International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Mihai Grigoraș
University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania; 
[e-mail]
The Concept of Theophany in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 
and John Scotus Eriugena – Differences between Byzantine and 
Carolingian Monastic Thinking
The aim of my paper is to compare the concept of theophany (θεοφάνεια – vision of God, 
divine manifestation) in the Dionysian Corpus and Eriugena’s Periphyseon. Both Dionysius and 
Eriugena show that God reveals Himself in the invisible and the visible realities of the universe, 
which have their cause and purpose in Him, and are called to participate in Him, during the process 
of reversion towards the divine unifying simplicity. While expressing their teaching both authors 
point out two major stages: the descend of Godhead towards human beings (I refer here only to 
men, although angels are also receivers of the divine manifestation) and the ascension of human 
beings towards God. This bivalent process depends on a sum of moral and intellectual conditions 
that a person needs to accomplish in order to be able to contemplate God throughout the creation. 
Here comes out one of the main differences between Dionysius and Eriugena: while the former 
emphasizes the practical life and the struggle against sins as a starting point towards gaining the true 
knowledge, the latter seems to pass cursorily over purgatio and to deal extensively with illuminatio 
and deificatio. My paper intends to investigate to what extent the Carolingian monastic tradition 
contrasts with the Byzantine counterpart in this peculiar Eriugenian reception of Dionysius, and to 
analyze the circumstances in which these differences appear.
Milan Đordević
Faculty of Theology “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Skopje, Macedonia; 
[e-mail]
Locality and Cross-Border Exchange in the Middle Ages
The Communication has an aim to introduce the work and the results of the summer school 
organized by the European Graduate School for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (EGSAMP) 
and the Faculty of Theology in Skopje, planned to be held in Ohrid immediately before the 23 
International Congress of Byzantine Studies in the period between 15 and 22 August 2016. The 
work covers the two major conceptual fields: borders (divisions) and exchange in the context of 
medieval philosophy and culture. The first field focuses on the following topics: the mental isolation 
between East and West; the foreigner as a conceptual figure in medieval philosophy; the otherness 
of Byzantium, as perceived in Scholasticism (Contra errors graecorum, the Byzantine antologia 
Damascenica, Bessarion as a teacher of philosophy); the non-philosophical and non-theological 
motives behind dialogue (the Latin and the Byzantine world). The Second field focuses on issues 
and intellectual processes like: translations and interpretations in the middle ages, including the 
self-rediscovering of the western medieval culture through the mediations of the Arab, Byzantine 

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and Jewish worlds; the circulation of manuscripts from the Byzantine/Arab world to the Latin and 
vice versa; the “fermenting processes” in medieval culture (like the medieval “renaissances”, The 
Latin empire in Constantinople (1204-1261), The Greek emigration in Italy after 1453).