Using the Theme of the Penetration of Fire into Iron for Description of Uniting with God in Eastern Christian Theology: The Path from Origen to Gregory Palamas. Part II: From the Language of Identification to the Language of Recognition

This paper is the second part of my study on the usage of the topic of the penetration of fire into iron to describe uniting man with God in the East Christian theological literature from Origen to Gregory Palamas. I show how the Stoic natural-philosophical paradigm of total blending, manifested in the example of the penetration of fire into iron, was borrowed by the Byzantine theologian — Maximus The Confessor, John of Damascus, Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas — when they were talking about deification, to illustrate the penetration of the divine into the created world and the union of the created with the divine, such that the created does not dissolve in the divine, but remains in its nature, imbued with the properties of the deity. The texts I have discussed testify that this line developed from the more «naive» and ontologizing discourse of Ps.-Macarius to the discourse where the unity is spoken of as a phenomenon revealed for intellectual abilities, which suggests an indication of unity in a certain respect and preserves from interpreting this unity as a merger of unified natures. For the latter, one can distinguish the strategy of cognition / recognition, which Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas adhered to. According to this strategy, we can discern the nature of fire revealed in iron through the properties displayed by incandescent iron, and, in the same way, we can conclude that a human being is god (of small letter) insofar as he manifests himself as God, that is, manifests the divine features.

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