The Divine Beauty concept in st. Basil the Great: semantic function and origin

Abstract

At present, the place of beauty in Christian theology, in particular, in theology, is being actively discussed in Russia. At the moment, there is a lack of historical research devoted to the reconstruction of the moral and theological Beauty category in the Eastern Patristic. The article deals with the Divine Beauty concept in the works of St. Basil the Great. The issue has not yet been investigated. There are 15 fragments where Divine Beauty concept is used. In all cases it functions as part of the metaphor of the Divine Beauty optical perception and is merely one of its semantic components. Apart from Divine Beauty, other semantic components form out a metaphor, which describe not beauty itself but its influence on a subject contemplating. In particular, methafor describes anthropological organ of contempleting, feelings the subject is expierencing, etc. St. Basil does not assign a logical content to the Divine Beauty concept , but endows its meaning through interaction with other semantic components in the metaphor. The origin of the concept in St. Basil is considered. The conclusion is that the idea of the beauty of God and the main term (κάλλος) are taken in the Septuagint through the mediation of Origen. He finds a metaphor as a means of philosophical elaboreting the concept in the "Symposium"of Plato and also, probably, in "Ennaeades" I 6 and V 8 of Plotinus. St. Basil places the metaphor of the optical Divine Beauty perception in various theological contexts, which have no entirely correspondence to anyone of the previous authors. So, St. Basil seems to have borrowed from Origen Christological and moral-ascetic context of using the metaphor, but expands the using to protology and eschatology, which corresponds Plato. In the using of the Divine Beauty concept, St. Basil is to be considered not as a philosophical borrower, but rather as a creator, who shapes new synthesis on the basis of the previous thought.