Saint Gregory Palamas
The theology of the person, as
this is revealed in the hesychast ascetic tradition, is the most
significant counter-argument to post-modern individualism and
relativism. The ascetics of introversion and of conscious tranquillity
(hesychia) is not a psychological proposition but the authentic and only
way of transforming the “repulsive mask” into a person.
It has been aptly remarked that what will best characterize the theology of the 21st century is its concern with anthropological questions[1]. If we have not sufficiently investigated anthropological truths in the sphere of theology today, imagine what must be the case in the realms of philosophy, the intellect and the social and human sciences.
Today’s post-modern people do not know
what a person is. They live, and project, the mask of a persona. What is
a mask? It’s a guise which was used in Ancient Greece by actors to take
on a variety of roles- personae- on stage in the theater. So this mask
is not something real, it’s artificial, it’s a virtual reality, to use
modern IT terminology. We need to remove this false object and replace
it with the real one, which, in this case is the person.
The Fathers of the Church did not define
what a person is. But in order to refer to the magnificence, the
enormous worth of the human being, they used the term “person”. Basil
the Great writes that persons are the only animals who are God-made[2].
Saint Gregory the Theologian says God made a creature- the person- who
was a mixture of visible and invisible nature, who is a second cosmos,
“great in miniature”[3]. Saint John Chrysostom stresses that “the person is the most carefully made of God’s living things”[4].
Human beings are the crown of creation.
The longing for perfection is innate. This can be seen in the execution
of any academic activity, art or even profession. People try, to the
best of their abilities, to achieve perfection, even in their everyday
activities. And this is evidence of the potential God has given us for
our personal perfection and completion as a psychosomatic entity and
being.
In the created universe, there is
nothing superior to us humans. “The lowest orders of beings, even though
they have a kind of rationality, still do not have an independent aim,
but rather their purpose is to be the material precondition of the
existence of humankind. People yearn for a boundless, personal reality
(God) Who is superior to them and can nourish them infinitely. They
cannot possess this reality, because their potential is limited, but nor
will they disappear into it”[5].
It is this personal God Who gives meaning and purpose to our existence.
Our human nature, with its countless hypostases, is able to
communicate, by energy, with the distinct and mutually-penetrative
persons of the Holy Trinity.
The late Elder Sophrony, in accord with
the holy Fathers, offers no definition of the person. More important for
his ascetic theology is his assertion that the person exists, which
leads him on to a description of its capacities. The person cannot be
defined, but it can be characterized, dynamically and existentially, by
the manifestation of its energies”[6]. The person lying in the “hidden being of the heart”[7], emerges when that being, through the Grace of God, discovers the sphere of the heart, the core of our being.
Saint Gregory Palamas says something very important and which is the central point of this article: When the nous,
our highest faculty, distances itself, through Orthodox ascetic
practice, from every perceptible thing, rises above the turmoil of
concern for material matters and instead supervises the inner being, it
will see the “repulsive mask”, that is the ugly, the hideous mask, which
has been put together by passionate attachment to earthly affairs,
which is nourished and inflated by sin. So the nous hastens to cleanse
this mask with grief and repentance, to remove the unsightly cover
through asceticism and observance of God’s commandments. Saint Gregory
goes on to say that since the soul is not diverted by the diversity of
sin, it discovers the peace of its psychosomatic powers, harmony of the
mind, and genuine inner tranquillity, so that it comes to real knowledge
of God and of itself[8].
Then the “repulsive mask” is transformed into a face, the persona into
person, in the image of the true and eternal face and person of Christ
the God/Man.
Post-Modern People and their Persona
However much times change politically,
culturally and socially, people remain essentially the same, the image
of God indelible and tarnished within them. After the fall of Adam and
Eve, sin and the passions of evil, whatever they may be- sensuality,
lasciviousness, vanity, pride, hatred, malice, anger, temper,
condemnation, avarice, greed, hypocrisy- are either fought against or
allowed to dominate, depending on whether people are aware of the
struggle and resist or are seduced by them, pander to them and foster
them. Never at any time, however, has there been such social acceptance
and legitimization of sin as in our own day.
Perhaps the most important reversal of
past conditions is the emergence of the individual. For perhaps the
first time in history, individuals have acquired their own value, their
own right to existence and their own autonomy. For the first time, they
have achieved such a measure of significance and importance that they
are held to be superior to the community, the totality, collective
cultural and inherited institutions and values and, of course, to the
Church[9].
There are many who claim we are living in a post-modern era, which,
apart from the autonomy of the individual inherited from modernism, is
characterized by fragmentation, saturation, relativism, irrationality,
anti-sociability, and the pessimistic desire for the end of history and
of the world. The fundamental slogan of modernism was Nietzsche’s
classic “God is dead”. Even though we may observe a “return to God” in
this post-modern era, a reappearance and resuscitation of religious
sentiment, the slogans “you’ve got to enjoy” and “everything’s
permissible” are the ones which predominate and hold sway. As presented
today, through philosophically, politically, socially and religiously
syncretist systems, people are no more than biological units. The model
in the post-modern day and age is the star, the actor, whereas in the
modern era it was the scientist, and in traditional times, the saint.
The centre of subjective gravity in traditional times was the soul, in
the modern era reason, and today the body. Today, the post-modern person
wants to acquire information, the modernist wanted knowledge and the
traditionalist wisdom.
People today, self-validating, vain,
hermetically sealed within their egos, hedonists and pessimists, are the
ones shaping our globalized bioethics, which express the unethical
moral diversity of the times. Despite their sharpness of mind, they do
not know what a person is, they haven’t exploited their real potential
which far exceeds the bounds of life on earth, and have not discovered
the eternal dimensions which ontologically belong to us humans. So from
these brief comparisons, we can see that people today have regressed,
they underestimate the quality and meaning of their lives. In other
words, people today have acquired a deeply hostile mask and persona. A
mighty struggle is required to rid ourselves of this mask, to transform
it into a human face.
Even though Orthodox Christians are “strangers and pilgrims”[10] in this world, even though their “commonwealth is in heaven”[11],
they still love in the world, within history. They cannot deride what
is happening in the political, social, cultural spheres, on the world
stage, because all this affects their lives. In our view, people today,
who are enslaved to the passions and disorientated as regards the
meaning of life, have a greater need than ever before of liberation from
this unnatural, aberrant, impassioned state.
The accentuation of the person in the hesychastic ascetic tradition
The course of treatment that should be
followed to ensure a restitution of our natural condition, for us to
recover that “ancient and elusive beauty”[12] is recommended in “the experience of tranquillity”, which Saint Gregory Palamas refers to as the “art of arts”[13].
This manner of living tranquillity is also called “hesychasm” in
Patristic terminology. Hesychasm is not a theological movement which
appeared in the 14th century with Saint Gregory Palamas as its prime exponent, but is rather the traditional road to deification and sanctification[14].
Hesychasm is the quintessence of Orthodox Tradition, the Tradition
which preserves the experience of the Holy Spirit, the continuation of
Pentecost, which expands under the supervision of Tradition, but which
is stifled by formality and conservatism if there is no concomitant
acquaintance with it.
Hesychasm is not lived only by monastics
and those who have foresworn the world. Hesychasm is an inner
condition, it is a continuous “dwelling in God and purity of the nous.
Hesychasm is the way in which the realm of the heart is revealed, the
centre of our existence, that which we may term our person. This is the
only way in which people can be reborn spiritually and have their
hypostatic (personal) state emerge. Without this ascetic training, there
is no point to the sacramental life of the Church, which can act
towards perdition as well as salvation.
People need to get rid of the persona
with the mask of the passions and become persons with a human face.
Purifying the heart of the passions needs to become their number one
priority in life. In this struggle, they should not attempt to conform
to an externally moral life but should carry out the fight in a
Christ-centred manner, with their thoughts fixed on Him. Grafted on to
the Body of Christ, which is the Church, particularly through the
sacraments of Baptism, Confession and the Divine Liturgy, people become
an ecclesiological hypostasis[15]-
though not yet a person actively- and with all their volition begin the
task of repentance. Saint Gregory Palamas makes the point that the
preparation and beginning of repentance is self-reproach, confession and
avoidance of evil[16].
For repentance to be complete, all three have to be observed together.
If people pray with contrition and self-reproach before God and promise
to refrain from sin, but do not go to the sacrament of confession, their
repentance, their struggle is not valid. Saint Gregory points out that:
“Those who sin before God, even if thereafter they refrain from sin,
even if they equal it with works of repentance, cannot feel forgiveness
for themselves unless they go to a person who has from God the authority
to loose transgressions, and receive from him the assurance of pardon”[17].
In this way, they conduct the “legitimate struggle” and take care not
to foster the passions by active sin or by giving in to wicked thoughts,
because the passions are an unnatural movement of the soul. When the
powers of the soul, i.e. desire, emotion and reason, do not function
normally, but work unnaturally, then the corresponding passions
flourish. Purification from the passions is achieved by the
corresponding exercise of the virtues and, according to Palamas, the
cure begins with desire[18].
So we place restraint on desire rather than give in to self-indulgence
and greed, we apply love to emotion instead of malice and irascibility,
and vigilance and prayer to reason in the place of heedlessness and
ignorance[19].
Purification of the passions through prayer of the heart
The faithful nourish their faculty of
reason with the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”.
When the name of Christ revolves in the nous of the faithful, it
provides divine enlightenment, so that they can discern the thoughts
that instigate active sin and then they are able to slay them at birth[20],
i.e. before they assume a provocative image. And when the passions are
not activated, they gradually die off, with the assistance of divine
Grace, or rather are transformed as Palamas explains. When this
necrosis/metamorphosis of the passions begins, they enter into
contemplation and there, at “the throne of Grace, the heart”[21] they discover another energy within it, that of direct cognition[22].Then
there occurs the union of the nous and the heart. Our nous is perhaps
the most fundamental theme of ascetic anthropology and the one most
difficult to discern for those who are not spiritual, those who are
earthly[23].
Many of the Fathers have given descriptions of the nous. By and large
they regard it as a power or eye of the soul. Palamas, however, defines
the nous and its functions in a unique, revelatory and precise manner.
He considers the nous a self-sustaining and supremely active substance[24].
It falls short of its proper function and loses its value when it is
restricted to the intellect, which is activated in an earthly spirit
which has its seat in the brain[25].
Our nous has substance and energy. The energy of direct cognition which
is dissipated outwards through the feelings and mixed up on the inside
with reason must return to the substance of the nous, which has its seat
in the heart, to the first, bodily, calculating organ[26]. And this return is effected through prayer.
If Christians persevere, through
repentance, in this state of prayer, God sends them the gift of prayer
of the heart. When the nous finds the heart and dwells there as in a
comfortable locus of prayer, then we can say that the person is praying
directly, from the heart, purely- the terms are identical. When prayer
in the heart is activated by the energy of direct cognition, then we can
talk of unceasing prayer, then we can apply the command of Paul to
“pray unceasingly”[27].
People who have the gift of unceasing prayer are able to say the prayer
of the heart, the recollection of Jesus within the heart, while at the
same time going about their business with others, working, studying and,
in general, pursuing an externally ordinary, natural life. And this can
also be achieved in “the world”. The discovery of this energy of direct
cognition indicates empirical communication with God. This energy is
the umbilical cord by which the faithful are attached to Grace and are
nourished spiritually.
With the perceptible energy of the
prayer of the heart, tranquillity is experienced with clarity, and
people begin to live their liberation from the passions of evil; and
this is real freedom. Recollection of God fosters and increases divine
longing and love for one’s neighbour, because, as Palamas stresses in
his homilies, love of others is the result of love of God. Real
introspection leads to and cultivates humble and loving social
relations. In the state of permanent and perfect enlightenment- i.e. the
greatest possible absorption of the gift of Grace, which comes after an
extensive period of withdrawal or removal, in accordance with God’s
providence in schooling us[28]- all our spiritual and bodily powers acquire their natural function, as in God’s scheme of things.
Such people experience Grace as light,
as a gentle flame within their hearts. Wonderful peace and sweetness
reign in their souls and bodies. The fact that “the body somehow takes
on the Grace active in the nous”[29] and that the energies of soul and body are common[30]
are central positions in the teaching of Saint Gregory Palamas, who
rejected Neo-Platonizing anthropology and epistemology, as expressed by
Barlaam. The uncreated light, which they still do not see, gives them
amazing knowledge[31],
irrefutable and certain, and their intellect is often held hostage to
wonderful “visions”, i.e. revelations of God’s supernatural mysteries[32].
The enlightenment of the nous is not the result of study or
instruction, but of personal participation in the uncreated knowledge of
God.
Those engaged in the struggle,
continuing in repentance and dependent on the pure Jesus prayer, fashion
their hearts so that they become receptors of the vision of the
uncreated Light, “the power of the divine Spirit… to the cessation of
all intellectual activity”[33],
where “they contemplate the glory of [their] holy nature, at a time
when God deems them worthy of admittance into spiritual mysteries”[34],
as Palamas puts it, rather than when they themselves want. With the
vision of the uncreated light, Christians actually experience
deification, the direct vision of God[35].
There is no end to this vision, however, but rather continuous
progress. This is why “a coruscation is one thing, but the abiding
vision of light is another”[36].
Deification, or glorification, is beyond the conception of the human
intellect, according to Saint Gregory Palamas. It cannot be explained
logically and is ineffable even for those who experience it[37].
It is not merely the unmingled essence of God which remains beyond
conception, but also the uncreated energies, even if people have in some
sense participated in them.
The necessity of the ascetic struggle for those who live in the world
It is worth mentioning here some of the
exhortations of this great beacon of Orthodoxy, taken from two homilies
on the feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. “We must
believe, as we have been taught by those who have been enlightened by
God and who have experience of these matters …Believing their teaching,
therefore, let us go forward toward the brilliance of that light”[38].
Here, it is obvious that he is telling us to progress towards that
Light, that is the vision of the uncreated Light, which is “the
effulgence, in which God communes with those who are worthy”[39].
This vision, which consists of the experience of Divine Grace, is not a
luxury in our lives, it is the purpose of our existence. If we exhaust
our powers on the lower levels of the spiritual life, where we achieve a
relationship with God that it is no more than intellectual, then this
is no more than moralism and intellectualism. And Palamas continues:
“When we love the beauty of unblemished glory, then we will cleanse the
eyes of our souls of earthly thoughts, spurning everything pleasant and
beautiful that is not permanent”[40].
“We will cast off our garments of skin, that is our earthly and carnal
way of thinking, and we will stand on holy ground, which is the struggle
for virtue and directing our gaze towards God. When we have such
assurance, the Light of God migrates towards us and we are illumined and
become immortal in the glory and lambency of the triple sun of the
Divinity”[41].
On the other hand, if we continue down the wide road, however, sweet
and attractive it seems at first, it brings eternal pain, because it
clothes the soul with the ugly garment of sin”[42].
And unless we have the garment of divine glory, we shall not be able to
enter the “heavenly wedding”, but will, instead, be led to “that fire
and outer darkness”[43].
It is important and worth noting that
these exhortations to cast off earthly thoughts, to cleanse the heart
and to make our way towards God were not expressed by Saint Gregory to a
gathering of monastics, but to his flock in Thessaloniki, to married
and single people, and are an indication that this is the road we must
all follow in order to arrive “by feeling and beyond feeling (at that
divine Light which is) ineffable, unapproachable, immaterial, uncreated,
deifying, eternal, the brilliance of the divine nature, the glory of
the Divinity, the exquisiteness of the heavenly kingdom”[44].
Also related to what we have already
mentioned is an incident from the life of Saint Gregory Palamas. When
he was a the Skete of Verria, the saint had a very interesting
conversation with a virtuous ascetic, Job, concerning the practice of
the prayer of the heart by those who were living in the world. The saint
urged all Christians to say the prayer while Job was of a different
mind, until an angel of the Lord appeared to him and confirmed Gregory’s
teaching as being inspired by God and indispensable for the Pastoral
theology of the Church[45].
Deification, the aim of human existence
According to the Fathers, deification,
or glorification, is not a moral event, but an ontological state. The
created human nature is united, “kneaded”, with the Triune God, through
the created energies, but not in essence[46].
“Deification was, from the start, the innermost desire of human
existence. When Adam tried to embezzle it by breaking God’s commandment,
he failed and, instead of his aspiration found decay and death. But
God’s love, though the incarnation of His Son, gave us the potential for
deification again”[47].
People who do not conform to the
hesychastic teaching of Saint Gregory Palamas, which expresses the
genuine spiritual experience within Orthodoxy, the way to find the
person, demonstrate that they do not have an Orthodox ecclesiastical
outlook. Hesychasm is action, not inertia[48].
It is an internal spiritual state. At the beginning, it requires a
fierce struggle against the passions, but then a proper spiritual
structure and unity in Christ are achieved in the realm of the heart,
whence emerges the person, the hypostasis. People then acquire
hypostatic prayer, prayer for the salvation of the whole world, they
live in unity and love towards all others and towards God, within a
“real tranquillity”, which, for Palamas, is “perfection beyond
perfection”[49].
In the final stage of deification, which is “beyond understanding and
beyond words”, they enjoy, they participate in divine beatitude, in rest
and respite.
People today have made their lives such that there’s no time for prayer “to be still and know God”[50].
With modern means of communication and transport, we can be in direct
contact with lots of people, and in a shorter time than ever before. We
know and are in touch with so many people, but, in the end, we do not
know ourselves. This disappointment, this existential void, this
loneliness that people of our time feel is due, for the most part, to
the fact that we don’t know how to pray, we don’t devote time to prayer
during the day or night. Our being is expanded through prayer and we
embrace the whole world. Prayer is missing from the world, which is why
it is in such a sorry state.
The value of the human person
Although people are created and finite,
they can communicate with the uncreated and infinite God through prayer.
Created people, through the uncreated energies of God, are able to
acquire the uncreated, divine life, to become what God is, by Grace,
though not identical in essence. This unity, this personal relationship
with God can be achieved by every human person, because, hypostatically,
in the person of Christ, perfect divine nature has been united with
perfect human nature, indivisible and unconfused. So we see, as the
blessed Elder Sophrony said, that God treats people not as objects or
subjects but as a fact, as a person[51], because between God and us there is an existential symmetricity[52].
We can become persons, because we have been created in the image of the
Divine Word, Christ, who is a Person. Only when we know and are united
with the Triune God empirically can we become persons and cast off our
“ugly masks”. The Church, as a charismatic state, is a communion of real
and eternal persons.
Empirical theology points out and
preserves the way to find the real person, which is something that
academic theology cannot do. Lots of people talk today about the person,
but in an intellectualized, philosophical/religious and academic manner[53]
which at best results in an alteration of the “repulsive mask” into an
“intellectual one” or a “personalization” of the modern individual into
one with an Orthodox theological outer garment, but certainly not into a
person. Without an ascetic struggle, with theoretical training alone,
the Orthodox spiritual life cannot be achieved, the person cannot
emerge. As Saint Paul says: “For it is not those who hear the law who
are righteous before God, but those who observe the law who will be
justified”[54].
The Fathers emphasize the fact that real contemplation comes as a
reward of real practice, “the practice of contemplation is an entrance”,
not the other way round. This is what the blessed Elder Efraim from
Katounakia used to say: prayer comes from obedience, and theology comes
from prayer. Contemporary blessed charismatic Elders, such as Elder
Sophrony, Elder Païsios, Elder Porfyrios, Elder Efraim from Katounakia,
Elder Iakovos Tsalikis, Elder Simon Arvanitis and Elder Amvrosios are
the most tangible examples of real, eternal persons.
The secularization which threatens the
Church, the religification of Orthodoxy through external, moralistic,
Puritanical forms on the one side, and intellectualized models and
unsound cerebral structures on the other are phenomena of our
post-modern age- post-Christian according to many. They can be combated
only with empirical theology, real communion with the Uncreated, and the
discovery of the true person. Theology, the teaching on the person, is a
unique and exclusive phenomenon which can be experienced only within
the Orthodox Tradition, not in philosophy, psychology nor even in the
other Christian confessions.
[1] See Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, Orthodox Theology in the 21st Century.
Athens, Indiktos Publications, 2005.
Athens, Indiktos Publications, 2005.
[2] Basil the Great, On Fasting, Discourse 2, PG 31, 212B.
[3] See Saint Gregory the Theologian, On Theophany, Discourse 38, PG 36, 321D-324A.
[4] Saint John Chrysostom, On Dives and Lazarus, PG 48, 1029.
[5] Protopresbyter Dum. Staniloae, Ο Θεός ο κόσμος και ο άνθρωπος, Athens 1990, pp. 30-31 and 35.
[6] See Fr. Nicholas Sakharov I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Jan 1, 2003.
[7] I Peter 3, 4.
[8] See Saint Gregory Palamas, On the Life of Saint Peter the Athonite.
[9] See Pandelis Kalaïtzidis, Ορθοδοξία και νεωτερικότητα. Προλεγόμενα, Athens 2007, p. 47.
[10] I Peter 2, 11.
[11] See Phil. 3, 20.
[12] Saint Gregory Palamas, Rebuttal of Akindynos
[13] See On those Living the Hesychast Life in Sanctity.
[14] Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos, Exact Method and Rule, Philokalia.
[15]
On the terms “hypostasis of biological existence”, “hypostasis of
ecclesiological existence” and “sacramental of Eucharistic hypostasis,
see Ioannis Zizioulas, «Από το προσωπείον εις το πρόσωπον», Χαριστήρια εις τιμήν του μητροπολίτου Γέροντος Χαλκηδόνος Μελίτωνος, Thessaloniki 1977, pp. 308-314 and 317.
[16] See Saint Gregory Palamas, Homily 47, 8.
[17] Idem, Homily 61, 5.
[18] See To the Nun Xeni.
[19] See Maximos the Confessor, Chapters on Love 4, 80, PG 90, 1068 CD.
[20] See Ps. 100, 8.
[21] On those Living the Hesychast Life in Sanctity.
[22] Ibid.
[23] On the difference between earthly and spiritual people, see I Cor. 2, 10-16.
[24] «[Νους] αυτοτελής εστιν ουσία και καθ᾽ εαυτήν ούσα ενεργητική», Homily 55, 36.
[25] Ibid.
[26]
For the great weight that Palamas lays on this most specific, greatest
and very particular energy of the nous and its distinction from our
reasoning energy, see our paper «Η χρήση της λογικής και της νοεράς ενεργείας του ανθρώπου κατά τον άγιο Γρηγόριο Παλαμά», Acts of the International Conferences of Athens and Limassol, Ο άγιος Γρηγόριος ο Παλαμάς στην ιστορία και το παρόν, pub. by the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, Holy Mountain 2000, pp. 769-780.
[27] I Thess., 5-17.
[28] On this extremely important and intense period of trial, see . Γέροντος Ιωσήφ Βατοπαιδινού, Ο Γέροντας Ιωσήφ ο Ησυχαστής, pub. by the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, 2001, pp. 280-291, 379-389; Archim. Sophrony, We Shall See Him As He Is, Essex 1996, pp. 193-220, 344-5.
[29] On those Living the Hesychast Life in Sanctity, 1, 3, 31.
[30] Ibid., 2, 2, 12.
[31] «Νοερόν τουτί το φως και γνώσεως παρεκτικόν». Ibid., 1, 3, 50.
[32]
«Τοιούτον γαρ τι εστι και η εξαιρέτως αληθής υπό των Πατέρων
ονομαζομένη θεωρία και η της ευχής εγκάρδιος ενέργεια και η εξ αυτής
πνευματική θέρμη τε και ηδονή και το εκ της Χάριτος θυμήρες δάκρυον. Τα
γαρ τούτων αίτια νοερά κυρίως καταλαμβάνει αισθήσει». Ibid.,1, 3, 31. Also Homily 53, 40, Ομιλίαι ΚΒ , Οικονόμου, p. 178: «έργοις
εδίδαξας ημάς ότι το θεωρείν ουκ αισθήσει μόνον η και λογισμώ τοις
όντως προσγίνεται ανθρώποις (μικρώ γαρ αν είεν των αλόγων κρείττους),
αλλά πολλώ μάλλον τη του νοός καθάρσει και τη της θείας Χάριτος μεθέξει,
καθ’ ην ου λογισμοίς αλλ’ επαφαίς αύλοις τοις θεοειδέσιν εντρυφώμεν
κάλλεσιν».
[33] Ibid., 1, 3, 17.
[34] Ibid., 2, 3, 15.
[35] Ibid., 2, 3, 29.
[36] Ibid., 2, 3, 35.
[37] Ibid., 3, 1, 32. See also Rebuttal of Akindynos, 2, 75.
[38] Ομιλίαι ΜΑ, Jerusalem, 1857, Homily 34, p. 194.
[39] Προς Αθανάσιον Κυζίκου 14.
[40] Ομιλίαι ΜΑ, Homily 34, p. 194.
[41] Ibid., Homily 35, pp. 199-200.
[42] Ibid., Homily 34, p. 194.
[43] Ibid., Homily 34, p. 194.
[44] On those Living the Hesychast Life in Sanctity, 3, 1, 22.
[45] Ομιλίαι ΜΑ, Patriarch Filotheos, Λόγος εγκωμιαστικός εις τον Θεσσαλονίκης Γρηγόριον τον Παλαμάν, pp. 18-19.
[46] See Saint Maximos the Confessor, Epistle 1, PG 91, 376B. Cf. Jn. 17, 21-24.
[47] See George Mantzaridis, Παλαμικά, pub. Pournaras, Thessaloniki, 1998, p. 153.
[48]
Those who insist on intellectualism or moralism are torpid. This is why
Gregory Palamas called Barlaam “a professor of indolence”. See also G.
Mantzaridis, op. cit., p. 15.
[49] Εις τον βίον του οσίου Πέτρου του εν Άθω 20, p. 173.
[50] See Ps. 45, 11.
[51] See Archim. Sophrony, We Shall See Him As He Is, p. 176.
[52] See Fr. Nicholas Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am.
[53] See Archim. Ierotheos Vlachos, Το πρόσωπο στην Ορθόδοξη Παράδοση, The Holy Monastery of the Birth of the Mother of God, Levadeia 1994, p. 87.
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