St. Gregory of Nazianzus - The Doctors of the Church with Dr. Matthew Bunson

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ธ.ค. 2024

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  • @n1ch0la5p
    @n1ch0la5p 7 ปีที่แล้ว +4

    To be fair to Saint Gregory the Theologian, the name theologian was not attributed to him because he "studied" God, but because God revealed Himself in him, and he professed God who was revealed in Him. The first one who was named "theologian" was John the Evangelist, and he hardly had the education and intellectual acumen to develop any form of systematic approach to theology. He was named theologian for one reason: his love for Christ allowed him to approach and express the mystery of incarnation of Christ as the Son and Logos of God. This does not mean that Peter or Paul or any of the other apostles were any less theologians than he. Following Holy Pentecost, and following that revelation to Paul on his way to Damascus, all were true theologians. John however differed because he expressed this common experience of revelation as the Son and Logos of God, Logos being more than Word, but also the raison d'être and principle of all Creation. The other evangelists and apostles knew Christ as the Son of God, and the Creator and the one Adam conversed with in Eden, but had never before expressed him in human terms as Logos.
    For the Church, Theology is not an academic exercise, and God cannot be fathomed or studied, since He exceeds human experience, and there are no paradigms that can be used to either imagine or express him. Gregory corrects Plato and writes, that some philosophers say that to conceive God is difficult, express him impossible, but according to him, contrarily, he says to express God is impossible, and to conceive Him even more impossible." (« Θεόν νοήσαι μεν χαλεπόν· φράσαι δε αδύνατον», ... Εγώ αντιθέτως λέγω· «φράσαι με αδύνατον, νοήσαι δε αδυνατότερον»). Therefore, God cannot be conceived by the human mind, and cannot be an object of study or scholarship. Not only God himself, in His being is unknowable, but even His very revelation to His creation, actualized (energeia) in His energies are also inconceivable. This is why the metaphysics of "proving" the existence of God was by a large a gross human misunderstanding. Today, no serious scientific mind accepts the art of metaphysics and its realm of immutables, nor Plato's realm of pre-existing ideas. All of this has been debunked by modern science, and as a result, all of theology produced in the Middle Ages collapsed along with it. So, the Fathers, who had essentially studied Greek philosophy under the best teachers of their times and rejected it as speculation. Some noted that the ancient philosophers were the inspiration of all heretics (ex. Eunomius, Apollinarius, etc.). They knew these systems thoroughly, and understood that biblical theology, revelation and anthropology were different from philosophical counterparts. For this reason, the use of philosophy as a gnosiological/epistemological method for Christian theology eclipsed for almost one millennium. Philosophy reemerged in the 9th C by men like Photius of Constantinople to be studied as a mode of intellectual development and a path towards developing the human mind and language. Never was philosophy or scholasticism considered as a method for the "development" of Christian theology. This was the understanding that glued together all of Christendom until at most the end of the 11th C.

    • @frankdsouza2425
      @frankdsouza2425 3 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      What a marvellously learned and informative comment. Thank you, Nicholas. Frank