www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology St. Gregory Palamas

So my apologies for correcting something you never meant to say.

There has always been an apophatic and ascetic core in the monastic life of the western Church. As attitudes change among us and throughout the entire Catholic world, I think that there will be many opportunities to thank Gregory Palamas, among others in both east and west, for keeping the flame alive.

Dear Eli,

Thank-you for your kind words, no apology needed. I just wanted to clarify my imprecision.

"Remember that Greek Orthodoxy and Slavic Orthodoxy both came under the influence of Calvinism for example, and the residue of that is still evident in Orthodoxy ...Same thing happened in the west with the rise of humanism and nominalism in the service of the gnostic. It bled out into the population and it is impossible to erase entirely."

Fr. Georges Florovsky lays this argument out pretty convincingly in his Ways of Russian theology. His writings are always worth reading.

But re: St. Gregory Palamas- His commemoration by the Melkites and others highlights these issues. It would be interesting to see what exactly was decided at the 1971 Synod, and the process for its reception by Rome.

Max percy

Eli [/QB][/QUOTE]

Dear Andrew you said:

I say:

I am of a different generation, and I truly recall a time when the Orthodox Church wanted desperately to unite with the Anglican's in the same way that the Protestants wanted to hang on to the Orthodox tail strings to find some legality in their existance. Actually, unity someday among all Christians was foremost on everyone's mind during the pre-Vatican II era, and it was only a matter of who could unite with who in order to have the strongest and most influential hand... of course, whenever and wherever talks would occur.

Of course, this is just the opinion I have formed from my own past experiences. It was a different era.

Zenovia

Dear Mac percy you said:

I say:

Saint Gregory Palamas was fighting the heresy of Barlaam. A heresy that had come about through (I believe), Calabria. It was considered an outgrowth of 'Scholasticm', and he reacted by defining the 'nous' as being the only way one can attain God...thus the practice of 'hesychasm'.

Now 'nous' can be interpreted as one's heart, yet in our Western mind, I think it would be a combination of heart and reasoning. It is though prayerful quietness in contrast to Barlaam's heresy of knowledge as the attainment of God. Different languages, and therefore different thought processes. and basically, there is where the Churches split up and go their own way...to theosis of course!

I believe there was a misinterpretation of Scholasticism by Palamas due to Barlaam as well as cultural factors, and a misinterpretation of Palamas by the West.

Zenovia

I heard not that long ago an interview with Bishop Kallistos talking about the history of relations between Orthodoxy and the Anglicans. He said the main problem is the Orthodox were talking to the people sympathetic to them, namely the high church Anglicans with an interest in the historic church. There was a whole wing of the Anglicans that had and have completely different views. Basically he said if push came to shove it would become obvious they were not really compatible; so even if some on both sides truly wanted some sort of union (and I agree some on both sides did), it would have been scuttled in the end.

Not everybody obviously was in favor of this. One of the clearest and most far sighted views can be found in this letter [orthodoxresearchinstitute.org] of St. Raphael of Brooklyn written in 1912.

All of its a moot point now anyway.

Andrew

It seems to me that the period of scholasticism in the west was a period of increasing secularization and professionalization, manifest in the changing of the traditional disciplines of study, that was strongly influenced by protestant reformed thinking.

I think that the greatest error made, perhaps inside, as well as outside the Catholic Church is to take that speculative thinking and make it equal to catholic theology.

Clearly it was not, nor is it now. Any more than contemporary Orthodox speculative theology is the equivalent of the Church's teaching of universal truths, and there are some wildly heterodox teachings out there among the Orthodox today. So bad that seminaries are seriously beginning to adjust their studies to reflect the need to reverse some of the thinking.

There are two books that I found to be thoroughly enjoyable to read and very helpful in examining the various elements of the period of the scholastics which was much larger than the few names that get trotted out regularly as representative of the period.

Thomas Langan's The Catholic Tradition

Jaques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence

Eli

In his book, "How Not To Say Mass", Fr. Dennis C. Smolarski, S.J. states that during a meeting between Catholics and Orthodox at the Vatican on Pentecost 1981, Pope John Paul II refered to Gregory Palamas as Saint Gregory. Fr. Dennis sees this as an "extremely symbolic gesture" in overcoming the East-West schism.