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Bishop Kallistos Ware Orthodox Church IntraText CT - Text |
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Two attempts at reunion; the hesychast controversy In 1204 the Crusaders set up a short-lived Latin kingdom at Constantinople, which came to an end in 1261 when the Greeks recovered their capital. Byzantium survived for two centuries more, and these years proved a time of great cultural, artistic, and religious revival. But politi- cally and economically the restored Byzantine Empire was in a precarious state, and found itself more and more helpless in the face of the Turkish armies which pressed upon it from the east. Two important attempts were made to secure reunion between the Christian east and west, the first in the thirteenth and the second in the fifteenth century. The moving spirit behind the 32 first attempt was Michael VIII (reigned 1259-1282), the Emperor who recovered Constantinople. While doubtless sincerely desiring Christian unity on religious grounds, his motive was also po- litical: threatened by attacks from Charles of Anjou, sovereign of Sicily, he desperately needed the support and protection of the Papacy, which could best be secured through a union of the Churches. A reunion Council was held at Lyons in 1274. The Orthodox delegates who attended agreed to recognize the Papal claims and to recite the Creed with the filioque. But the union proved no more than an agreement on paper, since it was fiercely rejected by the overwhelming majority of clergy and laity in the Byzantine Church, as well as by Bulgaria and the other Ortho- dox countries. The general reaction to the Council of Lyons was summed up in words attributed to the Emperor.s sister: .Better that my brother.s Empire should perish, than the purity of the Orthodox faith.. The union of Lyons was formally repudiated by Michael.s successor, and Mi- chael himself, for his .apostasy,. was deprived of Christian burial. Meanwhile east and west continued to grow further apart in their theology and in their whole manner of understanding the Christian life. Byzantium continued to live in a Patristic at- mosphere, using the ideas and language of the Greek Fathers of the fourth century. But in west- ern Europe the tradition of the Fathers was replaced by Scholasticism . that great synthesis of philosophy and theology worked out in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Western theologians now came to employ new categories of thought, a new theological method, and a new terminol- ogy which the east did not understand. To an ever-increasing extent the two sides were losing a common .universe of discourse.. Byzantium on its side also contributed to this process: here too there were theological de- velopments in which the west had neither part nor share, although there was nothing so radical as the Scholastic revolution. These theological developments were connected chiefly with the He- sychast Controversy, a dispute which arose at Byzantium in the middle of the fourteenth century, and which involved the doctrine of God.s nature and the methods of prayer used in the Orthodox Church. To understand the Hesychast Controversy, we must turn back for the moment to the earlier history of eastern mystical theology. The main features of this mystical theology were worked out by Clement (died 215) and by Origen of Alexandria (died 253-254), whose ideas were devel- oped in the fourth century by the Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nyssa, and by their disci- ple Evagrius of Pontus (died 399), a monk in the Egyptian desert. There are two trends in this mystical theology, not exactly opposed, but certainly at first sight inconsistent: the .way of nega- tion. and the .way of union.. The way of negation . apophatic theology, as it is often called . speaks of God in negative terms. God cannot be properly apprehended by man.s mind; human language, when applied to Him, is always inexact. It is therefore less misleading to use negative language about God rather than positive . to refuse to say what God is, and to state simply what He is not. As Gregory of Nyssa put it: .The true knowledge and vision of God consist in this . in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility. (The Life of Moses, 2, 163 [77A]). Negative theology reaches its classic expression in the so-called .Dionysian. writings. For many centuries these books were thought to be the work of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul.s convert at Athens (Acts 17:34); but they are in fact by an unknown author, who probably lived towards the end of the fifth century and belonged to circles sympathetic to the Mono- physites. Saint Maximus the Confessor (died 662) composed commentaries on the Dionysian writings, and so ensured for them a permanent place in Orthodox theology. Dionysius has also had a great influence on the west: it has been reckoned that he is quoted 1,760 times by Thomas 33 Aquinas in the Summa, while a fourteenth-century English chronicler records that the Mystical Theology of Dionysius .ran through England like the wild deer.. The apophatic language of Dionysius was repeated by many others. .God is infinite and incomprehensible,. wrote John of Damascus, .and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.. God does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself (On the Orthodox Faith 1, 4 [P.G. xciv, 800B]). This emphasis on God.s transcendence would seem at first sight to exclude any direct ex- perience of God. But in fact many of those who made greatest use of negative theology . Greg- ory of Nyssa, for example, or Dionysius, or Maximus . also believed in the possibility of a true mystical union with God; they combined the .way of negation. with the .way of union,. with the tradition of the mystics or hesychasts. (The name hesychast is derived from the Greek word hesychia, meaning .quiet.. A hesychast is one who in silence devotes himself to inner recollec- tion and secret prayer). While using the apophatic language of negative theology, these writers claimed an immediate experience of the unknowable God, a personal union with Him who is un- approachable. How were the two .ways. to be reconciled? How can God be both knowable and unknowable at once? This was one of the questions which was posed in an acute form in the fourteenth century. Connected with it was another, the question of the body and its place in prayer. Evagrius, like Origen, sometimes borrowed too heavily from Platonism: he wrote of prayer in intellectual terms, as an activity of the mind rather than of the whole man, and he seemed to allow no posi- tive role to man.s body in the process of redemption and deification. But the balance between mind and body is redressed in another ascetic writing, the Macarian Homilies. (These were tradi- tionally attributed to Saint Macarius of Egypt [300?-390], but it is now thought that they were written in Syria during the late fourth or the beginning of the fifth century). The Macarian Homi- lies revert to a more Biblical idea of man . not a soul imprisoned in a body (as in Greek thought), but a single and united whole, soul and body together. Where Evagrius speaks of the mind, Macarius uses the Hebraic idea of the heart. The change of emphasis is significant, for the heart includes the whole man . not only intellect, but will, emotions, and even body. Using .heart. in this Macarian sense, Orthodox often talk about .Prayer of the Heart.. What does the phrase mean? When a man begins to pray, at first he prays with the lips, and has to make a conscious intellectual effort in order to realize the meaning of what he says. But if he perseveres, praying continually with recollection, his intellect and his heart become united; he .finds the place of the heart,. his spirit acquires the power of .dwelling in the heart,. and so his prayer becomes .prayer of the heart.. It becomes something not merely said by the lips, not merely thought by the intellect, but offered spontaneously by the whole being of man . lips, intellect, emotions, will, and body. The prayer fills the entire consciousness, and no longer has to be forced out, but says itself. This Prayer of the Heart cannot be attained simply through our own efforts, but is a gift conferred by the grace of God. When Orthodox writers use the term .Prayer of the Heart,. they usually have in mind one particular prayer, the Jesus Prayer. Among Greek spiritual writers, first Diadochus of Photice (mid-fifth century) and later Saint John Climacus of Mount Sinai (579?-649?) recommended, as a specially valuable form of prayer, the constant repetition or remembrance of the name .Jesus.. In course of time the Invocation of the Name became crystallized into a short sentence, known as the Jesus Prayer: .Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. (In modern Orthodox practice the Prayer sometimes ends, ..have mercy on me a sinner.). By the thirteenth century (if not before), the recitation of the Jesus Prayer had become linked to certain physical exercises, designed to assist 34 concentration. Breathing was carefully regulated in time with the Prayer, and a particular bodily posture was recommended: head bowed, chin resting on the chest, eyes fixed on the place of the heart. (There are interesting parallels between the Hesychast .method. and Hindu Yoga or Mohammedan Dhikr; but the points of similarity must not be pressed too far). This is often called .the Hesychast method of prayer,. but it should not be thought that for the Hesychasts these exercises constituted the es- sence of prayer. They were regarded, not as an end in themselves, but as a help to concentration . as an accessory useful to some, but not obligatory upon all. The Hesychasts knew that there can be no mechanical means of acquiring God.s grace, and no techniques leading automatically to the mystical state. For the Hesychasts of Byzantium, the culmination of mystical experience was the vision of Divine and Uncreated Light. The works of Saint Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), the greatest of the Byzantine mystics, are full of this .Light mysticism.. When he writes of his own experiences, he speaks again and again of the Divine Light: .fire truly divine,. he calls it, .fire uncreated and invisible, without beginning and immaterial.. The Hesychasts believed that this light which they experienced was identical with the Uncreated Light which the three disciples saw surrounding Jesus at His Transfiguration on Mount Thabor. But how was this vision of Di- vine Light to be reconciled with the apophatic doctrine of God the transcendent and unapproach- able? All these questions concerning the transcendence of God, the role of the body in prayer, and the Divine Light came to a head in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Hesychasts were violently attacked by a learned Greek from Italy, Barlaam the Calabrian, who stated the doctrine of God.s .otherness. and unknowability in an extreme form. It is sometimes suggested that Bar- laam was influenced here by the Nominalist philosophy that was current in the west at this date; but more probably he derived his teaching from Greek sources. Starting from a one-sided exege- sis of Dionysius, he argued that God can only be known indirectly; Hesychasm (so he main- tained) was wrong to speak of an immediate experience of God, for any such experience is im- possible. Seizing on the bodily exercises which the Hesychasts employed, Barlaam accused them of holding a grossly materialistic conception of prayer. He was also scandalized by their claim to attain a vision of the Divine and Uncreated Light: here again he charged them with falling into a gross materialism. How can a man see God.s essence with his bodily eyes? The light which the Hesychasts beheld, in his view, was not the eternal light of the Divinity, but a temporary and cre- ated light. The defense of the Hesychasts was taken up by Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), Arch- bishop of Thessalonica. He upheld a doctrine of man which allowed for the use of bodily exer- cises in prayer, and he argued, against Barlaam, that the Hesychasts did indeed experience the Divine and Uncreated Light of Thabor. To explain how this was possible, Gregory developed the distinction between the essence and the energies of God. It was Gregory.s achievement to set Hesychasm on a firm dogmatic basis, by integrating it into Orthodox theology as a whole, and by showing how the Hesychast vision of Divine Light in no way undermined the apophatic doctrine of God. His teaching was confirmed by two councils held at Constantinople in 1341 and 1351, which, although local and not Ecumenical, yet possess a doctrinal authority in Orthodox theol- ogy scarcely inferior to the Seven General Councils themselves. But western Christendom has never officially recognized these two councils, although many western Christians personally ac- cept the theology of Palamas. Gregory began by reaffirming the Biblical doctrine of man and of the Incarnation. Man is a single, united whole: not only man.s mind but the whole man was created in the image of God 35 (P.G. cl, 1361C). Man.s body is not an enemy, but partner and collaborator with his soul. Christ, by taking a human body at the Incarnation, has .made the flesh an inexhaustible source of sanctifi- cation. (Homily 16 [P.G. cli, 193B]). Here Gregory took up and developed the ideas implicit in earlier writings, such as the Macarian Homilies; the same emphasis on man.s body, as we have seen, lies behind the Orthodox doctrine of icons. Gregory went on to apply this doctrine of man to the Hesychast methods of prayer: the Hesychasts, so he argued, in placing such emphasis on the part of the body in prayer, are not guilty of a gross materialism but are simply remaining faithful to the Biblical doctrine of man as a unity. Christ took human flesh and saved the whole man; there- fore it is the whole man . body and soul together . that prays to God. From this Gregory turned to the main problem: how to combine the two affirmations, that man knows God and that God is by nature unknowable. Gregory answered: we know the ener- gies of God, but not His essence. This distinction between God.s essence (ousia) and His ener- gies goes back to the Cappadocian Fathers. .We know our God from His energies,. wrote Saint Basil, .but we do not claim that we can draw near to His essence. For His energies come down to us, but His essence remains unapproachable. (Letter 234, 1). Gregory accepted this distinction. He affirmed, as emphatically as any exponent of negative theology, that God is in essence absolutely unknowable. .God is not a nature,. he wrote, .for He is above all nature; He is not a being, for He is above all beings.. No single thing of all that is created has or ever will have even the slightest communion with the supreme nature, or nearness to it. (P.G. cl, 1176C). But however re- mote from us in His essence, yet in His energies God has revealed Himself to men. These ener- gies are not something that exists apart from God, not a gift which God confers upon men: they are God Himself in His action and revelation to the world. God exists complete and entire in each of His divine energies. The world, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is charged with the grandeur of God; all creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fire of God.s energies. (Compare Maximus, Ambigua, P.G. xci, 1148D). It is through these energies that God enters into a direct and immediate relationship with mankind. In relation to man, the divine energy is in fact nothing else than the grace of God; grace is not just a .gift. of God, not just an object which God bestows on men, but a direct mani- festation of the living God Himself, a personal confrontation between creature and Creator. .Grace signifies all the abundance of the divine nature, in so far as it is communicated to men. (V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 162). When we say that the saints have been transformed or .deified. by the grace of God, what we mean is that they have a direct experience of God Himself. They know God . that is to say, God in His energies, not in His essence. God is Light, and therefore the experience of God.s energies takes the form of Light. The vision which the Hesychasts receive is (so Palamas argued) not a vision of some created light, but of the Light of the Godhead Itself . the same Light of the Godhead which surrounded Christ on Mount Thabor. This Light is not a sensible or material light, but it can be seen with physical eyes (as by the disciples at the Transfiguration), since when a man is deified, his bodily faculties as well as his soul are transformed. The Hesychasts. vision of Light is therefore a true vision of God in His divine energies; and they are quite correct in identifying it with the Uncreated Light of Thabor. Palamas, therefore, preserved God.s transcendence and avoided the pantheism to which an unguarded mysticism easily leads; yet he allowed for God.s immanence, for His continual pres- ence in the world. God remains .the Wholly Other,. and yet through His energies (which are God Himself) He enters into an immediate relationship with the world. God is a living God, the God of history, the God of the Bible, who became Incarnate in Christ. Barlaam, in excluding all 36 direct knowledge of God and in asserting that the Divine Light is something created, set too wide a gulf between God and man. Gregory.s fundamental concern in opposing Barlaam was therefore the same as that of Athanasius and the General Councils: to safeguard man.s direct approach to God, to uphold man.s full deification and entire redemption. That same doctrine of salvation which underlay the disputes about the Trinity, the Person of Christ, and the Holy Icons, lies also at the heart of the Hesychast controversy. .Into the closed world of Byzantium,. wrote Dom Gregory Dix, .no really fresh impulse ever came after the sixth century. Sleep began. in the ninth century, perhaps even earlier, in the sixth. (The Shape of the Liturgy, London, 1945, p. 548). The Byzantine controversies of the four- teenth century amply demonstrate the falsity of such an assertion. Certainly Gregory Palamas was no revolutionary innovator, but firmly rooted in the tradition of the past; yet he was a crea- tive theologian of the first rank, and his work shows that Orthodox theology did not cease to be active after the eighth century and the seventh Ecumenical Council. Among the contemporaries of Gregory Palamas was the lay theologian Nicholas Cabasilas, who was sympathetic to the Hesychasts, although not closely involved in the controversy. Ca- basilas is the author of a Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, which has become the classic Or- thodox work on this subject; he also wrote a treatise on the sacraments entitled The Life in Jesus Christ. The writings of Cabasilas are marked by two things in particular: a vivid sense of the per- son of Christ .the Saviour,. who, as he puts it, .is closer to us than our own soul. (P.G. cl, 712A); and a constant emphasis upon the sacraments. For him the mystical life is essentially a life in Christ and a life in the sacraments. There is a danger that mysticism may become speculative and individualist . divorced from the historical revelation in Christ and from the corporate life of the Church with its sacraments; but the mysticism of Cabasilas is always Christocentric, sacra- mental, ecclesial. His work shows how closely mysticism and the sacramental life were linked together in Byzantine theology. Palamas and his circle did not regard mystical prayer as a means of bypassing the normal institutional life of the Church.
A second reunion Council was held at Florence in 1438-1439. The Emperor John VIII (reigned 1425-1448) attended in person, together with the Patriarch of Constantinople and a large delegation from the Byzantine Church, as well as representatives from the other Orthodox Churches. There were prolonged discussions, and a genuine attempt was made by both sides to reach a true agreement on the great points of dispute. At the same time it was difficult for the Greeks to discuss theology dispassionately, for they knew that the political situation had now become desperate: the only hope of defeating the Turks lay in help from the west. Eventually a formula of union was drawn up, covering the filioque, Purgatory, azymes, and the Papal claims; and this was signed by all the Orthodox present at the Council except one . Mark, Archbishop of Ephesus, later canonized by the Orthodox Church. The Florentine Union was based on a two- fold principle: unanimity in matters of doctrine, respect for the legitimate rites and traditions pe- culiar to each Church. Thus in matters of doctrine, the Orthodox accepted the Papal claims (al- though here the wording of the formula of union was vague and ambiguous); they accepted the filioque; they accepted the Roman teaching on Purgatory (as a point of dispute between east and west, this only came into the open in the thirteenth century). But so far as .azymes. were con- cerned, no uniformity was demanded: Greeks were allowed to use leavened bread, while Latins were to continue to employ unleavened. But the Union of Florence, though celebrated throughout western Europe . bells were rung in all the parish churches of England . proved no more of a reality in the east than its predeces- 37 sor at Lyons. John VIII and his successor Constantine XI, the last Emperor of Byzantium and the eightieth in succession since Constantine the Great, both remained loyal to the union; but they were powerless to enforce it on their subjects, and did not even dare to proclaim it publicly at Constantinople until 1452. Many of those who signed at Florence revoked their signatures when they reached home. The decrees of the Council were never accepted by more than a minute frac- tion of the Byzantine clergy and people. The Grand Duke Lucas Notaras, echoing the words of the Emperor.s sister after Lyons, remarked: .I would rather see the Moslem turban in the midst of the city than the Latin miter.. John and Constantine had hoped that the Union of Florence would secure them military help from the west, but small indeed was the help which they actually received. On 7 April 1453 the Turks began to attack Constantinople by land and sea. Outnumbered by more than twenty to one, the Byzantines maintained a brilliant but hopeless defense for seven long weeks. In the early hours of 29 May the last Christian service was held in the great Church of the Holy Wisdom. It was a united service of Orthodox and Roman Catholics, for at this moment of crisis the support- ers and opponents of the Florentine Union forgot their differences. The Emperor went out after receiving communion, and died fighting on the walls. Later the same day the city fell to the Turks, and the most glorious church in Christendom became a mosque. It was the end of the Byzantine Empire. But it was not the end of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, far less the end of Orthodoxy.
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