Телесное зрение и созерцание в гносеологическом контексте: сравнение «Бесед на псалмы» Оригена и свт. Василия Великого

Abstract

The article considers on the material of the “Homilies on the Psalms” of Origen and saint Basil of Caesarea the use of vocabulary of visual sense in an epistemological context, including the concept of “contemplation”, which goes back to the ancient philosophical tradition. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explain the philosophical meaning of this concept as the highest stage on the path of knowledge as well as its place in the epistemological systems of both authors. On the basis of the description of cognitive processes by early Christian writers we discovered a number of patterns in the composition of the semantic field of vision as the sense that participates in the act of knowledge. At the same time, our study demonstrates that the use of both the concept of “contemplation” and the vocabulary of visual sense partially fits into the philosophical division of the neoplatonic curriculum: while the study by bodily vision of the sensuous world created by God is associated with physics, the contemplation as a study of the supersensuous world by supersensory vision is associated with epoptics. However, in the explanations we have examined, these three steps are never mentioned in a row, in contrast to other texts where Origen and saint Basil follow the scheme of ethics-physics-epoptics. As texts that serves as the basis for comparing the Christian reception of the vocabulary of visual sense in patristic literature of the 3rd and 4th centuries AD we choosed not only the exegetic sermons of individual psalms by Origen and saint Basil of Caesarea, but also a selection of other texts of the same authors representing relevant parallels in their use of vocabulary of visual sense. From the point of view of its scientific relevance, this study is also important because it shows the dependence of the “Homilies on the Psalms” by saint Basil of Caesarea upon the “Homilies on the Psalms” by Origen discovered in 2012 in the Codex Monacensis Graecus 314.