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This historiosophical article examines the peculiarities of the attitude of patristic traditionalism to Platonism and Aristotelianism. The author begins from the fact that in this spiritual-ideological trend the philosophical polarity of Platonism and Aristotelianism appears both in the usual and in the transformed form of the opposition between mystical (“Platonic”) and rational-discursive (“Aristotelian”) ways of cognition. It is shown that the Church was at the center of Byzantine culture. Its teaching was theology, its “handmaid” was philosophy, and their most important problem was the knowledge of God, which was investigated and solved in different ways in Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Western Christianity realized itself in scholasticism, and Eastern Christianity in hesychasm; there – in “words” (in grandiose “sums”), here – in hesychia, in silence; there – with the help of rational reasoning, here – based on the “third type of knowledge” – mystical. Resorting to historical-theological-philosophical excursions, the author justifies the vision of hesychasm as a proper Eastern Christian way of knowing God, its mystical core and the “heart” of Orthodoxy. It is argued that the presence of mystics in Catholicism is one thing, and the mystical Eastern Christian theology, the mystical Orthodox Church, is essentially another. It is proven that the hesychasts, and the Byzantine Church after them, gave positive answer to the main philosophical and theological question: can a Christian not only believe in God but also know him. The opinion is justified that behind the struggle (sometimes appropriate, sometimes inappropriate) of the Byzantine authorities with Platonism is the hidden meeting of the Platonic-Neoplatonic tradition with Hesychasm, and therefore with Orthodoxy, since the theologian-philosopher in Hesychasm, on the one hand, and philosopher-theologian in Platonic-Neoplatonic philosophy on the other, intersected, turning into the same – into mystics, who were united by a common goal (unification with the divine) and a mystical way towards it. This demonstrates the internal affinity of “Byzantinism” with Platonism, and by no means with Aristotelianism which is an alternative way to mysticism.
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