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c h a p t e r o n e The Activist and the Philosopher The Hexaemerons of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa During the early centuries of Orthodoxy, discussions of nature focused almost exclusively on explaining the events associated with the six days of Creation described in the first chapter of Genesis. This interest resulted in a series of exegetical texts called the Hexaemerons, that is, the six days during which God created the world and living things. These commentaries sought to explain what God had wanted to reveal to Moses, the supposed author of Genesis, about his creation . Beyond these commentaries, there was little discussion of natural philosophy and cosmology, which had flourished among the ancient Greeks. The Commentary on Genesis by Philo of Alexandria The roots of the Hexaemeron tradition go back before the Christian era. The best-known non-Christian commentary on Genesis was written by Philo of Alexandria (c. 12 bce–c. 54 ce) and called De Opificio Mundi (or The Creation of the World according to Moses).1 It was the source of inspiration for later Christian texts, especially the Christian school of thought developed in Alexandria that tried to reconcile the Bible with Hellenic philosophy. Orthodox Jews considered Philo, a Hellenized Jew, as “assimilated to the Greeks,” and yet Christians called him “Philo the Jew”; as for Greek philosophers, they had trouble acknowledging his monotheism founded on the Bible. Philo’s purpose was to convince pagan philosophers of the universality of Jewish monotheism. In his exegetical text, he interpreted the teaching of Moses in the book of Genesis through the mind of a Greek philosopher. According to Philo, the world (the cosmos of the ancients) is the creation of God and for this reason reflects the divine, as do humans who belong to this cosmos; both are images of God. “The world that is in law corresponds to the world and the world to the law, and a man who is obedient to the law, being, by so doing, a citizen of the 2 Science and Eastern Orthodoxy world, arranges his actions with reference to the intention of nature, in harmony with which the whole universal world is regularized.”2 According to Philo, order and the law in the Platonic sense (i.e., that order and law rule the cosmos and should also apply to society) argue in favor of Creation , because, if the world were not created, then it would be quite simply anarchic : “With regard to that which has not been created, there is no feeling of interest , as if it were his own, in the breast of him who has not created it. It is then a pernicious doctrine . . . to establish a system in this world such as anarchy is in a city.”3 But this created world, although marvelous—and this is the great difference between Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy—cannot be compared to God. “Some men, admiring the world itself rather than the Creator of the world, have represented it as existing without any maker and eternal, and as impiously and falsely, have represented God as existing in a state of complete inactivity .”4 However, Philo’s God is closer to Plato’s god than to the Jews’: “But Moses . . . was well aware that it is indispensable that in all existing things there must be an active cause, and a passive subject, and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe . . . while the passive subject is something inanimate and incapable of motion by any intrinsic power of its own, but having been set in motion, and fashioned and endowed with life by the intellect, it became transformed into that most perfect work, this world.”5 God is thus identified with the universal intellect, the active cause that acts in a constructive manner upon what is inanimate. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”: this motto of the Academy of Plato, on a par with the Platonic love of order and the law, is applicable to the cosmos of Philo. For according to the Jewish and Alexandrine philosopher, the world created by God is ordered mathematically and obeys the laws of Greek natural philosophy. Philo’s God is a mathematician; he has created and ordered nature according to this science. It is numbers that explain the very duration of Creation . An omnipotent God would have created in a single instant the cosmos and everything included in it. That he spent six days doing so is...

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