Knowledge and Experience in the Theology of Gregory Palamas

Knowledge and Experience in
the Theology of
Gregory Palamas

James Blackstone

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Introduction

The dynamic patterning of unions and distinctions in Palamas’s thought provides a productive context for understanding knowledge and experience.¹ Within this patterning, a range of anthropological categories is integrated and unified such that no final separation is possible between knowledge and experience, or between theology and spirituality, or abstraction and matter, or apophasis and practice, or hesychasm and society. Rather, without negating any of these respective terms, Palamas provides a consistent shaping of the whole human being, through a concentric intensification of a broad range of epistemic faculties, towards transcendent divine-human union.² He presents this shaping in apophatic and iconic modes, and in my argument the concept of the icon finally brings under one head the diversity of processes of knowing and experiencing divinity that Palamas explores.

The coherence of Palamas’s treatment of knowledge, including rational knowledge, depends upon an attentive register, at different levels, of his pervasive apophaticism. Palamas was writing at the end of a period in which there was what Michael Sells, in The Mystical Languages of Unsaying, terms a ‘flowering of apophatic mysticism’ that lasted for one hundred and fifty years from the mid-twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth century’.³ Sells concludes that ‘the exposition of apophatic language offered here may challenge preconceptions about Western vs. Eastern thought, and medieval←1 | 2→ vs. modern thought. Medieval apophasis in the Abrahamic traditions exposes the common portrayal of medieval absolutist faith “in God” as an imposition of a stereotyped generic name of deity upon a culture that developed a critique of generic God-language as radical as any’.4 This conclusion applies as much to Palamas as to Sells’s chosen authors.⁵ Whereas Sells’s argument largely concerns performative apophatic language, the focus of this book, while taking language into consideration, largely concerns anthropological faculties. In selecting a patterning of unions and distinctions, however, my argument shares in Sells’s concern to seek consistent conceptual rigour not simply in the face of potentially mystifying notions of ineffability and transcendence but in fact precisely in order to give these notions their force. Put another way, the structure of unions and distinctions makes possible a sharp analysis of apophatic transformation of human faculties that avoids succumbing to a wrong-headed anti-rational ‘mysticism’.

In considering the category of experience it is useful first to note that the concept of religious experience has a relatively recent history.⁶ In that history, scholars have questioned whether religious experience is itself contentful or whether it acts merely as a linguistic placeholder;⁷ whether experience is part of a psychoanalytic and positivist experientialism resistant to deconstruction, or whether it is better to talk of the negativity of experience (rather than the experience of negativity);⁸ and whether reli←2 | 3→gious experience is a phenomenologically distinct state or whether it may be described in terms of virtually any possible state of the human subject.9 My argument inevitably engages with these concerns but its conclusions are formed within Palamas’s frame of reference.¹⁰ In analysis of Palamas’s texts we find that the Greek term πεῖρα (translated as ‘experience’) is a broad one, and includes the experience of evil, the experience of temptation and of practical asceticism, as well as the more problematic notion of ‘mystical’ experience.¹¹ Furthermore, it is necessary that analysis of experience goes beyond the specific term πεῖρα to include, in particular, noetic perception, noetic prayer and the impressing of the humble heart by the Spirit.¹² So we will consider the notion of experience not through the analysis of one term or even a range of particular terms, but through analysis of Palamas’s description of the whole human hypostasis transformed in all its parts under the unifying action of divine grace.

The central place given to anthropology in this study is relatively rare in the wider literature on Palamas.¹³ The range of themes which has←3 | 4→ received greater attention, and which will be referenced in the course of our study, includes the doctrine of divine essence and uncreated energies, the doctrine of deification, the relation of Neoplatonist categories to Christian incarnational categories, and consistency or otherwise with the Patristic tradition. This field of studies is burgeoning, and it is worth noting the immense historic though sometimes controversial influence within it of John Meyendorff. John Demetracopoulos makes a good case that Meyendorff is central to a tendency to set Palamas up wrongly as a representative of the good ‘existential Christian East’ as against the bad ‘essentialist Christian West’ represented by Barlaam.14 While in some instances throughout this book John Meyendorff’s views are challenged, it is always with respect for Meyendorff’s profound impact upon the study of Palamas’s theology. Studies on Palamas’s anthropology itself include research by Kiprian Kern (1950), Georgios Mantzaridis (1973, 1984), Robert Sinkewicz (1986, 1999), Håkan Gunnarsson (2002) and Anestis Keselopoulos (2004). Kern offers an introduction to core anthropological topics in Palamas’s work.¹⁵ Mantzaridis goes into greater detail but his approach remains general.¹⁶ Sinkewicz has written studies in←4 | 5→ anthropology on specific themes on two particular texts; the 150 Chapters and the first Triad.17 Gunnarsson gives attention to the transformation of the nous and I refer to his analysis but he says less about the heart and less still about the passions: rather, Gunnarsson offsets Palamas’s concepts of illumination against Palamas’s earlier understanding of the value of philosophical argument in theology.¹⁸ Keselopoulos provides a largely unanalysed compilation of a number of Palamas’s teachings on the passions in the context of the deification of the human being.¹⁹ This work builds on the foregoing material, focusing on the transformation of the human faculties within a patterning of unions and distinctions – a focus which constitutes in itself a fresh approach to the distinctions between divine essence and uncreated energies.

This is not however simply to argue for an epistemological starting point as distinct from an ontological starting point. As I shall be arguing, it is precisely because Palamas founds epistemology upon the prior divine-human union, realized in the incarnated and resurrected Son of God, that human epistemological development is simultaneously ontological change. What is more, Palamas conceives both the union of divine and human natures in Christ’s hypostasis, and also the union between humans and Christ, in supra-ontological terms, so challenging literal conceptions of ontology. On these bases, the distinction between ontology and epistemology has limited value.²⁰ The framework of unions and←5 | 6→ distinctions incorporates the ground covered by concepts of epistemology and ontology without needing to calibrate their respective priority in the theological task.

The first two chapters, one with a historical emphasis, the next with a linguistic emphasis, set the trajectory for the main argument. Through exploration of the historical context in Chapter 1, the focus of noetic transformation is located as the core concern; and through exploration in Chapter 2 of Palamas’s use of language, apophasis is understood as the key to expression of this transformation towards union. Bernard McGinn, in an article titled ‘Three Forms of Negativity in Christian Mysticism’, argues that apophasis is not simply about language and thought (negativity one), but it is also about will and desire (negativity two) and about dereliction and affliction related to God’s active abandonment (negativity three).21 Indeed, the remaining chapters of the book consider apophasis not only as pertaining to thought, and to the will, but to the whole human person. Each of these remaining chapters – pertaining to the nous, the heart, the passions and the body – shares certain structural elements. Generally, each starts from Palamas’s←6 | 7→ creative delineation of distinctions, which in turn make possible his concepts of union-in-distinctions. And each is structured to maintain an openness to the dynamic of apophatic transformation, giving priority to transformation of the nous and thereafter to the transformation of all human faculties. The overall argument is that this gifted transformation leads to a union that is transcendent to, yet a fulfilment of, human knowledge and experience.←7 | 8→ ←8 | 9→

1 I have been influenced in selecting the framework of unions and distinctions by Melchisedec Törönen’s Union and Distinction in the Thought of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2 Rejection of binary theological categorizations is not new. See, for example, in our context Andrew Louth, Theology and Spirituality (revised edn) (Fairacres, Oxford: SLG Press, 1978); Sandra Schneiders, ‘Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?’ Horizons 2.13 (1986), 253–74; and Mark McIntosh, Mystical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

3 Michael Sells, The Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5.

4 Sells, Mystical Languages, 303, fn. 9.

5 As John Meyendorff judges: ‘At the source of Byzantine theological controversies of the fourteenth century lies the problem of “apophatic” theology’ (Introduction à l’Étude de Grégoire Palamas [Patristica Sorboniensia 3] [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959], 281).

6 See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Oakland: University of California Press, 1985), xii, who notes the modern provenance in the West of both concepts, ‘religious’ and ‘experience’. In this context see also Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (London: SCM Press, 1988), 90 ff., on the ‘contraction’ of the concept of religious experience from the public to the private realm.

7 See Robert Sharf, ‘Experience’, in Mark Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 113; Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 128.

8 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 259, 264.