Theology of Hesychasm: Gregory Palamas.

The debates, which took place in fourteenth-century Byzantium, involved a series of issues including forms of monastic spirituality. The discussion however was fundamentally a theological one: the hesychast method of prayer was debated in the light of earlier tradition concerning knowledge of God, Christology, and anthropology. The endorsement given by the Byzantine Church to the hesychast theologians implied a stand on these basic issues of the Christian faith as well. The debate originated in a confrontation between an Athonite monk, Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), and a Calabrian Italo-Greek “philosopher” Barlaam. At the beginning, the issue was the doctrine of man’s knowledge of God and the nature of theology. For Palamas, immediate knowledge of God in Christ is available to all the baptized and therefore is the real basis and criterion of true theology. Barlaam insisted however on the unknowability of God except through indirect, created, means — revealed Scripture, induction from creation, or exceptional mystical revelations. In fact, the issue was not radically different from the one which Symeon the New Theologian had debated with certain of his monks who denied the possibility of a direct vision of God. At a second stage of the debate, Barlaam also attacked as a form of Messalian materialism the psychosomatic method of prayer practiced by Byzantine hesychasts.

Although this method is held by some as a return to the origins of monasticism, it appears only in explicit, written documents, of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. It is described in particular by Nicephorus the Hesychast, an anonymous author, whose Method of Holy Prayer and Attention is attributed, by some manuscripts, to Symeon the New Theologian and to Gregory of Sinai (1255-1346) who became widely known in Slavic countries. Undoubtedly, the Method was widely known, for Gregory Palamas quotes among its adepts such major figures of the Church as Patriarch Athanasius I (1289-1293, 1303-1310) and Theoleptus, Metropolitan of Philadelphia (1250-1321/26).²⁶ The method consisted in obtaining “attention” (prosoche) — the first condition of authentic prayer — by concentrating one’s mind “in the heart” retaining each breath and reciting mentally the short prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” Parallelisms in non-Christian Eastern spiritual practices are easy to find, and “materialistic” abuses may have occurred among Byzantine monks. But the major representatives of fourteenth-century hesychasm are unanimous in saying that the psychosomatic method is not an end in itself but only a useful tool for placing a man literally “in attention” — ready to receive the grace of God provided, which, of course, he deserve by “observing the commandments.” Barlaam objected to this method with a Platonic view of man: any somatic participation in prayer can only be an obstacle to a true “intellectual” encounter. The Council of 1341 condemned Barlaam for his attacks on the monks. Still, several Byzantine theologians — Gregory Akindynos, Nicephorus Gregoras, and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones later — continued to protest against the theological positions of Palamas. Palamas however received final conciliar endorsement of his theology successively in 1347, 1351, and posthumously in 1368 when he was also canonized.

The theological positions of Gregory Palamas may be summarized in the three following points:

1) Knowledge of God is an experience given to all Christians through Baptism and through their continuous participation in the life of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. It requires the involvement of the whole man in prayer and service through love for God and neighbour; and then it becomes recognizable as not only an “intellectual” experience of the mind alone but also as a “spiritual sense,” which conveys a perception neither purely “intellectual” nor purely material. In Christ, God assumed the whole of man: soul and body; and man as such was deified. In prayer — for example, in the “method” — in the sacraments, in the entire life of the Church as a community, man is called to participation in divine life: this participation is also the true knowledge of God.

2) God is absolutely inaccessible in His essence, both this life and in the future; for only the three divine hypostases are “God by essence.” Man, in “deification,” can become God only “by grace” or “by energy.” The inaccessibility of the essence of God was one of the basic affirmations of the Cappadocian Fathers against Eunomius and also, in a different context, against Origen. Affirming the absolute transcendence of God is only another way of saying that He is the Creator ex nihilo: anything, which exists outside of God, exists only through His “will” or “energy,” and can participate in His life only as a result of His will or “grace.”

3) The full force with which Palamas affirms God’s inaccessibility and the equally strong affirmation of deification and of participation in God’s life as the original purpose and the goal of human existence also gives full reality to the Palamite distinction between “essence” and “energy” in God. Palamas does not try to justify the distinction philosophically: his God is a living God, both transcendent and willingly immanent, who does not enter into preconceived philosophical categories. However, Palamas considers his teaching to be a development of the Sixth Council decisions that Christ has two natures (“essences”) and two natural wills (“energies”). ²⁷ For Christ’s humanity itself, en-hypostasized as it is in the Logos and thus having become truly God’s humanity, did not become “God by essence;” it was penetrated with the divine energy — through the circumin-cessio idiomatum — and, in it, our own humanity finds access to God in His energies. The energies, therefore, are never considered as divine emanations or as a diminished God. They are divine life as given by God to His creatures; and they are God; for in His Son, He truly gave Himself for our salvation.

The victory of Palamism in the fourteenth century was therefore the victory of a specifically Christian, God-centred humanism for which the Greek patristic tradition always stood in opposition to all concepts of man, which considered him as an autonomous or “secular” being. Its essential intuition that “deification” does not suppress humanity but makes man truly human and is, of course, greatly relevant for our own contemporary concerns: man can be fully “human” only if he restores his lost communion with God.

Notes

1. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos; PG 40:1272-1276.

2. Pseudo-Nilus (Evagrius), De Oratione, 84; PG 79:1185B.

3. Ibid., 52.

4. Ibid., 34A.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. Macarius of Egypt, Horn., 11, 1; cd. Dörries, pp. 96-97.

7. Ibid., 15, 20; p. 139.

8. Ibid., 11, 11; p. 103.

9. Ibid., 1, 12; p. 12.

10. Diadochus, Cap. 77, 78; ed. E. des Places, SC, 5 bis (Paris: Cerf, 1955), pp. 135-136.

11. Ibid., 85; pp. 144-145.

12. See ibid., 31, 32, 61, 88.

13. John Climacus, The Ladder of Paradise, Degree 28; PG 88:1112C.

14. Ibid., Degree 27; PG 88:1097AB.

15. On Evagrius and Maximus, see Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund: Gleerup, 1965), pp. 317-325.

16. See P. Sherwood, in Maximus the Confessor, The Ascetic Life, ACW 21 (Westminster: Newman, 1955), p. 83.

17. See Lossky, Vision of God, pp. 9-10.

18. Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Preface to the Eighth Council, Mansi XVI, 6.

19. I. Hausherr, ed., in OrientChr 12 (1928), 45.

20. Symeon the New Theologian, Cat. II; ed. B. Krivocheine, Symeon le Nouveau Theohgien, Catecheses, SC 96 (Paris: Cerf, 1963), pp. 421-424.

21. See J. Darrouzes, SC 122, Introduction, p. 26.

22. Symeon the New Theologian, Cat. VI, ed. Krivocheine, pp. 358-368.

23. Symeon the New Theologian, Euch. 2; ed. Krivocheine, pp. 47-73.

24. Cat. 29; ed. Krivocheine, pp. 166-190.

25. Cap. Eth., 6; ed. J. Darrouzes, pp. 406-454.

26. Gregory Palamas, Triads, I, 2; ed. J. MeyendorfT, Defence des saints hesychastes, Specilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30 (Louvain, 1959), p. 99.

27. Synodal Tome of 1351; PG 151:722B.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 573