‘What of Stephen, the first martyr,’ Palamas asks, ‘whose face, even while he was yet living, shone like the face of an angel? Did not his body experience divine things? Is not such an experience and the activity allied to it common to soul and body?’ In other words, the Holy Martyr Stephen was not transported out of his body to meet the Lord his body was already shining with Uncreated Light before his martyrdom – this is the charismatic work of the Spirit. What this means, Palamas says, is that it is in the body that the Spirit works to manifest his charismatic works.
#WORLD MAP TAKE ME DEEPER THAN MY FEET COULD EVER WANDER FREE#
In such a way, the body, which was once enslaved to sin, becomes united to G-d, set free from sin, and deified. Replying to this, he says that the recollection of the soul (the nous) into the body is actually the way that G-d unites himself to us, which means that the body will not be filled with darkness, but with G-d’s light. This is because one of the main objections to hesychasm, it seems in the Triads, is that the soul will be ‘nailed’ to the body, filling the soul with ‘darkness’ ( Triads, II.ii.12). It turns out that Palamas himself writes about the charismata, the experience of the divine presence that works wonders through the material body. Spending the day re-reading part of Palamas’s Triads, I found even more surprising insights about hesychasm and the body. It’s been a rather charismatic day for me: when I took communion today, I felt a deep sense of G-d’s presence within me, and it reminded me a lot of the charismatic moments that permeated my life even before I became Eastern Catholic. I feel like I have been basking in the Uncreated Light of Tabor on this Sunday of Holy Gregory Palamas. Weitzmann: “Die Ikone” – PD-Art, via Wikimedia Commons 92 x 64 cm, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai (Egypt) / K. Loca sancta icon from the 12th (13th?) century.
0 kommentar(er)
