The Metaphysical Structure of the Pseudo-Dionysius World in the Triads of Gregory Palamas

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The paper examines Gregory Palmas’s metaphysics of light and its application to the hierarchical and symbolic structure of Dionysius world. For many researchers the hierarchical and symbolic structure in which Pseudo-Dionysius sees the opportunity to approach God, seems to be pagan, neo-Platonic construction, impossible to adopt to a Christocentric vision of the Palamas` world. Th e author of Triads extensively analyzes the importance and role hierarchy, an intricate structure of cognition through symbols and analogies, but in the words of J. Meyendorff, this is actually a Christian epistemology, oscillating around the dogma of the Incarnation with its historical (time) conditioning. Palamas found in the thought of the Areopagite conviction of the necessity to acquire knowledge through the hierarchy and symbol because of the weakness of human intellect, which must rotate in a circle of innate knowledge. On the other hand, according to the author of Corpus intellect has the ability to transcend itself. Doctor of hesychasm extends this capability to the whole human person, which is the composition of the body and soul. The Bishop of Th essaloniki presents the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius in the perspective of the remarks of Maximus the confessor about the nature and attributed to its energies, the humanity filled with the divine energies. He considers the theandric divine human nature of Christ as a foundation of the possibility that the man shares with Christ the same divine condition. Due to such possibility every human person is able to go beyond the hierarchy and to know God directly thanks to the operations of energies which transformed his nature.

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Keywords: Gregory Palamas · Pseudo-Dionysius · divine energies · metaphysics of light · deifi cation · hesychasm · Byzantine philosophy · symbol · hierarchy

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