Cappadocian philosophers

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The Cappadocian philosophers, the Cappadocian Fathers, or simply The Cappadocians, are three significant figures in the history of Hellenistic Christian philosophy and theology. They represent its most mature thought as a school indigenously Greek in mother-tongue and culture. They were a 4th-century monastic family, led by Saint Macrina the Younger to provide a central place for her brothers to study and meditate, and also to provide a peaceful shelter for their mother.

Abbess Makrina fostered the formation and development of the three men who collectively became designated "the Cappadocian Fathers" considered from a churchly and theological point of view. Of course, as philosophers, these thinkers were competitive with other philosophers of the various non-Christian philosophical schools and with other Christians engaged in this activity. The three Cappadocians were Basil the Great who was the older of Makrina's brothers and eventually became bishop of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa who was the younger of Makrina's brothers and also became eventually a bishop of the diocese associated thereafter with his name.

These scholars set out to demonstrate that Christians could hold their own in conversations with learned Greek-speaking intellectuals and that the Christian faith itself was not anti-philosophical but was a thoroughly distinctive movement of learning, piety, and life-style - one best represented by monasticism. While, as monastics, churchmen, and bishops, they made major contributions to the definition of the Trinity finalized at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 and the Nicene Creed, their philosophical contributions pertained to conceptualizing extrabiblically but compatibly, they thought, the accommodation of God to communication with humanity and the incomprehensibility of God except as God revealed Himself and originally created humanity as a creature capable of receiving that accommodative knowledge. Around this basic intellection, all other finite and imperfect knowledge could develop both for good and for ill.