Person and Personal Reality: The Actuality of the Eastern Christian Understanding of Man

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titlePerson and Personal Reality: The Actuality of the Eastern Christian Understanding of Man
3. Language term English
4. lemma author Tampakis, Kostas
5. lemma category Orthodox Anthropology - Philosophy of science/epistemology - Patristic studies
6. Publication date 2013
7. lemma work Person and Personal Reality: The Actuality of the Eastern Christian Understanding of Man
8. lemma manifestations Values of the Human Person. Contemporary Challenges
9. Keywords St Gregory of Nyssa - Saint Basil the Great - Maximus the Confessor - St. Gregory Palamas - Phenomenology - Neopatristic movement
10. Lemma body

    1. This article was also written under the aegis of The Knowledge Based Society Project. It aims to assess the understanding of man as person in the Eastern Christian tradition. The Patristic notion of person, first stated by Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great, received subsequent nuances and explanations with Byzantine authors, starting with Maxim the Confessor through Gregory Palamas’ period. Modernity took over the notion of person and used it, answering some needs especially present in psychology and social sciences. But the significance of the notion of person in the modern context is different from the one in the Eastern Christian environment. Modern anthropological paradigms do not longer satisfy all explanatory needs. The recovery of a whole vision on man may find its sources in the Patristic and Byzantine description of man as person, which affirms personhood not as a psychological aspect but as a notion through which a reality is described. Thus, a person must be understood as a form of physical reality, which has the possibility of freedom, and which it can change itself. The paper begins by discussing how the emergence of modern philosophy after Descartes suspended discussions on the soul in terms of science, while also establishing a set of dichotomies in the relevant narrative. It then underlines that some current philosophical perspectives, such as phenomenology, suggest another way of talking about the human person, that of the embodied being. Finally, the paper focuses on the suggestion of the neopatristic movement, in which he sees the most coherent attempt to recover the original Patristic meaning of pershonhood. The author traces its development from the early Christian Fathers to the present, through the concepts of hypostasis and prosopon. Finally, the paper argues that, by recovering the original Patristic meaning, we see that a person is a kind of reality, who is continuously called upon to integrate the microcosm with macrocosm