A Hesychast Theory of Virtue

Two Types of Epistemology and Practical Philosophy in the Palamite Treatise Capita 150

Abstract

One of the issues debated by St. Gregory Palamas in the sentential treatise Capita 150 is the practical problem of the genealogy of virtue, which he approaches in an eminently epistemological context. Palamas distinguishes between two modes of knowledge that are, equally, two ways of life: the natural and the spiritual. The natural mode of knowledge is articulated between three topoi of the self: perception (aisthēsis), the imaginative faculty of the soul (phantastikon) and the intellect (nous). The data of knowledge come eminently from the senses, being stored in the phantastikon so that later the intellect can lean in an intentional manner on them, thus producing virtues or vices. In contrast, the spiritual way of knowing has to do primarily not with sensory experience, but with that of the Holy Spirit, through which man shares what we know about God, the world, and ourselves. As knowledge of God, it is not a knowledge of the divine being or nature, but a knowledge of Him from His energies which, in order to share an authentic knowledge of God, must be uncreated. From the experience of God’s grace, which is an experience of the inner man, another type of virtues arises. These presuppose, like the natural ones, a moral effort to fulfill moral imperatives, this time of divine origin, but springing from the original experience of repentance, which leads St. Gregory Palamas to call them „works of repentance” (erga tēs metanoias). They lead to the knowledge of Christ dwelling in the human heart through divine grace, but, equally, they are produced by this interior experience of an almost sacramental nature. As such, they are, ultimately, practical expressions of the love between God and man.