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Saint Gregory Palamas - and the time of saints.
The voice of a long-lost Christianity that speaks in a way we can often understand today. Saint Gregory Palamas was a figure of some importance historically. As well as actively opposing the beginnings of modern intellectualism in his time and place, in the Greece of 700 years ago, he played a major part in establishing consistency of the meanings by which the language of the saints that had preceded him had previously lacked. The problem he resolved in that way was simply one of time, distance and limited communication: many of whom, some of them not very well read, and all separated by distances that in those days could mean many weeks of travel, had over the centuries been forced by the lack of an agreed terminology to describe their spiritual experiences each in their own idiosyncratic ways. This task was possible to Palamas only because he was himself a Hesychast, a practitioner of the hesychastic method taught by certain of those early fathers of the church for attaining inner stillness. So he was not only a significant author, but also an ascetic, for in those days the mainstream of Christian spirituality was still centred around the ascetic exercises first recommended by Saint Paul, which were, in the way they were then taken, a complete way of life and a Christian equivalent of eastern practices such as Zen and Yoga. By the fourth century, the Christian use of the word hesychia was clearly defined, as when it was used: 'to describe the state of inner rest and silence which victory over the passions gained for a monk, and so allowed him to proceed to contemplation.' The term was used by philosopher-saint Gregory of Nyssa, in his 'Life of Moses', which - in addition to Gregory Palamas' Triads - gives one of the best definitions of the contemplative mysticism of Nyssa's earlier time. This was one of the stages through which the teaching of the church was developed further in response to a need to correct growing divergences from the original stream of the New Testament teaching. It was in these elaborations of the original Christian teaching that the distinction between the inner and outer churches, the ascetic and the purely liturgical forms of Christianity, first began to become visible. (It should be noted here that the ascetic forms include the liturgical aspect of the faith, although the opposite is not true.)
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