Marcus Plested
All Articles by Marcus Plested
Professor of Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology, Marquette University
St Gregory Palamas on the Eschatological State: Some Observations
This paper serves as a brief and very preliminary exploration of a fascinating and under-explored aspect of St Gregory Palamas’ teaching: the nature of the next life. While we are used to thinking of St Gregory as someone who fought for the reality of human experience of the breaking-in of the Kingdom, the eschaton, even in this life, we are perhaps less prone to ponder what he has to say about the next life. In this respect, Gregory offers a number of intriguing suggestions, notably in terms of the vision of God with the eyes of the spiritual body and human participation, not only in the Resurrection but also in the Ascension of Christ.
The whole thrust of St Gregory Palamas’ teaching is dedicated to the proposition that the eschaton is not to be imagined as some sort of future state but as the underlying, undergirding, and all-embracing eternal reality of the cosmos—a reality that is absolutely accessible to us in this life, and which has a habit of breaking into this world and upsetting all our comforting notions of linear time and bounded space. This breaking-in of the alone real, the Kingdom, is of course more than mildly mind-boggling, and indeed incapable of exhaustive expression. As T.S. Eliot puts it: ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’.1 But Palamas is at great pains to defend the possibility of the vision and ingress of the wholly actual, the eternal now, into this life—however unbearable that might be. To put it more simply, Palamas categorically affirms that human beings can see and experience God and his Kingdom both in this life and a fortiori in the next life. The eschaton is to be understood not in terms of spatial or temporal extent (that is as far off and/or a long time ahead) but as the ultimate and uttermost here and now.2
Palamas’ conception of time and eternity is certainly nourished by the hymnography and iconography of the Orthodox Church. Among many possible examples, let me invoke the text of the divine liturgy of St John Chrysostom in