Page 142 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
doing so, they tilt their head forward, touching the chest with their chin, whilst (appar- ently) facing their belly button.42 Also, during the ceaseless repetition of the Jesus prayer, they withheld their breathing, and they explained to Varlaam that while doing so, an unearthly light is being revealed to them, the same light with which Christ shone on Mount Tabor at the point of His Transfiguration. This was the method that the earlier mentioned Grigorios of Sinai had been teaching and propagating during the twenties and thirties of the 14th century.
Varlaam considered this hesychast prayer method and its teaching as highly hereti- cal, and he eventually succeeded in creating a public opposition against the hesychasts. Thus, the Hesychast Debate that followed, between 1341 and 1352, constitutes a historical point, where the mystical experience of the vision of the uncreated light, rooted deeply in the history of the Early Church, became the subject of questioning and theological quarrel. We shall not refer to all separate debates which took place. Rather, we shall lim- it this overview to those separate debates that were most significant.
In the historic council (debate) regarding the dogmatic appropriateness of the hesy- chast teaching and practice, held on the 10th of June 1341 in Hagia Sophia in Constantino- ple, in the presence of emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos (1328–1341) and patriarch Io- annis XIV Kalekas,43 the argument of Gregory Palamas, who represented the hesychasts, was that God in His essence is entirely transcendent of the world. Thus, Palamas argued that man can become close to God only through a process of irrational enlightenment.44
More particularly, Palamas claimed that God can only be approached through the internal Prayer of the Mind (νοερά προσευχή) – which is what the earlier described practice of the Jesus prayer essentially is. The core reason for Varlaam’s inability to com- prehend and accept this mystical prayer practice as dogmatically correct was that he based his theological arguments on Aristotle’s dialectical syllogism,45 and accordingly
42 Ibid., 211–212.
43 For a more detailed description of the related events see: Βλάσιος Φειδάς, Εκκλησιαστική Ιστορία B ́: Από την Εικονομαχία μέχρι τη Μεταρρύθμιση. Τρίτη Έκδοση (Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις «Διήγηση», 2002), 513–520.
44 Георгије Острогорски, О Веровањима и Схватањима Византинаца. Наслов Оригинала: Studien zur Geschi- chte des byzantinischen Bilderstreites. Превела Др Љиљана Црепајац (Београд: Просвета, 1970), 213–214.
45 We remind that according to Aristotle, from basic principles the demonstrative syllogism produces particular knowledge, whereas the dialectical syllogism is the logical enquiry into those basic meanings: only the first is properly employed in science, as it subjects the particular phenomena to general principles. In the following, we include an ex- cerpt from an essay by Evelyn M. Barker entitled Aristotle’s Reform of Paideia, which concisely explains the difference between the demonstrative and dialectical syllogism: “Instead of distinguishing an abstract syllogistic form from its material content, in the way of modern logic, Aristotle divides syllogistic premises into demonstrative and dialectic premises. He differentiates the two by their degree of certainty, and how a thinker actually propounds them. Demon- strative premises are necessarily true propositions known by infallible rational intuition, and always asserted. Dialec- tical premises, on the other hand, are supposed true without having the mark of certainty, and are either raised for the
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