Inventing Gregory Palamas

I just received in the mail Oxford University Press's catalogue of forthcoming works. As always, there are lots of interesting books in the works, but none more so, it seems to me, than this book, not due out for nearly a year, but well worth the wait both because of the author (who is a widely respected translator and author of many books) and especially the timeliness of the topic: Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age by Norman Russell (OUP, 2019).

For those who have followed Orthodox constructions of identity in the West in the last three decades, as well as Orthodox apologetics, the figure of Gregory Palamas looms large, almost always as a cipher and a rock against whom the horrors of (inter alia) Thomism, rationalism, and scholasticism can be dashed to pieces in triumphalist fashion. But that narrative construction, always shaky at best as far as real scholars were concerned, really began to fall apart when Christiaan Kappes (interviewed here) published his book on the Immaculate Conception; and when, a few months later, Marcus Plested published his book on Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Both showed that Palamas was far from the anti-Western figure he had been made out to be; both showed that he engaged, often quite positively, with Thomism and other Western schools of thought. (For an interview with, engagement of, and lecture by Plested, go here and follow the links.)

To be fair, it is not only Orthodox apologists who got into this act. As Russell's forthcoming book notes, a key figure in Western distortions of Eastern thought, a key figure in Western polemics and triumphalism of an equally repellent variety, is Martin Jugie, who had an obvious hatred of Palamas and did everything he could to poison Western Catholicism against him. As Jaroslav Pelikan once archly said of Jugie, his tragedy was that he knew so much but understood so little.

Jugie and others figure prominently in Russell's forthcoming book, for which the publisher has given us this table of contents:

List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I THE HISTORICAL RECEPTION OF PALAMITE THEOLOGY
1. The Orthodox Struggle to Assimilate Palamite Thinking
2. Martin Jugie and the invention of Palamism
3. John Meyendorff's Response to Jugie
4. New Directions since Meyendorff
Part II RAISING THE LARGER QUESTIONS
5. What Does Doctrinal Development Mean?
6. How is a Participatory Understanding of the Divine Mystery to be Attained?
7. What is the Reality of Divine-Human Communion?
8. Could Palamas Become 'the Inheritance of all Christians'?
Bibliography

And this description:

The fourteenth-century Greek hesychast and controversialist, Gregory Palamas, has been so successfully cast as 'the other' in Western theological discourse that it can be difficult to gain a sympathetic hearing for him. In the first part of this book, Norman Russell traces the historical reception of Palamite thought in Orthodoxy and in the West, and investigates how 'Palamism' was constructed in the early twentieth century by both Western and Eastern theologians (principally Martin Jugie and John Meyendorff) for polemical or apologetic purposes. Russell argues that we need to go behind these ideological constructions in order to gain a true perception of the teaching of Gregory Palamas. In his recent survey of Palamite scholarship, Robert Sinkewicz noted that it is now time to raise the larger questions. The second part of the book attempts to do this, following the contours of Palamas' thinking in three areas: his relationship to tradition, his philosophy, and his theology. Russell shows that Palamite thought, when freed of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, has the potential to enrich our understanding of divine-human communion. This study contributes to the changing paradigm of scholarship on Palamas, nudging it towards the point at which Palamite thought can be used fruitfully by contemporary Western and Eastern theologians without the need to subscribe to what has been regarded as 'Palamism'.

When the book is published next year, I will have more to say about it then. 

Heroic and Holy Ukrainian Churchmen of the 20th Century

The news that the Vatican dicastery responsible for such matters has been ordered by the pope of Rome to publish a decree recognizing the heroic virtues of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky is good news indeed, as the Ottawa institute bearing his name explains.

Would it be churlish to remark that such news is grossly overdue, and should never have been held up for decades in Rome in the first place? There are important ecclesiological issues here. More than a decade ago now I asked those involved with the process why the synod of the supposedly sui iuris Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) did not simply go ahead with its own process of declaring Sheptytsky a saint (of which I am not in doubt). The argument in favor of handling matters locally only gained strength under the papacy of Benedict XVI, who returned beatifications to the home church of the candidate in question, and was, moreover, on record going back decades in calling for far greater decentralization (of many issues and practices) out of Rome and back to the local and regional structures of the Church. Canonizations were once, of course, very local affairs, and only gradually centralized in Rome for reasons that make rather limited sense today.

There are, moreover, important geopolitical considerations, at least according to John Allen. I think Allen may be making more of this than meets the eye, but let that pass for now.

What of this towering man--both literally and figuratively (he was nearly 7 feet tall)? Who was this "lion of Halychyna"? For those unfamiliar with his life, this recent article, while suffering from the usual infelicities of English (and some confusion about Habsburg geography), is not a bad place to start. The historian Timothy Snyder--who, I recently discovered with some surprise, is apparently a fluent Ukrainian speaker--outlined Sheptytsky's role in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust in this 2009 piece from the New York Review of Books. Snyder is the author of such important and well-received studies as his recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and earlier works, including The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–-1999.

For those who want good studies on Sheptytsky, there are, fortunately, several in English by reputable scholars--though, alas, no good book-length biography that I know of, notwithstanding the fact his rich, long, productive life would certainly lend itself to one. Perhaps the estimable church historian and priest Athanasius McVay, author of several recent studies, and author also of this invaluable blog, can be thumb-screwed into writing one if he is not already doing so. I interviewed him here about one of his earlier books; but see here also for others.

Returning for a moment to the question of his role in the Holocaust, see this handsome and moving book recently published by the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa: Archbishop Andrei Sheptytsky and the Ukrainian Jewish Bond. But see even more the memoirs of one Jew whose survival he attributes to Sheptytsky: Kurt Lewin's  A Journey Through Illusions. (A Ukrainian version was apparently published in 2007.) This is a haunting, moving book deserving a wide audience.

For a study of Sheptytsky's liturgical theology, see Peter Galadza's The Theology and Liturgical Work of Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944).

For his sophiology, see Andriy Chirovsky's Pray for God's Wisdom: The Mystical Sophiology of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky.

For his moral theology, see Andrii Krawchuk's  Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytsky.

For an early and very short work about his ecumenical activity, see George Perejda's Apostle of Church Unity: The life of the servant of God, Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky. But there is in fact a much more recent, much more scholarly, and much more wide-ranging treatment of his ecumenical activity and much else besides in the collection Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts'kyi. Edited by Paul Robert Magocsi and Krawchuk, with an introduction by the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan, this collection is not to be missed.

After his death on 1 November 1944, Sheptytsky was succeeded as primate by the formidable Joseph Slipyj, who was arrested the next year along with the rest of the UGCC hierarchy and sent to the Gulag.

Many other Ukrainian Catholics were simply shot or murdered in other horrifying ways. Some of them were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001. Some of their stories are told in Blessed Bishop Nicholas Charnetsky, C.Ss.R., and Companions Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church: Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I also drew some lessons from this "church of martyrs" in a recent article here.

The story of another martyr is told by Athanasius McVay in God's Martyr, History's Witness.

Slipyj was not killed but spent a brutal 18 years in concentration camps. He would be released in 1963 and exiled to Rome (his "gilded cage" as I was told he called it) for the remaining 21 years of his life, dying just a scant 5 years before the legalization of the UGCC and its emergence from the underground.

Slipyj was the object of a study by the eminent Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan: Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. This, too, is an invaluable study and nobody with any interest in these matters can afford to be without this study written by Pelikan, who was regarded by many as the doyen of church historians until his death in 2006.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Slipyj's death last September, several publishers brought out English translations of some of his works. One such may be found here.