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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 5 - Page 1 |
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ABSTRACTION AND CONTEMPLATIONStudies of Gregory Palamas, who resolved many of the differences in use of language between different ‘fathers of the church’ who lived in widely different times and places, show that he also used certain key words from classical psychology, but brought them forward into a true Christian context. One is the Greek word apharaisin. Used in one sense by Aristotle, this word is now generally rendered in English as abstraction, in its 20th Century English sense of intellectual abstraction. But in fact, the early church, including Saint Denys, who is attributed as the source of the teachings of certain schools of mediaeval mystics, (Dionysius the Areopagite), and with Saint Gregory Palamas – trained in his youth in Aristotelian philosophy, as its later spokesman - used the word in The Triads with a very specialist esoteric meaning. Today we believe – as Aristotle appeared to do - that abstraction is an intellectual process. But to these early fathers of the church, apharaisin was an element in theoria, the science of what we in the West now call contemplation. Palamas wrote about it, quoting St. Denys, that: (Triad 1: 3-17.) “As the great Dionysius said, ‘The union of someone to the light which comes from above, when they are divinized, occurs when all noetic activity ceases.’ It is not the product of a cause, nor is it just a relationship, for these are both the results of activity of the nous, while this union occurs as a result of inner abstraction (apharaisin). But it is not itself abstraction, for if it was simply abstraction, it would depend on us.” This is how we ‘find God, by finding ourselves in a deep inner stillness.’ The abstracted nous is the window within us between the eternal and the temporal, the self and the Personality. Its identification with (or loss of separation from) the different activities of the psyche is our imprisonment in time: this is also John Romanides’ ‘short-circuit between head and heart,’ which he also describes as the ‘disease of religion.’ This is not to say that religion is disease, but the diseased form of religion is one in which nous is ruled by the contents of the psyche. The cure is ‘theosis’: divinisation. “So contemplation is not simply abstraction or negation. It is a union and a divinisation which occurs, mystically and inexpressibly, by the grace of God, after we have separated ourselves from all that has come from below to write on the nous. In fact, it happens after the cessation of all noetic activity. This is more than mere abstraction, and the inner abstraction is no more than the sign of that cessation.” |
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