Medieval Institute

In the latter portion of The Triads, St. Gregory Palamas describes deification as an event that is inclusive of the entirety of man’s being, inasmuch as he becomes “entirely God in his soul and body by grace”. This bold assertion on the part of St. Gregory is demonstrative of the way in which he consciously follows in the footsteps of his theological forebearer, St. Maximus the Confessor, by synthesizing Evagrian-style spirituality with Biblical anthropological presuppositions. Man qua being, for Palamas, can only be defined as such to the extent that he possesses both soul and body, both of which are eternally predetermined for deification. The ascetic life and the practice of the virtues therefore constitute not a rejection of the body or its powers, but rather function as a way of redirecting man away from an inordinate obsession with the physical world that he may become receptive to the deifying grace of God. In his rigorous defense of the practitioners of hesychia, Palamas makes it clear that he considers prayer and the ecstatic experience of the uncreated light to be events that are inclusive of man’s entire hypostasis, even asserting that man’s bodily senses become capable of participating in this foretaste of the eschata. My paper shall focus upon Palamas’ ‘eschatological’ view of the body and his insistence on the relevance of man’s somatic dimension in the spiritual life. I shall also strive to illuminate the ontological presuppositions of his synthesis that enable his anthropological perspective, with particular emphasis on those which he received from his predecessors. Finally, I will argue that the Incarnation is a sine qua non of his theology and, consequently, of his eschatology of body.

This essay examines Christos Yannaras’ critique of modern moral sensibilities and his arguments for the retrieval of what he terms a “Eucharistic ethos,” an approach that affirms an essentially ontological model of morality in which love and interpersonal communion function as the highest moral criteria. The point of departure is Yannaras’ genealogy of western epistemology and metaphysics, perhaps most concisely expressed in his thoughtful but challenging work Heidegger and the Areopagite. As he argues, Medieval Scholastic rejection of apophaticism inaugurates the reduction and eventual death of ontology, which, although diagnosed by Nietzsche, culminates in the solipsistic moralism of Immanuel Kant. This Kantian-style narcissism is the functional impetus, consciously or unconsciously, within modern moral sensibilities. The way back from the slow retreat into subjective individualism, as Yannaras suggests in his Freedom of Morality, is the re-establishment of a “Eucharistic ethos” in which ultimate human concerns again become the foundation for morality, as opposed to abstracted laws designed as markers for individual achievement. As I argue throughout, Yannaras’ makes a real contribution to Christian ethics and, moreover, finds himself in the illustrious company of thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams in recognizing and diagnosing the extent to which contemporary moral sensibilities have the tendency to be detached from authentic human concerns. Finally, in an attempt to build on Yannaras’ proposals, I critically discuss his own ontological suppositions, arguing that aspects of his personalist perspective work to seriously undermine his efforts to retrieve a Eucharistic ethos and, consequently, require reconsideration if his approach to morality is to have enduring resonance.

This paper briefly explores the ontological ethics of St. Maximus the Confessor in light of the modern shame/guilt distinction. As many prominent commentators have affirmed, a virtue-based or ontological sense of ethics is intrinsic to or at least presupposed by the Confessor's great theological synthesis. Appropriating but simultaneously transcending Aristotelian and Stoic naturalism, Maximus establishes the chief virtue of love as the ontological locus of being, the δύναµις that enables the eschatological wholeness of nature and a genuine reciprocity between rational beings. Inasmuch as every authentic virtue constitutes a manifestation of love and its nature-constituting properties, the habituation of virtue and the resulting disposition occurs in relation to an 'other'. The activity of virtue is an ontic movement towards one's Creator and fellow creatures, achieving a functional community of nature and a perichoretic relationship with the divine. Conversely, an unvirtuous disposition and the habituation of vice facilitate a rupture in nature and movement towards solipsism, a reality that is represented par excellence by Maximus's discussions of the ontological mechanisms involved in humanity's fall. As this essay proposes, the reciprocal or relational approach to virtue manifested in the Confessor's synthesis is consistent with the criteria of certain modern ethical approaches that affirm the natural superiority of shame over the individuating emotion of guilt. Indeed, it seems quite probable that Maximus would have great sympathy for Bernard Williams's endorsement of shame as an ethical emotion, insofar as it implies that the subject who undergoes shame is the member of a community who fails to live or act in a " cooperative or self-sacrificing manner. " The ethical dimensions of the Confessor's synthesis, therefore, constitute a very interesting and provocative alternative to the majority of contemporary Christian approaches to morals, which, in Kantian fashion, typically fixate upon the autonomous fulfilment of abstracted principles and rely on the inner-directed or insular emotion of guilt to correct behavioural lapses. In his provocative and challenging work, Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues for the inherent inadequacy of modern approaches to morality, outlooks that are dependent, in his view, upon modes of 'inner-directedness and guilt'. (1) Following Nietzsche's spirited critique of European morals in his Genealogy of Morals, Williams argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed a moral psychology to the modern western human that is primarily guided by