A Book Review… Byzantium And Belief In Divine Providence
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Briel, Matthew C. A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 270.
This book could be read as a theological treatise, except that Matthew Briel, a philosophy professor at Assumption College, wants to show how Greek metaphysics shaped the future Bishop Scholarios’ understanding of Byzantine Orthodoxy.
We are told that the study of modern Hellenism usually begins with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But from the perspective of Greek culture, the starting point is not 1453 but 1354 when Demetrios Kydones translated into Greek the Summa Contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas. So relates Briel when interpreting Orthodoxy’s spiritual nature. He takes his lead from another Byzantine scholar, Christos Yannaras. The adoption of Aquinas, Briel declares, brought about the modern period of Orthodox theology.
Gennadios Scholarios ran a school of philosophy in Constantinople in the 1420s and 1430s. He was drawn to Aquinas for his knowledge of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and for his mastery of dogmatics. Scholarios began his study of Thomas by translating into Greek the Summa Contra Gentiles. He followed that by translating the Summa Theologiae, the De Ente et Essentia, and Thomas’ commentaries on the De Anima, the Physics, and the Posterior Analytics. Add to this his command of Augustine and Scotus, and Scholarios’ scholarship would qualify him for a chair in medieval philosophy at any major American university.
In an aside, Briel relates that the Church of the Dormition in Moscow, today recognized the world over as the symbol of Russia, was in its initial construction ill-fated. Two years after its construction, the edifice collapsed. The local architects were sacked and the authorities went to Italy, where they found a Bolognese architect to erect the building we know today.
Briel writes, “Just as the Italian and other architects had to continue the same architectural traditions with the requirement of grandeur to match, the theologians of the period were called upon to develop a new interpretation of the same Orthodox truth, particularly with respect to the doctrine of divine Providence.”
With Byzantium suffering from numerous afflictions in the fifteenth century — plagues and earthquakes — the people had a sense of being abandoned by God. Were natural disasters an expression of divine anger, or the wrath of God, as some Byzantines thought? Belief in divine Providence was melting away, and people were losing their faith. The sense that God had abandoned His people was consummated in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Turks.
For Scholarios and other theologians, the great question was: How do we account for our belief in an all-powerful and merciful God, given the extraordinary events of the age? Scholarios responded by developing an inherited Christian understanding of divine Providence. He was soon led to Origen (c. 184-c. 253) of Alexandria who held that God’s providential care extends to all that has been created, particularly rational creatures.
Thus Providence is viewed as both a loving guidance and a foreknowledge of all that happens. Briel argues that the Greek “theology of Providence” can be seen as a continuous thread of inquiry, dating from Origen and later developed by John Damascene in the eighth century. Addressing the issue of predetermination, God foreknows everything, says Damascene, but does not force future contingencies.
A concern about fate led Scholarios to a deeper engagement with Aquinas. His study of Aquinas led him to incorporate, in Briel’s words, “Aquinas’ seamless theology of Providence into a Greek Orthodox framework.” Of particular influence was Thomas’ distinction between essence and existence. With its implication for created and uncreated being, it is commonly called the analogy of being.
That theory includes a doctrine of divine simplicity and secondary causality as well as Aquinas’ teaching on human cooperation with God in the performance of worthy acts. Scholarios in developing his theory of analogy is led by a doctrine of participation, though he does not use that Platonic term.
In the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, Byzantine scholars and laity alike held that in order to be truly Eastern, one must not be contaminated by Aristotle and the Scholasticism of the West. Briel ends his treatise with the hope “to have demonstrated that this need not be the case, and in fact was not the case in one remarkable Byzantine figure.”
It may not be out of place to note that Briel’s 135 pages of text is accompanied by almost as many pages of footnotes and supporting documentation. The focus of the present book, A Greek Thomist, is of course Gennadios Scholarios, but Briel’s in-depth research has equipped him with an extraordinary knowledge of Byzantine culture and intellectual history. One may hope that he exploits that learning for a wider audience in future essays and monographs.
