Phronema Catalogue

Abstract: The relationship and abiding tension between the two educational traditions of exothen and kath’imas education in Byzantium is a theme that persisted with greater or lesser intensity for over a thousand years.1 Examining the writings of Saint Gregory Palamas in the Hesychast Controversy one discovers the rekindling of this debate during the mid-fourteenth century.2 What stands out in this particular instance of the debate is Gregory’s articulation of a dual-epistemological theory of knowledge, and the effect this has for understanding the relationship between philosophical and theological knowledge as embodied in the two educational traditions of Byzantium. Gregory’s teachings with respect to the distinction between the uncreated essence and uncreated energies of God ultimately provide the underlying basis of this dual-epistemology and its ramifications for resolving the tensions of the exothen and kath’imas educational traditions.

- Matthew Penney, Queen’s University