Photius, Palamas, and the Councils

Farrell completes his account of the First Europe with St. Photius’s Mystagogy as its formal dogmatic reply to the Second Europe, the Council of 879–880 as its conciliar rejection of the Filioque addition, and St. Gregory Palamas’s essence-energies distinction — ratified by the fourteenth-century Palamite councils — as the fully non-dialectical doctrine of God. This file expounds that constructive climax and connects it to the repository’s own collections on Photius and Palamas.

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

The Mystagogy as the Formal Reply

If the Cappadocians and Maximus lay the foundation (see The Cappadocian and Maximian Foundation), St. Photius the Great supplies, in Farrell’s reading, the First Europe’s formal dogmatic reply to the Second — the moment when the patristic doctrine of God turns and answers the Augustinian Filioque directly and at length. That reply is the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (c. 884–886), and it is not incidental that Farrell chose to translate it: the Mystagogy is, in the architecture of GHD, the First Europe’s constitutional document on the procession of the Spirit (see From Oxford to St. Tikhon’s; St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit).

Photius’s central arguments are exactly the ones Farrell’s whole book presupposes: the monarchy of the Father as the sole cause (aitia) and principle (archē) in the Trinity; the charge that the double procession introduces two causes (dyo aitia) into the Godhead and so destroys its unity; and the distinction between the eternal procession (ekporeusis) of the Spirit from the Father alone and the temporal mission of the Spirit through the Son in the economy (Photius, Mystagogy §§11, 14, 20, 29–30, trans. Farrell). For Farrell the Mystagogy is the First Europe stating, with full dogmatic precision, why the Second Europe’s construction cannot stand: it is the theology of the monarchy of the Father set formally against the theology of the simple essence (see The Two Triadologies).

The repository’s Photius collection also registers a nuance Farrell’s frame can obscure and which honesty requires: Photius’s strict “from the Father alone” (ek monou tou Patros) excludes even the per Filium for the eternal procession, stating the case more uncompromisingly than St. John of Damascus’s “from the Father alone, but through the Son,” and the later synthesis of Gregory of Cyprus and Palamas distinguished the eternal procession (from the Father alone) from the eternal manifestation through the Son. Photius is the foundation the tradition built on, not the last word (see St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; St. John of Damascus).

The Council of 879–880

Farrell gives conciliar weight to the Council of Constantinople of 879–880, which reunited East and West under Photius, reaffirmed the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed without the Filioque, and forbade any addition to it. In much Orthodox reckoning — and Farrell shares this emphasis — this council has a strong claim to be reckoned the Eighth Ecumenical Council, since it was a genuinely ecumenical synod, attended by legates of Pope John VIII, that ruled on the Filioque addition and on the standing of Photius (see St. Photius: The Council of 879–880; The Seven Ecumenical Councils). For Farrell the council is the First Europe’s formal, conciliar repudiation of the Second Europe’s creedal innovation — the point at which the whole Church, East and West together, still spoke against the addition. [Disputed: whether 879–880 is properly numbered the Eighth Ecumenical Council is itself a question on which Orthodox opinion varies and which the Church has not formally settled by a pan-Orthodox act; the repository’s own councils collection treats the canonical seven as the settled ecumenical series and notes 879–880’s strong but contested claim. Farrell’s emphasis belongs to the tradition that presses that claim.]

Palamas and the Essence-Energies Distinction

The constructive climax is St. Gregory Palamas and the essence-energies distinction, which Farrell presents as the fully articulated non-dialectical doctrine of God — the First Europe’s final answer to absolute divine simplicity (see Absolute Divine Simplicity). Palamas distinguishes the utterly transcendent, imparticipable divine essence from the uncreated energies in which God really communicates himself and is really participated — the same energies as the light of Tabor, the grace of deification, the glory in which the saints see God (see St. Gregory Palamas; Orthodoxy: Theosis).

For Farrell this distinction is decisive because it is non-dialectical in his precise sense: essence and energies are really distinct but not opposed, not defined by mutual negation, not related as thesis and antithesis. God is unknown in his essence and truly known in his energies, without contradiction and without dialectic — a real, positive self-giving of the personal God, grounded in the monarchy of the Father, that neither collapses into an absolutely simple essence nor generates a self-consuming logic. Where the Augustinian God is a simple essence in which opposed relations subsist (a “dialectical God”), the Palamite God is a communion of persons, self-giving in the energies (see What “Dialectic” Means). This is the theology Farrell holds out as the health of which the Second Europe is the pathology.

The Palamite Councils

The essence-energies distinction is not, for Farrell or for Orthodoxy, a private theologoumenon: it was dogmatized by the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351, which vindicated Palamas against Barlaam of Calabria and his successors and which the Orthodox Church receives as authoritative (the Synodikon of Orthodoxy incorporates their affirmations). Farrell reads these councils as the First Europe’s formal dogmatic settlement of the doctrine of God — the conciliar seal on the non-dialectical theology, set against the increasingly rationalized and absolutely-simple God of the Latin scholastic West (see St. Gregory Palamas). Here Farrell stands on firm dogmatic ground: the Palamite councils and their essence-energies dogma are Orthodox teaching, and his exposition of them is sound. The contested element remains only the frame — the claim that this constitutes one civilization’s total theology set against another’s total pathology (see The Scholarly Debate).

The First Europe, Rightly Received

Across both files, the pattern is consistent. Farrell’s constructive theology of the First Europe — the Cappadocian monarchy, the Maximian vision, the Photian Mystagogy, the Council of 879–880, and the Palamite essence-energies distinction ratified by the fourteenth-century councils — is, in its dogmatic substance, simply Orthodox theology, expounded by a competent scholar. What is Farrell’s own is the historiographical use he makes of it: casting it as one seamless civilizational theology in total opposition to a dialectical West. The reader receives the theology as the Church’s, and holds the sweeping opposition as Farrell’s thesis (see What the Reader Can Take With Confidence).

See Also

References

  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
  • Photius. The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987. §§11, 14, 20, 29–30.
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. London: Faith Press, 1964; and Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Papadakis, Aristeides. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994 (on the Council of 879–880).