Filip Ivanovic

The contribution considers three themes, Hesiod as the precursor of scientific philosophy and ethics, Plato’s political thought and its importance in our days, and the continuity of Greek thought in Byzantine philosophy. It deals with Hesiod’s works Theogony and Works and Days, Plato’s Republic, and it examines the formation of main formulations of Byzantine-Christian doctrines (God’s essence and nature, iconoclastic debate, etc.), through the use of methods and terms of ancient Greek philosophy.

This paper challenges the widespread Enlightenment view of Byzantium as a monster of human spirit showing that much of this bias is due to the generalizations drawn from unfounded analogies between the religious anti-intellectualism in the Latin West and its supposed counterpart in the Byzantine orthodoxy. It points to the first university that was founded in Constantinople and others that soon followed in other cities of Byzantium. Paideia represented the main thread of continuity with ancient antiquity, and it played a central role in the shaping character and it contributed to understandings across a diversity of peoples; its cultivation in open schools and research centers (providing a channel for upward mobility) was unequalled until modern times.

The famous and mysterious fifth century author, who wrote his works known as the Corpus Dionysiacum under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite, is one of the most controversial characters in the history of philosophy. His thought is well known for the concepts of apophatic and cataphatic theologies and hierarchy, as well as for his understanding of eros, beauty, and deification, which all greatly influenced the Areopagite’s posterity. His system is a successful amalgam of ancient philosophy and Christian doctrines. The aim of this article is to examine one of these concepts, namely beauty, which will help in understanding Dionysius ’ aesthetics in its original terms, as well as in its connections to Neoplatonism. Concretely, the article focuses on the conception of the divine beauty, and is therefore articulated through two sections, which deal with beauty as an attribute of God, and the famous pair of good and beautiful.

One of the thinkers who intellectually consolidated deification and gave it a solid doctrinal basis, which has remained fundamentally important until today, was (Pseudo)-Dionysius the Areopagite. His entire thought was dedicated to the deification of all creation, and ultimate goal was "the cloud of unknowing", in which the soul, following the ascending path of apophatic theology, reaches mystical union with God. The ascending process starts with material objects, symbols, through which God manifests Himself to humanity. Given the reality of the human person, who is called upon to receive the revelation, the Divinity cannot be perceived without the help of mediators that, for Dionysius, were "sacred veils" beneath which the divine light is hidden. The aim of this article is to highlight the role of visual elements (material objects, symbols) as the starting point in the process of deification, and in the context of the aesthetic elements of Christianity and the Church’s doctrine of deification, which owes its foundation to the Areopagite.