History of theology
Origins
Plato (center left) and Aristotle, detail from School of Athens, fresco by Raphael, 1508–11; in the Stanza
della Segnatura, the Vatican. Plato is shown pointing to the heavens and the realm of forms, Aristotle to
the earth and the realm of things.
The term theology is derived from the Latin theologia (“study [or understanding] of God [or the gods]”),
which itself is derived from the Greek theos (“God”) and logos (“reason”). Theology originated with the
pre-Socratic philosophers (the philosophers of ancient Greece who flourished before the time
of Socrates [c. 470–399 bce]). Inspired by the cosmogonic notions of earlier poets such
as Hesiod and Homer, the pre-Socratics were preoccupied with questions about the origin and ultimate
nature of the universe. The first great theologian, however, was Socrates’ student Plato, who appears
also to have been the first to use the term theology. For Plato, theology was the study of eternal realities,
the realm of what he called forms, or ideas. For his pupil Aristotle (384–322 bce), theology was the
study of the highest form of reality, the “first substance,” which he seems to have regarded at different
times as the “unmoved mover” and as “being qua being.” Aristotle spoke of three theoretical, or
speculative, ways of knowing: the mathematical, the physical, and the theological, with theology being
the “most honourable.”
The notion of theology as the study or contemplation (theoria) of the highest form of reality became
commonplace in the Hellenistic philosophy of the Roman world in which Christianity emerged. In that
world, the quest for God acquired for many people—including both Christians and non-Christians—a
certain urgency, in part because of the recognized inadequacy of the traditional pagan religions and the
social and political turmoil of the era. Accordingly, philosophical speculation about the ultimate nature
of reality assumed a distinctly religious cast. The “lower” studies of logic and ethics and the observation
of nature came to be regarded as preparatory training for communion with the divine.
These ideas very quickly found acceptance among Christian thinkers, notably the 3rd-century
theologian Origen, who described the three stages in the Christian’s advance to communion with God as
the ethical, the physical, and the “epoptic,” or visionary. Origen’s triad was developed by the 4th-
century monastic Evagrius Ponticus, who distinguished between praktiki (ascetic
struggle), physiki (contemplation of the natural order), and theologia (theology as contemplation of
God). The understanding of theology as the fruit of sustained ascetic struggle, as the highest exercise of
the human mind, and as prayer quickly established itself in Greek Christianity, and this interpretation is
still fundamental in Eastern Orthodox theology. It is expressed succinctly in Evagrius’s oft-quoted
assertion: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.”
Alongside this sense of theology, Christians also understood the word theologia to mean the study of the
divine, or the unraveling of the nature of the divine as revealed in the Bible. Christians believed that God
reveals himself in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) through the history of the chosen people
of Israel and in the New Testament through Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Son of God. A
distinction quickly developed in Christian reflection on God between theologia, strictly understood as
the study of God in himself—that is, the study of God’s divine nature—and oikonomia, understood to
mean the study of God’s activities in the created order, particularly the acts of creation and redemption.
Because God is known only through his self-manifestation in the created order, however, the distinction
between theologia and oikonomia is easily blurred. Nevertheless, it remains fundamental in Greek
theology.
Late antiquity and the Middle Ages
The development of Christian theology was decisively influenced by an unknown writer of the early 6th
century whose works circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the
Athenian disciple of St. Paul the Apostle (the writer is therefore often called Pseudo-Dionysius). In the
writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, God is depicted as revealing himself to the created order
through hierarchies of angels and through the hierarchy of the church. Pseudo-Dionysius also introduced
a number of distinctions about the nature of theology that were destined to be of profound influence. His
short treatise The Mystical Theology discusses affirmative and negative (kataphatic and apophatic)
theologies, symbolic theology, and mystical theology. Pseudo-Dionysius borrowed the kataphatic-
apophatic distinction from the great 5th-century Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus: whereas a kataphatic
theology affirms what God has revealed of himself (in creation and revelation), an apophatic theology
negates everything ascribed to God because human concepts and images are inadequate to describe his
reality. Symbolic theology, as Pseudo-Dionysius understood it, is an extension of kataphatic theology
that seeks to interpret symbols and images that are used in the Scriptures to express God’s nature and
activity. Mystical, or hidden, theology seems to be the experience of the divine reality to which
apophatic theology points—the equivalent of theologia in the sense in which Evagrius Ponticus used the
term. This identification was made explicit by the 11th-century Byzantine theologian Nicetas Stethatos.
