 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Through His Works You Shall Know Him, Palamas and Hesychasm. If you are a faithful listener who has come to this series on Byzantine philosophy straight after the earlier episodes on medieval philosophy, you may have been struck by several differences. There have been fewer Marx Brothers references and more rulers named Constantine, albeit like a good pasta sauce with some basil thrown in for good measure. Also, religious institutions have played a far less dominant role. Our account of Latin medieval philosophy included extensive discussion of mendicant orders and monastic contexts. In the Byzantium series too, we've met our share of churchmen, such as the monk John of Damascus, the bishop Nicholas of Metone, and the Syrian patriarch Timothy. But many of our protagonists have been men and women of the secular world. An exception who proved the rule was Michael of Sallos, whose brief stint as a monk convinced him that he preferred the life of the courtier and scholar. In fact though, monastic traditions were of tremendous importance in Byzantine culture and not only as centers of spirituality. Some of the manuscripts we've recently been discussing were made or stored at monasteries. They were also institutions of political and economic importance. Their status under imperial tax law was a matter of heated dispute, and it was common for aristocrats to become patrons of monasteries. Sallos is again an example here, as is a figure we met last time, Theodore Metochites, whose refurbishment of a monastery at Kora included the sponsoring of mosaics that survived to the present day and are a highlight of extant Byzantine art. But of course, monasteries were not just places where the rich could simultaneously display both wealth and piety. They were above all dedicated to ascetic religious devotion following advice laid down by the Cappadocian father Basilov Caesarea and subsequently by Theodore the Studite. This earlier Theodore was abbot of one of the most important monastic institutions of the empire, the Monastery of Studios, founded in the 5th century and located in Constantinople. It was admired for its role in opposing iconoclasm and seems to have played a key role in the introduction of the minuscule script we spoke about as one of the main advances in Byzantine writing technology. The studion was home to other famous names too, such as Simeon the New Theologian, a contemporary of Sallos and like him an aristocrat who entered monastic life as a refuge from politics. Actually though, a hagiography of Simeon makes him sound more like Harry Potter than Michael Sallos, firstly because of the supernatural feats ascribed to Simeon, such as miraculous acts of healing, and secondly because at the monastery he slept in a small cupboard under the stairs. Unlike Harry Potter though, Simeon had a good relationship with He Who Must Not Be Named. Under the influence of theologians like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory Nazianzus, Simeon was convinced of the utter transcendence of God above human language and thought. He therefore called God the unattainable. Insofar as a connection to God could be attained nonetheless, it would certainly not be by the study of pagan philosophy. When a theologian quizzed Simeon on matters of doctrine, he scornfully replied that the Holy Spirit is sent not to rhetoricians, not to philosophers, not to those who have studied Hellenistic writings, but to the pure in heart and body who speak and even more live simply. For Simeon, rigorous sadicism was a path towards a mystical vision of God. He described that experience as a light, filling all the space around the mystic, with the mystic himself seeming to become one with the light. In retrospect, it is hard to read about Simeon without seeing him as the forerunner of a later thinker, a man who lived two centuries later and who occupies an even more prominent role in the history of Byzantine theology. This was Gregory Palamas. He was associated with another famous monastery located on the peninsula of Mount Atvos and his name is all but synonymous with the approach to monastic practice called hesychasm. This word comes from the Greek hesychia, meaning silence or restfulness, a term that had been used in a spiritual context since the 4th century. It refers to the monks in the form of unceasing prayer, a practice that involved bodily disciplines like breath control and fasting in order to aid mental concentration. Palamas was a powerful defender of this life against its detractors, something that ironically meant that his own career would be anything but peaceful. Instead, he was at the center of the hesychast controversy, a debate that went on for years, with the fortunes of its protagonists rising and falling with the star of their supporters among the political elite. To do what J.K. Rowling could not manage with her Harry Potter novels and keep a long story short, everything began in 1335 when a Greek-speaking Italian, Barlaam of Calabria, was asked to refute theological errors held by the Latin Christians. Part of his strategy was to argue that the Latin scholastic theologians were inappropriately striving to establish syllogistic proofs concerning the nature of God, as if the divine could be captured with the tools of Aristotelian logic. Barlaam denied that this was possible, holding instead that God is too transcendent to be grasped by humans with the certainty that is required in Aristotelian science. Palamas agreed with Barlaam that God cannot be grasped by human reason, but argued that God could be grasped with certainty nonetheless through faith. He added, in a rather Platonist vein, that the physical world is subject to constant change, whereas God is eternal and immutable. So, if we expect certain knowledge to concern what is forever true, as Aristotle himself says, then this sort of knowledge in fact applies especially to God, not to created things. Barlaam tried to diffuse the situation by claiming that it was effectively a terminological misunderstanding. One might achieve demonstration or certainty about God in some loose sense, but not the technical sense described by Aristotle. But, there was no denying that he and Palamas had a serious disagreement on one other point, and it's here that hesychasm comes into the hesychast controversy. For Barlaam, human reason and philosophy may be incapable of discerning the divine nature, but they are still the best tools we have for understanding God and his creation. Palamas, by contrast, believed in the possibility of a mystical vision in which to the believer as a brilliant illumination. Monks like Simeon the New Theologian had enjoyed such visions, and so had the disciples who, according to the Bible, saw Christ appear to them on Mount Tabor, clothed in light. Of course, Barlaam accepted the reality of such experiences, but said they were created by God. For Palamas, though, the light was God himself. Well, sort of. We've now come to the key move in Palamas's defense of hesychasm, his contrast between what is in Greek called the oesia and energiae of God, that is, his essence and his activities, often translated in secondary literature with energies, since the English is close to the original Greek. Their distinction goes way back in the Christian theological tradition. It was used by Maximus the Confessor, who argued that since there were two natures in Christ, divine and human, Christ must be capable of activities that express his two natures. For instance, walking is a human activity, but his divinity makes it possible for him to walk on water. The Cappadocian Fathers too, distinguish nature or essence from energiae, activity or energy. This can easily look like a purely theological point, so it's worth stepping back for a moment to explain why it is of general philosophical interest. For one thing, the Cappadocians applied the point to created things, not only God. They held that the essence of even an insect is ultimately inaccessible to us, never mind the essence of God. Since in this life, at least, our understanding is based entirely on sense perception, we can never hope to know true natures, but we access those natures indirectly through their external manifestations. All of this sounds much more skeptical than what we might find in Aristotle, but it has at least a family resemblance to ideas put forward by pagan Platonists. In particular, Plotinus had distinguished between the internal and external activity, or energiae, of things, giving the everyday example of fire, which naturally gives off heat and light as outer manifestations of an inner essence. Christian thinkers took note of this distinction, and also took note of the forbiddingly ambitious standards that pagan thinkers had laid down for true philosophical understanding. You only understand the essences or inner activities of things if you grasp unchanging, necessary, universal truths about them. Beginning with Plato, philosophers had been expressing doubt that mere sense experience would be enough to reach such a lofty ambition. Yet, it is clearly possible to experience the effects that naturally arise from essences. Harry Potter has no clue what the essence of an owl is, not even Hermione can figure that one out, but it's easy to observe the activities that flow from the owl's nature such as flying or delivering the mail. Now we can return to that claim that Palamas was making, but only sort of, namely that when Jesus' disciples, or a monk, behold a divine light, they are beholding God. If we want to speak strictly we should say that they are not beholding God's essence or nature, but experiencing the activity or energy that makes manifest that essence or nature. One should not be misled by this, however, into thinking that the mystic fails to behold God after all. Just consider that, when you stretch out your hand to feel the warmth of a fire, you are really experiencing the fire. Just so, the mystic who encounters God's light is experiencing God through his activity. This is how it is possible to participate in or unify with God. Furthermore, God's activity is not created, as Baarlam claimed, but itself divine. God remains unnamable and incomprehensible in his essence, yet the union or participation of a mystical vision allows us to go beyond the purely negative approach of theologians who allow us only to say what God is not. It is a higher way of grasping God, born of practice, and known only through experience. This shows how wrong Baarlam was to extol the admittedly limited achievements of rational philosophy as the highest that can be attained by humankind. Palamas would agree with the somewhat earlier author John Tsitsis who wrote, The kind of philosophy which is puffed up with arguments is false. The philosophy of real monks is the real kind. The latter is preparation for death, and killing of the flesh, and knowledge of the true and real beings, assimilation to God, as far as possible for humans, and love of wisdom and of God. But, notice that in the midst of this quote Tsitsis quotes Plato, who was the first to speak of assimilation to God insofar as is possible. Similarly, we've just seen Palamas drawing on the pagan philosophical tradition in differentiating activities from essence, even if his immediate references are Greek theologians like Maximus and Gregory Nazianzus. In any case, Palamas is not out to denigrate natural reason. Though he is highly critical of pagan philosophers, this is not because they used reason, but because they misused it, leading them to embrace such erroneous doctrines as Plato's belief that the whole cosmos has a single world soul. Palamas won the first round of the hesychasm when Paulim was condemned in 1341, but the debate was far from over. This story has already had its fair share of Gregory's, and hesychasm was now criticized from a different direction by another one, Gregory Akyndinos. He believed that Palamas was putting forward innovative doctrines and misinterpreting authoritative texts. Worst of all, by crediting the hesychast visionary with a true participation in God, Palamas was suggesting that the visionary can himself become divine. Palamas was vindicated again in 1347, only to be attacked anew by a figure we met in the last episode, Nikephoros Gregoras. Both Akyndinos and Gregoras believed that applying the distinction between essence and activity to God would have the consequence of splitting the divine realm into two. Or actually, since there are many activities, Palamas was dividing the divine into many more than two. There would be God's essence, and then all his various activities or energies. This was the most difficult challenge for Palamas to meet, and in fact, modern-day exegetes have not always agreed about how he meant to do so. In part, he just goes on the offensive by pointing out the dire consequences of rejecting the hesychast theory. Given that various fathers of the Church insisted on the ineffable transcendence of God's very essence, denying the reality of activities around the essence would mean cutting us off from God entirely. Also, it cannot be the case that everything but God's essence is created, as his opponents claim, because then God's activity of creation would itself need to be created, which leads to a regress. The plurality of activities does not imply splitting up the unity of God. To the contrary, it proves that God's many activities must indeed be distinguished from his essence, since if they were not, then God's essence would be subject to plurality. This is all clear and pretty convincing, but when he comes to defend his own view, Palamas's arguments are not so easy to follow, or for that matter, to swallow. He is emphatic that the activities are inseparable from the essence, yet not identical with it. But when he tries to explain how this can be, he tends to say such things as that God is indivisibly divided and united divisibly. It's hard to imagine his opponents were much impressed by this sort of thing, and as I say, more recent readers have been unsure what to make of it too. One school of thought holds that the distinction between essence and activity is merely conceptual, just a contrast we introduce in order to understand God better. But it seems more likely that he takes the distinction to be a real one, made between two things that are very intimately connected. Or rather, we should resist the urge to think of the activities as further things that might or might not be distinct from God or from his essence. We might instead understand them as what God does, and things that he does freely. This would be a significant difference from the original Neoplatonic idea of an activity as a natural expression of an inner nature. After all, fire does not choose to radiate heat, and neither does Plotinus's first principle, the One, decide to emanate the rest of the cosmic hierarchy as if it might have refrained from doing so. For Palamas, by contrast, God does choose to manifest himself to the prayerful monk as a brilliant light. The visionary mystic is thus allowed to participate in God by freely offered grace. To this extent, it must be said that Palamas's theory is unmistakably a Christian one, a kind of metaphysical variation on the theme that God freely offered himself as a sacrifice to redeem humankind. This applies also to his celebration of the practical and even physical side of monastic practice. Intellectually minded opponents like Balaam and Gregoras could not accept the idea that God could be received by the mystic in a physical way, not even if the physical phenomenon in question was light. This could be at most a symbol of divinity, not the real thing. For Balaam especially, the body was something to be fled for the sake of intellectual contemplation. But Palamas is thinking less neoplatonically than him and more Christologically. What could be more true to the idea of the Incarnation than supposing that God comes to us when he sees fit by making himself manifest in the bodily realm? An irony of this whole debate is that when Balaam originally complained about those Latin scholastics who believed that they could syllogize about God, he was saying something that should have been congenial to Palamas. Balaam was trying to be faithful to the idea, so strong in Greek authorities like the Pseudo-Dionysius that if God can be grasped, it can be only by a kind of unknowing. Being much less well acquainted with Latin literature than Balaam, Palamas was slow to appreciate the force of this response to scholasticism and quick to leap to the defense of monastic approaches to God. Balaam was an unusual figure in this respect. He abandoned Constantinople after his condemnation to join the papal court at Avignon, where he encountered Petrarch and offered him lessons in Greek. As meetings between East and West go, that's a pretty stunning one, but this was a period of many such encounters, of theological disputes between Latin and Greek Christianity, and of ambitious attempts to unite the two spheres that had been so divided. I'll be devoting all my energies to explaining this in greater depth in the next episode, so it's essential that you don't miss that installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.