Antoine Lévy

The expression ‘political hesychasm’ was coined by late Soviet historiography. It designates the con­ tribution of the spiritual renewal initiated by Gregory Palamas to the dramatic rise of the Muscovite State between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The present paper argues that this influence runs much deeper than previously assumed. Behind what foreign visitors described as a species of oriental despotism, there is a brilliant translation of the hesychastic process of divinisation into political terms.

Despite its relative diffusion in the recent years, one is entitled to wonder whether the notion of ‘political hesychasm’ carries more meaning than that of a round square. It is difficult not to agree with the manner in which S. Khoruji singles out this inherent hiatus:’ [Hesychasm] is a specific activity of the human subject, an activity that leads it to actually and ontologically transcend and modify the fashion of its existence. As such, this activity is characterised by an aspect of foreignness when it comes  to the whole sphere of human empirical concerns, which includes social, cultural and political practices’.¹ In contrast to modes of prayer that aim at improving the material conditions of human personal and collective existence-or, to put it more theologically, at paving the road to God’s Kingdom on Earth-the hesychastic way that Palamas justified on dogmatic grounds is about accessing, through the practice of asceticism and mental prayer, a transforming reality that is fundamentally foreign to the coordinates of space and time-those that precisely define the horizon of political thinking. True, minds bent on ideological or confessional controversies will always be able to politicise the most apolitical type of human activity. Still, as Khoruji observes: ‘The political sphere has an anthropology of its own, its own rigid patterns of conduct and strategies of action. These are deeply foreign to the hesy-