ABSTRACT
Departing from the typical focus of Palamite studies – the essence/energies distinction and its controversies – this chapter seeks to examine St. Gregory Palamas’s anthropological criteria and situate him in the theological wake of the celebrated monk, St. Maximus the Confessor. A key secondary objective is, therefore, the refutation of the claim that Palamas’s anthropology constitutes a “reorientalizing” of the Eastern tradition and a dramatic departure from the paradigms established by Maximus and his theological progeny. As the chapter asserts, Palamas’s anthropological criteria are derived from the oeuvre of the Confessor and reflect the same microcosmic or “consubstantial” approach to personhood, an approach that regards the totality of the human being as possessing an eschatological destiny. The Palamite synthesis maintains the Maximian emphasis on the ontological unity of the soul/body composite and the role of the soul’s passible aspect in human eschatology, which St. Gregory deploys and effectively develops in his spirited defense of the practitioners of hesychia. Finally, the chapter strives to show that despite the attempts to construe his views to the contrary, Palamas shares in and endorses the same nature-affirming perspective that is celebrated in the Confessor’s thought.
