"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

writings rather than for composing treatises out of their own heads."

This text of Canon 19 of the Council in Trullo (692) reflects the
traditionalist and conservative character of the Byzantine, approaches to
theology and to exegesis in particular, and explains the presence in all
monastic and private libraries of Byzantium, of innumerable copies of
patristic catenae, and "chains" of authoritative interpretations of
particular Biblical texts expressing or claiming to express the continuity
of exegetical tradition.
Even though the consensus patrum reached by this method was in some
instances partial and artificial, the standard Church teaching came to rely
on it especially when it was sanctified by liturgical and hymnographical
usage. The Bible was always understood not simply as a source of revealed
doctrinal propositions or as a description of historical facts but as a
witness to a living Truth, which had become dynamically present in the
sacramental community of the New Testament Church. The veneration of the
Virgin, Mother of God, for example, was associated once and for all with a
typological interpretation of the Old Testament temple cult: the one who
carried God in her womb was the true "temple," the true "tabernacle," the
"candlestick," and God's final "abode." Thus, a Byzantine, who on the eve of
a Marian feast listened in church to a reading the Book of Proverbs about
"Wisdom building her house" (Pr 9:1 ff.) naturally and almost exclusively,
thought of the "Word becoming flesh" - i.e., finding His abode in the
Virgin. The identification of the Old Testament Wisdom with the Johannine
Logos had been taken for granted since the time of Origen, and no one would
have thought of challenging it. As early as the fourth century, when much of
the Arian debate centred on the famous text "The Lord created me at the
beginning of his works" (Pr 8:22), it was quite naturally interpreted by the
Arians in favour of their position. Athanasius and other members of the
Nicaean party declined to challenge the identification between Logos and
Wisdom preferring to find references to other texts supporting the uncreated
character of the Logos-Wisdom. No one questioned the established exegetical
consensus on the identification itself.
Much of the accepted Byzantine exegetical method had its origin in
Alexandrian tradition and its allegorism. St. Paul, in describing the story
of Abraham's two sons as an allegory of the two covenants (Ga 4:23), gave
Christian sanction to a non-literal method of interpreting Scripture known
as Midrash, which had developed among Palestinian rabbis in pre-Christian
times. Thus, in pushing the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture to
its very extremes, the Alexandrian Hellenistic milieu, common to Philo,
Clement, and Origen, could refer to the illustrious precedent of St. Paul
himself. Allegory was first of all consonant with the Hellenic and
especially the Platonic concern for eternal things as the opposite to
historical facts. The Greek intellectual's main difficulty in accepting
Christianity often lay in the absence of direct speculation on the
Unchangeable since his philosophical training had led him to associate
changeability with unreality. The allegorical method however allowed the
possibility of interpreting all concrete, changeable facts as symbols of
unchangeable realities. Thus, history itself was losing its centrality and
in extreme cases simply denied.