I hope this helps -- Adilbrand Noblesword's Hall of Warriors

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Date Posted: 08:36:44 05/26/02 Sun
Author: Omega
Subject: I hope this helps
In reply to: Adilbrand 's message, "Complete comprehension has failed" on 22:32:46 05/25/02 Sat

Scholasticism is the theological methodology that most people are familiar with -- with St Thomas Aquinas being the representative of scholasticism that most would be familiar with. It was a style of theology-philosophy, highly influenced by Aristotle... and the style that most know about from St Thomas, is also seen throughout the other major scholastics (some of which are St Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, St Albertus Magnus, Peter Abelard... etc).

Palamite theology -- the theology which was synthesized and developed by St. Gregory Palamas. It is a theology which discusses how we experience God only by God's energies or activities, but not in essence -- so that God in essence is beyond our comprehension or ideas, but we can know something about God through his activities/energies. (That's a very butchered version of Palamite thought, btw, but I am trying to keep it simple, which gets out the general idea, even if it suffers from being incomplete and somewhat incorrect because of the simplicity).

Here is a description of Gregory Palamas and his thought from Timothy Ware:

From this, Gregory [Palamas (1296-1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica] 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 _energies_ of God, but not His _essence_. This distinction between God's essence (ousia) and His energies 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." ... But however remote from us in His essence, yet in His energies God has revealed Himself to men. These energies 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 off God's energies.

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 manifestation 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... 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.

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