Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople (?) about 1296. He became a monk of the great community at Mount Athos, near Thessalonika. Here he was one of the formost supporters of a theory of contemplation called Hesychasm (or, after him, Palamism). The Hesychasts claimed that, by suitable spirtual disciplines, those engaged in contemplative prayer could come to see the “uncreated light” of God. Their opponents objected that this doctrine was inconsistent with the unity and the transcendence of God. At first, Hesychasm was condemned as heretical and Gregory was excommunicated.

However, in 1347, thanks chiefly to the unwavering support of the monks of Athos, Gregory was brought back from exile, cleared of heretical charges, and made bishop of Thessalonika. After much controversy, his position was declared orthodox by the church of Constantinople in 1351, but by then he was worn out and an invalid. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in his ideas.

Here is how his views are described by an Eastern Orthodox writer, Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia), in his book, The Orthodox Church, pp. 77-78, published by Penguin Usa. Copyright 1963,1964 by Timothy Ware.

From this, Gregory [Palamas (1296-1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica] turned to the main problem: how to combine the two affirmations, that man knows God and that God is by nature unknowable. Gregory answered: we know the _energies_ of God, but not His _essence_. This distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and His energies goes back to the Cappadocian Fathers. “We know our God from His energies”, wrote Saint Basil, “but we do not claim that we can draw near to His essence.” … But however remote from us in His essence, yet in His energies God has revealed Himself to men. These energies are not something that exists apart from God, not a gift which God confers upon men: they are God Himself in His action and revelation to the world. God exists complete and entire in each of His divine energies. The world, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is charged with the grandeur of God; all creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fire off God’s energies.

It is through these energies that God enters into a direct and Immediate relationship with mankind. In relation to man, the divine energy is in fact nothing else than the _grace_of_God_; grace is not just a “gift” of God, not just an object which God bestows on men, but a direct manifestation of the living God Himself, a personal confrontation between creature and Creator. “Grace signifies all the abundance of the divine nature, in so far as it is communicated to men.” [V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p 162] When we say that the saints have been transformed… by the grace of God, what we mean is that they have a direct experience of God Himself. They Know God–that is to say, God in His energies, not in His essence.

written by James Kiefer

Prayer

O God, who by your Holy Spirit give to some the word of wisdom, To others the word of knowledge, and to others the word of faith: We praise you for the gifts of grace manifested in your servant Gregory, and we pray that your Church may never be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Originally posted 11/9/2009.

Here is an ongoing rough translation of part of Fr. Martin Jugie, A.A. (1878-1954), “Palamite (Controverse),” in: M. Vacant et al., eds., Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, tome XI/2 (Paris 1932), cols. 1777-1818. Many thanks to Dr. Peter Gilbert of De Unione Ecclesiarum for sending me the French text. Once I transcribe the Greek, the process should be a lot quicker.

V. Palamism’s principal opponents. Their doctrine on the light of Tabor (col. 1802)
.

If Palamism recruited fervent adherents in 14th century Byzantium, it also picked up numerous and formidable adversaries, who would have undoubtedly triumphed without the intervention of the secular arm. A list of these adversaries, athough incomplete, has been conserved in the Vatic. græc, 1096, fol. 29 vº, which is from the end of the 14th century. We note, among other names, the following, who took an active part in the controversy: Barlaam, Gregory Acindynus, Nicephorus Gregoras, the hieromonk Niphon, the philosopher Georges Lapithes, John Calecas, Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch, Matthew of Ephesus, the hieromonk Prochorus Cydones. Cf. Giovanni Mercati, op. cit. It is necessary to add: [Theodore] Atouemes, Theodore Dexios, Isaac Argyros and the unionists Demetrius Cydones, John Cyparissiotes and Manuel Calecas.

Of Barlaam we have already spoken enough. We showed how, from the beginning of the quarrel, he had been abandoned by everyone, even by Acindynus, and by the monks less because of the substance of his doctrine about the Taboric Light than for the way he had expressed it. Palamites, as well, did not stop at these superficial differences, and they treated as Barlaamites all those who do not admit a real distinction between the essence of God and His operation, and the existence of an eternal divine light and uncreated grace.

Before speaking of the principle defenders of orthodoxy and sound philosophy against the innovations of Palamas, let us point out that one should not judge their true doctrine according to the statements of the Palamite theologians. If we believe them, Acindynus, John Calecas, Gregoras and the others taught pure nominalism. They made an inert nature; or else they lowered the action of God and all His relative and operative attributes. All these imputations are attributable to unfair accounts of the debate, which, to better crush the enemy, lend themselves to insanities. We do not mean that all the anti-Palamites were blameless in their way of speaking about God and His attributes: all had enough sense to make necessary distinctions and to reduce to null the sometimes subtle and embarrassing objections of Palamas and of his disciples. Most of the Byzantines were not introduced to the Scholastic method of the West, and were so equivocal that a doctor in Sorbonne should have torn like a spider web by an appropriate distinction that could leave a Nicephorus Gregoras silent. [???] But the adversaries of Palamism had enough philosophy and theology to maintain the absolute simplicity of the divine Being and deny everything else but Him the epithets of uncreated and eternal.

There is still a marked difference between the attitude of anti-Palamites of the first period and the one the polemicists of the second phase of the controversy had. The first, that is to say Acindynus, John Calecas, Theodore Dexios, Matthew of Ephesus and even Nicephorus Gregoras, are preoccupied with avoiding any doctrinal innovation and stick to, in matters of dogma, the teachings of the Symbol and the seven ecumenical councils. This attitude is commanded of them and by the defense made by the τόμος συνoδικὸς and by the pretention of Palamas and his followers to develop and explain the ancient definitions. They are resolute conservatives, who do not even want to pose the question of the nature of the Taboric light. Asked about this point, or they refuse to answer, as they did at the council of 1351; or they say: “If the light of Tabor is uncreated, it must be identified with God Himself, because God alone is uncreated; nothing is uncreated except Him. If you posit a light really distinct from the divine essence, it must necessarily be ranked among created things.” By virtue of this same principle, they declare that divine grace and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are created. They identify between the divine essence and the divine operation considered as a terminus a quo, and say it is created, if it is considered as a terminus ad quem, that is to say, in its effects. The Palamites show themselves to be unable to grasp this distinction, however so simple, and they accuse their adversaries of fickleness and contradiction; teaching sometimes that the Taboric Light is created, other times that it is uncreated; of reducing the divine operation to the status of a creature, or eradicating it by identifying it with the essence.

It has been brought to bear, heretofore, a false judgment on the theology of Acindynus due to the attribution which was made to him of the work De essentia et operatione, which belongs to Prochoros Cydones. Far from being Latinophrone, penetrated by Thomistic doctrine, he is a Byzantine in rigid conservatism, just as much an enemy of the Latins as Palamas, and who sticks to the traditional faith. All his formulas, all his expressions are derived from the Greek Fathers. The major thesis he supports against Palamas is this: God is an absolutely simple being, in Whom everything is really identified with the exception of the hypostatic properties: Tαὐτότης µόνη ὲν τῶ Θεῶ καὶ ἀπαραλλαξία πλὴν τῶν κατὰ τὰς τρεῖς Θεαρχικὰς ὐπoστἀσεις ἰδιoτήτῶν, Monac. 223, fol. 19 vº. In Him, there is no primary element and secondary element. Nothing outside of Him is uncreated. He is the first; everything that comes after is a creature; there is no intermediary between the Creator and the creature. There is nothing eternal outside of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: πᾶν τὸ ἕλαττον τοῦ Θεοῦ κτίσμα καὶ Θεὸς µόνoν τὸ Θεῖoν ἅκτιστιόν τε καὶ ᾶναρχoν καὶ Θεὸς µὲν πρῶτoν, µετὰ δὲ τοῦτον κτίσις, διὰ µεσου δὲ τὸ σύµπαν oύὀέν, καὶ µόυη τῆς κτίσεως ὑπέρκειται ἡ Θεία τε καὶ ἅκτιστoς φύσις, καὶ oὐδὲν πρoαιώνιoν πλὴν ∏ατρὸς καὶ Υῖoῦ καὶ ἁγίoυ ∏νεύµατoς. Ibid., fol. 18 vº. Based on this principle, he consequently rejects all the theses of Palamas: the divine light is not uncreated, unless one identifies it with the essence; the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not uncreated, since they are numerous; grace is not uncreated, since it is an effect produced in the creature. Regarding the object of the beatific vision, it is God Himself, that is to say His nature, His essence, which enters into communion with the sanctified creature in an incomprehensible manner and without the slightest change: τoῖς θεοφόρος πατρἀσιν ἐπόµενoι καὶ ἀναλλοιώτως καὶ ὐπὲρ αῖσθησιν καὶ διὰνoιαν δὲχεσθαι φρονοῦµεν τoὐς ἁγίoυς τὴν καὶ µακαρίαν oὐσίαν εις κoινωνίαν ἁγιασµoῦ. Ibid., fol. 31 vº-32.

2º The patriarch John Calecas, who was not a theologian by profession, approved and endorsed the doctrine of Acindynus. The work that he presented to the empress by way of apology (see above, col. 1787) was a collection of writings composed by Acindynus and by confessors and professors appointed by him. The tome of the synod of February 13 that deposed him has preserved some of anathematisms he threw against the Palamites: “Anathema to those who dare say that the glory of the deity of Christ is different from the essence of God. — Anathema to those who dare say that the divine grace is uncreated and yet differs from the essence of God. — Anathema to those who dare say that the uncreated divinity can be seen by the eyes of the body: Toῖς ἀπoτoλµῶσι καὶ λέγoυσι τὴν θείαν χάριν ἅκτιστoν µὲν εἷναι έτέραν δὲ παρα τὴν oὐσίαν τoῦ Θεoῦ, ἀνάθεµα.” Cf. P. G., t. CLII, col. 1280A.

4º Gregoras, in effect, also follows traces of Acindynus, and we have in him another representative of conservative Byzantinism, an enemy of all novelty. Like Aciyndus, he teaches the real identity, in God, of the essence and the operation, and demonstrates well that the divine simplicity is unique and no example can be found in creatures, every creature is composed of essence and quality: ἐκείνη µόνη τῆ θεία καὶ ἁπλoυστάτη φύσει πρoσήκει, ἑτέρα δὲ oὐδεµιᾶ τῶν κτιστῶν ἁπασῶν… πᾶσα κτίσις σύνθετός ὲστι ἐξ οὐσίας καὶ πoιότητoς. Hist. Byzant., l. XXXI (ὁ δεύτερoς δoγµατικός), P. G., t. CXLIX, col. 321 D, 324 A. However, whatever Dexios says about it, Nicephorus has a very definite theory on the light of Tabor. According to him, that light could only be created, since it was seen by mortal eyes, and there is nothing uncreated except for the divine essence. It was a symbolic manifestation of the enigmatic and uncreated light, analogous to the light that appeared in other theophanies. On Tabor, the Apostles contemplated not the uncreated divinity, not God, but a visible reality, that is to say something created: oἱ ἀπὀστoλoι τὸ ἐν τῶ Θαὅωρἰω λἁµψαν τότε θεασάµενοι φῶς, oύτε θεότητα εῖδoν ἅκτιστoν, oὕτε Θεόν, ἀλλἀ τι τῶν ὅντων καὶ γινωσκoµένων. Op. cit., l. XXXIII, c. XIII, P. G., loc. cit., col. 384-385. He also denies that such light can be the object of Heavenly beatitude. Ibid., col. 376-380. Moreover, many points remain obscure in the theology of the monk of Chora. We see western Scholasticism has not rubbed off on him and he is a novice in the art of making clear distinctions that dispel the ambiguities.

5º What is missing from Nicephorus Gregoras, Prochoros Cydones, the Brother of Demetrius, possesses to an unusual degree. In his work ∏ερὶ οὐσίας καὶ ἐνεργεἱας, in six books (cf. Vatic. græc. 1435, and the study quoted by G. Mercati), we hear a true disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas, who assimilated his doctrine well, and brings full light on the issues debated between Palamites and anti-Palamites and by the appropriate distinctions. He rightly begins by noting that those before him, in Byzantium, addressed the question of God’s essence and His operation, ἐνὲργεια. From their uncertain pace in the discussion, their lack of confidence in the fight: διὸ καὶ άκριτ ἐστινός αὐτοῖς ὁ ἀγών, καὶ σκιαµαχία τὸ δλον. De essentia et operatione, l. I, c. I, P. G, t. CLI, col. 1192-1193. The criticism is particularly true for Gregoras, who professed such contempt for Latin theologians. With imperturbable coolness and a very sure hand, Prochoros walks the iron from Aristotelian and Thomistic dialectic in the Palamite plague, and bursts all the blisters of falsehood. Philotheus is also stunned by such audacity and does not tread there. The devil, he says, speaks through the mouth of Prochoros. Barlaam was nothing compared to him! The disciples of Palamas could not follow him in his relentless deductions. The sun and its rays disappeared before the infinite transcendence of the pure Act, and the θεότητες of Palamas melted before it like snow in the sun. See the interesting excerpts of Prochoros in the synodal tome of 1368 reported earlier. The reading of this tome shows well the confusion into which the Thomistic hieromonk threw his Palamite opponents. On his works, see G. Mercati, op. cit.

8º Let us finally note among the adversaries of Palamism the Dominican Manuel Calecas (†1410), a Greek who converted to Catholicism, who left us a short but excellent refutation of the synodal tome of 1351, in his work ∏ερὶ οὐσίας καὶ ἐνεργεἱας, P. G., t. CLII, col. 283-428. Manuel especially uses positive arguments from Scripture and tradition but he knows St. Thomas well, and it gives him an incontestable superiority over the polemicists who have drawn from Greek sources.

Originally posted 10/31/2009.

Yesterday (10/30/2009), Energetic Procession webmaster Perry Robinson said the following in response to my 10/15/2009 post “God Cannot Be Seen with the Eyes of the Body“:

But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him.

Luke 9:32

I guess the glory isn’t God.

Dear Perry,
1. The Apostles saw the Uncreated Light of His glory [Jn 1:14], but not by corporeal vision [Jn 1:18; 1 Tim 6:16]. With regard to the Transfiguration, St. Matthew uses the diction “there appeared to them” [Mt 17:3] and quotes our Lord as instructing the Apostles to “do not tell the vision to anyone” [Mt 17:9], and mentions that after the manifestation, the disciples saw only Jesus with their eyes [Mt 17:8]. Perhaps this hints that the vision of the Uncreated Light was not with the bodily eyes.

2. But aside from this speculation, the authority of three Great Doctors of the West suffices to show that the uncreated light is not seen with the bodily eye: St. Augustine [Epistle 147], St. Jerome [On Isaiah 6:1], and St. Ambrose [On Luke 1:2].

God bless you and yours,
Will R. Huysman

Originally posted 10/16/2009.

My Current Opinion
1. I don’t mean to scandalize my Eastern brethren or open up old wounds, but in the interests of clarifying my current opinion and soliciting expert help for my still-unsolved misgivings, I must confess that, for the foreseeable future, I cannot give an honest and solid defense of Catholic veneration of Gregory Palamas in light of several factors that show he is not a teacher of orthodoxy. The saintly Cardinal Josyf Slipyj apparently managed to give a successful defense,{1} but I have, despite intensive research, been unable to find how the cardinal defended Gregory in light of his many demonstrable theological errors.

Virtues & Positive Contributions of Gregory Palamas
2. There were many positive aspects of Gregory Palamas’ life and teaching. He taught that the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom he had a strong devotion, is the Mediatrix who was immaculately conceived.{2} He was a zealous faster and practitioner of the Jesus Prayer.{3} He cried for his sins and went for long periods without sleep in order to conquer his passions.{4} After his mother died, he consoled his sisters and put them in a convent in Thessalonica so that they would become holier.{5} He put a great emphasis on the body’s role in salvation.{6}

Essence-Energies Distinction
3. However, Gregory cannot be said to be a teacher of orthodoxy. I do not fault him for his distinction between the essence and energies, because in the proper sense, this distinction is true and in continuity with the Eastern Fathers, and does not conflict with absolute divine simplicity.{7} For such knowledge I am indebted to Dr. Michael Liccione of the blogs Sacramentum Vitae and Philosophia Perennis. However, Gregory Palamas scandalized many and incurred ecclesiastical censures (that he disobeyed) when he explained this distinction with blasphemous terminology: “The deifying grace of the Holy Spirit is an inferior deity, a gift of the superior deity.”{8}

Delayed Beatific Vision
4. Gregory Palamas taught a delayed beatific vision,{9} which makes no sense.{10}

Palamas Understood Yet Really Rejected Catholic Triadology
5. I formerly thought that, with the nuances of ekporeusis, Gregory’s teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit stood in no real contradiction to the Catholic doctrine. I tried to remove this stumbling block by appealing to the possibility of his hearing mistranslations of the Latin, and the possibility that he did not know of the wealth of Patristic testimony in favor of Filioque.{11} Then, much to my dismay, I read conclusive proof that Gregory Palamas taught that there is no communication of consubstantial divinity (divine essence, not only energy) from the Father to the Son and from the Father, through and with the Son, to the Holy Spirit.{12} Gregory had seen the Patristic florigelia of John XI Bekkos, yet he went out of his way to pervert the true meaning of the Church Fathers’ words to fit within the narrow Triadology he had inherited from Gregory II the Cypriot.{13} He even taught that the Holy Spirit was the mutual love of the Father and Son, but avoided the necessary corollary that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.{14} Gregory Palamas understood what the Catholics were saying, yet he rejected their teaching.

Palamas’s Anti-Latin Statements Thus Inexcusable
6. Thus I no longer had any basis to excuse Palamas of such statements as “We will not receive you Latins in communion with us as long as you say that the Spirit is also from the Son” and “Indeed, the leaders of Old Rome did not add to the Symbol anything that might have even proved to be Orthodox,” nor his accusation against “the Church of the Latins” of a “failure to return from heresy, … although it was the greatest and the leader of the Patriarchal Thrones of outstanding eminence.”{15} Nor could I soften his harsh words that “It is right to demand that they [the Latins] remove the addition and not, by reason of the eminence of some living Pope, cease loving those who ended their lives with a death attested by God.”{16}

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus
7. Palamas taught that Christ founded the Church on St. Peter,{17} yet there was no excuse for his refusal to enter into full, visible, communion with that Church: I’ve shown above that it was not like he refused to commune with the Latins because he was misinformed about what they really taught; instead, he knew what they taught, yet persisted in his separation from them. Thus I, not knowing how the holy Josyf Slipyj faced these glaring difficulties, am stuck for the foreseeable future in my inability to defend the appropriateness of Catholic veneration of Gregory Palamas in the face of these specific difficulties. Reader expertise on this vexing issue is much appreciated! Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. God bless you and yours!

Notes & References
{1} Huysman, Will R. “Cardinal Josyf Slipyj of Blessed Memory on the Appropriateness of Catholic Veneration of St. Gregory Palamas.” The Banana Republican. 26 Sept. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/cardinal-slipyj-on-venerating-st-gregory-palamas>.
{2} On Mary Mediatrix see Gregory’s On the Annunciation in PG 151:177B.
{3} Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos. “Personal relationship of St. Gregory with the Theotókos.” St. Gregory Palamas as a Hagiorite. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://www.pelagia.org/htm/b16.en.saint_gregory_palamas_as_a_hagiorite.09.htm#s12>.
{4} Patriarch Philotheos of Constantinople. “
The life of Saint Gregory Palamas Archbishop of Thessalonika the Wonderworker.” Saint Gregory Palamas Greek Orthodox Monastery. 1368. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://sgpm.goarch.org/Monastery/?page_id=33>.
{5} Nassif, Fr. Bassam A. “Light for the World: the Life of St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359).” The Self-Ruled Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://www.antiochian.org/gregory-palamas>.
{6} Hunter, H. D. “Palamas, Gregory.” New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 10. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 766. 15 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Fordham University Libraries. 24 Mar. 2009.
{7} If the Palamite distinction led to ditheism or a composite God, then the Catholic Church would not see the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has formally adopted the Palamite essence-energies distinction, in such a positive light. See the following:
a) Huysman, Will R. “Essence, Energy, and Uncreated and Created Grace.” The Banana Republican. 22 Aug. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/essence-energy-uncreated-created-grace>.
b) Huysman, Will R. “Divine Essence and Divine Energies: A Real Distinction.” 24 Oct. 2008. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican.blogspot.com/2008/10/divine-essence-and-divine-energies-real.html>.
c) Huysman, Will R. “Biblical and Patristic Distinction Between Divine Essence and Energies.” The Banana Republican. 8 Jul. 2008. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican.blogspot.com/2008/07/biblical-and-patristic-distinction.html>.
{8} Jugie, Martin, A.A.. “The two councils of 1341.” Trans. Dr. Peter Gilbert. The Palamite Controversy. Paris, 1932. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://bekkos.wordpress.com/martin-jugie-the-palamite-controversy/1-the-two-councils-of-1341>.
{9} Personal communication with Mr. James Likoudis, 7/11/2009.
{10} Huysman, Will R. “Why God Led Me to Rome Instead of Constantinople.” The Banana Republican. 21 Jul. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/god-led-me-to-rome-over-constantinople>:

If the saints do not experience the beatific vision before the Last Judgment, then what was the point of Christ’s descent into the Limbo of the Fathers? Though deprived of the vision of the Ἄκτιστον Φῶς (Uncreated Light), they were in a state of hope and knew that Christ would free them. What difference would Christ have made for these holy men and women if He had not let them into Heaven so they could forever after experience the vision of God? Surely the saints experience an accidental increase in happiness at the Last Judgment, when they are reunited with their bodies, but that is not when they first see God face to face [1 Cor 13:12]!

{11} On the conclusive proof of the Patristic consensus in favor of Filioque, see Huysman, Will R. “Filioque: Fathers, Popes, & Councils.” The Banana Republican. 4 Aug. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/filioque-fathers-popes-councils>.
{12} On the night of 10/8/2009, I read conclusive proof of this in the relevant section of George C. Papademetriou’s Introduction to St. Gregory Palamas.
{13} Gilbert, Dr. Peter. “The Debate on Bekkos’s Epigraphs.” De Unione Ecclesiarum. 1 Jun. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://bekkos.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/the-debate-on-bekkoss-epigraphs>.
{14} Huysman, Will R. “Filioque: Fathers, Popes, & Councils.” The Banana Republican. 4 Aug. 2009. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/filioque-fathers-popes-councils>.
{15} “St. Gregory Palamas and the Pope of Rome.” Orthodox Tradition. Vol. XIII, no. 2. 27. 16 Oct. 2009 <http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/qasgpp.pdf>
{16} Ibid.
{17} Palamas, Gregory. Triads III.i.36: “This is clearly shown by Peter, the leader of the apostles and foundation-stone of the Church…”

Originally posted 10/15/2009.

God is invisible to the corporeal eye in this life and the next since He is incorporeal. The corporeal eye can see only corporeal substances. When we receive our glorified bodies in the resurrection, our material flesh will not receive powers proper to spiritual substances, but will be transfigured so that the soul is not pulled down to the level of the senses.{1} There is no such thing as seeing the Uncreated Light with the eyes of the body.

Notes & References
{1} See p. 86 of Pohle, Rev. Joseph, Ph.D, D.D. God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes – A Dogmatic Treatise. St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder, 1911.

by M.C. Steenberg

from Monachos.net.

Three foundational aspects of the Theology of St Gregory Palamas

The theology of St Gregory Palamas, as expressed during the Palamite Controversy of the mid-14^th century, is far too extensive to be addressed in its full breadth in a paper such as this. Rather than attempt a manifestly impossible task, then, we will limit the focus of this essay to three central points in that theology: first, the idea of knowledge as expressed in the conflict between Gregory and Barlaam; second, the matter of prayer and the body; and third, the notion of the divine vision, which will lead naturally into a discussion of the energies and the essence of God.

A Knowledge Beyond Knowing: Barlaam’s Objection to Apodictic Theology

One of the first objections raised against St Gregory Palamas’ theology was brought forth by Barlaam of Calabria, and dealt specifically with the issue of knowledge. Two fundamentally different views on knowledge were involved in this dispute: first was that which Barlaam and others held, and which might broadly be termed, following Meyendorff, as the Dialectic Method of knowing God.¹ This was a largely philosophical view, based upon the position that knowledge of God might be gained by the use of discursive reason, dialectic, and rational investigation. As this very fact would suggest, the dialectic approach involved a strong element of kataphaticism. Yet, following the course of the great philosophers, it also readily admitted of the incapability of affirmative theology to truly apprehend the divine truths of God; and thus there was a strong, if not consuming trend towards apophatic theology present in this view. Barlaam himself seems to have based his own severe apophaticism on the model and example of Pseudo-Dionysius, with which he was quite familiar; yet his understanding of that writer was incomplete: where Dionysius was to stress certain positive elements of his apophatic reasoning (such as the positive experience of the divine darkness), Barlaam’s model seems to have been almost wholly negative—to the point of bordering on a certain agnosticism. God is transcendent, he taught, and thus to ascend to purer knowledge we must espouse negative theology and transcend our own perceptive reason; yet ultimately the Transcendent cannot be truly known, even with apophaticism used to its utmost. At the heart of Barlaam’s teaching is the significant idea that God cannot truly be perceived by man; that God the Transcendent can never be wholly known by man the created and finite.

Gregory, on the other hand, taught something quite different. This second conception of knowledge of God brought it out of the realm of mere dialectic—whether positive or negative, kataphatic or apophatic—and into the arena of demonstration; what Meyendorff terms Apodictic Knowledge of God.² Natural knowledge, believed Gregory, is one aspect of man’s relationship to his Creator; and yet it is quite a different thing to know about God, than it is to actually know Him. The great divergence between this view and that of Barlaam, was that Gregory believed the latter aspect to be not only a hypothetical possibility (which Barlaam would have denied), but a fully attainable reality. It was not a question of whether or not man could know God by direct, immediate knowledge, but whether or not he would, given the life he was leading.

Gregory’s view should not be seen to undermine a positive view of philosophical thought as a whole, which was a continual accusation made by Barlaam. Taken as a tool for the progression of the human person towards a state receptive to divine grace, Gregory saw philosophy and discursive knowledge as a perfectly reasonable set of aids for the Christian. It was only when philosophy, whose created end is the furtherance of knowledge of God,³ was misused by the philosophers and turned, in effect, into God, that Gregory raised his voice in ardent opposition. This was the ‘fallen’ state of knowledge, which did not betray an evil inherent in knowledge itself, but simply the misuse made of it by certain philosophical schools. Gregory understood natural knowledge within the metaphor of the natural world revealing aspects of God; to which revelation God Himself would add the grace to know Him intimately. He writes:

There is a knowledge about God and His doctrines. (…) The use and activity of the natural powers of the soul and of the body do shape the rational image of man, but that is not the same as the perfect beauty of the noble state which comes from above; that is by no means the supernatural union with the more than resplendent light, which is the sole source of sure theology.⁴

Thus Gregory viewed natural knowledge, in all its philosophical forms, as a tool leading to something greater, yet every bit as real as that very knowledge: the divine grace which brings about union, the true source of contemplative knowing.

But this conception clashed harshly with that of Barlaam, who seems firmly to have espoused the neo-Platonic tradition as he interpreted it from Dionysius, and could not find common ground between his own rationalist views and those of Gregory. Much of the earlier arguments in the Palamite conflict centred in this very issue of knowledge, and apart from being an interesting debate in its own right, this dispute led Gregory into the formative stages of the theological conceptions he would bring forth later in the controversy. The relationship of apophaticism to human knowledge, and that to God’s nature as transcendent Being, would come into play with great importance a short time later, and, as we shall see, would have direct bearing on Gregory’s famous argument for the distinction of energies and essence.

Prayer and the Body: Objections to the Hesychast Method of Prayer

An objection which would soon follow the above, involved the method of prayer practised by the hesychast monks. As we discussed in our previous paper on the historical background of the Palamite controversy, Barlaam learned of this practise only a short time after beginning his discussions with Gregory, and soon added this item to those in dispute.

Once more we find the presence of two general views which clashed in this debate. The first, again, is that of Barlaam, and might be termed the Platonic, or Evagrian conception of the human person. We will not spend a great deal of time discussing this view here, as its basis is essentially that of the neo-Platonic, dualist understanding of humanity, which has been addressed in previous papers. Yet it should be noted that Barlaam shared Evagrios’ spritualizing tendencies, which in the Calabrian’s case edged the conception of human spirituality into the realm of that which brought the soul into sanctification by means of overcoming the body. While we might not see Barlaam as quite so daringly dualist as Evagrios, and certainly not Plotinus, we still find in him the central tenets of a dualistic theology.

In opposition to this view was Gregory, who took a more biblical stance in his understanding of the human person. Maintaining the Old Testament conception of the human person as an integral whole, whose character and essence is seated in the heart (kardi/a)—a view which, while not always in the majority, has certainly never been absent in the patristic tradition—Gregory could not take a share in the philosophical dualism of Barlaam and his contemporaries. Meyendorff writes, ‘It is above all against a dualistic conception of man that Palamas raises his voice’,⁵ and indeed it was largely for polemical reasons that Palamas raised the issue at all. Yet it was one of fundamental importance to his understanding of humanity as the creation of God, and one which he saw as not only theologically necessary, but empirically verifiable:

What pain or joy or movement of the body is there, which is not shared by soul and body?⁶

Gregory could thus not support the view that soul and body were distinct and separate in the greater scheme of human life. Still less could he accept the notion that the soul was good and the body evil, for ‘only the Messalian heretics say that the body is evil in itself.’⁷ In Gregory’s conception, matter in itself, whether the matter of the human body or that of any other form, could not be evil by essence, for it was the creation of God. ‘Apart from sin, nothing is wrong in itself in the present life, not even death, but everything can lead to evil.’⁸ Here we find a key element in Palamas’ theology that began to be directly expressed in his conflicts with Barlaam over the nature of the human person: the idea that it is only the misuse of the elements of created nature, whether mind or matter, soul or body, that cause them to become ‘evil’ and far from God. In their ‘natural’ state, all elements of creation have the ability to bring about knowledge of and union with the Creator. Again, we find that Gregory is here far from innovative, as this notion had been expressed in the writings of the Fathers for centuries (quite notably in the fourth chapter of Pseudo-Dionysius’ On the Divine Names); yet it was Gregory’s special gift to take this long-standing and essential element of patristic theology, and weave it so artfully into his greater conception of the sanctification of the human person. In speaking again of the connection of soul and body, and this time relating it to the activity of both in the spiritual life of the individual, he writes:

There are blessed passions, activities common to soul and body, which do not attach the spirit to the flesh (sa/rc), but draw up the flesh to a dignity near to that of the spirit, and make it to turn towards the heights. (…) In the same way as the Divinity of the Word Incarnate is common to soul and body … so, in spiritual men, is the grace of the Spirit transmitted to the body by the soul as intermediary, and this gives it to experience of divine things, and allows it to feel the same passion as the soul.⁹

It is interesting to note that Gregory did indeed advocate the use of a ‘psycho-somatic technique’ in the hesychast method of prayer; yet he did so not out of a conviction that this was an essential necessity (rather, he saw it principally as in aid for beginners),¹⁰ but rather out of a conviction that refusing to admit the validity of a type of prayer involving the body would be to negate the reality of the intimate and foundational unity of the human person. This unity, when properly attuned, may not only serve as the source of wholeness in personal sanctification, but allows the whole person to take an active part in the progression toward a sanctified state.

Unnatural Participation: Objections to the Divine Vision, and the Distinction of Energies and Essence

A third major objection raised against Palamas’ teachings was that centring on his defence of the divine vision—of his support of the reports of those hesychasts who claimed to have seen the Divine Light with their own eyes. Both Barlaam and Akindynos, and to some degree Gregoras, would object to this notion, for to their minds it sounded too reminiscent of the heresy of the Messalians. That the hesychasts would claim to see God, using much the same language as St Symeon the New Theologian had used three centuries earlier, seemed to echo the Messalian concept of beholding the divine nature with bodily eyes—a notion that had been refuted at the Sixth Oecumenical Council and elsewhere. Yet Gregory Palamas would ardently defend the monks’ claims, and to that defence we will now turn.

We do not have time here to delve too deeply into the reports of experiences of the divine light, for such could easily consume a paper of its own (if not several). Our principal interest is to relate how Gregory’s understanding of these experiences—of the individual’s own apprehension of the Divine Being in personal, visible form—related to the overall theological ‘picture’ which he produced in his writings as the result of the Palamite controversy as a whole. In this we will discover his defence of the vision of the light, and his distinction between the essence and the energies of God, to be manifest extensions of the theological points we have already discussed.

First we must return to that point most recently addressed: that of prayer. Gregory and the Athonite hesychasts did not understand the divine vision, generally, as a randomly accorded charismatic gift, but rather the fruit of true and inspired prayer. In our above quotation from his second Triad, Palamas wrote that the passions, when properly focused and directed (i.e., through prayer), possess the ability to ‘draw up the flesh to a dignity near to that of the spirit,’ and that in this state the Spirit ‘gives [the body] to experience of divine things.’ This is the goal toward which the practise of hesychasm—which Palamas did not see as the end of spirituality, but a chief among its tools—is aimed: the purification and sanctification of the person, so that the divine transfiguration wrought of the Spirit might take place.

This transfiguration of the body so that it might ‘experience divine things’ was not understood by Gregory in a merely metaphorical sense; it was not simply a symbol for increased knowledge of God that led to improved understanding, but a real and true change in the human person, such that the manner of his knowing the Divine Creator might indeed be transformed. To fully understand this concept, we must now return to the first theological point discussed in this paper: that of Gregory’s ‘apodictic’ conception of divine knowledge. We have already addressed Barlaam’s contention that the limitations of man’s knowledge keep him from ever coming to a real knowledge of the Divinity, who utterly transcends all human thought—and the fact that this led him to espouse a severe apophaticism, leading almost to agnosticism in its final analysis. Gregory, too, found place for the apophatic approach, but for a different—and important—reason: he did not see it so much as the limitations of man’s knowledge that kept him from knowing God by personal experience, but the fact that God, by nature,is unknowable. It is not simply a lack of proper perception—through which we must work apophatically—that keeps humanity distant from a personal knowledge of God’s nature, but the fact that God Himself is entirely unknowable in that nature to His creation, as a property of His being.

This would at first seem to be in line with the very claims that Barlaam made in opposition to Gregory, but that similarity is lost when one considers that, while Palamas understood God’s nature to be unknowable, he believed that God Himself is nonetheless directly known. Here he developed his famous distinction between two aspects of the Divine Being: the essence, which is the nature discussed above, and which has as a ‘property’ its absolute transcendence and ‘unknowability’ to the human mind; and the energies, which are the workings of that essence in the universe, and which are given to the experience of those who are in a state of grace ready to behold them.

The energies of God, as distinct from His essence, nonetheless relate to this essence. They are not foreign to the nature of God, but inherent products of it. Moreover, they are not mere ‘side-effects’ of God’s presence, but His actual immanence. Meyendorff writes,

The Trinity itself is totally present in the divine energies, and there is no question of the emanations of Plotinus or of beings distinct from God. On every suitable occasion Palamas stresses the fact that the energies have neither hypostasis nor existence of their own, but result from the divine hypostasis.¹¹

This is an essential point in Gregory’s theology, for it stresses the union of differing characteristics of God’s being: essence and energy are two aspects of His nature, yet they are not wholly disparate or foreign to one another. But neither are they the same—and here, again, Gregory stresses the supreme transcendence of the divine essence, as related to the immanent presence and experience of the energies. The latter are those uncreated indications of God that ‘manifest [Him] outside of his unkowable essence,’¹² yet they are not to be seen either as the essence itself, nor as composite ‘parts’ which together make up that essence.

Neither the uncreated goodness, nor the eternal glory, nor the life and all such things are simply the superessential essence of God, for God, as Cause, transcends them; nevertheless we say that He is Life, Goodness and other such things.¹³

They do not compose the being of God (…) It is He who gives them their existence, without taking his existence from them; indeed it is not the realities which surround God which are the essence of God, but he is their essence.¹⁴

Thus we see Gregory’s insistence upon the firm distinction between essence and energy, which defines them as unique and separate aspects of God’s being, yet each a real and whole manifestation of God Himself. In a powerful and revealing phrase, he writes ‘God complete is present in each of the divine energies.’¹⁵

Within this context of God as existent in His essence and manifest in His energies, we can see with improved clarity Gregory’s conception of the divine vision in hesychast prayer. This is not direct encounter with God’s transcendent nature, which both Barlaam and Gregory agreed was impossible; nor was it a ‘materialisation’ of God’s being such that human eyes might behold it, which would be the heresy of the Messalians. Rather it is the personal encounter of the transfigured person with the manifest energies of the living God, in which the Transcendent One is eminently (‘apodictically’) known and experienced, without losing His transcendence of being. ‘When the Saints receive the vision,’ writes Meyendorff, ‘they enter into direct contact with God Himself, who remains totally transcendent though revealing himself to them.’¹⁶

The opposition to the hesychast experience of the divine vision was, then, met by Gregory with a detailed and intricate theological response that both preserved the sacred and ineffable ‘otherness’ of God, while nonetheless insisting upon the reality of experience and personal knowledge of the same.

Concluding Thoughts

There is much to Gregory’s theology which has not been discussed in this short paper, as time restraints dictated that only a few of the major issues be addressed. Yet the above three concepts are of central importance to his entire theological outlook, and have been of great influence in contemporary discussion, ever since the rediscovery of his works in this century. Once can see in Palamas’ theology a holistic view of man and a dynamic conception of faith, which are intimately bound up in a spirituality of sanctification and transfiguration that is wholly in line with the patristic tradition in which the saint lived and thought. It is fitting, perhaps, that we should close our patristic survey with this author who, 1,400 years after the earthly life of Christ, so dynamically presented what had been taught and exposited about Him in the centuries previous.

Points for further discussion

1. There are no dogmas in physiology. Palamas was supportive of scientific investigation into the workings of human physiology, and did not believe that this study and its discoveries did not conflict with divine truth.

2. The Mystical Doctrine of the Incarnation. A point of vital importance in Palamite theology: that the Incarnation of Christ wrought a ‘radical change’ (Meyendorff, p. 149) in the relationship of man with God, and this change is passed along to all humanity through the mystical participation of prayer and the sacraments.

3. The notion of return to one’s self, for Christ is in us.

4. The central significance of baptism and the Eucharist as the means by which the sanctification of the body is joined together with that of the soul/mind through prayer.

5. Christian Materialism: the extension of Gregory’s views on the Incarnation and the redemption of matter, to the extent that all of matter may itself be ‘deified’ to some degree.

6. The significance of Grace as the spur by which all salvific and sanctifying activity occurs, and its relation to the soul and body (connected with point #4, above).

Notes:

]]> http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-orthodoxy-of-st-gregory-palamas/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:05:40 +0000 Will Huysman http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-orthodoxy-of-st-gregory-palamas/

Originally posted 9/28/2009.

The controversy over the appropriateness of Catholic veneration of St. Gregory Palamas is tied to the controversy over the Hesychast theologian’s orthodoxy in three key areas. St. Gregory Palamas was orthodox in areas two and three, but he definitely adhered to the heterodox position on the procession of the Holy Spirit;{1} he went out of his way to reject the Catholic doctrine on the procession of the Holy Spirit, and, when writing against the Catholic Patristic hermeneutic, failed to do justice to the Greek Fathers because he reduced their teaching to an eternal energetic manifestation of the Holy Spirit through the Son.{2} I don’t know specifically how the saintly Cardinal Josyf Slipyj overcame this stumbling block when he wrote in defense of the sainthood of Gregory Palamas on theological and ecclesiological grounds.{3} I pray that someone will translate the writings of Cardinal Slipyj, so that the controversy over the appropriateness of venerating St. Gregory Palamas will cease!

1. Procession of the Holy Spirit
Heterodox: There is no communication of consubstantial divinity (divine essence, not just energy) from the Father to the Son and from the Father, through and with the Son, to the Holy Spirit (Photianism).
Orthodox: The Father alone spirates the Holy Spirit in the sense of ekporeusis, but this does not exclude the communication of consubstantial divinity (divine essence, not just energy) from the Father to the Son and from the Father, through and with the Son, to the Holy Spirit (Filioquism).{4}

2. Uncreated Light
Heterodox: The Uncreated Light can be seen with the eyes of the body (Messalianism).
Orthodox: The Uncreated Light cannot be seen with the eyes of the body.{5}

3. Essence-Energies Distinction
Heterodox: God as what He eternally and unalterably is in se, given His creation and redemption of us, is really distinct from God as what He eternally does ad extra (Ditheism).
Orthodox: God as what He necessarily is irrespective of what He does ad extra is really distinct from God as what He eternally does ad extra.{6}

Notes & References
{1} Tonight (10/8/2009) I read conclusive proof of this in the relevant section of George C. Papademetriou’s Introduction to St. Gregory Palamas.
{2} Huysman, Will R. “Filioque.” The Banana Republican. 4 Aug. 2009. 7 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/filioque-fathers-popes-councils/>.
{3} Huysman, Will. “Cardinal Josyf Slipyj of Blessed Memory on the Appropriateness of Catholic Veneration of St. Gregory Palamas.” The Banana Republican. 26 Sept. 2009. 7 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/cardinal-slipyj-on-venerating-st-gregory-palamas/>.
{4} Huysman, Will R. “Filioque.” The Banana Republican. 4 Aug. 2009. 7 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/filioque-fathers-popes-councils/>.
{5} Huysman, Will R. “Vladimir Lossky On the Patristic Understanding of the Light of Tabor.” The Banana Republican. 1 Oct. 2009. 7 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/vladimir-lossky-tabor-light-patristics/>.
{6} Huysman, Will. “Essence, Energy, and Uncreated and Created Grace.” The Banana Republican. 22 Aug. 2009. 7 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican1.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/essence-energy-uncreated-created-grace/>.

Originally posted 9/26/2009.

1. This is what I can gather regarding the holy Josyf Slipyj’s justification of Catholic veneration of St. Gregory Palamas,{1} based on the relevant section of Pelikan, Jaroslav. Confessor Between East and West: a Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990.

2. Cardinal Slipyj cited the 1917 Eastern Catholic “Petersburg Synod” as historical precedent, since that synod sanctioned Eastern Cathlic veneration of Orthodox saints who were not canonized in the Roman Catholic Church (Pelikan 228).{1} The God-bearing cardinal demonstrated the compatibility of Palamite theology with Catholic theology based on his study of the writings of Fr. John Meyendorff and Fr. Georges Florovsky, both Eastern Orthodox scholars (228).{2} Ultimately, as the most erudite Slipyj showed in the 200-page votum to which Fr. Serge Keleher refers,{3} the mystical theology of St. Gregory Palamas is indispensable to the Eastern Catholic tradition and Eastern Catholic piety, rather than antithetical to Catholic theology (228).
Notes & References
{1} For my own attempt, see Huysman, Will R. “Apologia Pro Sanctus Gregorius Palamas.” The Banana Republican. 27 Mar. 2009. 26 Sept. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican.blogspot.com/2009/03/apologia-pro-sanctus-gregorius-palamas.html>.
{2} Tvory Kard. Josyfa Verchovnoho Archyjepiskopa [Opera omnia Card. Josephi (Slipyj Kobernyckyj-Dyckovskyj) archiepiscopi maioris]. Rome: Universitas Ucrainorum a S. Clemente Papa, 1968-. 3/4:75-83.
{3} Slipyj, Letter to Archbishop Francscus Seper of Zagreb, 6.iv.1971, Archivum Patriarchale Sanctae Sophiae, Università Catolica Ucraina, Rome, 40:90-91.
{4} See post #218811 by Fr. Serge Keleher in The Byzantine Forum.

Originally posted 8/22/2009.

Defining the Terms
1. ES-1 (oὐσία in Byzantine sense): God as what He necessarily is irrespective of what He does ad extra, according to the definition of the erudite Dr. Mike Liccione. No creature can see ES-1 for the simple reason that we cannot know God except as He acts on us. This is the sense in which the Eastern Fathers like St. Gregory the Theologian (Doctor) [Oration 28:3] and St. Maximos the Confessor deny that the beatific vision is of the divine essence, for such vision would entail comprehension and our existence as a divine hypostasis, which blasphemous doctrines must be shunned.

2. ES-2 (essentia in Latin sense): God as what He eternally and unalterably is in se, given His creation and redemption of us, as explained by Dr. Mike Liccione. ES-2 becomes the form whereby our intellect understands once we get to Heaven, by the grace of God [St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica III-S, q. 92, art. 1, corp.].
3. Energy (ένέργεία = operatio): God as what He eternally does ad extra.
4. ADS (Absolute Divine Simplicity): God is pure act, so that in Him there is no composition between act and passive potency.
5. UG (Uncreated Grace): God Himself as He gives Himself to creatures: e.g., the Trinity indwelling in righteous persons. The uncreated God is the objective last end of men and angels [Summa Theologica I, q. 26, art. 3, ad 2].
6. CG (Created Grace): the created effects of God’s communicating Himself, e.g., the beatific vision. The created beatific vision is the subjective last end of men and angels [Summa Theologica I, q. 26, art. 3, ad 2], because God is not divided into degrees of goodness, whereas the beatific vision differs [1 Cor 15:41] according to the degree of charity [Summa Theologica III-S, q. 93, art. 3, corp.].

Notional Essence-Energies Distinction in Latin Theology
7. Dr. Mike Liccione says the following: ES-2 is notionally distinct from the Energy that realizes ES-2 in a complete and unalterable manner. ES-2 and energy are not really distinct because given the eternal manner in which the Energy realizes ES-2, there is only a logical, not a real, possibility that the Energy would have realized ES-2 in a different way. Since the Energies are not the only logically possible manifestations of ES-2, ADS is compatible with the fact that God freely created.

Real Essence-Energies Distinction in Eastern Theology
8. On the other hand, ES-1 is clearly really distinct from the Energy. This, however, is no prejudice to ADS, because the distinction does not involve composition between act and potential; ES-1 is God as active ad intra irrespective of His ad extra activity, and Energy, God as He is active ad extra, is active but not acted upon, and does not change or begin to exist, since an essence cannot exist without a natural energy, and the essence of God is eternal [St. Gregory Palamas: Physical, Theological, Moral, and Practical Chapters 128 in PG 150:1212A]. ES-1 is God, ES-2 is God, and Energy is God.

Originally posted 10/1/2009.

1. Vladimir Lossky says on page 222 of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church:

Most of the Fathers who speak of the Transfiguration witness to the divine and uncreated nature of the light which appeared to the apostles. St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Maximus, St. Andrew of Crete, St. Symeon the New Theologian, Euthymius Zigabenus, all speak of it in this way, and it would be perverse in the extreme to interpret all the passages in question as mere figures of speech.{1}

2. The above list includes two saints who are formally recognized as Doctors of the Universal Church. The Church Doctor and Holy Hierarch St. Gregory the Theologian calls the Tabor Light uncreated divinity in Oration 40:6 [PG 36:365A].{2} St. Gregory Palamas makes use of other witnesses in his 150 Chapters. St. John of Damascus, another Doctor, said in his Homily on the Transfiguration of the Lord 12 [PG 96:564B] that the light of glory shining from Christ’s body on Mt. Tabor was the uncreated light of divinity.{3} So, too, does St. Symeon Metaphrastes say, in his Commentary on the Apostle John 1 [PG 116:685D], that the Tabor Light is the divinity of Christ manifested to the sons of thunder.{4}
3. Palamites further claimed that Sts. Athanasios the Great, John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great taught that the Tabor Light was uncreated.{5} Gregory Akindynos rejected the idea that the Tabor Light was uncreated and really distinct from the divine essence, yet visible to the corporeal eye.{6} So, too, was this thesis rejected by the Latin Patriarch Paul of Constantinople [PG 154:835-838] in his letter to the caesaropapist usurper, Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos.{7} The Monk Isaac Argyros{8} and John the Cypriot [PG 152:864]{9} also rejected the theory.
4. The Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas, wonderworker and prince of theologians, quotes three Doctors when he argues that the Godhead cannot be seen by the corporeal eye: Sts. Ambrose the Great of Milan, Jerome the Great of Strido, and Augustine the Great of Hippo.{10} Catholic theologians use “essence” in a sense such that the divine essence and the divine energy are only notionally distinct,{11} and therefore when they say that the “essence” cannot be seen by the corporeal eye either in this life or the next, they also rule out the idea that the “energy” can be seen by the corporeal eye in this life. This might be why the saintly Pope John Paul II the Great says in reference to Hesychasm, “There was no lack of tension with the Catholic viewpoint on certain aspects of this practice.”{12} He nevertheless considered Palamas to be a saint.{13} Pope John Paul II the Great, pray for us!
Notes & References
{1} Lossky, Vladimir Nikolaievich. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. 1 Oct. 2009 <http://books.google.com/books?id=dxqvWwPSCSwC&pg=PA222#v=onepage&q=&f=false>.
{2} Qtd. in St. Gregory Palamas, Physical, Theological, Moral, and Practical Chapters §146.
{3} Qtd. in Ibid.
{4} Qtd. in Ibid., §149.
{5} See p. 133 of Vol. 2 of Fr. Martin Jugie’s Theologia dogmatica Christianorum orientalium ab Ecclesia Catholica dissidentium. The very learned Fr. Jugie was a staunch opponent of Palamism.
{6} Ibid., p. 155. When the anti-Palamite writers argued against St. Gregory Palamas’s real distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies (operations), they may have been using the term “essence” in a different sense than St. Gregory Palamas. If so, then there is no real contradiction between the two theological systems with respect to the essence-energies distinction. If not, then the systems cannot be reconciled. But we have reason to believe that the theologians did use the term “essence” differently, since, thanks to the saintly Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, the Catholic Church regards Gregory Palamas as a saint.
{7} Qtd. in ibid., 138.
{8} Qtd. in ibid., 159.
{9} Qtd. in ibid., 160.
{10} Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica III-S, q. 92, art. 2, corp.
{11} Huysman, Will. “Essence, Energy, and Uncreated and Created Grace.” The Banana Republican. 22 Aug. 2009. 3 Oct. 2009 <http://thebananarepublican.blogspot.com/2009/08/essence-energy-and-uncreated-and.html>.
{12} Pope John Paul II the Great. “Eastern Theology Has Enriched the Whole Church” §2. Eternal World Television Network. 11 Aug. 1996. 3 Oct. 2009 <http://motherofgodchurch.org/mog/documents/jp2_EASTERN_THEOLOGY_HAS_ENRICHED_THE_WHOLE_CHURCH.HTM>.
{13} Liles, Martha. “Saint Gregory Palamas.” Melkite Greek Catholic Information Center. 3 Oct. 2009 <http://www.mliles.com/melkite/stgregorypalamas.shtml>.

A Homily on the Dormition of Our Supremely Pure

Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Both love and duty today fashion my homily for your charity. It is not only that I wish, because of my love for you, and because I am obliged by the sacred canons, to bring to your God-loving ears a saving word and thus to nourish your souls, but if there be any among those things that bind by obligation and love and can be narrated with praise for the Church, it is the great deed of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. The desire is double, not single, since it induces me, entreats and persuades me, whereas the inexorable duty constrains me, though speech cannot attain to what surpasses it, just as the eye is unable to look fixedly upon the sun. One cannot utter things which surpass speech, yet it is within our power by the love for mankind of those hymned, to compose a song of praise and all at once both to leave untouched intangible things, to satisfy the debt with words and to offer up the first fruits of our love for the Mother of God in hymns composed according to our abilities.

If, then, “death of the righteous man is honorable” (cf. Ps. 115:6) and the “memory of the just man is celebrated with songs of praise” (Prov. 10:7). How much more ought we to honor with great praises the memory of the holiest of the saints, she by whom all holiness is afforded to the saints, I mean the Ever-Virgin. Mother of God! Even so we celebrate today her holy dormition or translation to another life, whereby, while being “a little lower than angels” (Ps. 8:6), by her proximity to the God of all, and in the wondrous deeds which from the beginning of time were written down and accomplished with respect to her, she has ascended incomparably higher than the angels and the archangels and all the super-celestial hosts that are found beyond them. For her sake the God-possessed prophets pronounce prophecies, miracles are wrought to foreshow that future Marvel of the whole world, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. The flow of generations and circumstances journeys to the destination of that new mystery wrought in her; the statutes of the Spirit provide beforehand types of the future truth. The end, or rather the beginning and root, of those divine wonders and deeds is the annunciation to the supremely virtuous Joachim and Anna of what was to be accomplished: namely, that they who were barren from youth would beget in deep old age her that would bring forth without seed Him that was timelessly begotten of God the Father before the ages. A vow was given by those who marvelously begot her to return her that was given to the Giver; so accordingly the Mother of God strangely changed her dwelling from the house of her father to the house of God while still an infant . She passed not a few years in the Holy of Holies itself, wherein under the care of an angel she enjoyed ineffable nourishment such as even Adam did not succeed in tasting; for indeed if he had, like this immaculate one, he would not have fallen away from life, even though it was because of Adam and so that she might prove to be his daughter, that she yielded a little to nature, as did her Son, Who has now ascended from earth into heaven.

Find the rest of the homily here.

I’ve been asserting this for years. Now someone has done a scholarly work supporting it. God bless A.N. Williams! — Antiochian-Thomist

From AccessMyLibrary.com.

Orrologion has posted the original text of the “Twelve Differences between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches” by Teófilo de Jesús along with excellent responses to each of the twelve points from Fr Alvin Kimel, of Pontifications* fame, who in his extended period of discernment after leaving the Episcopal Church studied the claims of both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in great depth.

Some excerpts:

On Primacy. Is it true that the Orthodox Church rejects totally any understanding of ecclesial headship? What about the bishop of a diocese? Does he not wield and embody a divine authority given to him by Christ Jesus? Is he not the head of his community, which precisely is the Church? And when Catholics speak of the Pope as the earthly head of the Church, are they in any way denying that Christ alone is properly head of the Church? When Catholics speak of the primacy of the Pope, are they exalting the Pope above the Episcopate, as if their power and authority derived from him? And are Orthodox theologians incapable of entertaining an authentic primacy within the episcopal college for the bishop of Rome? …

On Conciliarity. The Catholic Church understands the Church precisely as a communion of particular Churches and local dioceses; moreover, the Church as the universal Church is not to be understood as simply the sum or collection of all particular Churches: each diocese is itself a truly catholic body … Catholic ecclesiology is so much more complex and diverse than is sometimes appreciated …

On Original Sin. I’m sure there are differences between Catholic construals of anthropology and Orthodox construals of anthropology (please note the plural); but I do not believe that this is because the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches a forensic imputation of original sin and the Orthodox Church does not. Why do I say this? Because it is not at all clear to me that the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches the *forensic* imputation of Adam’s guilt to humanity. I know that some (many?) Catholic theologians have sometimes taught something like this over the centuries, but the Catholic Church has strained over recent decades to clarify the meaning of Original Sin not as the forensic transfer of Adam’s guilt but as the inheritance of the Adamic condition of real alienation from God–i.e., the absence of sanctifying grace … Important differences on the nature of original exist between St Augustine and magisterial Catholic teaching …

On Liturgical Reform. I agree here that there are important differences between Catholic and Orthodox liturgical praxis at the present time. Sadly, many sectors of the Catholic Church appear to have uncritically embraced the thesis that the Church must adapt her liturgy to the spirit of the modern age. This has been disastrous for Catholic life and spirituality. One does see signs, however, that the insanity is passing.

On Grace and Deification. While perhaps it might have been true at some point in the past that Catholic theologians tended to reduce grace to a created power, this cannot be asserted today. Catholic theologians are quite clear that everything begins with and centers around Uncreated Grace. Catholic theologians do have a problem with some of the Palamite construals of grace and the popular Orthodox rejection of any notion of created grace–they do not see how the Palamite position does not lead to the annihilation of human nature–but this does not mean that Catholic theologians and poets cannot envision an eschatological life as full and vivid as the Orthodox. Surely Dante’s Paradiso may be invoked at this point. But I do acknowledge a difference of homiletical and ascetical emphasis between Catholics and Orthodox on theosis, sanctifying suffering, and the life of the resurrection.

* I was inspired to begin blogging after reading Pontifications, though I am not nearly as erudite and well-spoken as Fr Kimel and some of his interlocutors, both Catholic and Orthodox.

 ——————————————————

What do you think? 

I know nothing about the recent controversy over this, referenced at the beginning of this article from St. Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania (anonymous), and was surprised to hear about it.  But this article seems to address it well, briefly, and Orthodoxly.  It also highlights the misinterpretation or misunderstanding of Patristic writings that is possible unless one is steeped ever more deeply in Orthodoxy’s Patristic, Holy Tradition, ie, not just historic prooftexts (or even Scriptural for that matter), but the Tradition in its fullness, including the Liturgy and its hymns and prayers, the spiritual and ascetic struggle to receive God’s Gift, and even how Orthodoxy has and has not made use of non-canonical (“apocryphal”) scriptures and related writings.  For its taste of this, I highly recommend the article even if you already don’t question the sinlessness of the Theotokos.

(I would only add to the piece, to clarify it, that at no time did Mary lose her free will.  She was probably sorely tempted!)

The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies

“Overcoming the Schism,” Chicago, May 8-10, 1998

THE SCHISM: GROUNDS FOR DIVISION, GROUNDS FOR UNITY
“A LATIN’S LAMENTATION OVER GENNADIOS SCHOLARIOS”
Fr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem.

In August of 1994, I was happy to be one of the many Latin clerics who over the years, in divisa or in borghese, have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain of Athos, the Garden of the Mother of God. On the feast of the Lord’s Transfiguration I was able to set foot on that peninsula where souls and bodies hidden from the world, but known to God and His angels, share still in the bright glory of that mystery narrated in the Holy Gospels. I made this pilgrimage with the blessing of my abbot after attending an international meeting of some clergy. On Athos I expected to be refreshed and edified, and I was, after having had to breathe deeply the “schismatic” atmosphere of a sadly typical postconciliar gathering of ecclesiastics, some of whom were merely juridically Roman Catholic, for whom God and the things of God could scarcely be said to hold the primacy, and the Pope not at all.

In a shop by the docks at the little western port of the Mountain I found a postcard representation of an icon depicting a touching and curious scene: “The Lamentation over Constantine Palaiologos” written at the Old Calendarist hesychasterion of the Mother of God of the Myrtle Tree in Attica. In the icon the emperor reposes on a bier with a candle as two women mourn on either side, one kneeling, written as “Orthodoxy” and the other, “Hellas”, standing with her hand to her mouth in a gesture of reverence, calling to mind the original sense of the imperial Roman adoratio. A touching scene, I say, because it brings to mind the magnificent “courage born of despair,” as even the malicious Gibbon puts it, with which the last of the Roman emperors died leading the defense of his New Rome, yet still a curious one, since this Constantine XII died in communion with the see of Old Rome, having received the Eucharistic viaticum on the morning of the halosis at a uniate liturgy, the last to be served in the Church of Holy Wisdom.

Even more curious was the figure “Hellas” for nothing could be less Byzantine, less Orthodox, less imperial, than the use of this term to name the nation of Greek-speaking Romaioi. To Orthodox Byzantium “hellenic” meant secular, pagan, something worse than heterodox, to be anathematized in the synodikon on the first Sunday of Great Lent. At the time of the fall of the City a “hellene” was one who exceeded even the utilitarian impiety of the Florentine latinophrones by promoting the Florentine Platonic revival.

The figure of Orthodoxy, undoubtedly the most important in the image, was in very strange company indeed, with anomalies more than anachronistic. That this icon was the work of Old Calendarists who clearly intended it to be the expression of a rigorously Orthodox historical sensibility indicates a fact, more relevant than ever, which those of us – inter quos ego – who sympathize with the zealots, Catholic and Orthodox, must keep in mind. It is this: We must be vigilant to ensure that in our understanding and defense of right belief and right worship we do not adopt the ideological preoccupations of political and philosophical movements, sometimes those of our friends and allies, which are foreign to our faith and its tradition, lest we undermine the very thing we are striving to preserve. We must examine carefully the understanding and instincts of the best representatives of our twin tradition, Eastern and Western, especially at the points in history when they are explicitly opposing each other or together combating the same contemporary errors. The happy result of this can be a genuine ecumenism, an ecumenism of the “anti-ecumenical,” innocent of ideology or indifferentism. Dom Gerard Calvet, abbot of the traditional Benedictine abbey of the Madeleine, Le Barroux in Provence has said: “The true ecumenism is that of Tradition… the more I deepen my understanding of Tradition, the more I rediscover other men.” [1]

After the pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, I went to Serres in Macedonia near the Bulgarian border, to the monastery of the Holy Forerunner, to the tomb of Gennadios Scholarios, first Patriarch of Constantinople under Turkish domination, to pay a debt of gratitude to him by praying for the repose of his soul, just having completed in 1993 a study of his thought for a doctorate at a Roman university. The monastery which was the place of his retirement, from which he hoped (and hopes still!) to rise in the parousia, is now flourishing after many years without a monastic community. There are nuns there, the spiritual daughters of the great Father Ephraim, abbot of Philotheou on Athos, who has founded a number of observant communities in Greece and most recently in Arizona at a desert town ominously – for the Orthodox at least – named Florence.

Two kind nuns accompanied me to the katholikon where they were amazed and a bit reluctant to see me venerate the relics of the monastery, and stood by with a certain sceptical vigilance as I prayed a rosary more romano at the epitaph of the patriarch, one on each side, as I knelt there. They simply did not know what to expect from a Latin priest, but they were willing and charitable enough in their watchfulness. Here was another touching and curious scene. Yet it was a scene more truly indicative of the state of things past and present and future than that written on the postcard icon. This was a living icon of the clarity about Tradition just commended, with the tense, but kind-hearted akrivia which ought to characterize the relations between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. No one of us had made a compromise, but something true had really brought us together.

The nuns represented the living tradition of Orthodoxy, the kneeling priest, the faith of the Roman Catholic Thomist. What did the patriarch lying in death, surrounded by his modern mourners represent? We will now see. The rest of my conference will draw out the implications of this brief act of piety on behalf of the departed patriarch. Let it be a kind of historical-theological “Lamentation over Gennadios Scholarios,” a threnos which may not only move us at the thought of the beauty and the possibilities that once were, but also shed light on our duties at the present hour.

Gennadios Scholarios was the handpicked successor of St. Mark of Ephesus as leader of the zealot opposition to the union council of Florence, at which they had both assisted. When the union decree of the council was promulgated by the emperor Constantine and the papal legate Cardinal Isidore of Kiev in Hagia Sophia in December 1452, just six months before the fall of the City, Gennadios published the following proclamation on the door of his cell in the monastery of Charsianeites nearby: “O miserable Romans, why will you abandon the truth; and why instead of confiding in God will you put your trust in the Italians? In losing your faith you will lose your city. Have mercy on me O Lord! I protest in your presence that I am innocent of the crime. O miserable Romans, consider, pause, and repent. At the same moment you renounce the religion of your fathers, by embracing impiety you submit to a foreign servitude.” Later, after the fall of the City, Mehmet II brought Gennadios back from captivity to make him the patriarch of the Romans and the first ethnarch of the Greek-speaking Christians under the Turcocracy. Gennadios resigned in 1457 to go to Vatopedi on Athos, and was brought back again in 1462, and then resigned definitively in 1464 and went into retirement at the monastery of the Forerunner in Serres. There he continued a theological and philosophical production which had characterized his whole life since the conclusion of the Council of Florence. [2] He reposed in the Lord sometime the in the year 1472.

Surely Gennadios professed an Orthodoxy of the utmost purity, and possessed an anti-Latin animus firm enough to make him doctrinally acceptable to the saintly arch-zealot Mark of Ephesus and politically acceptible to the wily Sultan. One would expect his writings to reflect this. On examining them, then, one can only be struck with amazement to see that he is an enthusiastic follower and translator of St. Thomas Aquinas. Western Scholasticism is supposed to be the bane of both the ecumenically-minded and traditionalist Orthodox today, one of the only points they share in common. There is barely a point of heterodox Latin theology or liturgy which the zealots do not either trace to it or determine as its cause. There is barely an aspect of traditional Orthodox practice that the modernists want to change in favor of restoring and updating, in which they do not see some Latinizing scholastic or even – perish the thought – Augustinian influence. Both lament the influence of Latin scholasticism on some of the standard Orthodox theological manuals and catechisms in use until recently in Greece and in Slavic countries. Scholasticism, synonymous it would seem with rationalism, and the cause of secularism, is pernicious and fundamentally unorthodox, a foreign influence, an aberration. But let us hear what Gennadios, the patriarch, patriot, and anti-Latin zealot has to say in the preface to his summaries- of all things-the two Summae of St. Thomas Aquinas:

“The present book is a summary of two books, on of that against the Gentiles, or those heresies which oppose the truth, the other the first part of the Summa Theologiae of which there are three parts. We have taken up the labor of such a summary on account of our great love for these two books. We have put these things together which we had written out before our captivity, and later rediscovered in the diaspora. Since they are in no wise of an easily transportable size on account of the breadth and size of the chapters and questions, and of the fullness of the precise arguments contained in them, and since this our unfortunate life after our national disaster lavishes on us wanderings and distasteful goings and comings, and being unable to carry about so great a weight of books, of necessity and for no other ambition we have made a project of this summary so that it can suffice for us and for anyone else who is well versed in them, in place of the complete books. The author of these books is a Latin by birth and so he adheres to the dogma of that church as an inheritance; this is only human. But he is a wise man, and is inferior to none of those who are perfect in wisdom among men. He wrote most especially as a commentator of Aristotelian philosophy, and of the Old and New Testaments. Most of the principal conclusions of both Sacred Theology and philosophy are seen in his books, almost all of which we have studied, both the few which were translated by others into the Greek language, and their Latin originals, some of which we ourselves have translated into our own tongue. (But alas! All our labor was in vain, for we were about to suffer along with the fatherland which perished on account of our wickedness, the divine mercy being unable to hold out any longer against the divine justice.) In all the aforesaid areas this wise man is most excellent, as the best interpreter and synthesizer in those matters in which his church agrees with ours. In those things wherein that church and he differ from us-they are few in number-namely on the procession of the Holy Spirit and the divine essence and energies, in these not only do we observe the dogma of our fatherland, but we have even fought for it in many books. Our zeal even to the shedding of blood for our dogmas is evident to all men, both friends and enemies, and the whole world is filled with the books we have produced against those who deny them. Glory be to God in all things!” [3]

In a later summary of the Prima secundae of the Summa Theologiae, completed while in retirement at Serres, Gennadios sums up his attitude to the Angelic Doctor: “Would O excellent Thomas that you had not been born in the West. Then you would not have needed to defend the deviations of the church there…you would have been as perfect in theology as you are in ethics.” [4]

Gennadios’ Thomism is not a sort of hapax in Orthodox thought, We are not dealing here with the idiosyncrasy of one thinker. He represents an already longstanding late Byzantine tradition of admiration and judicious use of Aquinas’ works by theologians and apostles of the first rank. The emperor-monk John VI Joasaph Kantakuzenos, a fervent Palamite, in fact the imperial vindicator of the doctrine of Palamas, was a monk of the Charsianeites monastery where Gennadios was to enter almost a century later. As emperor he had sponsored the translation of Thomas’ Summa contra gentiles by Demetrios Kydones, and he used this very translation to refute the latinizing doctrine of Demetrios’ own brother Prochoros who was also a Thomist. Both the latinophron and the Palamite zealot appealed to the teaching of Aquinas. Gennadios’ two teachers, also monks of the monastery of Charsianeites, Joseph Bryennios and Makarios Makres, whom the Orthodox venerate as blessed, used the writings of St. Thomas in their dialogue treatises against the Muslims, taking arguments verbatim, but without attribution, from the Contra gentiles in defense of the incarnation and of consecrated virginity. Bryennios, an anti-unionist missionary in Crete, and Makres were the most vigorous of opponents to union with Rome. In 1964 when the monks of Athos made a proclamation against the ecumenism of Patriarch Athenagoras, they used the words of Bryennios, the accomplished Latinist and admirer and student of St. Thomas Aquinas, as the peroration of their ardent declaration against uniatism: “We will never renounce you, beloved Orthodoxy! We will never betray you O Reverence of the Fathers! We will never abandon you Mother Piety! In you we were born, in you do we live, in you we shall repose. And if the times demand we will die a thousand times for you.” [5]

The Christian use of Aristotle, the use of demonstrative argumentation in theology was practically identical with Orthodox Byzantine theology, even, or rather especially, as practiced by the mystics. When St. Mark of Ephesus reminisces in his deathbed speech to Gennadios, the very one in which he confers on him the onus of leading the fight against the union of Florence, and nostalgically reminds him of the days when he taught him about the different uses of modal propositions in argumentation, he is fully in the line of St. Maximos Confessor and St. Gregory Palamas, with the Kabasilas brothers, with the Patriarch Photios, St. John Damascene and the whole of Orthodox tradition. [6] Aquinas was recognized as eminently compatible with this tradition, its use of authority and logical discourse, and so there was every reason for even those most jealous of doctrinal purity to make use of him.

Another set of facts illustrates our point dramatically. At the end of Byzantine history there was a fierce polemic in which both Orthodox zealots and uniate Roman converts were allied and fervent participants. The Platonic doctrine of Gemistos Plethon, whom Cosimo de Medici had invited to speak in his circle during the time of the council of Florence, and at which conference Gennadios assisted, called for a restoration of paganism. The Thomists among the Greeks, both uniate and Orthodox ,began an attack on what they perceived to be a conspiracy for the subversion of Christendom by the Platonizing humanists. Their plot was not to undermine the faith directly, but to undermine it by attacking Aristotelian philosophy. Gennadios wrote copiously against the profane Hellenism of Plethon, and dedicated his works in defense of Aristotle to his teacher Mark of Ephesus. The uniate George Trapezountios hoped to convert Mehmet II after the fall of Constantinople to Christianity and Aristotelianism, and thus see the restored Roman emperor use his power to crush, not Orthodoxy, but the Platonic conspiracy. In a discourse presented to the Sultan while on a mission from Pius II , Trapezountios recommends that he consult Gennadios on these points as a learned and reliable guide. [7]

So why is it that the difference between the Latin scholastic tradition and the Eastern Orthodox tradition are seen today to be so irreducible, and precisely on account of their Latin-ness or Eastern-ness? Why is it that contemporary Orthodox thinkers as diverse as Meyendorff and Cavarnos insist that the best of Orthodox tradition is inherently unscholastic and Platonic? I will offer only one of the several possible reasons, but the one which is the most dangerous to the faith and practice of Catholics and Orthodox alike, and it is nothing less than the adoption of an anti-scholasticism inspired not by Platonism, but by modern ideologies, which imprison the faith in their categories. This will lead us to an appreciation of just what will serve us best to overcome the schism in a way which is truly Orthodox and Catholic and so endowed with the supernatural power of the true faith, which is the victory which the apostle tells us overcomes the world. [8]

The world, whether working in the church or outside it, inspired by the “philosophies of suspicion” as Pope John Paul II calls them, with the esoteric gnosis of dialectical historicism, wants to reduce the faith to some contingent fact of history determined by irreducible elements of race, language, political or economic forces, in other words to one ideology among others, not capable of fulfilling the doctrinal standard of St. Vincent of Lerins quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, or of the First Vatican Council that the dogmas of the faith are held in every age in eodem sensu et significatu. For if there is a Byzantine outlook or a Latin one which determines dogma itself, if there is any human criterion which is the most formal explanation of the faith and practice of the Church , and not the fact of God revealing the faith “once for all delivered to the saints,” and the human mind able to give its reasonable assent, then the faith is simply one stage in a dialectical progress which leaves it outmoded, and doctrinal differences are simply irreducible antitheses ready to be resolved into a higher synthesis which makes their truth or falsehood irrelevant. St. Pius X was nothing less than a prophet when he taught at the beginning of this century that scholasticism was the fortress of defence which maintains the integrity of doctrine in the face of modernist historicism, and that there is no clearer sign of the presence of this error than disdain for the traditional use of philosophy in the Church. We must beware. If one is Catholic or Orthodox solely because he is determined by certain cultural, ethnic and political forces, then when these forces are judged by the mighty of this world, within the church or without, to have fulfilled their purpose in the movement of perpetual progress, toward universal democratic capitalism for example, or renewal and updating, he must obediently give up the faith. What was once a tool in the process becomes its obstacle and so écraser l’infame becomes the motto of the lodge, seminar, or cabinet room. This happened to the Gallican French, is happening in the Irish republic and Poland now, as it has happened in Greece, and will happen in Russia, in Serbia and in Croatia. It also will happen here when the time comes when being a Catholic or Orthodox believer will not be able to be a profession of a “mere Christianity” which protects with its “family values” the rapaciousness of the elite few and so escapes their persecution. In the modern world, nationalist or statist romanticisms, inspiring as they may seem, carry in themselves the seeds of their own undoing.

Gennadios Scholarios was not Orthodox because that religion was the genius and defense of the Greek people, but rather he loved his nation because he was Orthodox, preferring its fall to its defection in its faith. He was Orthodox and so a patriot, because he heeded the injunction of of Moses to honor His father and mother and of St. Peter to love the brethren, to fear God, and honor the emperor. The Croatian and Serb and American must do the same. Countless pious Orthodox and Catholics have died and are dying in our dying century as victims of the arrangements of others who are the enemies of the faith and homeland of any man on any side. During the First World War the Pope of Rome, like a new Judas Maccabeus, took the vigorously supernatural initiative of giving to every Catholic priest the privilege of offering the sacrifice of the Mass twice more than the usual once on All Souls’ Day for the repose of all the departed of both sides in the immense conflict.

Our century has only confirmed the urgency of his insight. Perhaps that is where we must begin an ecumenism of the anti-ecumenical, simply by praying for the dead. As Lance tells the wavering modernist priest in Walker Percy’s novel: “So you pray for the dead. You know, something has changed in you.” He who is in the world does not understand, or rather understands and hates such a scene as our little lamentation over Gennadios Scholarios in August of 1994. The nuns and I could not both be in the right about the primacy of Rome, but we were united by the truth which was in us, some aspect of it at least, and which was in the life of one man, and by our prayers, stands ready to be revealed at the last day.

In the meantime, though, the thought of St. Thomas is a rich and fruitful source of theological wisdom which I invite the Orthodox to study as belonging to them as surely as it belonged to Gennadios Scholarios, Joseph Bryennios, and Makarios Makres. They will thus give evidence that they understand that our differences are truly dogmatic and divine in origin and not ideological or ethnic, and they will provide themselves with a sure bulwark against the theological modernism which has already devastated the Latin church and has made great inroads in their own.

In order to bear this point out, I offer the Orthodox the same prophecy which Monsignor Romano Guardini addressed to Roman Catholics shortly after the Second World War in his work The End of the Modern World. He says:

“The cultural deposit preserved by the Church thus far will not be able to endure against he general decay of tradition. Even when it does endure it will be shaken and threatened on all sides. Dogma in its very nature, however, surmounts the march of time because it is rooted in eternity, and we can surmise that the character and conduct of coming Christian life will reveal itself especially through its old dogmatic roots. Christianity will once again need to prove itself as a faith which is not self-evident; it will be forced to distinguish itself more sharply from a dominant non-Christian ethos. At that juncture the theological significance of dogma will begin a fresh advance; similarly will its practical and existential significance increase. I need not say that I imply no “modernization” here, no weakening of the content and effectiveness of Christian dogma, rather I emphasize its absoluteness, its unconditional demands and affirmations. These will be accentuated.”

Before I conclude I will give an example of how the insights of St. Thomas can be in such deep harmony with Orthodoxy. In the Summa contra gentiles, in chapter 42 of the first book, St. Thomas demonstrates that there is only one God. At the end of the chapter, as is his method, he indicates the errors which the truth expounded contradicts. There he makes the illuminating observation that the truth that there is only one God is not contradicted so much by polytheism as by dualism. The polytheist, he says, usually holds that there is one supreme God from whom the others derive, and with whom he shares his power of wisdom, happiness, and the governance of the world. This manner of speaking is found frequently in Sacred Scripture, Thomas points out, where the holy angels and even men are called gods, in Psalms 81 and 85, and in many other places besides, since God does in fact share his knowledge, felicity, and power with his creatures. This is indeed the reason why creatures point to the unique existence of God, because they are secondary, but real causes dependent on the first cause. The dualist holds the greater error, that there are first principles which are irreducible. Later on in chapter 69 of Book III Aquinas uses an uncustomary severity characterizing as “ridiculous” the abuse of monotheism by the denying of the reality of secondary causality in order to exalt the omnipotence of God.

This insight, of the importance of secondary causes, is the key to an Orthodoxy of the concrete order, and it distinguishes it from Islam and Protestantism with their exaggerated monotheism, and from esoteric philosophical ideologies with their relativistic perpetual dialectic of opposites. The sacraments, the liturgy of the church, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the veneration of icons and relics, the invocation of the Mother of God, the angels, and saints, ascetical practices, all are secondary causes whereby the divine grace and power of God One in the Holy Trinity are bestowed on the faithful. This is why the controversies over the holy images, the sign of the cross, the azymes, the calendar, are not in themselves absurd. The Orthodox Christian is intensely aware of the efficacy of secondary causes in the obtaining of supernatural goods. We have already indicated one such practice rooted in the doctrine of secondary causality, prayer for the departed. The ecumenism of the anti-ecumenical can continue on this level, by exalting the use of holy things and saving them from profanation, and sharing them with each other to the limited, but still considerable extent that doctrinal fidelity will allow. A popular song sung by the enslaved Orthodox after the fall of Constantinople shows the “ecumenical” power of this Thomistic insight into secondary causality:

“They took the City, they took her: they took Thessalonica:

They took even Saint Sophia, they took the great monastery,

which had three hundred semantra and seventy-two bells:

Every bell had a priest, and every priest a deacon.

In the Great Church where the holy gifts were revealed, the King of all,

there came to them a voice from heaven, from the mouth of the angels:

‘Leave off your psalter, put away the holy gifts.

Send word to the land of the Franks to come and take them:

Let them come and take the golden cross and the holy gospel,

and the holy table, lest it be profaned.’

And when Our Lady heard this, the icons wept:

‘Be still dear Mistress, do not weep, do not cry:

Again with the years, with time, again this place will be yours.’”

The ultimate overcoming of the schism is an eschatological fact, but still an historical one. It will happen, nolumus, volumus, if what we believe is true. The lamenting icons do not lie, not the ones in the Great Church, not even the one I bought on Athos, in spite of its ideological confusion. The use of holy persons, times, places, and things leads us here and now to that eternal City where the faithful departed of the Old and the New and the Third Rome hope to go, as we remember them. From their place they remind us in the words of the Purgatorio:

Qui sarai tu poco tempo silvano;

E sarai meco, sanza fine, cive

Di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano. [9]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Dom Gerard Calvet, Régard sur la Chrétienté (Le Barroux 1982) 27.

[2] His opera omnia were produced in a critical edition sponsored by the Augustinians of the Assumption. Oeuvres complètes de Georges Scholarios, ed. Petit, Sidéridès, Jugie (Paris 1928-1936).

[3] ibid., vol V, 1. (translation ours).

[4] ibid., vol VI, 1 (translation ours).

[5] Alexander Kalomiros, Against False Union, trans. George Gabriel (Seattle 1967) 101-105.

[6] For an overview of Byzantine Orthodox Aristotelianism see my The Byzantine Thomism of Gennadios Scholarios (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 1993) 13-39.

[7] On this too little studied point see E. Garin, “Il Platonismo come ideologia della sovversione di Europa: la polemica anti-platonica di Giorgio Trapezunzio,” Studia Humanitatis: Ernesto Grassi zum 70 Geburtstag (Munich 1973) 113-120.

[8] Cf. I John 5:4.

[9] Canto xxxii, 100-102.

http://www.balkanstudies.org/1998/barber.htm

Our friend Wei-Hsein Wan of Torn Notebook (formerly Bumi Dipijak) has posted a quote from Saint Basil the Great, with commentary, illustrating a certain broadness of mind about doctrinal matters, a legitimate variance and pluralism in theological expression, within a common dogmatic framework (the Nicene Creed, sans Filioque, quoted as such in Dominus Iesus 1):

At such a time, then, there is need of great effort and diligence that the Churches may in some way be benefited. It is an advantage that parts hitherto severed should be united. Union would be effected if we were willing to accommodate ourselves to the weaker, where we can do so without injury to souls; since, then, many mouths are open against the Holy Spirit, and many tongues whetted to blasphemy against Him, we implore you, as far as in you lies, to reduce the blasphemers to a small number, and to receive into communion all who do not assert the Holy Spirit to be a creature, that the blasphemers may be left alone, and may either be ashamed and return to the truth, or, if they abide in their error, may cease to have any importance from the smallness of their numbers.

Let us then seek no more than this, but propose to all the brethren, who are willing to join us, the Nicene Creed. If they assent to that, let us further require that the Holy Spirit ought not to be called a creature, nor any of those who say so be received into communion. I do not think that we ought to insist upon anything beyond this. For I am convinced that by longer communication and mutual experience without strife, if anything more requires to be added by way of explanation, the Lord Who works all things together for good for them that love Him, will grant it. (St. Basil the Great, Letter 113: To the Presbyters of Tarsus [emphasis added])

I can certainly see how this sort of attitude can go too far, leading to an extreme theological agnosticism (the kind that got Barlaam in hot water with Palamas). But it is a good corrective, I think, to the extreme theological maximalism and triumphalism one so often finds among partisans of both East and West (and which, in my reading, made permanent the schism and crystallized the extreme opposing points-of-view).

“What almost always passes for ‘Orthodox theology’ among English-speaking Orthodox these days is actually just a branch of the larger Orthodox picture. Indeed, it tends sometimes to be rather sectarian.

The Orthodox Church is an ancient castle, as it were, of which only two or three rooms have been much in use since about 1920. These two or three rooms were furnished by the Russian émigrés in Paris between the two World Wars. This furniture is heavily neo-Palamite and anti-Scholastic. It relies heavily on the Cappadocians, Maximus, and Gregory Palamas (who are good folks, or course). Anything that does not fit comfortably into that model is dismissed as “Western” and even non-Orthodox.

Consequently, one will look in vain in that theology for any significant contribution from the Alexandrians, chiefly Cyril, and that major Antiochian, Chrysostom. When these are quoted, it is usually some incidental point on which they can afford to be quoted.

Now I submit that any ‘Orthodox’ theology that has so little use for the two major figures from Antioch and Alexandria is giving something less than the whole picture.

Likewise, this popular neo-Palamite brand of Orthodoxy, though it quotes Damascene when it is convenient, never really engages Damascene’’s manifestly ‘Scholastic’ approach to theology.

Much less does it have any use for the other early Scholastic theologians, such as Theodore the Studite and Euthymus Zygabenus. There is no recognition that Scholasticism was born in the East, not the West, and that only the rise of the Turk kept it from flourishing in the East.

There is also no explicit recognition that the defining pattern of Orthodox Christology was formulated in the West before Chalcedon. Pope Leo’’s distinctions are already very clear in Augustine decades before Chalcedon. Yet, Orthodox treatises on the history of Christology regularly ignore Augustine.

Augustine tends to be classified as a ‘Scholastic,’ which he most certainly was not.

But Western and Scholastic are bad words with these folks.

In fact, however, Augustine and the Scholastics represent only other rooms in the larger castle.

For this reason I urge you, as you can, to read in the Orthodox sources that tend to get skipped in what currently passes for ‘Orthodoxy.’ For my part, I believe the Russian émigré theology from Paris, which seems profoundly reactionary and anti-Western, is an inadequate instrument for the evangelization of this country and the world. I say this while gladly recognizing my own debt to Russian émigré theology.”

– Father Patrick Henry Reardon (All Saints’ Orthodox Church, Chicago), an excerpt from an e-mail to an inquirer that’s been making the rounds in the Orthodox and Catholic blogospheres

—–

I do, I confess, take exception to the claim [by Fr John McGuckin] that [my] book [The Beauty of the Infinite] ‘is not Orthodox theology’. Of course it is. Admittedly it does not much resemble the sort of ‘neo-Palamite’, ‘neo-patristic’ books which have dominated Eastern theology since the middle of the last century, when the great ressourcements movement that has done so much to define modern Orthodoxy was inaugurated. But Orthodox theology has taken many forms over the centuries – mystical, scholastic, mystagogical, idealist, neo-patristic, even ‘Sophiological’ – all of which have been perfectly legitimate expressions of the Eastern Church’s mind. And frankly, I think that the theological idiom to which Orthodox theology has been confined for the last fifty years or so has largely exhausted itself and has become tediously repetitive. It has also, to a very great extent, done much to distort the Orthodox understanding of the traditions of both East and West.

– David Bentley Hart, Scottish Journal of Theology, 60(1): 95-101 (2007).

From our old friend Mike Liccione comes an important clarification on the Latin Catholic notion of “created grace” –

There certainly were Catholic theologians in the later Middle Ages who were “nominalists,” and it is certainly true that many of those nominalists treated the question of grace in more or less the way janotec criticizes. But not all scholastics were nominalists by any means. The via moderna of that period in Catholic theology, in my opinion, did tend to go wrong as janotec says; and that was a key precursor to Protestantism’s essentially forensic account of justification. But some Catholic theologians were Franciscans and Thomists who were anything but followers of that path. Indeed, in the hands of those more traditionally-minded theologians, the very concept of “created grace” was intended largely to explain how justification and sanctification consisted in what we’d now call an “ontological” change in the human soul, in such wise that the soul could become a “partaker of the divine nature” without becoming God-by-nature. In that respect, use of the concept of created grace had the same goal as that of St. Gregory Palamas when he expatiated on the distinction between the divine “essence,” which cannot be shared, and the divine “energies” or actions ad extra, which can and indeed must be shared if we are to have the life God destines us for—the “life eternal” otherwise known as theosis or “divinization.” As I see it, the chief difference between the older, more robust Catholic theology postulating “created” grace, and the Palamite view that the divine energies are “uncreated” and thus God, is that the Catholics used the term grace not merely for its primary referent, which is indeed the Uncreated himself insofar as he communicates his life to us, but also for the instruments he uses to communicate his life to the human person, and especially for some of the effects of that communication within the human person.

Please read the entire informative post here.