Classical & Byzantine Christian Notions of the Self
& Their Significance Today
J A McGuckin.
A Lecture Offered to the 'Andrei Saguna' Faculty of Theology at the 'Lucian Blaga'
University of Sibiu, Romania, On the Occasion of the Bestowal
of a Doctorate Honoris Causa. Nov. 13th 2014.
Published in: In: Patristic Theology. vol.1. 2024. pp. 6–21.(McMasters University, Center for Patristics & Early Christianity. Hamilton ON).
We may tend to think today that the concept of the human person (and here I mean the term philosophically, the idea of spiritual subjectivity), is the unassailable focus of our Christian culture, the locus of some of our highest religious and intellective ideals, and the last bastion of the concept of social and political freedom. Even if we are aware of the revisioning of ideas of self that goes on apace in the worlds of cyber science, often called 'Artificial Intelligence', we might think that this cannot assail the primacy of the place the idea has in our culture. But the same changes are also going on with great energy in the field of contemporary Neuro-science. Here, new empirical understandings of the complexities of the brain have newly raised old questions about identity and personhood, once approached in the light of metaphysics and philosophy.
The movement around personality and personhood is not entirely in the direction of materialist reductionism however. The old arms-length distance that science formerly employed, to hold away the 'suspicious' trades of the theologian and philosopher, have begun to be eroded more rapidly in this era than at any other time since the 16th century. And this is something of a problem, because formative training in the long ages of the great divorce we have witnessed between arts and sciences, have rendered theologians unskilled in scientific method, and produced generations of scientists who are rank amateurs in terms of philosophy: and yet who now need philosophical rigour to advance beyond the frontier of the investigation of the brain's chemo-electrical synaptic functioning, so as to arrive at significant statements about personhood beyond the simple mapping of personality disorders. The same applies equally for physicists, to allow them to go beyond the long accepted impasse of two systems for explaining cosmological rule-ordering, so as to approach the single pressing question of the disparities of cosmic existence, one that might offer a coherently comprehensive account of what it is that is: which is, I suggest, the provoker of that other great metaphysical question which never goes away: why it is that anything is.
So, unquestionably we need today to learn new sets of languages. One common term of semantic that lies in our midst: a security checkpoint, as it were, between the armed camps of humanities and sciences; between religion and secularism; between philos-ophy and metaphysics; between the microcosm and the macrocosm; is the concept of the person.
This concept, we may think, is so central to all European thought, so basic to an understanding of everything significant, that we may even be tempted to take it for granted. We ought not to make that mistake. For most of the history of the idea Personhood was not significant at all as a substantive; certainly not in the worlds of the great antique religious systems . And in those systems of religion and philosophy that still follow the archaic matrices, such as Hinduism, or Buddhism, this is still the case. Far from being a substantive, personhood is approached at best as an accidental: at worst as a deceit - Maya that illusion of personal identity that prevents the seeker after truth from recognising the structures of reality.
In the pre-Christian classical systems of cosmology which emphasized cyclical schemes of coming to being, and coming into dissolution, personhood was an accidental category, and so it occupies a place in Aristotle's scheme of the natural order. One cannot derive a sure knowledge of the genus by application of so peripheral a notion as the individual (to idion). One needs to make an analysis of the ethos of the whole nature (ousia) by reference to its teleotic drive. The telos or the end goal of the nature, seen as an enclosed and driven system, renders the fractured approach of personalist understandings wholly irrelevant. Prosopon, the Greek word for 'person' (a thing which misleads so many readers of text books today), does not mean person in our sense of discrete subjective consciousness, it simply refers to an existent specimen: to idion. The semantic itself gives the game away for prosopon derives from the Greek for actor's megaphone: the mask or 'face' the classical actor wore on stage (with fixed clichéd aspects of happiness or sorrow or fear) to serve as an amplification system for the audience. Prosopon was itself a cliché of singularity not a mark of individuation. Persona is simply the Latin synonym: per sonare meaning literally an actor's speaking tube.
It was the Christians, however, who brought this idea of the centrality of personhood, the new concept of the substantive nature of the person, to the fore in human culture and thought, and it was Christians who in the age of Byzantium supplied the new and refined semantic for one of the greatest advances in thought about human consciousness that history records. Prosopon became Hypostasis. It was Christological and Trinitarian doctrine that drove this process on. I would like to focus on this in the first part of today's lecture in order to draw some conclusions about what this might suggest to us in an age when the very place of personhood in centre stage on world philosophy and science is being attacked by twin forces of dissolution: first of all the negative energy of a culture no longer understanding the value-systems society holds up for itself (this was why classical antiquity, rooted in a mythical system of values, fell before Christian logic), and secondly the darker force of mechanisation of the human spirit that seeks to reduce those unexpected and often uncontrollable brilliances of human individual spiritedness into a system that can depersonalize sufficiently, so as to enable collect-ivization and thus control. We have lived through a so-called 'great age' in the last two centuries – not so much the great age of empire (as they fell too frequently in the course of time for that) but rather the so-called great age of Totalitarian Collectivisation. These twin forces of value dissolution, and mechanized collectivism, operate relentlessly in human society: sometimes taking on a savage and dark form and oppressing gener-ations at a time, when the energy of a totalitarian leader puts collective power to work subjugating persons; but sometimes also in eras of great social 'drift' when the laziness of a society neglects its philosophical axioms, grows apart from or distant to them, and allows the great inner core of notions such as freedom and philanthropy, to corrode, and give ground before the growth of non personal philosophies. One case in point is western capitalism in a global environment: that much vaunted 'defender' of the rights of individual persons, which has raised consciousness in the developed West to such a pitch (a point of narcissism one might even say) but clearly at the cost of enslaving and silencing countless hundreds of thousands of others, who work in the sweat shops of the world unseen and unheard. Ours is the age, the third in line after imperial Rome, and then Colonial America, when slavery has been reinvented. It is not the résumé we might expect for our contemporary civilisation, to be sure, but global slavery has been estimated in our time as embracing a minimum of 10, and a possible upper figure of 30, million people on the face of the earth in conditions of true enslavement.
If Christians first brought the notion of personhood as a substantive to the world's agenda, we might be in a position to repair the notion in a time when it is clearly being damaged by those who either do not understand its universality (and dismiss the rights of persons), or those who do not seem to understand its function as a term of communion (and so elevate rights of persons as an agenda separated from broader terms of moral culture). Let me base these statements by looking first into Platonic, then Aristotelian, then Byzantine Christian philosophies of personhood, for it is my thesis that the Christian personalism of the Byzantines, their synthesizing response to the work of the classical philosophers, is that which today still underpins our Orthodox conception of transfigured humanity, and society as communion, which many parts of Western culture appear to have lost sight of, by having lost the intellectual premisses out of which the philosophy of personhood first arose. This happened in four acts: two Platonic iterations, one Aristotelian, and an overarching Byzantine Christian synthesis.
Briefly put the force of the concept of individuation for the Platonic system is that it is a process of the ascent of the psyche to the Ideal, an epistemic journey, which is its liberation and return to primary form. In the Aristotelian system the idea of individual consciousness is used a process of moral expression. It is the emergence of the individual as free agent. In the late revisions of both these Greek schools which we now call Neoplatonism, reflection on individuation is: a process of inward focus for connection to the intelligible realities that signal the mystical connection of the individual to the Supreme Nous. Finally, the Christian Fathers synthesized this collective material and subordinated it to a fundamental soteriological principle of the divine incarnation transfiguring the bondedness of human reality (the mortal ousia) into a liberative Epektasis, a bounded infinity of the mortal rendered immortal by entering into the fathomless reality of communion with the infinite God.
Individuation in Pre-Christian Greek Thought
The Platonic school is fundamentally responsible for the success of that all pervasive image of the self as the ‘true inner reality’: a private and clarified place where the self emerges and the boundaries of the divine and human become to some degree tangential. In the Phaedo Plato considers what is meant by the immortality of the soul. For him, the soul has a certain kinship with that which is everlasting, immortal, unchanging. It has the quality of an Ideal Form. Philosophical enquiry into the soul, and other aspects of the good life, is the empirical praxis of immortality: such enquiry strengthens the bond between the soul and the Ideal Forms with which it has kinship. In Homeric writing the Soul or Psyche had been merely a fluttering and useless ‘shade’. For Plato, however, it is the adamantine core which frees itself from material limitation. To know the soul one must first know the Ideal Form. The soul fell from the Ideal Forms and was imprisoned in material sensible reality. There is, thus, an important division between Intelligible and Sensible; Ideal Form and material Deformation; Being and Becoming. True wisdom is gained by recollection of the knowledge that the soul possessed before its material decline. The way to this wisdom is by searching and true perception. This cannot be achieved if one already thinks one possesses a true pers-pective – a common illusion that suffocates humanity (his famous analogy of the prisoners in the cave).
Using Socrates as an ideal teacher Plato begins with Aporia – puzzlement – the systematic destruction of existing false premises to arrive, by reduction and denial of false ideas , at a true conception (orthos logos, or orthodoxia). The dialogue Meno pursues this track in seeking to define Virtue. The student of philosophy who begins to see, is one who can eventually join with Socrates in setting puzzling questions himself –applying the aporetic method as a self-directed means of truth finding. We already have the answer to what we seek: we need to stimulate the awareness of the Ideal Forms by Recollection. For this he uses the verb En-Einai; a ‘being in’ , or a ‘being possible’. The point of the word play is that knowledge is possible for us because it is already in us. The dawning insight to which this reflective scrutiny leads us is a cardinal moment in philosophy and ethic, and charts the emergence of Self-knowledge.
Plotinos, the greatest of the Neo Platonic teachers, later married Platonist theories of divine intelligible reality with the Stoic moral motive of the inward turning to the life of the soul, and thereby transformed Platonic metaphysics into a viable religious system that had immense attraction for Christians. For Plotinos, the archetypal model of the eye of the soul is the Supreme Nous, or The One, that divine reality which is the centre of all Existence, the Unity which all multiplicity innately yearns for. The World-Soul, or Logos mediator of this unity to the disparate cosmos, revolves around this supreme Light like a satellite moon. Because of this, individual souls (which are akin to Logos) also revolve around the light in their individual existences, but are ambivalently capable of orientating towards that light or facing outward into the darkness of non-intelligible reality. If the soul turns towards the light, it turns inward by a natural kinetic energy to noetic awareness. The awareness grows, for the élite, to the point of noetic union – or the mystical apprehension of reality as 'One beyond the Many'. Here, late Platonic metaphysic has become close to being a spiritual religion . St. Gregory the Theologian is much affected by this model, whereas his mentor, Origen of Alexandria, was much closer to the older ‘ascentive epistemic' imagery of Plato. Both Origen and Gregory, however, differ considerably from their Platonic sources, in the way that both of them constantly evoke the biblical idea of Transfiguration (Metamorphosis) as a way of explaining the human Telos . For both, the Logos is personified and personifying in a way that for Plotinos it is not.
Aristotelian Presuppositions
Aristotle, in seeking to approach the definition of reality from a different perspective to the intellective (noetic/spiritual) idealism of Plato, marked a new beginning for reflective thought on the nature of the individual. The Platonic system left more than a large question-mark hanging over the very validity, or at least utility, of the scrutiny of contemporary existential forms (the sensible/sensory domain which was de facto illusory). For Plato there was the perennial danger of mistaking the ‘shadow on the wall’ of the cave, for a perception into Ideal Form. With Aristotle, the concept of the Class or Nature has become a dominant aspect of his taxonomy of existence. For him, it is the nature which is essential, and the individual which manifests it, or constitutes it ‘practically’. The universal form, for Aristotle, was located within the collective character of the genus. There was a substantial form (ousia) capable of empirical description. The close observation of the individual specimen, therefore, a serious empirical scrutiny, leads to the amassing of a clear understanding both of the generic class and the characteristics (accidents, idiomata) of the individual manifestation of that genus.
The key to this process of analysis of the substantial form was the study of genesis: that is the manner in which a life form evolves, sets into motion its own peculiar and characteristic activities, unfolds towards its natural telos (goal). The true definition of a thing is that which it is when it has attained the sum of its generic potential. This gave rise to a dynamic sense of nature as a ‘lived out process’. For Aristotle energeia is that which moves the life form from potentiality to the perfected realisation of its essence. For a human the bios, the way a person directs the life force, is critically important. It is the very unfolding of the nature, not merely a product of it. Even in God the essence is an energy; an actus purus. This was to have an immense impact on Latin Medieval Christian thought, especially that of the great scholastic Thomas Aquinas. In the case of humanity, this process is the manner in which individuals, or ‘primary substances’, unfold their life-force teleologically in the course of a life’s activities, choices, and attainments: a teleological process which is the acquisition of human nature in the particular case of each individual – an arrival at human nature which is only potentially present in individual members of the species from birth. It is from such arguments about teleology that, for example, Aristotle does not consider young people capable of moral identity – a position which was to be highly influential on Christian ascetics, and their doctrine of the passions and apatheia.
In this system, the acquiring of a form of natural stasis – stability, – is quintessential to the emerging of true identity. In antique-biographical terms the chief item of importance is the cataloguing of the accurate ‘empirical moment’ – that time and place and condition in which the Humanum has finally emerged. Childhood and Old Age are not key areas of the Aristotelian reality of the Person as being chiefly conditioned by pupae-like emergence, or senile decadence. This ‘attained’ humanity is characterised as the ethos of a person. Ethos is a fundamental concept for Aristotle’s thought, and it is a sought-after goal of much ancient autobiographical writing: seen as the depicting of the ethos of the self . Aristotle’s ideas were significant for drawing a strong connection in Antiquity between a close psychological scrutiny, and a programme for Moral Paideia (educational philosophy). Philosophy in this genre was fundamental for defining anthropology and for attaining the goal of the telos of the humanum.
Christian Configurations of the Self
Clearly then, the purpose of Late Antique philosophy, pagan or Christian, in this era (its skopos) was to embrace the issue of transcendentals. The Christians, among other schools of the time of Second Sophistic, had a lively interest in matters of religious philosophy that had been left unresolved by the ancient greats. A prime example of this was Plato’s theory of the soul’s nature, and the shape of its ascent. In terms of the former, Plato had left the philosophical tradition a dominant image of the Soul being somehow like a Charioteer; and the way one resolves the problem of the chariot’s direction, being a exemplum of the good life. The Soul-chariot is driven by two horses, one black (standing for the appetitive part of the soul epithymitikon), one white (standing for the irascible part of the soul, to thymikon). The Charioteer stands for the reasoning faculty in a human (to logistikon) who struggles to control the forces of the soul, especially the more unman-ageable black steed. This appetitive soul is the part of human experience and conscious-ness driven by instinct, desire, and self-reference. The irascible soul is that which seeks nobler and more elevated forms in life. The principle of Reason, or adjudication, tries to mediate between the two struggling ‘drives’ that make up the Psyche. It is a very lively image that held a great sway. It proposes the philosophical life as quintessentially the one which seeks to integrate human faculties, in a moral habituation that privileges higher things over base instincts: exemplifying the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Now the Byzantine Christians, in the synthetic tradition of the Cappadocian Fathers' muted Origenianism, developed the Platonic psychology in a very distinct way that gave birth in effect to a new form of philosophical anthropology. Into Plato's strongly dyadic view (two horses pulling differently under the attempted mastery of the mind) they introduced more of a genuinely triadic structure to rework from its foundations the doctrine of the soul (Psyche). While the Apostle Paul often spoke of the binary war of flesh and spirit (sarx, pneuma), it was equally noticeable to the Fathers how the New Testament tended to address the issue of the constitution of the Human as a triadic correlation of Body, Soul and Spirit. This triad was brought into dialogue with Platonic 'Psychology' by the Fathers, beginning with Origen, so that the core of the human consciousness now became the lower soul (epithymitikon), the higher soul (thymikon) and the Spiritual Intelligence (Nous). Writers of the Origenian intellectual tradition, notably Gregory the Theologian, Evagrius Pontike, Maximus the Confessor, Dionysios the Areopagite, and Elias Ekdikos (along with many other monastic theorists) applied this doctrine pervasively in the Byzantine world’s ascetical theory of mystical contemplation. St. Gregory the Theologian habitually calls Christianity in general, and the ascetical life in particular: 'Our philosophy.'
Among the Fathers, the lower soul was seen to be the body consciousness attuned to instinctive life. It had a range of needs and desires (fight/flight/acquisition) dominated by material concerns. It had also a range of perceptions: moving from simple material awarenesses (hunger, fear) to more elevated sensibilities (empathy, affection). At the top range of the lower soul’s skopos, it overlapped with the lower range of the middle soul. The middle soul represented a more emotive and more abstracted range of consciousness (dealing in perceptions and deductions and higher questions of motivation) but it was still intimately linked with its lower neighbour: sometimes guiding it; sometimes being led by it. At the middle soul’s upper range, however, it was akin to its next higher neighbour in the triad – what the Byzantines addressed as the highest soul: the Nous. But the Nous did not simply mean intelligence or reason (logos); that form of human ratiocination was seen to reside usually in the upper regions of the middle soul. Nous was particularly and distinctively that aspect of graced awareness that constituted a human being most distinctively, and differently from all other created species. For the Byzantine ascetical philosophers it was the locus of the Divine Image in humankind. In its lower range the Nous would process reflection and thinking; while in its higher ranges it would process transcendental awareness, and be the place where the consciousness of the divine image within human consciousness took place; and where awareness of God’s descent by grace into humanity also registered. The Byzantine philosophers thus proposed Nous as the synthetic term covering Logos and Pneuma. This reworking of Platonic psychology by the Byzantines into this triadic and flexible view of anthropological constitution, as a system of correlated influences and mediations, gave great dynamism to a new view of human nature, and provided a transcendentalism which Plato’s theory lacked. Plato had wished to resolve the correlation (to syntheton) of soul and body by the intellective dismissal and eventual physical dissolution of the body. By contrast, this elevation of the material form to graced sacramental stature is an important and lasting contribution of Christian Greek philosophy to the importance of the empirical process; chiefly made by the 4th and 5th century Greek Fathers, who thus stand out as the first wave of significant Byzantine philosophers; though it is a view that is deepened by the 6th to 10th century ascetical writers. Empiricism in their hands, however, is not rendered into material reductionism, but into a vision of the human person as transcendental process of transfiguration .
Following from this, the next major achievement of Byzantine patristic philosophy was the doctrine of personhood. In Classical Hellenistic thought, following Aristotle’s lead, the concept of the person means to idion: something individual, particular, proper; and accordingly eccentric. For Aristotle, we may recall, the individual could not serve as the exemplar of true study: it had to be the species, the collective. The individual was the domain of the eccentric, the peripheral. Once again the Greek Fathers radically changed this widespread view and by dint of their relentless focus on matters Christological and Trinitarian (in a wide arc of authors taking one another forward, from Origen, through Athanasius and Gregory the Theologian, to Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) they brought forward the notion (and semantic) of personhood (hypostasis) to the status of a substantive primary category (hypostasis semantically means ‘a substantive’). Allying it with their doctrine of the human soul, and attributing the possession of a human soul to the divine Logos made flesh in the God Man, whose incarnation was thereby a paradigm of the deified regeneration of the human race (palingennesia, theiosis), the Greek Fathers asserted that the Human person was a creature whose transcendence was released from the boundaries of a mortal nature, to have once more afforded to it the gift of immortality and the possibility of communion with God. The Person (first of all that of the God-Man whose single divine Hypostasis both explained and energized the way the Incarnation saved the Human Race) thus became a concept of immense centrality and importance. It thereby started upon a trajectory which would have incalculable results in the history of Christian civilisation. Without the major Byzantine Christological contributions, the idea of personhood may well have left western civilisation as untouched by its allure, as it did (for example) in Asian Buddhism, where it remains stalled in the role of an illusory notion.
The Christian Fathers, in short, combined all three available philosophical models of selfhood creatively. To Plato's idea of ascentive epistemology (wisdom as an uplifting way to achieve identity) they added Aristotle's quest for the definitive ethos of a nature, as well as Plotinos' concept of the awareness of divine potency as the giving of identity's core in the act of communion. They are driven to this synthetic position by their own twin imperatives: the retelling of the tale of human identity through and in the person of Christ, who is the infinite Logos fully inhominated: whose person is thus necessarily substantive because it carries the weight of the second hypostasis of the Godhead borne up by the transfiguration of frail flesh. The doctrine of the Incarnation substantivizes, or hypostatizes, the concept of spiritual personhood as the quintessential ethos of the Self, and the ground of communion between Godhead and Manhood. The Christian Fathers, therefore, creatively synthesized classical Greek philosophy with biblical and Christological imperatives, so as to make a distinctly new philosophico-religious statement.
Though the Greek Fathers are the lead in the evangelical synthesis of this tradition of selfhood, the Christian revisioning of Plato's psychology actually goes on throughout the life of Christian Byzantium. In the 13th and 14th centuries, after the Byzantines had recaptured their capital, the Paleologan emperors presided over a last revival of philosophy. In this late flowering there was a steady stream of significant commentaries produced on Aristotle, Plato, and the Neo-Platonic writings of Proclus. Significant examples are: the works of Sophonias, Leo Magentenos, Theodore Metochites, Nikephoros Choumnos, Nikephoras Gregoras, Plethon (the most radical of the Byzantine Neo-Platonists), Gennadios Scholarios, and Bessarion, the last two of whom bring us into the final era of the last days of the empire, which fell to the Ottomans in May 1453. The course of Byzantine philosophy in the time of the Greek Fathers shows a wide range of theologians who were readers of a large and broad library of philosophic texts, including Plato and Aristotle as staples, but also the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and elements of Cynic diatribe. Their greatest achievement, philosophically speaking, was their adaptation of the idea of the self to be a hypostatic force, a sacramental reality capable of bearing the weight of a substantive, and of serving dynamically as a transcendental point of encounter with the divine.
What this means in our time.
What might the Patristic Byzantine reformulations of the idea of self have to suggest to us today? One of our current societal problems is that this doctrine of selfhood has been profoundly forgotten in a theological curriculum that since the Enlightenment has neglected the dominant Christian ascetical tradition, where it is lodged, in favour of apologetic dogmatic theology. One way forward would be to restore Ascetical Theology to its rightful place as the major stream of thought behind classical Christianity. This would suggest that Christian history is not the record of this or that doctrinal controversy: rather a sustained essay on soteriology: with personhood as the primary locus where the human encounters the divine and is redeemed by the communion.
Another great problem is that having given the idea of the person as substantive to western civilisation, Christian theorists neglected to engage with it when in the early 20th century onwards, the concept was radically reinterpreted by psychological decon-structionist views. These medical therapeutic approaches, from Freud onwards to our own era when Psychiatry has more or less become completely a chemical field, argued that the human self is a working model that (often) goes wrong. This brought a reductionist view centre stage, that drove out the former transcendentalism from which the idea was first born. Worse than this, perhaps, this modern idea of the self, or the person seeking therapeutic redress, has evolved into the concept of the person with a range of rights over and against other persons. The idea has thus become oppositional, and narcissistically driven; when of old, in Christian patristic hands, it was conceived as a kenotic gift from the Lord of humility, that sought to explain the principle of social communion. In other words its premisses have today been more or less drastically reversed. The human rights agenda stripped of its transcendentalist basis, however, becomes morally unsustainable. In the Christian system the self was a critically important and sacred thing, precisely because the person was a representation of the Covenant of God with humanity. As we may recall, the key to the Byzantine genius in reinterpreting Aristotle, was to redefine empiricism as no longer meaning material reductionism. The close empirical analysis of the self, for them, demonstrated that the essence of achieved human personhood was the observation that the human nature was not a closed ousia, such that we were locked into our genus. Quite the contrary, it was posed as an ever energized stretching out (epektasis) that is the very root of all our brilliant and multifaceted culture, yet transcends even that to impress upon our root human consciousness a transcendental force that makes us ask not only what it is that is; but why it is. This 'why?' is the dynamic move that at once explains the ascentive thrust of human personhood – the strange issue of the qualitative nature of existence - as well as (for Christian philosophy) the quest for that Person who is at once the Why; being the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Byzantine philosophy demands human personhood be seen as essentially teleotic. Unlike him, it goes further in explaining what that Telos involves.
The human rights agenda, as we have it today in all its fragility, is such a powerfully important force for the good, that surely it is critical that we should not let it sink (as unquestionably it is sinking) because the transcendental imperative it was first designed to express, has been muffled and obscured by reductionist simplification. Christians, who once gave this idea to western civilisation, need to be more efficiently heard redrafting the premisses we once brought to the making of Europe: the concept of spiritual personhood at the core of moral and societal values.
Further Reading:
L Benakis ‘He spoude tes byzantines philosophias kritike episkepse: 1949-1971.’ Philosophia. Athens. 1971. 390-433.
R Berchman Middle Platonism in Transition. Scholars Press. Chicago. 1984.
R Berchman & J F. Finamore (edd.) Conversations Platonic and Neoplatonic Intellect, Soul, and Nature. Academie Verlag. Hamburg. 2010
J A McGuckin ‘The Shaping of the Soul’s Perceptions in the Byzantine Ascetic Elias Ekdikos.’ St. Vladimir’s Seminary Theological Quarterly. 55. 3. 2011. 343-363.
Idem Gregory of Nazianzus. in: The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. (ed.) L Gerson. CUP. Cambridge & New York. 2011. vol. 1. pp. 482-497.
Idem The Trinity in the Greek Fathers. in: P Phan (ed). The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity. CUP. Cambridge & New York. 2011.49-69.
Idem 'The Notion of The Beautiful in Greek Thought and its Early Christian Transfiguration.' (Editor’s Preface) in: J A McGuckin (ed). The Concept of Beauty in Patristic and Byzantine Theology. Theotokos Press. New York. 2012. 7-18.
Idem Byzantine Philosophy. in: The New Catholic Encyclopedia. [Supplement 2012-2013]. Ed. R. Fastigii. Gale Cengage. New York – Detroit. 2013. vol 1. 195-198.
P Cary Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self. part. 1 chs. 1-3. pp. 1-44.
LP Gerson Plotinus. chs. 7 & 10. pp. 127-163 & 203-212.
G Misch A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. 1. pp. 289-307.
K Oehler Antike Philosophie und byzantinisches Mittelalter. Munich 1969.
D J O’Meara ‘Philosophy.’ in: A P Kazhdan. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. vol. 3. Oxford. 1991. 1658-1661.
G Podskalsky Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz. Munich 1977.
B Tatakis La Philosophie byzantine. Paris 1949.