Is there something here that we miss, something we need to understand, in order to approach the Byzantine world? Many people, even post-liberation Greeks, admire the West for its creativity in science and technology, even in literature and arts. All-encompassing doubt, which is at the roots of science and of a literature that follows the most extreme and opposite ways, is impossible in a world of a concrete, revealed, personal and ascertained faith.
We can see this even in the difference between Plato and Aristotle, where the first fixes his mind to the other life, uses the mythical dimension in order to initiate his pupils to the mysteries of deification, etc. while the second, a marginal thinker in the course of Greek thinking, explores and questions everything leveled by the same scientific and lowly manner. West developed as it did, not only when it knew the ancient Greeks, who were always the familiar and desirable education of Byzantines, but when it lost its faith. The more atheist it became, the more its science developed, along with a literature penetrated by agony.
Therefore, compared with modern West, Byzantium presents the paradox of an immovable movement that lasted for over a millennium, because it lacked the existential agony which is present in meta-medieval atheist societies. Instead of that kind of creativity, Byzantium gave to its peoples a coherent society in a living meaning that they shared, explored, praised… This, on the other hand, did not permit an expanding-to-all-dimensions thinking, even to the dimension of quasi-thinking and quasi-literature of e.g. Marquis de Sade and the like, that the West produced and admires; it did not permit also totalitarian ideologies as is nazism and communism, ending to the present condition of raw consumerism and free-market cannibalism, started already in medieval West, not only in Genoa and Venice, but in all the Crusading countries which, instead of gaining the Holy Lands, ravaged the Byzantine.
Hermes
George, you have a duty to historical accuracy. Aristotle was not an abberation in Greek culture and Plato was not the mainstream. It was actually the other way around. I know this does not conform to the narrative you try to construct on this site, so as to make Orthodoxy seem like the natural successor to the ancient world, but it is more accurate.
Good site but try and make it better.
E-Blog
Here is (roughly) the line I have in mind: Homer, Hesiod, Presocratics, Tragedy and Comedy, Socrates, Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus, Proclus. If this is not the main Greek line, perhaps you could give me yours and correct me. Besides this, it is very well known that the life of ancient Greeks was formed around the Divine, whether the many Gods of the popular feeling or the One God of the philosophers. Aristotle is the only thinker that developed a science of ‘knowing everything’, from the growing of plants to the formation of clouds, preparing thus the modern western and un-greek notion of philosophy.
John
I am a regular visitor of Ellopos, and I can’t say that historical accuracy is a rare element here. Orthodoxy does not need anyone to ‘construct a narrative’ and make it seem a ‘natural successor to the ancient world’. The Greek people by themselves, who became Christians and remain until now, prove it adequately I think.
Costis
Hermes’ passion is not for historical accuracy, but against Christianity