Svyatogorsk Tomos in defense of the sacredly silent

In the most important doctrinal work of St. Gregory Palamas’s “Svyatogorsk Tomos in Defense of the Sacredly Silent” (1340) condemns all the main provisions of the teachings of Barlaam of Calabria: - uncreatedness only of the essence, but not of the energies of God; - imitation as the only path to deification; - accusations of messalianism against those who call Divine grace uncreated, unborn and hypostatic; - The Light of Tabor as a transitory phenomenon and sign; - denial of the participation of the body, along with the soul, in the grace given by God to the mysteriously and ineffably purified mind. The document, compiled by Saint Gregory together with the Athonite monks, served to defend his teaching at the Council of Constantinople (1351), and also contributed to the condemnation of the heresy of Barlaam. The tomos became the official response of Mount Athos to the theological disputes of the 14th century, known as the hesychast disputes. It expounds and defends the Orthodox teaching about the difference between the incomprehensible essence of God and His uncreated, uncreated Divine energies, through which God manifests Himself and makes possible the deification (union) of man with Him. Particular attention is paid to the uncreated nature of the Tabor Light, revealed to the apostles, as a visible manifestation of Divine energies, as well as to the true understanding of dispassion as the transformation of the passionate part of the soul, and not its mortification. The document also touches on questions about the place of the mind in man and the participation of the body in spiritual states of grace. It is emphasized that spiritual sacraments are comprehended not by reasoning, but by living experience, accessible to those who are purified by virtue and are in obedience. The work is one of the symbolic books of the Orthodox Church. *Title of the work in Greek – ῾Αγιορειτικὸς τόμος ὑπὲρ τῶν ἱερῶς ἡσυχαζόντων διὰ τοὺς ἐξ ἰδίας ἀπειρίας καὶ τῆς πρὸς τοὺς ἁγίους ἀπειθείας ἀθετοῦντας τὰς τοῦ πνεύματος μυστικὰς ἐνεργείας κρεῖττον ἢ λόγος ἐν τοῖς κατὰ πνεῦμα ζῶσιν ἐνεργουμένας καὶ δι᾿ ἔργων φανερουμένας ἀλλ᾿ οὐ διὰ λόγων ἀποδεικνυμένας. In defense of the sacredly silent, against those who, having no experience, not believing the saints, reject the indescribable mysterious actions (energies) of the Spirit, which act in those who live according to the Spirit and reveal themselves actively, and are not proven by reasoning. The institutions, barely heard and already jointly recognized and openly proclaimed by all, were the sacraments of the Mosaic Law, and only the prophets saw spiritually in them. The blessings of the future age promised to the saints are the sacraments of living according to the Gospel, and seeing in them is given to those who are worthy of having spiritual vision, and they see them in a small measure, as if a certain part of the pledge. And just as the ancient Jew, listening unfavorably to the prophets speaking about the Word and the Spirit of the co-eternal and pre-eternal God, would have blocked his ears, thinking that piety does not allow one to listen to these words, that they contradict the voice recognized by the pious, that is, who said “The Lord thy God is one Lord” 1, so now the same can be experienced by one who is without reverence listens about spiritual mysteries, which are known only to those who are purified by virtue. And again, just as those predictions came true, what was then a secret came into agreement with obvious things, and we now believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in the Trinitarian Divinity, in one nature, simple, uncomplicated, uncreated, invisible, incomprehensible to the mind, so will it be when by the ineffable appearance of God, one in three perfect hypostases, the future age will be revealed in due course for all it will become clear that the mysterious things agree with the obvious ones. The following is also worthy of attention: just as the consistency of the Trinitarian Divinity and what was said about the unity of command became evident everywhere to the ends of the earth in later times, the prophets knew this even before the events took place and were able to convey their knowledge to those who believed them then, in the same way and now we accept the words of confession, both those that are openly proclaimed and those that are mysteriously, spiritually made clear to the worthy. Some are initiated into the sacraments by their own experience - these are those who, for the sake of the Gospel life, rejected the acquisition of money, human glory and obscene pleasures of the flesh and further strengthened their renunciation by entering into obedience to those who had succeeded in the age of Christ; carelessly in silence, listening to themselves and to God, in pure prayer, becoming above themselves and abiding in God, with the help of a mysterious union with Him that transcends the mind, they became involved in the sacraments that are inaccessible to the mind. Others - for respect, faith and love for such people. This is how we, too, listening to the words of the great Dionysius in his second letter to Gaius about divinity, superiority and goodness as a deifying gift of God, believe that God, who gives this grace to the worthy, is superior to this divinity, because God does not tolerate diversity and no one here speaks of two divinities. And Saint Maximus, when he writes about Melchizedek 2, calls this grace of God uncreated and eternally existing from the eternally existing God, in another place - unborn, hypostatic light, which is worthy when they become worthy, reveals itself, but does not then arise at all; he calls this light the light of ineffable glory and the purity of angels. The great Macarius calls it the food of the incorporeal, the glory of the divine nature and the beauty of the future age, the divine and heavenly fire, the ineffable and mental light, the deposit of the Holy Spirit 3, the sanctifying oil of joy 4. Therefore, whoever counts among the Messalians 5 people who call this idolizing grace of God uncreated, ungenerated and hypostatic, and calls them double theists, let him know, whoever he is, that he opposes God’s saints and if he does not repent, he will cast himself out of the lot of those who are being saved, falling away from the One and Only God of the saints by nature. But he who, having faith and obedience, agrees with the saints and does not invent excuses for sins 6 , does not ignorantly reject what is said explicitly, but does not know the way in which the sacrament is performed, let him not neglect to study carefully from those who know. He learns that neither the dogma that protects us, nor the completely divine sacrament deviates in any way from divine words and actions, in the most important things, without which nothing could exist at all. He who declares that without the deifying grace of the Spirit, complete unity with God is achieved through mere imitation and intercourse, as among people of equal equality and loving each other, and that the deifying grace of God is a state of rational nature that arises through simple imitation, and not a supernatural ineffable illumination and not Divine energy, invisibly visible to the worthy and inconceivably conceivable, let him know that, not knowingly, he fell into the deception of the Messalians. After all, if deification is carried out by virtue of natural ability and is covered by the limits that nature sets, then God will then make people deified naturally, out of inevitable necessity. Let such a one not strive to impose his vacillation on those who stand firm, let him not denigrate those whose faith is immaculate, putting aside arrogance, but learn from those who are experienced or from those who have been taught by them that the grace of deification is completely incomprehensible by anything, for it has no property capable of being contained in nature, otherwise it is no longer grace, but a manifestation of the action of natural force. And what happens will cease to be something extraordinary if deification could take place due to the ability to contain deification. Deification would then be a natural work of nature, and not a gift from God. Then man could become God by nature and be called such by right. After all, the property inherent by nature in every being is nothing more than the constant movement of nature towards activity. How does deification place the deified person outside of himself, if it itself is limited by the limits of nature - I cannot understand this. This means that the grace of deification stands above nature, virtue and knowledge and, according to the testimony of St. Maxima, everything like that is infinitely beneath her. Every virtue and imitation of God within our power makes the one who acquires them suitable for divine unity, while the ineffable unity itself is accomplished by grace. Thanks to it, the whole God abides near those who are completely worthy, and near the whole God the whole saints abide entirely, receiving the whole God in return for themselves, as if as a reward for ascending to Him, having acquired Him alone, God, and He, in the image of the soul fused with the body, has deigned them, as His members, to be in Him. He who declares those who say the mind has its seat in the heart or in the brain to be Messalians, let him know that he has not diligently studied the saints, for the great Athanasius places the rational part of the soul in the brain, and Macarius, who is in no way inferior to him in greatness, places the activity of the mind in the heart, 7 and almost all the saints agree with them. And the divine Gregory of Nyssa 8 does not contradict the saints with this when he says that the mind is incorporeal and is neither inside the body nor outside it. They speak of the mind inside the body as being in contact with the body, and by expressing it in a different way, they do not differ at all from it. So, the one who says that the Divine, as incorporeal, does not dwell in any place, is not contradicted by the one who says that the Word of God dwelt inside the virgin and immaculate womb, meaning that there He, out of inexpressible love for mankind, incomprehensible to reason, came into contact with our mixture. Whoever says that the light that illuminated the disciples on Tabor 9 is a phenomenon and a sign, like those that arise and disappear, and does not have the fullness of being and does not exceed all speculation, but is lower than speculation in its action, he clearly does not agree with the opinion of the saints, for they call it in their hymns and writings the light ineffable, uncreated, eternal, timeless, unapproachable, immeasurable, boundless, boundless, invisible to angels and men, original and unchangeable beauty, the glory of God, the glory of Christ, the glory of the Spirit, the ray of the Divine, and similar names. The flesh, they say, is glorified along with what it has received, and the glory of the Divine becomes the glory of the body, but in the visible body the glory was invisible to those who could not contain what is inaccessible even to the gaze of angels. What is transformed is not what He did not take upon Himself, and not what He did not change into, but what He made clear to His disciples, opening their eyes, making them sighted from the blind. Remaining identical to Himself, He now appeared to the eyes of the disciples as He had been before, for He is the true Light 10, the beauty of glory, and shone like the sun; This likeness is dim, but it is impossible to give an impeccable likeness to the uncreated in the created. Whoever recognizes only the essence of God as uncreated, but not all those eternal energies of Him, over which He rises as the productive above the produced, let him listen to Saint Maximus, who says: “All the immortals and immortality itself, all the living and life itself, all the saints and holiness itself, all the virtuous and virtue itself, all the good and goodness itself, all that exist and existence itself - all of them, undoubtedly, are the creations of God. However, some began to be in time, for God was then when they were not; others did not begin to be in time, for He was never without virtue, goodness, holiness and immortality” 11. And again: “goodness and everything that is included in this concept, as well as simply all life, immortality, simplicity, immutability, infinity and that which is essentially contemplated around God - they are the creations of God, and did not begin to be in time. After all, virtue or anything of the above was never preceded by non-existence, although the beings participating in them themselves began to be in time. For every virtue is beginningless and time does not precede it, since from eternity it has as its Parent the only God, God is infinitely and infinitely different from all beings - both those who participate and those who allow participation” 12. Let him learn from this that not everything that has happened from God is also subject to time, for some of them have no beginning, and this does not at all distort the statement about the one Triple Unit, beginningless in nature, and the supernatural simplicity inherent in It. Likewise, the mind, in weak resemblance to that highest indivisibility, is not at all complex due to the thoughts inherent in it. Whoever does not accept the spiritual states imprinted in the body from the grace-filled gifts of the Spirit, characteristic of those who have succeeded in the soul according to God, who calls dispassion the state of the deadness of the passionate part of the soul, and not the state of its activity aimed at the better - when the passionate part has completely turned away from evil deeds and turned to good ones, having lost bad properties and been enriched by good ones - he, following a similar opinion, rejects the presence of the body in the incorruptible age being; after all, if then the body will participate with the soul in unspeakable blessings, then now it will certainly, as far as it can contain, participate in the grace that God mysteriously and ineffably gives to the purified mind, and the body in itself will experience divine things, if the passionate part of the soul has changed, been sanctified, but not mortified as a state and, with the community of body and soul, sanctifies the dispositions and actions of the body. After all, when the blessings of life are abandoned for the sake of the hope of future blessings, the mind, according to the word of Saint Diadochos, having a healthy course due to carelessness, itself feels the divine ineffable goodness and, to the extent of its success, allows the body to participate in its goodness. And the joy that is then born in the soul and in the body is an undoubted reminder of incorruptible life. The mind tends to perceive light differently from the senses. The sense perceives sensory light, which shows sensory objects as sensory, and the light of the mind is knowledge resting in thoughts. This means that vision and mind do not perceive the same light, but both act within limits consistent with their own nature, and in what is consistent with nature. And those who are blessed with spiritual and supernatural grace and power, those who are awarded this, see with their feelings and minds that which is above all feelings and all minds. Let us say together with the great theologian Gregory that this is known only to God and to those who do such things. The Scriptures taught us this, we received this from our Fathers, we learned this from our little experience. And our most honorable hieromonk and brother Gregory wrote about this in defense of the sacredly silent. Certifying his exact adherence to the traditions of the saints, we have added our signatures for complete confidence of the readers: Protos of the sacred monasteries on the Holy Mountain, Hieromonk Isaac. Hegumen of the sacred royal and holy Lavra of Theodosius, hieromonk. The abbot of the Iveron Monastery signed in his dialect. Hieromonk Ioannikios, abbot of the sacred and royal Monastery of Vatopedi. The abbot of the Serbian Monastery signed in his own dialect. The least hieromonk Philotheus, having the same thoughts, signed it. The least among the hieromonks and confessor of the sacred Monastery, Esphigmen Amphilochius. The least among the hieromonks and confessor of Vatopedi Theodosius. Hegumen of the Holy Monastery Kotlomus Theosterikt hieromonk. The sinful Geronius Maroulis, the elder of the sacred Lavra, having the same thoughts, signed. The least of the monks, Callistus Muzalon. Insignificant among the hieromonks, Gerasim saw, read what was written truthfully, accepted and signed. The insignificant old man and the least of the monks Moses, having the same thoughts, signed. The smallest and most insignificant among the monks, Gregory Stravolankodite, who is also the silent one, having the same thoughts and understanding, signed. The elder from the skete Magul and the youngest among the hieromonks Isaiah, having the same thoughts, signed. The least of the monks is Mark the Sinaite. From the monastery of Magul, the smallest among the hieromonks, Kallist. The silent old man of Syria signed his name in his dialect. The least of the monks, Sophronius. The least of the monks is Joseph. The humble Bishop of Jerissa and the Holy Mountain, Jacob, brought up in the Holy Mountain and patristic traditions, testifies that in the person of those who put their signatures here, the entire Holy Mountain signed in agreement with them, and he himself, agreeing, signed, putting a seal. And after all he added the following: if anyone does not agree with the saints, as we and our Fathers who were shortly before us agree, then we will not enter into communion with him. To the synod. translation: The Lord our God is one Lord (Deut. 6:4). Wed. Rev. Maxim the Confessor. Various theological and economic chapters. First centenary, No. 75 // PG 90, 1380. Massalians (Messalians) – the Syriac name for the heretics Euchites (“prayer books”); their teaching arose in the 4th century. and spread widely in Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. According to the testimony of Bl. Theodoret of Cyrus, they denied the effectiveness of St. baptism and st. Eucharist and claimed that every person is inherent in an evil spirit from birth; he is driven out by intense prayer and his place is taken by the Holy Spirit, felt visibly and visibly and conquering all passion (Ecclesiastical History, IV, 11). Condemned at the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus (431), the Massalians enjoyed popularity for a long time in the 11th century. had their own strong communities in Thrace. Byzantine writers called the Bogomils, who were close to them, Massalians, who traced their origins to the Bulgarian priest Bogomil (10th century). The dualistic heresy of the Bogomils rejected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the liturgical life of the Church, sacraments, icons, rituals, recognizing only the New Testament. The Bogomils associated worldly affairs and human flesh with the activities of the evil spirit and called for evading earthly affairs, defeating the flesh in feats of self-sacrifice. Bogomilism became widespread in Bulgaria, Serbia and Byzantium, where it existed until the 15th century. To the synod. translation: for the forgiveness of sinful deeds (Ps. 141:4). Wed. Rev. Macarius of Egypt. On keeping the heart, ch. 4 // PG, t. 34, col. 824D. See St. Gregory of Nyssa. On the structure of man, ch. 15 // PG, t. 44, col. 177B. See Rev. Maxim the Confessor. Chapters on theology and the economy of the incarnation of the Son of God. First centenary, No. 50. Translation cit. from the ed.: The Works of St. Maximus the Confessor. Book I / Trans. Sidorova A. I. M., 1993. P. 223. You might be interested in: