Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom

Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom

David Bradshaw

Language: English

Pages: 312

ISBN: 0521035562

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Winner of the Journal of the History of Ideas's Morris D. Forkosch prize This book traces the development thought about God and the relationship between God's being and activity from Aristotle, through the pagan Neoplatonists, to thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas (in the West) and Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas (in the East). The resulst is a comparative history of philosophical thought in the two halves of Christendom, providing a philosophical backdrop to the schism between the Eastern and Western churches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

occurrence of the sense of energeia as “energy” reminds us that the divine energeiai are not merely operations, but God Himself as manifested within creation. It follows that the sort of participation Basil describes is not merely cooperation with God, but an actual participation in the divine being. Basil does not shy away from this conclusion. Immediately after the passage quoted, he asks how the Holy Spirit can be brought into such intimate association with a human soul. His answer is that the

achieving self-knowledge and recovering one’s true self. For Gregory the process is one of purifying and uncovering the divine image within the soul. It ends by making manifest what had in a sense been true all along, that “God is in you.” For Iamblichus the knowledge of the gods is “co-existent with our very being,” so that in theurgy we do not invoke the gods as beings foreign to us; the divine in us “seeks vehemently that which is like itself.”76 Both authors ultimately ground the possibility

moment of convergence has passed. What can we conclude about the Prime Mover’s noetic activity? The Mover “thinks itself” only in the sense that all active intellect thinks itself. The direct objects of its contemplation are the forms, the objects of the 18 19 20 According to Stephen Menn, “Aristotle and Plato on God as Nous and as the Good,” Review of Metaphysics 45 (1992), 554, a computer search shows that the first author to use the plural regularly was Plotinus. I assume the standard way of

by reference to Plotinus and Proclus. See Cristina D’Ancona Costa, Recherches sur le Liber de Causis (Paris, 1995), 138–47. See Badawi, La transmission de la philosophie grecque, 52–54. It is translated in vol. 2 of Plotini Opera. chap t e r 6 Gods, demons, and theurgy One feature the philosophies we have examined so far have in common is that for them the energeia of God has no specifically religious importance. It is philosophically important, of course, because the existence and character

self-interested motives on which to act. Instead he shares in the gods’ contemplation and governance of the cosmos. Besides his description of “blessed spectacles,” the other main context in which Iamblichus speaks of participation in the divine energeiai is in discussing mantic divination, i.e., that involving possession by a god.48 He distinguishes three forms of such possession: the possessed “either subject their whole life as a vehicle or instrument to the inspiring gods, or exchange human

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