International Network for Byzantine Philosophy

An excerpt from Professor Aristotle Papanikolaou’s The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 13, 17, 20. It is quite a remarkable fact that in the history of theology in the Christian East, there exists a core and guiding principle that is never challenged within the movement of the tradition: the principle of divine-human communion. This principle may sometimes be ignored, or often under-emphasized, but there are always trajectories within the tradition at any given moment in history that keeps its memory alive. Divine-human communion, or theosis , sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians, and the influence of this principle is visible in writings related to questions of political theology […] The first signs of a distinctively “Orthodox” political theology, one that would wield considerable influence on what would become the Orthodox Church even beyond the definitive fa

An excerpt from Professor John Panteleimon Manoussakis’ “Friendship in Late Antiquity: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen and Basil the Great” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship , ed. Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 181–85. The first letters* exchanged between [Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen] record for us the beginnings of a disagreement concerning the proper way of living, what usually goes by the name of philosophia . When Gregory writes, remembering those early days in Athens, that philosophy became their study, he means only loosely and incidentally the discipline we call by that name today. As it becomes clear in the rest of the oration, philosophy for him meant something more. He goes on to explain how they embarked upon the study of philosophia more systematically when they had both left Athens and were no longer students (suggesting, perhaps, the time when Basil was touring the monastic communiti

An excerpt from Professor Paul M. Blowers’ Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 101–3. For Maximus [the Confessor], the Christian Gospel gave witness to a universe being transfigured, to an emerging cosmic and eschatological politeia embracing all of spiritual and material creation, of which Jesus Christ was both the pioneer and the perfecter in his incarnation [...] At the outset I would note my debt to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, in exploring the intricate web of dialectical themes and syntheses that constitute Maximus’ christocentric Weltbild , did not simply measure Maximus’ universe by the cosmological and metaphysical bequests of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, no matter the significance of those philosophical idioms to his doctrine of creation. Instead, von Balthasar recognized that for Maximus, as for others earlier in the Greek patristic tradition, the goal was less to construct a

An excerpt from Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), 8–10. To the three Cappadocians should be added, as “the Fourth Cappadocian,” Macrina (the Younger), the oldest sister of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa, named for their grandmother, Macrina the Elder. Not only was she, according to Gregory's accounts, a Christian role model for both of them by her profound and ascetic spirituality, but at the death of their parents she became the educator of the entire family, and that in both Christianity and Classical culture. Through her philosophy and theology, Macrina was even the teacher of both of her brothers, who were bishops and theologians, “sister and teacher at the same time,” as Gregory called her in the opening sentence of the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (as he elsewhere referred to Basil, his brother, as “our