06 — The First Europe

Farrell’s constructive account of the theology he takes to be healthy: the Cappadocian monarchy of the Father and the primacy of person over essence, St. Maximus the Confessor’s Christological and cosmic completion of it, St. Photius’s Mystagogy as its formal reply to the Filioque, the Council of 879–880, and St. Gregory Palamas’s essence-energies distinction as the fully non-dialectical doctrine of God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine (patristic and conciliar theology)

Overview

The polemic of GHD is remembered, but its constructive half is where Farrell writes closest to his own competence and closest to plain Orthodox teaching. This section expounds that constructive foundation and links it throughout to the repository’s collections on the Fathers and councils it draws upon. The consistent finding: the dogmatic substance — the monarchy of the Father, the Maximian vision, the Photian refutation of the Filioque, the 879–880 council, the Palamite essence-energies distinction dogmatized in the fourteenth century — is Orthodox theology soundly expounded; what is Farrell’s own, and contested, is the historiographical frame that casts it as one civilization’s total theology set against another’s total pathology (the “de Régnon paradigm” that recent scholarship questions).

Files in This Section

  • The Cappadocian and Maximian Foundation — the monarchy of the Father (Basil, the two Gregories), the irreducibility of person to essence, and Maximus’s logoi-cosmology and dyothelite anthropology; with an honest note on where the sharp East-West contrast is contested and on the awkwardness of Maximus’s Letter to Marinus.
  • Photius, Palamas, and the Councils — the Mystagogy as the formal reply, the Council of 879–880 (and the disputed “Eighth Ecumenical” claim), and the Palamite essence-energies distinction ratified by the councils of 1341/1347/1351.

See Also