aquinas.
But analogy in Dionysius means something, I think, quite different. It refers to the creaturely capacity to receive and understand. It is, if you like, the cata dovina ton, as far as possible, Platonism, which qualifies anything we say about the creature’s participation in God. Again one might say that the contrast here in these different interpretations of analogy is a contrast between a conceptual issue on the side of Aquinas and one concerned much more broadly with our capacity to receive and understand with Dionysius.
Now the other Greek theologian who is enormously important to Aquinas is Saint John Damascene. The point in which we reached this contrast between conceptual theology and something that is more concerned with the creature’s capacity to receive and understand union with God perhaps provides a cue for the consideration of this other major Eastern Orthodox influence on Aquinas, the work of Saint John Damascene.
It’s commonly asserted that the work known in the West is De Fide Orthodoxa, “On the Orthodox Faith” by the Damascene, lies behind the dogmatic structures of Western Scholasticism. It certainly seems to be true that this work provides the ground plan for the comprehensive surveys of Christian dogma put forward by the schoolmen from the sentences of Peter Lombard to the Summas of High Scholasticism.
But I would argue that the step from the Damascene’s “Century of Accurate Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” as the Greek work would be called, to the De Fide Orthodoxa in Latin is more than just a matter of translation. Saint John Damascene’s work belongs to the genre of the century, a collection of 100 chapters, anything from a sentence to a couple of paragraphs, invented by the fourth century monk of the Egyptian desert Evagrius Pontus first used for collections of ascetic wisdom and later used to incorporate succinct statements of Christian doctrine, for instance by Saint Maximus the Confessor. But the Century remained a monastic genre and John, I think, would have been conscious of this.
His Century covers Christian teaching in a roughly credile form, God creation and humankind, Christology and Redemption, then the church sacraments and worship. Then he intended to be in some way to be comprehensive, I mean that’s why you have a century because a century gets something complete, it’s certainly not intended to be exhaustive and nor is the structure particularly systematic.
It’s an account of Christian doctrine intended, I think, certainly for monks living under Islam who needed to be clear about what Orthodox Christianity stood for but even more to help them to understand how to progress through faithful prayer and worship to union with God. The Latin version, De Fide Orthodoxa translated by Burgundio of Pisa in the mid-twelfth century, probably about 1153-54, is different in significant ways.
Apart from detailed points of translation, the most striking difference is that De Fide Orthodoxa is divided into four books on God, on creation, on the incarnation and redemption, and on the sacraments, so this last section is mostly about other things. This division reflects the four books of Peter Lombard’s sentences which again are divided into four books on the mystery of the trinity, on creation, on the incarnation of the word and on the doctrine of signs. He underlies the sections of the medieval Summa, not least Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.
It seems to me that the Lombard’s division into four is clearly lacking not to say Augustinian inspiration with this movement from the mystery of the trinity to the doctrine of signs, signa, by way of creation and incarnation. That suggests to me that the parallel between the fourfold division of the Latin version of the Damascene and the fourfold division of Lombard’s sentences is to be explained not so much by the Lombard basing his division on the Damascene but by the Latin translator or some later editor of the Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith trying with only moderate success to fit the Damascene’s work to a Latin structure, only support of that is the fact that the earliest manuscripts of the Latin De Orthodox De Fide don’t have this division to four books.
It comes later on though we can’t exactly when, fairly soon. Furthermore, in such Latin dress with discussing four areas of theology the Damascene’s work now looks much more systematic with pretensions to exhaustiveness than the original Greek version. Now, how does this bear on Thomas’ debt to Eastern Orthodox tradition as represented in the Damascene?
First of all, De Fide Orthodoxa was for Thomas a treasury of Greek theology which he draws on throughout the Summa and in his other writings: the mystery of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation out of nothing, ex nihlo, the nature of the angels, the focal role of the human as God’s image in the created order, the post-Chalcedonian developments of Byzantine Christology, the profound sense of the importance the bodily underlying both the incarnation and the sacramental order of the church. All this Aquinas draws on gratefully, even if some, indeed much of it, was already firmly established in the Western tradition independently with the contribution of the Damascene De Fide Orthodoxa.
Secondly, however, the form of De Fide Orthodoxa suggested by the Latin division of the four books may have suggested to Aquinas that Greek theology had a much more systematic form and was in fact the case. The form in which the Damascene’s work was known in the Greek East was still, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, as a century or a variant on this. In fact the commonest form in which the Greek “On The Orthodox Faith” is found in Medieval manuscript is probably the original form intended by John the Damascene, not just part three of the fountainhead of knowledge as the existing preparatory letter to what ….. suggests but as the last two thirds of a work known as 150 philosophical and theological chapters, the first 50 being an introduction to logic known as the Dialectica. It was this work, in 150 chapters, a variant on the Century but also echoing the number of the Psalms and certain times of a sacred number.
It was this work of 150 chapters that formed the model for Palamas’ own 150 philosophical chapters, his summary, again by no means exhaustive, of his position in his Hesychast controversy. The lack of system in Greek theology both with Damascene and Palamas is part … or it could be argued, is part of a more profound sense of apophaticism before the mystery of God, which we know through participation and cannot express in any exhaustive way.
Now that we’ve got so far, I think we’re in a position to look at the other side of the engagement between Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas. The reception of the Angelic Doctor in the East from the fourteenth century onwards, this will fall into three very unequal parts.
First, the engagement in the fourteenth and fifteenth century in Byzantium so long as it was part of the Christian Byzantium Empire before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Secondly the place of what we might call, with some reservation, Thomism and Orthodox Theology from the fall of Constantinople to the twentieth century. Finally, engagement with Aquinas in the twentieth century.
Now I’m going to follow the chronological order, though I’ve already marked the beginning. The ordo cognoscendi is perhaps the reverse. For a long time the Greeks were not really that interested in Latin theology and there were very few examples of the translation of Latin works into Greek until about the thirteenth century.
One work that was translated and well known and well loved in the Byzantine world were the dialogues of Gregory the Great, which were translated by Pope Zacharias in the eighth century. At the end of the thirteenth century, there begins to be an interest in Latin theology and so in the last decade of the thirteenth century, Augustine’s De Trinitate was translated into Greek by Maximus Planudes, and other works followed in the fourteenth century.
Augustine’s works were widely read and not just among those in Byzantium who looked to the West with admiration. Even Gregory Palamas read Augustine’s De Trinitate, though the use he made of it is sometimes surprising. As well as introducing into Byzantine theology, Augustine’s notions of this Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son, Palamas also found in Augustine fuel for his attack on the double possession of the Holy Spirit, the filioque.
Planudes also translated into Greek, probably about 1295, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. The first work of Aquinas’ to be translated into Greek was his, as we’ve already seen, his Summa Contra Gentiles. The translation of which by Demetrius Cydones was published in 1354. This seems to be popular, with a wide circulation. At least 40 manuscripts survived. Demetrius Cydones later translated parts one and two of the Summa Theologiae, and his brother Prochorus translated some of the third part.
By this time the Palamite controversy was well underway. The tide had turned in favor of Saint Gregory of Palamas and decisively in 1347 with the accession to the imperial throne of John VI Kantakouzenos and Palamas’ own elevation to the metropolitical throne of Thessaloniki, which was followed by Palamas’ vindication at synods in 1347 and 1351. Palamas’ defense of his position against Barlaam, the triads in defense of the holy Hesychasts, have been published about 1358 and is 150 chapters between the two synods.
The defense of Palamas by the monks of Mount Athos, the Hagioritic Tome, had also been issued in 1341. The principal issue of the controversy, whether through their prayer the Hesychast monks could attain to deifying participation in God and in particular whether the division of the Divine Light was a vision of God Himself or a vision simply referring to God or maybe even a hallucination, had been resolved by Palamas through his utilization of the distinction between God’s essence and his activities or energies. A distinction which he drew from the Greek theological tradition going back to Saint Basil the Great, according to which God is unknowable in his essence and yet truly known through his images, which are not created effects of God activity but God himself in his activity.
Those who opposed Palamas, initially Barlaam the Calabrian monk then Gregory Akindynos, probably himself also an Athonite monk and a learned scholar Nicephorus Gregoras regarded the distinctions in the essence of God in his uncreated images an infringing the divine unity and simplicity and effectively introducing into Christianity pagan polytheism.
They made this point independently of any knowledge of Aquinas but the availability of Aquinas’ works in the Greek world would have provided further support for those who rejected the distinction between the divine ousia and the divine enegia, such a rejection being implicit in the fundamental Thomist affirmation of the identity in God of esse and essentia, of existence and essence.
There’s a further issue in which Aquinas’ voice was important both for those who welcomed him and those who opposed him. This was the longstanding doctrinal issue between East and West, those who’d frustrated the attempt at union of the Council of Lyon which death prevented Aquinas from attending. The question of the filioque, that is the question of whether the Holy Spirit precedes from the Father as the original version of the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed had asserted or whether it precedes from the Father and the Son, filioque, as asserted by the Western edition to the ecumenical creed.
Aquinas’ argument in support of the filioque in the Summa Theologiae in part one, question 36 article two, form a succinct version of the argument presented in much great length by Anselm in his De Prechiones Espiritu Sancti, and like that argument precede from purely logical considerations without any reference to the witness of Scripture or the traditions of church. Both Anselm and Aquinas deduced the theory that there is in fact one God, three persons and the only way they can be distinguished is by relationship.
Reactions to Aquinas varied. On the one hand there were those who opposed his theological method, his use of Aristotelian logic, syllogisms. Though the Greek word theorismos has a much wider connotation that the English word. On the other hand, there were those who seemed to welcome his theological method but lamented his theological position. Notable among the latter was Gennadius Scolarius, the first patriarch in Constantinople under the Ottomans who apostatizes Thomas thus, “Come now,” he says, “excellent Thomas, O that you had not be born in the West so it were bound to act as adjudicate for the deviations of that church both in the case of the procession of the Spirit and the difference between the divine essence and energies, for otherwise you would have been infallible in matters theological as you are in matters ethical.”
Though it’s worth mentioning that Gennadius also admired other aspects of Thomas’ theology, in particular for instance his Doctrine of Transubstantiation. But such a reaction seems to have been rare. Those who attacked Aquinas on the matter of the Holy Spirit or the relation to the essence and energies also frequently attacked his theological method.
Notable among those was Nilus Cabasilas, who succeeded Palamas on the throne of Thessaloniki and whose attack on the Latin doctrine of the possession of the Spirit includes an attack on the rationalism of Thomas’ argumentation. So in modern terms, he opposes Eastern apophaticism to Aquinas’ rationalism. He also attacks the appeal made by the Latins to Scripture and the fathers, not that they did it wrong.
The procession of the Holy Spirit was a defining issue between East and West. Those who were attracted to Thomas’ theological method and embraced his theological opinion on this issue frequently ended up by making their peace with the Latin church, these included Demetrius Cydones. In relation to the question of the relationship between the divine essences and energies, the situation there was different.
There were those like Prochorus Cydones, the younger brother of Demetrius, who embraced Thomas’ theological method and argued against the Palamite position and yet remained Orthodox. There were others like Tephanes the third, metropolitan of Lycia, who were thoroughly Aristotelian in their theological method not just in its argumentation but also in its metaphysics, and from this position defended Palamite understanding of the divine light at Tabor against the attacks of such as Prochorus Cydones.
The tendency in scholarship over the last century to see the controversy in Byzantium in polarized terms, on the one hand a kind of Platonist anti-western monks and on the other hand Aristotelian western inclining lay scholars is certainly simplistic and needs to be resisted. If we do that, the reception of Thomas and Thomism, or Thomism of the Summa will be seen to be correspondingly complex.
Now the next stage in the reception of Thomas and the Summa is a theory of what Father Georges Florovsky called “borrowing from Luther,” the Babylonian captivity of the Orthodox church. He actually said the Babylonian captivity of the Russian church, but the Greeks have taken it up and they have—there’s a round for instance in his book “The Longings of the One” has a section which is called “The Babylonian Captivity Orthodoxy.” In his period, the Orthodox church at first primarily the church of the Ottoman empire increasingly found itself caught up in the aftermath of the Reformation in the Western church.
Protestants and later Catholics looked to the Eastern Orthodox church for support in the ensuing controversy. In 629 Cyrillus Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople several times in the 620’s and 630’s, published a confessie fideles in which the Orthodox faith was represented in thoroughly Calvinist terms.
This produced a reaction within the Orthodox world and led to Lucaris’ condemnation at Constantinople in 638 and 642 and in Yash in 642 and in Jerusalem in 1672. The synod of Yash, as well as condemning Lucaris ratified the Orthodox confession of Peter Mogila, metropolitan of Kiev, which even in the revised form adopted by the synod expressed the Orthodox faith by contrast in a markedly Latin and scholastic way.
In these confessions and others by Metrophanes Kritopoulos in 1625 and Dositheus, patriach of Jerusalem, in 1672, Orthodox theologians were attempting to express their faith in relation to the debates of the Reformation and they inevitably fell under the sway of issues and concepts quite foreign to traditional Orthodoxy.
Those who were inclined more to Roman Catholic ideas fell under the influence of the baroque scholasticisms of the day, and it was these Latin inclining confessions that became influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and defined the approach of theology found in the theological academies established first in Kiev, and later throughout Russia from the time of the Petrine reforms. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, teaching in these academies was in Latin, using Western scholastic textbooks leading to an inevitable Latin influence.
How far though one can think of this is any kind of engagement with Aquinas in general or with someone in particular may be doubted. From the point of view of modern Thomist scholarship, the Thomism of this period is regarded debase, too indebted to Francisco Suárez. the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish Jesuit theologian commentator to Aquinas. Just as from the point of view of Western modern Orthodox theology, the Orthodox religions of this period are generally dismissed as corrupted by their encounter with Western theology.
So it looks as if it’s the case that the Orthodox theologians of this period may have drunk deep at the wells of Orthodoxy but these wells were thoroughly muddy. I’m very sure that if I did more work on that, it would become more complex. The attitude to Suárez has changed in the last 20 years and he seems much more significant than he used to be. I think the whole issue would look rather different if I ever got around to taking account of more recent scholarship.
In modern Orthodox, just to close, the revival of Eastern Orthodox theology in the past two centuries was mostly in fairly conscious opposition to the West. The influence of first in the Slav countries and then in Greece of the Philokalia, a collection of Byzantine aesthetical texts complied and published by St. Macarius of Corinth and St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain in 1792 has ensured that an important strand in Orthodox theology has laid emphasis on prayer and spiritual experience and looked back to Saint Gregory Palamas.
The initial intellectual reception of the Philokalia was among the Russians and among them, among the Slavophiles such as Kireevsky and Khomyakov, who was seeking anxiously to define what it was that distinguished the Orthodox experience of the Slavs from the newly encountered West.
Russian personalism as opposed to the perceived individualism to the West, the Russian sense of soboronost, togetherness, it was with a sense of identity defined in such terms that the Russian intellectuals expelled Lenin in 1922, found themselves in a welcoming but unfamiliar West. And it’s not surprising that out of the encounters with Western theologians through groups such as the …. colloquy in Paris, on to Daguerre, a sense of Orthodox identity emerged that rejected the narrow scholasticism of seminary theology, whether Western or Eastern, and for some at least fashioned itself as a kind of mirror image to the near Thomism of Gilson and Maritain.
It called itself the Neo-Patristic synthesis, perhaps in conscious opposition to and imitation of Neo-Thomism, and it’s hardly surprising that it saw the Hesychast controversy as a kind of archetypal clash between West and East, between Thomist scholasticism and Palamite spiritual experience, a clash between Western essentialism and Eastern existentialism, despite the fact that the Thomist of Neo-Thomism was also cast as an existentialist by Gilson and Maritain.
This sense of the meaning of Orthodoxy has been immensely fruitful and has been received and developed throughout the Orthodox world by Dumitru Staniloae in Romania, by the now St Justin Popovic in Serbia and with great élan by theologians and philosophers of the stature of John Zizuleth, Kristoff Yanorath and Stelios Ramfos in Greece.
Such a sense of where Orthodoxy stands is not very propitious to any authentic encounter with Aquinas. There is some positive appreciation of Aquinas in Ramfos, but it seems to be based on secondary sources than any engagement with Aquinas himself. There has also been some attention paid to Aquinas by the remarkable Russian scholar and polymath Sergei Afanasiev who died in 2004, who also translated some passages from the works of Aquinas. His interest seems to have been inspired by the theories in art expanded by the Neo-Thomists such as Maritain and Gilson.
It seems to me that the genuine Orthodox engagement of Sir Thomas Aquinas is yet to begin. It will demand that of the Orthodox a willingness to abandon or at least put on hold a tendency to see the West as the cause of all the problems of modern civilization and trace these back to the Middle Ages and the schism, whether this is possible remains to be seen. Thank you.
Question: What insights do you think the Orthodox tradition could provide into trying to explain some of the big debates that take place in and out in contemporary Thomistic philosophy such as you mentioned Gilson and Maritain as one interpretation on them, but of course you have the aristotelians and the phenomenologist and those sorts of things. Is there any insight that the East can provide to help shed some light on those sorts of questions?
Fr Andrew Louth: Yes, I think so. I think in two ways, it seems to me that the philosophical issues for which appeal is made to Aquinas and very often the treatment to these issues in the classical works of Gilson and Maritain and even more modern works like, say, Bryan Davies the living Dominican scholar.
It seems to me that these do tend to reduce Thomism to a matter of concepts and therefore introduce the question of God to a conceptual issue, that God is the first cause or God is, as it were, a kind of ultimate value that underwrites our moral values and so in both these contexts God is seen as a sort of explanation of the conceptualists that we have about meaning, causality, morality and so on, and that seems to me to be a limitation, a limitation that should be very evident in the debate that is taking place now. The moralists are saying that, the existentialists, they’re all going round and round and round, and part of it is that the notion of God has become really some sort of justifying concept and this is quite foreign, I think, to patristic theology, I think it’s quite foreign to the way John of Damascus approaches the question of God in his On the Orthodox Faith, it’s very foreign, I think also to the way Palamas operates.
What I think is contributed by Orthodox, Greek, whatever reflection on this is, is that God is seen, if you add primarily as one to whom we pray, not primarily as the first cause, not primarily as the … when one tries moral values but one to whom we pray and so there is a context of engagement and worship which needs to be taken into account and it can be taken into account.
One of the persons who does this very well, though in enormous obscurity because of the way he writes, is Jean-Luc Marion. It seems that a great deal that Marion is wanting to say is that the trouble with a lot of Orthodox theology is in treating the concept therefore treats him as a being, treats him as a domino in a conceptual game that’s going on. That’s what he wants to reject. In one of his early books, “L’Idole et la distance,” in the chapter on Dionysius he makes the rather, I think, implausible, but immensely fascinating suggestion that when Dionysius says that God is the eitere, the cause, he doesn’t mean cause, he literized the eitere from etiome, to beseech, so that God is the one who is beseeched not the one who causes things, it’s a kind of intellectual jump. That’s why I actually think it’s very exciting, even if improbable.
That’s one thing, the other think I would say is this that … and this comes from a different perspective, I really almost get the impression until very recently, Aquinas was essentially understood as a philosopher. Maritain, Gilson, Bryan Davies and others all write about him, write about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas.
Most of Saint Thomas’ works were not philosophical works. He wrote a great deal of Bibllical commentary. Indeed, if you take a kind of canter citations the most important Greek father for him is not either of the people I’ve talked about, it’s Saint John Chrysostom, whose Biblical homilies were translated into Latin and which Thomas obviously loved inordinately. These were a really wonderful way into understanding the Scriptures.
It seems to me that what I think Orthodoxy might contribute by drawing attention to what I just said a minute ago, it might help a re-evaluation of highness which as it were pushes the philosophy not one side, not out of the way altogether, I mean, it’s important and I’m not wanting to have a theology that has got no philosophical bite at all, but seeing that it’s not the only thing that’s there in Aquinas, there’s very much more there in Aquinas and that’s another way to distinguish from some of the schoolmen. I don’t think it’s true that Scotus was a great commentator in the way that Aquinas was.
Question: Thank you for your talk, you mention that Aquinas mentions alot of Fides Ratio and gave a very rich dimension of Ratio because of his spiritual sentiments.Some people claim that he was more a philosopher than a theologian, do you think that if he was more of a philosopher he would have been accepted as a philosopher or if he had used philosophy more for the sake of theology then he would have been considered more as a holy theologian philosopher than just a philosopher?
Fr Andrew Louth: I don’t think I want to suggest the kind of counter factualism if Aquinas had been different, he would have been better. I think I’ve been looking at Aquinas for years and said, “Have we actually got him in focus?” The philosophical Aquinas that you get in most of the textbooks, is that not a mistake? I’m not trying to change Aquinas, I’m trying to change perceptions of Aquinas. At least that’s what I think I want to do when this thing gets expanded in some bigger.
The question of ratio I think is very interesting because again, I think that is putting the wrong context, that the place of ratio in Aquinas is extremely important and without refuting Yannaras, the Greek philosopher on this, half a sentence after talking about ratio in Aquinas he’s talking about Descartes and the Enlightenment and so on. For him, ratio in Aquinas means what it meant to Descartes.
Did it? I don’t really like it actually, but it seems to me though that the place of ratio in Aquinas is actually very interesting but is actually rather different. One of the things that I haven’t mentioned in this, because it’s a thought that’s come to me and I haven’t had the chance to fit it in, is that I think that we need to stop a moment and think why is it that it was Summa Contra Gentiles that was the first work that was translated into Greek by Demetrius Cydones.
Now everybody assumes that he did this to introduce Thomist philosophy or Thomism into the Greek world. If you’re doing that I think there are a lot more useful, more obvious things to translate than the Contra Gentiles. The point of the Contra Gentiles, as its title indicates, is that it is the sense of finding a common ground essentially with Muslims so that we can communicate with them and ultimately convert them.
But the important thing is to actually communicate with them, because unless we have some kind of common language they won’t hear what we’re saying. The Summa Contra Gentiles seems to me to be an attempt to work at a notion of ratio that is, as it were, broad enough to provide a common ground between Muslims and Christians and also Jews, I think.
I also think we need to pick up what intellectual historians of this period have been saying for some time, that the world is not divided into East and West, it really was a Mediterranean world in which borders were constantly being crossed, and that we need to have a sense of the unity of the Mediterranean world. I think the Contra Gentiles fits into that, and I think it’s very likely that the Byzantines would have been very interested in finding a way of talking to the Muslims.
Palamas himself in 1354 found himself putting into the literally thinking that it was a nicely done waterway, to get water himself and discovers it had just been conquered by the Muslims, the Ottomans, and he was arrested, and I think was under a general, he wrote two letters from this period of, not exactly imprisonment, and talked a great length about a conversation he had had with a Muslim mullah.
It’s interesting that though a crime, Palamas is quite clear he’s righting the mullah his wrong, nonetheless a discussion takes place and a discussion where they have notions in common, nothing as broad and deep as ratio, much more concerned with exegetical issues. It seems to me very, very likely in 1354 that the Byzantines would be extremely interested in a work that was intended to find common ground between Muslims and Christians as a way of communicating with them.
I think how it goes in balance likely this, I pray, I think I’m right that the Summa Contra Gentiles was commissioned from Aquinas from the Dominican General Raymond de Penyafort and Raymond de Penyafort also commissioned somebody else to write a work called The Art, The Arts. That somebody else was Ramon Lou, who is in his own intellectual light focused on Mallorca, where he came from. He was very much concerned with relationships between Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Arts is an attempt to grind a sort of common language, a common way of thinking that enables Christians and Muslims to communicate with one another with the intent of converting them, yes, but the initial step was the important one.
Question: Thank you, Father, for sharing your paper. I just wondered if you could elaborate on your closing thoughts about this sort of Anti-Western tendency in contemporary Orthodox world or Orthodox theology and the sorts of things that would have to happen or perhaps are even happening that would lead to a sort of more positive appropriation of Aquinas and indeed more broadly of extremes of Western thought.
Fr Andrew Louth: There’s not much sign of it yet, that’s the problem. There are little things, like for instance in the English introduction to the translation of Orthodox of the West by Christos Yannaras he says that the opposition to the East and West that he's working with is not an opposition between us and them.
The West is not the other, it’s an opposition that is within his own soul. There’s not much evidence of this in the book [ie. Yannaras' book Orthodoxy and the West], and I think it’s a later thought. If it’s a later thought, it’s an interesting thought that the problem of the West for Orthodoxy that Yannaras sees is not a problem about other people, it’s a problem about a problem that is happening already within Orthodoxy and which we can’t just simply expel.
I suspect as in lots of cases what’s going to happen is that sooner or later we’ll wake up and realize that in fact we can’t pretend that we are unaffected by the values of the West. We are deeply affected by the values of the West. We hold conferences and we go there in airplanes and we have air conditioning and that sort of thing. All of these things will be impossible if we rejected the West completely.
I think what is eventually going to happen is that we will realize that the West can’t be simply regarded as something that can be rejected, that it is too much part of who we are now and we have to engage with it and engage in such a way that the positive aspect the West has discovered since the Enlightenment and the Rise of Science are firm and yet the negative elements are acknowledged and we try to do something about it.
I suppose another example, some of the ways in which we try to talk about theology, is not an attempt to reject scientific progress but an attempt to see that there is here a problem and that to just simply let the West go on it’s way, all this Westernization and consumerization is inadequate. In some ways, some sort of genuine dialog between say Charles Taylor and Yannaras, for instance, would be very interesting if they would be interested to talk to one another. It seems to me is that what Charles Taylor will say is putting question marks against aspects of the West in a way which is very similar what Yannaras is doing. Yannaras, as you can see, is not totally unusual. There are a lot of people in both Greece and in Russia who would echo the sort of thing that Yannaras says.
The other issue I think is that I think you also have to recognize there is a terrible danger in banging on about the West, of ignoring the very real political advances that have been made, ideas of freedom and ecology and so on. It seems to me that there’s a great deal in Orthodoxy that is indifferent to this. That I think is something which seems to be rather shameful.
by Fr Andrew Louth
Talk given to the Oxford Orthodox Christian Student Society, at the Danson Room, Trinity College, Oxford, October 20th, 2011, 19:00-20:30
Transcript:
Fr Andrew Louth: I call this paper Aquinas and Orthodoxy. It’s got a bit of a history, but we don’t need to know the history of the paper. The engagement of Eastern Orthodoxy theology with Saint Thomas Aquinas is a complex and shadowy affair. Within a century of Aquinas’ death some of the works of the theologian were available in Greek translation in the Byzantine world and were greeted with both enthusiasm and dismay. Our understanding of this early Byzantine reaction to Thomism is complicated by a number of factors.
First of all, the works of Aquinas became known in the full flush of the Palamite controversy or the Hesychast controversy, by which time positions had already hardened. The first work of Aquinas’ to appear in Greek, the Summa contra Gentiles, was published in 1354. The three synods in Constantinople that supported Palamas in the Hesychast controversy are dated 341, 347 and 351, while the Hagioritic Tome, the statement of the monks of the holy mountain in support of Palamas, dates from 1341.
So Aquinas didn’t really in any way influence the controversy, rather what happened is that the reception of Aquinas fitted into largely predetermined positions, though often enough in a rather bewildering variety of ways. Now I think it’s important to emphasize this and to remember it, because our understanding of the engagement between Thomas and Byzantine Theology in the fourteenth century is made more difficult by the fact that in the twentieth century the Palamite controversy came to be seen as definitive for understanding the nature of the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom.
Palamism, as it were defining the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy, in opposition to Western Christendom that was defined by Scholasticism or sometimes by a more complex duality embracing Scholasticism and the emerging non-dogmatic mysticism of the Western later Middle Ages.
Virtually all Orthodox scholarship on the fourteenth century and most of the Western scholarship has been affected by the sense that here we find ourselves at the theological core of the schism. This in turn has been affected by the more immediate encounter between Orthodox theologians, to begin with mostly Russian Orthodox theologians and the West, that took place in the twentieth century.
Put perhaps rather too bluntly, the controversy of the fourteenth century has been seen from the perspective of the Russian Orthodox encounter with early twentieth century Roman Catholic theology in which Aquinas appeared either as the inspiration of a debased scholastic theology or as the hero of neo-Thomism. The interpretive categories employed in analyzing the fourteenth century therefore derived from the twentieth century engagement rather than the fourteenth, with the favored view being granted the [inaudible 00:03:02] of being existentialist.
Even to begin to disentangle this is more than can be attempted in a single paper. Therefore, this paper will remain really quite provisional. The Eastern Orthodox encounter with Aquinas however, either in the fourteenth or in the twentieth century or indeed in the centuries in between, is not perhaps the place to begin. For Aquinas himself engaged with tradition we would call Eastern Orthodox and which he knew to be Greek, though in Latin dress. Aquinas was indebted in his theology to a long tradition of theological reflection that had been shaped decisively by the Greek traditions of the Christian East.
Indeed, although Aquinas is cast in the Orthodox mind as the “Scholastic par excellence” this is to oversimplify. Unlike many of the schoolmen, Aquinas’ early education was not in a university but was in a monastic school – Montecassino, the monastery founded by Saint Benedict himself, where Lectio Divina and a meditative approach to the Scriptures would have made prayer and study inseparable venerated theory. Although his education was later supplemented by study at the University of Naples, an imperial foundation independent of the church, the basis of Aquinas’ learning was probably monastic and thus much closer to the tradition of what the Byzantines called the ‘Inner Wisdom.’
Furthermore, it was argued long ago within his Christology, Aquinas was uniquely well informed in comparison with his Western contemporaries by the Greek patristic tradition. More recently, the once popular idea that Aquinas departed from earlier Platonic tradition under the influence of the newly discovered Aristotle has been shaken and a strong Neoplatonic influence in Aquinas recognized.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that when Aquinas died in 1274 he was on his way to the Council of Lyon in an attempt to heal the schism between East and West. In general terms then, Aquinas appears more open to and concerned for Eastern influences than the common Orthodox preconception might suppose. In more strictly theological terms and especially in relation to the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas’ indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition may be considered further with reference to two theologians determinative of the Orthodox tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint John Damascene.
So first, Dionysius, the works ascribed to the disciple of the apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite have had an unparalleled influence on Eastern Orthodox theology. To put it briefly, these writings provided unifying theological vision that picked out the characteristic emphasis that Byzantine theology as it had developed by the beginning of the sixth century when the Corpus Areopagiticum first appeared.
There we find a cosmic vision focused on the Eucharistic celebration and associated sacramental rites in which the heavenly and the earthly realms united, the whole created order is governed by a principle of hierarchy by which everything is drawn more deeply into union with God, a principle of hierarchy manifest in its purity in the ranks of the celestial beings.
The creaturely orders are seen as engaged in praise of God, using the terms, the names by which God has revealed himself in the Scriptures, for the interpretation of which Dionysius introduces the terminology borrowed from Neoplatonism of apophatic and cataphatic theology, that is the theology of denial and the theology affirmation. It is through this praise the creatures are united to God and in this progress towards union there can be discerned a sequence of purification, illumination, union, the goal of which is an ecstatic union with God in love, experienced as darkness since it is beyond any creaturely capacity.
The writings of the Areopagite became known in the West initially through the ninth century Latin translations of Hilduin, Abbot of Saint-Denys and Eriugena. The version that Aquinas knew was a still further revision by John the Saracen. In both East and in West, attention was initially directed towards the works on the hierarchies, which became the subject of repeated commentary.
Such an approach preserved a sense of the integrity of the Areopagite’s vision. In the West this approach seems gradually to fall away, so that with Aquinas it is the work of the Divine Names to which he devotes a commentary. The extent of the influence of the Divine Names on Aquinas’ theology and especially the “Summa” is apparent from the index of citations of that work given in Payo’s edition of the commentary.
What lies behind this new approach to Dionysius is not clear, but it may have something to do with the fact that while the liturgical rites on which Dionysius commented remain recognizably similar in the East, liturgical development in the West had led to a practice of liturgy significantly different from that presupposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Although the celestial hierarchy remained important throughout Aquinas’ angelology, for which he was justly famous and that’s why he was called the Doctor Angelicus, attention to the Corpus Areopagiticum in the West shifted to the Divine Names in the Mystical Theology. There seems to be something emblematic in the fact that Thomas and later schoolmen comment on the Divine Names, while the Mystical Theology becomes the handbook of the emerging school of later medieval mysticism. Think for instance of the Middle English translation and commentary on the Mystical Theology, called Hid Divinity, by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
This shift of attention, I think, indicates a change in interpretation which maybe brought out by noting an early comment on the Divine Names preserved in the Greek Scholia. On Divine Names 5:8, the scholiast, conceivably Maximus the Confessor himself, comments: “As the cause of all that for God is hymned”, for he did not say these things are predicated as the same but properly speaking “hymned.”
In other words, the Divine Names is about how we use language to praise God not about the narrower logical issue of how he predicates qualities of God. This distinction seems to be lost in Aquinas. His commentary on the Divine Names is about divine predication. The connection with worship, which is explicit in Dionysius, has vanished.
This relates as we shall see that later to one of the principle bones of contention between Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas, the charge that for Aquinas and the schoolmen in general theology has become a matter of concept. It has been reduced to a rationalistic enterprise. The Summa Theologiae itself can be supported in support of this contention, but also against it. The Summa is composed of ‘questionnes,’ questions, the genre that came to dominate Western theology in the newly founded universities.
Although the questio related to the older genre of questions and answers, erotopokresis, they became important and remained important in the Byzantine world. In the world of the universities, it developed its own role. As Fergus Kerr has put it, the method behind the use of questionnes in disputations was, and I quote, “Not intended to reach compromise or supposed consensus by splitting the difference between conflicting interpretations. It’s allowed the disputants to discover the strengths and weaknesses of opposing views, but the aim was to work out the truth by considering and eliminating error, however common or plausible or seemingly supported by authority.”
The Summa Theologiae is a collection of questionnes in which Christian doctrine is interrogated and set out as an array of propositions supported and defended by reason. It could, in the circumstances, hardly be other than an exercise in conceptual theology. But on the other hand, the structure of the Summa suggests something beyond this. The arrangement of the questionnes is far from arbitrary and it can be interpreted as following a movement out from God into the created order and then back through the human to God in a process of contemplation, the whole cycle being made possible by God’s uniting himself with humankind and overcoming human sin in the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God.
Underlying the conceptual distinctions there is a fundamental concern with the return of creation to God, reflected in the cycle: rest, procession and return as Neoplatonic providence, so that the core concern of the Summa is deification or theosis of creation. As Fergus Kerr puts it in lapidary fashion to quote him again, “The Summa Theologiae is a study of the transcendental condition to beatific vision, not foundationalist apologetics but a set of practices for receiving the gift of beatitude.”
Another point of contrast between Dionysius and Thomas concerns their differing uses of the word and concept analogy, analogia. This is perhaps less significant than it once seemed to be when Thomists tended to reduce Thomism to the principle of Analogia Entis, the most famous led by the Jesuit Guevara but also in other people. Penido for instance wrote an important work called “Le rôle de l’analogie en théologie dogmatique.” This was in the mid-twentieth century, this approach to analogy, while this sense of analogy being central to Aquinas just gradually dismantled.
Nonetheless, analogia is important in Aquinas though maybe not the central crucial term, and is concerned with how we are to interpret our language about God. Aquinas seeks a middle way, the way of analogy, between the way that suggests that our concepts apply in the same way as they apply in the creative world, what’s called univocity, and the idea that our concepts as applied to God and creature reality have nothing at all in common, equivocity. Analogy is somewhere between these, but it preserves the sense that there is something in common between what we know when we say that God is good and all the creatures are good but doesn’t identify the concept in the two cases. So it is a conceptual puzzle for Aquinas.
But analogy in Dionysius means something, I think, quite different. It refers to the creaturely capacity to receive and understand. It is, if you like, the cata dovina ton, as far as possible, Platonism, which qualifies anything we say about the creature’s participation in God. Again one might say that the contrast here in these different interpretations of analogy is a contrast between a conceptual issue on the side of Aquinas and one concerned much more broadly with our capacity to receive and understand with Dionysius.
Now the other Greek theologian who is enormously important to Aquinas is Saint John Damascene. The point in which we reached this contrast between conceptual theology and something that is more concerned with the creature’s capacity to receive and understand union with God perhaps provides a cue for the consideration of this other major Eastern Orthodox influence on Aquinas, the work of Saint John Damascene.
It’s commonly asserted that the work known in the West is De Fide Orthodoxa, “On the Orthodox Faith” by the Damascene, lies behind the dogmatic structures of Western Scholasticism. It certainly seems to be true that this work provides the ground plan for the comprehensive surveys of Christian dogma put forward by the schoolmen from the sentences of Peter Lombard to the Summas of High Scholasticism.
But I would argue that the step from the Damascene’s “Century of Accurate Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” as the Greek work would be called, to the De Fide Orthodoxa in Latin is more than just a matter of translation. Saint John Damascene’s work belongs to the genre of the century, a collection of 100 chapters, anything from a sentence to a couple of paragraphs, invented by the fourth century monk of the Egyptian desert Evagrius Pontus first used for collections of ascetic wisdom and later used to incorporate succinct statements of Christian doctrine, for instance by Saint Maximus the Confessor. But the Century remained a monastic genre and John, I think, would have been conscious of this.
His Century covers Christian teaching in a roughly credile form, God creation and humankind, Christology and Redemption, then the church sacraments and worship. Then he intended to be in some way to be comprehensive, I mean that’s why you have a century because a century gets something complete, it’s certainly not intended to be exhaustive and nor is the structure particularly systematic.
It’s an account of Christian doctrine intended, I think, certainly for monks living under Islam who needed to be clear about what Orthodox Christianity stood for but even more to help them to understand how to progress through faithful prayer and worship to union with God. The Latin version, De Fide Orthodoxa translated by Burgundio of Pisa in the mid-twelfth century, probably about 1153-54, is different in significant ways.
Apart from detailed points of translation, the most striking difference is that De Fide Orthodoxa is divided into four books on God, on creation, on the incarnation and redemption, and on the sacraments, so this last section is mostly about other things. This division reflects the four books of Peter Lombard’s sentences which again are divided into four books on the mystery of the trinity, on creation, on the incarnation of the word and on the doctrine of signs. He underlies the sections of the medieval Summa, not least Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.
It seems to me that the Lombard’s division into four is clearly lacking not to say Augustinian inspiration with this movement from the mystery of the trinity to the doctrine of signs, signa, by way of creation and incarnation. That suggests to me that the parallel between the fourfold division of the Latin version of the Damascene and the fourfold division of Lombard’s sentences is to be explained not so much by the Lombard basing his division on the Damascene but by the Latin translator or some later editor of the Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith trying with only moderate success to fit the Damascene’s work to a Latin structure, only support of that is the fact that the earliest manuscripts of the Latin De Orthodox De Fide don’t have this division to four books.
It comes later on though we can’t exactly when, fairly soon. Furthermore, in such Latin dress with discussing four areas of theology the Damascene’s work now looks much more systematic with pretensions to exhaustiveness than the original Greek version. Now, how does this bear on Thomas’ debt to Eastern Orthodox tradition as represented in the Damascene?
First of all, De Fide Orthodoxa was for Thomas a treasury of Greek theology which he draws on throughout the Summa and in his other writings: the mystery of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation out of nothing, ex nihlo, the nature of the angels, the focal role of the human as God’s image in the created order, the post-Chalcedonian developments of Byzantine Christology, the profound sense of the importance the bodily underlying both the incarnation and the sacramental order of the church. All this Aquinas draws on gratefully, even if some, indeed much of it, was already firmly established in the Western tradition independently with the contribution of the Damascene De Fide Orthodoxa.
Secondly, however, the form of De Fide Orthodoxa suggested by the Latin division of the four books may have suggested to Aquinas that Greek theology had a much more systematic form and was in fact the case. The form in which the Damascene’s work was known in the Greek East was still, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, as a century or a variant on this. In fact the commonest form in which the Greek “On The Orthodox Faith” is found in Medieval manuscript is probably the original form intended by John the Damascene, not just part three of the fountainhead of knowledge as the existing preparatory letter to what ….. suggests but as the last two thirds of a work known as 150 philosophical and theological chapters, the first 50 being an introduction to logic known as the Dialectica. It was this work, in 150 chapters, a variant on the Century but also echoing the number of the Psalms and certain times of a sacred number.
It was this work of 150 chapters that formed the model for Palamas’ own 150 philosophical chapters, his summary, again by no means exhaustive, of his position in his Hesychast controversy. The lack of system in Greek theology both with Damascene and Palamas is part … or it could be argued, is part of a more profound sense of apophaticism before the mystery of God, which we know through participation and cannot express in any exhaustive way.
Now that we’ve got so far, I think we’re in a position to look at the other side of the engagement between Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas. The reception of the Angelic Doctor in the East from the fourteenth century onwards, this will fall into three very unequal parts.
First, the engagement in the fourteenth and fifteenth century in Byzantium so long as it was part of the Christian Byzantium Empire before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Secondly the place of what we might call, with some reservation, Thomism and Orthodox Theology from the fall of Constantinople to the twentieth century. Finally, engagement with Aquinas in the twentieth century.
Now I’m going to follow the chronological order, though I’ve already marked the beginning. The ordo cognoscendi is perhaps the reverse. For a long time the Greeks were not really that interested in Latin theology and there were very few examples of the translation of Latin works into Greek until about the thirteenth century.
One work that was translated and well known and well loved in the Byzantine world were the dialogues of Gregory the Great, which were translated by Pope Zacharias in the eighth century. At the end of the thirteenth century, there begins to be an interest in Latin theology and so in the last decade of the thirteenth century, Augustine’s De Trinitate was translated into Greek by Maximus Planudes, and other works followed in the fourteenth century.
Augustine’s works were widely read and not just among those in Byzantium who looked to the West with admiration. Even Gregory Palamas read Augustine’s De Trinitate, though the use he made of it is sometimes surprising. As well as introducing into Byzantine theology, Augustine’s notions of this Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son, Palamas also found in Augustine fuel for his attack on the double possession of the Holy Spirit, the filioque.
Planudes also translated into Greek, probably about 1295, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. The first work of Aquinas’ to be translated into Greek was his, as we’ve already seen, his Summa Contra Gentiles. The translation of which by Demetrius Cydones was published in 1354. This seems to be popular, with a wide circulation. At least 40 manuscripts survived. Demetrius Cydones later translated parts one and two of the Summa Theologiae, and his brother Prochorus translated some of the third part.
By this time the Palamite controversy was well underway. The tide had turned in favor of Saint Gregory of Palamas and decisively in 1347 with the accession to the imperial throne of John VI Kantakouzenos and Palamas’ own elevation to the metropolitical throne of Thessaloniki, which was followed by Palamas’ vindication at synods in 1347 and 1351. Palamas’ defense of his position against Barlaam, the triads in defense of the holy Hesychasts, have been published about 1358 and is 150 chapters between the two synods.
The defense of Palamas by the monks of Mount Athos, the Hagioritic Tome, had also been issued in 1341. The principal issue of the controversy, whether through their prayer the Hesychast monks could attain to deifying participation in God and in particular whether the division of the Divine Light was a vision of God Himself or a vision simply referring to God or maybe even a hallucination, had been resolved by Palamas through his utilization of the distinction between God’s essence and his activities or energies. A distinction which he drew from the Greek theological tradition going back to Saint Basil the Great, according to which God is unknowable in his essence and yet truly known through his images, which are not created effects of God activity but God himself in his activity.
Those who opposed Palamas, initially Barlaam the Calabrian monk then Gregory Akindynos, probably himself also an Athonite monk and a learned scholar Nicephorus Gregoras regarded the distinctions in the essence of God in his uncreated images an infringing the divine unity and simplicity and effectively introducing into Christianity pagan polytheism.
They made this point independently of any knowledge of Aquinas but the availability of Aquinas’ works in the Greek world would have provided further support for those who rejected the distinction between the divine ousia and the divine enegia, such a rejection being implicit in the fundamental Thomist affirmation of the identity in God of esse and essentia, of existence and essence.
There’s a further issue in which Aquinas’ voice was important both for those who welcomed him and those who opposed him. This was the longstanding doctrinal issue between East and West, those who’d frustrated the attempt at union of the Council of Lyon which death prevented Aquinas from attending. The question of the filioque, that is the question of whether the Holy Spirit precedes from the Father as the original version of the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed had asserted or whether it precedes from the Father and the Son, filioque, as asserted by the Western edition to the ecumenical creed.
Aquinas’ argument in support of the filioque in the Summa Theologiae in part one, question 36 article two, form a succinct version of the argument presented in much great length by Anselm in his De Prechiones Espiritu Sancti, and like that argument precede from purely logical considerations without any reference to the witness of Scripture or the traditions of church. Both Anselm and Aquinas deduced the theory that there is in fact one God, three persons and the only way they can be distinguished is by relationship.
Reactions to Aquinas varied. On the one hand there were those who opposed his theological method, his use of Aristotelian logic, syllogisms. Though the Greek word theorismos has a much wider connotation that the English word. On the other hand, there were those who seemed to welcome his theological method but lamented his theological position. Notable among the latter was Gennadius Scolarius, the first patriarch in Constantinople under the Ottomans who apostatizes Thomas thus, “Come now,” he says, “excellent Thomas, O that you had not be born in the West so it were bound to act as adjudicate for the deviations of that church both in the case of the procession of the Spirit and the difference between the divine essence and energies, for otherwise you would have been infallible in matters theological as you are in matters ethical.”
Though it’s worth mentioning that Gennadius also admired other aspects of Thomas’ theology, in particular for instance his Doctrine of Transubstantiation. But such a reaction seems to have been rare. Those who attacked Aquinas on the matter of the Holy Spirit or the relation to the essence and energies also frequently attacked his theological method.
Notable among those was Nilus Cabasilas, who succeeded Palamas on the throne of Thessaloniki and whose attack on the Latin doctrine of the possession of the Spirit includes an attack on the rationalism of Thomas’ argumentation. So in modern terms, he opposes Eastern apophaticism to Aquinas’ rationalism. He also attacks the appeal made by the Latins to Scripture and the fathers, not that they did it wrong.
The procession of the Holy Spirit was a defining issue between East and West. Those who were attracted to Thomas’ theological method and embraced his theological opinion on this issue frequently ended up by making their peace with the Latin church, these included Demetrius Cydones. In relation to the question of the relationship between the divine essences and energies, the situation there was different.
There were those like Prochorus Cydones, the younger brother of Demetrius, who embraced Thomas’ theological method and argued against the Palamite position and yet remained Orthodox. There were others like Tephanes the third, metropolitan of Lycia, who were thoroughly Aristotelian in their theological method not just in its argumentation but also in its metaphysics, and from this position defended Palamite understanding of the divine light at Tabor against the attacks of such as Prochorus Cydones.
The tendency in scholarship over the last century to see the controversy in Byzantium in polarized terms, on the one hand a kind of Platonist anti-western monks and on the other hand Aristotelian western inclining lay scholars is certainly simplistic and needs to be resisted. If we do that, the reception of Thomas and Thomism, or Thomism of the Summa will be seen to be correspondingly complex.
Now the next stage in the reception of Thomas and the Summa is a theory of what Father Georges Florovsky called “borrowing from Luther,” the Babylonian captivity of the Orthodox church. He actually said the Babylonian captivity of the Russian church, but the Greeks have taken it up and they have—there’s a round for instance in his book “The Longings of the One” has a section which is called “The Babylonian Captivity Orthodoxy.” In his period, the Orthodox church at first primarily the church of the Ottoman empire increasingly found itself caught up in the aftermath of the Reformation in the Western church.
Protestants and later Catholics looked to the Eastern Orthodox church for support in the ensuing controversy. In 629 Cyrillus Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople several times in the 620’s and 630’s, published a confessie fideles in which the Orthodox faith was represented in thoroughly Calvinist terms.
This produced a reaction within the Orthodox world and led to Lucaris’ condemnation at Constantinople in 638 and 642 and in Yash in 642 and in Jerusalem in 1672. The synod of Yash, as well as condemning Lucaris ratified the Orthodox confession of Peter Mogila, metropolitan of Kiev, which even in the revised form adopted by the synod expressed the Orthodox faith by contrast in a markedly Latin and scholastic way.
In these confessions and others by Metrophanes Kritopoulos in 1625 and Dositheus, patriach of Jerusalem, in 1672, Orthodox theologians were attempting to express their faith in relation to the debates of the Reformation and they inevitably fell under the sway of issues and concepts quite foreign to traditional Orthodoxy.
Those who were inclined more to Roman Catholic ideas fell under the influence of the baroque scholasticisms of the day, and it was these Latin inclining confessions that became influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and defined the approach of theology found in the theological academies established first in Kiev, and later throughout Russia from the time of the Petrine reforms. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, teaching in these academies was in Latin, using Western scholastic textbooks leading to an inevitable Latin influence.
How far though one can think of this is any kind of engagement with Aquinas in general or with someone in particular may be doubted. From the point of view of modern Thomist scholarship, the Thomism of this period is regarded debase, too indebted to Francisco Suárez. the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish Jesuit theologian commentator to Aquinas. Just as from the point of view of Western modern Orthodox theology, the Orthodox religions of this period are generally dismissed as corrupted by their encounter with Western theology.
So it looks as if it’s the case that the Orthodox theologians of this period may have drunk deep at the wells of Orthodoxy but these wells were thoroughly muddy. I’m very sure that if I did more work on that, it would become more complex. The attitude to Suárez has changed in the last 20 years and he seems much more significant than he used to be. I think the whole issue would look rather different if I ever got around to taking account of more recent scholarship.
In modern Orthodox, just to close, the revival of Eastern Orthodox theology in the past two centuries was mostly in fairly conscious opposition to the West. The influence of first in the Slav countries and then in Greece of the Philokalia, a collection of Byzantine aesthetical texts complied and published by St. Macarius of Corinth and St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain in 1792 has ensured that an important strand in Orthodox theology has laid emphasis on prayer and spiritual experience and looked back to Saint Gregory Palamas.
The initial intellectual reception of the Philokalia was among the Russians and among them, among the Slavophiles such as Kireevsky and Khomyakov, who was seeking anxiously to define what it was that distinguished the Orthodox experience of the Slavs from the newly encountered West.
Russian personalism as opposed to the perceived individualism to the West, the Russian sense of soboronost, togetherness, it was with a sense of identity defined in such terms that the Russian intellectuals expelled Lenin in 1922, found themselves in a welcoming but unfamiliar West. And it’s not surprising that out of the encounters with Western theologians through groups such as the …. colloquy in Paris, on to Daguerre, a sense of Orthodox identity emerged that rejected the narrow scholasticism of seminary theology, whether Western or Eastern, and for some at least fashioned itself as a kind of mirror image to the near Thomism of Gilson and Maritain.
It called itself the Neo-Patristic synthesis, perhaps in conscious opposition to and imitation of Neo-Thomism, and it’s hardly surprising that it saw the Hesychast controversy as a kind of archetypal clash between West and East, between Thomist scholasticism and Palamite spiritual experience, a clash between Western essentialism and Eastern existentialism, despite the fact that the Thomist of Neo-Thomism was also cast as an existentialist by Gilson and Maritain.
This sense of the meaning of Orthodoxy has been immensely fruitful and has been received and developed throughout the Orthodox world by Dumitru Staniloae in Romania, by the now St Justin Popovic in Serbia and with great élan by theologians and philosophers of the stature of John Zizuleth, Kristoff Yanorath and Stelios Ramfos in Greece.
Such a sense of where Orthodoxy stands is not very propitious to any authentic encounter with Aquinas. There is some positive appreciation of Aquinas in Ramfos, but it seems to be based on secondary sources than any engagement with Aquinas himself. There has also been some attention paid to Aquinas by the remarkable Russian scholar and polymath Sergei Afanasiev who died in 2004, who also translated some passages from the works of Aquinas. His interest seems to have been inspired by the theories in art expanded by the Neo-Thomists such as Maritain and Gilson.
It seems to me that the genuine Orthodox engagement of Sir Thomas Aquinas is yet to begin. It will demand that of the Orthodox a willingness to abandon or at least put on hold a tendency to see the West as the cause of all the problems of modern civilization and trace these back to the Middle Ages and the schism, whether this is possible remains to be seen. Thank you.
Question: What insights do you think the Orthodox tradition could provide into trying to explain some of the big debates that take place in and out in contemporary Thomistic philosophy such as you mentioned Gilson and Maritain as one interpretation on them, but of course you have the aristotelians and the phenomenologist and those sorts of things. Is there any insight that the East can provide to help shed some light on those sorts of questions?
Fr Andrew Louth: Yes, I think so. I think in two ways, it seems to me that the philosophical issues for which appeal is made to Aquinas and very often the treatment to these issues in the classical works of Gilson and Maritain and even more modern works like, say, Bryan Davies the living Dominican scholar.
It seems to me that these do tend to reduce Thomism to a matter of concepts and therefore introduce the question of God to a conceptual issue, that God is the first cause or God is, as it were, a kind of ultimate value that underwrites our moral values and so in both these contexts God is seen as a sort of explanation of the conceptualists that we have about meaning, causality, morality and so on, and that seems to me to be a limitation, a limitation that should be very evident in the debate that is taking place now. The moralists are saying that, the existentialists, they’re all going round and round and round, and part of it is that the notion of God has become really some sort of justifying concept and this is quite foreign, I think, to patristic theology, I think it’s quite foreign to the way John of Damascus approaches the question of God in his On the Orthodox Faith, it’s very foreign, I think also to the way Palamas operates.
What I think is contributed by Orthodox, Greek, whatever reflection on this is, is that God is seen, if you add primarily as one to whom we pray, not primarily as the first cause, not primarily as the … when one tries moral values but one to whom we pray and so there is a context of engagement and worship which needs to be taken into account and it can be taken into account.
One of the persons who does this very well, though in enormous obscurity because of the way he writes, is Jean-Luc Marion. It seems that a great deal that Marion is wanting to say is that the trouble with a lot of Orthodox theology is in treating the concept therefore treats him as a being, treats him as a domino in a conceptual game that’s going on. That’s what he wants to reject. In one of his early books, “L’Idole et la distance,” in the chapter on Dionysius he makes the rather, I think, implausible, but immensely fascinating suggestion that when Dionysius says that God is the eitere, the cause, he doesn’t mean cause, he literized the eitere from etiome, to beseech, so that God is the one who is beseeched not the one who causes things, it’s a kind of intellectual jump. That’s why I actually think it’s very exciting, even if improbable.
That’s one thing, the other think I would say is this that … and this comes from a different perspective, I really almost get the impression until very recently, Aquinas was essentially understood as a philosopher. Maritain, Gilson, Bryan Davies and others all write about him, write about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas.
Most of Saint Thomas’ works were not philosophical works. He wrote a great deal of Bibllical commentary. Indeed, if you take a kind of canter citations the most important Greek father for him is not either of the people I’ve talked about, it’s Saint John Chrysostom, whose Biblical homilies were translated into Latin and which Thomas obviously loved inordinately. These were a really wonderful way into understanding the Scriptures.
It seems to me that what I think Orthodoxy might contribute by drawing attention to what I just said a minute ago, it might help a re-evaluation of highness which as it were pushes the philosophy not one side, not out of the way altogether, I mean, it’s important and I’m not wanting to have a theology that has got no philosophical bite at all, but seeing that it’s not the only thing that’s there in Aquinas, there’s very much more there in Aquinas and that’s another way to distinguish from some of the schoolmen. I don’t think it’s true that Scotus was a great commentator in the way that Aquinas was.
Question: Thank you for your talk, you mention that Aquinas mentions alot of Fides Ratio and gave a very rich dimension of Ratio because of his spiritual sentiments.Some people claim that he was more a philosopher than a theologian, do you think that if he was more of a philosopher he would have been accepted as a philosopher or if he had used philosophy more for the sake of theology then he would have been considered more as a holy theologian philosopher than just a philosopher?
Fr Andrew Louth: I don’t think I want to suggest the kind of counter factualism if Aquinas had been different, he would have been better. I think I’ve been looking at Aquinas for years and said, “Have we actually got him in focus?” The philosophical Aquinas that you get in most of the textbooks, is that not a mistake? I’m not trying to change Aquinas, I’m trying to change perceptions of Aquinas. At least that’s what I think I want to do when this thing gets expanded in some bigger.
The question of ratio I think is very interesting because again, I think that is putting the wrong context, that the place of ratio in Aquinas is extremely important and without refuting Yannaras, the Greek philosopher on this, half a sentence after talking about ratio in Aquinas he’s talking about Descartes and the Enlightenment and so on. For him, ratio in Aquinas means what it meant to Descartes.
Did it? I don’t really like it actually, but it seems to me though that the place of ratio in Aquinas is actually very interesting but is actually rather different. One of the things that I haven’t mentioned in this, because it’s a thought that’s come to me and I haven’t had the chance to fit it in, is that I think that we need to stop a moment and think why is it that it was Summa Contra Gentiles that was the first work that was translated into Greek by Demetrius Cydones.
Now everybody assumes that he did this to introduce Thomist philosophy or Thomism into the Greek world. If you’re doing that I think there are a lot more useful, more obvious things to translate than the Contra Gentiles. The point of the Contra Gentiles, as its title indicates, is that it is the sense of finding a common ground essentially with Muslims so that we can communicate with them and ultimately convert them.
But the important thing is to actually communicate with them, because unless we have some kind of common language they won’t hear what we’re saying. The Summa Contra Gentiles seems to me to be an attempt to work at a notion of ratio that is, as it were, broad enough to provide a common ground between Muslims and Christians and also Jews, I think.
I also think we need to pick up what intellectual historians of this period have been saying for some time, that the world is not divided into East and West, it really was a Mediterranean world in which borders were constantly being crossed, and that we need to have a sense of the unity of the Mediterranean world. I think the Contra Gentiles fits into that, and I think it’s very likely that the Byzantines would have been very interested in finding a way of talking to the Muslims.
Palamas himself in 1354 found himself putting into the literally thinking that it was a nicely done waterway, to get water himself and discovers it had just been conquered by the Muslims, the Ottomans, and he was arrested, and I think was under a general, he wrote two letters from this period of, not exactly imprisonment, and talked a great length about a conversation he had had with a Muslim mullah.
It’s interesting that though a crime, Palamas is quite clear he’s righting the mullah his wrong, nonetheless a discussion takes place and a discussion where they have notions in common, nothing as broad and deep as ratio, much more concerned with exegetical issues. It seems to me very, very likely in 1354 that the Byzantines would be extremely interested in a work that was intended to find common ground between Muslims and Christians as a way of communicating with them.
I think how it goes in balance likely this, I pray, I think I’m right that the Summa Contra Gentiles was commissioned from Aquinas from the Dominican General Raymond de Penyafort and Raymond de Penyafort also commissioned somebody else to write a work called The Art, The Arts. That somebody else was Ramon Lou, who is in his own intellectual light focused on Mallorca, where he came from. He was very much concerned with relationships between Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Arts is an attempt to grind a sort of common language, a common way of thinking that enables Christians and Muslims to communicate with one another with the intent of converting them, yes, but the initial step was the important one.
Question: Thank you, Father, for sharing your paper. I just wondered if you could elaborate on your closing thoughts about this sort of Anti-Western tendency in contemporary Orthodox world or Orthodox theology and the sorts of things that would have to happen or perhaps are even happening that would lead to a sort of more positive appropriation of Aquinas and indeed more broadly of extremes of Western thought.
Fr Andrew Louth: There’s not much sign of it yet, that’s the problem. There are little things, like for instance in the English introduction to the translation of Orthodox of the West by Christos Yannaras he says that the opposition to the East and West that he's working with is not an opposition between us and them.
The West is not the other, it’s an opposition that is within his own soul. There’s not much evidence of this in the book [ie. Yannaras' book Orthodoxy and the West], and I think it’s a later thought. If it’s a later thought, it’s an interesting thought that the problem of the West for Orthodoxy that Yannaras sees is not a problem about other people, it’s a problem about a problem that is happening already within Orthodoxy and which we can’t just simply expel.
I suspect as in lots of cases what’s going to happen is that sooner or later we’ll wake up and realize that in fact we can’t pretend that we are unaffected by the values of the West. We are deeply affected by the values of the West. We hold conferences and we go there in airplanes and we have air conditioning and that sort of thing. All of these things will be impossible if we rejected the West completely.
I think what is eventually going to happen is that we will realize that the West can’t be simply regarded as something that can be rejected, that it is too much part of who we are now and we have to engage with it and engage in such a way that the positive aspect the West has discovered since the Enlightenment and the Rise of Science are firm and yet the negative elements are acknowledged and we try to do something about it.
I suppose another example, some of the ways in which we try to talk about theology, is not an attempt to reject scientific progress but an attempt to see that there is here a problem and that to just simply let the West go on it’s way, all this Westernization and consumerization is inadequate. In some ways, some sort of genuine dialog between say Charles Taylor and Yannaras, for instance, would be very interesting if they would be interested to talk to one another. It seems to me is that what Charles Taylor will say is putting question marks against aspects of the West in a way which is very similar what Yannaras is doing. Yannaras, as you can see, is not totally unusual. There are a lot of people in both Greece and in Russia who would echo the sort of thing that Yannaras says.
The other issue I think is that I think you also have to recognize there is a terrible danger in banging on about the West, of ignoring the very real political advances that have been made, ideas of freedom and ecology and so on. It seems to me that there’s a great deal in Orthodoxy that is indifferent to this. That I think is something which seems to be rather shameful.
