GREGORY PALAMAS ON THE NATURE OF PERSONAL COMMUNION
I. The Promise; eternal life or knowledge of God.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a deep topic enlightening the mind and warming the heart. He is the Person who reveals Christ’s presence to us and makes us partakers of His eternal life (2 Pe.1.4). Throughout Christian history, Christians have speculated on how we practically may become aware of His presence and foster that grace. Gregory Palamas (1296-1354), archbishop of Constantinople, articulated a Byzantine expression of what is now a days, in a very broad way, quietism, or hesychasm, inner stillness. Since eternal life is knowledge of God (Jn.17.3), this occupied a great place in his thought. Building on his patristic devotional tradition, he answered obliquely what is knowledge of God, how we attain this, and what are it’s limits. Having outlined this in the main, I also point out the potential perils of his position.
II. Paradisiacal paradigm; contemplating God.
The best way to understand the paradigm Palamas employed is to start with his scholia on Genesis. What was Adam’s state? Spiritually, Adam was in communion with God. Union with God is life, separation from Him is death.
For, “death, properly speaking, is this: for the soul to be unharnessed from divine grace and to be yoked to sin.” Bodily, he was clothed with God’s glory, possessing the glory of the resurrection. The inner man was stripped of divine grace, dead separated from the life giving Spirit, and bodily subject to a living death.
The mind/ spirit stripped of divine grace joins itself to sensual pleasure and preoccupation with the outward world. In fact, Adam became of one mind/ spirit with the evil one by his transgression. Repentance, μετανοια, is the inward change, turn of the mind, of the νους, when it seeks to follow Christ, the Light who illumines the heart. The mind/spirit then communicates the spiritual light it has seen to the body, and in this way the body as well participates in salvation and glorification.
III. What is knowledge?
Let’s start apophatically; what is not knowledge of God? In the first place, it is not proof derived from syllogistic reasoning. Nor is it the knowledge furnished from analytic reasoning, or from synthetic judgments. Gregory directly attacked the Medieval Scholasticism and it’s conception of the intellectual acts of divisio, division, compositio, synthesis, or the act of judgment itself. These forms of knowledge afford, at best, knowledge about God, not knowing Him personally.
Knowledge of God is also specifically not philosophizing about God. Philosophy, despite it’s assertions to be a love of wisdom, for Gregory, is neither wise, nor leads to the knowledge of God. In fact, it is demonic. For if it led to Christ what would the purpose of Christ’s coming be? To rephrase Paul, “If righteousness (saving knowledge) comes through the philosophers, Christ is dead in vain.”
Knowledge of God is, properly speaking, not knowledge in the sense of an idea (form, eidos). We are not to rest content with a concept of God, that would be idolatry. Rather, knowledge for him is more a spiritual perception. To explain this, he notes that humans possess a twofold character of knowledge. One is rational, in accord with our sensitive nature. We share this in common with the beasts. Like St. Jude alluded (Jd.10), people can know things naturally, as brute beasts. This is what James calls “soulish” (Natural, KJV) Or, as Paul says, “the soulish man receives not the things of the spirit of God.” (1 Co.2.14).
Knowledge, or spiritual perception, is above rational activity. The light of our intellect does not impart the presence of God. Rather Christ enlightens the mind with the presence of His love (cf. 2 Co.4.4-11), which is called knowledge, though it is not the result of mental speculation. It is direct apprehension. This is in the exact same tenor as Paul who prayed that they might (Eph.3.19a) “γνωωαι τε την υπερβαλλουσαν της γνωσεως αγαπην του Χριστου,” that they may “know the love of Christ which supasses all knowledge.” Knowledge then is a term he loosely used, but means perception of union with the divine love of Christ. It is above thought according to Paul, being given to us.
This distinction between thought and intellectual perception is an idea he borrowed from the Old Testament Septuagint. He noted that Solomon spoke of two distinct intellectual realities, αισθησις, or perception, and νοησις, or thought. Since we are told to acquire both, feeling, αισθησις, and making sense then out of the feeling- νοησις, noesis- are distinct.
Mental speculation then must cease. This does not mean the mind is vain. It means rather the mind knows it’s limits, not being able to manufacture the presence of God. Instead, it means that we seek to be aware of His presence and trust it is incomprehensible so we stop laboring for an explanation. We simply rest the intellect in faith at God’s presence.
Gregory connects this ceasing of mental operation to the Sabbath rest of the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews.
“For those who spiritually sabbatize are these who also resting from all their servile works, as much as it is attainable, they completely strip away everything discursive and produced by discursive reasoning and which has been elaborately reasoned about knowledge of the powers of the soul, namely, the work and all the aesthetic helps, and quite simply every bodily activity, as much is in our power, but even what is not in our power-the end exactly as respiration, so long as it is in our power.” (Triads 1.2).
So knowledge of God’s light, for Gregory, is not the product of discursive reasoning, analysis, or concept. It is more properly an experience of God’s glory, of His light which is the love of Christ communed with in the heart.
IV. What we know
Adam knew God by being joined to His Spirit (cf.1 Co.6.17). The restoration to communion is the reversal of the Fall. This communion is specifically communion with the energies of God. The glory of God, with which Adam was clothed, is God’s grace and activity, or energies, in the world. This is merely a biblical designation, to be differentiated from the results of these energies which are called energimata, or created effects of God’s manifested eternal uncreated power. Jesus said “the glory which you gave me I have given them.” (Jn.17.22). It is the glory Ηe “had with God before the foundation of the world.” (Jn.17.5) And therefore it is uncreated. It is the glory manifested to the disciples of Thabor. (Mt.17.1-13).
This energy of God is not God’s essence. The Christian cannot see the essence of God. Just like Moses could not see, so “no man has seen God at any time,” for “God dwells in light unapproachable, whom no man can see.” (1 Ti.6.16). The Christian then properly sees the parousia of God, the presence of Christ, not His ousia, His essence. We see the glory around Him, not He Himself, though we will see Christ in His fullness.
V. How we know; attention and stillness and a life undefiled
The glory of God placed in the Christian’s heart is only perceived when we are conscious of it by directing all our attention to Him. The normal condition of our consciousness teaches us this; we are only aware of what things we direct our attention to. So to bring a Christian into a state of one pointed devotion to the Lord, Gregory enjoins an intense practice of spiritual stillness, ησηχια. Quite simply, the mind is stopped, quieted from rushing for the world and is forced to place it’s attention where the throne of grace is, namely, the heart. The Christian invokes God’s Name (His glory) on each inhalation and respiration and so we become imbued with His presence.
Gregory is not thinking metaphorically, but also not strictly literal, when he says we are to look within. Being fully convinced of the unity and pysychosomatic/spiritual nature of our existence, he holds, contrary to Neoplatonists, that we must not escape the body but confine our minds to seek the presence of God in the heart. His understanding is that the law of sin dwells in our members and placing the law of prayer and our attention on the heart, which is the throne of God, then we are released from the law of sin and the law of the Spirit takes root in our life Gregory was not advocating a blind form of natural mysticism, divorced from praxis. Awareness of God’s presence presupposes repentance and a life of obedience to the commandments. Why the commandments? They purify the heart and make it capable of receiving the grace of God, as David said, they enlighten the soul (Ps.19.8). The commandments themselves are the tree of life and possess God’s presence, for where His Word is, there is His Spirit.
Stillness is also called απαθεια, dispasssion. A sinful desire is a movement of the mind away from God. In modern terms, we would say an attachment. It is the metaphysical way of expressing “the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.” It is the abscence of affection, of love for things forbidden of God. Dispassion is another way of expressing the biblical truth that “charity seeks not her own.”
VI. Scriptural metaphors appropriated by Palamas for communion
The mystery of communion with God is better understood through the biblical text and the tropes it uses to convey these truths. Gregory’s favorite figure is the figure of light. His usage of this biblical illustration is what really initiated his doctrinal conflicts. Approximately 1330, a controversy arose about his teaching on the light at the Mount of Transfiguration, Mount Thabor. He taught the disciples saw the light of Christ which was not a created light, as the humanist theologians were contending, but the glory of God itself, though not His essence. Through a series of 9 dialogues with a humanist monk, he explains that the light of Thabor is the glory of God which will be revealed at the parousia. After all, Jesus said the disciples present there would see the kingdom of God come with power (Cf.Mt.16.28). Gregory was not advocating anything different than what is normally accepted in contemporary theology. Who God justifies, He glorifies. A taste of this glorification is had even now, realized in the spirit; and as we are not Platonists, it is participated in the body as well.
The other trope from Scripture which he employs is the face to face nature of communion. Gregory wrote several sermons on Moses’ ascent to Mount Sinai, and how Moses saw God face to face. We are προσωπον προς προσωπον, face to face. Christ is face to face with God (Jn1.3), through His mediation in His person, we can see the glory of God in the face of Jesus, not by ourselves, for no flesh can see the essence of God (as Christ sees) and live. This latter point, I believe, is the resolution of the created/ uncreated dispute between East and West .
Gregory draws on the Lord’s parable of the prodigal and relates it to his mystical theology. Understanding that the kingdom of God is within us (Lk.17.20), and that the heart is the abode of the Father, His house, then we ask, what does it mean to leave the house? Gregory sees the wandering of the mind, πλανη, in this parable. Not centered on the presence of God, it is a prodigal. Granted, this is clearly Alexandrian exegesis at it’s extreme, but I would say it is coherent. Prayer then is the restoration of the mind (the prodigal son) to the heart and brings us face to face with the Lord.
Another analogy he draws from the Scripture is the treasurehouse of the heart. The Lord commands the disciples to close door and enter into the closet and pray (Mt.6.8-13). For Gregory, this is a call to shut the world out and lock ourselves in God’s presence, in the heart, which elsewhere is compared to a treasure store. The five senses are shut and the door to the world is shut and we hide the mind in God’s treasury.
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