Filozoficzne podstawy rozumienia Opatrzności u Greckich Ojców Kościoła

Abstract

In this article we would like to concern a connection between understanding of God’s Providence and the order of the world. Since the world was for a first time called a cosmos in the school of Pythagoras, Greek philosophers started to see the world as an order. Everything had its own place, and was made with a kind of perfection. The order and perfection of the world revels clearly the reason of the maker of the universe, and therefore the universe can be understood by the human mind. It was shown for first time in the philosophy of Socrates, and had lead him to conclusion, that the world not only has been made by someone witch a perfect intelligence, but God must also rule the world because of His perfection. This means that there is a providence of God- pronoia (this term comes, according to Proklos, from pro- nou - pra-mind or pra-intelligence). And when He rules the cosmos, there must be an aim for the whole universe and for the human life, because perfect ruling must be understood as a leading to the aim. Article shows briefly the development of conception of God’s Providence until late Neoplatonism and the problem of the aim of the human life and the world. The final fulfilling of that problem lays in connection between philosophy and religion, because it is hardly possible to find a solution of the problem of human destiny after death only by using reason without a faith. As a conclusion, we would like to show that the best solutions of almost all questions that come from the Greek conception of God’s Providence we could find in the Christian philosophy of the Greek Fathers of the Church. It can be seen especially in the problem of the aim of human life. Since every part of the universe was made with a reason, a human body either cannot be understood as something not important or even wrong. Therefore Christian dogma of resurrection of body perfectly fits to a Greek understanding of pronoia. In a writings of Greek Church Fathers we can see a vision of the world concerned as an order perfectly created and ruled by God’s Providence. At the end this article shows hierarchical system of the “most platonic” Christian writer- Pseudo Dionysius The Aeropagite as the best example.