The second Sunday of Great Lent is dedicated to the memory of St. Gregory Palamas. The question might be asked, and should be asked: Why would this particular man and his life and his teaching be particularly commemorated during the Great Lenten season? We remember, of course, that the Great Lenten season is the time when we try to really focus on the essentials, where we try very intentionally, very purposefully, to contemplate God through and in the Person of his Son, Jesus Christ, crucified and glorified, where we try really to understand what really the Christian faith is, and really try with all of our might, so to speak, with all of our attention, to live that life and to do those things which allow us to live the life that God created us for in the beginning, which we have ruined through sin, and which Christ has saved through his death and resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

And St. Gregory is perfect for this, just perfect, and there’s no doubt at all, at least in my mind, that this is the reason why the Holy Spirit himself has inspired Christ’s holy Church to particularly compel the faithful to remember this man on the second Sunday of Great Lent.

St. Gregory was born at the very, very end of the 13th century, and he died in the middle of the 14th century. Actually, he was born in 1296, and he died in 1359. He was from a very aristocratic family in Constantinople, very distinguished, linked to the imperial house. His father, as we learn from the introduction to his writings in the Philokalia, published in England, that his father was a friend of the Emperor Andronicus II, was tutor to the future emperor, Andronicus III, that Gregory himself, as a young man, was under the spiritual guidance of St. Theoleptus of Philadelphia.

And then we learn that, after his father’s death, around the year [1316], which would be just about when Gregory was 20 or around there, that he traveled to Mount Athos with two of his brothers. And at the same time, his mother and two of his sisters entered into monastic life, into convents in Thessaloniki. St. Gregory and his brothers went to Mt. Athos, and they lived there for 20 years, and he prayed there during that period. And there’s a tradition that for several years, his personal prayer, his continuous brief prayer that he constantly recited—which was a practice at that time, to have a short verse that a person would constantly repeat, in addition to the psalms and the prayers of the Church and so on—that his short prayer was: “O Lord, O God, enlighten my darkness!”

“Enlighten my darkness”: he wanted to see; he wanted to be illumined. We might even say that he wanted his baptism to work; he wanted his baptism to take, because baptism, which is death and resurrection in Christ and sealing with the Holy Spirit, is a holy illumination. It’s where we are illumined to see things clearly, to see even the activities and the energies of God in all things and to see God revealed perfectly in Jesus Christ, his Son, and to know God as Father and to see the face of God, and the invisible Father through the visible face of his Son, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, and to be illumined by the Holy Spirit, to see things clearly. In biblical language, not to be a fool, not to be stupid, not to be in darkness. And Gregory had that zeal, that desire, for the divine light.

And it says that he lived there for 20 years, except he had to leave for a while during that period because of the attacks of Islam, of the Turks. He lived in a cave; that’s where he did his practice. And that he was following a life of what was called hesychasm. Hesychia in Greek, it means stillness or silence or quiet. And the monastic practice at the time was to live in total silence, complete silence, and even not only to have exterior silence but to quiet down interiorly, to quiet the thoughts, to quiet down the mind—actually to try, by the grace of God and the gift of the Holy Spirit, through simple prayer, to transcend the condition of thinking, because the highest activity of the human mind, the nous or the heart in biblical language, is the contemplation of God beyond images, beyond words, beyond symbols: to have like a direct contact with God Almighty himself, who is revealing himself and acting in our heart, in our soul, in the world around us, through his energies, and very particularly in the Person of Christ and within the life of the Church, in the sacramental life of the Church, the mystical life of the Church.

So Gregory was practicing solitude, and we learn again from this introduction to his writings in the Philokalia that he would spend five days a week in total solitude, complete silence, just continuous prayer, but would come out on the sabbath day, Saturday, and on Sunday to have the synaxis with the brothers, to keep the vigil for the Lord’s Day, to have holy Communion, participate in the mysteries, and probably to converse a little bit and to get some food. But that was the practice of the time.

But then emerged an event that would really be the event that would make St. Gregory so famous and so popular, and that was that certain scholars, a certain type of theological teachers, influenced by Aristotelianism and the West and Platonism and Latin theology and so on, even Thomas Aquinas and writings like that, were saying that God is a simple Essence, that God is kind of the uncaused Cause, that God is simple Being, that God has no “parts,” so to speak, and that God, his essence is unmovable; it’s stable. And therefore, when the Bible speaks about God acting or God revealing himself or God speaking, or even when it would speak about holy people like Moses or Elijah having some type of communion with God, like entering into the cloud and being filled with the divine light and claiming that they were in a palpable presence of God—that this teaching wasn’t really totally true; it wasn’t really real. Oh, it had a reality, but it was a kind of created reality; it was something that kind of God created in us, within our human faculties and our human possibilities, our human imaginations, our thinking, so that we would have some kind of idea about God.

But the claim was that these ideas about God and even the expression of the mystical experience about God, like, for example, experiencing the very light of God, like Moses did, or like the three apostles did on the Mount of Transfiguration that shone through the face of Jesus, well, the claim was being made that this was not a real communion with God, because God is a pure Substance; he is beyond any kind of activity and movement. And there were even certain teachers, for example like Anselm of Canterbury, who said that the various characteristics of God in Scripture—like God’s beauty, God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s kindness, God’s compassion, and then even God’s wrath, God’s anger towards us—that they weren’t really real things; they were something that was told to us in human language that was supposed to teach us something, but that they couldn’t really be real, because God is unchanging; God is stable. God can’t really get angry or really love or really act and show himself; he’s the unmoved Mover, so to speak.

And therefore, when the saints were claiming to have real communion with God, well, it wasn’t really with God; it was with created actions in us that belong, so to speak, to the created order that weren’t really divine and would just give us some kind of an analogous idea about what kind of ways we should be able to think about God, but it was only thinking about God; it wasn’t real knowledge of God; it wasn’t real communion and experience of God, that that could not be claimed.

And here is where St. Gregory Palamas and his colleagues, following the Bible, following the holy Scriptures, following the Church Fathers that went before them, particularly the Cappadocian Fathers—Gregory the Theologian, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa—and then other spiritual writers, like Diadochos of Photiki or Macarius of Egypt or John of the Ladder, and then other mystical writers like the author of a collection of writings called the Aeropagitic writings of Dionysios—Dionysios the Areopagite: some writings were very popular in the name of Dionysios about how God is and about how God acts—and then of course there’s Maximus the Confessor, probably the greatest Father who cleared up—as he thought he did, anyway—the ambiguities in Gregory the Theologian and became one of the main teachers of all those who followed after him—he lived in the seventh century—and then there were people like Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century and so on—but these, all these holy Fathers, according to St. Gregory, taught, following the apostles and the Bible and the prophets, that really, no! God really does act in our life.

God’s energies and actions are really divine; they’re not something that God creates within us to have some kind of idea about God, but they’re really the presence of God himself. And the claim would be that God is not some kind of unmoved Mover or Supreme Being or uncaused Cause, or static Substance—no! Because in the Latin kind of Aristotelian line, God was being but not becoming; God was unchanging but not changing; God was simple and not multiple; God was static and not moving, not dynamic, and so on. Whereas the Bible, or how the Eastern Fathers, like Gregory and Basil and the other Gregory and Maximus and Symeon and others said, especially Dionysios, they said that, no, God is completely different.

God’s not like anything that exists. God is beyond being. He’s beyond becoming. He’s beyond non-being. That in God, the one and the many… God isn’t one as opposed to many; he’s beyond one and many, but he reveals himself to us as being itself, goodness itself, love itself, truth itself, but he also reveals himself in a multiplicity, countless number, of the divine actions and energies, because he is the living God, and these actions or operations or energies of God—his speaking, his acting, his being angry, his revealing himself, his hiding himself—these are all real! God is a living God. He’s beyond anything in a created order. You can’t simply identify him with being. In fact, Gregory Palamas will say, “If God is being; I am not. If I am being, God is not. If God is, I am not; if I am, God is not.” What he meant by that was: You can’t use the term “being” for God and for creation in the same way.

Now, if you say, “God is,” then you have to qualify that God is beyond anything. For example, if a Christian, let’s say, was walking down the street and was wearing a cross, and some person came up to him and said, “Hey, are you a Christian? You’re a believer; you have that cross on.” He’d say, “Yeah.” And then if the person said, “Do you believe God exists?” And of course the first Christian would be, “Yes, of course. We believe God exists.” But if we were really doing our duty according to the Bible and according to the holy Fathers and certainly according to St. Gregory Palamas, we would say to that person, “Do you have a minute? Let’s chat.” And then we’d say to that person, “You know, I just said to you, ‘God exists,’ and by that I mean, yes, there is God. Yes, it is not true that there is no God; yes, there is God. But if you think that God exists like I exist or you exist or that building or that tree exist, or even the planet Earth exists, or like the hundred thousand billion galaxies with the hundred thousand billion stars in the expanding universe exist, then we would have to say God does not exist.”

God brings into existence creatures who can say that they exist, but God is beyond existence. He’s even beyond non-existence. In his summary of the patristic writings that he wrote in the ninth century, St. John of Damascus said God is not only beyond being; he’s beyond non-being, that we have to negate even the negations that we make about God, because if we say God does not exist like the creation exists, that concept would even be contingent on an idea of creation. But God, as Prophet Isaiah said, a long time before Jesus, God doesn’t have any comparisons. There’s nothing in heaven and on earth to compare with him. As it was already revealed to the holy men and women of the old covenant, God is holy—kadosha, holy. And holy means not like anything else; it means completely different, completely other, like there’s nothing you can say about God but just to contemplate his activities in silence.

St. Gregory of Nyssa says, quoting Psalm 116, “If we dare to speak about God, then every man is a liar,” because whatever we say we have to correct somehow. Even the great English man and theological writer John Henry Newman, who was a Church of England person who became a Roman Catholic mainly because of the Church Fathers, he said that theology for a Christian is saying and un-saying to a positive effect. Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) quoted that once. I loved it. He says that’s the same thing that the Eastern Church Fathers say. Theology is saying and un-saying for a positive effect, for a good reason, because you affirm something—in theological language, that’s called cataphatic—and then you negate it—that’s called apophatic.

So when you say anything about what God is or what God is like, you can say it. You can say: God exists, God is good, God is love. But immediately you have to correct it and say: Not like being and not like goodness and not like love that we can capture with our mind; God is way beyond that. Nevertheless, he acts. He speaks. He shows himself. As Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the fourth century, his actions and operations, he said, they descend even unto us; they penetrate our created world. In fact, the Fathers even said that all of creation, all of the cosmos, is penetrated by these divine actions. Maximus called them logoi, words. St. Augustine did, too; he called them the seminal—rationes seminales, the ideas and the words of God that penetrate reality. So in and through all things you can actually touch and experience God himself!

And it’s really God. It’s not an idea about God, or it’s not some kind of thing that God creates that somehow or other makes us think about God and understand God within our own terms. No, no, no, no: it’s something that blows our mind completely, but we have to affirm it. We have to say: Yeah! This is really God—God in his action.

And Gregory Palamas believed that, and so he began to defend it, and he defended it against those who said it was not true. And he was very lucky, Gregory Palamas. Why? Because he himself most likely—virtually certainly, but certainly many of the other holy people that he knew, the holy monks and nuns that he knew—had had that experience of God. That through their prayer, through their fasting, through their solitude, through transcending thinking and simply rational types of discourse and conversation and mental acrobatics, they had opened themselves to the very energies and actions of God. And the claim was that they even had the experience of God that they called the uncreated light. We don’t know what that light was like. They all say: Well, it’s not like the light of the sun; it’s something like it, but much different, so different that you almost can’t use that example. But you’ve got to speak in some way, even though, as Gregory of Nyssa said, you’re still a liar when you talk, because you have to correct it.

But in any case, they claimed that they really were illumined by the very light of God. That God is light, he dwells in unapproachable light, Christ is the light of God, the light of the world, in him was light, the Holy Spirit is light-bearing, and where the Father, God the Father, acts through his Son and Logos-Word, Jesus Christ incarnate on earth, by the indwelling of his Holy Spirit, there’s a real communion with God, a real participation in God. And here they would even quote the letter of Peter in the New Testament that says through Christ we become partakers of the divine nature.

Now, Gregory was very careful to say God’s nature is beyond nature; it’s supra-natural. It’s super non-natural; it’s super non-knowable, he would say. In fact, Maximus before him said: When it comes to what God is in God’s own self, you can only have supra non-knowledge through an act of supra non-knowing to know the supra non-knowable. That’s an amazing sentence, but that’s how divinity is. But Gregory Palamas said: Yeah, that’s it; that’s what we know. Nevertheless, the Person of God the Father, who is this way, through the Person of his Son and Logos, Word incarnate, as Jesus, who is this way, because he is also divine, of the same divinity of God the Father—Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created; that’s the Nicene Creed—and through the Holy Spirit, who is also of the very same divinity as the Father and the Son, that these three divine hypostases or Persons, they act and they reveal that nature through their actions.

And so the reason why we can even say that what God is in God’s own self, what divinity is, is incomprehensible; or, as we say in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible. Ineffable means there’s no words; incomprehensible means you can’t comprehend it, you can’t grasp it; inconceivable means there’s no concepts; invisible means there’s no vision, there’s no images, nothing: it’s beyond, always existing, eternally the same. Nevertheless, that’s a living God, who acts in the world.

And so Gregory, how he formulated it, very carefully, in very long treatises, which were accepted by two Councils of the Church officially—so this is official Church dogma—he said that the Father acts through the Son by the Holy Spirit, communicating to us the activities and the qualities and the virtues and the powers and the splendors and the beauties and the glories and the magnificences of God himself, divine—really divine—that flow from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, equally from the three divine Persons who share the same divine nature. And this is real. Communion with God is real.

So Gregory says that when the Lord Jesus says in St. John’s gospel, “This is eternal life: to know—to know—” And that verb, “to know” or perceive or see, is used over a hundred times in St. John’s gospel. St. Paul said, “In Jesus are hid all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” So there’s knowledge. So in St. John’s gospel, Jesus says, “This is eternal life”—this is to be really alive—“to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And to know the only true God through Jesus Christ, and to know that, through God, that he is Abba Father, he is the Father of Jesus—but he, and his only-begotten Son, and his Holy Spirit live in a divinity that’s ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, beyond anything that humans can say. Nevertheless, that is participatable, partakable, communicable, knowable, comprehensible—through the divine energies, through the divine actions of God, that really touch us and come to us.

Way back in the fourth century, St. Athanasius the Great, the great teacher of the Cappadocians—of Basil and Gregory and Chrysostom—St. Athanasius, he said: If we cannot know God, why live? And he said: If we cannot know God, then the Bible is lying, because the Bible says we can know God. The Bible says even we must know God. We must know God: we must know him and his Son and his Spirit, who are unknowable! [Laughter] Unknowable in nature, but knowable in Person by the divine energies that flow from that nature.

And Gregory said that the divine actions and operations are substantial, essential activities. They come from God even if there would be no creation. They flow eternally from God, even before God created the world, even before the hundred thousand billion galaxies and the hundred thousand billion stars: God, in his divinity, in the pleroma, the fullness and the superabundance of his divine life, was expressing himself—the Father in the Son by the Spirit—in countless divine ways of appearing—revelations, shinings, theophanies. And then when he creates the world, he creates the world to participate in them, to know him through them.

Now, Gregory stood for this; he suffered for this. He defended this. He later became, later in his life—he didn’t live very long; I think he was in his 60s when he died—but he became the archbishop of Thessaloniki. He became a great pastor and teacher. Church councils defended his doctrine and the doctrine of the holy hesychastic Fathers with him. The Fathers on Mount Athos did the same thing. And this was proclaimed as a victory of Orthodoxy.

Bishop Kallistos (Ware), I believe it was—certainly those who produced the Philokalia for us, to whom we are eternally grateful, in English language—they said that in some sense celebrating St. Gregory Palamas on the second Sunday of Lent is like having a second Sunday of Orthodoxy, because if the first Sunday of Orthodoxy, defending the holy icons, was to defend that human beings are really made in the image and likeness of God, that Jesus Christ really is himself personally the icon of God, and that Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can really see and know God through Jesus, through the activities of God through Jesus that are made possible to us by the Holy Spirit—if that is the Triumph of Orthodoxy, then the Palamite theology defends this truth even, we might say, further, deeper, more systematically, more accurately, more in proper theological terms.

But those theological terms, as Gregory himself said, following the first Gregory in the fourth century, he said: But these are the terms that are from the fishermen, not from the philosophers. He said we speak about God aliefthekos, and not aristotelikos; we speak about God as fishermen—the apostles, he meant—not as philosophers—aristotelikos, that meant Aristotle. The holy Fathers knew Aristotle, and they used a lot of his categories. Even the category of hypostasis, nature, and energy is an Aristotelian category. But it’s completely baptized and changed and properly expressed when related to God.

And here, we might dare to say that the Latin theology didn’t really do that perfectly well. There were Latins, by the way, who did do it. St. John of the Cross, for example, he taught just what Gregory Palamas taught, Teresa of Avila, in their mystical writings; even some others, like Bonaventure. The only problem is, they were suspected. In fact, John of the Cross, we even have his books because the Scholastic inquisitors put him in jail because they thought he was some kind of a heretic because he was teaching deification and the divine lamps and radiances and resemblances that we can really experience in “the living flame of love”—that was the name of his last book.

So there were Western mystical writers who taught the same thing—we must really admit that and thank God for it—but it seems that the Scholastic Barlaam way of thinking, those who were against Gregory Palamas, Akindynos, the Scholastic-type teachers, that until very recently they won the day in the West, so much so that the Council of Trent, against Protestantism, claimed that grace was a created entity, that grace wasn’t the real presence of the living God really in our life, from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, but it was something God kind of produced and then infused in us, some kind of created substance that can make us holy. And then they made all these different kind of created graces—convenient grace, sanctifying grace, deifying grace, this kind of grace, preventative grace, and so on.

But our Eastern Orthodox Tradition, we use the term “grace,” but for us charis, grace, it simply means the very presence of God and the gift of God of his own divine powers and energies in our life, through which we have real, true communion with the living God.

Now during Great Lent, that’s what we’re supposed to be thinking about. That’s what we’re supposed to be, God helping us sinners, even experiencing, at least a little bit: to really know God, at least a little bit. And we do what the holy Fathers did, what they taught us, like Gregory: We try to be quiet, we try to be still, we try to get beyond our thinking and our speaking. We try to contemplate the Gospel. We participate in the holy mysteries of the Church: we have holy Communion, we confess our sins. We ask God for the grace to quench our passions and to redirect our natural passions to their proper end, which is communion with God.

So we really believe that if we do all the things that we Christians are supposed to do, and especially during Great Lent, then we open our self to the divine action, the divine grace, the divine energies. And then we can come, like our holy Fathers, to a real communion with the real God that is really true. That’s what Gregory and all of the holy Fathers defended, stood for, and they not only taught it by words—and they found what Gregory the Theologian called the theoprepeis logois, the perfect words, the words adequate or fitting or proper to God—they found the right words, but they lived it. They lived it in a reality beyond words. They lived it in that divine silence out of which every word proceeds and to which every word takes us.

And they’re telling us that we can do it, too; we have to do it, too. And if we’re miserable and sinful, at least we should not deny it, not doubt it. And we should honor those who did it, like St. Gregory and all of the saints. We should believe them; we should trust them. We should know that they are just proving to us that the Bible and the Gospel is true, that it’s real, that knowledge and communion with God is what we are created for. That’s what life is. That’s what makes life life. And that’s the life that we’re trying to rediscover and recapture and find, and at least a little bit live by during this Great Lenten season.

Holy Father Gregory Palamas, with all the holy hesychasts and all the saints, pray to God—pray to Christ our God for us sinners, that we would receive the Spirit and through Christ come to know the one, true, and living God, and to know that that knowledge by experience is real, true, and possible. And that knowledge is eternal life itself.