The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics: Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus

by Johannes Zachhuber

It has rarely been recognized that the Christian writers of the first millennium pursued an ambitious and exciting philosophical project alongside their engagement in the doctrinal controversies of their age. The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics offers, for the first time, a full analysis of this Patristic philosophy. It shows how it took its distinctive shape in the late fourth century and gives an account of its subsequent development until the time of John of Damascus.

The book falls into three main parts. The first starts with an analysis of the philosophical project underlying the teaching of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. This philosophy, arguably the first distinctively Christian theory of being, soon became near-universally shared in Eastern Christianity. Just a few decades after the Cappadocians, all sides in the early Christological controversy took its fundamental tenets for granted. Its application to the Christological problem thus appeared inevitable. Yet it created substantial conceptual problems.

Parts two and three describe in detail how these problems led to a series of increasingly radical modifications of the Cappadocian philosophy. In part two, Zachhuber explores the miaphysite opponents of the Council of Chalcedon, while in part three he discusses the defenders of the Council from the early sixth to the eighth century. Through this overview, the book reveals this period as one of remarkable philosophical creativity, fecundity, and innovation.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, History, Christianity, Christian

370 pages, Hardcover

Published July 30, 2020

Reviews

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an intense and detailed examination of the development of Christian theology between the Cappadocian Fathers and John of Damascus. This was a period that the resolution of Trinitarian issues and rise and fall of Christological issues. The author, Johannes Zachhuber, is a professor of Theology at Oxford, who brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and the philosophical issues into the discussion. Along the way, he introduces us to the theological players, such as Gregory of Nyssa. John the Grammarian, Severus of Antioch (St. Severus for the Monophysites), and John of Damascus (“the Damascene”) in a way that give reality to people who are either unknown or only vaguely known.

This is not a work for the faint-hearted. Having some background in Aristotelian metaphysics is essential, and, even then, for amateurs like myself, the fine distinctions between nature, physis, ousia, enhypostaton, prosopon, hypostasis, idiotes, and other concepts is taxing. However, since I approached this mostly as history, I found the discussion interesting. This review will favor that perspective. There are other reviews of the text that explain the philosophical elements that are vague to me. https://www.academia.edu/101676467/Re...

Zachhuber starts with Cappadocian Fathers, the brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory, and their friend, Gegory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocians were active in the late Fourth Century. Basil died on January 1, 379. His work was carried on by his brother and friend.

The issue for the Cappadocians was the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity. Previous efforts at this had proven problematic. Origen was very influential but offered an explanation that lessened the Son:

Origen argued for a slight but important distinction between the two divine persons: the Father, he suggested, was God in the fullest and most proper sense of the word; the source of all being including the Son.32 The Son thus received his divinity by derivation from that source. He was god, but not ‘the’ God. He was not a rival or competitor of the Father. He was not, for example, entirely simple without any participation in the plurality of the created world which explains why he, not the Father, became directly involved in salvation history and, specifically, the Incarnation.

Zachhuber, Johannes. The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics: Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus (p. 21). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Zachhuber notes that the “crucial ontological subordination of the Son to the father functioned as a door opener to more radical Arian positions.” After the Council of Nicea (325 AD), Origen’s explanation was seen as incompatible with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy adopted the Athanasian position that the Father and the Son were Homooousias, i.e. of the same substance. The opposition position proposed by Arius was “Homoiousias,” meaning “of a similar substance.” Homoiousians appealed to the authority of Origen, but the authority of Origen was something that the orthodox tradition did not want to entirely repudiate.


This is a long review. Please visit my Medium page for the rest of the review.

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[John Agar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zachhuber’s stated contention is that “the emerging intellectual culture of late ancient Christianity can be conceptualized as a kind of philosophy within the late ancient context of a plurality of philosophical schools. Its relationship to the philosophies of Platonism or Stoicism will then appear analogous to the one those schools had amongst each other.” Consequently, Christianity shouldn’t be seen as an “anti-philosophical force” and hellenization should not be seen as “a betrayal of the purity of the gospel.” (P. 2) Unfortunately, nothing in Zachhuber’s book is even relevant to these conclusions. He provides an account of churchmen’s attempts to resolve certain issues in Christian theology; nothing he writes has anything to do with ancient metaphysics.
Zacchuber’s project is two-fold. First, he discusses the more or less final articulation of the trinity at the Council of Constantinople in 381. This adopted theological distinctions perfected by the Cappadocian Fathers. Zachhuber briefly summarizes the role of Origen in introducing the term hypostasis, and of the Council of Nicaea in laying out the basic framework of the trinitarian claim. This discussion is difficult to follow, but Zachhubr seems to say that in the mid fourth century Christians did not make a clear distinction between hypostasis and ousia. Eventually, “influential Eastern bishops” began objecting to the “Nicene phrase homoousios on the grounds that it implied complete ontological co-ordination of Father and Son.” (P. 22) Basil of Caesarea, the oldest of the three Cappadocians and theologically “the natural heir to Athanasius,” laid out “the doctrinal outlines of what became known as the Cappadocian settlement underwriting the eventual victory of Nicene Christianity.” (P. 18) But Basil died in 379, two years before the Council of Constinople.(P. 18) “With his death, both Gregories [Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen] emerge from this shadow and immediately become recognizable as major intellectuals and church leaders in their own right with unparalleled influence” in the period up and including the great Council.
Having set the stage, Zachhuber outlines various quibbles, but finally reports that the trinitarian view which the Cappadocians propounded and the Council of Constantinople adopted asserted that the persons in the trinity were all of the same essence but distinguished as separate hypostases. The operative metaphor was the distinction between generic unity and individuality within the genre. Thus ”Universal names, such as ‘man’ apply to the concrete universal, the totality of all human individuals, due to their ‘indefinite meaning’ while proper names indicate individuals in an unequivocal way. At the same time, universal terms conjure up a set of properties shared equally by all those particulars who are members of the same class, whereas proper names are connected with a set of idiomata that appertain to one individual only.” (Pp. 61-62) Universal names are in effect ousia, the single substance in which the hypostases of the three persons subsist.
“This, in nuce, is the Cappadocian philosophy that was to become the classical theory of Eastern Christian thought.” (P. 62)
It is obvious but nonetheless bears saying that there is absolutely nothing philosophical in this attempt to explain the trinity. Zachhuber says that the Cappodocians cribbed the distinction between the universal and the particular from Aristotle. But that is hardly a contribution to philosophy. This is especially true for two reasons.
To begin with, it could not have been less clear in 381 than it is today that the the trinity simply doesn’t map on to the metaphor of “man” as a universal term encompassing individual “men.” Gregory of Nyssa fully embraces this metaphor in his famous pamphlet To Ablabius.
“It is the notion of ‘hypostases’ that accords to each separation by means of the
properties that are seen in them, and this also appears in number as a composition. Nature, however, is one, unified with itself and a precisely undivided
monad, not increased through addition nor decreased through subtraction, but
in what it is it is one and remains one even though it appears in a multitude. It is
indivisible, continuous, and complete and not divided alongside the particulars
that participate in it. And just as a people, a community, an army, and an
assembly is always said in the singular, but each is known in the plural, so
according to the more precise formula, ‘man’ is properly said as one, even though
those who are shown in the same nature are a multitude.” (P. 64)
Gregory’s comparison of the trinity to armies and individuals is “jarring,” Zachhuber says, but “the point the Cappadocian seeks to make lies precisely in this combination.” (Id.) It doesn’t work.
This metaphor, to the extent it reflects a usage of Aristotelian terms, isn’t even good Aristotelian philosophy. As Zachhuber says, the metaphor can be interpreted in two ways: The hypostasis is universal (ousia) only qua realized in concrete instantiations. Or the hypostatis is a “bundle of generic properties characteristic of the universal nature and, as such, identical in all members of the species even when observed in the individual.” Gregory’s formulation embraces the second alternative. But, as Simplicius reports, Aristotelian commentators accepted the first approach. That approach is “not compatible with the kind of realism evidently espoused by Gregory of Nyssa because it assumes that the universal is modified in its individuations: Peter’s humanity, we might say, is really his and not Paul’s. Only as mentally abstracted from its instantiations can the universal, in this theory, really be one.”
Finally, the above problems are merely symptomatic of the fact that the trinity is a contradiction in terms — three personae are identical and different. Edward Wightman, the last Englishman burned at the stake for heresy, is reputed to have said that he could no more believe in the trinity than in a square circle. In fact, no one has ever explained the trinity any better than a square circle. At the beginning of the last century, Thomas Whittaker wrote of Origen — who, as noted, is Zachhuber’s point of departure in his narrative — that, “in the kingdom of thought the least among the Greek philosophers is greater than Origen.” This is even truer of the “philosophers” Zachhuber discusses — and Zachhuber should have acknowledged this.
The second part of the book discusses Christological disputes that came to the fore in the wake of the Council of Constantinople. As Zachhuber explains, the trinitarian settlement in Constantinople focused on God’s unity notwithstanding a “plurality of hypostases.” In contrast, explaining the incarnation “depended on a viable theory of the individual.” “By adopting the term hypostasis for the saviour’s personal individuality and by stipulating that his human nature stood in the same relation of consubstantiality to the rest of humankind as his divine nature stood with the other Trinitarian Persons, fifth-century Christianity set up Christology as a conceptual challenge almost exactly contrary to that of Trinitarianism.” (P. 11)
I pass on summarizing this.
Throughout the book Zachhuber writing is dull and sometimes quite awkward.

[Nathan Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well-executed book, though it does leave you with the impression that Trinitarian theology is all about universals and particulars rather than the relationship of filial devotion between Jesus and the Father that we actually find in the Gospels. Read it, but then go read the Bible and Origen.