The Neo-Palamite Lineage Farrell Radicalizes

Farrell did not invent the East-West grand narrative; he radicalizes a distinguished twentieth-century lineage — Vladimir Lossky, Fr. John Romanides, and Fr. John Meyendorff — the “neo-patristic” and “neo-Palamite” theologians who made the monarchy of the Father, the essence-energies distinction, and the Filioque the hinges of a story about the divergence of West from East. This file sets out that lineage precisely, so the reader can see what Farrell inherits and where he goes beyond his teachers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. neo-patristic theology)

Farrell’s Debts

God, History, and Dialectic stands at the far end of a well-defined tradition of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, and reading it well means seeing the tradition behind it. The core theses of GHD — that the unity of God is grounded in the monarchy of the Father and not the common essence; that the essence-energies distinction is the mark of authentic theology; that the Filioque is the symptom of a Western essence-first Trinitarianism; and that these differences have wide historical consequences — are not Farrell’s discoveries. They are the common patrimony of the neo-patristic synthesis and its neo-Palamite wing, and Farrell inherits them from three great figures in particular.

Vladimir Lossky

Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) is the fountainhead. His The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944; ET 1957) located the deep root of the East-West divergence in the Filioque and in the Western tendency to begin Trinitarian theology from the one essence rather than from the Father’s monarchy, and it made the essence-energies distinction and the apophatic-mystical character of Eastern theology central to the modern Orthodox self-understanding (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [1957]). Lossky is the source of the very framework GHD assumes: essence-first West versus person-first East, with the Filioque as the pivot. But Lossky was measured: he wrote dogmatic and mystical theology, not a total causal history, and he did not make Augustine the villain of a civilizational drama (see St. Augustine: The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion, which places Lossky’s framing as “more measured than Romanides”).

Fr. John Romanides

Fr. John S. Romanides (1927–2001) is the figure Farrell most resembles and most extends. In The Ancestral Sin (Greek 1957) and above all in Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine (1981), Romanides turned the Losskian dogmatic contrast into a historical and cultural thesis: Augustine’s theology represents a systematic “Franco-Latin” deviation — on original sin as inherited guilt, on the eudaimonistic and philosophical conception of God, on the loss of the essence-energies distinction, on the Filioque — which the Carolingian and scholastic West built into a whole theology structurally opposed to Orthodox theosis (Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine [1981]; see St. Augustine: The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). Romanides even framed the divergence in ethnic-political terms (Romans versus Franks) and made it the key to European history.

Farrell is, in effect, Romanides pushed to a system. Where Romanides gestured at a cultural thesis and concentrated on a set of doctrinal deviations, Farrell builds the total theological history — the “dialectic” as the master-category, the derivation of scholasticism, the Reformation, and secularization — that Romanides implied but did not fully construct (see Farrell’s Reading of Augustine; The Cultural Consequences). Farrell belongs to the Romanides pole and stands at its maximal end.

Fr. John Meyendorff

Fr. John Meyendorff (1926–1992) supplies the scholarly ballast, especially on Palamas. His A Study of Gregory Palamas (1959; ET 1964) and Byzantine Theology (1974) established the essence-energies distinction and the procession/manifestation distinction as central to the modern account of Byzantine theology, and credited Photius with the classic distinction between the eternal procession and the temporal mission of the Spirit (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology [1974]; see St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit). Meyendorff was a rigorous historian, more cautious than Romanides about sweeping civilizational claims, but his work provided the Palamite scholarship on which the neo-Palamite narrative — and GHD’s constructive Volume I — rests (see Photius, Palamas, and the Councils).

What the Lineage Gives Farrell, and Where He Departs

The lineage matters for a fair assessment in two ways. First, it shows that GHD’s dogmatic and theological core is not idiosyncratic: the monarchy of the Father, the essence-energies distinction, the critique of the Filioque and of absolute divine simplicity are the shared teaching of a serious and influential school of modern Orthodox theology, and much of it is simply Orthodox dogma (see The First Europe). A reader tempted to dismiss GHD because of its author’s later career (see The Second Career) should recognize that its theology is largely Lossky’s, Romanides’s, and Meyendorff’s, not Farrell’s private construction.

Second, it shows precisely where Farrell departs: in the degree of systematization and the reach of the causal claim. Lossky was dogmatic and measured; Meyendorff was a careful historian; even Romanides, the most polemical, did not build the complete dialectical machine that GHD attempts. Farrell takes the lineage’s genuine insight — that there is a real and consequential difference between Eastern and Western Trinitarian theology — and inflates it into a mono-causal theory of European civilization. That inflation is his own, and it is exactly the point at which the lineage itself has been challenged from the other side of the scholarly debate, by the critics of the “de Régnon paradigm” (see The De Régnon Paradigm Critique).

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957 (French orig. 1944).
  • Romanides, John S. Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981; The Ancestral Sin, trans. George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002 (Greek orig. 1957).
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964; Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.