ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is not to explore Byzantine philosophy and theology as two separate subjects. Rather I try to investigate the relation between the two, and in what sense and to what degree orthodox theology is philosophical. There are different views of what Byzantine philosophy is, or if there is any genuine philosophy at all in Byzantium. Isn’t Byzantine life dominated by theological concerns to such a degree that philosophy becomes a marginal phenomenon, relegated to some commentaries on Aristotle and pursued only by a few humanists? Such a point of view, of course, depends upon what one considers philosophy to be and how one considers the relation between philosophy and theology. I shall treat the question of the nature of philosophy before I enter into certain aspects of Byzantine theological thinking that seem to me to deserve being considered philosophical. Since there are, as a matter of fact, a lot of such aspects, I select a few basic ideas for closer inspection, such as the Byzantine understanding of the term philosophy, ideas of the nature of theological language and the notion of transcendence, and the doctrine of creation and cosmology.
