Abstract

There is no agreement on whether metaphysics proper did exist in Byzantium or, if so, in what it consists. Religion and theology covered officially the realm previously occupied by philosophy. Still, some room was available for discussing some special questions, the principal among them being the ontological status of ‘‘universals,’’ the structure of the divine being and the way the sensible beings derive their existence and qualities from the first principle. Many Byzantines from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, posing themselves in the Platonic tradition, seem to elaborate Ammonius’ doctrine of ‘‘universals,’’ whereas few subscribed to a less ‘‘realist’’ theory. An extra-realist theory was propounded in the first half of the fourteenth century by Gregory Palamas, who projected the multiplicity of the created beings to an inferior divine level, that is, to God’s ‘‘energies’’ construed as naturally emanating from God’s transcendental ‘‘essence.’’ Palamites in the latter half of the fourteenth century polished the harshness of this distinction by qualifying that it is “conceptual,” that is, points just to different aspects of a single being, whereas anti-Palamites argued against any sort of real distinction between God’s essence and acts. In the first half of the fifteenth century, a metaphysical quarrel between Scholarios’ Thomism and Plethon’s antiChristian Platonism focused on whether things derive hierarchically from each other (Plethon) or each is created directly from God and used by Him as a ‘‘causa proxima’’ of this or that fact. To get a better picture of metaphysics in Byzantium, a lot of work has still to be done.