Saint Gregory Palamas and the Search for a New Science

How can we approach what exists beyond the world, the transcendent, the divine, God himself? The issue was raised in the context of the Eastern Orthodox Tradition with particular intensity in the early 14th century. A prominent figure in the dialogue that developed was Archbishop Gregory Palamas of Thessaloniki. Starting from the fundamental philosophical terms “substance” and “energy”, Gregory Palamas reversed the usual order, substance comes first and energy follows, and proposed that energy (action, relation) reveals to us the substance and the subject, even the transcendent subject. Beyond the self-evident theological dimension, the Pauline proposal leads us to another way of articulating human thought and practice. A world unfolds before us as a network of relations and events, and by accepting the world, Palamas leads us beyond the world. Palamas’ epistemology opens up a new way of dealing with contemporary problems: otherness, the relation between language and the world, logic and its limits, the semiotics of modern physics, the person and society, politics and the crisis of modernity. In a paradoxical and implicit way, 14th-century Pauline thought is intertwined with the concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The issues raised by Palamian epistemology were discussed in two Greek-Italian meetings in Venice and Thessaloniki and the minutes of these meetings are contained in the present book.