On the Necessity of Philosophical Discourse In Orthodox discourse, we often hear about the importance of acquiring the mind of the

Church and indeed, the central struggle of our lives has to be the desire to know and to live the correct doctrines of the Church. In our contemporary climate, the objections to adequate studies of sound patristic theology arise from a false pietism that looks at all philosophical inquiry as scholasticism, Latin innovation, or Western captivity. One hears much about the heroism of grandmothers, keeping alive the faith by baptizing babies in secret. While this is of course truly laudatory, such examples are often used to shut down legitimate inquiry into necessary parts of our rich theological tradition, parts that are undeniably philosophical. The dialectical opposite to this position, also common in certain segments of contemporary Orthodoxy, is to simply assume that Orthodoxy has no particular intellectual system, that the mysteries revealed by the Fathers can be as well expressed in Hegelian, Marxist and Heideggerian systems as in the Neoplatonic synthesis of classical antiquity. However, this position makes a mockery of the doctrine that the Logos became incarnate in the fullness of time. Not only was it providential that the chaos of many rulers should come to an end under the rule of Augustus Caesar (as the Vespers hymns for the Feast of the Lord's Nativity make abundantly clear), it was also providential that certain philosophical ideas from Greek learning permeate the intellectual climate of the Mediterranean basin. St. Clement of Alexandria says in his Stromata: Accordingly, before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety, being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ. For when thou hast strengthened wisdom with a cope by philosophy, and with right expenditure, thou wilt preserve it unassailable by sophists. The way of truth is therefore one. Wisdom is therefore queen of philosophy, as philosophy is of preparatory culture (Stromata, ch. 5). In Aristotle East and West, David Bradshaw similarly writes: The question of where philosophy ends and theology begins within the eastern context is not one that has an easy answer, nor do we need to settle it here. It is sufcient to note that there are recognizable philosophical issues on which the authors of this period have a great deal to say: issues such as the status and meaning of nature; the relationship between body and soul, and the sensible and the intelligible; the way in which symbols and images represent their prototypes; the interconnection of theory and practice; person as a category irreducible to nature; and, above all, the nature of God and the possibility of human communion with the divine. On such topics the thought of the Christian East is best approached, not in terms of doctrinal history, but as the gradual working out of the fundamental revision of Neoplatonism begun by the Cappadocians and Dionysius (Aristotle East and West, 187). It was within this revised, or rather purged, perfected, and illumined, Neoplatonic tradition that the great Fathers of the ChurchSt. Dionysios the Areopagite, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Gregory of Cyprus, St. Gregory Palamas, among otherssaw, interpreted, and preached the great mystery of the God-man, Jesus Christ. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the Fathers of the Church, all eminently educated men, used their secular knowledge to express the rational Truth of the Orthodox Catholic faith. In his Divine Names, St. Dionysios the Aeropagite says For all knowledges are of beings and have their limit in beings, that which is beyond all being also transcends all knowledge (Divine Names I.4).

Statements like this reveal that the great saint firmly grounded himself in the Neo-Platonic philosophical tradition. Plotinus, whose project was the ongoing synthesis and harmonization of classical philosophy (Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, &c.) spells out more explicitly what St. Dionysios alludes to: Intelligence is not only potential, arriving at being intelligent after being unintelligentfor otherwise, we would be forced to see out some still higher principlebut is in actualization, and is eternal...Thought, therefore, must not be separated from its object...Intelligence, by its mere real existence, thinks beings, and makes them exist: it therefore is being. Indeed, the beings will either exist outside of it, or within it; and in the latter case they would have to be identical with it. That they should exist outside of Intelligence is unthinkable; for where would they be located? They must therefore exist within it, and be identical with it. They could not be in sense-objects, as common people think, because sense-objects, could not be the first in any genus (Plotinus, Ennead V.9.5). This difficult quote provides the broad philosophical ground on which the true metaphysics (and hence, epistemology) of the fathers is based. The divine Dionysios helps to articulate this foundation further: As [God is] cause of things existing, since all things were brought into being on account of Its [the Godhead's] creative goodness, both wise and good, because all things, whilst preserving the properties of their own nature unimpaired, are filled with every inspired harmony and holy comeliness, but preeminently, as loving toward man, because It truly and wholly shared, in one of Its Persons, in things belonging to us, recalling to Itself and replacing the human extremity, out of which, in a manner unutterable, the simplex Jesus was composed...and He who is superessentially exalted above every rank throughout nature, whilst retaining the unchangeable and unconfused steadfastness of His own properties (Divine Names I.4). Parsing the first part of the above quotes indicates that the basics of the Plotinianthat is to say, the Neoplatonicmetaphysics are genuinely present within the patristic tradition; indeed, as Bishop Alexander (Golitzin) observes in his landmark study of the Dionysian corpus, Et Introibo Ad Altare Dei: [St.] Dionysios' treatises on the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names...are the least original works of his corpus. While this statement will come as no surprise to those for whom the two treatises represent little other than thinly-veiled Neoplatonist metaphysics, we contend that the Aeropagite's want of originality here derives less from his imitation of the pagan masters than from his fidelity to the patristic teaching on the Trinity and the divine names or attributes (Golitzin 45). The ideas and teachings found in the Dionysian corpus are present in the works of the universally celebrated Cappadocian Fathers, and, through them, in those of that philosophical and theological giant of later antiquity, St. Maximos the Confessor. This testifies to the integral position that the equally patristic and Neoplatonic Areopagite holds in the Orthodox theological tradition. The first lesson of that metaphysical system is that to be is to be intelligible. All existing things (recalling the Dionysios and Plotinus quotes above) are apprehended and ultimately known by intellection. But, this intellection is not the same as rationalizationthough, this has become the way that Neoplatonism is understood due to post-Renaissance recovered readings of the ancient philsophers, under Western influence. To get at the true, Orthodox, understanding, one must remember that the nousthe noetic center of consciousnessis the faculty by which we apprehend God, and therefore

Truth. Our ability to know what is is our ability to use our nous (Latin intellectus, from whence the English intellect). Going deeper, as Plotinus (and St. Dionysios) does, we are able to understand that: Since thought is something essentially one, the form, which is the object of thought, and the idea are one and the same thing. Which then is this [particular] thing? Intelligence and the intellectual being, for no idea is foreign to intelligence; each form is intelligence, and the whole intelligence is in all forms; every particular form is a particular intelligence. (Plotinus, Ennead V.8) To understand this, one must remember that intelligence does not mean the abstraction of the mind, but rather that which is intelligiblethat which is an object of intellection. Being is identical with intelligibility, and, in fact, must be identical with it, since without an object for thought, thought could not exist. And, likewise, how can an object exist independent of the thought which apprehends it? The simple answer is that being is intelligibility. This is where St. Dionysios provides us with a classic and, for those who have been reared and educated in a Western philosophical context, revolutionary understanding of God. If God could be an object of intellection, that is if one says God exists or God is, one reduces God to the level of a mere being. This reduction makes God a simple, knowable essence, the heresy of Eunomius (refuted by St. Basil in the 4th century). In this sense, theism is an impossibility, ontologically speaking. To assert that God exists, in that existence means to be an object of intellection, and hence, a being, produces a paradox: if God exists then God is a being, and thus not God at all. One sees in this conceptual paradox the echo of the infamous atheistic challenge to theism: Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift? But, the atheistic solution is as inadequate as it is infantile. The atheist forgets that to say God is not or God does not exist is still to call to mind God as an object of intellection, and then to negate Him; there is no difference in saying God is not or unicorns are not because in the mental act of negation, whether of God or of unicorns, one's intellect is apprehending something that is intelligible: either a horse with a single horn, or a kind of supreme or first-being. As these imaginative beings are objects of intellection, they are still beings. So, atheism conceives of a being called God and rejects it, but still fails to resolve the paradox. Indeed, so radical is the patristic rejection of both theism and atheism that the contemporary Orthodox scholar, Dr. David Bradshaw, confidently asserts The East has no concept of God. It views God not as an essence to be grasped intellectually, but as a personal reality known though His acts, and above all by oneself sharing in those acts (Bradshaw 275). The only possible solution to the theistic paradox is the one provided by the Neoplatonic metaphysics of St. Dionysios (Perl 17). St. Dionysios says of the divinity that it: is neither soul nor mind; neither has it imagination, nor opinion, nor reason, nor intution, neither is it reason nor intuition, nor can it be reasoned or intuited...it is neither life nor does it live; neither is it essence, nor eternity, nor time...neither is it one or oneness, nor deity, nor goodness. It is not spirit, as we know it, nor is it sonship, nor fatherhood...it is no one of the things which are not, nor is it any of those things which are...beyond all affirmation....and beyond negation is the transcendence of him who, simple, is free of all things and beyond them all (Mystical Theology V. 1045d-1045b). So God's transcendence is complete and radical, beyond the polarities of non-being and being which are inherent to our existence in alone the continuum of sensibles (sense-objects) which exist between them. Indeed, this calls to mind the line from the Eucharistic anaphora of the Byzantine rite which says Thou it was who brought us from non-existence into being, and when we had fallen away, didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us up to heaven and hadst endowed us with Thy Kingdom which is to come [Emphasis added]. We see here an indication

in the heart of the liturgy itselfthe consecration of the Eucharistic giftsthis essential directionality in the mode of earthly existence. The ultimate and divine transcendence calls us forth from nonexistence, non-being, into being. And when we had fallen away, that is, through sinin ceasing to perfect our nous through apprehending the symbolic reality present in the sensible world as leading us to the higher, that is, back to Godbecame enslaved to death and subject to decay and corruption, he, himself, accomplished our raising back up from the sensible into the eternal, and from there beyond being itself. Here, philosophy acts rightly as a handmaiden, pointing the way to the true theology of the fathers, and we see in this simple articulationthat to be is to be intelligiblethat both our modern conception of rationalist dualism is impossible, since there can be no abstract intelligence without real objects to intellect, as well as our empiricist epistemology, because being (identical with truth and beauty) cannot be found in sense-objects themselves, because sense-objects are only sensible because of intellection. To take the Fathers seriously means to radically rethink how we think about reality. Of course, that leads us into questions about how reality as we know it actually came to be, and how its mode of existence and operation, as well how our knowing of reality operates on a continuum of cognition. These issues will be addressed in subsequent articles on Symbolon.