Глава 4. Современные исследователи о теозисе. Томистская и паламистская парадигмы

4.1 Revival of interest in the problem of deification: “neopalamism” The beginning of the 20th century was marked by the growing interest of Russian theologians in the problems of Palamism. Georgiy Florovsky (1893–1979) emphasized that “for a correct understanding of theosis, it is necessary to distinguish between essence and energies.” He argued that the concept of “deification” did not arise immediately, and began to take shape only after the doctrine of divine energies was explained. 224 Among the first authors who initiated an active study of the legacy of Gregory Palamas were the future Bishop Vasily Krivoshein (1900–1985), who directly belonged to the hesychast monastic tradition, and Archimandrite Cyprian Kern (1899–1960), a prominent representative of the “Parisian school” of Russian theology. Unlike the later works of Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff, they acknowledged the influence on Palamas of Aristotelian thought and Neoplatonism (Kern). 225 Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), who became one of the most notable Orthodox writers on Palamism in the 20th century, placed particular emphasis on the aspect of the individual, both in Trinitarian theology and in anthropology. He carefully avoids conceptualizing personality, insisting that it is “completely different”: the personal can only be grasped in personal communication. In terms of detailed analysis of the works of the Byzantine theologian, the studies of Lossky and Meyendorff have attracted more attention. 226 In his opinion, in Western Trinitarian theology the balance between essence and hypostases was disrupted. 227 Lossky understood the theological dispute between East and West as a dispute between revelation and reason, between “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” and “the God of philosophers and scientists.” 228 Lossky emphasized the ecclesiological aspect of deification, saying: “The work of Christ relates to human nature, which He heads in His Hypostasis. The work of the Holy Spirit relates to human individuals, addresses each of them separately. The Holy Spirit imparts to human hypostases in the Church the fullness of Divinity in a unique, personal way, adapted to each person as an individual created in the image of God.” 229 Many scholars have noted that Lossky followed an anachronistic method in his studies of the theology of deification: he tended to read the earlier Church Fathers in the light of the works of later authors. This led to the fact that too many ideas were introduced into the content of the works of the Church Fathers that were alien to the context of their works. 230 La Cunha writes that Lossky at times speaks “as if between the fourth and fourteenth centuries there was no evolution in the development of time, language and philosophy.” 231 Another important author for Orthodox neo-Palamism is John Meyendorff (1926–1992), who entered the debate after the publication in the 30s of several works by the Catholic theologian Martin Jugy, who sharply criticized the theology of Gregory Palamas and accused the latter of breaking with the patristic tradition. 232 What Lossky and Meyendorff have in common is their assessment of the works of Gregory Palamas as primarily a polemic of mystical (existential, as Meyendorff puts it) theology against profane philosophy. Both of these commentators tend to downplay the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on the patristic tradition, reducing this influence only to the borrowing of Platonic terminology and Stoic themes. Scott F. Pentecost notes that this approach of these commentators actually says more about their own attitude towards philosophy than about the attitude towards it of Gregory Palamas, who actively used metaphysical arguments. Anyone who does not notice the metaphysical aspects in Palamas’ thought and reduces the whole matter to the struggle of mystical experience against philosophy interprets the Byzantine theologian as an obscurantist, even if he himself does not agree with this definition of Palamas. Meyendorff characterized the doctrine of the difference between the divine essence and energies as the most important element of Byzantine theology, providing a dynamic understanding of human nature directed towards God, and contrasted it with the “static” Augustinian understanding. 233 Orthodox Greek theologians of the 20th century generally showed greater commitment to both the language and the themes of theology of deification, although not all were unanimous in this. Thus, Panagiotis Trembelas in his three-volume Dogmatics (1959–1961) devotes only 2 out of 1505 pages to the problem of theosis. The publication of the complete works of Gregory Palamas in the 60s changed the situation. The work of George Manzaridis, “The Deification of Man According to the Teachings of Gregory Palamas,” published in 1963, became, according to Christos Yannaras, a turning point for Greek theology of the 20th century. Manzaridis speaks of the double result of the Incarnation: the restoration and deification of human nature by Jesus Christ, which became accessible to all through the Sacraments of the Church. The Church is a “community of deification” in which believers acquire participation in uncreated energies and become what God is, with the exception of essence. Manzaridis notes that the Orthodox tradition was not monolithic: “the theme of the deification of man in the era of the Fathers was predominantly Christocentric, and in the hesychast period it was experienced in a more Spirit-centric way.” 234 The Christocentric aspect was emphasized by another Greek theologian, Panagiotis Nellas. He argued that the anthropological meaning of deification lies in the likeness of Christ: this theme is inherent in many of the epistles of St. Paul. And the apostle is not just talking about external imitation or moral improvement, but he means ontological transformation. Nellas insisted that the topic of deification should not be turned into a separate theological discipline, but it must be integrated into Christology and anthropology. Nellas' line of thought was continued by such famous Greek theologians as John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras. Zizioulas pondered the anthropological implications of Christology for many years, applying many ideas from modern philosophy. The individual, according to him, is not a closed, self-sufficient entity. Personality presupposes the open nature of being and is a relational category expressed by communication in freedom and love. The paradigm of humanity is Christ. Being in Christ means for a person becoming an authentic person through entering into the same filial relationship that characterizes the being of Christ. Humanity finds its authenticity in unity with God, and this personal unity is “theosis,” being the antithesis of that type of “deification” that asserts that human nature must cease to be what it is. What the Fathers expressed with the term “involvement,” Zizioulas defines through “personality.” Because of its relational nature, personhood implies distinctness from God without separation, communion with Him without fusion. 235 Christos Yannaras says that we know from Scripture that God exists as a Trinity of Persons in the union of personal freedom and love. It is wrong to think that God has love as his attribute; He is love because his life is actual communication. Unlike God, human beings are potentialities. The human personality exists only as a self-aware difference, only in comparison with another existence, only in relation to it. Overcoming this difference is the true goal of love; the same applies to the relationship with God. Since we are created in the image of God, we can either answer the call of His love - that is, choose life, or reject it - that is, choose death. From our being in the image of God, it follows that we not only have the ability to respond to His love, but we also have the potential to live the life of Christ. The desire for autonomy and existential self-sufficiency binds us to our inadequacy. This is an attempt at self-deification undertaken by Eve, who succumbed to the promises of the serpent and wished to become equal to God. The Church is not an instrument of individual salvation. Salvation in the Church is the liberation of life from corruption and death: not survival and transition after death to the “other world,” but the achievement of existential fullness, the participation of creation in the way of life inherent in the uncreated. Therefore, immortality is not an escape from individual extinction, but an overcoming of death through a personal relationship with God. But not only with God; Since we are related to each other and are responsible for each other, then “in reality the Church entrusts to everyone the great honor of being responsible for the salvation of the whole world...”. So, according to Yannaras, deification is the actualization of life as communion, allowing us to participate in the relationship of love between the Father and the Son, and thus achieving the fullness of our humanity. 236 The Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloie (1903–1993) combined apophatic and cataphatic approaches, which allowed him not to introduce such a tension between reason and experience, which is characteristic of the works of V. Lossky with his “total apophaticism.” 237 According to him, the image of God as the potential and tendency to participate in God in communication is ontologically given to the human personality and calls it to freedom and love, calls it to become the likeness of God, that is, to gain full participation in the divine life. This approach demonstrates Staniloje's commitment to the continuity of the nature-grace continuum. 238 For Staniloje, the most important element of the Eastern tradition is the conviction that knowledge of God is inseparable from union with Him. Moreover, no knowledge (of oneself or of others) is possible without love directed towards another person: here the personalism of Staniloje’s theology is manifested. Cognition is an act of participation, based on the love of the cognizing subject for another subject, and ultimately - on the relationship of the individual with the Supreme Subject. For Staniloje, a person is both a cognizing subject and a subject in relationships. 239 In contrast to the total apophatism of Lossky and Yannaras, Staniloje argues that the final reality of the relationship with God is not only the highest mystery, but also the key to all knowledge. The Holy Trinity, being a mystery, is at the same time intelligible; She gives a meaningful explanation to everything that exists. Staniloje calls the last reality “true metaphysics”, “ontology of love”. 240 The Romanian theologian expanded the well-known maxim of Athanasius of Alexandria, reformulating it as follows: “God became man not only so that man could become god, but also so that he could truly become man.” Stanila's theology of the cosmos states that all creation is called through man to participate in divine communion. 241 Nature for him does not oppose personality, as for Lossky and Zizioulas; human existence in some sense reflects the Palamist distinction between the essence and energies of God. Man is simultaneously being-in-himself and being-in-relationships. 242 4.2 Western theology of the 20th century on deification There are a number of theologians who, like Karl Barth, believe that the limitations of human nature should not be perceived as something humiliating for a person (Church Dogmatics III/4. 567), and argue that any transcendence for a person is tantamount to the loss of his true nature, and human limitations nevertheless make a personal relationship with God possible. 243 Others, however (such as Illingworth), have pointed out that the human personality structure, which calls for the fullness of the loving relationship with the Father and the Son made possible by the Incarnation, makes us capable of becoming “partakers of the divine nature.” After the First World War, the attention of Western researchers, under the influence of such representatives of the Russian emigration as Bulgakov, Florovsky and Krivoshein, was drawn to the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Anglican scholar Eric Mascall in his work Christ, the Christianity and the Church (1946), drawing on the Church Fathers and Spanish mystics, writes that the consequence of the Incarnation of Christ and our adoption through Him is “real participation in the life of the Holy Trinity.” The mystical theology of “the deification of man in Christ” is based on this participation in God. At the same time, he stipulates that the personal identity of a person must be preserved. “God and Christ are what we will become, but they are by no means what we will become.” 244 The emphasis on participation in the divine life through baptism in the restored human nature of the Incarnate Son refers to Irenaeus of Lyons and his realist approach to deification. 245 Based on the premise that openness to God is the essence of human nature, and that human reality is determined by relationships, Mascall argues that transcending human nature improves it, but does not destroy it. For this supernatural transformation, he writes, only one concept is suitable, which we find in the Christian tradition - the concept of deification. First of all, human nature is capable of deification because of its rationality. But individual elevation to the supernatural order is impossible: the entire human race is restored and reborn in Christ. Christians enter into this transformation through Baptism; they become sons of God through the mediation of the Son, who raises them into the life of the Trinity. Having become acquainted with the works of John Meyendorff on Gregory Palamas, Mascall states: “there is a fundamental dogmatic and religious agreement between St. Gregory Palamas and St. Thomas Aquinas." 246 The largest Catholic theologians of the 20th century were more or less critical of Palamism. Louis Bouyer, in his History of Christian Spirituality, wrote that deification is “nothing other than the reality of our participation in divine sonship, proper to Jesus, the Son of God, who became man precisely in order to offer us this possibility.” Bouyer, however, doubted Palamas' thesis about the real difference between energies and essence in God. Despite this, he wrote that Palamas's main goal was "to establish the possibility of real and direct contact between man and divine grace without understanding us as 'gods' in the pagan sense of the word." Hans Urs von Balthasar was skeptical of theology beyond the self-revelation of God. Palamas' approach seemed to him overly neoplatonic. Rejecting the terminology of deification, he argued that God's mystical gifts should be sought not in sensory experience or ecstatic states, but "in loving submission to the will of God." 247 Karl Rahner in his works, without using the usual terminology of deification, developed the idea of ​​man's communion with God. He criticized the naturalistic concept of human nature. Grace, according to him, is not something added that “justifies and deifies” human nature, since this would be too external an influence on the inner purpose of man (Rahner 1961: 299). According to Rahner, divine destiny is an ontological component of concrete human “whatness,” since nothing accidental can deify (Rahner 1961: 310). God created man in such a way that the latter is capable of receiving, as an unexpected and undeserved gift, Love, which God Himself is: “the ability to perceive God of self-dispensing personal love is the central, unchangeable existential of man” (Rahner 1961: 312). Rahner asks: How can a supernatural purpose not destroy human nature? And he gives this answer: thanks to participation in uncreated grace. Uncreated grace, or God's self-communication, presupposes a new relationship with God. Man is created again through divine self-communication. Created grace is already a consequence. Life in future glory is a manifestation of life in divine sonship (Rahner 1961: 326). But the beatific vision is not simply a “growth” determined by an internal impulse towards the final stage. This is “a new eschatological intervention of God” (Rahner 1961: 335). Man is called to share in the transforming glory of God. In other words, our highest goal is adoption, to be adopted into the source of our being. Norman Russell notes that this teaching of Karl Rahner represents the classic doctrine of deification, although it uses different terms. He who receives grace remains limited to creation, but at the same time is blessed by the infinite self-communication of God. 248 4.3 Thomism and Palamism: possibilities for dialogue Some modern researchers (Blum, Philips) believe that Eastern and Western theology can find common ground if it is recognized that they complement each other, forming the unity of the Christian faith. This should not be understood as a “peace treaty” of fundamentally irreconcilable positions, but as a recognition that each of the traditions has its limitations in some way. Callistos Ware draws attention to the common past of the two church traditions, which cannot be ignored, 249 and John Meyendorff calls for greater attention to be paid to the common origins of the tradition, in the light of which “the opposition of later teachers may seem to us less sharp” 250. Considering the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas in previous chapters, we saw: on the question of knowledge of God, both authors agree that to some extent knowledge of God is possible, and in addition, the desire for union with God does not imply a departure from knowledge. Thomas Aquinas often repeats Augustine's maxim that you cannot love what you do not know. Gregory Palamas, without accepting the extreme apophatism of Barlaam, argues that the basis of Christian life is the knowledge about God that we receive from the Scriptures and thanks to the Incarnation, as well as the knowledge that becomes the result of prayer as genuine contact with God. Palamas’ thesis that God “exceeds not only knowledge, but also ignorance” also limits apophaticism, which Palamas, recognizing as a fundamentally correct teaching, no longer considers the path to God. For Palamas, the distinction between essence and energies became a tool that retained the ability to talk about the self-communication of God (through energies), providing transcendence (due to the inaccessibility of essence). For Thomas Aquinas, analogical discourse became a solution to the problem of how to talk about God while avoiding both the claim to unequivocally infallible statements and the impossibility of any theological speech at all. In the theology of Thomas, the doctrine of analogy plays the same moderating and corrective role that the distinction between essence and energies plays in Palamas. Moreover, both theologians are convinced of the reality of deification. Thomas expresses this through the doctrine of the participation of the human intellect in divine self-knowledge, and Palamas - through the doctrine of participation in divine energies. In general, the doctrine of participation in God for both Aquinas and Palamas serves as a justification for the possibility of deification. When comparing the positions of Thomas and Gregory, one must take into account the theological intention that determines the introduction of certain concepts and creates the context of understanding. In this regard, it should be noted that the distinction between apprehensio and comprehensio, introduced by Thomas, in his doctrine of the knowledge of God serves to indicate the transcendence of God; similar to this is the function of the distinction between essence and energies on which Palamas insisted. The difference in the approaches of the two theologians is that Gregory, more clearly than Thomas Aquinas, emphasizes the transcendence of God, but there is no theory of language motivating theological discourse. Many researchers, proving the incompatibility of Thomism and Palamism, say that if Thomas teaches about the created nature of grace, then Palamas teaches about the uncreated. However, as was shown in the second chapter, Thomas speaks of created grace only in order to point out the created character of the human subject who receives it: the same grace for him appears created in the aspect of the recipient, and uncreated in the aspect of God’s self-communication. The question of the beatific vision has become one of the most intense areas of dispute between the Latin and Byzantine traditions, although it should be noted here that the severity of the controversy often arises due to the underestimation by Orthodox researchers of the nature of the vision involved, according to Aquinas. Those differences in the doctrine of divine contemplation (ϑεωρία) that are found in Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas are less than the similarities (this was shown in previous chapters). It must be taken into account that in general, on the issue of contemplation, many Fathers of the Church have differences in approaches. For Thomas, God's self-communication is not only the cause of glorification, but its very nature. In this regard, it should be noted that Palamas’s denial that deification is an improvement of human nature did not constitute a polemic with Aquinas’s position, but was intended to emphasize that there cannot be any natural evolution of man in the direction of God. The greatest agreement between Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas concerns the need for growth in virtues as a condition for deification, as well as the persistent emphasis on the fact that deification is a gift of grace. On the issue of the relationship between virtues and grace, Palamas accepts the teaching of synergy typical of the Eastern tradition. Thomas here takes a similar position: he departs from pure Augustinianism and speaks of “double causation,” according to which human action can be attributed to both God and the human subject. Despite the often repeated assertions of Orthodox authors that Palamas is inspired by patristic tradition, while Aquinas thinks like an Aristotelian philosopher, it should be noted that in Thomas' theology of deification the Sacraments play a much more significant role than in the Triads and 150 chapters. This is one of the facts that shows that the cliché that “Thomas took his inspiration from Aristotle” is not true. In those cases where Scripture and Tradition lead to different conclusions than Aristotle, Thomas does not hesitate to move away from Aristotelian metaphysics, for example, by asserting the creation of the world by God, he abandons the Aristotelian principle of the eternity of matter. Often researchers focus on what distinguishes these two theologians, and perhaps even specifically look for points of divergence. However, it must be admitted that both Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas - each of them made their own special contribution to the doctrine of the deification of man, based on patristic tradition. Theologians such as Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, reflecting on biblical texts, especially 2 Pet. 1:4, developed the doctrine of participation in the divine nature. It is this involvement that is at the center of the theological thought of Aquinas and Palamas. Also key themes of the patristic teaching on deification are the themes of knowledge of God and union with God, which plays such an important role in the works of Thomas and Gregory. Both theologians develop themes already formed in the writings of the Fathers, although they emphasize different elements of these themes. In general, it must be said that many of the provisions of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas, regarded by many as irreconcilable with each other, are in fact not contradictory, even if they were used by confronting groups of theologians of later generations as ideological “banners”. E. Zaitsev, Teaching, 119–20 Scott Pentecost, Quest for the divine presence: Metaphysics of participation and the relation of philosophy to theology in St. Gregory Palamas's Triads and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, Washington 1999, 38–39 Vladimir Lossky, Dogmatic Theology, Moscow 1991, 215 Quoted from E. Zaitsev, Teaching, 155 Rowan Williams, Theology of V. N. Lossky: presentation and criticism, Kiev 2009, 145 Vladimir Lossky, Essay on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church. Dogmatic Theology, Moscow 1991, 125 cfr. V. Kharlamov, Concept of Theosis, 10 Quoted from E. Zaitsev, Teaching, 217 A. Williams, Deification, 28 S. Pentecost, Quest for the Divine Presence, 17–39 N. Russell, Doctrine, 316–17 N. Russell, Doctrine, 317–18 Silviu Eugen Rogoberte, Mystical Existentialism or Communitarian Participation? Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru Stăniloae in Dumitru Stăniloae: Tradition and Modernity in Theology, Laşi-Oxford-Palm Beach-Portland 2002, 167 S. E. Rogoberte, Mystical Existentialism, 188 N. Russell, Doctrine, 313 N. Russell, Doctrine, 315–16 A. Williams, Deification, 56 I. Meyendorff, Life and Works, 3