For the Byzantines, the cause of evil can be neither God nor matter. The Neoplatonic doctrine for the evil as the privation of the good makes evil compatible with free will and providence but it does not solve the empirical problem. One solution is that God has his own unknown reasons to permit wrongdoing; this purposefulness of evil supports a ‘‘soul-making theodicy.’’ The choice of evil is a matter of free will, though it may be due to ignorance, weakness of will, pride, or disobedience. Even if the blame is put on devil, it is by his own will that he became the originator of the evil. Besides, a man who would never commit the evil in virtue of his nature is not free. So, the existence of evil is the proof of man’s freedom and a consequence of its use. Yet the threat to the existence of ethics is not removed if God’s foreknowledge makes all human actions predestinated and determined. Thinkers like Photios and Blemmydes believed that predestination (too close to the Greek concept of fate) is incompatible to the Christian conception of freedom. Many others, like Germanos, John of Damascus, Psellos, Metochites, and Scholarios, asserted that the belief in Providence does not contradict human free will; foreknowledge is not the cause of things to happen. So rational action and moral responsibility are possible in regard to ‘‘things that depend on us.’’ The issue was also present in the Platonists-Aristotelians controversy in the fifteenth century; thus Plethon argued for fate (hemarmene) and necessity, whereas Theodore Gazes demonstrated Plato and Aristotle in agreement.
We can say that for the Byzantines behavior is judged as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad,’’ but this evaluation is not the ultimate insofar as it is made on general ethical principles. Putting aside the emphasis on reasoning or experience, what counts is whether behavior, that is, human life, is grounded in ‘‘real life’’ (‘‘in Christ,’’ as Kabasilas would phrase it) or leads to (spiritual) death; hence the ‘‘ontological’’ character of Byzantine ethics. In a context that is characterized by theological traditionalism and philosophical antiquarianism, the emphasis would be on ascetic or on secular features, on rigorous canons or on their ‘‘economical’’ enforcement, on sin or on penitence. Goodness and holiness can be seen as two aspects of the human life that is being lived as a response to God’s ‘‘wishing-to-be-in-us’’ (Rowan Williams). And thus Byzantine ethics appears not so much as a theoretical discipline to be found in statements or arguments, but as a practice narrated in a variety of texts.
See also: > Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions > Ethics > Eustratios of Nicaea > Happiness > Maximus the Confessor > Michael of Ephesus > Nicomachean Ethics, Commentaries on Aristotle’s > Political Philosophy, Byzantine
World History
