Eastern Orthodox scholar Marcus Plested has done much work in correcting historical errors that have been a cause of dispute between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Surprisingly, he has noted that there was a positive reception and influence of Augustine in the work of Gregory Palamas. He writes:
Reinhard Flogaus and John Demetracopoulos have separately put together a persuasive case that Palamas made frequent use of Augustine, drawing directly and at time verbally on the translation of De Trinitate made by Maximos Planoudes in the late 13th century. Gregory’s encounter with Augustine is especially evident in Chapters 34-37 and 125-135 of the One Hundred Fifty Chapters and in other works from the mid-to-late 1340s onwards. In one very revealing case from the late 1350s, Palamas introduces a quotation from Augustine with the words, “For as one of the wise and apostolic men has said.” He does not give the name; he simply refers to Augustine as one of the wise and apostolic men. This reluctance to name the source speaks volumes not only of Gregory’s conviction of the authority of Augustine but also of the need for certain discretion in appealing to that authority. Other instances uncovered so far encompass a wide range of subjects: from the motives of the Incarnation, to the meaning of death, the four kinds of logos within man, and to God’s possession of goodness and wisdom not as quality but as essence.
Given the prevalence of an essentialist versus personalist paradigm in Palamas’s scholarship, East/West, it is intriguing to find Palamas himself countenancing Augustine even at his most essentialist. This calls for a little more discussion beginning with Chapter 36. Here the Holy Spirit is likened to an ineffable love of the begetter toward the begotten. The Son possesses this love, writes Palamas, as co-proceeding from the Father and Himself, and as resting co-naturally in Him. The Spirit is not only of the Father but also of the Son, and the Son possesses the Spirit as the spirit of truth, wisdom, and word. The Spirit is, moreover, intimated in Proverbs 8:30 when the Logos declares, “I was she who rejoiced together with him.” This verse leaves Palamas to conclude that this pre-eternal rejoicing of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit who is, as has been said, common to both. But this does not, he is careful to note, detract in any way from the fact that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father alone according to his being.”
So Palamas is clearly ruling out any hint of the Latin Filioque in respect to origination. But he is equally clearly not confining co-procession to the temporal mission of the Spirit: he is certainly speaking of the immanent divine life of the Trinity. There are antecedents for this kind of language in the Byzantine tradition: Maximus the Confessor’s intuition of the fundamental congruity of procession “through” and “from” the Son; St. John of Damascus’s eternal “resting” of the Spirit in the Son; or Gregory of Cyprus’s eternal “shining forth” of the Spirit through the Son. But such precedents cannot explain away the astonishing parallels with Augustine’s notion of the Spirit as the “mutual love” of Father and Son. The fact that Palamas proceeds immediately to propose a Trinitarian image in man in terms of the operation of mind, knowledge, and love only serves to make the connection with Augustine unmistakable.
This sympathetic but not uncritical reception of some key features of Augustine’s Trinitarian teaching is, at first sight, puzzling. Palamas is known to have been a fierce opponent of the Latin Filioque and it seems very strange to find him embracing some of the key images of Augustine, the foremost expositor of this doctrine. In his anti-Latin Apodictic Treatises of 1336, Palamas insists in no uncertain terms on procession from the Father alone. But upon closer inspection, Palamas reveals himself to be rather more than an uncompromising monopatrist unable to think, that is, beyond the purely temporal mission or sending of the Spirit by the Son. Perfectly aware that some Greek patristic texts, such as Cyril of Alexandria’s Thesaurus involve the Son in the eternal procession of the Spirit in some way, Palamas produces a remarkably constructive approach to the whole problem.
Palamas is very clear that there can be no talk of the procession of the hypostasis of the Spirit from the hypostasis of the Son. The Spirit has his particular mode of being from the hypostasis of the Father alone. But we can speak of the Spirit as being from the Father and from the Son, or from the Father through the Son, in terms of nature. Because of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, the Spirit may be said, and this is a quote from Palamas, “to be naturally from the Son and from his essence,” manifesting thereby the Spirit’s own consubstantiality with the Father and the Son. This eternal divine movement has a temporal counterpart: The Spirit, writes Palamas, eternally flows-forth from the Father into the Son and becomes manifest in the saints from the Father through the Son. So, it is nothing new to say that the Spirit goes forth from the Son and from his nature. Alongside this procession from the nature of the Son, the Spirit is also given, sent, poured out, and goes out through and from the Son to the worthy.
To sum up this section, while scarcely sympathetic to or especially when informed about the contemporary Latin position on the Filioque, Palamas nonetheless offers in the Apodictic Treatises a very constructive Orthodox take on this difficult question. He allows for what we might call an “Orthodox filioque” both in respect to the eternal divine life and the manifestation of the divine energia among creatures. But he remains adamant that the hypostasis of the Father is the sole originating principle of the divinity. So, there can certainly be no question of adding the offending word to the Creed or of accepting the Filioque in terms of origination. Nonetheless, Palamas’s capacity to embrace co-possession on both eternal and temporal planes helped prepare the ground for the remarkably positive reception of Augustine’s Trinitarian teaching evident in subsequent works as the One Hundred Fifty Chapters. This is not the case of a simple Easterner being so impressed by Augustine as to embrace some of Augustine’s ideas at the expense of the coherence of his own doctrine. No, Augustine appealed to Palamas precisely because of the underlying similarity of their approaches to the mystery of the Trinity. Palamas has an acute sense of the unity of the Godhead that is quite as essentialist as anything one might find in Augustine but remains, like Augustine, properly alive to the distinction of persons.
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But the basic fact that an archetypal Easterner (Palamas) should embrace an archetypal Westerner (Augustine) is strange only if one begins with an assumption of an East/West dichotomy in opposition in the first place. What is puzzling is the fact that so many observers across the theological spectrum in East and West alike have approached the issue under precisely such an assumption. A serious engagement with Augustine is out of the question for virtually all critics and admirers of Palamas. But a serious engagement there was, and one which must press us to question further the hackneyed dichotomy of East and West.[1]
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