A THEOLOGICAL MEDITATION · THE EASTERN STREAM OF THE TRADITION
Gregory Palamas & Seraphim of Sarov
The Orthodox Tradition since the Great Schism · The Uncreated Light · d. 1359 & 1833
Palamas — PAL-ah-mas · Hesychasm — HEZ-ih-kaz-um · Seraphim — SER-ah-fim of Sarov · theosis — thee-OH-sis · energies — the Palamite distinction · Jesus Prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
O God, who by thy servants Gregory and Seraphim didst show that the light which shone on Tabor is available to every soul that seeks thee in stillness; Grant that we may learn from the Eastern stream of the tradition the patience of the Jesus Prayer and the radiance of the saints who have been transfigured by thy grace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Great Schism of 1054, which divided the Christian Church between Rome and Constantinople, is among the tragedies this archive must name honestly — not to assign blame, which belongs to both sides, but to acknowledge that the tradition this archive has been tracing did not end at the Schism on either side of it. The Patristic series reaches John of Damascus, who died in 749, and there the archive’s explicit treatment of the Eastern tradition ends. But the Eastern Church did not end with John of Damascus; it continued, through the Schism and the Crusades and the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman centuries, to produce theologians, saints, and mystics of the first order. Two of them stand for the whole: Gregory Palamas (PAL-ah-mas) of Thessalonica, who gave the Orthodox tradition its mature theology of prayer; and Seraphim (SER-ah-fim) of Sarov, who embodied that theology in a life of such extraordinary holiness that his witness is among the most luminous in the cloud of witnesses.
Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) was a monk of Mount Athos who was drawn into the great theological controversy of the fourteenth century: whether the light seen by the disciples at the Transfiguration was created or uncreated. The Hesychast (HEZ-ih-kaz-um) controversy turned on this question, and Palamas’s answer was the foundation of Orthodox mystical theology: God’s essence is absolutely transcendent and cannot be experienced directly by any creature; but God’s energies — the divine activities by which God is present and active in the world — are truly uncreated and truly God, and it is these energies that the mystic experiences in prayer. The light of Tabor was not a created light; it was the uncreated light of the divine energies, the same light that will illuminate the New Jerusalem at the last day. This distinction gives the Orthodox tradition its characteristic confidence about theosis (thee-OH-sis): the real participation of the human person in the divine life, genuinely transforming the soul into the likeness of God without collapsing the distinction between Creator and creature.
Seraphim of Sarov (1754–1833) is the most beloved saint of the Russian Orthodox Church — a monk and hermit of the forest near Sarov who spent fifteen years in solitude, three years standing on a rock in prayer, and the last years of his life as a spiritual father to the thousands who came to find him in the forest. His conversation with his disciple Motovilov, recorded in 1831, is one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of Christian mysticism: Motovilov asks him what it means to acquire the Holy Spirit — Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved is Seraphim’s watchword — and Seraphim’s face becomes radiant with the uncreated light, and Motovilov sees it directly and is warmed by it as if by the summer sun, in the middle of a Russian winter. Seraphim died on his knees in prayer before an icon of the Mother of God. He called everyone who came to him, regardless of season, my joy — and the greeting is itself a theological statement: the Holy Spirit, acquired by prayer, overflows as the joy that Paul lists as the second fruit of the Spirit.
The Anglican tradition has been in dialogue with the Orthodox church since the seventeenth century, and the twentieth century saw a deepening of that engagement through Vladimir Lossky, whose Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) brought Palamite theology into the awareness of Western theologians, and through the growing influence of the Philokalia, the great anthology of Orthodox spiritual writings that the Jesus Prayer tradition carries into every generation. The Jesus Prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner — is the simplest and most portable form of Christian prayer, directly rooted in the tax collector’s prayer in Luke 18, and it has entered Anglican spiritual direction through the Orthodox encounter. The archive includes Palamas and Seraphim not as curiosities from another tradition but as members of the same Body, praying the same prayer, seeing by the same uncreated light, in the communion of saints that death and schism cannot ultimately divide.
O Almighty God, whose uncreated light shone on Tabor and shines in the hearts of those who seek thee in stillness; Grant that we may learn from thy servants Gregory and Seraphim the patience of the Jesus Prayer and the courage of the theology that says thou art truly known and not merely known about; and may the division that separates Eastern from Western Christendom be healed at last in the light that neither schism can extinguish; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.