Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 1 part 21/21

This alone would not suffice merely to convict him as a writer of falsehoods, but in addition to rank the saints together with the heretics (for it is their teaching that only he who has learned by experience clearly knows the energies of the Spirit, whereas he insists that those who say this are heretics); this, then, would have sufficed even to convict him as an accuser of the saints after Christ. But this did not satisfy him; rather, he employed a second and a third, and yet very many further methods against them — or rather, against himself.

For where the saints, in their several writings, seem in some instances to differ from one another, he, siding at one time with the statement of this one, at another with that one, uses it shamelessly to attack the others, and makes them altogether outcasts and rejects, so as even to subject them to excommunications and anathemas.

…using him as incorporeal, he marshaled him against the other saints — as many as have said that the mind is in the heart — and immediately numbered them among the heretics, as though arrayed against the truth.

But we have clearly demonstrated, both in the Hagioritic Tome against those who hold such views, and in the second discourse On Prayer, that they are in harmony with one another even on this point, and that we ourselves are in harmony with them.

But hear again how he ranged the Nyssen himself among the heretics. For Gregory, having said of the protomartyr Stephen that he beheld the divine not while remaining within human nature and power, but having been commingled with the grace of the Holy Spirit — since it is attested by Scripture that like is beheld by like; for if the glory of the Father and the Son became capable of being received by human nature, then he who declares the vision to be incapable of being received speaks falsely; yet it is not necessary either that Gregory should be lying while the scriptural narrative remains true — Gregory having clearly said these things in his encomium on the divine Stephen, Barlaam in many ways enrolls the saint among the heretics, on account of the grace and the commingling (for he does not securely perceive the force of what is said); and above all, he casts out from the chorus of the Orthodox the one who said these things, calling him — by way of slander — a Messalian and a Vlachernite on account of the vision, setting against him those who say that God is invisible.

'But what,' he says, 'of the fact that man, having become above man, sees God?'

'For he might become an angel — yet the greatest of our theologians falls short of the least of the angels; and even if we should grant that he became an angel,' he says, 'still not even angels see the essence of God.'

To whom one might justly say: you are the disciple of wicked angels; for it is from them that you have been initiated to become an accuser of the saints.

But not even when the king wishes to grant a soldier the honor of speaking with him face to face would that soldier thereby immediately become a general, nor, because he then stands nearer, has he on that account acquired the rank of commander-in-chief.

'But it is not possible,' he says, 'for God to meet with man except through an angel; for we are hierarchically governed through angels.'

Do you impose necessities upon him who is also the Lord of necessities, who dissolves them whenever he wills, and sometimes even completely transforms them?

Tell me, then: which of the angels was it who said to Moses, 'I am He who is, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,' if not the Son of God, as the great Basil also says?

And what of that which is written in the Exodus of Israel, that the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man would speak to his own friend?

And as for the one who conversed with Abraham, when he swore by himself — if indeed he was an angel — how does the Apostle say that he had no one greater by whom to swear?

But if, under the shadow of the Law, God himself was pleased to converse with the fathers, how is it that, now that the truth has been made manifest and the law of grace has been made clear — according to which not an angel, not a man, but the Lord himself saved us, and the very Spirit of God has taught us all truth — God will not manifest himself, through himself, to the saints?

Or shall we suppose that he did not disdain to become man for our sake, and endured the cross and death on our behalf, and this while we were still impious…

…as the Apostle says — and yet he will disdain, immediately and without mediation, to dwell in man, to appear to him, and to converse with him — and this not merely to a pious man, but to one sanctified, and who through the keeping of the divine commandments has beforehand purified both body and mind, and has thereby made himself a vehicle and a straight yoke-team of the all-powerful Spirit?

This, indeed, the divine Gregory of Nyssa himself also demonstrates: after mentioning that heavenly and supernatural vision of Stephen, he says, 'Was this achievement, then, of human nature?'

'Was it perhaps some angel who raised that lowly nature up to such a height?'

'These things are not so; for it is not so written that Stephen, having become great in power or full of angelic assistance, saw what he saw, but that Stephen, being full of the Holy Spirit, saw the glory of God and the only-begotten Son of God.'

…as the prophet said, the light is seen, without being perceived by means of created light.

Here, then, he spoke of a vision made receivable through the Spirit, but not of knowledge; and 'no one has seen God' — taking this in that sense, and setting it, by way of aporia, against the spiritual vision of Stephen, he brought forward the resolution most beautifully and most piously.

Moreover, in addition to these things, he did not say that the essence is containable or visible, but rather the glory of the Father and the grace of the Spirit.

'But I,' he says, 'hearing that this grace and this glory are supernatural and similar to God — for, as he says, like is perceived by like — therefore, since it is uncreated and without beginning, I say that this is the essence of God.'

And it cannot be so, O theologian who stands arrayed against the saints (for be well assured that you will by no means escape the notice of those who know, even though, concealing the names, you slyly put forward the sacred thought of the saints as though it belonged to some alien-minded person) — can it not, then, be that a supernatural energy of God, without beginning and uncreated, exists, and that, by wholly making God manifest (p.

) it is, by itself, similar to God for those who supernaturally behold in the Spirit?

'Far from it!' he says; 'for the essence of God alone is uncreated and without beginning, whereas every energy of his is created.'

What impiety! For either God does not have natural and essential energies — and whoever says this is godless (for this, he says, is directly [to say] that God does not exist; for the holy fathers plainly say, according to the divine Maximus, that no nature whatsoever either exists or is known apart from its essential energy) — either, then, there are no essential and natural divine energies, and consequently there is no God at all; or, if there are divine energies, natural and essential, but these are created, then the essence of God possessing them will also be created; for that essence and nature whose natural and essential energies are created, that very nature and essence possessing them both exists and is known as created.

Tell me, then: whence do we know Christ in two energies and two natures, if the natural energies of God are not uncreated?

What, then? Is not the will of God an energy of the nature of God?

Is, then, the will of the uncreated created?

And is it, then, also subject to time and to a beginning, and did it acquire a willing which it did not have before the ages?

Thus, by his novel utterances, this wretched man does injury not only to the divine nature but also to the sojourn of the Savior in the flesh; and, wishing to be an accuser of Christians, he has cast himself out of the pious fullness of Christians, proven by his own arguments to be a monophysite and a monothelite, worse than any who have ever appeared.

For if, according to his arguments, every energy of God — apart from the essence of God that first energizes all things — had a temporal beginning, and every energy of God is necessarily created, then Christ did not, in accordance with nature, possess both created and uncreated energies (p.

) but only created ones; he was, then, of a single energy — and that not divine, as those heretics of evil belief once said — for all these fall under the category of the created; and if he was of a single energy, he was necessarily also of a single nature — and this again not divine, according to the monophysites of old, but created; for that nature whose energy is created is not itself uncreated.

Furthermore, if God does not have beginningless energies — he who is beyond them, inasmuch as that which acts thus surpasses what is acted upon — how then is he pre-beginningless and beyond-beginningless?

For, according to the great Dionysius, God would not be 'super-God' unless the reality of the deifying gift were called 'divinity' — which perpetually exists from the ever-existing God, according to the divine Maximus (for if one should not grant this, those who are deified would participate in the essence of God and would be gods by nature). Just as, then, if the grace of deification did not exist, God would not be called 'super-God,' so likewise he would not be called 'beyond-beginningless' unless, as the divine Maximus says, immortality, infinity, the very reality of being, and all that is beheld essentially concerning God, are beginningless works of God.

By such grace, according to the same saint, man becomes beginningless, just as Melchizedek is testified to have had neither beginning of days nor end of life; and everyone who, according to Paul, lives the divine and eternal life of the Word dwelling within him — how could this be, unless the grace itself were beginningless?

'But even if one should grant,' he says, 'that the divine energies are uncreated, no one has seen them, unless they have become created.'

That, then, those energies never become created, but only the things that participate [in them] are created — since the things participated in preexist in God — and that, were this not so, created things would participate in the essence of God, which is more absurd than anything else, let us for now leave aside.

But neither do we see far-off things as though they were before our eyes (p.

) nor future things as though they were present, nor do we know God's will concerning us unless it comes to pass; yet the prophets have known even the counsel existing in God before the ages, though not yet accomplished.

Thus also the chosen among the disciples, as you hear the Church chant — unless your ears have been made deaf — saw on Tabor the essential and everlasting comeliness of God, not the glory of God as it comes from created things, as you yourself have basely supposed, but that very supra-luminous splendor of the archetypal beauty, that very formless form of divine loveliness, through which man is deified and accounted worthy of divine converse face to face; that very everlasting and unending kingdom of God; that very light beyond intellect and unapproachable — a heavenly light, boundless, timeless, everlasting, a light flashing forth incorruption, a light that deifies those who are deified. For they saw that very grace of the Spirit which they afterward came to have dwelling within them; for there is one grace of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, which, though they saw it with bodily eyes, yet with eyes opened — so that from blind they became seeing, according to the divine John of Damascus — and thus beheld that uncreated light, which even in the age to come will be beheld unceasingly by the saints alone, according to holy Dionysius and Maximus.

Do you see that the saints, through the Spirit, having transcended themselves, behold the divine energies in God which are invisible to created power?

'For he who has been accounted worthy,' he says, 'to come to be in God, will know all the principles of beings preexisting in Him, according to a certain simple and undivided knowledge; and again, when the soul has been gathered together to itself and to God, the reasoning that still divides it into multiplicity and by way of conception will no longer exist, once its head has been crowned with the first, sole, and one Logos and God (p.

) — in whom, according to a single incomprehensible simplicity, all the principles of beings preexist uniformly; gazing fixedly upon whom, who is not outside it but is wholly present, whole, within it, by a simple contact, the soul itself will also know the principles of beings, on account of which, perhaps, before being wedded to the Logos and God, it was led about by divisive methods.'

Do you see how those who have come to be in God, and have been deified, and gaze upon Him in a manner inspired by God, do not see as we do?

For they see wondrously, by sense, things beyond sense, and by intellect, things beyond intellect, the power of the Spirit coming to be present in human faculties, through which they see the things that are beyond us.

Since we, then, always join together with sense that which is beyond sense — so that, along with its supernatural character, the name-transcending character of that vision too might be shown — the sophist of wickedness, sophistically dividing what we have joined, supposes he is saying something against us, and deceives those who are childish in understanding, prattling as though we suppose the divine to be perceptible by sense — just as if one were to say this of you who affirm that God has an essence, or of those who hold that the universal is something contemplated by bare conception alone and does not truly exist, or is something belonging to particulars.

To whom I would say what we too said to this man, rightly named the 'Latin-Greek': you seem to understand the discourses concerning God the way an ox or an ass understands those who sing.

For thus you accuse us, mishearing what we say as spiritual and beyond intellect, as though we spoke of it as something sensible; and although what pertains to a thing is most different from what a thing is in itself, you yourself hear them as identical — just as you do also regarding those things about God which you consider to be its natural properties.

'But God,' he says, 'will differ in nothing from the things that are seen, if he is seen from the things around him; for each of these visible things is seen not from what belongs to it in itself, but from what is around it (p.

) that it is seen; for sight does not apprehend the essence of the sun, but the things around it.'

First of all, then, from the very example you yourself have proposed, you show yourself to be a willing slanderer of God and his saints; for there is the sun and the ray, and that from which the ray takes its name — yet there are not, on this account, two suns; likewise, then, God is one, even though the deifying grace that comes from God is theologically spoken of as divinity; and the light belongs among the things around the sun — it is not, therefore, the essence of the sun.

How, then, is the light which, from God, shines upon the saints, the essence of God?

Does it come into being when it is seen, or did it also exist before being seen?

Much more, surely, does this light preexist — the light that deifies those who behold it.

Furthermore, if on this account God differs in no way from any of the things seen, how then, pray, is he not seen by you and those like you — or rather, even by men far better than you?

Let your eyes, then, being blind to the light beheld by the saints, and let your mouth, blaspheming such things against that divine light — teaching that it is not natural, nor visible through the air — be stopped.

By insisting so strongly on this, you have left not even the age to come unassailed; for while those who speak of God plainly say that we shall then have no need of air and of the light that comes through it, you declare this light — which is not receivable by the faculty of sense, the beauty of the age to come that abides — to be sensible, and maintain that even then it will be visible through air.

'But even if I am beset with weakness with regard to such a light,' he says, 'yet, having ears open, I hear one who says that God is sketched in outline by the intellect alone, from the things around him, illuminating our ruling faculty to such a degree — and this even for those who have been purified — as the swiftness of a flash of lightning that does not remain still.' You truly seem like a blind man being taught about light by one of those who see — one who, before he has finished listening to his teacher, through his surpassing folly, as though he himself knew better and were about to teach him (p.

) rises up against his teacher.

For this reason God, at the beginning, shines around exceedingly faintly to the intellect alone, so that by what is graspable he may draw [the soul] toward himself, while by what is ungraspable he may be marveled at; and being marveled at, he may be desired the more; and being desired, he may purify.

No; for this purification, according to the fathers, does not require great effort to attain, and it is naturally prone to fall easily from its purity; wherefore it could also be attained apart from divine longing, as this theologian has shown; and such purification is fitting for those who are being introduced [to the life of prayer].

But divine longing, purifying every faculty and power of soul and body, and rendering the purification of the intellect more abiding, makes man receptive of the deifying grace.

Therefore that which is divine, being experienced, purifies; and purifying, it renders souls god-formed; and to those who have become such, God, as to his own, already converses — my argument dares something bold — being united to and known by gods; and perhaps to such an extent as he already knows those who are known by him.

Where here is the faintness of the illumination?

'For to the extent,' he says, 'that God knows them, to that same extent, perhaps,' he says, 'they too know God.'

Not by faint impulses of discursive thought, as he said when beginning his discourse, but by knowing God in God, and having already become god-formed through union with him, and by a god-formed power laying hold upon the most divine graces of the Spirit — upon which it is impossible for those who are not god-formed, and who seek the things concerning God by intellect alone, to fix their gaze.

But that the one who has experienced this knows God by the grace that makes man god-formed — this has already become clear.

But whence shall we know that this grace is also light?

From the same author again, or also from another of those who teach through experience.

'...the hidden mystery of simplicity,' he adds; 'according to which, beholding the light of the unseen and ineffable-beyond-utterance glory, they too become, together with the powers above, receptive of that blessed purity.'

But whence do we know that this light is also deification?

Hear again from the same author: for having spoken of the manner, insofar as attainable, of the union of God with those who are being deified — a union that occurs after the manner of soul to body, so that the whole man may be deified, being made divine by the grace of God who became man — he adds: the whole man remaining what he is in soul and body, because of the grace and the divine splendor of that blessed glory which becomes wholly fitting to him throughout.

Do you see how that light is the splendor of God?

What then — is the splendor of God a created thing?

But hear what follows: after which it is not possible to conceive of anything more splendid or more exalted; for what is more desirable to those who are worthy than deification?

Have you heard that this splendor is deification, and that for those accounted worthy there is nothing more exalted than this contemplation?

But do you wish to learn that this is the means by which God is united to those who are worthy?

Hear again what follows: according to which God, being united to those who have become gods, makes them wholly his own through his goodness.

This, then, is the deifying gift, which the most radiant luminary of the Areopagus of Athens, calling it 'divinity,' says that God is beyond.

Where now is your knowledge, and your imitation, and your abstraction, by which you hasten to strip away from the many even the knowledge, from faith, of that true imitation of God which is above us?

'But has he not also said,' he says, 'that God is beyond the Non-Being that is by way of transcendence — even though he addressed him as beyond this divinity?'

To you, certainly, he has not spoken, I know well; for he speaks not to (p.

) your ears, but to the ears of those who truly hear; for he is blessed.

For when he says that God possesses the superessential in a superessential manner, what else does he mean than that, since that Non-Being which is by way of transcendence is itself superessential, God is beyond even this, possessing the superessential in a superessential way?

And what of him who says — or rather, of those who say (for they are one, according to the Lord's prayer, and by naming one we bring forward all the saints) — what, then, of those who say that God is infinitely removed even from deification in its superessential mode?

And what of him who said that the transcendence of God is beyond every affirmation and negation?

Do they not say that God is beyond the Non-Being that is by way of transcendence, and beyond the uncreated immortality, life, and goodness — even though you, unable to gaze up to the height of their sound theology, have — alas for the audacity! alas for the deception you have suffered! — plainly called them impious, all of them, and cast them out?

But they, taking no account of you or of your base-minded opinion and your all-daring tongue, have added, upon all such things, 'infinitely, infinite times over' to the divine transcendence, knowing it to be ineffable, alike beyond all concepts and all words.

But how this man has also made virtue into vice must be shown briefly.

He says that dispassion is the deadening, as a fixed habitual state, of the passible faculty.

For its energies, he says, blind and bury the divine eye above all else; therefore this faculty must not be permitted to be active in respect of any of its powers.

For these too are energies of the passible faculty; for it is by this power of the soul that we love and turn away, that we feel affinity and become estranged. The lovers of the good, therefore, effect a transposition—

—of this power, but not a deadening: not shutting it up motionless within themselves, but displaying it active in the love toward God and neighbor, on which two commandments, according to the word of the Lord, the whole Law and the Prophets hang.

But if these bury the divine eye and render him who lives according to them subject to the passions, which of the other virtues is not a vice?

And having engendered the same slander against the fathers of our own time, he set it forth in his own words—while we glory in having become partakers of the outrage committed against the saints; for assuredly we shall also share the blessing with them.

However, it is fitting to observe this: that if someone should wish to call, as it were, a single satanic treatise the wicked heresies from of old until now—divided into chapters comprising those that grew up at various times and in various ways through the instigations of that one [the devil]—then this book of the ‘Latin-Greek’ is the epilogue of them all.

For neither, having falsely accused God’s Old Testament, did he spare the New; nor, having sinned against the divine nature, did he leave unassailed God’s sojourn in the flesh; nor, having insulted spiritual contemplation, did he leave the practice of virtue unslandered; nor, having attacked the life of the blessed men in the present age, did he fail to lay his hands also upon the things of the age to come—but he assailed, so to speak, absolutely everything good and sacred and divine, whether present or past, whether within our power or not within our power, whether hoped for or already furnished as a kind of pledge to the worthy, both to the saints before the Law and to those after the Law; of whom, against but a few—

—each one of those who led the heresies, in his own turn, set himself in opposition; but this man, having now arrayed himself in common opposition to all of them, has produced a treatise full of every dreadful heresy, which in many ways slanders all the saints and almost all their teachings—so much so that it would be easy for us, having set forth a few syllables of each of the saints, then, upon rereading this wicked tablet, immediately to make it clear to everyone that he does not shrink from calling those who wrote them heretics and impious, atheists and polytheists, and accursed men.

If, then, someone who disbelieves us truly wishes to see the truth, let him come to us and learn, since such writings have been openly set forth; but if, whether with good reason or without, he chooses to embrace the accuser of the saints, he himself shall bear his own judgment, whoever he may be.