Breathing with both Lungs: A spiritual Phenomenology of Eastern & Western Christianity #1

 

 

 

The theologies of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Gregory Palamas have often come to be seen as synthetically representing the intellectual tradition of the Western and Eastern Church respectively; and this for a good reason. Both Thomas and Gregory shed a unique light on the Christian revelatum which can indeed furnish many valuable insights into the distinct “spirit” that enlivens the Western and the Eastern tradition of Christianity. Nevertheless, among certain apologists (or rather polemicists) who seem to relate to their respective traditions on the emotional level of a sports fan to his favorite football team, it has also become fashionable to turn “Thomism” and “Palamism” into archetypical symbols of everything they deem wrong with the “heretics” of the opposing side, which has led to countless distortions when it comes to the actual doctrine of these two great saints. 

Thus, for the West, Palamism has sealed the Eastern flight into an irrational fideism and subjectivist mysticism that closes all doors to a rational inquiry about the nature of God and the destiny of man. And in the eyes of the East, the “Thomistic” Western Church has doomed itself irreversibly to a sterile rationalism that “killeth the Spirit” (2. Cor. 3:6) and in which the Easterner cannot help but perceive a truly “Promethean” element; the desire to penetrate beyond the veil of mystery unto the “things that are above the understanding of man” (Sir. 3:25), to measure God Himself by “number and weight” (Wis. 11:20) and to count His every hair (Lk. 12:7) – “Seek not the things that are too high for thee” (Sir. 3:22).

The Latin sees the Eastern “agnosticism” as a betrayal of reason and thus also an implicit attack on the dignity of man whose theomorphism (imago Dei) resides, for the Catholic tradition from Augustine to Thomas, primarily in the rational (and intellectual) soul. The Eastern suspicion against reason must strike him as a false humility and he is quick to detect in it a quasi-Protestant tendency to place “subjective experience” over the objective evidentness of ecclesial dogma. In the mystical ambience of the East he fails to see more than a reduction of religious truth to a vague “feeling” (a “charismaticism” avant la lettre even!) and in Palamas a kind of forerunner of the subversive existentialism of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard – thereby completely ignoring the fact that Hesychasm has nothing to do with Protestant sentimentalism but represents a wholly objective and “cordial” way of knowing that goes beyond the limitations of discursive thought.

For the Easterner, scholastic theology is a betrayal of “the Fathers”^[1]; St. Thomas and the Latin doctors, so he argues, have drawn their subtle argument not from the evidence of revelation and the sacred traditions of the Apostles, but rather from the “worldly wisdom” of Plato and Aristotle – thereby conveniently forgetting that St. Thomas (the man who said he’d sell all of Paris for St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on Matthew!) exceeded all of his peers in his ardent veneration for the Eastern Fathers (there’s hardly a single page of the Summa where one will not find at least one Eastern Father quoted as authoritatively), and that the selfsame Fathers were more than happy to draw on the wisdom of the Greeks whenever it seemed appropriate.

In short: for the Easterner all scholasticism is “Barlaam”, that great antipode of St. Gregory Palamas (who, even though he has become a powerful symbol for anti-Latin polemics, was neither a Thomist nor a Catholic, but a Byzantine humanist with expressively anti-scholastic sentiments). And for the Westerner all Eastern theology is “mysticism” in the worst sense of the word (as a “mystificationism”).

When Thomas says “intellect” the East only hears: reason, dianoia, “intellectualism”. When Palamas says “heart” the West only hears: affection, sentiment, or rather: “sentimentalism” (whereas both effect mean the same thing, namely that what is most exalted in man, the nous or the “apex mentis”).

 

*

 

While such polemical caricatures possess a certain symbolic validity that we do not want to deny (for every polemic contains a grain of truth), they are of course highly inaccurate when it comes to the persons of Aquinas and Palamas themselves. Indeed, the supposition of an ardent antagonism between these two thinkers is really a quite modern phenomenon that can be traced back to neo-Palamite revival of the 20^th century which wished to position itself decisively against the “Western rationalism” in all its forms. The polarization of “Thomism vs. Palamism” does thus not occur around the main protagonists per se but primarily around their supporters, who have done much to obscure the true character of their respective figureheads.

The venerable Archbishop of Thessalonica (who had no intention of developing a new theology but merely strove to defend the perennial doctrine of the Fathers against its modern detractors) ^[2] was not at all a “Palamite” and certainly didn’t consider himself as such, neither was St. Thomas a “Thomist”; and as the century-old patina of neo-Thomism has been continually scraped off in the more recent past, there begins to emerge a much truer picture as that of the “Aristotelian rationalist” as which he has often been labeled: Thomas the mystic, the poet, the disciple of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (who ranks among the most cited authorities of his whole oeuvre), Thomas the Platonist.^[3]

There’s even a long history of an Eastern reception of Thomism in the years following his death; one of the most ardent admirers of St. Thomas was none other than Gennadios Scholarius (who is venerated as a saint in at least some Orthodox churches). Scholarius had been Patriarch of Constantinople (from 1454-64) and then retired as a monk to study and translate the works of the Angelic Doctors of whom he said that “none of his followers has honored Thomas Aquinas more than I, nor does anyone who becomes his follower need any other muse”.

Further, when some anti-scholastics old and new say that logical inquiry is “worse than useless in the search for divine truths” (Nicephoras Gregoras), all the while claiming for themselves the authority of St. Gregory, they forget that Palamas himself was well learned in Aristotelian philosophy and in his own writings frequently makes use of syllogism. In fact, in condemning all philosophizing as “Hellenistic sophistry” they show themselves to be much more closely aligned with the much-hated Barlaam than with the Hesychast Doctor.

 

It is Gregory’s opponents who exhibit the anti-logical theological mentality all too commonly associated with him and his supporters. Barlaam, although no mean student of logic himself, was deeply skeptical about the possibility of any rational argumentation in relation to the divine and scornful of the Latin dependence on syllogisms. Barlaam was especially dismissive of Aquinas, his reliance on reason and rejecting outright his use of the syllogism, most particularly the apodictic syllogism. In stark contrast, Palamas not only defends the apodictic syllogism but also explicitly defends the Latin use of the syllogism, declaring that ‘we have in truth been taught by the Fathers to syllogize about [theological matters], and no one would write even against the Latins because of this’ (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, II.2).

 

Now, just as we have no desire to engage in the polemical mudslinging that the intellectual hooligans of both camps have been engaged in for centuries now, we’re not at all interested in the excessive “ecumenism” that has come to dominate the discourse around Palamism and Thomism in recent times (especially since the II. Vatican Council). The question cannot be one of trying to “synthesize” Palamism and Thomism or to make them in any way “compatible”. While they are not simply opposable in the metric of “rationalism vs. mysticism” they represent yet two distinct theological vision that remain irreconcilable on the horizontal plane alone. The only way unification can be approached is along the vertical dimension, the dimension of “depth”, which is the specific domain of esoterism. And such is the approach that we want to assume here.

 

*

 

First let us point out that we’re dealing here with two fundamentally different “theological styles” or ordos theologiae; between the rather ad-hoc and polemical style of St. Gregory and the highly systematic architecture of the Summa with its narrowly defined vocabulary, shaped by all the precision of scholastic pedantry, there is hardly much common ground. One cannot help but feel that in speaking about “essence”, “existence”, “energies” and the likes, Thomists and Palamites are drawing on fundamentally different assumptions. They speak two different languages that are hardly “translatable” and this was already recognized by St. Thomas himself when he writes in his Contra Errores Graecorum that “Latins and Greeks professing the same faith do so using different words” and again in De Potentia: “If we take careful note of the statements of the Greeks we shall find they differ from us more in words than in meaning”.

Further, both take their departure from radically different starting points: Palamas writes firstly as a polemicist; his “providential mission” was to defend the spiritual practice of the holy Hesychast against the onslaughts of a decadent Byzantine humanism and this is mirrored in the character of his writings which are primarily apologias addressed against certain heretics (namely Barlaam the Calabrian and Gregory Akindynos) and decisively not anything resembling a theological summa.

The focal point of Gregory’s Triads is the doctrine of deification, theôsis, and it is only secondarily that from it emerges a doctrine about God’s nature and His acting in the world, which necessarily remains rather vague and undefined (hence why the effort of his followers to turn his doctrine into some coherent system called “Palamism” has always been problematic and hampered by countless problems of interpretation). 

Thomas on the other hand starts from a doctrine of God, a true theology, from which then everything else – be it anthropology, cosmology, or ethics – naturally flows. From first to last, the Summa is one coherent whole with a nigh miraculous harmony; like the elements of the great Gothic cathedrals, every part is linked to the other and all come together to form a veritable intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk. It is without a doubt one of the most “complete” productions of the human speculative spirits.

Palamas’ approach might be called “inductive”; it starts from the facts of experience, the deifying vision of the Uncreated Light, and reasons from this to the nature of God. Aquinas starts from first principles: God, the Divine Essence, the Absolute (the only thing that is self-evident), and deduces from this (inter alia) how man might experience deification. They could thus be said to represent the two pillars of “method” and “doctrine”, vajra and ghanta, thunderbolt and bell. As Origen says: “both wisdom and holiness are allied to participation in Divinity” (De Prin. I.6.2).

 

Deification East and West

 

 

Now the question of theôsis is of course a central one when it comes to disputes between Palamites and Thomists or the Eastern and Western tradition more generally. Some have even claimed that the post-Augustinian West had totally abandoned the Patristic teaching of deification all together, opting instead for a pure and shallow moralism and an overly legalistic view of justification according to which God didn’t “become man so man could become God”, but merely to pay of some age-old debt or to appease the wrath of a vengeful God.

However this formulaic presentation (which is even repeated in much of the scholarly literature ad nauseam) is of course utter non-sense: “Christ has not only come to vivify us but to deify us”, St. Augustine affirms with all the other Fathers^[4] (Sermo XXIII), and one will not have to look to mystics like St. John of the Cross or more fringe (and often “suspect”) theologians like Cusanus, Erigena, and Meister Eckhart, to find abundant references to theôsis or deification in the Western tradition. As such St. Thomas too is no stranger to the word “deificare”, “deificatio”, etc. (cf. S.Th. I-II.112.1, I.12.5, etc.), however it is certainly true that in his theological Gesamtkunstwerk the doctrine of deification doesn’t occupy nearly the central role that it has for St. Gregory; in Thomas it is one small block in that great edifice that is the Summa, whereas in the discourses of Palamas it constitutes the very “foundation stone”.

 

*

 

According to the teaching of Aquinas, we are deified by an ontological participation in the virtues (for “the divine nature is only communicable according to the participation of some similitude”, S.Th. I.13.9), primarily the “theological” or “infused” virtues, chief among them charity: “faith calls us, hope lifts us up, and charity unites us” (St. Augustine). Love is the unitive force par excellence, the “virtus unitiva” (I-II.28.1) and “since the Divine Essence is identical with Charity, all love is participation of the Divine Charity”, the very Life and Love of God (II-II.23.2).

It is by “Goodness” that God creates the world, it is the Name that “signifies divine causality” (I.5.2): Divine Love, Mercy, Infinitude, Divine Mâyâ, the Holy Spirit; the agapic outpouring of the Divine Essence, its irradiation, gift of self: Bonum est diffusivium sui. But being the universal first cause, Goodness is also the end of all things (cf. I.44.4, I.6.3), their final telos (and this whole vision of the procession and return of all things is also mirrored in very structure of the Summa). Divine Love is the Alpha and Omega, the exhaling and inhaling of Divinity, al-Râhman, al-Rahmin, as well as the path on which we return to the Principle.

“Because the Holy Ghost is Love, the soul is assimilated to the Holy Ghost by the gift of Charity” (I.43.5); in its own self-less love it imitates the divine outpouring, thus sharing in the very “gift” of the Paraclete. And it is by this infusion of charity, which constitutes itself no less than the self-giving of the Holy Spirit, that we are transmuted by His “fiery tongues” into the alchemical gold of the new man (“O Spiraculum sanctitatis / O ignis caritatis / O dulcis gustus in pectoribus / et infusio cordium in bono odore virtutum”)

 

*

 

For St. Gregory, on the other hand, theôsis is fundamentally a “participation in the knowledge of His theurgic light” (St. Dionysius), the “transformation of the mind” (“metamorphousthe tê anakainôsei tou noós”, Rom. 12:2) in the partaking of the Uncreated Energies, by which the Spirit, slowly but surely, changes man into an alter Christus – “Those who participate in divine grace become, conformably with grace itself, without origin and infinite”.

 

The invisible vision of Divine Beauty deifies human persons and renders them worthy of personal relations with God (Triads, III.3.9).

 

Palamas has inherited a deep awareness of the notion of “theologia-as-theôria” from the Eastern Fathers, hence why he must fundamentally reject the sufficiency of all merely speculative knowledge about God (especially as he’s seeing this patristic vision attacked by the rationalism of Barlaam et al.). For him the only true “theology” is the inner gnosis of the saint. Rather than external learning and the “wisdom of the world”, he knows only one Wisdom worthy of this name and that is Christ Himself, the Wisdom that “made fishermen into Apostles” and turned the wisdom of the wise into foolishness: “This knowledge, which is beyond all conception, is common to all who have believed in Christ” (II.3.66). And the only way to attain to this gnosis is by the union with Him who is Knowledge itself thereby “recovering the vision that is ours by nature”.

 

*

 

While both Thomas and Gregory thus speak of theôsis, their doctrine of deification has a distinct quality that is in conformity with the different “spiritual temperaments” of the “faustian” West and the “magian” soul of the East.

Both are “spiritual” in the proper sense of the word (there’s nothing yet in Thomas of the psychic sentimentalism of later devotions). Yet in Aquinas there’s a clear emphasis on will over intellect, or love over knowledge (even to the point of stating that the perfection of the beatific vision will depend on the measure of our charity: “he who has more charity will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified”, S.Th. I.12.6), whereas in Palamas it is the axis of gnosis, the “inner vision” (theôria), that prevails. For the Westerner “charity is the gate of gnosis”, whereas for the East “apatheia is the mother charity” – “When our intellect has been liberated, it will finally possess the love of God” (Maximus Confessor). 

This is simply in the nature of things. Western man is essentially volitional and characterized by that Faustian striving for the Infinite that is expressed in all his mental form, from the sursum corda of the gothic arches to the fortissimo of Beethoven’s symphonies, and thus the Catholic way is principally (although not exclusively) one of love, the “cleaving” (adhaere) to God until the unio mystica, the “mystical marriage” of the soul and her Bridegroom, is consummated: “He who loves God with his inmost soul, transforms himself into God” (Bernard of Clairvaux).  The Latin is a troubadour of divine Love, a fedele d’amore, endowed with a devotional temperament that we, for a lack of a better term, might call “chivalric”.

The great mystical symbol of the Latin West is that of the “hierogamy”, the Song of Songs the Scripture which nourished its greatest mystics from St. Bernard to John of the Cross. But every marriage is also a death (the mors mystica), and, since loving God means loving one’s death, there has always been in the Western tradition an intimate embrace of eros and thanatos^[5] (the Transverberation of St. Teresa!) which is not to be confused with the pathological “sympathy with death” of the romantics, the Wagnerian Liebestod, but rather signifies the willess surrendering into the divine Love which is the true Freedom and Beatitude – “in in la sua volontade è nostra pace”.  Even in its most “gnostic” and sober expressions (St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Rhinelanders etc.) one can discern this eros, the gentle chivalry of the soul, l’amour courtois, that lovingly penetrates through the Divine Darkness – “black yet beautiful” – unto the “secret treasury” of the Bridegroom: “The King has brought me into His chambers” (Cant. 1:4).

 

*

 

The Eastern way is one of detachment and repentance, an inner metanoia into the depths of the heart. Everything in it, from the somber monotony of its chants to the tears of the cenobites, exudes the perfume of the “joyful sorrow” that comes from the consciousness of being the “greatest of sinners” while yet knowing oneself kept by the Love of God that “faileth not” (Ps. 136:2). In unceasing prayer and ascetic struggle the monk practices a continual self-naughting, a “debecoming”, until he is fully “transparent” like the thin air, penetrated by the splendor of the Uncreated Light: a “living icon”.  Its great symbol is the Transfiguration, the glory of the future Resurrection piercing already into the darkness of this world, and Mt. Tabor is the axial mountain around which its whole spiritual universe revolves.

The Westerner looks towards Golgotha, the holy wounds, the Mater Dolorosa, and the streaming forth of the divine blood to cleanse the world from all corruption (and is it no coincidence that the Western saints receive the stigmata, whereas the Eastern saint attains the vision of the Uncreated Light).

We might liken both traditions to the “water and blood” that flowed from out the Divine Heart (Joh. 19:34), the tranquil seas of contemplation and the intoxicating wine of divine love which nourishes the devotee with its sweetness; or we might see them as the “heat” and “light” emanating from the One Divine Sun, the “burning flame of Divine Love” (St. John of Cross) and the “light, mysterious, inaccessible, immaterial, uncreated, deifying, eternal; the radiance of divine nature and glory of the Divinity” (St. Palamas). They thus manifest the two great Johannine sayings: “God is Love” (1. Joh. 4:8) and “God is Light” (1. Joh. 1:5) and their saints appear like the Seraphim (“the flaming ones”) and Cherubim (“great understanding” or “effusion of wisdom”) before the Throne of God.

 

*

 

The “pneumatic” East is thoroughly “masculine”, while the devotional West possesses a stronger “feminine” element that manifests with particular clarity in the cult of the Virgin, who is elevated to the great symbol of the Eternal Feminine (Dante’s Beatrice), an avatâra of Divine Love and Compassion, that dominates Catholic spirituality in a manner that far exceeds the eastern veneration of the Theotokos (and, as we tried to show before, even the Latin Filioque could be considered a “Marian dogma”, deeply tied to the mystery of the “Immaculate Conception”, which, according to St. Maximilian Kolbe, “is one of the Names of the Holy Spirit”).^[6] As “avatars” of this Eternal Feminine (which is deeply tied to divine Beauty, Goodness, Beatitude) appear also the great female Doctors and beacons of the Church: St. Hildegard, St. Catharine of Siena, and the two Thereses: Teresa d’Avila and the Little Flower; apparitions, the likes of which one will search in vain in the Eastern tradition. Even St. Mary of Egypt with her gaunt features, wearing the hair shirt of the penitents, appears almost “asexual”, an “angel of the desert” like John the Baptist depicted as the “winged man” on the Eastern iconostasis. Hers is the ethereal beauty of apatheia which knows nothing of the ecstatic raptures of the “mystical brides” of the West.    

The “Marian” West is more inclined to the lunar side of being and its more affective/passive temperament is also mirrored in its iconography, which is dominated by the suffering Christ and the Virgin in her sky-blue garments. The cupolas of the Eastern churches are dominated by Christ glorified, the Pantocrator, who appears in all the impassable majesty of a Byzantine emperor (and vice versa in the Oriental view, which traditionally knows of no clear divide between throne and altar, the emperor itself is a kind of solar hero, whereas the Germanic king is essentially a knight, noble in virtue and yet humble and poor of heart). The Divine Liturgy is the great celebration of the Paschal Mystery, the splendor of the Christ-Sun in its zenith, and in it the “heavenly liturgy” of the Apocalypse is already rendered present on Earth. The Roman Mass, with its silent dignity and solemn cerimoniality, lives out of the deep sense of sharing in the unspeakable mystery of the Cross, it is the “sacrifice of Calvary” (as the Catechism states), the eternal immolation of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the wound. The Roman altar is a tomb, that of the East evokes already the Holi of Holies of the New Jerusalem.

 

The Way of Analogy and the Meaning of Apophaticism

 

 

Contrary to the “spiritual idealism” of St. Gregory, which tends to dismiss all cerebral knowing in favor of the “knowledge of the heart”, the vision of St. Thomas, which is fundamentally devotional, operates on the Augustinian adage that “No one can love what he does not know”. The whole doctrine of the Summa is founded on these two pillars, love and knowledge, which find their archetype in the very Life of the Blessed Trinity.

According to the Latin (Augustino-Thomistic) Trinitarianism, the first intra-divine procession is intellectual (per modum intelligibilem), Divine Knowledge, the Word, whereas the second procession is one of will, i.e. Love (per modum amoris), the Holy Spirit (cf. S.Th. I.27). And thus for Thomas our deification via similitude lies essentially in an “imitation of the nature of God”, imitatio Trinitatis.

 

Since man is said to be to the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature. Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself (I.93.4). 

 

In God Understanding precedes Love (in ordine cognoscendi only of course); God knows Himself and in this Knowledge He pours over into the infinite Love and Blessedness that results from His perfect self-recognition, and thus Divine Charity becomes the matrix of creation. By inverse analogy, for the creature to return to its supreme Source and attain that perfect Knowledge of the Essence that the blessed shall enjoy in the life to come, it has to “love” in order to “understand”. Creation proceeds from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit and inversely it is on the wings of the Spirit that we are carried back unto the bosom of the Father: “Through the Spirit we know Christ and through the Son we contemplate the Father” (St. John of Damascus).

Contrary to what many have claimed, Thomas is very well aware of the limitations of human reason and his profound apophaticism is often underestimated (“the ultimate human knowledge of God”, says the Angelic Doctor, “is to know that one does not know God”). Theology is “like straw” like he himself admitted (“mihi videtur ut palea”), but without straw there can be no fire; and while Thomas would thus fundamentally agree with Gregory that the “true knowledge” is that of the saint rather than the scholar, he would also say that – since “none can love what he does not know” – unification with God requires some objective knowledge (however provisional it might be), because without an object known there’s also nothing to direct the will towards and without love, supreme knowledge remains inaccessible.

*

 

We see how the Thomistic perspective has an intrinsic affinity for cataphaticism; it knows about the insufficiency of our philosophical speculation but it nevertheless see no reason to reject them all together in the more radical apophaticism that the East feels so intuitively drawn to. The via eminentia (way of analogy) of St. Thomas allows for cataphatic assertions about God’s nature while at the same time being fully aware that such affirmations can only every be “provisional” or equivocal; in it the concepts become symbols that open themselves vertically to the Mystery of God.

This cataphatic tendency might also be explained by the fact that there’s in Thomism and the Western tradition more generally a greater confidence in the human intellect and reason; that man, as imago Dei, can truly come to a knowledge of God by the use of his God-given faculties (however limited it may be). For the intellect is “a lamp of the Lord” (Prov. 20:27), “lumen derivatum a Deo” (Thomas), and through it man participates directly in the Prima Veritas that is God Himself “who teaches the soul interiorly by infusing such things as natural reason cannot attain” (De Anima, V.6).

We find the “analogical spirit” of the West also expressed in the Augustinian notion of the “liber naturae”, so popular among the Victorines and other scholastics (not to mention the poverello of Assisi!); that the created beings do, in a very real manner, signify or “symbolize” God Himself, for “ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal Power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20): “Omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est, et speculum”.

 

With an extraordinary abundance, with a kind of poetical joy, Hugh of St. Victor, St. Bonaventure, Raymond Lully strive to make out the ternary order in the structure of things which symbolizes for them the Trinity of the Christian God. The Itinerary of the Soul to God is filled from cover to cover with this idea, and it has been maintained that even the terza rima of the Divine Comedy, that admirable mirror of the medieval world, was chosen by the poet so that the poem, like the world it describes, should be stamped in its very matter with the likeness of God … Just as it is by His goodness that God gives being to beings, so also it is by His goodness that He makes causes to be causes, thus delegating to them a certain participation in His actuality. Or rather, since causality flows from actuality, let us say that He confers the one in conferring the other, so that to the Christian mind the physical world in which we live offers a face which is the reverse of its physicism itself, a face where all that was read on the one side in terms of force, energy and law, is now read, on the other in terms of participations and analogies of the Divine Being. The Christian world takes on the character of a sacred world with a relation to God inscribed in its very being and every law that rules its functioning … Bestiaries, Mirrors of the World, stained glass, cathedral porches, each in its own way expressed a symbolic universe in which things, taken in their very essence, are merely so many expressions of God (Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, V)

 

For medieval man “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1).  According to St. Thomas “knowledge of God’s perfection is acquired by considering the perfections of creatures” (S.Th. I.13.2), so much so that he even bases one his “five way” (the quarta via) on the hierarchy of being and the principle of analogy: the world proves God, it means God, for the Divine Essence is “the proper notion of all particular things” (propria ratio singulorum), the ultimate Referent to which all things refer.

 

*

 

Palamas is decisively more skeptical in this regard and sees in such deductions from the created to the Uncreated order the danger of paganism – a worry that is certainly not completely unfounded. For once the intellectual vision is lost and phenomena lose their metaphysical transparency, the “veil” of creatures can truly turn from vidyâ- to avidyâ-mâyâ, from anamnesis to lethe, and while the “original sin” of the Eastern gnosis is “gnosticism”, so the sin of the West has always been naturalism (the latter of which being, due to its universal appeal, always more dangerous, from which we see that the Western church is even “catholic” in her errors).

 

‘They worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator’ (Rom. 1:25), endowing the sense-perceptible and insensate stars with intelligence. And worshipping these in their sorry manner, they address them as superior and inferior gods and entrust them with dominion over the universe (Capita XXVI).

 

Gregory is of course speaking about the Platonists and “who believed the stars to be the bodies of gods” (Triads, II.3.4). For the Platonist the sphere of the fixed stars truly is the kosmos noetos, not merely a “simulacrum” but a true manifestation (hierophany) of the intelligible in the visible world, and when Plato sees in the heavenly bodies “an image of the everlasting gods” (Tim. 37C), i.e. of the forms,  this of course not to be understood in a purely “idolatrous” or “pantheistic” sense (just like the Pythagoreans, in praying to Helios, the rising sun, were really worshipping the “True Sun”, A-pollon: the “Not-Many”).[7]

This Platonic worldview which discerns the invisibilia of God in the visible world is thus  much closer aligned to the “symbolist mind” of the medieval genius (and maybe this is also why the ancient teaching according to which “the intelligences move the spheres” could so easily be picked by the scholastics).  The more “Semitic” mentality of the East on the other hand, which has a greater propensity to seeing a strict opposition between God and the world, must be deeply uncomfortable with such assertions and this comes clearly to the fore in St. Gregory’s condemnation of the “Greek wisdom”, even going so far as to calling it outright “demonic” (Triads, I.1.19). The fact that the Latin West should so readily embraced the Greek sophia, whereas the East has tended to avoid too much “philosophizing” in its theology, is thus not to be explained from merely historical circumstances (the texts of Plato and Aristotle had been availed for centuries in the East long before they ever arrived to Europe from the 13^th century onward), but from a deep sympathy of soul; how crude is the “pagan Plato” of Palamas when compared to the “divine Plato” (Divus Plato) of the Thomistic synthesis!

We might even argue that the difference of perspective between East and West in this matter (apophasis vs. kataphasis) flows naturally from their respective relation to Platonism ^[8], especially the doctrine of exemplars as expressed in the West by St. Augustine’s conceptualism and the Eastern doctrine of the logoi stemming from St. Maximus. For Thomas (building on Augustine) God turns back unto Himself in the eternal procession of Knowledge and in it knows the Infinitude of His Essence in so many different imitable aspects which are the archetypes of creatures. Since these ideas are, in the Thomistic view, not-different from the Divine Essence, the creature who instantiate them can truly take on a “theophanic” quality – however limited it may be. For Palamas the ideas pertain to the order of energies which are seen as ultimately distinct from the Essence (which remains radically unknowable) and thus do not serve this contemplative function as readily.

 

*

 

The analogic perspective of Thomas is one of continuity: it envisages the chain of correspondences that link phenomena through all states of the being to their archetype in the Divine Essence. For “the effect pre-exist in the causes; and the being which any thing has in itself derives from the Essence as its exemplar” (Contra Gentiles, I.66): “omne agens agit sibi simile”. The apophatic way of St. Gregory is one of rupture –“there is none like You among the gods” (Ps. 86:8) – and this is equally true, for (as St. Thomas likewise affirms) the perfection of created things can obviously never exhaust the infinity of the Creator: “Finiti ad Infinitum nulla est proportio”.

We see here two fundamentally different (although not mutually exclusive) perspectives emerging, which we might illustrate by means of the image of a tree reflected in a river: From one perspective there’s a radical discontinuity between the actual tree and its reflection, but from another point of view it is still essentially the same tree, albeit inverted.

This is also the true meaning of the (Platonic) doctrine of analogia which signifies both difference and identity (“inverse” and “direct analogy”) as is already expressed in the very prefix “ana-” which can denote both a repetition and an inversion (as well as an ascension, the “anagôge” which is of course the ultimate aim of the analogic way).

Analogy is a relation of identity which distinguishes the One (A) and the Other (B) while at the same time binding them together; it is the very structure of existence, the “repetition of the logos” (ana-logia) through all existential planes, the cosmic reverberation of the unique Word through the “region of dissimilitude”, and as such it is the principle that lies at the very heart of the eternal question of “the One and the many”: “It is the passage of unity to multiplicity and, at the same time, the return of multiplicity to Unity, for it is the repetition of Identity through Alterity” (Borella), the bond which links the phenomena to their archetype and ultimately to Divine Essence itself where sameness and otherness coincide in the Supreme Identity.

 

*

 

Whereas Thomas ascends on the analogical way from form to the Formless, “per lumina vera ad verum lumen” (Abbot Suger); from the “shadow” of otherness to the Supernal Sun of the Good, the “pure Analogy” wherein alterity collapses in on itself in the inversion/repetition of its own inversion, negatio negationis (being other than the other and nothing other than the same), in the perspective on St. Palamas the limited knowledge that can be gained from created being is rigorously nil vis-à-vis the mystical theôria of the Divine Light itself: “We lift ourselves up, abandoning earthly shadows, by drawing near to the true light of Christ” (Triads,III.1.35).

The apophasis of Palamas operates by the strict “apheiresis panton”; it is a “divinization which occurs mystically and ineffably by the grace of God, after the stripping away of everything from here below which imprints itself on the mind, or rather after the cessation of all intellectual activity” (I.3.17).

We see that for Palamas apophatic theology is not simply a “mental exercise” but a spiritual way, “not simply abstraction and negation, but a union” (ibid.). This is often not understood, especially in the West, where (among many modern theologians) the via negativa has often fallen under the suspicious of agnosticism or “covert atheism”. The Westerner might even sense it in an iconoclastic, antinomian element that is not far removed from a certain “Luciferanism”; the “rejection of the gift” (as the expression goes), the prideful desire to go even beyond what God has revealed of Himself in Jesus Christ.

But contrary to what Barlaam (and many of his modern disciples) thought, the goal of apophaticism lies not in demonstrating the limitation of the human mind and the precarious character of all our knowledge (which would indeed be nothing but agnosticism) but precisely in a “de-limitation” (if we dare says so); a katharsis which purifies the mind and conducts it to the “highest peak of mystic lore” (St. Dionysius), like Moses ascending into the Divine Darkness of Sinai: “ignote consurge!”

 “God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing”, says St. Gregory, and thus the via negativa “does not mean agnosticism, or refusal to know God”, but is a preliminary step for “a change of heart” (I.3.4), a spiritual metanoia towards the ineffable Light of Christ (for only the “pure of heart” shall see God).

 

One sees, not in a negative way – for one does see something – but in a manner superior to negation. For God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing mind enabling us to attain to the contemplation of the reality which reveals itself to us as it raises us to God (I.3.4).

 

In fact – and we cannot stress this enough – the apophaticism of mystical theology has nothing to do with the (post-)modern skepticism about the epistemic value of language or some existential despair before the radical otherness of God. As the Areopagite teaches, “we should not conclude that the negations (apophaseis) are simply the opposites of the affirmations (kataphaseis) but rather that the Cause of all is prior to this: beyond privation, beyond every negation, beyond every affirmation” (Mystical Theology, II). In negating that God is “Goodness”, “Cause”, “Life”, “Being” etc., one does not aim to contradict cataphaticism but to go “above” it. In true apohasis the (affirmative) concept is not seen as some kind of “alienation from the unspeakable” but as a mental symbol that opens itself to its transcendent referent. Thus it is necessary to go even beyond purely “negative theology” to the “mystical theology” properly speaking, which lies beyond affirmation and negation; a non-discursive, “theophatic” way of knowing: that “silent theology” which “makes us adhere without words and without knowledge to the realities that are neither said nor known” (St. Dionysius).

 

Negative theology is not the opposite of affirmative theology, it is its anagogy. This means not only that it purifies our images and our concepts, that it fights their inevitable anthropomorphism, but also, and more profoundly, that it introduces in the conceptual language what we might call an ‘anagogical tension’ … It is necessary that the negation has penetrated in the very heart of the affirmation for the affirmation to be valid. And it is in this transcendent and purified affirmation that the negation itself is justified … The concept is admitted in its full theological validity but opened ‘upwards’. It is recognized in its nature of a mental symbol and thus overcome, not through negation, but by leaning on it as on a springboard, because it indicates to us, by its own content, what must be the sense of this overcoming. This is the work of mystical theology (Borella, Théologie Mystique, VIII.4).

 

We see that the analogic and apophatic ways do not differ substantially as to their ultimate goal. We might say that they merely represent different rungs on the same ladder of divine ascent, for according to the holy Areopagite, the great teacher of both Aquinas as well as Palamas, theologia starts from “symbolic theology” (pertaining for example to the different images used in Scripture to describe God) through kataphasis (wherein different philosophical concepts are abstracted from the images: Good, Just, Cause, etc.) and apophasis (which realizes these concept in their symbolic quality and them “opens” them) to “mystical theology”, i.e. gnôsis.

We might link the cataphatic approach of the West to the human nature of Christ and the Eastern apophasis to His divine nature, and thus the mystery of the “two churches” (Eastern and Western Christianity) also points us to the mystery of the two Natures, which are “without mixture and confusion” but also “without separation and division” (for “what God hath united” no schism of man can rend asunder).

 

*

 

However while both ways are thus essentially united as to their last End, the manner in which the Eastern and Western perspective manifests “existentially” differs once more profoundly.

The Western optimism concerning phenomena for example shows itself clearly in the visionary and supremely “visual” spiritualities of St. Teresa and Ignatius of Loyola (to which the Eastern spirit cannot but exhibit a deep hostility, knowing mental images or the “imagination” only in its malefic, and not its “anagogic” aspect).^[9] The Gothic church is ornamented with flowers and arabesques, a true cosmic image (a “cosmic summa”) in which everything, from plants and animals, to the crafts and the seasons, the zodiac and the choir of angels, finds its place.

The Eastern church is wholly “otherworldly”, in it reigns the heavenly light of Tabor in which the “world of shadows” finds itself almost completely drowned in the radiance of the trihypostatic Sun. It presents a true icon of the Eastern soul as such, in which still reverberates the “magian dualism between light and darkness” which shaped the dreams of Mani, Zoroaster, and Plotinus. The life of the desert monk is a constant struggle against “the cosmic powers of this darkness” (Eph. 6:12), an (often physical) combat with the demonic hosts, and the flat perspective of the mosaics, whose figures appear almost “weightless”, knows neither of depth or shading (“depth is matter”, says Plotinus, “and that is why matter is dark”).

When the East might thus be called “Plotinian”, the West on the hand, with its firm belief in the “theurgic power” of phenomena and the magical correspondence between above and below is “Iamblichean”. An alchemico-hermetic tradition like that of the West (which even counts prominent churchmen like Albertus Magnus among its greats) could’ve never flourished in the spiritual climate of the Eastern Church, just like from it there couldn’t have sprung the poetry of Dante and the Chanson de Geste. This “theurgic” outlook is also one reason why the Mass (which, unlike in the East, is celebrated on every single day) is the contemplative centre and heart of all Catholic spirituality and so too the philosophy of St. Thomas (the poet of the Pange lingua) has often been characterized as supremely “sacramental”. 

 

*

 

The cathedral of the Middle Ages is still closer to the “natural temple” of the forest, which shows itself not only in the vegetal ornament and the massive wood-carved altarpieces (some of the greatest products of “Germanic Catholicism”), but also in the sound of the organ that accompanies its liturgy, which, as Spengler has noted, is deeply connected to murmur of rustling trees and the chirping of birds.

 

The word ‘God’ sounds different under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest. The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica; the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with mysterious light – these are the architectural actualizing of a world-feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men's heads, its branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth … The rustle of the woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt, for it lies beyond the possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling [i.e. that of Greco-Roman antiquity] – stands with its secret questions ‘whence? whither?’ its merging of presence into eternity, in a deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration, with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ, that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue (Decline of the West, I.6.7).

 

The Eastern liturgy knows only the raw human voice, but the Gregorian chant that is accompanied by the organ is superhuman, angelic, “incorporeal”, like the rose-windowed facades of the late Gothic where stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the stained glass; it’s ethereal “thinness” reminds one of the crystalline walls of Sainte-Chapelle which seem almost to levitate: music made stone.

 

*

 

There’s a youthful playfulness in the forms of medieval Catholicism, a spring-like musicality that is specific to the Western genius and perhaps its greatest quality; even the summas, with their contrapuntal composition of quaestios and articulis, the alternating rhythm of objections and responses, seem to foreshadow the polyphonic chorales of Palestrina. From the colorful illuminations and their sprawling marginalia, to the reveries of Gothic tracery: all is music and all portrays a joie de vivre deeply rooted in a popular piety that knows how to embrace both this world and the next.

But the ups and downs of the Western soul, the height of its affect and its tragic pathos, also make it prone to a certain “imbalance”, a greater “lability”, which makes it capable of producing both Chartres and the atom bomb, the motets of Bach and the ugliness of the post-industrial cityscape. This shows itself clearly in the degeneration of medieval forms after the Renaissance, when the midsummer night’s dream of the Middle Ages gives way to the nightmarish convulsions of the Baroque with its gloomy titanism and its false and worldly sensuality.

Once the centre is lost, they become petrified and heavy, their youthful grace weighed down by the spirit of this world, and from this time onwards the particular “idiom” that the Western genius was able to bestow on the Christian religion is always in risk of turning into a parody of itself: Here the nobility of sentiment becomes a dull emotionalism, the delicacy of forms: kitsch ^[10], and the sacred intellectuality of the scholastic schools turns into the sterile “intellectualism” of the humanists. 

The East cannot grow old, for, in a sense, it was never young (and this is its great advantage); from the beginning it rests contently in the wisdom of the Fathers, indifferent to the spirit of novelty that is so alluring to the Western mind; the saints of the East with their long white beards and the plain black robes still radiate the sancta sobrietas of the Apostles: “pax vobiscum” (but can one imagine St. Bernard with the beard of the Patriarchs?). The East knows that “the figure of this world is passing away” (1. Cor. 7:31) and for the saint who has recovered our ancestral vision it has already passed.

 

*

 

Everywhere and in all things the Western soul lifts itself up towards heaven: from the verticality of gothic forms and the ecstasies of St. Teresa, to the high notes of Gregorian chant which almost push the human voice to the peaks of it capacities.

Whereas the West strives for “height” and “depth”, the dimension of time, which also that of the will which is always ecstatically projected into the future, the East lives in the “breadth” of space: the desert basked in the light of the sun, the infinity of Russian planes^[11], the mountain ranges of Athos, the deep serenity of and stillness (hesychia) that comes with the remembrance of God, and the reverse perspective of Byzantine art.

Eastern Christianity (and this it shares with the Asiatic East in general) is essential atemporal, more firmly rooted in the central point (the standpoint of stillness), the nunc stans of the present, which also the “cavern of the heart” in which resounds the prayer of the anchorite. “The world, as it unfolds in front of the magian soul, has a kind of extensiveness that could be called cave-like” (eine Ausgedehntheit, die höhlenhaft genannt warden darf), as Spengler so keenly observed. Even the Eastern church is essentially a cavern, and the Hagia Sophia (which has been aptly described as an “introverted Gothic striving under a closed outer casing”) expresses the same idea as the mountain cave of St. Anthony. It is the Dionysian universe of celestial hierarchies who delegate the Heavenly Light from the highest Seraphim to the lowest worm and whose “horizontal” is firmly fixed under the dome of heaven (which is also the dome of Byzantine architecture), whereas for Western space opens upwards into an undefined infinity.

When the Western mind is defined by the vertical, the axial Tree, the Eastern soul dreams of the sphere: the solar disk, eternity, heavenly perfection, the “sphaira noeté” of Plotinus, which is still echoed in the spherical Resurrection bodies (sômata pneumatika) of Origen.

 

This is not to raise any questions of “better” or “worse”, which are utterly useless and subjectivist categories when it comes to these matters. The Catholicism of St. Thomas is exactly what is has to be, how Heaven has willed it, and so is the distinctively “Eastern” form of Christianity (and we’re talking here always not merely about Orthodoxy, but also about Eastern Catholics and the Oriental Churches). Religion is by definition the union of the vertical and the horizontal, heaven and earth, and each ambience reflects the Divine Ray of the Logos in a color peculiar to it and the soul of its people. And just like the saint loves all men, no matter their accidental corruption, because he discerns in them the living Christ, so the heart of the gnostic becomes capable of every form in which the Word has chosen to show itself forth to its disciples (even if it be tainted by the errors of men).

 

 

[To be continued ...]