Beyond Stillness: Hesychasm and the Divine Energies between Praxis and Theoria in St Gregory Palamas (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016
The 13th and 14th centuries represented the most productive and influential period in the history of philosophy and theology in the West. A parallel and less influential (for the West) proliferation of arguments and theories took place in the East, at the same time, as a result of the defence of the Hesychastic movement offered by St Gregory Palamas and his followers. The papers brought together in this volume discuss the importance of Palamite ideas for the understanding of God in terms of divine energies, and for contemporary approaches to solving perennial problems in science, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. Some of the contributors take a more reserved evaluation of the Palamite corpus, preferring to highlight similarities and differences between Palamas and the chief representatives of Medieval Scholasticism, such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham. Other essays offer a radical re-evaluation of the Western history of philosophy and theology, preferring to bring out the reasons for Western philosophical and theological shortcomings and providing a wider critique on Western culture. Contributors to this volume include some of the top scholars on Palamite studies from the fields of philosophy, theology, aesthetics, cultural criticism, and art theory. As such, it represents a particularly useful resource for advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in Christian theology and philosophy, Byzantine cultural studies and aesthetics.
Analogia, 2018
Does a direct experience of God and the associated grace-filled transformation make people infallible, or can even saints still be wrong when they interpret who can be saved and who cannot, what forms of life people should choose, which political systems, figures and positions they should support? This article examines what St Gregory Palamas says on the nature of the saints' experience and knowledge, how stability and progress are interrelated in his notion of deification, and what the consequences are of his differentiation between knowledge coming from above and natural knowledge. Among the reasons for the appreciation of St Gregory Palamas in twentieth and twenty first century theology is undoubtedly his emphasis on the real presence of God in creation, and, in particular, in the human experience of being reached, purified, and transformed by God, who through his grace joins to himself whom he wishes. It could be argued that his essence-energy distinction, or his accounts of the psychosomatic techniques of prayer, all serve this one goal: to defend the reality of divine-human communion. Preserving divine simplicity, on the one hand, and the possibility of human deification, on the other, Palamas argued that the eschatological divine fullness of life can irrupt into this life, as in the case of Christ's Incarnation. Through Christ, it can transform people who are found worthy to see this fullness in terms of the uncreated deifying light. In this article, I will examine the epistemological consequences of the direct experiences of and participation in God. My basic question will be: according to Palamas, does the experience of the deifying light make holy men and women infallible in their theological statements, in their discernment of what are, and what are not, good morals or even good political decisions?
Gregory Palamas’ Defense of Theology as Ἐπιστήμη: Historical Background and Sources
Studia Patristica, 2020
This study highlights more unusual cases where Byzantine liturgical sources, such as in the Menaion and homiletic material of Fathers, are essential to understand certain notions of Palamas’ theoptic and epoptic ideas. The vocabulary and central themes of divine vision and participation in the divine energies are often found in Byzantine hymnody describing such experiences of divine light by the apostles and other saints. In some cases, Palamas’ formulations are closest to literature of a liturgical vs. dogmatic character. Furthermore, certain Palamite values, such as the presumed infallibility of patristic axioms (e.g., Basil the Great’s teaching on the Holy Spirit) build on liturgical assertions of the saint’s authority in doctrinal matters. Palamas’ combination of liturgical sources for his logical arguments on behalf of the apodeictic syllogism within an Aristotelian typology will be explored. This will lead to the conclusion that Palamas was very much influenced by contemporary Scholastic views and opinions on theology as a science and on the nature of the beatific vision. However, his own theory combined a natural epistemological skepticism with a divine illumination theory that distinguishes him from both Medieval Latin and Barlaamian positions on the scientific status of theology.
THE THEOTOKOS AS MYSTICAL THEOLOGIAN: ST GREGORY PALAMAS' SERMONS ON THE VIRGIN MARY
2015
In contrast with the post-12th century notion of theology as an academic subject, the properly patristic idea of theologia is inseparable from prayer to be “truly” practiced. Theologia is an experience to be thus attained, for the vision of divine glory is not only for the age to come but is indeed available to the saints in the present life. Such will be one of the central arguments that St. Gregory Palamas will make in defence of the hesychasts, for whom -- as his sermons on the Theotokos teach – the Virgin is to be considered a model. For Palamas, the Mother of God by-passes the stages of praktiki and physiki and moves directly into theologia. She is the true theologian who prays truly and is from the start gifted with the discerning spirit of prophecy. Having entered into the Holy of Holies shortly after she was weaned, she more than any other has insight into a divine knowledge beyond that contemplated in philosophy and analogical reasoning. Fruit of experiencing a communion with God unlike any other, her mystical vision of God transcends mere discursive speculation. Yet the implication is that, in becoming the Mother of God, she embodies a paradox: having been fashioned by God through providential grace, she freely consents to be the means of fashioning God in a human form through her flesh. In her body, she circumscribes the pre-eternal God. In the light of some of the issues raised in his controversy with Barlaam, Palamas’ teachings on the Mother of God put into a new perspective the question that Spinoza introduced into modern and contemporary philosophy: what can the body be?
The thirteenth-century prerequisites of St. Gregory Palamas' theology
A new periodization of the thirteenth-century Byzantine theology is proposed. The impact of Gregory Palamas’ thirteenth-century predecessors upon the doctrine of essence and energies in God is analyzed, special attention being given to the increasing role of the notion of interpenetration in Moschambar, Blemmydes, Gregory of Cyprus. In the second part of the paper Hesychast, apocryphal and Aristotelian motives are uncovered in Blemmydes’ treatise On Virtue and Ascesis (ca. 1265–1266). The article is based on my Belgrade report read in 2016 during the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies.
THE SILENT QUEST OF THE DIVINE ENCOUNTER IN THE HESYCHASTIC TRADITION
Abstract: Following a long tradition of monastic practice which goes back to the Cappadocian fathers, the hesychastic movement played an important part in offering the Orthodox community a viable alternative to the main-line Church with its nominalism and corrupt ecclesiastic practices. This paper tries to articulate their message of spiritual renewal, which remains fresh even today. Religious and political upheaval and continuous marginalization in stead of hindering the hesychasts in practicing spiritual disciplines, encouraged them edifying their tradition until today in most East- European countries, sometimes even supported by the main Orthodox clerics. Their mystical approach to soteriologic prayer and direct transcendental communion with God resulted in a Christology that gave birth to a community of hermits practicing the ‘Jesus prayer’. A very basic lifestyle and a few elements of creedal value create the basis for a whole community to re-live the experience of the Taboric light beyond words and images.
Communion with God: An Energetic Defense of Gregory Palamas
Modern Theology, 2016
This paper responds to Robert Jenson’s and Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s critiques that the Palamite distinction between essence and energies prevents communion with the divine hypostases. Palamas is shown to consider energies that which make essence, and to insist that these energies must be enhypostatic. Combined with a non-polyonomous concept of divine simplicity, this metaphysic allows for distinct knowledge of each hypostasis as God through activity. Therefore, using Western distinctions provided by Leonard Hodgson and Petro Chirico, Palamas is shown to preserve the possibility of communion. The paper concludes by showing the distinction as amenable with Jensons’s and LaCugna’s projects.
Potency of God. Hypostaticity and living being in Gregory Palamas
Starting from the 24th chapter of Gregory Palamas’ The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, the paper shows how God’s act of creation places a genetic ontological difference inside of the human being. The rational soul (λογικὴ ψυχή) is by nature hyper-cosmic, while the body is from the cosmos and constitutes the animality of the human hypostasis. A real ontological speech on the human being is therefore possible only at the level of his corporeity. On the other hand, the rational soul constitutes the κατ'εἰκόνα Θεοῦ, the centre of human hypostaticity, which is the hyper-ontological foundation of every human person, his being-hypostasis in the likeness of the Holy Trinity, what roots anthropology in Triadology. Moreover, in the paper the Theo-anthropology of Gregory Palamas is studied in relation with Aristotle’s anthropology and psychology.