#gregory palamas

[baebeylik]

Saint Gregory Palamas. Greek(Byzantine), 14th to 15th Century.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

[loneberry]

Prayer

"Even the gods are moved by the voice of entreaty" — Ovid

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ ἐλέησόν με 

Kyrie Iesou Christe Eleison me

(KEE-ree-ay ee-SOO khree-STAY eh-lay-ee-SOHN meh)

*

Eleison / mercy. Once I read this poem about mercy in Boston. The great poet Fanny Howe was in attendance. After the reading she asked me if I was raised Catholic (I was) and said she wished she had the whole night to think about the poem. "I was still myself before I was born"--she told me she had had the same thought recently. As a materialist, I am not even sure what I meant by that line, but the line--the poem--wrote itself through me. God? I'm not sure I believe in God. I left the Catholic Church long ago. But still I sense an absent presence and because I have the consciousness of Homo sapiens, I project a "mind" onto that absent presence. I would like to understand why we are wired this way, why we seem to have been made for prayer.

I don't know what I am trying to say. When I started assembling my "Collected Graces" manuscript I began reading theological debates about "grace" and found myself most persuaded by the hesychast view--the theological distinction, made by St Gregory Palamas, between God's essence and God's energies and the belief that, through prayer, one can be illumined by the uncreated light of God's energies. But most of all I love the simplicity of hesychasm's "method"--you repeat this prayer from the heart. I feel a great sense of relief when I do it.

[bibleillustrated]

Proverbs 12:19 Link: bible-illustrated.blogspot.com/2019/03/Pr1219.html The truthful lip shall be established forever, But a lying tongue is but for a moment. This illustration was made possible thanks to the generous donation of Niklaus von Houck; consider pledging at: www.patreon.com/BibleIllustrated Pictured: St. Gregory Palamas (center), Barlaam of Calabria (left), Gregory Akindynos (right)

[byzantine-nectarine]

For a man to know God, and to know himself and his proper rank - a knowledge now possessed even by Christians who are thought to be quite unlearned - is a knowledge superior to natural science and astronomy and to all philosophy concerning such matters.

Moreover, for our intellect to know its own infirmity, and to seek healing for it, is incomparably greater than to know and search out the magnitude of the stars, the principles of nature, the generation of terrestrial things and the circuits of celestial bodies, their solstices and risings, stations and retrogressions, separation and conjunctions and, in short, all the multiform relationships which arise from the many different motions of the heavens. 

For the intellect that recognizes its own infirmity has discovered where to enter in order to find salvation and how to approach the light of knowledge and receive the true wisdom that does not pass away with the present world. 

- Saint Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and On the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts, chapter 29 (from The Philokalia, Volume 4)

[pure-dove]

Something I'm very much enjoying about Tollefson (he's doing a lot of work to make Palamas palatable) — the idea that the qualities of God (love, etc) are energies and therefore not just metaphorical (cf Gregory of Nazianzus, when he talks about how any description of God is necessarily metaphorical due to the transcendent nature of the divine) means that when God is said to be something, that's a very real something, something more real than we can possibly say, but not real in a way which prevents us from saying it — which really emphasizes how essence/energies distinction is doing a lot of work for Palamas to reconcile Patristic urges with coarser theologies

[pure-dove]

I do have to wonder if the treatment of Palamas is due to a language shift in the meaning of the term 'energies' — Tollefson certainly thinks so, Russell perhaps as well. It definitely changes the reading of Palamas to interpret him as saying that we interact with God through his activity — which I think is broadly correct, and moreover necessarily true if we operate on classical conceptions of divinity

[pure-dove]

Meyerdorff's treatment of Palamas is excruciating but it makes sense by the last chapter of his study because as an interpreter of Palamas he's awful but he's doing a great job of reifying east-west relations, which is a very neat political goal. Considering that ANW considers Meyerdorff to be primarily responding to homogenizing tendencies in Catholic thought (see Jugie et al) it makes sense that Meyerdorff is interpreting Palamas in the most bizarre, polemical way possible in order to say, "here's what he really thinks!"

[pure-dove]

I think people misunderstand Palamas tremendously because he's not a theologian. If you think of him as a theologian, you either have to do backflips to keep him internally consistent (AN Williams; Meyerdorff) or acknowledge him as flawed in some way (probably Rowan Williams, but I can't find his paper anywhere). But he's not a theologian. He's an orator (derogatory) trying to reconcile primary experience with theological orthodoxy.