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

patristic tradition will oppose to this idea the notion of the absolute
transcendence of God expressed in apophatic theology; but for Origen, the
monistic structure encompassing God and the "intellects" in one single
substance is broken only by the Fall. Misusing their "freedom," the
intellects committed the sin of revolting against God. Some sinned heavily
and became demons; others sinned less and became angels; others did still
less and became archangels. Thus, each received a condition proportionate to
its own sin. The remaining souls committed sins neither heavy enough to rank
with the demons nor light enough to become angels, and so it was that God
created the present world and link the soul with a body as a punishment.11
The present visible world, which includes man - understood as an intellect
transformed through sin into a body - is the result of the Fall; man's
ultimate destiny is dematerialization and a return to a union with God's
substance.
Evagrius Ponticus significantly developed this Origenistic system by
applying it to Christology. According to Evagrius, Jesus Christ was not the
Logos taking flesh but only an "intellect" that had not committed the
original sin and thus was not involved in the catastrophe of
materialization. He assumed a body in order to show the way toward a
restoration of man's original union with God.12 Around this teaching of
Evagrius', serious conflicts, which lasted until the reign of Justinian,
arose between feuding monastic parties. At the centre of these disturbances,
which was the Lavra of St. Sabbas in Palestine, some monks claimed to be
"equal to Christ" (isochristot) since in them through prayer and
contemplation there is the original relationship with God, which also
existed in Christ, had been restored. This extreme and obviously heretical
form of Origenism was condemned first by imperial decree, then by the
ecumenical council of 553. The writings of Origen and Evagrius were
destroyed and preserved only partially in Latin or Syrian translations or
protected by pseudonyms. Ancient Hellenism had to give way once again to the
basic principles of Biblical Christianity.

Pseudo-Dionysius.

The condemnation of Origen and Evagrius did not mean however the total
disappearance of the Platonic world-view from Byzantine Christianity. The
Hellenic concept of the world as "order" and "hierarchy," the strict
Platonic division between the "intelligible" and the "sensible" worlds, and
the Neo-Platonic grouping of beings into "triads" reappear in the famous
writings of a mysterious early-sixth-century author who wrote under the
pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite. The quasi-apostolic authority of this
unknown author went unchallenged in both East and West throughout the Middle
Ages.
Historians of Eastern Christian thought usually emphasize the role of
Dionysius - together with that of Gregory of Nyssa and of Maximus the
Confessor - in expounding apophatic theology. According to Vladimir Lossky,
Dionysius, far from being "a Platonist with a tinge of Christianity," is the
very opposite: "a Christian thinker disguised as a Neo-Platonist, a
theologian very much aware of his task, which was to conquer the ground held
by Neo-Platonism by becoming a master of its philosophical method."13 And,