Byzantine Readings of Aquinas Marcus Plested Marquette University, [email protected]

Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Theology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of 1-1-2013 "Light from the West": Byzantine Readings of Aquinas Marcus Plested Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. "'Light from the West' Byzantine Readings of Aquinas," in Orthodox Constructions of the West. Eds. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013: 58-70. Publisher Link. © 2013 Fordham University Press. Used with permission. IILIGHT FROM THE WEST": BYZANTINE READINGS OF AQ!JINAS Marcus Plested t is a truth universally acknowledged that East and West possess fun I damentally opposing theological bases, presuppositions, and method ologies. But the assumption that East and West are meaningful and clearly delineated theological categories is of relatively recent provenance. It is the burden of this paper to demonstrate that this assumption of opposition was by no means prevalent in the last century of the Roman (or Byzantine) Empire. I propose to make this point through an examination of a range of Byzantine responses to the work of Thomas Aquinas. The tide of this essay, "Light from the West," deliberately invokes and reverses the "orientale lumen" lauded in the Golden Epistle of William of St-Thierry. Writing to a Carthusian monastery in the Ardennes in 1144, William famously praised its monks for their shining example of asceti cism that made "the light of the East and the ancient fervor in religion of Egypt" shine amidst the "darknesses of the West and the cold regions of Gaul."l William's happy phraseology was taken up by Pope John Paul II as the incipit of his much-heralded Apostolic Letter of 1995, Orientale lu men. In that letter, the Roman Catholic Church is bidden to give heed to the wisdom and distinctive charisms of the Christian East. It must be said that the reverse process is all too rarely undertaken in the Christian East itself: few are the voices who would counsel the Orthodox to seek wisdom in the traditions of the Christian West. The certainty of eternal opposi tion can be comforting: it is far easier to expatiate on the follies and errors of the West than to come to terms with the problems and failings of our 58 BYZANTINE READINGS OF AQUINAS . 59 own tradition, let alone seriously consider what might actually be learnt from the Christian West. With such musings in mind, I was delighted to come across a fifteenth century Byzantine canon in honor of Thomas Aquinas, hailing him as a light or star from the West. The canon is the work of Joseph, Bishop of Methone Oohn Plousiadenos) and praises Thomas in the best and most florid tradition of Byzantine hymnography. Here is a brief extract: As a light from the west he has illumined the Church of Christ the musical swan and subtle teacher, Thomas the all-blessed, Aquinas by name, to whom we, gathered together, cry: Hail, universal teacher!2 One particularly ingenious feature of this verse is the rendering of Aqui nas not by the more usual E~ l\1CtVa'tO'U or similar, but by 1\.rxtvo'U<;, a choice of term that conveys a sense of shrewdness, sagacity, and quickness of mind. This composition is not, of course, in liturgical use in the Ortho dox Church and, as the work of a unionist bishop, carries no credence in Orthodox circles. It stands, nonetheless, as a poignant witness to the pos sibility of a creative interaction between Latin and Byzantine cultural and theological traditions. We can be very precise about the date and even the hour at which Thomas emerged fully onto the Byzantine scene. It was at three o'clock in the afternoon of December 24, 1354, that the high imperial official Deme trios Kydones put the final touch to his translation of the Summa contra gentiles-a task that had taken a year to complete amid his many other pressing concerns.3 Why he felt compelled to be quite so precise in the tim ing he gives in his manuscript is something of a mystery: Perhaps he was indicating on the eve of the Nativity that this translation was itself a kind of incarnation; or perhaps he was simply practicing or showing off his Latin. But whatever the solution to that particular conundrum, it is clear that Thomas enjoyed a certain vogue in the last century of Byzantium, down to and beyond the cataclysmic fall of the City in 1453. Thomas's popularity was, however, emphatically not confined to a literary elite of anti-Palamite pro-unionists. What is perhaps most fascinating about the 60 MARCUS PLESTED Byzantine reception of Aquinas is the sheer diversity of those who took him seriously: both to learn from him and to critique him. Among his admirers we find unionists and anti-unionists, Palamites and anti-Palamites (and, indeed, any combination of those categories). All this runs somewhat counter to the deeply ingrained scholarly sup position that theological method lies at the heart, or at least close to the center, of the theological estrangement between East and West. In the twentieth century, theologians on both sides of the gulf have urged this position of methodological incompatibility. Martin Jugie and Gerhard Podskalsky pursue this line from a Western standpoint, both taking St. Gregory Palamas and his supporters as archetypal of the philosophical incoherence and theological muddle of the Christian East.4 We also fi nd shades of this approach in Rowan Williams's early critique of Palamas.5 Virtually all Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century have been content to accept the methodological gap between East and West, but with the sympathies reversed. Thus, the philosophical rationalism of the West is routinely contrasted with the experiential and mystical theology of the Christian East. This is true across the' board, pertaining both to the so-called neopatristic and Russian religious schools of Orthodox thought.6 In the latter category, Sergius Bulgakov takes the rationalism of the Latin West to be encapsulated in Aquinas's doctrine of transubstantiation. This doctrine he sees as accomplishing the enslavement of theology by phi losophy. It is a "rationalistic, groundless determination." Such unwonted probing of the mystery of transmutation is taken to be typical of medieval Western Scholasticism, in whose recesses lurked the "rationalism that was just beginning to raise its head and would lead to the humanistic Renais sance." The only way out of the stifling confines of such earthbound ratio nalism is a return to the Fathers: "By relying on the patristic doctrine, we can exit the scholastic labyrinth and go out into the open air."? Almost identical sentiments are expressed in the work of Vladimir Lossky, a theologian associated with the neopatristic revival of modern Or thodox theology and conventionally treated as something of an opposite to Bulgakov. For Lossky, it is not transubstantiation but rather the jilioque that most aptly represents the ills of Western theology with Aquinas, again, its principal proponent. The jilioque represents an unwarranted rational ization of the mystery of the Trinity, a rationalization that leads inexora bly to secularism.8 For Lossky, mystery and the experience of deification are the hallmarks of Orthodox theology, whereas Scholasticism has been BYZANTINE READINGS OF AQUINAS 61 fatally flawed in its elevation of reason and consequent loss of any real apo phaticism or truly participatory theology. Indeed, he doubts that between the positive rationalizing approach of the West and the negative mystical approach of the East there is really any common ground at all: "The dif ference between the two conceptions of the Trinity determines, on both sides, the whole character of theological thought. This is so to such an ex tent that it becomes difficult to apply, without equivocation, the same name of theology to these two different ways of dealing with divine realities."9 For Lossky, as for Bulgakov, only a creative rerum to the Fathers offers a real alternative to the sorry Western saga of decline and fall. This is also the position of Georges Florovsky and John Meyendorff, and has become virtually standard within modern Orthodox theology. Aquinas features prominently in these juxtapositions of East and West as the foremost exponent and champion of the Scholastic method, a method that is presented in modern Orthodox theology as antithetical to the ap proach of Gregory Palamas. In practice, Palam';ls has become for many Orthodox a kind of anti-Thomas or "our answer to Aquinas." This process is certainly to be seen not only as a rejoinder ro Jugie but also asa response to the success achieved by the creative retrieval of Thomas led by figures such as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. But it has not always been thus. When we turn back to the last years of the Byzantine Empire, we see that the situation is far more complex than such comforting dichotomies would allow. It is difficult not to read these years as one might a Greek tragedy. The recaprure of the Queen of Cities in 1261 and diplomatic triumphs such as the Sicilian Vespers were bright spots in an otherwise relentless story of political decline and fall, exacer bated by civil wars and bitter theological disputes. The empire was reduced to client status before the ever-growing might of the Ottomans. It is one of those extraordinary historical conjunctions that 1354-the year of Ky dones's translation-was also the date of the Ottoman capture of Gallip oli, which gave the Turks their first permanent foothold in Europe and thereby effectively sealed the fate of the embattled empire.IO For Christos Yannaras, Kydones's translation was quite as catastrophic in consequence as the loss of Gallipoli.

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