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A Greek Thomist Providence in Gennadios Scholarios

M AT T H E W C . B R I E L

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix A Note on Transliteration xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 PA R T I

Why Was Providence a Pressing Question? 000 CHAPTER I

God’s Wrath? Affliction and the Christian Understanding of Divine Governance 000 CHAPTER 2

Why Was Providence a Pressing Question in 1458? Apocalypse, Tyche, and Qismet 000 PA R T I I

Predecessors to and Sources of Scholarios’s Theology of Providence 000 CHAPTER 3

Greek Patristic and Byzantine Tradition on the Question of Providence 000 CHAPTER 4

Thomas Aquinas 000

viii Contents

PA R T I I I

The Development of Scholarios’s Thought on Providence, 1432–72 000 CHAPTER 5

The Challenge of Pletho and the Development of Scholarios’s Theology of Providence, 1432–58 000 CHAPTER 6

Scholarios’s Study of Aquinas’s Metaphysics 000 CHAPTER 7

Historical and Theological Analysis of First Tract on Providence 000 Conclusion 000 Epilogue: Influence and Significance 000 Appendix 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000

Introduction

We usually begin the study of the history of “modern” Hellenism with the Fall of Constantinople (1453), the final act in the collapse of what we call “Byzantine” Hellenism. . . . [However,] from the point of view of the development of Greek culture . . . the starting-point of the “modern” period is not 1453 but 1354, when Demetrios Kydones . . . translated into Greek the Summa contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas. — C hristos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age

Gennadios Scholarios, perhaps the greatest Orthodox theologian of his generation, seems to have died peacefully in the book-rich monastery of St. John the Forerunner, fifty miles Northeast of Thessaloniki, in 1472. This area had been under Turkish control for nearly a century by the time he died. Scholarios was in many ways a liminal figure. Faithfully Orthodox, he was an avid reader of the Latin Thomas Aquinas. Born in the center of Byzantium, Constantinople, around 1400, Scholarios came to maturity during a period of artistic and intellectual brilliance, a period all the more luminous in its intellectual flourishing when contrasted with the accelerating decline of the empire. However, after 1453 Constantinople was conquered and many Eastern Orthodox nations wished to claim its august legacy. Moscow had claimed unofficially the title of Third Rome by the reign of Vasilii III (r. 1505–33). This claim was based in large part upon the lineage of his 1

2 A Greek Thomist

mother, Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last emperor of the Romans, Constantine XI, who died without issue while defending Constantinople from the Turks. It is not only significant that the idea of Rome was claimed by Moscow in the fifteenth century. There is a parallel in Moscow to Scholarios’s use of Aquinas. Sophia arrived in Moscow in the year of Scholarios’s death and married Grand Duke Ivan III, who was most certainly interested in empire building. That same year Ivan III commissioned the local architects Kryvtsov and Myshkin to build a new Church of the Dormition, part of a larger plan for the reconstruction of the Kremlin.1 This church is recognized today across the world as a symbol of Russia and of pre-1917 Russian Orthodoxy in particular. It is in this church that all the Russian tsars between 1547 and 1917 were crowned and most Moscow patriarchs were buried.2 The construction of the new church, however, was not a simple feat. Indeed, two years after construction began, the entire edifice collapsed. The walls were not strong enough to support the ambitious dome. Frustrated but not deterred, in 1475 Ivan sacked his local architects and hired the Bolognese architect and engineer Aristotele Fioravanti. He told Fioravanti that the building must be stable and that it must be modeled after the twelfth-century Church of the Dormition in Vladimir-Suzdal, the cradle of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Fioravanti introduced several internal structural modifications that had been recently developed in Italy. In addition to laying a much deeper foundation and driving oaks into that foundation for stability, he also designed lightweight but hardened bricks for construction and employed iron tie-rods for the vaults.3 Finally, he used groin vaults and transverse arches to support the massive dome, giving the interior a light and airy feel.4 This was to be a model for many other churches in Russia. The Church of the Dormition in Moscow, then, is entirely traditional in its appearance and its effect on the worshiping community yet employs new Italian technology in order to support its lofty aspirations. It can be profitably contrasted with a church built nearly four hundred years later, St. Petersburg’s nineteenth-century St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the world’s largest Orthodox church. This neoclassical building’s exterior was influenced by Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Its interior decoration, much influenced by Italian Renaissance and Baroque church interi-

Introduction 3

ors, fits well in Peter the Great’s westernized city. The architect, August Montferrand, clearly imported Roman ecclesial architecture to Russia. When in St. Isaac’s, one feels as if one were in France rather than Russia. Moscow’s traditional Church of the Dormition and St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of St. Isaac illustrate two ways of using Western, especially Latin Catholic, forms in the Orthodox Church. The earlier project seems a clear instance of active appropriation or, in John Henry Newman’s terms, assimilation: “Whatever has life is characterized by growth, so that in no respect to grow is to cease to live. It grows by taking into its own substance external materials; and this absorption or assimilation is completed when the materials appropriated come to belong to it or enter into its unity.”5 Newman compares Christianity to a particular kind of idea that has its existence and lives in individual minds and in the mind of the church and yet greatly stimulates human beings to deeper thought and action. It does this in part by drawing on the imagination. Newman says of the power of an idea’s development and assimilation: Thus, a power of development is a proof of life, not only in its essay, but especially in it success. . . . A living idea becomes many, remains many, yet remains one. . . . The idea never was that throve and lasted, yet, like mathematical truth, incorporated nothing from external sources. So far from the fact of such incorporation implying corruption, as is sometimes supposed, development is a process of incorporation.6 The goals of the builder of the Dormition Cathedral were clear: Ivan wished to continue on a larger scale the traditional Russian ecclesial form. However, to continue this tradition he used Western technologies in order to support his project. St. Isaac’s, on the other hand, is clearly an instance of the wholesale application of Western forms to Russian Orthodox ecclesial architecture. Indeed, St. Isaac’s Cathedral mimics Western forms and in this way is a parallel to the Western captivity of Orthodox theology described by Georges Florovsky in which the forms — a nd, to a certain degree, substance — of Latin scholastic theology were incorporated into Orthodox theology. However, this incorporation did not change the Latin forms and substance into Orthodox theology but rather, like a virus,

4 A Greek Thomist

infected Orthodox theology or, in Florovsky’s image, made Orthodox theology a prisoner of the West. The problem with this captivity is that it is a denial of Russian Orthodoxy’s own spiritual nature: “the ages of Russian Westernism which was a departure and even a flight to the West, a denial of Russia.”7 Christos Yannaras carries forward Florovsky’s insight and claims, in the epigraph to this chapter, that it was in particular the adoption of Aquinas that brought about the modern period in Orthodox theology, a period defined by Orthodoxy’s enthrallment to the West. Gennadios Scholarios, we shall see, played a key role in weaving Aquinas more tightly into the fabric of Greek thought than had been accomplished by Aquinas’s translators in the fourteenth century. But is this necessarily a kind of captivity to the modern West or a mimicking, in the mode of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, of Western forms? A betrayal of the Orthodox patrimony? When an Orthodox theologian draws on Aquinas, must the result be a kind of hybrid of Eastern and Western thought? That may well happen, but it need not happen. In the case of Scholarios’s use of Aquinas, as in Ivan’s use of Fioravanti, we do not have a tertium quid, neither Catholic nor Orthodox. Rather, the result is a healthy development of the Orthodox theological tradition. The dynamic is better explained by Newman’s model of assimilation. Indeed, like the Cathedral of the Dormition, Scholarios’s theology is faithfully Orthodox. But like Ivan, Scholarios uses some of the technical insights of an Italian specialist in order to make his Orthodox edifice larger or more comprehensive than had ever been possible using the less developed traditional Greek Christian philosophical resources.8 In particular, Scholarios uses Aquinas (as well as Scotus) in order to effect a more comprehensive Orthodox theology that makes a substantial advance in the Orthodox tradition concerning providence. Rather than a corruption of the Orthodox tradition, Scholarios’s use of Aquinas is, in Newmanian terms, a sign of that tradition’s inherent vigor. Why has such an advance in the Orthodox theological tradition been overlooked until now? Although a critical edition of Scholarios’s texts on the question of the predetermination of death was published in 1928, they have thus far received little scholarly attention, apart from undefended claims that the texts reflect the summit of Greek theological reflection on the question of providence.9 Even though manuscript evi-

Introduction 5

dence indicates that these tracts were widely read from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,10 there are no modern translations of Scholarios’s treatises, and the longest historical treatment they have received is a seven-page section of a dissertation from 1937.11 How can one explain this modern neglect? The answer may lie in the biographies of Scholarios himself and in the editor of his works, Martin Jugie. Scholarios (ca. 1400–1472), then a layman, ran a school of philoso phy in Constantinople in the 1420s and 1430s.12 He was especially interested in and devoted to Aristotle and, in the course of his studies, came to admire Thomas Aquinas, whose texts, translated into Greek in the 1350s, circulated among the scholars of Constantinople for the last century of its existence as a Christian capital.13 At the Council of Florence in 1439, Scholarios argued strongly for union with the Latin West. However, after returning to the city, he changed his mind for reasons that remain unclear and took up the mantle of the anti-unionist party from Mark of Ephesos while the latter was on his deathbed. And so from 1445 until 1453, Scholarios, out of favor with the pro union imperial court, retired to a monastery on the edge of the city and wrote pamphlets, including one in demotic Greek, against the union while at the same time intensively studying the theology of Aquinas. Meanwhile, Mehmed II (“the Conqueror”) took over the Byzantine territory surrounding the Sea of Marmara and made preparations for attacking Constantinople. As Mehmed built up his massive Rumeli Hisari (the fortified operations base for his attack) within the sight of the Queen of Cities, Scholarios and the members of his synaxis continued their campaign against union with Rome.14 Constantinople fell on May 29, 1453, and Scholarios was enslaved. Mehmed released him from slavery and ordered that he be consecrated bishop and made patriarch of Constantinople. More the scholar than the statesman, he was on the patriarchal throne for the next two years and then retired to the Monastery of the Prodromos outside of Thessaloniki, where he wrote his first tract on providence, which draws deeply from Aquinas’s theology of providence. While Scholarios is much revered by the Orthodox,15 his reputation now rests more on his popular legacy as an opponent of union with Rome than on any appreciation of his theological contribution. Indeed, he is seen to be an opponent of the West tout court. This is ironic because one

6 A Greek Thomist

quarter of his surviving works are commentaries on Thomas Aquinas written after he began to oppose union with Rome, a fact of which any serious engagement with Scholarios’s thought must be cognizant.16 In other words, in the popular mind he became more Orthodox — that is, anti-Western — precisely when he was becoming more theologically influenced by the Angelic Doctor. But this very assumption, that to be Orthodox is to be anti-Western, is itself a twentieth-century creation, one of whose remote causes is Martin Jugie. An infamous entry by Jugie on the fourteenth-century Palamite Controversy in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique17 in 1932 was one of the main catalysts for Vladimir Lossky’s 1944 The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, whose impact on twentieth-century Orthodox self-consciousness was immense. Among other things, Lossky’s book defends Palamas and his teaching on the distinction between the essence and energies of God. Lossky claims that Palamas’s opponents in the fourteenth-century dispute were strongly influenced by Aristotle and even quote the Greek translation of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.18 The true Orthodox of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it is assumed by Lossky, must be free of any Western contamination. In the second chapter of his 2012 monograph, Marcus Plested describes how this scholarly presupposition was the foundation for the hegemonic narrative of the Orthodox theological tradition in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, Orthodoxy begins to be defined simply negatively as non-Western, in opposition to Augustine and especially Aquinas. When one turns to the past in the work of historical theology with this vision of Orthodoxy, one either flattens out subtle nuances by overlooking the possibility of Western influence or, in the cases where the influence is very strong, purposefully excludes authors and texts from consideration as Orthodox theologians. This is the main cause for overlooking the man whom John Meyendorff called an “intellectual enigma awaiting modern scholarly investigation.”19 The story is that of an advance in the Greek theological tradition. This advance has been assimilated fully by the Greek theological tradition to such an extent that the very fact of its advance has been overlooked.20 The story is an examination of a significant and influential development of Greek Orthodox theology on the question of providence that occurred in Scholarios’s creative reception of Aquinas. It is significant because it marks an important achievement: to the question, Is God

Introduction 7

omnipotent or are human beings free?, Scholarios answers “yes” rather than choosing either of the alternatives. It is influential in that this theology was received and accepted by leading theologians for five hundred years after it was written. It is the argument of this book that a particular use of Western scholastic thought, Gennadios Scholarios’s use of Thomas Aquinas’s theology of providence, is in fact more like the instance of the Kremlin’s Church of the Dormition than like St. Petersburg’s St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Specifically, Scholarios’s presentation of this theology of providence is in the traditional manner and in continuity with the previous Orthodox theological traditions. Like Ivan III, however, Scholarios faced a problem. New times called for new articulations of the same Orthodox truth. Scholarios in particular had to respond to intellectual difficulties and to a particular philosophical challenge that had not been faced before, just as the Muscovite architects had to continue the same architectural tradition but with the new requirements of grandeur to match Grand Duke Ivan’s ambitions for his realm. Scholarios used and transformed Thomas’s ideas on the question of the predetermination of death in a way that allowed him to remain fully in accord with the Greek theological tradition as he inherited it. Thomas provided Scholarios with technical scholastic distinctions, precisions of the Greek patristic tradition, especially John Damascene, that allowed him to articulate a coherent account of the antinomies of divine foreknowledge and human freedom that had previously remained in tension in the Greek theological tradition. In addition to providing a constructive contribution to the Greek theological tradition, Scholarios also evinces a powerful and heretofore unknown reception of Aquinas’s thought on the issue of nature and grace. The particular kind of Thomism he develops avoids the later vexing issues in the West of the de auxiliis controversy by rejecting the hyper-Augustinian theology of grace and replacing it with the Greek theological concept of synergy. In short, Scholarios’s use of Aquinas in his first tract on providence provides a powerful testimony to the ecumenical potential of bringing Greek and Latin theologians into conversation with one another. The first tract on providence, which has not been translated, is complex, and Scholarios’s achievement of a cogent account for the predetermination of death deserves an extended analysis.21 In bringing light to

8 A Greek Thomist

this text I also draw attention to a theological debate that was of great concern to medieval Greek Christians but has been largely ignored by modern scholars. As a work of intellectual history, this monograph illuminates both an aspect of Byzantine mentality and an important development of the Greek theological tradition. In addition to adding to our understanding of the medieval Greek theological tradition, this book modifies our understanding of that tradition, for now it is not a hermetically sealed museum piece, but rather a living organism open to new insights. I argue, then, that to the extent that Orthodox doctrine is true and living, it must have the assimilative power spoken of by Newman: Since religious systems, true and false, have one and the same great and comprehensive subject-matter, they necessarily interfere with one another as rivals, both in those points in which they agree together, and in those in which they differ. That Christianity on its rise was in these circumstances of competition and controversy, is sufficiently evident. . . . It was surrounded by rites, sects and philosophies which contemplated the same questions, sometimes advocated the same truths, and in no slight degree wore the same external appearance. It could not stand still, it could not take its own way, and let them take theirs: they came across its path, and a conflict was inevitable. The very nature of a true philosophy relatively to other systems is to be polemical, eclectic, unitive: Christianity was polemical; it could not but be eclectic; but was it also unitive? Had it the power, keeping its own identity, of absorbing its antagonists, as Aaron’s rod, according to St. Jerome’s illustration, devoured the rods of the sorcerers of Egypt? Did it incorporate them into itself, or was it dissolved into them? Did it assimilate them into its own substance, or, keeping its name, was it simply infected by them? In a word, were its developments faithful or corrupt?22 Finally, by examining the constructive use of Aquinas by a Greek Orthodox author and the incorporation of Latin Catholic theology into the Greek Orthodox theological tradition, this book will also examine a productive cultural and ecclesial translation of Aquinas. In Scholarios’s analysis of the good human act, which builds upon Thomistic concep-

Introduction 9

tions of the human being as the instrumental cause, one finds a new kind of Thomism that places greater emphasis on the human contribution in any good moral act and in the very reception of grace to do that act. Like Ivan, Scholarios had recourse to an Italian master for his technical prowess: Scholarios went to Thomas Aquinas for his knowledge of Aristotle’s philosophy and his mastery of dogmatics, whereas Ivan went to Aristotele Fioravanti for his mastery of engineering. Like Ivan’s Church of the Dormition, the product of Scholarios’s effort would have an enormous impact on later ecclesial culture. This book attempts to trace its development in three stages. In the first two chapters I examine the historical pressures that led Scholarios and his contemporaries to think with greater intensity about the question of divine providence than anyone had before. In the second section, chapters 3 and 4, I briefly describe the theological resources that Scholarios had at hand in order to address the problem of his day. In the third stage, chapters 5–7, I examine the particular challenge that pressed on Scholarios and how he came to a deep understanding and active appropriation of Thomas Aquinas to solve that problem.

Excerpt of A Greek Thomist