A word about St. Gregory Palamas

Exclusive. Today, on the second Sunday of Great Lent, the Orthodox Church around the world celebrates the memory of St. Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki in the 14th century, one of the most outstanding fathers of the Orthodox Church. The feast of St. Gregory Palamas is celebrated twice a year, on the second Sunday of Great Lent, following the week of the Solemnity of Orthodoxy, and on the day of his death, November 27 (XNUMX). The personality of St. Gregory Palamas, who lived in the distant XIV century, has been set by the Holy Church as a reference point for all of us so that we learn something very important in his exploits and in his teachings. How important is the experience and testimony of the great Thessalonian for the Church?

A word about St. Gregory Palamas

Now St. Gregory is considered a Greek saint, but the country where he lived was then called differently - the Byzantine Empire, from the IV-V centuries. — in fact, the only world state, the legal successor of the Roman Empire. However, during the time of Gregory, the great empire was already on the verge of great decline, succumbing to the attacks of the Muslim Turks and the Crusaders. The spiritual environment in which he had to live and defend the true faith of the saint was just as difficult.

Saint Gregory was born in Constantinople in 1296. His father, who died when Grigory was only seven years old, held a prominent position at the imperial court as a member of the Senate and adviser to the royal court. The emperor entrusted him to be the mentor of his grandson, who became the next emperor. Despite the death of his father, St. Grigory lived in privileged conditions, grew up next to the emperor and was educated by the most gifted philosophers and theologians of that time.

After these classes, St. Gregory went to the Holy Mountain, where he became a monk. At the same time, his mother and two sisters also went to the monasteries in Thessaloniki. In 1325, Grigory was ordained a hieromonk.

In 1335 he was elected abbot of the Esphygmenian monastery, but later resigned and led a hesychast life until he was asked to defend the Athos monks against the charges brought by Barlaam the Calabrian.

This conflict is usually called the Hesychast controversy. Later he was ordained as the archbishop of the city of Thessaloniki. During this period, he was sent to Constantinople, where he was captured by the Turks. After the redemption, he spent all his time with his flock in Thessalonica, and from this period we have preserved a large part of the sermons he preached.

Saint Gregory died when he was 61 years old. His last words were: "to the heights!" He was canonized 9 years after he went to God. Probably the fastest canonization in the history of Orthodoxy. The icons of the saint appeared in the Byzantine Empire immediately after his glorification in 1368. St. Gregory is depicted on them as a mature man with short, dark hair and a large dark beard. His clothes are traditional episcopal robes of that time: patterned or felon and omophorus. In his left hand he has a holy scripture (Gospel, sometimes with a scroll), with his right hand he makes a blessing gesture.

There are later images dating back to the time after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, in which the saint appears in the eppanokallimahon, a special headdress of saints in the monastic sleigh. Emphasis is placed on his ascetic (ascetic) feat.

The oldest known images of Saint Gregory Palamas are in Thessaloniki. In the main cathedral church of the Vlasodon monastery, there is a fresco painting: a half-figure of the saint in a three-quarter turn, with a nimbus, in his hands he holds an open Gospel. There is also a later painting of the church located in its southern side altar, instead of the figures of the four evangelists, which are traditional for this part of the premises, the icon painter placed in them the image of the saint, together with the great theologians and teachers of the Church - the apostle John the Theologian, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Simeon the New Theologian, who also wrote a lot on the topics of theosis. Such fresco icons of the saint are well known in many Greek monasteries.

The doctrine of divine grace, theologically grounded, dogmatically verified, belongs to Saint Grigory Palamas. And it is no coincidence that his memory falls on the second week of Great Lent, immediately after the week of the Solemnity of Orthodoxy. Because the goal of Orthodoxy is to attract the grace of God, i.e. the divine uncreated energies, Favor light, i.e. the deification of the human being. This week can also be called the week about the Light of Favor, because the Transfiguration of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ on Mount Favor took place about a month before His crucifixion.

St. Grigory Palamas taught and proved by the practice of his own life in Christ that God, who is not known in essence, is known by His energies, that these very energies of the grace of God were visible to the disciples in the Transfiguration of the Lord; and the uncreated light of God, and our salvation is the fruit of the transformation of a believing Christian by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Only the sinful relaxation of our souls hinders their path to transformation into God. When the human soul is subordinated to the flesh, sinful passions, pleasures, pleasures, it becomes paralyzed and unable to serve either God or neighbor and cannot even rise in prayer. Such a soul is also closed to the grace of God. She needs a lot of effort to change and rise from spiritual relaxation. It requires willful effort, turning to Christ.

It is for this reason that St. Gregory Palamas takes us back to the early Church Fathers, who simply taught that Christ became man so that men could become gods. By this we do not mean the New Age nonsense of men becoming God and usurping His power and being, for God is beyond anything we can ever be. Therefore, we mean that under the ascetic feat of self-transformation, we become a special people, separated from the world, we adopt the features of Christ and become, as the Scriptures tell us, "partakers of God's being", or, translating the Greek original into the modern Ukrainian language, "co-participants of the Divine nature." And again, we achieve this through humility, asceticism, prayers, fasting, a life focused on the Eucharist and, most importantly, love for God.

Saint Gregory was not just a preacher, but also an ascetic. In Greece, outside the town of Kavalla near Thessaloniki, you can still see a cave in the rocks - it was the home of Gregory Palamas before he was ordained as an archbishop. It was in this cave that he spent years in fasting and prayer. And there he received the gifts of the Holy Spirit, learned the grace of God.

At the same time that St. Gregory lived in extreme fasting and prayer, there lived an intelligent philosopher, also a Greek, a Hellenist, whose name was Barlaam. He said that it is logically impossible to know God, because God is by definition unknowable and inaccessible to the human mind. Saint Gregory recognized Barlaam's so-called "logic" as blasphemy, heresy. He recognized that Barlaam lacked purity of heart and therefore flexibility of mind, and that his logic was that of an ungodly man who trusted only in his own mental powers and imagination, mental powers, and not in the help of the Creator of all things visible and invisible.

For if Barlaam were right, then all the work of Christ for us, from His conception and human birth, His circumcision, His baptism, His Crucifixion, His Resurrection, His ascension, are all in vain, they are all in vain. Unlike Barlaam, St. Gregory said that since Christ the Creator became man and part of creation, he made human nature potentially holy—as well as his own human nature. By bestowing grace, He has given all of us in our human nature access to holiness. As the sun is known to us through its energies of heat and light, so God can be known to us through the uncreated energies of the Holy Spirit.

Simply put, if we reject the teachings of St. Gregory on this, we reject the entire work of Christ and therefore also reject the Descent of the Holy Spirit.

Barlaam's approach would mean that we cannot know God, that there is no point in fasting and prayer. In fact, Barlaam's "philosophy" was the denial of God and thus the cornerstone of the atheism and unbelief of the 20th century with all its mass murders and genocides with their hundreds of millions of victims. Indeed, Barlaam's approach underlies all those recent ideas that said there is no God, that man stands alone at the head of the universe, because there is nothing higher than man.

Saint Gregory argued the opposite of Barlaam. He claimed that a person carries two aspirations, one for good, the other for evil. However, the inclination to good can develop in a person only through the acquisition of the grace of God, the Divine energy sent to us from God, available as long as our hearts and minds are pure enough to receive this grace. But this grace that enlightens and enlightens us can come to us only if we repent, if we accept the process of fasting and prayer, tears and self-sacrifice.

It is important for us to understand that Saint Gregory's thoughts, expressed in detail in his writings, are not just thoughts, not just another doctrine like Barlaam's, but they were based on his experience, they were inspired by Christ. Saint Gregory was not talking about an idea, but about the reality that he experienced as an ascetic in that cave, which can still be visited today. And the fact is that it is the miraculous relics of the saint (and parts of these relics) Gregory are carried in the procession through the streets of Thessaloniki even today, and not the graceless ashes of the bones of Barlaam.

Before us is the reality of the Church, it is the grace of God's energies, it is holiness, experience and knowledge of God, not imaginary, not the fruit of fantasy and the pursuit of the mind. But this God-known reality is experienced by those who are pure in heart and mind. For as it is written: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And this is the goal of all true Christian hearts and minds.

Grigory Palama did not build a theological or philosophical system, nor was he a teacher who wrote treatises in the spirit of academic theology. He himself was a prayer leader who devoted himself to prayer, and when the disciples of that Barlaam (Petrarch's teacher) attacked the church, it was St. Gregory who was called to use his talents to defend it.

Central in the polemic in which St. Gregory, there is a question "What is the purpose of the Christian life?" In the simplest answer, we can say that it is theosis, a Greek word that is usually translated into Ukrainian as deification. This word expresses the Christian's voluntary union with God.

Emphasizing this union even more, the outstanding Romanian theologian, Fr. Dumitru Staniloae writes that "spirituality is aimed at improving believers in Christ. This perfection cannot be achieved in Christ without participation in his God-human life. Therefore, the goal of Orthodox spirituality is the improvement of the believer through his union with Christ."

Over the centuries of human history, man has been able to convince himself naturally that the human body is weak, painful, and ultimately mortal, and that the world around him is not good. In the forest, animals eat each other, otherwise they will not survive. And there are also floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. That's the trouble. At the same time, Divine Revelation directly says that the Creator is Good, and the world is beautiful. And here there is a problem that leads many people to break away from faith, and this problem is religious and philosophical. The existence of an unpleasant and uncomfortable world, including the human body.

The religious philosophers of India came to the idea that "being is suffering", and therefore one should stop being. Buddhism appeared.

The religious philosophy and theology of Christianity came to the idea that the world is beautiful and man is beautiful, but only ... in God. That is, the universe and mainly humanity that we observe is a kind of moment in the process of creation. And this world, and mainly man, continues to be an object of creation.

God continues the creation of man through redemption and salvation. Through theosis-deification. By his special actions, which are called "grace", God leads a person to transformation, that is, to His eternal light.

And here it is important to say about this. The teaching of Gregory Palamas about "divine actions" in the Eastern churches in the 20th century was subject to materialistic vulgarization, which resulted in the idea of ​​Divine grace as a "beneficial radiation", some substance that has a subjectivity separate from God (that is, "accumulates in icons and relics" etc.) although the word "incorporeal" in the works of Grigory Palamas himself has the meaning that the Divine does not have any separate subjectivity from God. And with all that, Divine action is present in the world, works with this world.

And the main thing is working with a person and cooperating with a person. Not because a person who visited some sacred places, kissed icons or relics and gained good "radiation". No, no and again no. But it is a person's inner openness to God, his repentance and desire to cooperate with God that make a person a participant in divine action. The movement of the inner will of one's weak ego opens a person to the action of grace. This is the main topic of today's thoughts.

Hieromonk Feofan (Skorobagatov) of Polotsk,

doctor of theological sciences