The Authority of Experience in The Hesychast Saints According to St Gregory Palamas: The Relationship Between Ontology and Epistemology Revisited
Abstract
This article examines what St Gregory Palamas says on the nature of the saints' experience and knowledge, how stability and progress are interrelated in his notion of deification, and what the consequences are of his differentiation between knowledge coming from above and natural knowledge. Among the reasons for the appreciation of St Gregory Palamas in twentieth and twenty first century theology is undoubtedly his emphasis on the real presence of God in creation, and, in particular, in the human experience of being reached, purified, and transformed by God, who through his grace joins to himself whom he wishes.
It could be argued that his essence-energy distinction, or his accounts of the psychosomatic techniques of prayer, all serve this one goal: to defend the reality of divine-human communion. Preserving divine simplicity, on the one hand, and the possibility of human deification, on the other, Palamas argued that the eschatological divine fullness of life can irrupt into this life, as in the case of Christ's Incarnation.
Through Christ, it can transform people who are found worthy to see this fullness in terms of the uncreated deifying light.