Вестник Екатеринбургской духовной семинарии (Feb 2022)
THE DOCTRINES OF MATTER IN LEONTIUS OF BYZANTIUM, THEOPHANES OF NICAEA, AND IN THE MIDDLE BYZANTINE PERIOD: THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCES
Abstract
In the present article a case is made that Theophanes of Nicaea’s both early and later doctrine on matter, as well as his soteriology, was liable to Aristotelian and Leontian influences. (By the later doctrine we mean that which was presented in the Nicaean Metropolitan’s Eulogy of the Most Holy Theotokos). The same line(s) of Aristotelian influence were appropriated, if only indirectly, by such wide-known pillars of Late Byzantine theology and philosophical thought as St. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Gregory Palamas. All these authors have received from philosophical sources the centuries-aged doctrine on the matter’s general mutability and transitivity from one genus to another, going back to Heraclitus, Aristotle etc. Another idea was also appropriated from the armory of Aristotelianism, i. e., in course of relationship between the different-level beings any such being of a lower level gets similar to a matter or, put another way, acquires a logos of matter in relation to the upper-level beings. This pattern was instrumental for Patristic authors in their describing the dynamism of our deification, in which process all the created is assimilated to a kind of matter as related to the Divine Spirit. What is more, the very recognition of the subsistence of particular beings — a common trait in Leontius of Byzantium and Theophanes of Nicaea — might well have been inspired by the general thrust of Stagirite’s theory of matter with its characteristic spirit of particularism, making itself manifest in such passages as, e. g., Metaph. K 1068 b 10–11. It was John Philoponus (6th century) who taught about the motion of souls in an analogous manner. A similar idea of a such-and-such integer natural faculty of a soul, which is an amalgam of different particular faculties, will feature prominently in Theophanes of Nicaea’s anthropology. Very important here is the Aristotelian idea of a soul’s possible transition from one state to another according to passive faculties as well, not only according to active ones. Theophanes has widely recognized and appropriated this line of thought.
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