Filip Ivanovic

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.

This article explores the ecclesiological views of Dionysius the Areopagite through the examination of his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, where he discusses the hierarchical ranks and sacraments, and of his Letter VIII to monk Demophilus, which is important for Dionysius's understanding of hierarchical organisation and discipline. These issues are put in the context of other important questions of the Areopagite's thought, such as his symbolic theory, the character of deification and the role of knowledge in it. Although the Areopagite is one of the most famous among early Christian Greek thinkers, his ecclesiology is somewhat less familiar, especially in the West. This article tries to fill in that gap, hence it represents a general, introductory outline of Dionysius's ecclesiology, with the aim of making it more accessible to the broader Western readership and to incite further research on the subject.

One of the questions that presented itself with the rise and development of the Christian faith was the problem of divine omnipotence. By resolving the problem of divine power, it became possible to explain many focal problems of mankind and the world, including, for example, the problem of the existence of evil, or of suffering. This article deals with two perspectives on this problem. Usually, the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damiani is pointed to as a pioneer and originator of the discussion of divine powers. But, St. Isidor 's considerations were developed five centuries before Damiani wrote his famous treatise De divina omnipotentia. On the other hand, the debate in Scholasticism emerged as a long and lively discussion of different ways of defining the problem. The distinction of potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata contributed greatly to debating the general question of divine omnipotence. However, although it was useful in the theological-philosophical sense, this distinction later on provoked political solutions which sometimes served the interest of only one man