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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 25 - Page 3 |
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Empirical and contemplative knowledge It is easy to assume that the idea of empirical knowledge is mutually exclusive to the concept of contemplative knowledge. In fact what Paul called the Wisdom of God is rather found where there is agreement between experiential observation and the special contemplative knowledge that develops alongside clear observation of this kind. In fact, a proper understanding of the way they thought then showed that the best of them did not argue by simple comparison of ideas, but found Its terminology was built on that of Saint Paul, whose basic terms were still being followed - and still understood - more than a thousand years later, for example by Gregory Palamas in his Triads. With the splitting of the Roman Empire towards the end of the first Christian Millennium, this Philosophy of God, the unique knowledge that had sustained the church for a millennium, changed its character. This point in history can be identified very precisely from Palamas' text. This happened first and more fully in Western Christendom. There, the Philosophy of God had never been widely established, despite the activities of key individuals such as Cassian. In the Eastern Empire, almost identical with the original Greek oikumene, it began to decline more slowly, in our time having gone almost entirely 'underground' but even now remaining fully functional as a true spiritual way, a last living remnant of the ancient Time of Saints. This point became a 'watershed' or point of major change in the form of our Christian civilisation. With an understanding of its nature, the modern saying that 'Christianity has been tried and failed' and its converse, that 'Christianity has never been tried and therefore has never failed, can be seen in a clearer light. It is now clear that Christianity was tried and succeeded in its first-millennium, but that outside the original 'inner circle' of the church the faith has effectively lost its way. In the earlier era of Christianity, the intellectual element in human thought and the intellectual faculty in the human psyche were treated differently from how they have been treated since then. With the barbarian conquest of the Western Roman Empire, there had begun an era in which the divisive elements of classical Hellenistic intellectualism once again entered the arena. NOTES: (1) Constantin Cavarnos; 'The Hellenic Christian Philosophical Tradition', Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, MA, 1989. p109. (2) Constantin Cavarnos; 'The Hellenic Christian Philosophical Tradition,' P21. |
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