The human body in the philosophy of religion from the Greek ontology to the Byzantine theology

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleΤό ἀνθρώπινο σῶμα στή φιλοσοφία τῆς θρησκείας ἀπό τήν ἑλληνική ὀντολογία στή βυζαντινή θεολογία
3. Language term English
4. lemma author Koutalis, Vangelis
5. lemma category Orthodox Anthropology - Orthodox theological tradition and practice > Patristic studies
6. Publication date 28-11-2018
7. lemma work Begzos, Marios [Author]. The human body in the philosophy of religion from the Greek ontology to the Byzantine theology
8. lemma manifestations Ελληνική Φιλοσοφική Επιθεώρηση
9. Keywords Greek philosophy - corporeality - soul and body - anthropology - Byzantine Fathers
10. Citations
    1. <p>Begzos, Marios [Μπέγζος, Μάριος] (1992). The human body in the philosophy of religion from the Greek ontology to the Byzantine theology. <em>Ελληνική Φιλοσοφική Επιθεώρηση</em>, <em>9</em>, 21-28.</p>
11. Lemma body

    1. The starting points for this article are the questions how is the human being related to its body, and whether the body pertains to the Having (avoir) or to the Being (être) of the human being. The author examines the answers given in the Greek ontology and in the Byzantine theology, pointing out the substantial difference between the conceptions of the body developed in these two intellectual traditions.

       The ancient Greek anthropology boils down to the view that “the human being has a body”. The beingness of the human being is not necessarily linked with its corporeality. The human being, more over, is considered as a dual being, possessing a body and also possessing a soul, the latter having primacy over the first and being depicted as imprisoned in the first or tainted by the first. By contrast, the Byzantine theology, having inherited, through the New Testament theology and the primordial Christianity, the problematic of the Jewish Old Testament “poetical materialism”, installs Being, instead of Having, at the center of the anthropological discussions. Here, the ontological primacy is granted to the body rather than to the soul, and the body-soul dualism is replaced by the idea of a psychosomatic unity, which in the texts of the Byzantine theologians is usually denoted by the Greek philosophical term συναμφότερον. A new crucial distinction comes to the forefront, that between the flesh and the body: the body is considered as anthropologically neutral, whereas the flesh is considered as susceptible to sin.