Gregory Palamas’ Polemic against Nicephorus Gregoras

Gregory Palamas’ treatise Against the False Writings by Gregoras is not only a theological and polemical treatise on the nature of the Taboric light, as well as on the essence-energy relation in God, but also a pamphlet (psogos), shaping a negative image of the author’s opponent. Following his line of reasoning from the Antirrheticus against Acindynus (VI. 1), Palamas has singled out two levels of philosophy, i. e., the secular one, which had been the subject even of Moses’ study in his early years, and the Christian one, resulting from the spiritual experience of ascesis and stillness. If Gregoras was unable to conceive the higher, Christian level of philosophy, it was the consequence from his inaptitude to have properly mastered even the first, mundane one. Thus, his controversial considerations about the nature of Taboric light violated the law of the excluded third, which had been articulated by Aristotle. Nicephorus’ main syllogism on the light of Tabor, represented by Palamas in (IV. 16), is correct from purely formal-logical viewpoint, but not from theological one. Thus, unlike God being something (or somebody) general, Taboric light is not a particular thing (otherwise the latter would have been an accident in God, whereas it was St Gregory the Theologian who had strictly prohibited to think so), and it is for this reason that the standard line of reasoning SeP ⸧ SoP is irrelevant here. When the point at stake is a philosophical consideration of the Hesychast experience, the formal logic, including the standard calculus of propositions, is not supporrted by theology. This is why Gregoras turned out to be an illiterate and controversial person, and even more so, a baffoon, this meaning that Palamas with his portrait of Nicephorus excluded him from the intellectual elite. Putting a special emphasis on his apprenticeship in philosophy with Theodore Metochites, Palamas made it clear that he was continuing the line of his master’s polemics against the enemies of education and wisdom

Agnosticism · Syllogism · Byzantine Studies and History · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies

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