Ep 45: Gregory Palamas [feat. Christiaan Kappes]

[@brandoncummins7813]

Nice video!

[@Jerônimo_de_Estridão]

1:05:00 St. Saul saw a light that blinded his physical eyeballs while the guys on his side didn't saw anything. Damascene talks about how moses really saw with his eyes the immaterial fire in the burning bush, but for that he needed to purify the "eye of his soul first". It is a paradox, but Palamas affirmations to Barlaan and to his sheeps is not necessarelly contradictory.

[@johnjoyce8518]

I didn’t realize you weren’t taking questions so I’ll just put my live chant questions here in case Fr Kappes is able to answer them or if you or anyone else has any insight: Has the Church ever given a definitive answer to the question about the beatific vision in via? And if not where did the debate go in the later Middle Ages? I’m familiar with the opinion about St Paul expressed by Thomas and Bonaventure but didn’t understand the reference to Benedict XII. Also, why couldn’t the mediating energy/operation between uncreated and created being be simply “Incarnation”?

[@AdithiaKusno]

I am a subdeacon in Byzantine Catholic Church. Based on what I learned in seminary under Fr Kappes it seems that the Church has left this question open without definitive dogma on it. My own personal articulation of this debate is that Thomists would understand beatific vision analogous to seeing God in heaven via zoom call. What they would see is truly God but via created effects of pixelation on their zoom screen. Palamism argues in heaven we would truly see God via our own deified eyeballs not through another created effects. So the difference is not in the existence of created effects or not. Both Thomism and Palamism agree in created effects. Our own eyeballs were created effects. But the difference is that we Palamites don't call this created effects but rather deified and divine theosis. A parallel of this would be equivalent of saying that the Father eternally out of time created the Son instead of eternally out of time caused the Son. Notice how similar concept could have different implications.