ABSTRACT
“Theology – study of the highest problems in the universe by means of philosophical reason – is a specifically Greek creation. It is the loftiest and most daring venture of the intellect” ( Jaeger 1944: 298). Plato was the first great theologian, and he appears to be the first to use the term theologia – though the speculations of the Presocratic philosophers about the origin of everything were regarded as “theologizing” by Aristotle, who ranks their speculations with the cosmogonic notions of poets such as Hesiod and Homer, whom he called theologoi (“theologians”). For Plato, theology was the study of eternal realities, that is, the realm of the Forms or Ideas. For his pupil Aristotle, theology was the study of the highest form of reality, the “first substance,” which he seems to have regarded at different times as being the “unmoved mover” or as “being qua being.” He spoke of three theoretical, or speculative, ways of knowing: the mathematical, the physical, and the theological, theology being the “most honorable.” Such a notion of theology as the study, or contemplation (theoria), of the highest form of reality was a commonplace in the Hellenistic philosophy of the Roman world in which Christianity first emerged. But that was a world in which the quest for God had for many, besides Christians, a certain urgency: the realization of the highest contemplative exercise of the mind acquired a religious coloring. The “lower” studies of logic, ethics, and the understanding of the natural order became a sequence of preparatory training for communion with the divine, seen as fulfillment. These ideas very quickly found acceptance among Christian thinkers, so that in the third century Origen saw three stages in the Christian’s advance to communion with God, the ethical, the physical, and the “enoptic” (possibly “epoptic”) or visionary, a triad that found its classical form in the fourth century with Evagrius, the theorist of the monastic asceticism of the Egyptian desert: praktike (ascetic struggle), physike (contemplation of the natural order), and theologia (theology as contemplation of God). Such an understanding of theology as essentially prayer or contemplation, the highest exercise of the human mind or heart, the fruit of sustained ascetic struggle, quickly established itself in Geek Christianity, and is still fundamental in Orthodox theology. It is expressed succinctly in Evagrius’ oft-quoted assertion: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly, you will be a theologian” (On Prayer 60).
