Speaker 1: 0:00

So I think I've basically given you the conclusion to this course. Already we talked about the analogies, the analogia entis and the analogia fide, the anisius, the areopagite and his impact on East and West and especially in the Orthodox tradition through Maximus, through Simeon, through Palamas. How important Dionysius the Areopagite really is. His influence is noticeable. Throughout the debates I had spoken to you about the impact of William of Ockham's criticisms of the realist view prevalent in scholasticism and then in the orthodox tradition there is neither the analogia entis nor the analogia fide, because there's no similarity or likeness between God and creation. I had also told you that in the experience of theosis even orthodox theology is abolished. The bible concepts are aids. They're necessary aids, they're correct and they are right as a guidance, as a help in helping us to determine our course. Holy Scripture is for us a guide towards God, the greatest guide we have in the life of the Church. But Scripture has no likeness of God and it's one thing to have guidance and it's quite another to possess the likeness of God. When reading Holy Scripture it's not possible for us to theologize correctly based solely on the Bible. And if one attempts to theologize based solely on Scripture, then you cannot avoid becoming a heretic, because the correct interpretation of the Bible only takes place when it is accompanied by the experience of illumination and of theosis. Without illumination and theosis we cannot interpret holy scripture correctly. And isn't this why, on a deeper level, the church has placed the memory of St Gregory Palamas on the second Sunday of Great Lent, immediately following the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It's not enough to believe correctly, intellectually. The Orthodox faith is a life lived and it is experience of God. And we see as an example of this, placed before us the person of St Gregory Palamas himself. Let's say, we have a book on surgery. Can anyone take a book on surgery and read it without the practical experience of surgery and interpret it correctly? I mean, this is what people think can be done. Is it possible for a person to declare that he's going to become a surgeon and, instead of going to a medical college, to first become a doctor and to study anatomy and so forth, and not only to study and to sit examinations, but to go through the relevant exercises, study under an experienced surgeon and under the supervision of a surgeon, and then begin to practice the various forms of surgical intervention? Can that person become a surgeon without doing that it's obvious that that's not possible. And the same thing applies to all the sciences biology, chemistry, astronomy, paleontology, anthropology, so on.

Speaker 1: 4:40

In whatever discipline, father John Romanides used to say to us, it is necessary for one to practice so that he or she can proceed to the verification of a certain theory. In other words, theory is verified by empirical or experiential practice, by empirical knowledge, and in the same way, one who does not approach the Holy Bible through those who know, by experience, through those who have the same experience with the prophets and the apostles, for whom baptism is illumination and theosis or glorification. When one arrives at illumination and has the Holy Spirit praying within them, and then when that person has arrived at theopteia and sees Christ in glory, the very vision of Christ in glory, that is theosis. And this is also to be found in the ancient Latin writers, although they call it glorificatio. This is a more biblical term. Theosis is a theological description of glorification.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Look, for example, at the passage in St Paul 1 Corinthians, where he says and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. Or one member be honored. The translation that I prefer is King James, but here King James needs to be corrected. It's not when one member be honored, it's when one member be glorified, it is the end of the loss. All the members rejoice and we have been speaking almost incessantly about the fact that we do not know the essence of God, but we do know his energies.

Speaker 1: 7:02

We know God in his energetic aspect and again, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that in Yinosuke, to know when we say that we know something in terms of human knowledge, it means that we can describe it, that the thing in question is describable. It means that we can describe that the thing in question is describable. And when we endeavor to describe a thing, we use similarities. We say something is like something or it's unlike something else, but God is indescribable and, according to the fathers are uncircumscribed, whereas all creatures, on the other hand, are describable. They're all comprised of atoms and so forth, and we can describe them. But when we say that God is different, is this the same as saying that this or that creature is different from the rest? No-transcript.

Speaker 1: 8:20

So Holy Scripture, which uses words taken from the realm of human experience, created words from the created world, cannot be by itself a bridge to God. The Bible of its own is not a bridge to God by itself, cannot be to God by itself it cannot be. All the names which Holy Scripture employs are descriptive. Every single name that we find in Holy Scripture is descriptive. It's taken from man's experience of the created world. Now, in the experience of theosis, now, in the experience of theosis, man sees that God is nameless, anonymous, that is. All names are surpassed in the experience of theosis.

Speaker 1: 9:21

And we have the very important passage in the Initius, which many fathers use, that God is neither monad nor triad. So in the experience of theosis, one sees that God is neither one nor three. He's neither one object nor three objects. So when we think in terms of subject-object relationships, the subject speaks and the object is that about which the subject speaks, but God is neither subject nor object. When we say that the Father loves the Son, we're not talking about the subject of love and the object of love, as Saint Augustine wrote, saint Augustine speaks of God in a way that would suggest God loving himself self-love. So, since there is in God neither subject nor object, god is neither the subject of his love nor the object of his love. So we don't have with God three persons as we do, three human persons. God is neither three persons or personalities, nor one person.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Personalism is not an orthodox concept. Not only is God not a personal God, but God is not God. Remember Anselm's ontological argument God does not correspond to anything that man can conceive of. According to Anselm, god is the highest thing that we can conceive of. But Dionysius and the other fathers of the Church tell us that God is, as we've seen in the Cappadocians especially, there's no personal relationship with God.

Speaker 1: 11:03

The communion with the Holy Trinity is essential and energetic, but not personal. What we mean is that that which characterizes the distinctiveness, the uniqueness of each of the divine hypostases is non-communicable. It's non-communicable with us, it's non-communicable within the life of the Holy Trinity. That's what makes the Father the Father alone and uniquely, and that's what makes the Son the Son, and that's what makes the Holy Spirit the Spirit. We do not have some form of modalism in the Holy Trinity. Each of the divine hypostases is unique and distinctive, and yet we're speaking of one God. So, as again Father John Romanides used to say, god is not a colleague.

Speaker 1: 12:20

But where does the personal relationship with God come in? We have the incarnation. We have the greatest of all events in the history of the universe, that the Logos became flesh. The Logos was made flesh. We have the incarnation, where we do have a personal relationship with God in and through the assumed human flesh, human nature of the Son and Word of God, nature of the Son and Word of God hypostatically united to him uniquely. So the incarnation brings a very special relationship, a new relationship with man which does not exist from the perspective of the Holy Trinity. Only one of the Holy Trinity, only one of the Holy Trinity was made flesh. And this introduces us again to the importance of Jesus Christ, the importance of Christology, because in and through the assumed human nature of Christ, as we said, we do come into personal relationship with God himself and never forget that the revelation of Christ is at one and the same time a revelation of the Holy Trinity, because he who has seen Christ, the Son of God, has seen the Father, and no one can recognize him as God and Lord but by the Holy Spirit.

Speaker 1: 14:23

The life of the Church, the life of the Fathers one way, if you wish, of describing a theological method, quote-unquote of the Fathers of the Church is the life of repentance. True theology, which is the way of true repentance is the only way out of the black despair in the world today. When man is regenerated by the grace of God and he begins to enter into that communion with Christ and has a taste of the life to come, then he's filled with gratitude. And that gratitude and that thankfulness which constitutes the central mystery of the life of the Church, the divine records, dispels all depression, all despair, and brings peace and real joy that no man can take away from us, no man, no created thing. So that's an outline of what I wanted to say to you by way of conclusion. But really the conclusion to this will be, god willing, going to focus on the ladder of divine ascent by St John and and saint siloam the athonite by archimandrite.

Speaker 1: 16:05

So what saint gregory palamas says is that there is no essence that does not have an energy. If you deny the energy of anything, be it created or uncreated, that's therefore saying that that thing quote unquote does not exist, since there is no such thing. And remember, energy means life, one of the ways that St Gregory and the other fathers, st John Damascene, puts it that simply we're speaking of life. In the realm of Christology, long before the 14th century, it was proclaimed very clearly that each of the two natures in Christ has its own proper and natural energy. So the divine nature in Christ, which is one and the same, the nature of the Holy Trinity. If the nature is divine and uncreated, it has a divine and uncreated energy, just as the human nature in Christ has human and created energy. The energy follows naturally on the nature, and here nature, essence. Remember, they are synonymous. There's no such thing as an essence that has no energy.

Speaker 1: 17:45

So that's why, in the debates with Balaam, palamas said to Balaam you're an atheist, since your God doesn't exist. Remember, at first, when Balaam attacked the Hezekiahs, he didn't attack anyone by name and he didn't accuse the Hezekiahs of being miscellaneous. Later, after the first response of St Gregory, he did, and so St Gregory added to what he had previously written, and so he becomes more explicit, more specific. But remember, this comes up again in the six questions that the emperor asked in the third council against Gregoras. It's contained in one of the six questions, and the debate showed that, just as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity does not impair, do any violence to the oneness of God and, if you will, the simplicity of God, so too the fact that there is cause and caused cause and caused distinction between the essence and the energy or energies of God. That too does not impair the simplicity of God, because it's not philosophy. In philosophical terms it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That just betrays the fact that the others were taking a philosophical approach.

Speaker 1: 19:21

Western scholars in general they mistake. When they look at the writings of the father, they see an argumentation. Something is being presented and it's being presented in a logical way, a reasonable way. It's an argumentation. But that's not the question. The question is what is the argumentation based on? That's the question. Is it based on the speculations of the human mind or is it based on the knowledge of the vision of Christ in glory? The orthodox answer is that it's based on the knowledge of the vision of Christ in glory. That's difficult. That's a difficult theology. It's easier, difficult theology. It's easier to speculate.

Speaker 1: 20:21

Nothing has any value unless we try to do it with some humility. You can be very successful by imposing your will, forging ahead according to your own will, and you can achieve great things according to the world, but what significance do they have on the eternal plane? It's highly questionable. If they are not. Those accomplishments are not accompanied by a certain humility, and that's not to reduce the theology of the great alamas to a simple word, but to show the rich content of that simple word.

Speaker 1: 21:22

St Gregory was not anti-intellectual. He was mistaken by Gregoros and company as an anti-intellectual. Whenever you look at the doctrines of the church, you must ask yourself what is the practical relevance of this doctrine for my life as a Christian? What is the church trying to teach us again in a practical way? So it's incumbent upon each of us to have that approach, to ask that question and to ask God to enlighten us. Sometimes we see the practical relevance sooner than at other times and really, because it's such a personal thing, it's revealed to each of us as and when God wills. But you have to be looking out for that. You have to have that approach. And St Gregory Palamas is not an optional extra. He's celebrated on the second Sunday of Great Lent. That tells you something about the centrality.

Speaker 1: 22:46

This is Orthodox theology. It is so important to see everything that we've studied so far in the context of the ascetic life, so far in the context of the ascetic life. When I say the ascetic life, I mean a Christian life which is for each and every one of us, it's not just for monastics. There's only one Christ and there's only one gospel. As Father Sofroni says, living the commandments of Christ is the ascetic life. It's not a coincidence that the essence, energies distinction is not presented in a systematic way until the 13th, 14th centuries. That's when there was a pastoral theological need for this distinction to be unpacked for us and to be presented in this way.

Speaker 1: 23:51

In St Gregory you have the personal embodiment of the Orthodox faith. You have the ascetic character of the Orthodox faith underlined, and what you have is an expression of the Orthodox faith that literally pushed theological language to its limits. Some things were clarified, and so they were there. It's not that they weren't there All the doctrines of the faith are there but they were clarified and articulated more clearly, more accurately, with St Gregory and, as we know, that tradition is still with us today. It didn't stop with St Gregory, but what you find in the person of St Gregory is this pushing theological expression to its very limits. Click on the Support the Show button in the description box and become a supporter of the Mount Tabor Academy podcasts, which aim to introduce the theology and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church to the wider community.