Byzantine Hesychasm: Luminosity and Transfiguration of the Human in the Uncreated Light

Abstract

The philosophical foundations of the Byzantine Hesychasm in the context of interrelationship between the human being and God in the uncreated Divine Light are taken under consideration. Some doctrines that precede the late Hesychasm and Gregory Palama and palamites’ teaching are analyzing in this sense. The forming of Hesychasm as a trend of the Byzantine thought is discussed in the article, starting from the early period of the Eastern Christian Empire’s history. The conceptions of Hermit Fathers (Evagrius Ponticus and Macarius of Egypt), John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai are showed. The most important philosophical ideas of the Eastern Patristics are presented as a gradual emergence of the coherent mystical Christian doctrine of the Hesychasm. The authors pay a special attention to the reflection of the anthropological and epistemological provisions of Gregory Palama and his fellows’ theology which can be seen as a peculiar axiological space of the Late Byzantine’s culture. The peculiarity of the Hesychast religious gnosis is considered, being conveyed in Palama’s narrations of the ways of knowing God by a human through the uncreated Tabor light. The essence of the God-knowing process is reflected by the Byzantine thinker’s teaching about the transfigured nature of the human being, that has become perfect and deified due to the deep perception of the Divine light. The Hesychast Tabor light is a mean of the human and God’ spiritual unity, that converted a nature of an individual into luminous beginning. The transfiguration of the human, their luminosity “by the God’s grace” endow the human and God by a feature of comparability, however, incomparable with any other created being. The movement to the luminous transfiguration of the human is demonstrated as a twofold process—from God to the human and, vice versa, from the human to God, another word as a mutual activity of theosis and kenosis.     

Keywords:

Byzantine Philosophy,, Christianity,, Hesychasm, he Divine (Tabor) Light, Transfiguration, Deification