Discussant: Marcus Plested
Opponents on both sides of the Palamite controversy (1338-1368) invoked the writings of the Church Fathers to support their theological claims and positions. Though scholars have long debated the patristic antecedents of the essence-energies distinction, research has tended to focus almost exclusively on the fidelity of St. Gregory Palamas to his patristic sources. This Workshop seeks, instead, to explore the use of the Fathers in the Palamite controversy more generally, from neglected influences on the writings of Palamas himself to the use of patristic authorities by Gregory’s opponents and subsequent defenders. Comprising a philological, historical, and theological exploration, this Workshop features papers on the following topics:
* The Fathers in St. Gregory Palamas
* Patristic sources in anti-Palamite theology
* Middle Byzantine and later patristic influences on the Palamite controversy
* The role of the Liturgy and Hymnography in the Palamite controversy
* The use of the Fathers by Palamite authors to 1453
Papers focus on individual Church Fathers and patristic sources and methodology in general—all aspects of patristic theology that enhances our understanding of Palamite and anti-Palamite theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
This study plans to highlight more unusual cases where Byzantine liturgical sources, such as in the Menaion and homiletic material of Fathers, are essential to understand certain notions of Palamas’s theoptic and epoptic ideas. The vocabulary and central themes of divine vision and participation in the divine energies are often found in Byzantine hymnody describing such experiences of divine light by the apostles and other saints. In some cases, Palamas’s formulations are closest to literature of a liturgical vs. dogmatic character. Furthermore, certain Palamite values, such as the presumed infallibility of patristic axioms (e.g., Basil the Great’s teaching on the Holy Spirit) build on liturgical assertions of the saint’s authority in doctrinal matters. Palamas’s combination of liturgical sources for his logical arguments on behalf of the apodeictic syllogism within an Aristotelian typology with be explored. This will lead to the conclusion that Palamas was very much influenced by contemporary Scholastic views and opinions on theology as a science and on the nature of the beatific vision. However, his own theory combined a natural epistemological skepticism with a divine illumination theory that distinguishes him from both Medieval Latin and Barlaamian positions on the scientific status of theology.
There are some aspects of St Gregory Palamas’ anthropology which await an in-depth examination and analysis. One of them is his notion αἴσθησις νοερὰ καὶ θεία (intellectual and divine perception). Our paper is an effort to fill this gap. What is the background of this notion? Does it have a patristic precedent or is it of Palamas’ coinage? Why the term ‘νοερά’ (intellectual) and why ‘αἴσθησις’ (perception)? Aren’t they, somehow, contradictory? What are the eyes of the soul and the experience of God? How can the coordination of the physical and the spiritual senses be made?
Τhe paper shows that the αἴσθησις νοερὰ combines in itself both the spiritual and the bodily: although it is beyond natural sense-perception (αἴσθησις), it touches both the soul and the body. However, the latter has to be transformed so that it may participate in the spiritual realities. Moreover, the paper stresses the central place that ‘experience’ (πείρα) has in the spiritual struggle, according to Palamas: it is this experience—which is different from discursive reasoning (διάνοια), the power of thinking—that permits man to discern the reality of his communion with the divine life, that he sees God and not a lesser light or trick of the evil one. Furthermore, Palamas speaks about the coordination of the physical and the spiritual senses, as well as the ‘implanted’ (ἐγγεγενημένην) spiritual power in the eyes of those who see the divine light. Finally, the presuppositions of seeing the light are mentioned: ascesis, detachment, and purification of the heart.
John Meyendorff claims that ‘It is only within the perspective of the Maximian doctrine of the two energies or wills of Christ that it is possible to understand the terminology of St. Gregory Palamas.’ While scholarship on the Christological controversies prior to the sixth ecumenical council tends to focus on the question of Christ's wills, the Confessor’s early articulation of Christ’s two energies contains important aspects of his Christology that inform Palamas’s thought. This paper establishes Palamas’s indebtedness to Maximus the Confessor’s dyenergist Christology, particularly his treatment of Dionysius’s term ‘new theandric energy’ in Ambiguum 5.Maximus’s efforts to clarify the Dionysian phrase in light of Chalcedon result in a Christology in which the human energy of Christ mediates the concealment and disclosure of the divine energy; Christ ‘worked wonders in a human way, and suffered in a divine way.’ This paradigm becomes important for Maximus’s descriptions of deification, such that the saints’ mode of acting reflects Christ’s mode of theandric activity. Gregory Palamas profited from Maximus’s work on this topic as he articulated the essence-energies distinction and the deified life of the hesychast in the Triads.