John Philoponus and Maximus the Confessor at the Crossroads of Philosophical and Theological Thought in Late Antiquity*

Grigory Benevich Saint-Petersburg [email protected]

JOHN PHILOPONUS AND MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR AT THE CROSSROADS OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT IN LATE ANTIQUITY*

The article deals with the approaches to philosophy and to theology that were demonstrated by John Philoponus (6th AD) and by Maximus the Confessor (7th AD) during their lives. Periodization of their creative activity is given and some parallels in their lives are shown to exist in spite of all their diff erences. This comparison of their respective lives and approaches to some important themes of philosophy and theology allows clarifi cation of a character of appropriation and usage of philosophy during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Mid- dle Ages. Several similarities and diff erences in the teaching of these thinkers are examined. These include particularly the theory of logoi; Christological and Trinitarian teaching; some aspects of anthropol- ogy (body-soul relations and embryology); a itude to Neoplatonism. Philoponus’ “projects” on the Christianization of philosophy and the philosophisation of Christianity are compared to Maximus’s “project” on Christian philosophy with the teaching of deifi cation in its center. John Philoponus (c. AD. 490 to 570s) and Maximus the Confessor (c. AD. 580 – 13 August 662) are two of the most important Christian philosophers and thinkers of the fi rst half of the 6th and the fi rst half of the 7th century respectively in the Roman-Byzantine Empire. However, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that their heritage received a proper evaluation and that they are being systematically studied. Following the approach of Basil Lurié in his “History of the

(*) I would like to express my gratitude to the program in Hellenic Stud- ies at Princeton University for its support of my research and to Professors Peter Brown and Christian Wildberg for their lively discussions on the ﬁ rst dra of this article.

102 Grigory Benevich 103

Byzantine Philosophy”,1 I believe that it is most fruitful for the study of the history of philosophy in Byzantium during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages to compare some important is- sues in the teaching of these thinkers in their approaches to philosophy and theology. Such a comparison is justifi ed because Philoponus was one of the most outstanding philosophers and scholars who a empted the Christianization of Ancient Greek philosophy, while Maximus the Confessor is venerated as one the most important theologians of the 7th century who greatly infl uenced Late Byzantine theology. It is even more interesting to compare these two great fi gures if one bears in mind that, at the end of a life of active participation in Christological controversies, although in diff erent ways, each was marginalized by the prevailing ideologues. Philoponus was a thinker whose philosoph- ically grounded doctrine was treated as a heresy by the majority of his contemporaries. Maximus was persecuted and died as a confessor. In Philoponus, we meet an intellectual giant; whereas in Maximus we meet a saint, who also happened to be a philosopher.

John Philoponus

In modern scholarship a periodization of Philoponus’ life has been made by Koenraad Verrycken.2 He drew a sharp distinction between the purely philosophical (non-Christian) and the “Christian” periods of Philoponus’ biography. However, Clemens Scholten challenged Ver- rycken by expressing a unitary view of Piloponus’ creative activity.3 Verrycken defended his bipartite schema in his review of Scholten.4 Some of Verrycken’s ideas were also criticized by Christian Wildberg.5 However, Wildberg’s criticism was centered on Verrycken’s explana- tion of Philoponus’ transition from one period to another, not his peri-

(1) See В. М. ЛУРЬЕ, История византийской философии. Формативный период (Санкт-Петербург: Axiôma, 2006) 211ff . (2) See K. Verrycken, The development of Philoponus’ thought and its chronology, in: R. R. K. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed. The Ancient Com- mentators and Their Infl uence (London: Duckworth, 1990) 233–274. (3) See C. Scholten, Antike Naturphilosophie und christliche Kosmologie in der Schri “De Opifi cio Mundi” des Johannes Philoponos (Berlin—New York: Wal- ter de Gruyter, 1996) (PTS, 45) 125–132. (4) In: Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 41 (1998) 256–259. (5) See C. Wildberg, Impetus Theory and the Hermeneutics of Science in Simplicius and Philoponus, Hyperboreus 5 (1999) 107–124.